Night Film

by Marisha Pessl

  “Why would anyone agree to such a thing?” Hopper asked, as she took another drink. “Signing away your life, your mind and body, to one man? He sounds like Charles Manson.”

  She looked amused by his vehemence, narrowing her eyes at him.

  “There’s the human desire to exert free will, yes. But there’s an equally strong desire to be tied up, gagged, and bound. Naturally, there was the glory that came with appearing in a Cordova picture. You were made. You would get the best roles after working with him. Even when he went underground. It gave you cachet. You were a warrior. Yet the true value of working with Stanny was not money or acclaim, it was the afterward. All us actors spoke of it. When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams. Working with that irascible man was the most grueling time of my life. I accessed the deepest, most tormented parts of myself, parts I was petrified of opening because I doubted I’d ever get them closed again. Perhaps I never have. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. You were making a film. Something that would outlast you. Something wild. A powerful piece of art that wasn’t a commercial concoction, but something to slice into people, make them bleed. Living at The Peak, you were as underground as any resistance, working for the last true rebel. You were also learning how far you could go—in love and fear, in resilience and sex, in euphoria. To throw off what you’d been taught by society and make it all up for yourself. To live from scratch. Can you imagine the intoxication of such a thing? You come back from this and you realize the rest of the world is asleep, in a coma, and they don’t even know.”

  “Is that why you fell in love with him?” Nora asked tentatively.

  Marlowe sat up, jolted by the question, jutting out her chin. “Everyone fell in love with him, child. You’d be mere putty in his hands. That goes for every one of you. Who can resist the man who understands and appreciates your every cell? We married during the production of Lovechild.” She said it with a sad wave of her hand, staring down at the Heaven Hill bottle, now almost empty.

  “Let’s just say, when it was over, I saw that our love was a hothouse flower. Thriving and vivid indoors, in very specific conditions; outside the enclave, in the real world, dead. I couldn’t live at The Peak, not forever. Because by then Stanny refused to leave it. It was his private dimension, his personal netherworld. He wanted to remain forever on this magical planet. I had to get back to Earth.”

  “He really refused to leave?” Nora whispered, incredulous.

  Marlowe stared her down. “Zeus was loath to leave Olympus, was he not, unless he had mortals to torment? Occasionally during shooting, Stanny would vanish somewhere for weeks at a time and couldn’t be found. Not anywhere. So we often wondered if there was some other place he went. The secret place within the secret place. When he did finally show up again, he had strange rocky sand in his boots and he reeked of the open sea. He was also especially voracious in the sack, if you catch my drift—like he’d sailed away for a time on his pirate ship, invaded villages, burned them to the ground, raped and stole and murdered, and then he came back to The Peak with the salt still encrusting his hair, and all that mist, sweat, and blood soaked into his skin.” She smiled dreamily. “Those were the nights he split me in half.”

  “Hold on,” Hopper interjected, sitting forward, elbows on his knees. “These intruders from town. You’re saying Cordova became one of them?”

  Marlowe looked exasperated. “I said I didn’t know the exact nature of his involvement, Tarzan. But at some point he was doing more than just observing. It was the reason for his wife’s suicide. Genevra. He never told me exactly what happened. But I imagine that the poor, rather fragile woman found out about his nightly activities. You see, that priest—he was still there, hanging on, silently waiting at the perimeter. An oily shadow, always around. It was too much for her mentally. One gray afternoon, she drowned herself in a lake on the property. The police ruled it an accident, but Stanny knew the truth. Genevra hadn’t gone swimming. She boarded a small boat, rowed out to the center of the lake, and climbed right in, pockets of her dress filled with stones. They found the boat later, destroyed it. Stanny adored her, of course. But not enough to be ordinary. He couldn’t be contained by one woman. Or one man. You’ll find that great artists don’t love, live, fuck, or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they’re never too gutted, because they need only to pour that tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.”

  Marlowe fell silent, abruptly weary. For a minute, she did nothing but fumble with the robe, pinching at the fabric.

  “Rumors about what Cordova did at The Peak swirled, of course. Especially among us actors. One story I heard was from Max Hiedelbrau. Max played Father Jinley’s father in Crack in the Window and that prick of a patriarch in To Breathe with Kings.”

  I remembered Max from both films; he was Australian, a tall, portly actor with a drooping bloodhound face.

  “Max is a notorious insomniac. At four in the morning during the shooting of Crack in the Window, he was outside, taking a walk through the gardens, rehearsing his lines. He saw a figure hurrying to the front entrance, up the steps, vanishing inside the manor. It was Stanny. He appeared to be coming back from the woods, and he was carrying a black bundle in his arms. When Max followed he noticed on the handle of the front doors there were reddish-brown streaks. It was blood. Tiny droplets trailed through the marble foyer and up the stairs. Max went to bed. By morning the droplets had all been cleaned up.”

  Marlowe slurped down the last drop of Heaven Hill.

  “People did whisper,” she went on, eyeing me. “But the Warner Brothers executives who periodically visited the set said nothing. And yet—and this is rather telling—even though The Peak was one of the most luxurious private residences they’d ever set foot in, with a full-time staff and a French chef, not one of those slick Hollywood suits ever spent a single night at the mansion. No matter how late shooting went, they always retired to a hotel in Tupper Lake well over an hour away.”

  “They were afraid?” Nora asked.

  She smiled wryly. “They didn’t have the der Sacke. As long as Stanny made them money, produced films the public was dying to see, they didn’t give a damn about his personal life. If he drank blood? Chanted? Decapitated animals? They’d dealt with trouble before. There was an incident they had to hush up involving one of the actresses—apparently she went mad working with Stanny. So scared out of her skin, the poor girl climbed out of her fourth-floor bedroom window in the dead of night, scaled to the ground like a centipede, and was never seen again.”

  “Who was she?” asked Nora.

  Marlowe shrugged. “Her name escapes me. You see, whatever he was doing to unleash this creativity, get his actors to hack into their own souls and bleed out for the camera so the world could drink it—as long as everyone kept their mouths shut, it was business as usual. They looked the other way. We all did.”

  “But not Ashley.”

  Hopper whispered it, his voice so quiet and resolute, it sliced through the room, through Marlowe herself, rendering her silent, even a little unnerved.

  “She’d never look the other way,” he said.

  “No,” Marlowe answered.

  87

  “It happened on a devil’s bridge,” Marlowe continued, staring at Hopper, anxiously clutching at her shoulders and chest to make sure she was fully covered by the robe. “You’ve heard of them?”

  “No,” said Nora.

  “They’re medieval bridges. Steeped in folklore. Most are in Europe, from England to Slovenia, built between one thousand and sixteen hundred A
.D. Though the stories of each bridge vary, the underlying premise is that the devil agrees to help build the bridge in exchange for the first human soul to cross it. I don’t know the specifics. But somehow there came to be such a bridge on The Peak property. They built it, I imagine.”

  “You mean the townspeople from Crowthorpe Falls,” I said.

  She nodded. “From the moment she entered the world, Ashley was an extraordinary child. A glorious image of her father. Fearless, dark-haired, with his pale blue-gray eyes clear as a stream. The intelligence, the unquenchable curiosity, the way she grasped life. The two of them were inseparable. Stanny loved his son, Theo. But there was something about Ashley that … well, he couldn’t help but worship her. Everyone did.”

  She chugged the Heaven Hill bottle with her head thrown back, seemingly oblivious that it was totally empty. She wiped her mouth.

  “Stanislas never knew how Ashley came to follow him into the woods that night. Ashley never told anyone. But I have a pretty good hunch who gave her the idea. You see, that priest—he was still lurking. He hadn’t been with Cordova at The Peak for some time. After Genevra’s death, he took off, supposedly traveled throughout Africa doing missionary work, but then, rather suddenly, the old boy was back in town, having no place to stay and little money. Cordova didn’t object to his old pal shacking up at The Peak once again. I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine the priest was quite jealous of Ashley. He adored Cordova. He must have hoped that Stanny and he would one day … I don’t know. Live happily ever after? Like a couple of lovesick teenagers?”

  Marlowe fell back in the chair. “However it happened, in the middle of the night in June—this was back in 1992; Ashley was five—Stanislas was at this devil’s bridge he’d constructed with these townspeople. When he was partaking in, whatever it was they did—a ritual of the utmost depravity, I’d imagine—Ashley appeared from out of nowhere. She stepped right onto the bridge. You can imagine how disturbing such a scene would be for any child. But Ashley wasn’t afraid. Stanislas, when he saw her, screamed at her to stop, go back. But in the chaos, when she saw her father, she did what any little girl who loved her father would do—she ran to him. Ashley ran the entire length of the bridge, stopping only when she’d reached the other side. She was the first human soul to cross it.”

  Marlowe fell silent, sitting unsteadily forward. A white bony hand had emerged from the voluminous black satin sleeve, resting on her throat.

  “Stanislas was appalled. The scene was immediately disbanded. Fires put out. Whoever and whatever these people were, they were ordered to leave the property. Stanislas led Ashley back to the house. To his relief, she seemed fine. She was herself. Wasn’t even afraid of what she’d just seen. Her family home was a veritable movie set, after all. She’d watched bonfires, cars exploding, men and women declaring their undying love, their undying hate, fight scenes, love scenes, chase scenes, women hanging for dear life off the sides of buildings, men falling out of the sky—all in her own backyard. He tucked her into bed and read aloud to her, a chapter from one of her favorite fairy tales, The Mysterious World of Bartho Lore. She fell asleep that night with a smile on her face—just as she always did. Stanny decided not to tell his wife. I don’t know the extent of Astrid’s—Stanny’s third wife’s—knowledge of what he’d been up to in the middle of the night, but there seemed to be an understanding that he was free to do what he liked, so long as he didn’t involve the children. When Stanny went to bed that night, he prayed to God. An interesting choice, given how he’d been spending his free time. But it was to God. Even then, he didn’t quite believe in the things he’d been doing. Now he hoped none of it was real. It couldn’t be. The idea’s really absurd. Is it not?”

  She asked this with cynical delight, taking another long swig from the empty Heaven Hill bottle. Maybe she was guzzling the fumes.

  “Within a week, Stanislas began to notice a difference. Ashley was always a watchful, gifted child, but now her gifts started having ferocious tendencies. He’d invited some Chinese soldiers and a former ambassador to live at the house while he worked on his next picture. Within two weeks of their arrival, Ashley was entirely fluent in the language. She also began staring, staring right into people, as if she could read their thoughts, see their fates unspooled before her like a roll of thirty-five-millimeter. She still laughed, of course, was still so beautiful, but there was a gravity in her now that had never been there before. And then there was the piano.”

  Marlowe shuddered at the thought.

  “Astrid was a trained pianist. Since Ashley was four, she had a teacher from Juilliard travel up to the estate twice a week to give the girl private lessons. At five, Ashley was good for her age but never had real passion for the instrument. She preferred to be outdoors, riding horses and bikes, climbing trees. Now she sat down, shut herself inside for hours, and played until her fingers swelled with blisters. Within weeks, the girl could master any piece put before her, Beethoven, Bartók, in mere hours, the whole thing memorized. More and more, this shift in Ashley was palpable. Stanny was too devastated to believe it. Yet he began to do research. Throughout history, alliances with the devil often manifest themselves in virtuosic mastery of an instrument. In eighteenth-century Italy, there was Paganini—still believed to be the finest violinist ever to have lived. The same was true for Robert Johnson, the blues musician. He went to a crossroads in Tunica, Mississippi, and gave the devil his soul in exchange for total music mastery.”

  She paused, her breathing shallow, nervous.

  “Astrid was still ignorant of what had occurred. She thought her daughter was simply growing up with a rabid intelligence. But then she began noticing Ashley was oddly cold to the touch, and when she took her temperature, rather than the normal ninety-eight-point-six degrees, Ashley was consistently around ninety-seven, ninety-six. She took her to New York City to visit various hospitals. Doctors found nothing wrong. Astrid worried, especially when Ashley began showing signs of behavioral problems. She’d stopped laughing. And when she became angry she had a temper that was frightening. Stanislas finally had to tell his poor wife. He showed Astrid what he believed to be the devil’s mark on Ashley. Something called the toad’s footprint. A sizable freckle in the iris close to the pupil. Ashley had it in her left eye.”

  I stared at her. Marlowe had just described what Lupe, the housekeeper at the Waldorf had talked about. Huella del mal. Evil’s footprint. Nora turned to me, clearly remembering how she’d pointed out the freckle in the medical examiner’s photo.

  “Astrid naturally didn’t want to believe it. But then there was a terrifying incident that changed her perspective. In the middle of the night, the whole house woke up to a man screaming in his bed. It was the priest. The pajamas the man was wearing, as well as the black clerical clothes in his closet, were on fire. He was on fire. The family managed to snuff out the flames, and Astrid put the man, barely conscious, into the back of her car, so she could drive him to the hospital, because Cordova, of course, could no longer drive. He refused to leave the property. They didn’t want to call an ambulance for fear of the terrible publicity. So, in Astrid’s frenzied state, driving like hell, she rounded a hairpin turn, lost control, and hit a tree, totaling her car. Theo rescued the man in a van, as this priest, drifting in and out of consciousness, moaning from the pain, inched toward death. He dropped him off at a rural hospital outside of Albany and took off. The priest was admitted under the name John Doe, third-degree burns covering his entire body. Ashley had seemingly slept through the entire incident. But the next morning, Astrid noticed her daughter had a terrible burn mark on her left hand. Astrid knew she was responsible. It was the moment she started to believe Stanny, that this devil’s curse was real.” Marlowe shook her head. “The priest survived, though I heard he vanished from the hospital a month after his admittance and was never seen again, not at The Peak, not anywhere else.”

  I could hardly believe it. Marlowe had described in immaculate detail the incident
I’d unearthed five years ago when I was researching Cordova. The motel desk clerk, Kate Miller, had witnessed a car accident in the early hours of a late-May morning. Astrid Cordova was behind the wheel. Astrid claimed to be alone in the car, but Kate had sworn there was someone else, a man in the backseat dressed in black clothing, his face covered in bandages—a man she claimed was Cordova.

  It had been the priest, burned alive.

  “How old was Ashley at the time of this incident?” I asked.

  Marlowe shrugged. “Fifteen? Sixteen? Afterward, they sent her away.”

  “Where?”

  “Some camp for unruly teens. It was a final, rather futile attempt to pretend the problem with Ashley was ordinary.”

  I turned to Hopper. He was slumped down in the chair, ankle crossed on his knee, watching Marlowe intently.

  “Astrid was irate, demanded her husband fix it. He did have an idea. He believed it just might be possible to reverse this curse if they exchanged Ashley’s soul for another’s. A swap. With another child. This led to the rift between Ashley and her family. Because when it was finally explained to her, Ashley wanted to accept her fate. But Cordova was always searching for a way out. He did until the very end. He became consumed with it. To make another film was out of the question. There was only this. It ate him alive, cannibalized the family. There would be times when Ashley was perfectly normal, when they’d hope that whatever darkness she was succumbing to was entirely in their heads. But then something would happen and they’d know it was happening. He’d be coming for her.”