Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “Drop the crazy actress shtick,” Hopper said.

  “It’s not shtick,” whispered Nora, sitting stiffly on the couch.

  “We’re not leaving until you start talking—”

  “Hopper,” I cautioned.

  “Then I suppose we’ll be shacking up together. You’ll sleep in the guest room. My days of bull riding are over. Though I warn you. The sheets haven’t been changed since I bedded Hans, so they’ll be sticky.”

  Abruptly, Hopper stood up, strode to a lamp in the corner, and, switching it on, drenched the room suddenly in blue light. It was as if he’d thrown acid on her. Marlowe hunched forward, gasping, burying her face in her knees.

  “Turn it off,” I said to him, though he didn’t appear to hear me. I realized this situation was swiftly eroding, though the more I reprimanded Hopper, the more it seemed to invigorate Marlowe.

  “Ashley Cordova. What do you know?” he demanded, looming over her.

  “Diddly squatkis! You deaf, Romeo?”

  “Hopper.” I stood up.

  “Poop,” chirped Marlowe. “Zilch-o. Goose egg. From the day she was born, she was toast.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” said Nora.

  “Are you going to shake it out of me? Murder me? Good. I’ll finally get my postage stamp. Unlike Ashley. No one will remember her. She died for nothing.”

  Before I could react, Hopper bent over her, roughly shaking her by the shoulders.

  “You don’t hold a candle to her—”

  I leapt forward and wrenched Hopper away from her, shoving him back onto the couch.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I shouted.

  Hopper appeared to be as stunned by what he’d just done as I was. I turned back to Marlowe. She was slumped in the chair, motionless.

  Jesus Christ.

  It looked like he’d just shaken the last bit of life out of her.

  Now we were all going to meet Old Sparky.

  Nora raced back over to the lamp, switching it off, and the room again melted into dark drowsy vines and sharp rocks, Marlowe a slippery black animal lying wounded in the chair. After a moment, I realized with a wave of horror that Marlowe was whimpering, frail moans that sounded as if they were trickling out of some dark corner inside of her.

  “We’re sorry,” Nora whispered, crouching beside her, putting a hand on her knee. “He didn’t mean to hurt you. Can we bring you something to drink? Some water, or … ?”

  Abruptly, Marlowe stopped crying—like someone had flicked an off switch.

  She lifted her head.

  “Oh, yes, child. There’s some, uh, club soda just”—she twisted around the armchair, craning her neck toward the other side of the room—“there, in the bookcase, second shelf; behind Treasure Island you’ll find some, uh, water. If you could just fetch it for me, dearie.”

  She was pointing emphatically at the shelves lining the far side of the room, around them a painted fresco of trellised roses climbing to the ceiling. Nora ran to it, fumbling behind the rows of books.

  “There’s just booze here,” Nora said, pulling out a large bottle, reading the front. “Heaven Hill Old Style Bourbon.”

  “Really? What a shame. Lucille must have confiscated my Evian. She’s always riding me hard about my water drinking. Wants me to go to meetings for it, Hydrated Anonymous or whatever the fuck. I’ll have to make due with that, uh, bourbon, child. Bring me my Heaven Hill. And don’t drag your feet.”

  Nora was reluctant.

  “Give it to her,” I said.

  “What if it mixes with the pills she’s taken?”

  My gut told me ol’ Marlowe wasn’t on pills—or anything at all. When she’d jumped down from that countertop like a flying monkey out of The Wizard of Oz she’d had superb reflexes. Whatever irrational phrases she was spewing seemed purely mental, a side effect of being alone and locked inside this apartment for a couple of years. For all of her feigned terror at our break-in, I could see, too, she was eager for a live audience.

  “Give it to her.”

  Marlowe practically lurched out of the chair to snatch the bottle from Nora. Her hands moving faster than a blackjack dealer’s in Vegas, she unscrewed it and chugged. Never before had I seen such thirst except in a Mountain Dew commercial. There was a soft clink of metal against the glass, and I noticed her spidery white fingers had slipped out of the long sleeve. She was wearing a single piece of jewelry, a ring with a large black pearl.

  It was what her old fiancé Knightly had allegedly given her, the day he’d broken off their engagement. Though I’d fact-checked Beckman’s story before, it was startling to see evidence of that emblem of heartbreak, here, now, right in front of me.

  Marlowe pulled the bottle from her lips with a gasp, wiping her mouth. She sat back, settling comfortably into the chair. She looked calm now and oddly lucid, clutching the bottle like a swaddled child in her arms.

  “So, you’d like to know about Cordova, dearies,” Marlowe whispered.

  “Yes,” said Nora.

  “You sure? Some knowledge, it eats you alive.”

  “We’ll take our chances,” I said, sitting in the chair across from her.

  She seemed very pleased by this response, gearing up for something, preparing.

  It was at least two or three minutes before she spoke again, her low voice, rutted with rocks and potholes only moments before, suddenly smoothly paved, winding its way effortlessly through the dark.

  “What do you know about The Peak?” she whispered.

  86

  “It’s Cordova’s legendary estate,” I said. “It sits north of Lows Lake in the wilderness.”

  “Did you know it was built on a Mohawk massacre site?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  She excitedly licked her lips. “Sixty-eight women and children were slaughtered there, their bodies thrown in a pit on a hill and set fire to. This was where they constructed the foundation for the house. Stanny naturally didn’t know that when he bought the place. He told me all he knew was that the couple living there, some British lord and his idiot wife, had gone bankrupt. But they failed to disclose the wife went completely loony living there. When they sold the estate, returning to England, the lord had no choice to put his poor mad wife into an institution. Within days, she stabbed a doctor in the ear with scissors. She was transferred to Broadmoor, hospital for the criminally insane. Shortly thereafter, the lord dropped dead of a heart attack. And that, as they say, is a wrap.”

  Stanny—it was obviously her pet name for Cordova. She paused to take another long drink from the bottle. It was as if with every swig she was resuscitating herself, coming slowly back to life. She even seemed to grow less bony, filling in.

  “My Stanny,” she went on, clearing her throat, “without knowing a thing about any of this, moved right into his lovely mansion with his lovely wife, and his baby son. Now, I’m a cynical old bitch, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t believe. Religion? Humans desperate to take out infinity insurance. Death? The great big nada. Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt. Nevertheless, knowledge of those two simple facts, massacre and madness? It would have kept even me away.”

  She took another swig, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

  “Stanny told me, the very first day they arrived, after the movers had gone, his wife disappeared to take a nap upstairs and he went for one of his long walks. He always walked alone in the woods when he needed an idea for a picture. And he needed one. Somewhere in an Empty Room had come out. It was so good it broke hearts. Everyone was dying to see what he’d do next.”

  She paused, her bony hands crawling out of the sleeves to fiddle with the white Heaven Hill label on the bottle.

  “He’d been walking for an hour, following one path and then another deep into the forest when he noticed a knotted red string dangling from a tree branch. A single red string. Do you know what it means?”

  Nora shook
her head. Marlowe nodded with a wave of her hand.

  “He untied it, thinking nothing of it, and continued on until the trail opened up into a circular clearing beside a wild rushing river. Within the clearing, nothing grew. Not a stray leaf or pinecone or twig. Only dirt in a perfect—inhuman—circle. Outside of it on the ground he found a sheet of plastic, letters written backward across it, the words indecipherable. There was a naked, headless doll with its feet nailed to a wooden board, its wrists tied with more red string. Stanny assumed it had been left by local pranksters who frequented his property. He collected the junk and threw it away. But when he checked the same area three weeks later, he saw black charred circles on the ground where there had been evident burning. It smelled recent. He complained to local police. They wrote up a report and assured him they’d patrol the area and let locals know the house was no longer vacant. Stanny put up no-trespassing signs along the perimeter of his property. A month later, he and his wife woke to piercing screams in the dead of night. They didn’t know if they were animal or human. In the morning he went to the area. There, at the center of a perfect circle, was an altar with a newborn fawn on it, its eyes gouged out, its mouth tied shut. Carved into its dappled body with a knife were strange symbols. Stanny was livid. He reported it to the local police. Again they wrote up the report. And yet? There was something in their expression, the way they glanced at each other. Stanny realized they not only already knew who was doing such things, they were in on it themselves. They, along with countless people in the town, were using his property for sadistic rituals. Not that Stanny should have been surprised. He was living amongst country kooks, after all, white-trash crazies, in-bred Deliverance freakazoids.”

  She grinned impishly, her eyes bright.

  “You get the idea. And you can imagine what Stanny’s dear wife, Genevra, from a swank Milanese family, thought about such backwoods heathens. She pleaded with him to erect a fence around the property for protection, to keep them out. So he did. He put up a twenty-foot electric fence, spent a fortune on it. The problem was, what he’d actually done was, rather than keeping them out, he’d barricaded himself and his family in.”

  She fell silent for a moment.

  “I don’t know how he fell into experimenting with it,” she went on. “He never told me. Stanny wasn’t afraid of the unknown. Within the universe. Within ourselves. It was the subject he plumbed endlessly. He took submarines down there. He went down, down into the dark crags and muck of human desire and longing into the ugly unconscious. No one knew when he’d come back, if he ever would. When he was working on a project he disappeared. He breathed it. He’d write all night for days and days until he was so tired he slept for two weeks like a hibernating monster. He could be agony to live with. I, of course, experienced it firsthand, up close and personal.”

  Visibly proud of this pronouncement, she gulped down the Heaven Hill, a drop sliding off her chin.

  “The problem with Stanny,” she went on, wiping her mouth, “as with so many geniuses, was his insatiable needs. For life. For learning. For devouring. For fucking. For understanding why people did the things they did. He never judged, you see. Nothing was categorically wrong. It was all human in his eyes and thus worthy of inquiry, of examining from all sides.”

  She squinted at us.

  “You’re his fans, are you not?”

  I couldn’t immediately answer. I was too stunned, not just by what she was saying but by her sudden energy and sanity, both of which seemed to increase in direct ratio to the amount of Heaven Hill she guzzled—now almost half the bottle.

  “What do you know about his early life?” she demanded.

  “He was the only child of a single mother,” I said. “Grew up in the Bronx.”

  “And he was amazing at chess,” Nora added. “He used to play for money at the tables in Washington Square Park.”

  “That was Kubrick. Not Cordova. Get your geniuses straight, for fuck’s sake.” Marlowe surveyed us. “That’s it?”

  When we said nothing, she scoffed.

  “That’s what I’ve always found so pathetic about fans. They weep when they have a live glimpse of you, frame the fork you touched. Yet they’re impervious to doing anything with that inspiration, like enriching their own lives. It drove Stanny-boy crazy. He used to say to me, ‘Huey’—it was his nickname for me—‘Huey, they see the films five times, write me fan letters, but the underlying meaning is lost on them. They take nothing away. Not heroism. Not courage. It’s all just entertainment.’ ”

  Huey sighed, taking another swig.

  “Stanny was raised to be a good Catholic. His mother, Lola, worked two jobs as a maid in one of the big New York hotels. She was from a small village outside of Naples. Yet she knew a great deal about stregheria. You’ve heard of it, I suppose?”

  “No,” Nora said, shaking her head.

  “It’s an ancient Italian word for witchcraft. A seven-hundred-year-old tradition, passed along mostly in wives’ tales, yarns to scare children, make them eat their vegetables and go to bed early. Cordova’s father was from the Catalan region of Spain, a blacksmith. The family lived together in a small town outside Barcelona before they were due to immigrate to the States when Stanny was three years old. The day they were meant to leave, the father decided he couldn’t go. He didn’t want to leave his homeland. So, Lola took her son and set out for America. Within a year the father had a new family. Stanny never spoke to his father again. But he remembered his Spanish grandmother telling him about bruixeria, the Catalan tradition of witchcraft. He said she told him on New Year’s Eve witches have the utmost power, and that’s when they kidnap children. She told him to put the fire tongs in the form of a cross over the embers in the fireplace, sprinkle them with salt, and the boy would prevent a witch’s entry via the chimney. So, you see, my dears, Stanny grew up with superstition. Certainly not taken seriously, yet it was nevertheless present on both his mother’s and his father’s side of the family. And Stanny’s imagination on the worst of days is stronger than our realities. I think with a background like that, he was sadly predisposed to it … susceptible, you might say.”

  She gazed at us, her fingers fiddling with the pearl ring, twisting it around and around her finger.

  “He never told me how it happened. But shortly after building the fence around the property, he realized the townspeople were still trespassing.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “They came by boat. The estate is north of Lows Lake. If you leave from the public shore and make your way to the northern side and along a narrow river, eventually it will feed into a lake on The Peak property. When Stanislas found this breach, he had his men build a chain-link patch straight down to the bottom of the riverbed so only a thimble could get past. A week later he and his wife woke up to the sound of drumming. Voices. Screams. The next morning he went back to the fence and saw that the spot barring the way by the river had been sawed straight through. And he could see from the way the wires were cut it’d been done by somebody on the inside of the property, not the out.”

  “Someone living there,” I said.

  She nodded but didn’t elaborate.

  “Who? A servant?”

  “Every paradise has its viper.” She smiled. “If Stanny had one weakness it was his belief that personality was fluid. He didn’t believe people could be evil, not in some pure form. He always liked a lot of people around him. Hangers-on, groupies, you’d call them, though he called them his allies. He hadn’t been living at The Peak a month when he met in town, quite by accident, a handsome young priest who’d also just moved to Crowthorpe to set up his parish. Stanny needed a religious adviser for a script he was working on, Thumbscrew, and the two men became friends. Within weeks, the priest was shacked up at The Peak. Genevra was furious. She loathed the man. He was hot as hell, a brawny Tyrone Power type with gold hair, blue eyes. Probably had one hell of a der Schwanz, if you catch my drift. He claimed to have been raised in the Iowan cornfields.
But something was rancid about the man. Genevra tried to convince Stanny he was dangerous. An impostor. A leech. She was Italian, a staunch Catholic, and had noticed rather gaping holes in the man’s knowledge of the Church. She also believed he was unnaturally obsessed with her husband. Stanny told her to relax, that the man was fascinating, an inspiration.”

  Marlowe took another long drink.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I suspect one night Stanny went down to the crossroads to confront these townspeople and ended up hiding, watching them. By the time he returned to the mansion at dawn, he had a wildly different perspective on the entire business. I don’t know what he saw or what they did. Nothing was proven, but Genevra always believed that the priest had everything to do with it. That he’d made some kind of deal with these people, was perhaps even one of them.”

  She sighed.

  “So Stanny began his life there. Creatively, he came into his own. Certainly, his previous pictures were electrifying, but this new body of work he was producing at The Peak, it was a different dimension. He began to craft his night films. He explained it once. ‘Huey,’ he said to me. ‘I love to put my characters in the dark. It’s only then that I can see exactly who they are.’ ”

  She fumbled with her long satin sleeves, smoothing the fabric over her knees. I didn’t say anything, mesmerized by what she was telling us about Cordova, and also by Marlowe herself. She’d grown so lucid and animated, she seemed entirely different from the woman we’d encountered before.

  “Eventually there was no need for him ever to leave that property,” she continued. “Everything, everyone, came to him. He had three hundred acres. He built his sets there, edited his films there. When he had to leave, it was because he’d found a shooting location close to Crowthorpe. It was as if he’d come to believe his power could only be harnessed when he was on those grounds. And it was true. The quality of performances he was able to capture was astounding. His energy had no bounds. He was Poseidon, his actors his school of minnows. When you were working with Stanny on a picture you stayed at The Peak. You ate your meals there, you never left, were allowed no contact with the outside world. You turned your life over to him, handed him the keys to your kingdom. That meant your mind as much as your body. It was all agreed to beforehand. You showed up on the first day of production, ignorant and blind. You knew nothing about the film, or who your character was, or really anything at all except that your life as you’d known it was over. You were setting off on a new journey down a wormhole into something unknown. When you finally emerged three or four months later and returned home, you were changed. You realized before, you’d been asleep.”