Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “Private investigators,” said Nora with evident excitement.

  Somewhere Sam Spade just rolled over in his grave. I was certain Morgan would call us out on this obvious lie, but he nodded.

  “Who hired you?” he asked solemnly. “Her family?”

  He meant Ashley.

  “We work for ourselves,” I said.

  “Everything you tell us can be off the record,” added Nora.

  He seemed to accept this, too, staring into the dark water of the pool. I realized then, he didn’t care who we were. Some people were so burdened by a secret they’d give it away free to any willing stranger.

  “Stace doesn’t know a thing about it,” he said. “She thinks I was fired ’cause Briarwood found out we’re Adventists.”

  “It’ll stay that way,” said Hopper. “How did you know Ashley?”

  But Morgan was no longer paying attention. Something had caught his attention in the kiddie pool. Frowning, he stepped a few feet away, picked up a fallen tree branch, and extended it into the water, trawling through the decaying leaves and mud.

  A bulky object was actually floating there, bobbing along the bottom. He snagged it on the branch, pulling it toward him.

  I thought it was a drowned animal—a squirrel or possum. So did Nora; she was staring at me with a stricken, horrified face as Morgan reached right in and pulled the thing out, dripping.

  It was a plastic baby doll.

  It was missing an eye, half bald, seeping blackened water, yet still smiling manically with puffy cheeks, what remained of its yellow hair matted with leaves. It was wearing a ruffled white dress, now mottled black, some kind of fungus growing like rancid heads of cauliflower out of the neck. Its fat little arms reached out at nothing.

  “Last few weeks I turned the house upside down looking for this thing,” mumbled Morgan, shaking his head. “My daughter cried for three days straight when it went missing. Couldn’t find it. Was like the doll got fed up, walked clear outta the house. I had to sit her down, tell her it was gone now, went to be with God in heaven. Whole time, it was just out here.”

  He chuckled at the irony of it, a tight, frustrated sound.

  “How did Ashley break out of Briarwood?” Hopper asked, glancing at me, indicating he sensed something was off with the man.

  “With me,” Morgan answered simply, still staring down at the doll.

  Hopper nodded, waiting for him to go on. But he didn’t.

  “How?” Hopper prompted in a low voice.

  Morgan glanced at us again, as if remembering we were there, smiling sadly. “It’s funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.”

  He let his arm fall to his side, holding the doll by its leg, its dress hanging over its head, exposing frilly underwear and drooling black water on the grass.

  “I was coverin’ for a buddy of mine,” he said. “Working the night shift. Nine to nine. Stace hated when I took all-nighters, but I liked to watch the monitors at night. It’s easy work. I’m the only one in the back rooms of the center. Patients are asleep, the corridors so still and quiet, it’s like you’re the last man alive.” He cleared his throat. “I guess it was about three in the morning. I wasn’t paying much attention. I had some magazines. Wasn’t supposed to, but I’d done it a million times before. Nothing happens. There’s nothing ever going on except the nurses checkin’ the Code Reds.”

  “And what are the Code Reds?” I asked.

  “Patients on suicide watch.”

  “What about Code Silver?” asked Hopper.

  “Those are the patients kept apart ’cause they can hurt themselves and others. I’d been watching all night. It was like every other. Quiet. I’m flipping through a magazine when I glance up and something catches my eye on the monitor. One a’ them music rooms in Straffen. There’s somebody in there. As soon as I seen that, it switches to another. Video feeds are on a ten-second rotation. You can break the sequence to take a longer look at any live feed. I break, go back to that music room. I see there’s a girl in there. She’s a patient, ’cause she’s wearing the authorized white pajamas. She’s at the piano. Camera’s high in the corner of the ceiling, so I’m lookin’ down on her, a little over her shoulder. All I see are her skinny arms moving fast, her dark hair in a braid. Never seen her before. I work day shifts mostly, and you get to know the patients. I channel in audio, turn up the speaker …”

  He fell silent, running a hand over the top of his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It freaked me out.”

  “Why?”

  “It was like a recordin’. Most times we got patients poundin’ out ‘Heart and Soul.’ My first thought, she was one a’ those polter—uh—”

  “Poltergeist,” interjected Nora eagerly.

  “Yeah. Somethin’ not real. She was playin’ violent-like, head down, hands flippin’ so fast. My second thought was I was losin’ it. Seein’ somethin’ strange. I’m set to sound the alarm, but somethin’ makes me hesitate. She ends that music, starts another, and before I know it even though I got my finger on the switch to call a breach, a whole half-hour goes by, then another. When she stops playin’ she’s quiet for a long time. Then, real slow, she lifts her head. I could just see the side of her face, but it was like …”

  He fell silent and shuddered uncomfortably.

  “Like what?” Hopper asked.

  “She knew I was there. Watching.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He gazed at me, serious. “She saw me.”

  “She saw the camera in the ceiling?”

  “It was more than that. She stood up, and when she got to the door she turned and smiled right at me.” He paused, incredulous, as he remembered. “She was like nothin’ I’d ever seen before. A black-haired angel. She slipped right out. And I tracked her. Watched her move down the hall and outside. She moved fast. I’m havin’ a hard time keepin’ up with her on all the different video feeds. I follow her down the paths all the way back to Maudsley. I figured for sure she was going to get caught, but she enters, and for some crazy reason, there’s no officer at the front desk.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “She hurries in and up the back stairs so fast it’s like her feet don’t touch the ground. She goes all the way up to the third floor, races inside her room. I can’t believe that, either. She’s Code Silver, which means she’s got a round-the-clock nurse detail. I keep watchin’. Twenty minutes later, I see the security officer and the nurse in charge of the third floor. They come smiling upstairs from the basement and something tells me they weren’t down there doin’ laundry. They got a little thing goin’. Somehow the girl knew about it.” He paused, wiping his nose. “First thing I do is wipe the tapes. They’re never checked, anyway. Not unless a problem’s reported. But I erase ’em, just in case. The next morning I put in a request for extra night shifts.”

  “Why’d you do that?” asked Hopper with faint accusation.

  “I had to see her again.” He shrugged bashfully. “She went there to play piano every night. And I watched. The music …” He seemed unable to find the right words. “It’s what you’ll hear in heaven if you’re lucky enough to get there. The whole time she ignored me, ’cept for the very end, when she’d look at me.” Morgan smiled to himself as he surveyed the ground. “I had to find out who she was. I wasn’t authorized to look into the files of patients. But I didn’t care. I had to know.”

  “What’d you find out?” I asked.

  “She had a fear of darkness. This thing called nycta somethin’—”

  “Nyctophobia?” blurted Nora.

  “That’s it. I looked it up. People who got it go crazy in the dark. They start shakin’. Convulsin’. Think they’re drownin’ and dyin’. Sometimes they pass out. Or kill themselves—”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Wasn’t Ashley in the dark when you watched her on the camera?”


  Morgan shook his head. “Briarwood’s bright at night. The sidewalks and central grounds are kept lit for security purposes. Interior building lights are on energy-saving motion detectors, so they’d light up around her as she came and went. Some of them are on a delay. I began to notice she’d wait for a light to go on before she’d continue. When she was outside she’d keep to the bright side of every path. Like she couldn’t step on a shadow or she’d melt or somethin’. She was real careful about it.”

  I frowned, trying to imagine such a manner of moving, skipping from one patch of light to another. I recalled the ascent through the Hanging Gardens up to the roof of the warehouse in Chinatown—had there been enough weak light to step through all the way up? And yet around the Central Park Reservoir, where she’d flickered in and out of the lamplight in that red coat, it was mostly pitch black.

  “The other thing I found out,” Morgan went on, “was the doctor treatin’ her sent out a hospital-wide memo barring her from playing the piano. Said it brought on manic episodes. The date the order went out was the first night I saw Ashley. So, it was like she had to play. Like nothing could stop her from it.”

  He fell silent for a moment.

  “On the eighth night I watched, on her way out of the music room I noticed she removed something from her pocket and stopped for a second right over the top of the piano. It happened fast. I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. I rewound the tape and saw she’d stuck something in there. I waited till the end of my shift and headed over to Straffen, up to the music room on the second floor. When I walked in, the smell of her, the feel of her was still there. A perfume and like a warmth, I guess. I went over to the piano, checked under the lid. Inside, tucked in the strings, was a folded-up piece of paper. I took it but waited until I was safe in my car to read it.”

  He paused, visibly uneasy.

  “What did it say?” I asked.

  “Morgan!”

  A screen door slammed.

  “What’re you still doin’ out here?”

  Stace was on the front porch, cradling the baby against her chest, shading her eyes in the glare of the light. Stepping after her was another child, a little girl of about four, wearing a white nightgown covered with what appeared to be cherries.

  “They’re not gone yet?”

  “Everything’s fine!” Morgan shouted. He turned to us, whispering, “Drive down the driveway and wait for me there, okay?”

  He hurried back across the lawn.

  “Oh my God. I told you to get rid of them!”

  “They’re from Human Resources. Doing a survey. Hey. Look what I found.”

  “But we’re not supposed to—what is that?”

  “Baby. I just rescued her from the pool.”

  “Are you insane?”

  The little girl screamed, no doubt upon taking a look at that doll. Nora and Hopper were already making their way across the grass. I headed after them, and when we climbed back into my car the Devolds had returned inside, though their shouting could still be heard above the wind.

  21

  “It’s obvious Morgan fell in love with Ashley,” Nora said.

  “Can you blame him?” I asked. “He is married to It. I’m referencing the Stephen King book.”

  “He’s a freak is what he is,” said Hopper.

  I turned around to him in the backseat. “You remember Ashley having nyctophobia at Six Silver Lakes?”

  Glaring at me, he exhaled cigarette smoke out the window. “No way.”

  We were in my car, sitting at the end of Devold’s driveway. We’d been waiting for him to reappear for forty-five minutes. Apart from my headlights illuminating the unmarked road, which twisted around the dense shrubs in front of us, it was pitch black out here, totally deserted. The wind had picked up. It whistled insistently against the car, making the branches nervously tap the windshield.

  “He’s probably not coming back,” I muttered. “Stace put the guy’s muzzle back on and returned him to his cage in the basement.”

  “She wasn’t that bad,” said Nora, shooting me a look.

  “Let me bear witness as the only person in this car who’s been to the dark side of marriage and survived. She’s bad. She makes my ex-wife look like Mother Teresa.”

  “He’s coming back,” muttered Hopper. “He has to.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s dying to talk about her.”

  He ground out the cigarette on the window, flicking the butt outside.

  Suddenly, Nora gasped as the man himself stepped into the headlights.

  I didn’t know how we’d managed not to hear his footsteps. There was something odd in the way he stood there in his faded blue flannel shirt, blinking at us uneasily, his head held down at a strange, shy angle. None of us said a word. Something was wrong. But again, Hopper and Nora were unlocking the doors, scrambling out. I held back to observe the guy for a few seconds longer. In spite of his sudden appearance, the ghostly pallor, he looked uncomfortable—wounded, even.

  I climbed out, leaving the headlights on.

  “I only got five minutes,” Morgan said nervously. “Otherwise Stace’ll get out the shotgun.”

  It had to be a joke, yet he said it with unnerving seriousness.

  Blinking, he held out a folded piece of paper.

  Hopper immediately snatched it, shooting him a suspicious look as he opened it in the beam of light. When he finished reading, his face giving away nothing, he handed it to Nora, who read it with wide eyes and passed it to me.

  It was torn from a legal pad.

  “It took three weeks to plan,” Morgan said. “I’d use all prerecorded tapes. They’d play, not the live feed. The time code would be wrong, but no one ever checked. I went down into storage, where they keep all the patients’ personal belongings until they check out, and I got hers from her locker and kept it for her in a box in my house. All she had was a red-and-black coat. Real fancy.”

  “That was it?” I asked, noting the odd, rather fastidious way he’d said it. I couldn’t help but imagine him silently slipping out of his bed in the middle of the night while Stace slept, creeping down into his own dark basement to open up the cardboard box, staring in at her red coat—that coat.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She didn’t have anything else.”

  “No cellphone? No handbag?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “What about clothing?”

  “Nothing. See, her father’s famous. He makes Hollywood movies. I figured she’d want some nice clothes, so I left her a note asking for her sizes. Then I took a day off, went up to Liberty, bought her some jeans, black boots, and a pretty black T-shirt with an angel on the front.”

  Ashley was wearing the same clothing when she died.

  “Once I had the details worked out,” he went on, “I went to the music room and left Ashley a note tucked between the piano strings right where she did. It said when she was ready, she should play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ That’d be my green light. It’d mean the very next night I’d come for her at two A.M. when her nurse and the guard were gettin’ it on in the boiler room.”

  “Why that particular song?” I asked.

  “She’d played it before.” He smiled. “It reminded me of her. That night, Stace ended up in the hospital and was put on bed rest. I had to transfer back to days. I didn’t see Ashley for a week. I was worried I missed her playin’ it. But the first night I was back on the night shift she darted into that music room and I was freaking out because I wasn’t sure she was going to play it. But then she did. Right at the end. I knew then we were on.”

  He stared at us, flecks of light brightening his small eyes. He was newly animated, remembering it.

  “The next night, around one, I get the prerecorded tapes going. Then I tell the officer on duty who sits out front, Stace’s having another pregnancy scare and I had to head home. I go straight to Maudsley, thinking I’m going to have to slip up to Ashley’s room to get her. But if she isn’t alr
eady standing out in front waiting for me in those white pajamas. My heart’s beating like crazy. I’m nervous as a goddamn schoolkid because, you know, it was the first time I was seeing her in the flesh. She just took my hand, and together we ran across the lawn, simple as that.” He grinned sheepishly. “It was like she was leading me. Like she’d planned it. I opened my trunk, she climbed in, and we drove out of there.”

  “But wasn’t it dark inside the trunk?” Nora asked. “If Ashley had nyctophobia she wouldn’t have climbed in there.”

  Morgan smiled proudly. “I took care of it. I had two flashlights in there for her so she wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “Did they stop you at the gatehouse?” I asked.

  “Sure. But I said my wife was having another emergency and he let me through. As soon as we were out of there I pulled over so Ashley could get out of the trunk. I brought her back here so she could shower and change. I also had to put my daughter to bed. Stace was still in the hospital, so our neighbor was watching the baby. I asked Ashley where she wanted to go and she said the train station because she had to get to New York City.”

  “Did she say why?” I asked.

  “I think she was meetin’ someone.”

  “Who?” Hopper asked.

  “Don’t know. She was shy. Didn’t talk much. Just looked at me. She liked my little girl, Mellie, though. Read her a bedtime story while I was on the phone with Stace at the hospital.”

  “Where was Ashley going in the city?” I asked.

  “Walford Towers? Somethin’ like that.”

  “She told you this?”

  He looked guilty. “No. She’d asked to use the Internet while she was here. When she was in the bathroom I checked the browser to see what she looked for online. It was a website for a hotel on Park Avenue.”

  “The Waldorf Towers?” I suggested.

  Morgan nodded. “That sounds about right. When she was dressed, she put on that red coat and she looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I drove her to the station. We got there ’Bout four in the morning. I gave her some cash, then left her in the car while I went and bought two tickets to Grand Central.”