Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  I took a moment to recalibrate my mind, to assure myself I was alone and whatever I found in here was a narrative plucked from Cordova’s head. I was not and never had been in Wait for Me Here—though as I noted this, I realized the very fact that I needed to reassure myself of such a thing was horrifying in itself.

  Had I already lost my head? Not yet.

  I wiped the sweat off my face and headed around the pond’s perimeter, staring into the red-soaked greenery.

  Within minutes, I found what I was looking for: Popcorn’s work shed.

  The old blue wooden door was ajar, the same crooked sign nailed to the outside: PRIVATE KEEP OUT. I gently pushed it open.

  Popcorn wasn’t home.

  It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, filled with meticulously organized shelving, cubbyholes housing envelopes of seeds, plastic trays, terra-cotta pots, bags of mulch and fertilizer. Directly in front of me, facing the greenhouse’s glass walls—too dirty to see through—sat a desk and tall stool, where Popcorn could always be found smoking his cigars, reading his comic books, and listening to the Beatles. A small wire cage—some kind of trap for catching raccoons—stood atop the desk beside a faded comic called Mikey’s Friend and a half-smoked cigar in an ashtray.

  I stepped inside to pick it up. It smelled recent.

  Next to the desk on the wall was an old bulletin board, jumbled with poorly written directions for tending the soil and plants, a tattered postcard of colored shacks standing on stilts along the edge of a dark bay.

  I tugged it loose and checked the reverse side. There was no address, only four scribbled words on the back.

  Someday soon you’ll come.

  I put it back, turning. Various gardening tools had been mounted along the walls using old spikes: hand sickles, Austrian scythes, pruning saws, axes of all different sizes. I moved over to inspect them—the same way Special Agent Fox had inspected them.

  In Wait for Me Here, the eleven teenage bodies of the Leadville killings had been mutilated in ways mimicking accidents that occurred at an old paper mill—chemical burns, boiler explosions, industrial roller entrapment. But there was another constant: Each victim was a high-school student killed by a stab through the left ventricle of the heart using a pair of hedge shears, the pointed blades exactly nine and a half inches long.

  Special Agent Fox sneaks in here in the dead of night to examine Popcorn’s gardening tools—every saw, snip, and clipper—trying to find a blade with that exact measurement. He comes up empty-handed. Because the hedge shears weren’t hidden in the work shed, as he’d suspected.

  Now where in the hell were they?

  My eyes were stinging, and I was drenched in sweat, getting steamed alive in here like a lobster. The heat was so overpowering I could hardly think, hardly remember that pivotal scene at the end, when Popcorn accidentally finds the shears buried somewhere in here, in one of his beloved flower beds.

  I remembered they were encrusted in blood and the look on the poor man’s face when he came across them planting a new set of seeds, seeds with a bizarre name. His look was of such horror.

  Real horror?

  Was it my imagination or was it actually getting hotter in here?

  I shrugged off my backpack, yanked off Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat and the sweater, leaving them on the wire trap. I wrenched a hoe off the wall and exited the shed, slipping around the koi pond.

  Popcorn was the only person in the film to know the truth behind the murders. “Sometimes only the silent man can see the full picture.” Beckman had said it, or was it someone in the film?

  I needed to get my hands on those shears.

  I stepped into the flower bed, traipsing through plants growing so thickly I couldn’t see the ground.

  I bent down, noticing a white handwritten sign stuck into the dirt.

  EYE-PRICKLES, it read.

  I stepped forward a few feet, spotting another.

  DEATH CHERRIES.

  There were countless similar signs arranged under the leaves.

  BLUE ROCKET. TONGUE TACKS. SORCERER’S VIOLET. MAD SEEDS.

  That one sounded familiar. Pushing up my sleeves, I raked the hoe through the dirt and immediately felt something hard in the loose soil. I bent down, seeing something shiny.

  It was a brass compass, the glass face cracked.

  It had belonged to Popcorn. The compass was a source of ridicule throughout the film. The whole town mocked the way he constantly pulled it out of his overalls, closely inspecting it as if to make sure he was still on course on his very important journey around the world, the joke being that the poor man had been born in Leadville and had never set foot outside the tiny town.

  I pocketed the compass and shoved the hoe deeper into the dirt, the blade catching on something else.

  I crouched down to inspect it. It was a half-decomposed cardboard box, sodden and limp, though I could make out the letters on the front.

  Cracker Jack.

  I threw it aside, ignoring the unease flooding through me, doggedly digging into the soil again. And I felt something else there, something bulky. I bent down to it.

  Something was buried deep in the dirt.

  Fighting a wave of nausea—it had to be the oppressive heat, the red lights making every plant and flower, even my own hands, look blood-soaked—I stabbed the hoe directly downward. It caught in some roots. Crouching, I brutally tore out some of the plants, leaves and limbs shuddering in my face as if in protest.

  I could feel it with my hands, something hidden here, something hard.

  Something human-sized. Popcorn?

  It made no sense. At the end of the film, Popcorn was in the clear, safe. He was keeping the killer’s secret, and if anyone could keep a secret it was a mute man. Then what the hell was buried here? Why were his compass and box of Cracker Jack—the two items the gardener was famously never without—hidden here? Had the killer decided to finish him off? Had Cordova?

  As my mind spun, suddenly I was aware of, somewhere far away, a dull thud. It sounded like a door banging closed. I scrambled to my feet.

  I could hear faint footsteps of more than one person—two, maybe three. They echoed through the warehouse, moving quickly, probably hurrying down those narrow corridors between the film sets.

  I was no longer alone. I tried to ignore this reality for a few seconds, frantically digging through the flower bed with my bare hands.

  I just needed one glimpse of what was here. I uprooted plants, throwing them aside, tunneling through the soil, my fingers feeling something.

  It felt like denim. Popcorn’s overalls.

  I fumbled to take the camera from my pocket, but realized, idiotically, I’d left it back in Brad’s herringbone coat. To excavate whatever it was buried here would require clearing away the entire flower bed.

  I paused, listening.

  Those footsteps were getting louder. They had to know I was here.

  I’d have to come back.

  I stepped out of the foliage, racing back around the pond to the work shed. I grabbed Brad’s coat, pulled it on, throwing the backpack over my shoulder. I fought my way through the plants to reach the back door.

  I opened it a crack, staring out at the deserted lawn. I darted out, gulping down the freezing air, relieved to be out of that gory crimson light, that tropical heat, barreling into the crisp darkness of the soundstage.

  I froze. The entire building was hiccoughing with footsteps, seemingly coming down the same passage where I’d entered Wait for Me Here.

  I took off in the opposite direction, moving down a stone path out of the set straight into a vast desolate beach of white sand dunes and bristling sea grass. In the distance, an angular beach house rose high in the sky on stilts.

  It was Kay Glass’s house from A Small Evil.

  I headed across the sand toward the house and beyond it, the moonlit ocean. My sense was this set would take me back to the Jacksons’, and hopefully the exit out of here.

  Sudd
enly—far ahead, a dark figure with a flashlight streaked over the dunes, heading straight for me.

  I whipped around, stumbling back out, careening through the next opening I could find, finding myself racing down the middle of a deserted street.

  It was the Main Street of a small town, a ghost town that I didn’t recognize, though I could see fairly well, due to the blinking red and green Christmas lights strewn up over the road.

  Dark storefronts slipped past.

  SILVER DOLLAR SALOON.

  SUNSHINE GROCERY.

  PASTIME GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. MEMBERS ONLY.

  Sprinting footsteps ricocheted behind me. I leapt up onto the sidewalk to Dream-a-lot Movie House, heaved the door open, and sprinted past candy and soda counters and down a narrow hall, theaters advertising Distortion at eleven-thirty, Chasing the Red at twelve.

  I yanked open the first door and it dumped me, thank Christ, back into the warehouse and smack into something hard, a concrete wall. I charged along it, looking behind, and saw the flashlight was there again, and another one was heading straight toward me. I grabbed the bars of some scaffolding and began to climb. I’d gone ten, twelve feet, when I reached a wooden platform. I scrambled up onto it.

  “See anything?” I heard a male say below.

  “He headed the other way.”

  I waited several minutes, and, when the lights were farther off, cautiously stood up. The platform was sturdy, the rigging supporting tungsten lights pointing downward into some kind of stone interior. A pillar stood about four feet across from me with a banner reading—I could barely make out the words—STIR THE WATERS. It was Father Jinley’s church from A Crack in the Window. Just beneath me along the wall were stained-glass windows, a three-inch ledge. I bent down, sliding down onto it, and with a silent Hail Mary, leapt across the divide—intending to grab the pillar and slide down.

  I missed. I reached out, seizing some sort of mounted wood plaque to break my fall. It wrenched loose, tiles clattering around me as I crashed to the floor, the plaque skidding across the stones.

  Fuck. I scrambled to my feet, seeing a flashlight slipping down the arched passageway in front of me, illuminating a vaulted ceiling, alcoves with statues. I hurried away from it down the rows of pews, heading to the back portal, spotting the confessional in the back corner. The simple sight of it made my stomach plunge, but I unlatched the ornate door—it emitted a faint moan—and climbed inside.

  It was tight with my backpack on, pitch-black.

  I crouched down to the floor, waiting.

  Within seconds, I heard someone enter the church and stop—no doubt inspecting the smashed hymn board I’d pried off the wall.

  I waited, my heart pounding, noticing a stench. Vomit? Urine? The footsteps resumed, the flashlight edging closer, illuminating the confessional door, which I could see was a carved wood screen of vines and flowers. I recognized the pattern and could hardly believe now I was staring out of it with dread, exactly as Father Jinley had stared out—albeit for somewhat different reasons.

  The film’s opening scene took place right in here, when Jinley was conducting his first confessional duties. He was fresh out of seminary school and believed, with the arrogant optimism of the young and inexperienced, that he would lead the depraved to the righteous path. After waiting for more than an hour without a single penitent sinner showing up, a mysterious figure at last enters the other side in a rush, sitting down on the seat with an ominous thud.

  The memory made me inadvertently crane my neck to inspect that confessional window only a few inches above my head, the dark latticed smoke screen ensuring total anonymity.

  This enigmatic stranger, as the priest soon realizes, knows Jinley’s dark secret, that he put his three-year-old bastard daughter on a Brooklyn rooftop, allowing her to teeter along the edge while chasing the roosting pigeons, and then, losing her balance, fall to her death on a sidewalk far below—all the while, Jinley watched from a crack in the window and did nothing. Jinley had his reasons, of course—he believed his little girl to be the devil incarnate. But as for who was watching him that afternoon, who this mysterious person was poised behind the screen, someone who vows in a knowing whisper to tear him apart and make him renounce God—it takes Jinley the whole film to figure it out, the identity of the person even more terrifying than his secret.

  I realized the footsteps sounded as if they were retreating down some other passage, the faint light now gone.

  I rose a few inches, sitting on the wooden seat just behind me, listening. I appeared to be alone. Had it been this side of the box Father Jinley had been sitting on or the other? Was I on the good guy’s side or the side of evil? Where was that goddamn smell coming from? I leaned forward, staring through the screen, the latticed openings in the form of minute crosses.

  I froze in horror. Someone was there.

  There was a person sitting on the other side.

  I hardly believed my eyes, yet I could hear breathing, the shifting of heavy fabric, and then—as if aware that he was now being observed—he slowly turned to face me.

  I was barely able to make out a face shadowed by a dark hood.

  The next few moments happened so swiftly, I was hardly aware of what I did: I blasted out of the box, racing past the transept, passing the entrance to Jinley’s office and through a door, which if I remembered correctly led into an underground crypt. It was too dark to see. I reached out, waiting for the feel of cold stones, then realized I’d been emptied back into the soundstage.

  I heard pounding, a chorus of neon lights moaning above. The lights were coming on. Suddenly I was drenched in bright light, half-blinded. I stumbled forward, feeling a door handle, pulled it, wheeling out into another freezing room.

  But it wasn’t a room.

  Real leaves crunched under my feet. Real wind rushed my face. And looking up, I swore that was a real moon over my head.

  I didn’t let myself believe it, that I’d actually escaped that soundstage. But after running a few yards, I looked back and saw the warehouse sitting quietly in the woods behind me. It looked innocuous, so wan and blank-faced—no hint of the levels of hell that lay inside.

  I was back in cold, hard reality, thank Christ. I ran back down the hill, heading toward Graves Pond. The men must not have realized I’d escaped, because no one was running after me anymore. Who the hell were they? And what had I seen on the other side of that confessional?

  I checked my watch, forgetting it was broken: 7:58.

  I fumbled in my pockets, taking a quick inventory of what I had—the child’s blood-soaked shirt and Popcorn’s compass. They were there; so was my pocket knife, but my camera was gone. It had been deep inside the pocket but must have fallen out when I’d yanked the coat back on. Berating myself for such sloppiness, fighting the urge to go back for it, I broke into a sprint, the wind hissing punitively in my ears, the moon lighting the way.

  A dog barked. It sounded like one of the hounds that had chased me, but frustrated now, tied up, though it was probably just a matter of time until it was set loose again.

  I’d come to Graves Pond. I crept to the water’s edge, staring through the foliage to its shimmering surface. There was still no sign of Hopper, Nora, or the canoe—not of anyone. Hopper and Nora. I realized with amazement those names seemed to come at me from far away, deep in my past. How long had I been inside that soundstage? Years? Was it some sort of wormhole, a dimension away from time? I hadn’t thought about them, not their well-being or the mystery of where they’d gone. I hadn’t been aware of anything except Cordova. Those sets were narcotics, dominating my head so entirely there’d been no space for any other thought.

  They must have gone for help. They were paddling back the way we’d come, safe. I needed to believe this so I wouldn’t worry, instead devising a new plan. But I knew in my gut Hopper wouldn’t give up on Ashley so easily. Neither would Nora. They must both be here somewhere, then, wandering, running in desperate circles.

  Squintin
g out at the opposite shoreline, the black hill, I spotted another one of the flashlights moving over the crest. The person seemed to be hurrying down the path to the wooden dock. Something was running through the grass. It had to be one of the dogs.

  I stepped away from the lake’s perimeter, breaking into a jog, heading east. I could gage my direction from what I knew of the lake’s position. East was the shortest distance to the property’s perimeter and the closest public road, Country Road 112. It was my best bet for help. My priorities had changed. Lives might be at stake now, if Nora and Hopper were trapped somewhere inside here, possibly hurt—or worse.

  Considering this as I ran, I’d unconsciously taken Popcorn’s compass from my pocket, clasping it as if it were a prized possession, a last hope. I saw in surprise that though the glass face was cracked, the needle was trembling due north.

  I turned in a circle to check its bearings. They were spot-on.

  The thing actually worked.

  I raced on, every now and then checking the compass to make sure I was on course—just as old Popcorn had checked it, much to the entertainment of the entire town.

  When in hell was I going to have the chance to go back to that greenhouse? I’d given up too soon. Popcorn, if he was actually buried there, would remain an entombed secret. My mind spinning, I forced myself to keep moving. The forest seemed to parade past in a cruel loop, like the synthetic backdrop in an old movie where the characters chat and drive but never look at the road. Were these real trees? Every trunk of every spruce was elongated and bare, identical to the others, every one.

  And then, staring off to my left, I saw it again, the warehouse.

  I froze, horrified.

  I’d run in a complete circle.

  Popcorn’s compass had been playing tricks on me, deliberately leading me astray. But no—taking a few steps toward the hulking structure, I realized this one was cylindrical, a silo, the exterior painted yellow.