Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “When Grandma Eli gave me Septimus, she gave me the directions that went with him,” she said. “You have to give him away to someone who needs him. That’s part of his magic. You’re supposed to know the right time to give him away, and it’s when it hurts the most. I want you to have him.”

  “I don’t want a bird.”

  “But you need a bird.”

  She unlatched the door, and the blue parakeet fluttered into her palm. She whispered something into his invisible ear, returned him to his swing, and then she was moving again, slipping past me down the hall. She didn’t stop until we were outside on my stoop.

  “I’ll go with you. Interview the hippie. Make sure this person wasn’t part of the Symbionese Liberation Army—”

  “No. I’m handling it.”

  “So that’s it? I’ll never see you again?”

  She wrinkled her nose as if I’d said something idiotic. “’course you’re going to see me again.” She reached up onto her tiptoes and hugged me. The girl gave the most premium of hugs—skinny arms clamped around your neck like zip ties, bony knees bumping yours. It was like she was trying to get an indelible impression of you to take away with her forever.

  She grabbed her bags and took off down the steps.

  I waited until she rounded the corner, then took off after her. I knew she’d kill me if she saw me, but thankfully the sidewalks were mobbed with shoppers, so I was able to stay out of sight, tailing her all the way into the subway, where she hopped on a 1 train, transferred to the L and then the 6, finally exiting at Astor Place.

  Emerging from the packed station, I lost sight of her. I looked everywhere, even began to panic, worried that was it, I’d never know what happened to her, if she was safe—Bernstein, the precious gold coin slipping out of my fumbling hands, disappearing into New York’s millions.

  But then I spotted her. She’d crossed Saint Marks Place, was walking with her usual corkscrew gait past the pizza parlor, the racks of magazines. I followed her down East Ninth, coming to a small triangular garden where the street intersected Tenth. She skipped up the steps of a shabby brownstone. I held back, slipping into a doorway.

  Nora set down her bags and rang the bell.

  As I’d tailed her, I’d mapped the various rescue scenarios—barging in the front door, kicking aside the nine cats, the raccoon, four decades’ worth of Village Voices, racing past the stoners making out on the couch and the psychedelic poster for the Human Be-In, all the way upstairs to Nora’s room: rat-friendly, stench of old sponge. Nora, perched on the edge of a futon, would spring to her feet, throwing her arms around my neck.

  Woodward? I made a huge mistake.

  And yet. Though the building was certainly dodgy—rusty air conditioners, window boxes with dead plants—I noticed on the first and second floors there were not one but two bay windows, and they did appear to get tons of light.

  But no one had answered the door. Nora rang the buzzer a second time.

  Let no one be home. Let the super-nice hippie have had a family emergency back in Woodstock. Or if someone answered, let it be a half-naked singer-songwriter with a tattoo on his chest that read WELCOME TO THE RAINBOW. Let me just rescue her one more time.

  The door opened, and a plump woman with frizzy gray hair appeared, wearing a striped apron streaked with dirt from a flower bed or clay from a potter’s wheel. She was unquestionably into tarot cards and soy, though I might have been wrong about everything else. Nora said something, and the woman smiled, taking a Duane Reade bag as they disappeared inside, the door closing.

  I waited for something—music turning on, a light. But there was nothing, nothing for me, not anymore, only a soft breeze coursing down the block, pushing the stray yellow leaves and the bits of trash caught along the curb.

  I walked home.

  102

  I’d decided it’d be wise to take a few days to recover from The Peak and clear my head before organizing my thoughts, wrapping up the investigation. I had that persistent sense again of having swum through leagues of blackened water, my insides still leaden, my mind streaked with mud.

  Yet real life was calling. I had unpaid bills, voicemails, month-old emails I hadn’t bothered to open, quite a few from friends who’d written I’m worried and You OK and WTF??? in the subject lines. I wrote them all back—I’d bought a replacement HP laptop a week before we left for The Peak—but to do even this simple task seemed pointless and irritating.

  I began to realize, with a sort of morbid fascination, that I hadn’t actually left The Peak—not entirely. Because the moment I was in bed, lights off, I needed only to close my eyes and I was back there. That property, maybe it was an unrequited time I’d always be returning to now, the way others returned in their dreams to golden childhood dances or battlefields, weekends at a lake house with some girl in a red bikini. Half awake, half dreaming, I plunged back inside that estate, wandering its dark gardens and statues hacked to pieces, past the dogs, the blinding flashlights manned by shadows. I backtracked through the tunnels, no longer searching for evidence to incriminate Cordova, but some crucial part of myself I’d accidentally lost up there—like an arm, or my soul.

  And that fear I’d felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world—watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar—made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who’d sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells.

  Why did I assume that I’d be fine, be able to process The Peak as if it were a trip to Egypt or the time in Mitú I’d been held for eleven days in a jail cell—a harrowing experience to digest and get over? Not this thing. No, The Peak and the truth about what the man had done were still sitting in my stomach very much alive, pulsing and drooling and intact, making me increasingly sick, maybe even killing me.

  This restlessness was made all the more worse by the fact that I was alone. Everyone was gone. Nora was right. Hopper was as finished as she was. I called him twice, heard nothing. I didn’t understand it—that they could both be done with the case and me, simple as that, that they could so ignorantly conclude that it all ended here. Didn’t they want to know if those were real human bones I’d found up there, that there were no other children hurt in Cordova’s mad attempts to save Ashley’s life? Weren’t they curious about the obvious remaining question—where was Cordova now?

  I drew all sorts of scathing conclusions—that they’d finally shown me their true colors; they were young and shallow; it was a larger indicator of the problems of today’s youth; raised by the Internet, they flitted from one fixation to the next with all the gravity of a mouse-click—but the truth was, I missed them. And I was furious I cared.

  It made me remember Cleo’s pronouncement all those weeks ago when she’d found the killing curse on the soles of our shoes.

  It pulls apart the closest friends, isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. It’ll drive you mad, which in some ways is worse than death.

  I hadn’t taken it seriously. Now I couldn’t help but note how accurate it was turning out to be, the isolation and fractured friendships, the sense of being pushed to the outer margins of life.

  Unless that was just Cordova. Maybe he was a virus: contagious, destructive, mutating constantly so you never quite grasped what you were dealing with, silently sewing himself into your DNA. Those with even the barest exposure contracted a fascination and a fear that replicated to the point that it overtook your entire life.

  There was no cure. You could only learn to live with it.

  After three days of wandering my apartment, avoiding the box of the remaining Cordova research, taking antibiotics and steroids for my h
and and rash, I realized that to try and relax was making me so uncomfortable, I had little choice but to let it remain murky.

  At eleven o’clock on Wednesday night I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to 83 Henry. Falcone, unsurprisingly, was right. When I stepped across the street, staring at the shabby walk-up nestled by Manhattan Bridge, it appeared that every tenant, for whatever reason, had vacated. Now every window was dark, though I could make out the ruffled pink gauzy curtains on the fifth floor. I tried the front entrance. It was locked, of course; yet, staring through the small window, I noticed that the names had been removed from all the mailboxes.

  I took off toward Market Street, and within two blocks, passed Hao Hair Salon, where I’d taped up Ashley’s flier in the window all those weeks ago. I was surprised to see that it was still there, only faded by the sun.

  Ashley was little more than a ghostly face, the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? barely legible. Seeing it gave me a nagging feeling that time was running out—or maybe it was simply moving on.

  Hopper and Nora were gone, and now, so was Ashley.

  103

  I’d tried Cynthia countless times, hoping for an update on Sam, but I’d still heard nothing. As much as her stonewalling drove me crazy, I did sense it meant that Sam was okay; if anything was seriously wrong, she’d phone me. At least, this was what I told myself.

  As Sharon Falcone had explained, it was going to take at least a month until I knew if those were human bones I’d found up at The Peak, so in the meantime, there were a few critical leads to follow up on.

  I logged on to the Blackboards, checking out rumors about the real-world fates of Rachel Dempsey and Fernando Ponti, the actors who’d played Leigh and Popcorn in the Cordova films. Cross-checking the Blackboards, I was surprised to learn that The Natural Huntsman—some kind of macho pro-NRA hunting newsletter—was accurate regarding Rachel Dempsey.

  Dempsey, who played Leigh in La Douleur when she was only twenty, was never seen or heard from again after vanishing in Nepal on April 2, 2007. There were two articles about the disappearance in her hometown newspaper, though there were no further developments and no record of any husband or children she’d left behind. I did find on the Internet existence of a Marion Dempsey living in Woonsocket—Rachel’s mother or sister, I hoped. I called the public directory, found the number, and after it rang interminably, an exasperated woman who curtly identified herself as “Mrs. Dempsey’s nurse” picked up. When I asked if her employer had a daughter named Rachel, I was told, “Mrs. Dempsey doesn’t trouble with that anymore”—which I took as a yes—and the woman hung up.

  Fernando Ponti, on the other hand—the charismatic elderly Cuban man who’d played Popcorn—had been spotted by three different individuals on three different occasions around Crowthorpe Falls between October 1994 (a year after Wait for Me Here was released) and August 1999. When I’d been inside the greenhouse, I’d had the distinct feeling that Popcorn was somehow still there, tending his plants and fish, and these three sightings seemed to suggest that I was right.

  Had the man never left? Had he loved his time at The Peak so much—or been so brainwashed—that he’d chosen to stay on as Popcorn, preferring his character to real life? Was he dead now, eternally buried in his fictitious gardens? I couldn’t find any records of Ponti’s family or where he’d come from beyond Cuba—which was mentioned only by the Blackboards. However, I was even more startled by the posting that detailed his disappearance inside Trophy Washing Machines, a store on the outskirts of Crowthorpe Falls.

  I’d come across the word Trophy back at The Peak. It’d been scrawled above one of the entrances to the underground tunnels.

  Had that particular corridor led to Trophy Washing Machines, clandestinely linking Crowthorpe Falls to the estate? It was too specific a word to be a coincidence. And it explained how Popcorn could have evaporated into thin air. He’d disappeared through a hidden hatch inside the store and headed home along this passage.

  I checked up on quite a few more actors on the Blackboards, those with the largest parts who’d probably resided at The Peak during shooting. I uncovered only one true constant: After working with Cordova, they all entered new phases of their lives, which tended to scatter them to the outer reaches of the globe.

  In not one case did the person remain the same, take up where they’d left off, go back to where they began.

  Rachel Dempsey, who’d played Leigh, had become an international hunter, which, oddly enough, made perfect sense; after playing the gullible and vulnerable Leigh, gagged and hog-tied in that buried bus, upon leaving The Peak, she appeared to have transformed herself from prey to predator. The rumor about Lulu Swallow, the woman who played Emily Jackson in Thumbscrew, was that she ended up living in a remote part of Nova Scotia and penning a series of dark-themed children’s books—the Lucy Straye orphan series—using the pen name E. Q. Nightingale. The debonair man who played Axel in La Douleur—Diane’s mysterious husband, with whom Leigh falls in love as she shadows him—ended up going to veterinary school and becoming a prominent Thoroughbred horse doctor; it was he who euthanized Eight Belles at the 2008 Kentucky Derby. The actor who played Brad Jackson—originally from England—supposedly moved to Thailand, where he was spotted by a Cordovite in 2002 in the red-light district Soi Cowboy with a teenage girl on the back of his motorbike.

  These people had scattered into the wind like ashes tossed in the air, all around the globe—one traveling as far as Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. I couldn’t tell if they were fleeing something by disappearing into new lives. Had they uncovered the truth about Cordova, seen the man up close, and that horror was what made them run? Or was it the opposite—had they been set free? Had they slaughtered the lamb, as they called it on the Blackboards—no longer restrained by anything; after working with Cordova, were they able to design the wildest life they could fathom for themselves and set about fiercely living it?

  From my vantage point, it was impossible to know if it was freedom or fear that drove them—or perhaps it was neither of these things and they’d been unleashed by Cordova onto the world, his devoted disciples, sent out to do his bidding, his work, which was God knew what.

  Whatever their motivations, I wondered if they felt anything similar to what I was feeling—the exhaustion, the nightmares, the sense of dislocation—as if somehow I’d swollen beyond ordinary life and could no longer fit back down into it.

  I was looking into this, searching the Blackboards not so facetiously for “aftereffects of Cordova” and “known symptoms,” when I was abruptly ejected from the site.

  No matter how many times I unplugged my laptop, restarted the settings, got a new IP address, tried a new user name—it resulted in the same exit page. Had I been banned, shut out—or found out?

  I turned my attention to looking into those plants that I’d hacked through inside the Reinhart greenhouse. The emergency room doctor’s last words had been that I’d encountered a potent irritant and it’d be helpful to know what it was, in case the rash didn’t improve. It was improving, had practically vanished within twenty-four hours of my taking the steroid medication. Yet one search for Mad Seeds was enough to set off alarm bells.

  Mad Seeds was one of many nicknames for Datura stramonium, or jimsonweed, a plant so poisonous one cup of the tea could kill a grown man. According to Wikipedia, side effects of either sucking the juice or eating the seeds produced “an inability to differentiate reality from fantasy, delirium and hallucinations, bizarre and possibly violent behavior, severe mydriasis”—dilation of the pupils—“resulting in painful photophobia”—intolerance to light—“that can last several days.” It gave men a sense of their upcoming deaths, turned ordinary people to “natural fools.”

  It was possible that, under the heat of those oppressive lights, sweating like a goddamn pig, I’d gotten drenched with the pollen and had unwittingly ingested it.

  I looked up every other name that I remembered: Tongue Tacks, Death
Cherries, Blue Rocket, Eye-Prickles. I couldn’t find tongue tacks or eye-prickles anywhere, but blue rocket was aconitum—one of the deadliest plants on Earth. It could be “absorbed through the skin, resulting in convulsions, and within an hour, a prolonged and excruciating death similar to strychnine poisoning.” Death Cherries was belladonna, also lethal and known for its fantastic hallucinatory properties, many of which came from one’s hopes and mental wishes, turning them to wild reality.

  I hadn’t realized it, but when I’d unwittingly wandered into that Reinhart greenhouse, it was akin to stepping inside a nuclear waste plant with a slight leak in one of the reactors or swimming blindly into a reef of great white sharks. It was a wonder that I wasn’t dead, hadn’t passed out somewhere on the property, fallen down a gorge—even jumped off the devil’s bridge, imagining I could fly. Beyond the obvious horror of my safety—it now called into question everything I’d seen and experienced up there. I could no longer trust a single recollection after I’d entered that greenhouse.

  Had I actually seen that stick man or been trapped inside those hexagons? Had I seen that deep ditch in the ground, or had my own overpowering hope to find tangible evidence up there conjured it right before my eyes? Those people in black cloaks who’d swarmed me—one of them waiting inside that church confessional—had they been real? Or a drug-induced incarnation of my fear?

  Now I couldn’t prove it either way. I might as well have smoked a goddamn crack pipe. It was an infuriating development, to say the least.

  Disgusted, vaguely enraged at myself for not being more careful, I decided to turn my attention instead to something concrete, something categorically real—researching missing persons in the Adirondacks.