Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  I stared at her. I could feel the outskirts of another headache coming on, but I tried to focus, to think. A glass vial used for drawing blood? Medical waste? Why would Cordova have such things—for use in another film?

  Her mention of Nelson Garcia made me remember the other incident he’d told me about, the UPS delivery of medical equipment intended for The Peak, but accidentally arriving at his own trailer. Nothing we’d learned over the course of the investigation, no one we’d interviewed had mentioned a detail that validated this story or Garcia’s suspicion, that there was someone injured or ill up at The Peak—except perhaps now, Nora and these incinerators she’d just described.

  Hopper had been listening to her with annoyed detachment, occasionally glaring at her over some specific detail she mentioned—the word incinerators, the glass vial labeled biohazard.

  “What about you?” I asked him. “What happened?”

  “Hopper got inside the mansion,” blurted Nora excitedly. “He found Ashley’s room—”

  “I don’t know it was her room for sure,” Hopper countered.

  “But—of course you do.” Clearly surprised by his sudden reticence, she turned to me, leaning in. “He found letters that he’d written Ashley, ones she’d never answered. They were kept safe, in order, right beside her bed. It looked like she’d read through them a million times. And there were pictures of them together on top of her desk. Then he found her practice room—”

  “I don’t know it was her practice room—”

  “But you found a piece on the piano she’d written, called Tiger Foot.”

  “Tiger Foot?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Hopper’s tribe name from Six Silver Lakes.”

  Hopper looked livid. “I don’t know what I found up there, okay. I don’t know.”

  “How did you get inside the house?” I asked him.

  “Climbed up onto the roof. Found a window unlatched.”

  “What was it like inside? Abandoned?”

  “No. It was … nice.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes and seemed unwilling to elaborate, but, as I was waiting expectantly, he sighed. “It was a castle. Gigantic. Gloomy as fuck. Mahogany walls. Tapestries with unicorns. Snarling bear heads. Paintings depicting floods and mayhem and people in pain. Wooden chairs, big as thrones. Knights’ swords hanging on the wall, and an iron chandelier with burned white candles covered in wax. Not that I had much time to browse. Someone let the dogs back in. I found a back staircase, headed to the basement, ducked inside the first room I found that was unlocked. I hid in there for hours.”

  “It was filled with thousands of filing cabinets,” added Nora.

  “Filing cabinets?” I asked. “Containing what?”

  “Actors’ head shots. Millions of pictures and résumés with weird notes written on the back.” She waited for Hopper to explain it to me, but, again, he looked infuriated by her candor.

  “What kind of notes?” I pressed when neither of them spoke.

  “Personal details,” said Hopper.

  “Such as?”

  “Background. Phobias. Secrets.”

  “They had to be actors Cordova had considered for roles,” said Nora. “It reminded me of the audition Olivia Endicott described. Remember how he asked her those weird personal questions?” She glanced at Hopper. “What was the one you told me about? That woman named Shell Baker?”

  “Her picture looked like it dated back to the seventies,” he said. “Someone had written on the back of it, ‘No family except a brother in the Navy, hates cats, diabetic, doesn’t like to be alone, sexually inexperienced.’ Another was, like, ‘Raised in Texas, car accident as a five-year-old child, left her in a back brace for a year, painfully shy.’ ”

  “Did you take anything with you?” I asked.

  He seemed irritated by the question. “Why?”

  “For evidence?”

  “No. I put it back and got the hell out of there.”

  “Then Hopper found a torture chamber,” Nora blurted.

  “It wasn’t a torture chamber,” he countered angrily. He looked at me. “Another room in the basement just had a bunch of wooden stretchers and planks, metal bridles, antiques—I didn’t know what half the shit was. I slipped out, snuck upstairs to the third floor. I found what I think was Ashley’s room, was looking around when I accidentally knocked over a lamp. Someone must have heard me, because I could hear someone coming up the stairs. I darted into a closet while this person, it sounded like a woman, wandered around. She righted the lamp and then she left. Only she locked me in. I couldn’t unlock the door from the inside. I was going to unscrew the doorknob, but then I heard one of the dogs outside the door. He had to have known I was in there. But he didn’t bark. There were giant bay windows in the room, overlooking the hill and Graves Pond, but when I climbed out, there was a sheer drop. I stayed in the room all night, silent, waiting for the dog to leave. About five in the morning someone whistled and it ran downstairs. I unscrewed the doorknob, managed to get out of the house without encountering anyone. I made a beeline for the canoe, but naturally it was gone. So I just followed the same stream that we’d come in on. I got lost, though. I wandered deep into a swamp, ended up in mud chest-high. I came upon a group of campers who looked at me like they thought I was the Loch Ness Monster. They told me I was in a section called the Hitchins Pond Primitive Area, which is all the way east of Lows Lake. It was about six at night when I made it back to the Jeep.”

  “Any sign of one of the Cordovas living at the house?” I asked.

  “No. The top floor was where the family had their bedrooms. No one slept there all night. I think the other people with the dogs were caretakers. Not that I saw any of them up close.”

  “You didn’t enter any other room in the basement?”

  “No. They were all locked.”

  “What about upstairs? Anything unusual?”

  He nodded, his face somber. “I found a closed-off wing toward the back of the house. Up a flight of spiral stairs into this tower was a bedroom suite. Half of it was brand-new. Brand-new beams of wood on the floors. You could see where the old met the new. I wondered if it’d been remodeled after a fire. And maybe that had been the Spider’s room. There was nothing there, though. Not a photograph, not a clerical collar. Nothing.”

  “What about this Pontiac you saw in the Evening View parking lot?”

  “I think it’s one of the caretakers. I had to leave Ashley’s doorknob unbolted, so they know someone entered her room.”

  “Any sign she’d been there in the days before her death?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t know how, but …” A smile flickered across his face, went out. “She was still in the air.”

  Expressly avoiding eye contact, he took a sip of coffee.

  “Now it’s your turn,” Nora whispered eagerly, leaning in.

  96

  What had happened to me? Did I even know?

  I told them everything I remembered, beginning with the dogs chasing me all the way to my return to the Evening View Motel. I didn’t consciously choose to tell them in such detail—Nora looked stricken, Hopper slightly infuriated, which made me wonder if it was wise to be so uncensored—but each word I uttered seemed to wrench loose the next, until all the confusion and horror came tumbling out in a landslide.

  When I’d finished, they said nothing for a moment, speechless. And I was relieved. I don’t think in all of my days of reporting, I’d ever so much needed to tell someone exactly what had happened, as if to do so was to finally walk out of there, pull myself out of those tunnels and shadows, once and for all.

  “What do you mean you found something you didn’t remember taking in Brad’s coat pockets?” Nora whispered.

  Before answering, I looked around to make sure our waitress was still back inside the kitchen. We were the only ones left in the restaurant. Even the elderly man who’d been seated at the counter was now shuffling out the door, leaning heavily on his cane, h
is every step an effort.

  Brad Jackson’s mud-soaked coat sat folded on the seat beside me.

  I pulled it over and, object by object, emptied the pockets, placing each item on the table in front of us. Popcorn’s compass. The child’s blood-soaked shirt. They looked odd here in the neon lights, out of place, souvenirs from a nightmare.

  “These I remember taking,” I said. “But not this.”

  I fumbled in the pocket and pulled out the final object lying at the bottom. It was a three-jointed set of bones, weathered and dirty, about five inches long.

  “What is that?” asked Nora.

  “It looks to me like a portion of a child’s foot. But I don’t know.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I’m guessing I came across it somewhere and took it, thinking it could be evidence. But I really don’t remember.”

  Nora’s alarmed gaze left the bones on the table and moved to me. “You don’t remember if those people did anything to you, or …”

  “No.”

  “What about how you got into that hexagon?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s obvious you were drugged,” said Hopper.

  Nora anxiously bit her lip. “Now what do we do?”

  “We’ll have some of this analyzed,” I said. “Find out if it’s human blood on the shirt or human bones. If it is, we need to find out whom they belong to. Was the Spider correct in his suspicions? Is there a mother out there, waiting for news of her missing child? I can’t prove what I saw up there was real, but I can prove Cordova believed in the curse. How far did he go in his work and in his hope to save Ashley? The man blurred fiction and fact. His art and his life were the same.”

  “That’s not what we decided,” Hopper muttered. “We made a deal before we broke into The Peak all three of us would decide what to do with the information. Not just you.”

  “But we don’t know what we have yet.”

  “What do you want to gain from all of this?” He stared at me accusingly. “Your name in friggin’ lights? The glory of stripping the great Cordova naked so you can parade him on a leash in front of the world for everyone to look at? So you can gloat that this is really what he is? And he wasn’t so great? You think that’s what Ash would’ve wanted?”

  “I don’t know what she wanted.”

  “This isn’t your lottery ticket. This is her life. I’m not going to let you turn it into some cheap tabloid story—”

  “No one’s suggesting that—”

  “We know what she went through,” he went on angrily. “We know the kind of madhouse she grew up in, what sort of family she had. How she lived her life. We know why she climbed to the top of that elevator shaft by herself in the middle of the night and jumped. It was to put an end to it. We know. You even saw that ditch filled with the shoes and gloves. So, when is it enough? How much more truth do you need to suck down until you’re fucking full?” He furiously shoved back his plate, fork clattering to the floor, and stalked out of the restaurant, the door slamming behind him.

  “He saw something up there,” whispered Nora. “Don’t know what. He’ll probably never tell anyone.”

  It had started to rain, and Hopper, zipping up his jacket, gazing at the ground, ducked away from the window, out of sight.

  “Whatever he was looking for,” she said, “whatever he wanted from her, he found it.”

  97

  The drive back to the city was tense and mostly silent. I stopped at River Rentals Inc. in Pine Lake to pay in full for the missing Souris River canoe, explaining to the kid with dreadlocks behind the counter that it’d been destroyed.

  “Seriously? What happened, man?”

  I could only hand him a credit card. He definitely didn’t want to know.

  We pulled onto the highway, and immediately Nora fell sound asleep in the seat beside me. I thought Hopper had, too, but every time I glanced in the rearview mirror, he was only staring out the window, his face unreadable, his thoughts probably somewhere back at The Peak.

  Nora was absolutely right. Hopper had admitted he’d spent the night in Ashley’s room, and I couldn’t help but suspect something he’d seen there or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he’d let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a love he’d been keeping in a cage. What was it like for him, every day standing outside in the wind and rain to stare at the ocean, yearning for some sign of her, never giving up hope? At The Peak perhaps she’d finally come into view, a ship coming neither toward him nor away, only riding that perfect line between heaven and earth, long enough for him to know that she had loved him, that what they had was real, before slipping out of sight, probably forever.

  I certainly understood his anger toward me and his desire to protect Ashley. I’d even anticipated it, that the deeper we got into the investigation, the more disturbing the truth about her family, Hopper and I would inevitably clash over what to do with the information. But for me to let it rest here, not to go all the way, was not an option.

  Hours later, at dusk, we were back in Manhattan, driving down its battered blocks of pedestrians and potholes. Hopper asked me to drop him off at his apartment on Ludlow, the only words he’d said during the entire ride.

  He climbed out of the Jeep, pulling his backpack over his shoulder.

  “I’ll see you guys,” he said curtly and slammed the door.

  “Wait,” said Nora.

  She hastily scrambled out and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him right on the sidewalk. He chucked her affectionately on the chin and moved up the steps to his building. When she climbed back in, I was surprised to see that she was crying.

  “Bernstein. Hey. What’s the matter?”

  “You don’t get it.” She wiped her eyes. “We’re never going to see him again.”

  “What? Don’t be silly.”

  She shook her head in disagreement, watching him disappear inside.

  I was surprised by the pronouncement, to say the least, certain it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t end like this, not here, when so much was still unanswered, but then I remembered his apartment, the bare walls and the bag from South Dakota, the lyrics from “Ramble On.” Had he found all the answers he needed and he was finished with us—simple as that?

  I didn’t know what to say, because abruptly Nora was heartbroken. She silently wept all the way out of the Lower East Side, down Houston Street, and well into the West Village. I tried comforting her, but ultimately was too drained to do more than concentrate on the simple task of getting the rental Jeep back to Hertz.

  A hot Saturday night in the Village was detonating around us. As we walked back to Perry Street, negotiating the dense crowds and honking cars, Nora didn’t say a word. When I let us back into the apartment, she ignored my question about whether or not she wanted any dinner, fleeing upstairs to Sam’s room.

  I headed to my office. It looked solemn, untouched. Gazing at the windows, the night, I actually wished Septimus was there on the windowsill to greet me. I could’ve used the company; he might be a parakeet, but he was reasonable. But we’d taken him to a kennel to be looked after. There was nothing and no one here.

  I tried calling Cynthia—I had the overwhelming desire to hear Sam’s low voice, to hear that she was all right—but she didn’t pick up. I left a message. I went upstairs and took a shower, locked everything I’d taken out of The Peak in my safe, and climbed into bed. I’d stuck Brad Jackson’s coat on a hanger, hanging it on the back of my closet door. It looked oddly limp there, oddly lifeless. Had I gone far enough up there? Seen enough at The Peak to get to the bottom of it?

  98

  I woke up gasping and lurched upright, expecting to hit my head on the ceiling of yet another hexagon, only to realize I really was at home. Nora was perched on the edge of my bed.

  “Christ. You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Everything all right?” I sat up, p
ropping myself up on the pillows. I was relieved to see she was no longer crying. “Are you upset about what happened? I’m sure you’re wrong about Hopper.”

  “No. Yes. It’s just …”

  “What?”

  “When we were tracking Ashley before, she was alive. Now I can feel she’s gone. And when Hopper said goodbye it reminded me of Terra Hermosa. There, the endings hit you hard because they’re sudden. Like, one day Amelia who loves flowers is there in the dining hall with her oxygen tank ordering the fruit plate, and the next? She’s nowhere. All they leave out is this memorial and what it is depends on what hallway you lived on. Like, if you lived on the first floor they put up an easel with a laminated picture of you smiling and knitting with your glasses around your neck. But if you lived on the fourth floor, they put this guestbook out to sign with flowers and a poem about loss printed off the Internet. And that’s it. After two weeks they take it down, the poster and the guestbook, and it’s like you were never there. I hate it so much.”

  “I hate it so much.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “It’s not. But then, that’s the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don’t want it to. The ending gives it meaning. But now that you mention it, will you promise to off me when I’m ninety and never leave home without an oxygen tank? Make a day of it. Just roll me and my wheelchair off the George Washington Bridge and call it a life. Deal?”

  The request seemed to make her smile. “Deal.”

  “They should really tack that on to the marriage ceremony. ‘Do you promise to love, honor, obey me, and also to kill me when I can no longer stand in a shower?’ ”

  “I really love you, Scott.”

  She blurted the words. They took me so off guard, I wasn’t certain I’d heard her correctly, but then she slid forward in the dark, kissed me on the mouth, then sat back, studying me intently, as if she’d just added a key ingredient to a new science experiment.