Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I leapt to my feet, the folding chair falling backward with a crack as I raced to the back of the room. The counters were disordered, burnt candles and ashtrays, scraps of paper scribbled with recipes for spells, battered notebooks, plastic sachets of powders marked YES and NO, jars of black ashes. The shelves were crammed to the ceiling with musty texts.

Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.

Cleo was suddenly beside me. “Calm down.”

The Evil Eye. Book of Tobit. The Essential Nostradamus. I yanked down Encyclopedia of Popular 19th Century Spells from the top shelf, black paperbacks showering the floor, a red pentagram on the cover.

“You’ll make it worse, ” Cleo said. “Potent black magic around an unstable mind is like enriched uranium near a fuse.”

I opened the encyclopedia, scanning the contents page.

“There might be another option,” Cleo said. “But it’s a long shot.”

I looked at her. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

She looked grudgingly at her watch, sighed, and moved to the back corner, where there was a small sink, stacks of notebooks, and a bulletin board propped on the counter laden with papers. She lifted the pages, looking for something, riffling through hand-drawn maps of Witch Country, Pennsylvania, a pamphlet from The Crystal Science League, the timeline of John the Conqueror, photographs of Enchantments employees, the Magical Practitioner’s Code of Ethics. She inspected a small scrap tacked underneath a postcard of a demonic-looking man and took it down, grabbing the cordless phone off the counter.

I stepped beside her.

It was a faded classified ad circled in red pen and torn from a newspaper. It read simply FOR THE GRIMMEST SITUATION ONLY, followed by a phone number, the area code 504.

“ That’s your expert? Are you kidding?”

“I said it was a long shot,” Cleo snapped, dialing the number.

I took the paper. On the reverse side there was a half-torn headline that read FLOODING SUSPENDS, and above that, The Lafourche Gazette, November 8, 1983.

“No answer,” Cleo said.

“Try again.”

Sighing, she pressed redial.

After another three tries, she shook her head.

“I’m sorry. I don’t even know what the number is. The paper’s been here forever. No one knows where it came from. Come back tomorrow and we’ll try—”

I grabbed the phone, pressed redial, pacing, my heart pounding with every unanswered ring.

It can’t end like this, not with my daughter vulnerable to some dark hell I’d unwittingly unleashed on her. As I silently repeated this, I realized with a wave of sickened understanding that Cordova must have chanted the very same thing when he’d learned Ashley had run over the devil’s bridge.

This truth I’d been chasing, slowly it was becoming my own.

Suddenly, the ringing stopped. There was a click on the line.

I thought for a moment it had gone dead, but then I heard faint wheezing.

“Hello?” The connection was full of static. “Anyone there?”

“Who’s calling?”

The voice was a prehistoric gasp. If it was a man, woman, or creature —I had no idea.

Cleo, frowning, grabbed the phone.

“Hello?”

She cleared her throat, her eyes widening in surprise.

“Yes. This is Cleopatra at Enchantments in New York City. I hope it’s not too late to be calling. We have the grimmest situation.”

She fell silent, seemingly being reprimanded, but then she smiled at me, relieved, and hurried back to the table.

“I understand. Yes, ma’am. Thank you. If you want to check the stove I’ll wait.” Cleo paused, taking a deep breath, staring at the black figurine. After a minute, in a bland, clinical voice, she succinctly explained the situation.

“And the inverse shadow is totally misbehaving,” she added.

She fell silent, listening, her face grave.

After ten minutes or so, she put a hand over the receiver.

“Go to the bookshelf,” she whispered. “See if you can find a book called Symbols of Black Alchemy Animal and Mineral. Should be on the top shelf.” She listened for a moment, frowning. “Green cover.”

I raced to the back. It took me just a minute to find it, a thick hardback by C.T. Jaybird Fellows. I yanked it down, carrying it back to the table.

“We need to identify the animal before she can help,” Cleo whispered.

I flipped open the book, scanning the musty pages, the drawings of animals discolored, the type old-fashioned and faded.

Dragon. Heart. Liver. Deer.

“I understand.” Cleo squinted at the figurine. “Fins, a tail with a small suction on the end. Like something between a snake and a fish.”

Pig. Goat. Tiger. Worm.

“Look up leviathan, ” Cleo whispered heatedly.

Owl. Pillar. Pine Tree. Leviathan.

The colored picture on the page for leviathan was nearly identical to the figurine. It had the same leering face, the distended tongue.

“That’s what it is,” announced Cleo happily into the phone, sliding the book toward herself, gazing down at the entry. “Out loud?” She cleared her throat. “ ‘The leviathan is a primordial sea serpent and one of the Dukes of Hell,’ ” she read. “ ‘Dante designated the creature the incarnation of total evil. Saint Thomas Aquinas described him as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, envy —the monstrous craving for that which you don’t have. In the Middle East, he represents chaos. In Satanism, he’s a demon of the inferno, which can be harnessed by the witch or warlock and discharged into the natural world for destructive means.’ ”

She paused, listening.

“Let me ask him.” She eyed me. “How many children did you see with this?”

“Two.”

“Did they have anything linking them? Did they go to the same school, have the same hobby, were they distantly related by blood? Anything like that?”

I couldn’t answer. My mind was spinning. Because I’d suddenly recalled Morgan Devold’s house, when his daughter, wearing that cherry-covered nightgown, had tiptoed after me down the drive. She’d been holding something in her fist, something small and black. It was this figurine.

“No,” I said. “There were three. Three children.”

“What did they have in common?”

I rubbed my eyes, trying to calm down, to think.

“They were between four and six years old. They had contact with a certain woman. The one who laid down the killing curse on our shoes. Ashley.” I’d said this, really only considering Devold’s daughter and the deaf child at Henry Street. But then the conclusion of my own words hit me: That meant Sam had encountered Ashley.

But that was impossible.

Cynthia never allowed Sam to talk to strangers. Yet she’d found me at the Reservoir. It wasn’t so vast a leap, then, that she’d found my child.

“How did they act?” Cleo asked. “Any strange behaviors? Whispering? Twitching or tics? Trancelike countenances? Any talk of death or violence?”

I couldn’t answer her. The horror of what I’d unknowingly done made me feel as if the room were caving in on me.

I’d brought the Cordovas right to Sam.

It’s a tapeworm that’s eaten its own tail. There’s no end to it. All it will do is wrap around your heart and squeeze all the blood out.

“ Hello ?” Cleo prompted.

Why in hell didn’t I turn away when I had the chance?

“ Excuse me, but we have a real live black witch on the line,” Cleo hissed, clamping her hand over the receiver. “We interrupted her while she was gutting a milk snake for an intranquillity spell. And she sounds like she’s three breaths from going tits up. If I were you, I’d focus. How did the children behave? ”