Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  She unlocked the door and stepped inside. But then, she slowly turned back, her hair gilded by some hidden light behind her.

  She smiled one last time. The door closed and the street went still.

  “That’s it,” I whispered, more to myself than the cabdriver. I turned around, sitting back against the seat, pale yellow light washing over me as we pulled away.

  115

  It was a fluke. But then, life is.

  It was a few days after my night out with Hopper and Nora, when I’d just started recovering from my hangover. I was cleaning my office. I let Septimus out of his cage, so he might fly around for a little exercise. I yanked the leather couch away from the wall and noticed, wedged along the floor, the three black-and-white reversing candles Cleo had given us.

  I’d forgotten all about them. They must have fallen there, unseen, when the room was ransacked.

  We’d barely burned them, preoccupied with everything else. But why not finish the job? I set them on a plate and lit all three. Hours later, when I was on the couch with a scotch and The Wall Street Journal, I glanced up and saw they’d burned down to nothing, just a sliver of white wax. The first and then the second extinguished, as if waiting for my full attention, the wicks flaring orange for a moment before going out. The third held on, the flame twisting as if refusing to let go, to die, but then it went dark, too.

  I realized my cell was ringing.

  “Hello?” I answered, not bothering to check the caller ID. My accountant was due to call back to inform me my life savings was on its last leg and it was time to either apply for a new teaching position or consider another investigation, one that actually paid money.

  “Scott? It’s Cynthia.”

  Fear instantly gripped me. “Is Sam all right?”

  “Yes. She’s wonderful. Well, no, actually, that’s not true.” She took a deep breath. “Is this a good time to talk?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  She sounded upset. “I’m sorry. Not returning your calls. I thought it was the right thing to do. But she’s inconsolable. Scott this, Scott that. Crying. I can’t take it.” Cynthia herself seemed on the verge of tears. “Does this Saturday work for you to spend some time with her?”

  “Saturday works.”

  She sniffed. “Maybe she can stay the night.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Good. How are you, by the way?”

  “I’m great now. How are you?”

  “Good.” She laughed gently. “So, Saturday, then? Jeannie’s back. She’s recovered from mono.”

  “Saturday.”

  We hung up. I was unable to take my eyes off those candles.

  They were smoking rather innocently, three long gray threads embroidering the air.

  116

  It was with the acute sense that a miracle had been worked, when on Saturday, Sam arrived on my doorstep with Jeannie in tow.

  It was a clear winter day with all the bounce and bright-eyed resilience of a teenager, sky blue, sun blinding, the two-day-old snow crunching like cake icing under our boots. I pulled out the stops: lemon and ricotta pancakes at Sarabeth’s; an expedition through FAO Schwarz where Sam was quite taken with a twelve-hundred-dollar life-sized African elephant from the Safari Collection (his coat meticulously hand cut by seasoned craftsmen, according to the tag), which Jeannie promptly nanny-nixed me from purchasing. We lost Jeannie after ice cream at the Plaza; crashing from a sugar high, she opted to skip the day’s crown jewel—ice-skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park—meeting us back at my place.

  “Please be careful,” Jeannie said, giving me a hard, knowing look before collapsing into a taxi.

  But it was smooth sailing, with just one rough patch: fitting Sam’s left foot into her skate. It seemed to get chewed up somewhere around the ankle and she screwed up her face, which prompted me to whisk it off and wrestle the skate wide open, doing a bit of phony straining like I was a prime contender for Mr. Universe—Sam giggled quite a bit—and then we hit the ice, father and daughter, hand in hand. It was packed with tourists—they were too giddy to be native New Yorkers—but once we were swallowed by the mob, it was as if we were inside a sea of joy. Everywhere—it was colored parkas and laughter, sizzling woosh noises as Central Park South and Fifth Avenue towered over us.

  It was when we walked down the cobblestone sidewalk along Fifth that the good stuff happened. Sam disclosed the name of her best friend: Delphine. The girl sounded beyond chic at six, born in Paris.

  “Delphine comes to school in a limousine,” Sam noted.

  “Good for Delphine. How do you get to school?”

  “Mommy walks me.”

  Thank Christ, Bruce was keeping his Bentley under wraps. I made a mental note to keep an eye on old Delphine. It sounded like she’d be climbing out of bedroom windows in no time.

  Sam wanted to show me her new shin guards and soccer cleats and had recently learned the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius. She also very much liked her new PE teacher, a young woman named Lucy who was happily married to Mr. Lucas, who taught earth science. Sam spoke quietly and categorically on each of these subjects, explaining them with senior official authority, me the cheerful ignorant underling. She also mentioned quite a few proper names—Clara, a dog (or very unfortunate boy) named Maestro, Mr. Frank, something called The Tall Tale Circle—as if I knew precisely who and what each of these things were. And I was moved by this, because it meant Sam sensed there’d never been a moment I wasn’t with her, that I was always seeing what she saw.

  After we greeted two passing dachshunds, Sam announced she was ready to go home. In the taxi, I asked if she’d had a good day. She nodded.

  “And honey?”

  She was yawning.

  “Remember the toy Mom found in your coat pocket?”

  It was an intriguing enough question for Sam to stare at me.

  “The, uh, black snake?” I clarified, as casually as I could.

  “The dragon Mommy got mad about?” asked Sam.

  “Yes, the dragon Mommy got mad about. Where’d you get it?”

  “Ashley.”

  I did my best to look nonchalant. “And where did you meet Ashley?”

  “With Jeannie in the playground.”

  With Jeannie in the playground. “When was this?”

  “A long time ago.” Sam yawned again, her eyes comically heavy.

  “Did you speak to her?”

  She shook her head. “She was too far away.”

  “How far away?”

  “She was by cars and I was on the swing.”

  “But how did she give you the dragon?”

  “She left it.” She said it with a teacher’s exasperation, as if it’d already been explained many times.

  “When? The next day?”

  She nodded vaguely.

  “Okay. You’re the most astute judge of character I’ve ever met, and I greatly value your opinion. What’d you think of her? Ashley.”

  She smiled faintly at the mention of the name. But her eyes were closing.

  “She was a magical …” she whispered.

  “What? Sam?”

  But she was out, head lolling against my arm, hands on her lap as if holding an invisible clump of violets. At Perry Street I carried her upstairs so she could sleep, though Jeannie woke her up at seven to put her in her cloud pajamas. We watched Finding Nemo. I made egg-white omelets. When Jeannie went upstairs to take out her contacts, which seemed to be code for calling a boyfriend, Sam sat eating quietly at the kitchen table.

  It was the chance to ask her more about Ashley, to fathom how on earth it had happened, but then, taking the seat beside her, she looked at me, chewing slowly with her mouth tightly closed, as if she knew very well what I was about to ask and she found it sad that I still did not understand. Swallowing, she set down her fork and took my right hand, patting it like it was a lonely rabbit in a pet store, before reaching for her glass of milk.

  And I realized�
�of course—Sam had told me everything.

  117

  She was a magical.

  When I said goodbye to Sam the following day, I gave her the tightest hug and kissed her cheek, and then her hot head.

  “I love you more than—how much again?” I asked her.

  “The sun plus the moon.”

  I embraced Cynthia. She wasn’t expecting it.

  “You’re glorious,” I whispered into her hair. “And you always were. I’m sorry I never said it.”

  She stared after me in shock as I made my way out of the lobby, smiling at the two doormen, blatantly eavesdropping.

  “Did you get that? This woman is glorious.”

  The moment I got home, I pulled out the old sagging cardboard box again, spreading the few papers out on the floor.

  What had I learned when I’d been trapped inside that hexagon box—about myself? You couldn’t even see where it opened. It was a hint that I wasn’t seeing all of it, not the full picture.

  Maybe I still had it all wrong. Maybe I still wasn’t seeing something that even Sam had seen. And Nora. And Hopper.

  All three of them believed in Ashley. And I didn’t.

  But what if I did believe as blindly as Hopper, Nora—and Sam? Was it blindness, or did they all see in a way that I didn’t? What if I punted reason and common sense into the air, let them soar dumbly out of sight, and believed in witchcraft, in black magic, in Ashley? Burning the reversing candles had brought Sam back into my life. Yes, one could argue it was simply a coincidence that the moment they’d extinguished, Cynthia within a matter of seconds had called—but what if it wasn’t? Maybe it was the black magic again rearing its head, insisting it was real.

  What if I took a leap of faith and simply accepted that the truth behind this entire investigation resided not with Inez Gallo, but with Ashley? What if she hadn’t been in an especially precarious mental state? The truth about her illness meant nothing. Why couldn’t cancer be yet another symptom of the devil’s curse, as Ashley herself had believed? I might not have collected sufficient evidence up at The Peak—the stained boy’s shirt and those animal bones—but that did not vindicate Cordova from what I’d suspected, that he practiced black magic with the townspeople, that his night films weren’t fictions, but real live horrors, that he’d used children to try and free his daughter from the curse, possibly even crossing the line into hurting one of them, as the Spider had hinted.

  There’s nothing Gallo won’t do to protect him. I’d read it on the Blackboards. Yet, oddly enough, she’d chosen not to protect him from me. She’d directed me straight toward him.

  Or had she?

  Beckman had warned me that I might encounter a figure stationed at the intersection between life and death. It will be a decoy. A substitute to grant freedom to the real thing. He’s Cordova’s favorite character. He’s always there, when Cordova’s mind is at work, no matter what.

  That figure could very well have been that man back at the nursing home, the stranger I’d sat down beside.

  Bill Smith.

  He could have been anyone—anyone with a hefty enough frame and build, just senile and soundless enough not to be aware he was passing for Cordova. That wheel tattoo wasn’t definitive proof. It could have been drawn there—even tattooed by Gallo into the man’s hand in the middle of the night, when no nurse was watching. There was no security at Enderlin Estates, nothing stopping Gallo from doing what she wanted to whatever elderly stranger she chose, so he might serve as a feasible stand-in for her lord and master—thereby granting freedom to the real thing.

  She’d wanted him to go free.

  Perhaps Gallo was Cordova’s paid executioner, waiting for anyone who got too close to his whereabouts, who knew too much. Maybe she’d been waiting for me to come clamoring up onto that final wooden platform, and it was her job to tuck the burlap bag over my head and then the noose, ruthlessly heaving the ground out from under me, sending me flying, kicking, gasping back to reality, where she was so certain I’d stay.

  “I live in the real world,” she’d announced flatly. “And so do you.”

  She’d meant it as an order, a directive. She was giving me instructions, certain I’d follow them on my own accord, because I was a realist, a skeptic, a practical man. And yet I’d noticed, too, there was something faintly scathing about the way she’d said real world, as if it were the most miserable of life sentences.

  Ashley’s history will now forever remain where she wished it, where she believed in her heart it always was—beyond reason, between heaven and earth, land and sky, suspended much closer to legend than ordinary life—where the rest of us, including you, Mr. McGrath, must remain.

  Where the mermaids sing, I’d muttered.

  Mermaids. There was something about that word that had bothered Gallo. And if it unnerved her, it could only mean one thing: It was too close for her comfort to the real Cordova.

  It took me all night, all day, and one more night after that to find the connection. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t need to. I retyped the notes that had been stolen, detailing every witness we’d tracked down who’d encountered Ashley, everything I’d encountered at The Peak, every word I’d heard whispered about Cordova.

  When I did see it, I realized, it had been right in front of me, all along.

  Gatehouse. Mansion. Lake. Stables. Workshop. Lookout. Trophy. Pincoya Negro. Cemetery. Mrs. Peabody’s. Laboratory. The Z. Crossroads.

  The word had been scribbled above one of the thirteen blackened doorways down in the underground tunnels at The Peak.

  Pincoya. It was a kind of mermaid.

  “Long blond hair, incomparable beauty, luscious and sensual, she rises from the depths of the sea,” read the entry on Wikipedia. “She bestows riches or choking scarcity, and all of the mortals on land live in answer to her whims.” The creature had been spotted in one remote place on Earth and only one—an isolated island off the coast of South America called Chiloé.

  La Pincoya was just one of a throng of mythical creatures that haunted the island’s land and shores, which remained shrouded in heavy mist and rain eleven months of the year. It was a bleak and inhospitable place, one of the remotest islands on Earth, an island with a legendary history of witchcraft.

  I suddenly remembered, a detail Cleo had mentioned back at Enchantments the first time we’d gone to see her, when she was inspecting the materials we’d given her of Ashley’s Black Bone killing curse.

  I see some dark brown sand in here, some seaweed, too, she’d told us. She must have picked this up someplace exotic.

  There wasn’t much information about this island, Chiloé, but when I was reading a Spanish backpacker’s blog, I came across another connection.

  Puerto Montt.

  It was the last city on Chile’s mainland, before the country breaks up like a cookie into hundreds of crumbled islands. The backpacker had traveled from Puerto Montt to another town, Pargua, and from Pargua took the ferry to Chiloé. The only way to access the island was by boat, apart from a few rudimentary airfields.

  I knew I’d recently read about the city and after an hour of searching, I found where: in The Natural Huntsman, the article posted on the Blackboards about Rachel Dempsey’s vanishing from Nepal—Rachel Dempsey, who’d played Leigh in La Douleur. Although there’d been no sign of her after she’d disappeared from her hunting expedition, nine days after she was reported missing, her satellite phone had been turned on in Santiago, Chile, and she’d made a brief phone call to a number that was traced to Puerto Montt.

  I’d retyped the interview with Peg Martin in Washington Square Park and recalled Martin had mentioned that Theo Cordova had been carrying on an affair with a woman ten years older than he, a woman named Rachel who had appeared in one of Cordova’s films.

  Checking the dates, I saw Rachel Dempsey would have been twenty-seven in the spring of 1993, the year Peg Martin attended the picnic. Theo would have been only sixteen, an eleven-year age difference.

&
nbsp; It was close enough. So Rachel and Theo had seemingly been together. But what, exactly, had Rachel Dempsey planned for her hunting expedition in Nepal—to vanish off the face of the Earth? Disappear without a trace so she might resurface somewhere on that island in order to—what? Reunite in paradise with her lover, Theo? What was on that island?

  The houses there had a singular style of architecture. Called palafitos, they were modest cottages built atop rickety stilts and painted vibrant pinks, blues, and reds, so they resembled long-legged water bugs swarming the coastline, which was not a tropical paradise, but thorny and gray, with sharp rocks and dark water that seeped across the beach.

  I’d seen those stilt houses before.

  It was when I’d been inside Wait for Me Here, in the Reinhart family greenhouse, in Popcorn’s work shed. I’d noticed a postcard tacked to a bulletin board—those very same stilt houses pictured on the front of it. Thankfully I’d the prescience to take it down and read the back, where someone had scribbled four words.

  Someday soon you’ll come.

  There was more: The churches on Chiloé looked like no others in the world, a combination of European Jesuit culture and the native traditions of the indigenous people on the island. They were austere, covered in wooden tiles like flaking dragon scales and jutting steeples topped with a spindly cross. Like the palafitos, they, too, were painted wild colors, though this brightness evoked not jubilation, but the sinister cheer of a clown’s face.

  I’d seen one somewhere before. I raced back over to the floor, trawling the papers until I found it.

  In the Vanity Fair article, Ashley’s freshman-year roommate had mentioned, when Ashley abruptly moved out with no word, all she’d left were three Polaroids, which had slipped, forgotten, behind her dresser. The snapshots had been included in the article—artifacts of Ashley’s lost existence, portholes into her world. I’d barely glanced at them.

  Now, staring down at the first one, I felt light-headed with shock.

  It featured a small, morose-looking church. It wasn’t an exact match, but it had the same architecture as all the others on the island.