Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  After scrolling through a few more pages, I had an idea. I set up a simple post in the TALK TO STRANGERS section, asking for assistance identifying and privately accessing a mysterious club on Long Island with a French name, “held in a former jail or forgotten prison.”

  Then I put the computer to sleep and headed to bed.

  42

  I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. I had the gnawing feeling that he was still out there somewhere, watching me.

  Theo Cordova. The feeling was so acute I climbed out of bed, yanked up the shade, and looked out the window. But Perry Street remained silent and solemn, packed with shadows, no movement except the trees trembling in a faint freeze. Now I was turning into some paranoid nutcase straight out of Dostoyevsky.

  I went back to bed, pulling the sheet up over my face, furiously willing sleep, shoving my pillow over to the cool side. Within seconds it was hot and clammy. The sheets were scalding, too, untucking from the mattress so they bunched around my waist like carnivorous plants trying to strangle me. Whenever I closed my eyes, Theo’s face was there, half-drowned in the dark of the taxi, his dull eyes and deformed hand pressing against the window as if trying to tell me something, plead with me, warn me, as disturbing and elusive a presence as Ashley that night at the Reservoir.

  Somehow, around three in the morning, I must have fallen asleep because I was awakened by soft knocking on my door.

  I cracked open an eye. The clock read 3:46 A.M.

  “Can I come in?” whispered Nora.

  Without waiting for an answer—thank Christ I had on pajama bottoms—she crept inside. I couldn’t see much of her in the dark, but she appeared to be wearing a white long-sleeved nightgown, which made her look like a ghost that had just wafted into my room, now hovering at the end of my bed, sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth haunting.

  “I was just thinking …” she began, but didn’t continue.

  “Why are you thinking at four in the morning?” I asked, bunching the pillows underneath me and leaning back against the headboard. “This better be good.”

  “It’s Hopper. Before I couldn’t put my finger on it, but …” She propped her feet on the railing of the bed, slipping the nightgown over her knees. “How did he know to go to that piano store? Out of the whole city he found the one place she went to? It’s too incredible.”

  I agreed with her. It’d been such a stroke of luck, Hopper chancing upon an eyewitness for Ashley at Klavierhaus. When something appeared to be a wild coincidence, nine times out of ten it wasn’t.

  “And when I suggested that Ashley put that stuff under her bed, he got so mad.”

  “I noticed.”

  She bit her thumbnail. “You think he’s responsible in some way for what happened to her?”

  “Not sure yet. But he’s definitely hiding something.”

  “I don’t think he likes us, either.”

  “A terrible flaw. There’s also the chain-smoking, the morose scowling, the bad-boy hair. It’s like he thinks he’s the rebel in a John Hughes movie.”

  She giggled.

  “We’ll pull a choice move from the McGrath playbook. The Corleone. We keep him close. Eventually he’ll reveal himself. Works every time.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears, making the bed shake, but said nothing.

  “May I ask you something?” I asked.

  She turned to me, her face a milky blur in the dark.

  “Terra Hermosa. How were you allowed to live there? Surely there was some kind of age requirement.”

  “Oh. It was illegal. But I couldn’t leave Eli. She raised me. The worst day of my life up till then was when she fell in the parking lot of Bonnie Lee’s Fried Chicken and the doctors said she had to go into a home.”

  “How old were you when you moved in?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “What about your parents?”

  She fiddled with the frilly sleeves of her nightgown. “My mom died when I was three. She had a heart problem. My dad had been put away for twenty years by then.”

  “What was he put away for?”

  “Mail fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, credit cards. He was real hardworking at being illegal. Eli used to say if my dad put half the energy he did into cutting corners into just driving around the corner, he’d be a billionaire.”

  I nodded. I’d known such men, had investigated more than a few.

  “For a while I’d spend the day there, leave, then sneak back in at night. But after I got caught, I was all set to go into foster care. But Eli got together with the other seniors on her floor, and they made a big stink. The president ended up surprising everyone, because she didn’t want a senior uprising. She said if I stayed out of sight when the state evaluators came I could live there till I finished high school. There was always a room coming available, because someone was always dead. When Eli died of cancer I left without saying goodbye to anyone. I figured if I didn’t do it then, I never would.”

  She paused, clearing her throat. “She died in the hospital on a Sunday, and I went back to her room to collect her things. There’s a waiting list, so I knew someone was going to be moving in. If the family doesn’t take away the personal items they just chuck them, and within seconds the room looks like you were never there in the first place. Just an old bed and chair, a window waiting to be stared out of by the next person. I was getting her stuff together when all of a sudden Old Grubby Bill who lived right across the hall whistled at me through his teeth.”

  “Old Grubby Bill? You haven’t mentioned him.”

  “Everyone called him Grubby Bill because he always had black dirt under his fingernails. He’d fought in World War Two, and he bragged to everyone he was right beside Hitler’s bunker when it exploded. So, people used to whisper some of the debris from that bunker was still under his fingernails, which was why they were so filthy.”

  She paused, sniffing. “He whistled at me to come into his room. He was always whistling at people. I was scared to go in there. Nobody ever did, because it smelled. But he dug under his bed and pulled out a Rockport shoebox. He told me he’d been saving up money for my dreams. It had six hundred dollars in it. He handed it to me and said, ‘Now’s your chance to make something of yourself. Scram, kid.’ So I scrammed. I walked to the Kissimmee station and got on a bus to New York. People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”

  She fell silent. For a while, neither of us spoke, letting her story drift like a raft between us.

  “I was lucky,” she went on. “Most people just get one mom and dad. I got a whole crowd.”

  “You were very lucky.”

  She seemed pleased, tucking her hands inside the long white sleeves.

  “It’s easy to be yourself in the dark. Ever noticed that? Guess we should probably get some sleep.” The bed shook as she hopped off and darted out of the room. “ ’Night, Woodward.”

  “ ’Night, Bernstein.”

  43

  I closed the Vanity Fair article on my BlackBerry. It was after ten A.M., and we were in a taxi speeding down Avenue A.

  I was actually reassured by the piece—published on the website early this morning. The reporter hadn’t made much headway in her investigation, thank Christ, and a Google search of news for Ashley Cordova revealed no other reporter had uncovered the critical lead, that Ashley had been admitted to Briarwood—which meant we were still ahead of the game. At least for now.

  I made quick note of one odd detail: Ashley’s unexpected leave from Amherst during her freshman year.

  “There it is,” Nora said suddenly, and the driver pulled over.

  We’d turned down East Ninth Street, and Nora was indicating a narrow storefront sunken some five feet down from the sidewalk, a black front gate and a beat-up red metal awning, a single word painted across it in purple letters:

  ENCHANTMENTS

  On its website, Enchantments called itself New York City’s Oldest and Largest Witchcraft and Godd
ess Supply Store.

  We climbed out of the cab, heading down front steps encrusted with dead leaves and cigarette butts, stepping inside.

  Immediately, a tall, freckle-faced orange-haired kid moved out from behind the cash register, shouting, “Zero, come back here!”—Zero being a white Persian cat that had run toward the open door, though I closed the door before it could escape.

  “Thanks, man,” said the kid.

  There was an overpowering smell of incense, the ceiling low, narrow brick walls slanting inward like a corridor in an M. C. Escher print. They were lined with wooden shelves crammed with mystical knickknacks. In Enchantments it seemed all holy items were created equal. The store was arranged as if Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Vishnu—plus a couple of random pagans—had gotten together to hold a garage sale.

  Mini witch cauldrons (in Tall, Grande, and Venti) were brazenly stacked next to Saint Francis, Mary, and a few Catholic saints. Beside them was a much-paged-through paperback on display, Jewish Kabbal Magic, which sat next to a Bible, which was beside tarot cards, sachets of potpourri called Luck & Happiness Ouanga Bags, a basket of carved wax crucifixes, ceramic frogs, and plastic vials of Holy Water (on sale for $5.95).

  Apparently many New Yorkers had given up on shrinks and yoga and thought, Hell, let’s try magic, because the store was crowded. Toward the back, a group of thirtysomething women was swarming around a tall bookcase crammed with hundreds of colored candles, choosing them with a frantic intensity. A tired middle-aged man in a blue button-down—he looked alarmingly like my stockbroker—was carefully reading the directions on the back of a Ouija board.

  I stepped around Nora and a solemn boy with stringy brown hair paging through a pamphlet—I glanced at the title over his shoulder: Guide to Planetary and Magical Significance—and walked over to the display case. Inside were silver necklaces, pendants, and charms carved with hieroglyphics and other symbols I didn’t recognize. Hanging from the ceiling above the cash register was a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, a pentagram—the symbol for Satanists, if I remembered correctly from my college days. Beyond that on the back wall were framed 8 × 10 black-and-white headshots of men and women who had the severe expressions and dead raisin eyes of serial killers—legendary witches and warlocks, no doubt.

  A small faded handwritten sign was taped beside them.

  We do not sell black magick

  supplies, so don’t even ask.

  The orange-haired kid who’d chased Zero to the back of the store shuffled over to us.

  “Need some help?”

  “Yes,” said Nora, setting a book she’d been leafing through—Signs, Symbols & Omens—back down on the stand. “We were hoping someone could help us identify some herbs and roots that we found in strange patterns in our friend’s room.”

  He nodded, totally unsurprised, and pointed his thumb toward the back.

  “Ask the witches on call,” he said. “They know everything.”

  I hadn’t noticed it when we’d entered, but in the back of the store there was a wooden counter, a young Hispanic kid sitting behind it.

  Nora and I made our way to him, filing around the women fussing over the colored candles. One with frizzy red hair was holding a purple, a yellow, an orange, and a green. “Should I get Saint Elijah and San Miguel, too?” she asked her friend.

  “Don’t mess this up,” Nora whispered. “I know you don’t believe in this stuff, but it doesn’t mean you can be rude.”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  She shot me a look of warning before stepping behind a young woman quietly discussing something with the Hispanic kid. He was perched on a tall stool, industriously carving into a green candle with a large hunting knife.

  He didn’t look like a witch—but that was probably the same dim observation as a neighbor telling the Evening News old Jimmy who lived in his mother’s basement and was rarely seen in daylight didn’t look like a homicidal maniac. This male witch had shaggy black hair and was wearing an army-green workman’s shirt, the kind popularized by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, giving him a sort of socialist tropical authority.

  Cluttering the wooden counter in front of him were colored candles, sachets of herbs, bottles of oils and dark liquids, box cutters, string, switchblades. On a clipboard hanging off the side of the counter by a rope was a cluster of tattered pages. I grabbed it—ENCHANTMENTS CUSTOM CARVED MENU, it read—flipping through.

  “Win at Court. This candle allows you to win in all legal matters great and small.”

  “Purple Wisdom. Used for overcoming obstacles, known or unknown—and for prophetic decisions. It is for gaining wisdom in the ancient sciences such as astrology, hermetic magic, Qabbalism, and other magickal systems.”

  “Come to Me. This candle works on people who are full of sexual desire and brings them together. It is a VERY POWERFUL SEXUAL candle and should be used with caution.”

  I should have come here years ago.

  The woman in front of us stepped aside, and we moved to the counter.

  “How can I help you?” the kid asked without glancing up. Nora, in a lowered voice, tactfully explained why we were there, removing two Ziploc bags from her purse, one containing the dirt sample, the other with the cluster of roots tied together with white string.

  “We found this under our friend’s bed in a series of strange circles,” she said, holding up the dirt sample. “We need help identifying what it is and why it was put there.”

  The kid set down the knife, taking time to carefully wipe his hands on a rag before taking the bags. Without opening it, he rubbed the dirt between his fingers, inspecting it under the small desk lamp in front of him. He then opened it, sniffing, blinking from the stench. He resealed it, set it down, hopping off the stool. He grabbed a small stepladder shoved into the corner and set it down in front of the shelves to our right. They spanned all the way to the ceiling and were jam-packed with row upon row of giant glass jars filled with herbs, each one with a faded label.

  I stepped forward to read a few.

  ARROWROOT. BALM OF GILEAD. BLADDERWRACK. DEER’S TONGUE. DRAGON’S BLOOD CHUNKS. FIVE FINGER GRASS. HIGH JOHN THE CONQUEROR ROOT. QUEEN OF THE MEADOW. JOB’S TEARS.

  The kid climbed the ladder, reaching up on his tiptoes to collect a jar from the top shelf.

  VALERIAN ROOT, read the label.

  He returned to the counter with it, opened the lid, using a spoon to scoop some of the dirtlike substance into his palm.

  He compared it to the contents in the Ziploc bag.

  “Same texture, same smell,” he whispered to himself.

  “What is it?” asked Nora.

  “Vandal root.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “An herb. Its magical reputation is pretty dark.”

  “Its magical reputation?”

  He nodded, unperturbed by my skepticism. “Sure. Vandal is used a lot in black magic. Hexing. Forcing love. Uncrossing. It’s kinda like coming across a gimp costume in your best friend’s closet. There’s no explaining that shit away, know what I mean?”

  I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded anyway.

  “You said it was laid out in a specific pattern?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I showed him the photos on my BlackBerry.

  “We also found these twigs tied together,” added Nora, indicating the other bag on the counter. “They were hidden along the doorjamb of her front door.” The kid, frowning at it, reached into a box on his left, donning a pair of latex gloves, and pulled out the clump of sticks.

  “Where’d you find all this?” he asked uncertainly.

  “In a friend’s room that she was renting,” I answered.

  He squinted at the root in the light, twirling it in his fingers. “This looks like some really high-level shit, so you should talk to Cleopatra. Lemme see if she’s available.”

  He yanked aside a heavy black velvet curtain in the back wall, and as he disappeared, I caught a glimpse of another room
with dim red light and a few candles.

  “Hang on to your wallet,” I said to Nora. “We’ve been marked as whales. We’re about to be granted access to the high-rollers room. They’re going to be offering us glimpses of our future, contact with the dead, and other soul-cleaning paraphernalia that’s going to save us from bad vibes and set us back a couple thousand bucks.”

  “Shhh,” she admonished as the Hispanic kid stuck his head out.

  “She’ll see you,” he said and held aside the curtain for us.

  Nora grabbed the plastic bags, eagerly stepping after him like she’d just been granted a one-on-one with the pope in the Vatican’s inner chambers.

  With a silent Hail Mary, I followed.

  44

  It was a small back room lit with gloomy red light, crumbling brick walls draped with black fabric, a circular wooden table with a few folding chairs, a red stained-glass lamp suspended over it.

  A woman—Cleopatra, I could only assume—was standing in the back beside a messy counter, talking on a cordless phone, her back to us. She was tall and pudgy, wearing a black peasant blouse, jeans, old red Doc Martens. Her shoulder-length jet-black hair, streaked with chunks of purple, sat atop her shoulders like a lampshade.

  “Have a seat,” the Hispanic kid said, pulling out the chairs for us around the table. “I’m Dexter, by the way.”

  “Yeah, let’s try that on him,” Cleopatra said into the phone, her voice flat and clinical. “The Juniper berries. See how he reacts. If he doesn’t call you to set up the third date, we’ll try something more potent.”

  She set the phone down and turned around.

  She was Asian—Korean, I guessed—with a stark, chubby face, late forties. She wore a long clip of bluebird feathers in her hair and so many silver bracelets, cuffs, dangly skull earrings, necklaces—one pendant a four-inch tooth from the mouth of a tiger—as she strode toward us, she rattled and clanged.