Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  The wind launched into another shrieking fit. I blinked, staring back to the end of the bridge and saw in disbelief that that thing wasn’t a trick of my eyes. It was still there, yet beginning to slink away, its bony limbs gyrating as if caught in some invisible eddy before vanishing into the trees.

  Get off this bridge, a voice screamed in my head. I tore down the incline, slipping on the leaves plastering the stones, stumbling blindly off, barreling down a dirt path, which led me into a circular clearing.

  It was deserted.

  That strange vision, whatever it was, had to be hiding somewhere. It was here they performed the rituals, where Cordova became one of them. I stepped forward, the movement making me so off balance I fell to the ground, staring up at the night sky, a sky so smooth it looked like black liquid had been poured between the trees. What was happening to me? My limbs were melting.

  I willed myself to sit upright. I wasn’t sitting in ordinary dirt, but fine black powder glittering with minerals, a few feet away, a charred log. I reached for it, astounded that even though it looked like the ordinary remnants of a bonfire, it was as heavy as iron and I couldn’t lift it.

  A ripped piece of white fabric was caught underneath it. It looked like it’d been torn off a child’s blouse.

  I pulled it loose, but a blast of wind whipped it out of my hand, sending it tripping like a stray white leaf across the clearing, vanishing into the trees. I stumbled after it. When I saw where it had escaped to, what had just sucked it down, I could only stare in horror.

  It was a trench filled with children’s belongings.

  I could make out every item lying there, some fifteen feet below: tiny slippers and T-shirts, baby dolls and trains, undershirts and sneakers, all of it decomposed and sodden, some blackened as if burned. It was here where Cordova had thrown it all, the stolen objects, his attempts at an exchange. I could see it so vividly, a clarity that seared my eyes—his mania, his desperation, his willingness to let every corner of his soul go black so that his daughter might live.

  I realized in shock that I was lying facedown in the dirt.

  How long had I been lying here? Hours? Days?

  I lifted my head, which was throbbing, the dark ground and spindly trees swinging drunkenly away from me.

  I wasn’t alone.

  Black robed figures were standing farther off, all around me, silent, hidden by the dark, as if they’d grown off of the shadows themselves. One suddenly streaked between the trees, wearing a hooded black cloak, and then another beside him. And then another.

  They were moving toward me. I scrambled to my feet.

  “Stay where you are,” I said. “Don’t come any closer.”

  Was that me shouting? The voice sounded miles away. I fumbled for my pocket knife. It was gone.

  It wasn’t normal, how fast they moved, faces missing inside those black hoods, and then I felt hands gripping me as I was pulled backward.

  There was the night sky and then a bag over my head, smells of dirt and sweat and my herringbone coat—no, no, it was my backpack—wrenching off of me, my arms pulled as if to tear them off. I heard one man’s terrible screaming. When the cries didn’t stop and I felt myself hoisted into the air, I realized they were my own.

  When I opened my eyes I was aware of nothing but a moth.

  It was small, pale white in the dim light. It appeared to be injured. One of its wings would not fold over its back. Just a few inches from my nose, it was trying to climb a dark wall. It walked up the wood and kept falling off, trying again, falling. Ruffling its wings, it moved straight toward me. It had a furry head and brown legs, antennae working in apparent consternation. Sensing I was alive and large, it shifted directions, away from me and back to the wall.

  It was cold. The air was subzero. My hands were numb.

  Where the hell was I? I was flying. The draft on my face was the wind pummeling me as I swerved to avoid a cluster of black clouds, atmospheric particles, ice and dust and sharp snowflakes spraying my face. A shrill note was ringing in my ears, a painful sound like a long needle stitching my brain.

  I tried to sit up, but my head hit something.

  I reached out. It was a smooth wooden wall.

  I was inside something, a capsule spinning upside down, vibrating with velocity. But it was only a dream. I let go of my fear. I stretched out my legs—I was still wearing boots—and they encountered another wall on both sides. This enclosure I was inside, this spaceship, was tight, yet a good foot or two larger than I was.

  I opened my eyes, blinking, but there was nothing to see, as if I were suspended high above the Earth, between layers of atmosphere and outer space. The ringing in my ears went silent.

  I had nothing to worry about, because eventually I’d wake up. That was what dreams were for, the waking, the floods of relief, shock that the mind could be so easily deceived, tangled sheets, sunlight streaming through a window. But then, what was the hurry? If the dream was born of my subconscious fears and desires, why not remain inside here a little while longer, soaring through space, to explore the dream, ransack it, find out its laws and parameters and what I’d been so afraid of.

  My arms reached out around me, groping at the sides.

  Aha. Same as below and above. The coffin. I am in my coffin.

  I opened my eyes. This wasn’t a dream, I realized with sudden horror.

  I couldn’t wake. I was awake.

  The pale white moth—somehow it had made it onto the ceiling and it was crawling in circles, as if it, too, were realizing it was trapped, that there was absolutely nowhere to go.

  I began to shout, banging on the walls with my fists, pummeling and kicking.

  It sounded as if I were only calling into an empty hole in the earth.

  Oh, God, no. This couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be real.

  Suddenly, I understood. I was meant to know where I was. To see. The fresh air would keep me alive for days, even weeks, as I struggled and fought the inevitable, so I could lucidly consider everything I was about to be ripped away from.

  My mind froze as I tried to remember where I’d been only moments ago. I had the feeling I’d traveled miles. My arms felt as if they’d rowed across an ocean. Maybe I was dreaming, then, because dreams had so many layers, so many slippery departures and ends of ends I couldn’t find footing or the slightest edge for my fingers to grasp hold of.

  I reached out, feeling the space around me.

  Odd. The coffin appeared to have more than four sides. I maneuvered myself around on my back, using the heels of my boots to propel myself in a circle, counting the walls. But I had no endpoint, and when I’d counted twelve, I was certain I’d done more than one rotation.

  I leaned down to my right foot, untied the laces around the metal hooks of my boot, and wrenched it off. I turned onto my stomach, inched myself close to a wall, feeling for a corner, leaving the shoe there as a marker, and then I slipped along the floor counterclockwise, my hands counting.

  One. Two.

  I spun on like this, a captive animal inspecting the boundaries of his cage.

  Three. Four. Five. Six.

  I touched the boot again. Six sides.

  A hexagon.

  Horror gripped me once again. It actually had a face and legs, a massive beast with skin of black rubber, a bony spine, and it was perched right beside me, waiting for me to give up hope so it could feast upon me. I struggled and kicked, banging my head multiple times, screaming for help—someone, anyone—though after a while, when there was no answer, when that shrill noise had returned, ricocheting inside my skull like a lazy bullet without the strength to make its way out, I could only lie back down, wheezing, in my six-sided coffin.

  I closed my eyes, letting my fear wash over me. I had to bathe in it, accept it, drink it down, let it cover me like sludge, so it became nothing so extraordinary, nothing so fearsome—and I could think.

  Images wafted through my head. Sam was there, playing hopscotch across a check
ered floor. The Peak came into view, dark and colossal, rising up on its overgrown hill, and then I saw myself in an overcoat, running across a bridge, figures like a black fog overtaking me, blotting me out.

  They must have dumped me in here, my oubliette. Why couldn’t I remember? My memories, they’d been hacked into, tinkered with, cut away, because there was nothing in my immediate past—nothing at all.

  But if there was a way in, there was a way out.

  I opened my eyes, realizing, in my wild flailing, I must have accidentally brushed the moth off the ceiling. It seemed to have sought refuge in a corner, and once again, fluttering its wings, it was trying to climb the wall.

  Taking care not to squash the thing, I managed to put my boot back on, then spun on my back like the rotating minute hand of a clock. Each foot that I moved, I pounded downward on the walls with my feet. On and on I went, the beating noises oddly muffled, so much despair flooding through me it felt as if it were splashing off my elbows and feet.

  When I heard the fifth panel crack, I struck it a second time. The wood buckled right in half, splintering, falling through. I looked down at my feet, my heart pounding.

  A gray rectangular hole stared back at me.

  I immediately twisted around, staring out the opening, my euphoria quickly sliding back into horror.

  There was nowhere to go—only another wooden panel just two feet away.

  It appeared to be another box.

  I pulled myself through. There was incrementally more light and more space, though my old coffin took up most of it, sitting in the center. I couldn’t sit up in here, either, the ceiling just a few inches higher. I crawled on my stomach along the outside perimeter and when I scrambled past the hole I’d just crawled out of, I knew I was right, I was inside yet another hexagonal box.

  What the hell was this? A hell of coffins built like Russian Matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, on and on, toward infinity? Or was it a mind game built from an M. C. Escher print? A scene from a Cordova film—I tried to think back through every scene of every film, but I knew I’d never seen anything like this.

  If I broke out of the first, I could break out of the second. Wedging my back against the first hexagon, positioning my feet on the outer walls, I bashed each panel as I had before, making my way around the perimeter.

  I did it once, twice, three times. Not one wall gave way.

  I inspected the first coffin and could make out in the faint light smooth wood, the side panels painted black. The sight suddenly triggered a memory deep in the storm-flooded cellars of my head.

  And then it hit me, exactly where I’d seen this before.

  The realization was such a shock, I could feel myself falling away from whatever flimsy reality I’d just been grasping, and I dropped backward, spinning through cold, black space.

  “There it is,” Beckman had said. “The mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe … Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.”

  Right now, a box like this was sitting on top of Beckman’s coffee table in Beckman’s living room, beside piles of faded newspapers and a tray of tea. It was the infamously locked box that had belonged to the killer in Wait for Me Here, his prized possession containing the thing that had destroyed him as a child, a box that had never been opened. Beckman had caught me trying to pick the lock. And just a few weeks ago when I’d visited him, I’d held it in my hands, shaking it, amused to hear the same old mysterious thumps inside, wondering what in the hell they could be.

  They were me. Those rattles were my own bones. What I’d wanted to see inside, I was now locked in.

  I heard myself gasp out loud at the irony of it. I could feel tears welling in my eyes, sliding off my face. It was too cruel an ending to fathom, a punishment that was pure Cordova. The man was showing me that some mysteries were best left untouched, that the truth of them was the unknown. To try and wrestle them open, letting their contents come to light, was only to destroy oneself.

  Suddenly filled with such rage, I began to pound every wall around me, over and over again, like a reptile trying to hatch. I shoved my back against the ceiling, heard it crack, and, thrusting my shoulder against it again, felt it give way. I climbed up, emerging onto a floor, blinking in the increased light at a third black hexagon boxing me in. How long would it go on? How many cages were there? I pounded every panel until another gave way, and another. I kept on escaping, crawling through walls that broke down, one box giving way to another, clambering forward and backward, up and down, so disoriented at times, I had to sit, letting my legs and arms settle on the ground, feel which direction gravity was coming from, so I’d know which way was up and which was down.

  I didn’t know how many boxes I’d crawled through—it felt like dozens, the light increasing with each one, inching ever closer—when, pressing against a ceiling, abruptly the floor gave way.

  Bright light, and I was plummeting, plummeting straight down—

  I reached out, grabbed the edge of the box seconds before it flew past, desperately hanging on as the panel I’d just smashed struck the ground.

  I looked down, blinking.

  Maybe it was just my faltering vision, my eyes unable any longer to register great depths or space, because it appeared as if I were hanging off the top of a skyscraper, the concrete ground about a mile below.

  Bright light was pouring in from somewhere, through a window out of sight. Craning my neck upward, I could see that I was inside a vast metal tower, dangling like a bit of snagged thread out of a hole in the bottom of a large wooden structure, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.

  There was nothing else here except a single metal ladder, which extended from the ground, up the steel wall, disappearing from view over the top of this box.

  I had to get up there. I couldn’t go around the outside. The only way to climb out was to climb back in. I swung myself up onto my elbows, the entire structure swaying dangerously from the movement. The cables or ropes, which were keeping this thing suspended in the air, emitted off-putting creaks, as if the whole thing were literally hanging by a thread—as if I were hanging by a thread.

  I managed to heave myself back inside the box, and then, trying to keep my movements easy so as not to dislodge the entire structure, I crawled back through every hole in every hexagon that I’d made. It felt nauseating to do this, to be breaking back inside the boxes from which I’d just liberated myself, my mind protesting as the light around me fell away, as if, with it went my every hope for escape. For life.

  I spent the next few hours searching for another way out, pounding the other panels in the other hexagons, trying to find the walls that would take me up to the top—to that ladder.

  But no matter how hard I pounded, nothing gave way.

  I couldn’t help but suspect in my brutish demolition, my fury, I’d inadvertently destroyed the correct way out of here, the only way, and all I could do now was wait for the inevitable.

  Time became a milky liquid I let myself float on, drifting away from this box on its lazy current, back and forth.

  Then I realized I was lying on my right side, gazing through the hole I’d made in that very first coffin. A sudden sound of fluttering caught my attention, waking me from a dream.

  The moth.

  I’d forgotten about it. I was overwhelmed with relief at the simple sight, the understanding that I wasn’t alone. It was crawling on the ceiling, but fell off, and then calmly righting itself, took off again for one of the walls. I leaned in, gently brushed it into my hand. Working its antennae, it began walking around, exploring the boundaries of its new cage, which was, of course, the palm of my hand.

  So I would die in here. I’d leave my little life.

  I’d barely worn it out. Li
fe had been a suit I’d only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.

  Sam came into my head.

  She came the way she always did, padding over to me with her brown bare feet and her wise face, staring down at me, wrinkling her nose. What would she think when Cynthia told her I’d disappeared? I’d become a mystery she’d have to give life to. I’d become a hero, a world explorer who’d gone missing searching for buried treasure on the high seas, more courageous than I’d ever been in real life. Or no—I’d be a cavern in her heart she’d brick up and wallpaper over, hang paintings in front of and potted plants, so no one would ever know that dank and hollow passage was even there.

  I could hear Beckman, as if he were suddenly here, staring dubiously at the walls enclosing me before downing the vodka in the shot glass in his hand. Did I not warn you, McGrath, that to capture Cordova was to try and trap shadows in a jar? You wanted the truth. Here it is. It’s boxes inside of boxes. What made you so certain you could ever figure him out? That his questions even had answers?

  But what had Beckman shouted, when he’d caught me drunkenly trying to pick the lock on that hexagon box? “Traitor!” “Philistine!” And yet, before he’d slammed the door in my face, he’d said something else.

  “You couldn’t even see where it opened.”

  It was a hint that I wasn’t seeing all of it, not the full picture, that I was blind to something, that the way out wasn’t the way out.

  I had it wrong.

  I noticed the moth had managed to fly even with its injured wing. It was crawling again across the ceiling of that first box. I stuck my head inside, watching it move in circles, and then, working its antennae and legs, it paused, then slipped through a hole in the wood, vanishing from sight.

  I reached out, running my hands across the ceiling, feeling where the moth had disappeared, an opening the size of a grain of rice. Tracing my fingers along it, I could feel something else, an indentation. I fumbled through my own clothing, which felt strangely foreign and detached from me, as if I were riffling through the pockets of another man, a man who was passed out or dead. I groped, hoping to find some type of tool to use, yet the only hard object I could find was some type of pendant around my neck.