Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “He?” Hopper demanded suddenly. “Who?”

  Marlowe turned to him.

  “Why, the devil, of course.”

  He chuckled. “Right.”

  She stared him down, her masklike face immobile.

  “Iblis in Islam,” she whispered. “Mara in Buddhism. Set in Ancient Egypt. Satan in Western civilizations. It’s surprising when you take the time to look at history how universally accepted he actually is.”

  Marlowe thoughtfully tilted her head, turning toward me.

  “Stanislas believed it would happen when she was twenty-four, twenty-five—some calculation of the full moons and all that. I don’t know the nature of what went on, but at some point the entire family became complicit in this design to transfer the promise onto some other child. Sadly, it wasn’t that outlandish a concept. These cults prey on runaways, children who wouldn’t be missed if they went missing. Many of these people get pregnant for the purpose of sacrificing the infant child on an altar. Occult crimes are very real in this country, only they’re shoved under the rug by police because it’s nearly impossible to convict in a court of law. Not because there isn’t evidence. Oh, no. These people can’t help but leave evidence of their terrifying rituals. It’s hard to clean up after yourself, if you spill blood weekly. No. It’s because juries can never quite believe. It’s a fantastical leap that they can’t make. It sounds like something out of a night film. Not real life.”

  She fell silent. In a mechanical reflex she fastidiously unscrewed the bottle, put it to her lips, but at last noticed, stunned, that there was nothing left in there, not a drop.

  “How do you know so much about all of it?” asked Nora quietly.

  Marlowe turned, seemingly about to berate her, but then lost steam, only gazed down at her hands, crumpled on her knees. She considered them as if they weren’t part of her, but strange insects that’d crawled up her legs and she was too weary to brush them away.

  “Stanny trusted me. He told me everything. He knew I’d understand the pain. Once I experienced such loss, it gutted me. It left me just my skin. When you love like that and lose, you never recover. Stanny knew I’d know how it felt. I’d spent time with Ashley. I certainly didn’t believe any of it when he first told me. But then I took her with me on vacation when she was about eight. We were sitting on the beach near Côté Plongée in Antibes and I’d catch her staring at me. It was as if she saw my past and my future—even my soul where it was headed when I died, writhing forever in limbo. It was as if she saw it all and she pitied me.”

  This gutting loss had to be a reference to Marlowe’s dashing fiancé, Knightly, dumping her for her sister, Olivia.

  “This priest,” I said, after a moment. “Do you remember his name?”

  “People just called him Priest, sort of playfully sarcastic. I remember him during the shooting of Lovechild. He liked to spend his day fishing. I’d spot him from a distance standing on the shore by the lake all in black, like an accidental inkblot seeping into the bright landscape of sky and blue lakes and trees. I wouldn’t know what he was doing until I was near him and noticed his long fishing rod and tackle box, that he was standing there so immobile, patiently waiting for a fish. He looked like he had the self-control to wait forever. Genevra gave him the nickname Ragno. The spider.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “S—spider.” She slurred the word. “How he moved. So silent.”

  “Was his real name Hugo Villarde?”

  “I … I don’t really know.”

  Marlowe was slipping away again, growing feeble, hunched back in the chair so no light hit her and she was little more than a ghostly white face floating in the dark. When she’d started talking, I’d had little confidence that what she told us would be sentient, much less the honest truth. Yet again and again she’d surprised me, disclosing details that corroborated everything I’d uncovered.

  And now: this revelation about the Spider.

  “Did you ever meet Cordova’s assistant, Inez Gallo?” I asked.

  Marlowe shuddered with distaste. “Coyote? But of course. Wherever Cordova went, his little Coyote followed. She loved him, of course. Did his every bidding, every menial chore, no matter how cruel. All she asked of him in return was to breathe his air. It was Stanny who came up with the title To Breathe with Kings, after her, Coyote’s, sheer pathetic-ness. I think she actually wished he’d eat her alive, so at last she’d be the closest to him of everyone, living out the rest of her days huddled in the darkest corners of his belly.”

  “Where is he now?” Nora asked after a moment. “Cordova, I mean.”

  “The jackpot question. No one has ever answered it right.”

  She mumbled this distractedly and didn’t speak again for such a long time, her chin lowered to her chest, that I wondered if she’d actually dozed off.

  “I imagine he’s still there,” she croaked at last. “Or he’s sailed away on his pirate ship out into the sea, never to return. With Ashley dead, I imagine, whatever last bit of humanity he had, my Stanny, he’s let go of it. Let it fly. There’s nothing holding him back now. Not anymore.”

  Marlowe made an odd choking noise and, bending over, began to cough, a violent hacking sound.

  “My bed,” she whispered. “Take me to my bed. I’m so … so very tired.”

  Nora glanced at me. It was my cue to assist Marlowe, though I hesitated. It was the fear of seeing her ravaged face close-up, the worry she was too fragile to touch. She’d retreated again, gone far away, folded up like an old deck chair, so weathered it seemed possible she’d come apart in raw splintered beams in my hands. Nora gently took the Heaven Hill bottle from her—Marlowe was reluctant to let it go, like a child unwilling to part with a doll—and then, bending over her, she gave her a hug.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” Nora whispered.

  I stepped beside her, and as carefully as I could, gathered Marlowe into my arms. She clamped her elbows tightly around my neck as I carried her out and down the hall, her face hidden deep inside the hood. When I set her down in her bed, Nora and Hopper stepping in behind me, instantly she buried herself under the covers like a beetle hiding in the sand.

  “Don’t leave me yet,” Marlowe whispered hoarsely from under the sheet. “You must read to me so I can sleep. Oh. Swallow. That was it.”

  “Read to you?” asked Nora.

  “I have a boy who comes. Every night at eight he comes and reads me asleep. There’s The Count. Read me just a little little …”

  “What book?” whispered Nora.

  “In the drawer. There, there. The Count of Cristo. He’s waiting.”

  Glancing at me uncertainly, Nora reached for the handle of the bedside table. And I found myself hoping that Marlowe was telling the truth. She seemed to be referring to the drug dealer both Harold and Olivia had mentioned. It was a fantastic misreading of the world, that someone mistaken for a drug dealer was simply coming up here to read books aloud to an old woman, lightness mistaken for dark, heaven mistaken for hell.

  But when Nora pulled open the drawer, there was nothing inside, no book, nothing but wads of Kleenex and fan mail.

  Hopper and I searched some of the other drawers, but we could find no copy of The Count of Monte Cristo—no books in her bedroom at all, only celebrity magazines and rubber-banded stacks of hundreds of fan letters addressed to Miss Marlowe Hughes. Hopper asked if she wanted him to read one of those aloud, but she didn’t answer.

  At last she was asleep.

  88

  “I can actually understand it,” I said, downing the rest of my scotch, pacing beside the living-room couch. “Cordova confined himself to a claustrophobic compound in the wilderness. He never left. He was king of a three-hundred-acre kingdom. He surrounded himself with people who idolized him, those hangers-on, allies, people who doubtlessly reminded him every day he was a god. He comes to buy into it, this so-called power. He cavorts in the woods in the middle of the night with locals who worship the de
vil. It’s only logical that eventually the entire family, including Ashley, comes to believe in it. And that belief destroys them.”

  “What if it is real?” asked Nora quietly from the couch. Hopper was at the other end, pensively smoking a cigarette.

  “You mean the powers Cordova harnessed on the property?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the forty-three years I’ve been alive, I’ve never seen a ghost. Never had a cold chill pass through me. Never seen a miracle. Every time my mind wanted to jump to some mystical conclusion, I’ve always found that inclination was simply born of fear and there was a rational explanation behind it.”

  “For someone who investigates, you’re blind,” Nora said.

  I didn’t know what had gotten into her. From the moment we’d left Marlowe’s apartment and come back here, ordering Chinese takeout and hashing it out, she’d been utterly convinced that everything Marlowe had told us, including this curse of the devil, was categorically true, and any suggestion otherwise, including simple skepticism, infuriated her.

  “It all makes sense, don’t you see?” Her face was turning red. “Ashley came to the city to track down this Spider. We don’t know why. But she knew it was finally happening. This transformation. She knew the devil was coming for her at last.”

  “Ashley believed it was happening, but it was only in her head.”

  “Then how do you explain that maid at the Waldorf seeing evil’s footprint in her eye? How Ashley magically made Morgan Devold break her out of Briarwood? Peter at Klavierhaus said the way she moved was otherworldly. Even Hopper’s story about her with the rattlesnake fits in with this. And what about the couple who lived at The Peak before Cordova arrived?”

  “Countless British aristocrats are eccentric. They marry their cousins. They’re inbred.”

  “How do you explain what happened to Olivia?”

  “She had a stroke. People have them every day.”

  She sighed. “How much evidence do you need before you wonder if it just might be real?”

  “There will never be hard evidence that people get sold to the devil.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “This is New York. If people found out worshipping the devil actually worked, every ambitious type A would be practicing it in their studio apartments.”

  She glared at me. “You’re an idiot.”

  “All of a sudden I’m an idiot?”

  “Not all of a sudden. You’ve been one for a while.”

  “Because I don’t buy into the power of some ceremony performed by a couple of country bumpkins? Because I ask questions? Need proof?”

  “You think you know everything. But you don’t. Life and people are right in front of you and you act superior and make jokes but it’s just a cover for the fact that you’re scared. If you were a child in first grade and a teacher gave you a crayon and asked you to draw yourself? You’d draw yourself this big!” She indicated a millimeter with her thumb and forefinger.

  “And you at nineteen, you know everything. Back in Saint Cloud near Kissimmee you figured it all out. Maybe I should shack up with Moe and Old Grubby Bill and that parakeet—which, by the way, doesn’t have magical powers unless you call shitting all day magic!”

  “You wouldn’t know magic if it kicked you in the ass.”

  “The answer’s simple,” Hopper said.

  I turned to him. “What?”

  “We have to break into The Peak.”

  He announced it calmly, inhaling his cigarette.

  “What you guys are arguing. It’s irrelevant. We don’t know where people’s belief ends and what’s real begins. Is there even a difference? But we do know three things.”

  “What?” asked Nora.

  “One. Ash was tracking down this Spider, and that makes at least some of what Hughes told us sound right. Ash wouldn’t let that guy off the hook, not if he was responsible for the devil’s curse. So if one thing Hughes said is right, logically the other stuff should at least be considered. Two. If Cordova was involved in that black magic, whether it’s real or not, Ash got sucked into it because of him. And that makes me want to kill him. Three. If any of this is true, people will want to know about it. That doesn’t make any difference to me. I care about Ash and nothing else. She sent me that monkey because I think she wanted me to find out the truth about her family. It was her way of confiding in me, the way she knew about Orlando.”

  Of course, he was right. In some ways, I’d known from the beginning where this was all heading: back to The Peak.

  “We’ll find a way to break in,” Hopper went on. “And whatever evidence we find, whatever truth we uncover about the Cordovas, however fucked up or however innocent, afterward, all three of us will decide together what to do with the knowledge. We’ll take a vote, and that’ll be it.”

  He eyed me with obvious mistrust as he said this, exhaling cigarette smoke in a fast stream.

  “But first we find the Spider,” I said.

  89

  The following day, we planned to be at Hugo Villarde’s antiques shop, The Broken Door, when it opened at 4:00 P.M.

  But in the mayhem of the past week, I’d forgotten one crucial detail: Santa Barbara. I had custody of Sam for the long weekend. Cynthia called me early, telling me that Sam’s new nanny—a woman named Staci Dillon—was going to pick up Sam from school at three-fifteen and bring her straight to my apartment. Cynthia had given the woman a set of my keys, so this wasn’t a problem; I figured she could let herself in and wait with Sam until we returned from the antiques shop.

  But the entire morning passed, then the early afternoon, and there was no word from this new nanny. I called her every half-hour, wondering how in the hell my ex-wife decided to trust a woman who ended her name in i. She might as well have hired someone named Ibiza or Tequila. Finally, at two-thirty, Staci called. She’d had an emergency; her seventeen-year-old son had been in a car accident on the Bruckner Expressway. He was okay, but she was coming from a Bronx hospital and running about an hour late. The earliest she could be at my apartment was five. I assured her it was no problem for me to pick Sam up from school. This meant, however, I’d have to bring Sam with me to The Broken Door—an unpleasant prospect.

  “Call Cynthia,” said Nora. “She might have a backup nanny.”

  “I can’t do that. She’s about to get on a plane.”

  “What about some 1-800 emergency nanny service?” asked Hopper, sitting on the couch’s armrest.

  “I can’t send a stranger to pick up Sam.”

  “Hopper and I can go to the shop,” said Nora.

  “And I sit this one out?”

  She nodded. It wasn’t a mystery where that suggestion was coming from; she was still stonewalling me after last night’s heated discussion about what was real and what wasn’t.

  “Just take her with us,” said Hopper. “If it’s sketchy? Leave.”

  I said nothing, thinking it over. We were close to something. I could feel it. If I left such a critical confrontation in the hands of Hopper and Nora, the lead could be blown entirely. Villarde could be tipped off, and he’d slip right through our fingers. But to put Sam in any kind of danger was inconceivable.

  “Better decide soon,” said Hopper. “We need to go.”

  90

  There was no obvious storefront and no sign, only a closed garage door with peeling red paint.

  Dead vines clung to the brick façade in long coils, like coarse strands of hair left on tiles after a shower. The upper floors were derelict, the windows broken or boarded up. The building had once been quite elegant, probably—detailed pilaster Corinthian columns flanked the garage; there was a row of yellow-and-blue stained-glass windows along the ground floor—but now it was all encrusted with dirt and washed out, as if the building had been buried for years and excavated only days ago.

  I stepped up to one of the doors, checking to see if there were apartment buzzers, and was amazed to see the name right there—VILLARDE—writ
ten neatly by hand in black pen beside a buzzer for the second floor.

  “He must live above the shop,” Hopper said quietly, staring up at the building.

  The second floor was the only one with windows that weren’t blown out. They were tall and narrow, the glass filthy, though in one I could see long yellow curtains hanging there, and a terra-cotta pot with a small green plant.

  “Scott.” Sam was yanking my hand. “Scott.”

  “Yes, sweetheart.”

  “Who’s that man?”

  She was pointing at Hopper.

  “I told you, honey. That’s Hopper.”

  She squinted up at me. “He’s your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  She considered this seriously, scrunching her mouth to the side. She then frowned at Nora, who’d moved toward the other door, trying the handle.

  “It’s locked,” Nora whispered, shading her eyes as she looked in the window.

  Sam was wearing her Spence uniform—white blouse, green-and-blue plaid jumper—though Cynthia had naturally added her Merchant Ivory touches: black coat with puffed sleeves, velvet barrette in her ringlets, black patent-leather shoes. From the moment we’d picked Sam up, she’d been shy and watchful—toward Hopper, in particular. She was also extremely squirmy, shuffling her feet, bouncing on my arm, putting her head way, way back to ask me something—all of which signaled she was coming down off some serious sugar and needed a snack.