Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  I stared at it in disbelief.

  The infamous Samsonite fawn-colored briefcase.

  It had been wedged against the wall and the other bedside table in the corner. I was shocked, and yet—what did Emily say in the film? Wherever the briefcase goes, Brad follows. I found myself looking over my shoulder to the empty doorway, half wondering if I was going to see Brad’s warped shadow projected on the hallway wall.

  I grabbed the case by the handle—it was surprisingly heavy—and set it down on the bed.

  I tried the latches. Locked. I realized then I knew the combination. Emily goes to great lengths to figure it out. It was the date that marked the sacking of Rome, the final blow in the decline of the Roman Empire, marking the onset of the Dark Ages.

  410.

  I spun the numbers into place. The locks popped open.

  I lifted the lid.

  It was piled with papers. I went through them, pulling out an issue of Time dated July 31, 1978, “The Test-Tube Baby” on the cover. Under that was a stack of student term papers, graded with handwritten comments. Marcie, you make a very nice argument that the Dark Ages were a natural rotation of history, but you need to go deeper.

  When I saw what was underneath that, I froze.

  Neatly folded in the corner was a boy’s plaid button-down shirt.

  I picked it up, feeling a wave of revulsion as the shriveled rigid sleeves unfolded in front of me, as if they had a fragile will of their own.

  The front of the shirt was stiff, covered in deep brown stains.

  It looked harrowingly real, a real souvenir from a real murder. The fabric itself seemed beaten, as if residue of unimaginable violence had soaked and dried into the fabric.

  It was a hell of a lot of effort to go through for a prop that never appears in the film. I recalled the ravaged white suits I’d found in Marlowe’s closet. I accessed the deepest, most tormented parts of myself, she’d said. Parts I was petrified of opening because I doubted I’d ever get them closed again.

  Maybe Cordova’s films were real. The terrors on-screen, real terrors, the murders, real murders. Was it possible?

  It would explain Cordova’s popularity—nothing moved people, made them gawk, like the truth. It also explained why none of the people who worked with Cordova ever spoke of the experience. Perhaps they were complicit—to disclose what horrors occurred during filming would only incriminate themselves. It was feasible that at the end of shooting, Cordova had something on every one of his actors, something that guaranteed their silence. I recalled a remark of Olivia Endicott’s, which at the time had struck me as rather strange—Cordova’s interrogation of her when she visited him for a potential role in Thumbscrew: I began to suspect the underlying purpose of the questions wasn’t so much to know me or see if I was right for the part, but to learn how isolated a person I was, who would notice if I ever vanished or changed in some way.

  Undoubtedly, Cordova looked for people he could manipulate. He had an obsession with capturing what was real; he’d forced his son, Theo, to appear in Wait for Me Here, rather than sending him to the emergency room so they could reattach his severed fingers. I also knew from the Blackboards—and Peg Martin—that Cordova used a film crew of illegal immigrants, a complicit squad of men and women who would never speak of what they’d seen.

  I suddenly felt wild exhilaration over the thought. How easily it fit in with everything I’d learned about the man, following in his daughter’s final footsteps.

  Cordova obviously took great care in assembling his players, every one from different backgrounds, some with no acting experience at all. He brought them here to live in his remote world, locking them inside it, allowing them no contact with the outside. Who would willingly agree to such a thing, signing away their life to one man?

  Hopper had asked Marlowe this. Yet did he need to? Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes.

  What exactly did Cordova make them endure? Everything his characters did? Then his night films were documentaries, live horrors, not fiction.

  He was even more depraved than I’d realized. A madman. The devil himself. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but it was what he’d become living here. But if his films were real, how easy it would be for the man to slip into harming real children, in order to save Ashley.

  I rummaged through the remaining papers in the briefcase. There were only lectures and notes, a typewritten letter from Simon & Schuster, dated January 13, 1978. Dear Mr. Jackson: I regret to inform you that your novel, Murder in the Barbican, will not fit within our current list of fiction titles. I remembered Brad had a wall safe he was always unlocking, but it was in his home office, which didn’t appear to be attached to this set. There was a door off the bedroom, which in the film opened into a bathroom, but when I opened it, there was only the black wall of the soundstage.

  I locked the briefcase, returning it to its infamous spot under the bed, and then rolled up the child’s blood-soaked shirt, tucked it into my back pants pocket; I didn’t want to lose it, so it was safest to keep it on me. I switched off the lamp and headed back down the hall.

  I rooted through my sodden clothes scattered beside the couch, finding my camera in the jacket. Thankfully I’d had the forethought to keep it dry, because it still worked, unlike my cellphone and flashlight. Both were dead. I took a few shots of the living room and kitchenette—fully stocked with seventies-era food: Velveeta cheese (still edible after thirty years), Dr Pepper, Swift Sizzlean Pork Strips—then stepped to the edge of the living room, staring out.

  From the lamp, I could see the soundstage extended far in front of me. Beyond the couch, a wall of steel pipe scaffolding was supporting something—probably another set—constructed on the opposite side.

  I realized, after a dazed moment, that I was still shivering. My jacket was still soaked, so after lacing up my boots, I strode to the front door, grabbed Brad Jackson’s herringbone overcoat off the chair, and put the thing on—again, not letting my mind consider the absurdity of it, that I was donning the coat of a probable psychopath.

  Hopefully, it wasn’t contagious.

  I checked my watch but saw it had stopped after being submerged in the pool. It read 7:58, which couldn’t be right. It had to be later.

  And then, heaving my backpack over my shoulder, I stepped out of Thumbscrew, following along the scaffolding to see what else was in this massive soundstage, what other worlds plucked from Cordova’s treacherous head I could sift through like an archaeologist searching for bones.

  When it became too dark to see anything, I took a picture, looking at it in the camera’s screen.

  An enormous red bird had been crudely spray-painted across the concrete wall to my left. I’d seen it in articles about Cordova. It was what Cordova’s fans used as a way to invoke the man’s presence, an anonymous sign calling for him to return. I moved on, stepping around the end of the scaffolding, entering what appeared to be a vast room. I could dimly make out an enormous mountain in front of me strewn with boulders. I took another photo and realized the mountain was garbage, the boulders corroded gasoline barrels, sprouting like giant mushrooms across the expanse.

  I took off across it, knocking right into a wooden sign.

  MILFORD GREENS LANDFILL

  DO NOT ENTER

  HAZARDOUS

  I was in La Douleur—French for the pain.

  The film’s meek and mousy heroine, Leigh—receptionist at a car dealership by day, community college student by night—agrees to spy on her best friend’s husband and not only becomes smitten with him—a native German named Axel—but gets dangerously entangled in his gangland dealings.

  The first night, she follows his maroon Mercury Grand Marquis all over town, eventually ending up here sometime around dawn, the Milford Greens Landfill. Leigh watches Axel
park his car and take off on foot across the junkyard, flocks of seagulls wafting off the trash like a screeching exhaust.

  He carries a small bag, its color the unmistakable robin’s-egg blue of Tiffany—the jewelry store. Spellbound, Leigh tiptoes after him, her hair going fizzy, her frumpy blouse untucking from her skirt. She climbs inside an old funeral hearse to spy on the man as he scales the hill to an overturned school bus. After removing a paper bag from behind the front wheel, Axel sticks the Tiffany bag in its place. Leigh waits for him to drive away, then makes her own way to the school bus, skidding and sliding through the debris. She pulls out the Tiffany bag, and inside finds a small blue Tiffany ring box—a box commonly used for engagement rings. Leigh is about to open it, when, noticing a black car pulling into the junkyard parking lot, she loses her balance and slips, the blue Tiffany box clattering through an open window into the derelict bus. Leigh goes after it. Within minutes, the thug known simply as Y shows up to collect the Tiffany bag. It doesn’t take him long to discover the bag empty, Leigh cowering inside the bus. And that’s the moment La Douleur morphs from voyeuristic suspense into a spellbinding wrong man nightmare.

  The landfill didn’t smell hazardous. There was a musty dampness in the air, as if this were a subterranean basement sealed for years, and faintly within it, a smell of gasoline. I stopped to check behind me and saw with surprise that it looked as if I were actually outside. Colossal screens mounted along the scaffolding gave the impression of wide-open sky. I could discern ghostly clouds painted there, though at least twenty feet above, the screens cut out to the empty black soundstage. The effect was dizzying, seemed to suggest some truth about the inherently blinkered nature of human perception. If only you looked a little farther, McGrath, you’d see it all gave way to … nothing.

  I hadn’t noticed it before, but down along the section where I’d entered was a small gravel parking lot fringed with bushes, a lone car parked there, beneath an unlit streetlight. With a chill of unease, I realized it was Leigh’s boxy blue Chevy Citation, straight from the 1980s. It looked as if it were waiting for her to come back.

  Maybe she never had. Maybe Leigh had never left this warehouse—or The Peak. I couldn’t recall if I’d heard of the actress ever appearing in another film.

  I turned, squinting far ahead at the indistinct smudge on the hill, realizing as I stumbled toward it, it was the overturned school bus, the very one Leigh gets trapped inside. In the final minutes of La Douleur, she’s forced in there by the gangsters, blindfolded and bound. Though she struggles courageously, determined to untie her hands using a metal spike jutting out of a derelict seat, the question of her fate is left unanswered. As she whimpers and flails, the film fades to black—though her cries can be heard throughout the end credits, barely drowned by the Beastie Boys song “Posse in Effect.”

  The incline was surprisingly steep, and I began to trip and slide in the plastic bags, blown-out tires, mattresses, and cracked TVs. I’d gone a few yards when I realized not just that the incline was growing even more vertical, but that my movement was dislodging the trash beneath me. I could feel it shifting, and within minutes the entire mountain was dislodging around me. I froze but found myself falling backward, nearly submerged in an avalanche of rusted cans and garbage bags. I scrambled upright, untangling myself from a biohazard suit, surfing toward the perimeter of the set as the entire hill continued to loosen, including that bus. It was impossible to get up there. I groped my way to the scrim of sky, lifted the fabric, and scrambled through the scaffolding as the landfill continued to crash behind me. I’d had enough of La Douleur. I’d be damned if I was going to die buried alive in Cordova’s trash.

  I lurched to my feet and took off down the dark corridor. Far ahead, at the very end—what looked to be a mile away—was an opening with pale red light. I hoped it was the way out of here.

  Every now and then I stopped to listen, hearing only the wind yowling across the soundstage roof high overhead. The longer I walked, the more that red light remained doggedly, persistently far-off. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was hallucinating, or if this warehouse’s concrete floor was somehow a treadmill and I was running in place. At one point I smelled, rather bizarrely, salt water. It was strong, intermixed with the scents of seaweed and sand. It had to be another film set, built behind the scaffolding rising up to my left, but it was too high to see anything.

  I could see the red light getting closer and felt sudden nerve-racking curiosity about what it was. Marlowe Hughes’s suburban McMansion in Lovechild? The brothel where Annie looks for her father in At Night All Birds Are Black? Archer’s boxcar clubhouse from The Legacy?

  I stepped around the corner.

  It was the greenhouse from Wait for Me Here.

  What was it Beckman had said about it? “If there was one setting that perfectly evoked the treacherous mind of a psychopath, it isn’t the Bates Motel, but the Reinhart family greenhouse, with its domes of moldy glass and corroded iron, tropical plants growing inside like insidious thoughts run amok, the frail sand pathway snaking through the foliage like the last vestige of humanity shrinking out of sight.”

  The greenhouse was a domed rectangular structure, built out of glass panes and pale green oxidized iron, the architecture mimicking the Royal Greenhouses in Brussels. It sat in serene seclusion in a dense medieval forest of Douglas firs—the effect created by more screens rigged around the set. The intense red light was emanating from inside the greenhouse and then, I remembered—of course—from the film.

  It was the crimson plant lights.

  I waited to be sure I was alone and stepped out onto the lawn, the silvered grass crunching under my boots. I stared down at it, unsettled, because it looked so real, bathed even in a morning dew. I bent down to touch it. It was plastic, the dew actually shiny iridescent paint sprayed across every blade.

  I reached the stone path, following it to the greenhouse’s single steel door—the back door, if I remembered correctly. The glass had become opaque from dirt and decades of condensation. Shadows of dark leaves pressed against the panes like the hands and faces of a trapped crowd, frantic to get out.

  I grabbed the iron doorknob—noticing it was in the form of an elegant and rather sinister R for Reinhart—and heaved the door open.

  A boiling blast of humidity hit my face.

  It had to be at least ninety-five degrees inside.

  A pathway of immaculate white sand led away from the door, though within a few feet, the dark knots of plants mushrooming from every direction buried it from view. Suspended overhead were green iron barrels lit up with row upon row of cherry-red and blue lights, giving the greenhouse the look of a gigantic oven set on broil.

  In Wait for Me Here, the Reinharts’ longtime deaf-mute gardener, Popcorn—prime suspect in the Leadville killings, later found to be innocent—lovingly tended these plants. Glancing around, I realized with unease that they looked exactly as they had in the film. I grabbed a giant shiny black leaf beside my shoulder, rubbing the surface to make sure it was real. It was.

  Wait for Me Here, I recalled, had been shot in 1992. The bulbs of these plant lights wouldn’t have lasted twenty years.

  Someone must come here regularly to tend these plants.

  A chill inched down my spine, but I stepped resolutely inside, shoving back the door, trying to keep it propped open to let some of the heat out.

  I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of getting trapped inside here, either, roasted alive by these lights. But even when I wedged in the rubber doorstopper, found buried in the sand just inside, the heavy iron door kept thudding determinedly closed right behind me, so I gave up, letting it slam. I checked to make sure it would still open, then headed down the path, shoving aside the foliage.

  It was like the Amazon. Stems as solid and twisted as water pipes laden with white tubular flowers, trees at least eight feet tall, limbs barbed with thistle, black star-shaped blooms, buds with tiny red berries—all of it clutched at my face and arms
like swarming orphans desperate for a handout, for human contact. Their aromas were overpowering and pungent, sweet as honeysuckle, though as soon as I inhaled them they seemed to turn earthen and foul. Given that I was wearing three layers of Brad Jackson’s wool clothing suitable for a brutal winter in Vermont, I was already sweating profusely. But I did my best to ignore the heat, jostling past a cluster of verdant trees leaden with drooping yellow blossoms as big as my hands. They collided with my face, getting into my nose and mouth, the pollen tart and acidic.

  I spit, left with an acrid aftertaste. Within a few yards, I saw with relief something I recognized: the koi pond.

  The pond was a perfect circle made of stones, filled to the brim with black water. In Wait for Me Here, giant Amazonica lily pads floated across the surface. And when Special Agent Fox nearly drowned in there, held underwater by the killer, he clawed at them for dear life, but they only dissolved feebly in his hands.

  Now the pool was devoid of plants, the black water so slick and smooth it looked to be made of plastic, though as I shoved my way past the foliage to reach the stone perimeter, I saw perfectly well it was real. I dipped my finger in to make sure. Lazy circular ripples marred the reflection of the red lights and the hulking glass and iron dome overhead.

  I assumed there’d be no koi left, not twenty years after the film was shot. But no—in the murky water, I glimpsed a white and orange streak through the murk. As quickly as it appeared, it vanished.

  Someone must come here regularly to feed the fish.

  In the film, Popcorn notoriously fed them Cracker Jacks from a box he kept in the front pocket of his filthy dirt-streaked Levi’s overalls.

  Maybe he still did.

  Maybe the poor man worked in here, lived in here.

  The thought made me turn, my eyes scanning the twisted leaves for some sign of that old gardener, his black face wrinkled and glistening, the bright gold tooth in his smile. “The Reinharts’ glorious greenhouse is Popcorn’s holy sanctuary,” I remembered Beckman intoning one night to his students. “It’s his refuge from ridicule—the one place in the world he doesn’t feel afraid.”