Marisha Pessl - Night Film

And the canoe was gone.

I looked around the trees seemingly locking me in an infinite jail.

I stepped back to the lake’s edge, staring out at the moonlit water.

It was deserted.

Hopper and Nora must have been caught. Or they took off, leaving me stranded. Or they’d been chased, escaped, planned to make their way back when the coast was clear. Or someone else had found the boat and confiscated it, someone waiting for me, watching.

I listened intently for footsteps but heard nothing.

I couldn’t stay here. And I couldn’t use a flashlight for fear someone in the distance would notice it. I took off around the perimeter of the lake, following the general direction the three of us had originally taken.

A dog barked.

It sounded miles away. But I picked up my pace and headed directly up the hill, feeling the last bit of warmth somewhere in my gut flickering, as if seconds from going out.

I stopped, staring far off to my right. There was some type of structure standing beyond the trees, glowing faintly blue in the dark. I took off toward it.

It was a gigantic warehouse, a flat roof, no evident windows. I rounded the first corner, finding a set of steel doors, a rusted chain looped through the handles, secured with a padlock. I quickly searched the ground, found a suitable rock, carried it back, and smashed the lock a few times until it twisted off. At this point, I didn’t care if the world heard me.

I slung the chain to the ground, pulled the door open, and stumbled inside.

The moonlight flooding in behind me illuminated a crude beamed wall, a concrete floor, the back of a brown couch farther ahead, a blanket folded neatly over the back — all of it retreating into pitch darkness as the metal door closed behind me with a resounding thud.

I slung off my backpack, untied my boots, stripped down to my boxers, and, nearly tripping over a raised step, collapsed on the couch. I fumbled for the blanket, pulling it over me. And I huddled there, shivering uncontrollably, willing my mind to thaw. I realized after a dazed moment that all I really wanted to do was sleep, which made me figure I had mild hypothermia, but I shoved that idea away as soon as it came.

Sleep will kill you. It’s the drug your body gives you before closing up shop.

Minutes passed. I didn’t know how long, as I couldn’t move my arm to check my watch. My thoughts kept slipping out of reach, tiny deflating buoys I was trying to grab ahold of to stay afloat. I imagined myself sitting in my bed at Perry Street, staring up at the ceiling. I wondered if we’d gotten into a car accident on the way to Weller’s Landing and this was what it felt like to be unconscious, detached from the world, bobbing between life and death, the Earth and the unknown.

Maybe I was still in that rancid swimming pool.

Maybe I’d never climbed out.

But after a while, I realized my eyes had adjusted to the dark. I was staring at an open newspaper sitting on a coffee table in front of me.

The Doverville Sentinel.

POLICE PROBE BOY DEATHS.

I blinked. I was sitting in a modest furnished living room. There was a white shag carpet on a wooden floor, and modern chairs, curtained windows, a brick fireplace.

I’d been here before.

I’d been inside this room.

Hanging on the wall opposite were three framed pictures beside a tiny kitchenette. A floor lamp with a cream shade hung over the couch. I reached up and tried the switch.

Instantly, pale light illuminated the room.

A wicker chair stood beside the front door, a man’s herringbone overcoat slung over the back. To my right, atop an end table, there was an Art Deco bronze statue of a woman balancing a crystal ball on her head. Emily, weeping in terror, grabs that statue to use as a weapon before dashing down the hall, hiding in a bedroom closet. This couch I was on, Emily sat right here in the opening scene, reading the newspaper about the latest child murder, as Brad entered, slinging his coat and briefcase on that chair beside the door.

I looked up. There was no ceiling, only scaffolding some forty feet overhead. Lights had been rigged up there, a few pointing down at me.

It was a film set.

I was in Brad and Emily Jackson’s living room from Thumbscrew —“an ominous tale of suspicion, paranoia, marriage, and the inscrutability of the human psyche,” according to Beckman.

Brad, a handsome professor of medieval studies at a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont, is newly married to Emily, a young woman with a lurid imagination. She becomes preoccupied with a string of local unsolved murders of young boys, every one eight years old, and begins to suspect her husband is the killer. Thumbscrew ends without a definitive conclusion as to whether or not Brad is guilty. I felt he was, though the Internet and almost certainly the Blackboards were rife with arguments for both sides. Beckman devoted an entire chapter to the film in his book American Mask : Chapter 11: The Brief Case. He wrote that the truth, which will set both Emily and the audience free, ultimately exists in Brad’s beaten-up leather Samsonite briefcase, which Brad fastidiously locks away in a safe along with his thumbscrews — the medieval torture device — every night when he returns home from teaching at the college.

Brad’s briefcase dominates the film so entirely — Emily becomes obsessed with it, desperate to steal it, break the locks, see what her husband was stowing inside — it was actually a main character, featured in more shots than Brad himself. Neither Emily nor the audience is ever allowed to see the inside, a narrative device Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction fifteen years later.

In the film’s third act, during the confrontation between Emily and Brad, when they fight each other — Emily convinced she must fend off a psychopath; Brad convinced his wife has gone crazy — the briefcase inadvertently slips down onto the floor between the bed and the wall. It remains there, unnoticed, tucked inside this tiny Vermont cottage, which, with Emily — an orphan — taken away to a mental hospital and Brad dead, will remain deserted for an unknown period of time.

The final shot of Thumbscrew is the briefcase, a slow tracking shot pulling out from under the bed, winding down the hall, out the front door past the police, into the woods, fading to black.

I rolled off the couch — some feeling had returned to my legs — and stepped across the room to the fireplace.

I walked over to the bookshelves. Thumbscrew, I remembered, had been made in 1978, and the worn-out paperbacks were from that time: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Salem’s Lot, The Gemini Contenders. So was the geometric brown-and-mustard-yellow wallpaper, the lacquered furniture, the orange swag lamp hanging by the front door, the orange-tiled kitchenette, an old GE waffle maker on the counter.

The place had a frozen-in-time feel, as if life had stopped here mid-conversation. No one seemed to have set foot here in decades.

I stepped through the doorway, heading down the narrow corridor. It was dim. I fumbled my way, opening two false doors — they opened back into the warehouse — though the one at the end led into another room.

It was the Jacksons’ master bedroom. I moved to the closet and slid aside the door. Emily’s clothing hung along the racks, housedresses, a pair of bell-bottom jeans, pairs of platform sandals and go-go boots. I stepped to the other end, which had Brad’s clothes, wool slacks, tweed jackets.