Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  I turned my back to it, breaking into a sprint.

  Within fifteen minutes, I’d reached a paved road. It had to be the lower section of The Peak’s driveway, which meant I was going in the right direction. Reassured, I veered away from it, keeping under the cover of forest but following its general direction. Within minutes, I could discern far ahead the dark blur of the military fence.

  I sprinted toward it, flooded with relief.

  There were no discernible electrical wires. I took a chance, running my hands along the rusted links, waiting for a shock.

  I felt nothing.

  I grabbed the chain link and began to climb. I was six feet off the ground when I noticed, far off to my right, two roofs protruding through the foliage, each with a blackened spike.

  The Peak gatehouses.

  I recognized them because I’d driven up here years ago. I’d climbed out of my car and took a snapshot of the entrance, so desperate to get inside here. Now so desperate to get out. I recalled what the Spider had told us, how he’d taken that underground tunnel, which linked the mansion to a gatehouse, in order to help the Crowthorpe townspeople enter the property.

  It meant—if the Spider had been telling the truth—access to that maze of tunnels underneath the property was right there, yards away, so goddamn close. I could see it with my own eyes.

  After a split second’s hesitation, I was clambering back down the fence and back into The Peak, my mind screaming in protest. I leapt into the overgrown grass, moving along the fence, heading straight for those two cottages flanking the wrought-iron gate.

  The first one had no entrance. The second had a narrow black door, a window at the top. There was no discernible light inside, no evident camera, the paint was flaking, the glass too filthy to see through.

  I needed one quick look at the entrance to those tunnels, to substantiate Villarde’s story—and then I’d get the hell out of here.

  It was locked, so I smashed the window with a rock, unlocked it, and slipped inside. It was a minuscule room, with a window overlooking the approach to the gate, a desk with an old computer, an office chair glazed with dust. The floor was bare—except for a small black carpet in the corner.

  I walked over to it and pulled back the rug.

  There it was: a small wooden hatch. I slid aside the metal bars, grabbed the rings, and heaved it open, staring into the raw black hole.

  Concrete stairs, barely a foot wide, led sharply downward. I moved down a few, crouching to take a look.

  The tunnel extending in front of me was black. Only a few feet of brick walls were visible before cutting out into a darkness so absolute it looked as if this part of the world had been left unfinished—a raw edge of the Earth, which gave way not to simple darkness, but to outer space.

  Staring into it, my head urged me to get the hell out now, close the hatch, climb back over that fence while I still had the chance.

  But what did I have on Cordova? What did I actually know?

  I tried to mentally grab hold of a few hard facts to stay afloat. I had in my pocket a few items, which might incriminate the man, but could very well amount to nothing as far as the law was concerned. I had stories, eyewitness accounts, testimonies, the truth that Ashley was dead. But was it enough to bury him? I’d hardly speared Cordova, my great white whale. He could go on with his black magic, his live horrors. Ashley was dead, so there was no need for an exchange, but had he stopped? What had I seen with my own eyes?

  As I considered this, the decaying brick walls of the tunnel seemed to constrict imperceptibly around me.

  Just what, exactly, was I escaping unscathed back to?

  An empty apartment. No one would be waiting for me when I made it back to Perry Street. Life would go on as before. I’d go on as before. Simply to think this was suddenly unbearable.

  What in the hell was I waiting for? When in life was the truth right in front of you? Because it was here, beyond the pitch darkness. Even if I couldn’t see it now, it was somewhere in front of me.

  Do I dare? I took three more steps down. The air was frigid, an iciness that ate at my bones. I yanked off my backpack, rummaged in the pocket for my flashlight, tried turning it on, but it still didn’t work. I removed a Ziploc bag containing a box of matches, heaved my backpack on, and lit a match.

  The tiny orange flame trembled as I held it out before me.

  I almost laughed out loud. The dark was shoved back just a few inches. The redbrick walls were crumbling, the ceiling low, thick with mold. It looked like a shriveled artery to hell. I checked my watch.

  Seven-fifty-eight. I was making incredible time.

  I moved back up, grabbing the hatch. I pulled it closed over my head with an irrevocable thud. Had I just sealed myself inside my own coffin?

  The match abruptly blew out. I lit another and began to walk.

  When that one extinguished, I slipped on through the darkness as quickly as I could. There were a hundred matches in the box. I had to ration them. I remembered the Spider mentioning the distance between the gatehouse and the mansion was two miles. If I walked four miles an hour, within fifteen minutes I’d be halfway. I waited for my eyes to adjust, but after a time I realized the swirling black liquid I was staring into was my eyes adjusted.

  My footsteps were a metronome for my breathing.

  Beyond that, my hiking boots crunching down the grimy floor, there were no other sounds, just a marked pressure—of being sealed, as if this passage were cutting under a body of water.

  When I couldn’t stand the dark any longer, when I actually began to feel confused as to whether or not I was actually moving, I stopped and lit another match.

  The constricted corridor had shrunken around me, and was now less than four feet wide, extending identically in both directions. I realized that seeing the fragile light was infinitely more disturbing than just plunging forward in total darkness. I might as well put my head all the way under. Just don’t stop swimming. When that light burned out, I dropped the match and kept on, my right hand running along the crumbling bricks as a guide. It kept me tethered to the world, to reality, because this darkness was so total it became physical, a thick black curtain. It turned me upside down, made me wonder if I was actually submerged in black water and I’d forgotten which was the way to air and light. Gravity seemed to be frail down here.

  I tripped on something bulky, instantly gripped with an irrational dread. It was a body, a severed limb. I kicked it a second time. It sounded like a bed sheet.

  I fumbled to light another match.

  A red piece of silk lay on the ground, covered in dust.

  I picked it up. It was a woman’s dress—cranberry red, old-fashioned—with long sleeves and a black plastic belt. Nearly all of the front buttons were missing. I studied the neck and glimpsed the pale purple label of Cordova’s longtime costume designer—Larkin—seconds before the match burned out.

  I unzipped my backpack, stuffed the dress inside, zipped it back up, and shuffled on. After a time, I worried that I’d accidentally turned around and was blindly rushing back to the gatehouse, but I didn’t stop. It was just disorientation, the dark bullying the mind. How flimsy was a single person’s authority, his confidence about his place in the world. Give him fifteen minutes of this, even Einstein would start to doubt the laws of the physical world, who he was, where he was, if he were alive or dead.

  To my horror, I kicked something again. It scuttled noisily across the floor, something hard. It sounded like a piece of wood.

  No. It was a bone. I lit another match.

  It was a woman’s black leather pump with a square scuffed heel, covered in dust.

  I checked my watch without thinking: 7:58.

  I stood up again, holding the match out in front of me.

  The view was a carbon copy of the one from before—a wizened brick corridor disappearing infinitely in both directions.

  It looked like I hadn’t moved.

  I continued on, trying to remain
calm. Why was the dress down here? A woman had tried to escape? Very much like the boy’s blood-soaked plaid shirt in my pocket, the dress looked like the vestiges of violence. To die here, alone and cold, to never be found, never be loved again. Sam would think I’d abandoned her. I tried to wrench my mind away from these thoughts, chuck my attention onto something cheerful, but this place, so black and cold, extinguished levity within seconds.

  I stepped on something.

  Pebbles.

  I stopped, feeling so many of them—hard and round—rolling underneath my boot. Children’s teeth? Molars, sprinkled here like crumbs?

  I fumbled with another match, lighting it.

  They weren’t teeth, but the red round plastic buttons of the dress.

  I bent down to inspect them. A few feet away, lying along the wall, was the other black shoe. I grabbed a handful of the buttons, shoved them into Brad’s overcoat pocket, and stood up again.

  It was exactly the same view—a black tunnel extending in front of me and behind me, eternal. I was on a treadmill, running in place. I was trapped in a fourth dimension, purgatory, where there was no time or progression, only inert floating.

  The match, I realized, was burning my fingers.

  I let go of it, lurched forward, faster now. I could feel my mind faltering as if on a tightrope, threatening to lose its balance. I lit another match and saw with relief only a few yards ahead—a break in the tunnel. In my haste to get there, the match blew out. I hurried on. When I felt the wall open up to my right, I lit another.

  I was in a small circular alcove, gaping mouths of more tunnels fanning out, seemingly in all directions. I slipped past them, seeing faint words scrawled above each opening in crude white paint.

  GATEHOUSE. MANSION. LAKE. STABLES. WORKSHOP. LOOKOUT. TROPHY. PINCOYA NEGRO. CEMETERY. MRS. PEABODY’S. LABORATORY. THE Z. CROSSROADS.

  Pincoya Negro? Laboratory? The Z? I remembered the Spider had mentioned there existed at this central point other secret passageways, which led to other hidden parts of the estate. I lit another match, holding it up to the word painted on the wood right in front of me.

  Crossroads.

  It was what the Spider had called the clearing where he’d taken Ashley.

  Crudely nailed planks, once blocking the passage, had been hacked away with an ax. It was what Villarde had done for the townspeople. Only bits of splintered wood and twisted nails had been left, some strewn on the ground.

  This corridor was cruder than the others, barely three feet wide, and looked as if it cut straight through granite, the walls slick from water seeping in from somewhere. Taking a step down it, I could see more words had been scrawled on the rocks in the same white paint. Farther down, there were drawings of stick figures with protruding noses and screaming mouths.

  I stepped forward to read some of it. If y go father leave all your love right HERE at the floor. WARNING: ye will leav this path neither amimal, vegetabl, or mineral. Say goodbi to ye lamb. May the Lord help y

  The match flickered out.

  I lit another and forced myself to take one more step inside, holding the flame out. It swiftly extinguished, a subzero wind blasting my face, swelled and quickly dispersed. Then, I heard sizzling in my ears, so deafening and close, I lurched backward, stumbled on the uneven floor back into the alcove, dropping the box of matches.

  Fuck. My heart pounding, I knelt down, groping for it along the floor.

  It had disappeared.

  Something was with me here, standing behind me, toying with me.

  Trying not to panic, I wheeled around unsteadily, getting down on my hands and knees, fumbling for the matches in the dirt.

  Calm down, McGrath. The box has to be here.

  The side of my left hand hit something. Matches. I grabbed them. But somehow, impossibly, the box had been tossed far behind me, wedged against the opposite wall between two passageways. It was like the leviathan’s shadow. It had a mind of its own.

  I got to my feet, ignoring that thought, lit a match, and stepped back to the opening.

  Crossroads. The tunnel twisted sharply left and out of sight.

  I took another step down the passage, the flame burning calmly now. Just for the hell of it, I groped in my pocket and removed the compass, curious to see what direction I’d be heading in.

  I could only stare down at it, incredulous.

  The red needle was going berserk, spinning madly counterclockwise.

  I shook it, but the needle wouldn’t stop rotating, around and around.

  It was too much for my mind to compute, so I dropped it back into Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat pocket and, trying to forget I’d ever looked at the thing, I took off down the corridor.

  I didn’t know how long I walked.

  I had the distinct feeling I wasn’t alone.

  It was a bone-chilling understanding that I was in close proximity to something alive and was seconds from running headlong into it. And yet when I shoved the flickering flame in front of me, expecting to see a face, animal eyes—there was only darkness in every direction.

  The Spider’s insidious voice began to worm its way into my head, growing louder with every step, as if that day at The Broken Door, he’d been narrating not his own secret, but the future, this walk, my walk. I can still remember the sound of her bare feet, how soft and clean they were, padding along the filthy ground next to mine.

  Was that what I was hearing, what I sensed beside me? Ashley?

  I kept walking, listening, but there was only my own boots, trudging on.

  After a time, the Spider’s voice faded and my mind became blank, a dirty chalkboard, smeared with half-erased thoughts.

  Ashley had come this way.

  And Cordova. He walked this, every time he had a new child to try and barter with the devil. Anything to save his daughter.

  I could discern a strong smell of metal mixed into the heavy moisture and mud. At one point, I heard distant rumbling, as if, overhead, animals were thundering in a stampede across the property, fleeing in terror. I touched the slippery rocks, warm water trickling through my fingers. The walls felt as if they were vibrating. Pebbles came loose from the ceiling, rattling to the ground. But then the noise was gone, the tunnel as silent as before, and I was left wondering if my anxiety, needing some type of outlet, had conjured the whole thing.

  I plodded on, noticing that my brain felt loose inside my skull, as if it were melting. I noted with a stab of horror that I was sweating as if I were back inside that greenhouse, as if I’d never escaped, never gotten out from under the blood-splattered lights. Yet I shivered, riddled with chills, the feeble flame I was holding revealing what I already knew: The black tunnel unspooled in front of me, on and on.

  The moment I accepted it, understood I could very well die wandering here, I’d reached the end.

  A few feet ahead, a bent and rusted metal ladder extended to the ceiling.

  I paused, listening, hearing nothing but the wails of powerful wind. I grabbed the rungs and climbed up, my arms and legs oddly weakened and slack as if filled with sand. When I reached the top, I could feel another wooden hatch above me, seemingly identical to the one I’d entered at the gatehouse. I slipped back the rails, shoved my shoulder against it, and opened the hatch.

  I was in a dense forest of birch trees, the entire world in razor focus. I could make out every leaf and branch, rock and weed bathed in green moonlight. It had to be a side effect of being submerged for so long underground in blackness, as if my eyes, ecstatic to be granted one last chance to see, were doing their best.

  I climbed out.

  I took off down a rutted dirt path, noticing, tied to an overhanging branch, a red string dancing in the wind.

  A few yards ahead, I saw a bridge. The devil’s bridge.

  Simply thinking it sucked the breath from my lungs.

  There was no one here. I was alone. The wind was howling furiously, shoving the coattails of my coat so far out, it felt as if a crowd were grasp
ing at it.

  The bridge was arched, made of dark gray stone. The construction looked meticulous, as if every piece had been laid by a master’s hand, a delicate curved structure diving up and over a deep ravine, where, I saw as I stepped closer, a river was raging, icy and black. I noticed the water didn’t flow freely but dammed around the rocks, then rolled over them in lumps like tar. Yet the sound of an ordinary river surged in my ears.

  Or was that the wind?

  The bridge was long, ending in another grove of trees.

  Ashley ran the entire length of this bridge.

  She was the first human soul to cross it.

  I stepped onto the first laid stones. I had nothing to fear. The curse was finished. The devil had what he wanted. Ashley. Yet I found myself whipping around to stare behind me into those skeletal trees to make sure no one was there, that Sam hadn’t somehow followed me, believing I’d been kidnapped by trolls.

  When I was halfway across, I was hit by a rush of vertigo. It was as if the bridge had been rising imperceptibly under my feet, because I could see great distances, high over the branches of an immense forest, stretching out for miles, churning in the wind like a mad sea. A roof with black spikes protruded from the treetops, so far away.

  A nauseating dizziness suddenly overtook me, and I had to turn away, staring ahead to the bridge’s end.

  Something was there.

  I felt myself go numb. It was only half human. What the other half was, I didn’t know. It was tall, seven or eight feet, with gaunt arms and a round, wide face so coarse it looked like bark. I could see its eyes, round red eyes, like two fire holes in the dirt, a mouth of thorns.

  I had to be hallucinating. Or I was asleep, in a coma. Dead.

  What in the hell was happening to me? How flimsy sanity was.

  I waited for my eyes to tell me it was an illusion, a hoax of the birch trees and the shadows falling in dark piles across the bridge as if they’d been severed from the objects that had created them. I reached for my pocket knife, realizing I was holding Popcorn’s compass.

  How had it snuck into my hand again? The red needle had stopped spinning and was now pointing straight ahead.