Marisha Pessl - Night Film

Now where in the hell were they?

My eyes were stinging, and I was drenched in sweat, getting steamed alive in here like a lobster. The heat was so overpowering I could hardly think, hardly remember that pivotal scene at the end, when Popcorn accidentally finds the shears buried somewhere in here, in one of his beloved flower beds.

I remembered they were encrusted in blood and the look on the poor man’s face when he came across them planting a new set of seeds, seeds with a bizarre name. His look was of such horror.

Real horror?

Was it my imagination or was it actually getting hotter in here?

I shrugged off my backpack, yanked off Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat and the sweater, leaving them on the wire trap. I wrenched a hoe off the wall and exited the shed, slipping around the koi pond.

Popcorn was the only person in the film to know the truth behind the murders. “Sometimes only the silent man can see the full picture.” Beckman had said it, or was it someone in the film?

I needed to get my hands on those shears.

I stepped into the flower bed, traipsing through plants growing so thickly I couldn’t see the ground.

I bent down, noticing a white handwritten sign stuck into the dirt.

EYE-PRICKLES, it read.

I stepped forward a few feet, spotting another.

DEATH CHERRIES.

There were countless similar signs arranged under the leaves.

BLUE ROCKET. TONGUE TACKS. SORCERER’S VIOLET. MAD SEEDS.

That one sounded familiar. Pushing up my sleeves, I raked the hoe through the dirt and immediately felt something hard in the loose soil. I bent down, seeing something shiny.

It was a brass compass, the glass face cracked.

It had belonged to Popcorn. The compass was a source of ridicule throughout the film. The whole town mocked the way he constantly pulled it out of his overalls, closely inspecting it as if to make sure he was still on course on his very important journey around the world, the joke being that the poor man had been born in Leadville and had never set foot outside the tiny town.

I pocketed the compass and shoved the hoe deeper into the dirt, the blade catching on something else.

I crouched down to inspect it. It was a half-decomposed cardboard box, sodden and limp, though I could make out the letters on the front.

Cracker Jack.

I threw it aside, ignoring the unease flooding through me, doggedly digging into the soil again. And I felt something else there, something bulky. I bent down to it.

Something was buried deep in the dirt.

Fighting a wave of nausea — it had to be the oppressive heat, the red lights making every plant and flower, even my own hands, look blood-soaked — I stabbed the hoe directly downward. It caught in some roots. Crouching, I brutally tore out some of the plants, leaves and limbs shuddering in my face as if in protest.

I could feel it with my hands, something hidden here, something hard.

Something human-sized. Popcorn?

It made no sense. At the end of the film, Popcorn was in the clear, safe. He was keeping the killer’s secret, and if anyone could keep a secret it was a mute man. Then what the hell was buried here ? Why were his compass and box of Cracker Jack — the two items the gardener was famously never without — hidden here? Had the killer decided to finish him off? Had Cordova?

As my mind spun, suddenly I was aware of, somewhere far away, a dull thud. It sounded like a door banging closed. I scrambled to my feet.

I could hear faint footsteps of more than one person — two, maybe three. They echoed through the warehouse, moving quickly, probably hurrying down those narrow corridors between the film sets.

I was no longer alone. I tried to ignore this reality for a few seconds, frantically digging through the flower bed with my bare hands.

I just needed one glimpse of what was here. I uprooted plants, throwing them aside, tunneling through the soil, my fingers feeling something.

It felt like denim. Popcorn’s overalls.

I fumbled to take the camera from my pocket, but realized, idiotically, I’d left it back in Brad’s herringbone coat. To excavate whatever it was buried here would require clearing away the entire flower bed.

I paused, listening.

Those footsteps were getting louder. They had to know I was here.

I’d have to come back.

I stepped out of the foliage, racing back around the pond to the work shed. I grabbed Brad’s coat, pulled it on, throwing the backpack over my shoulder. I fought my way through the plants to reach the back door.

I opened it a crack, staring out at the deserted lawn. I darted out, gulping down the freezing air, relieved to be out of that gory crimson light, that tropical heat, barreling into the crisp darkness of the soundstage.

I froze. The entire building was hiccoughing with footsteps, seemingly coming down the same passage where I’d entered Wait for Me Here.

I took off in the opposite direction, moving down a stone path out of the set straight into a vast desolate beach of white sand dunes and bristling sea grass. In the distance, an angular beach house rose high in the sky on stilts.

It was Kay Glass’s house from A Small Evil.

I headed across the sand toward the house and beyond it, the moonlit ocean. My sense was this set would take me back to the Jacksons’, and hopefully the exit out of here.

Suddenly — far ahead, a dark figure with a flashlight streaked over the dunes, heading straight for me.

I whipped around, stumbling back out, careening through the next opening I could find, finding myself racing down the middle of a deserted street.

It was the Main Street of a small town, a ghost town that I didn’t recognize, though I could see fairly well, due to the blinking red and green Christmas lights strewn up over the road.

Dark storefronts slipped past.

SILVER DOLLAR SALOON.

SUNSHINE GROCERY.

PASTIME GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. MEMBERS ONLY.

Sprinting footsteps ricocheted behind me. I leapt up onto the sidewalk to Dream-a-lot Movie House, heaved the door open, and sprinted past candy and soda counters and down a narrow hall, theaters advertising Distortion at eleven-thirty, Chasing the Red at twelve.

I yanked open the first door and it dumped me, thank Christ, back into the warehouse and smack into something hard, a concrete wall. I charged along it, looking behind, and saw the flashlight was there again, and another one was heading straight toward me. I grabbed the bars of some scaffolding and began to climb. I’d gone ten, twelve feet, when I reached a wooden platform. I scrambled up onto it.

“See anything?” I heard a male say below.

“He headed the other way.”

I waited several minutes, and, when the lights were farther off, cautiously stood up. The platform was sturdy, the rigging supporting tungsten lights pointing downward into some kind of stone interior. A pillar stood about four feet across from me with a banner reading — I could barely make out the words — STIR THE WATERS. It was Father Jinley’s church from A Crack in the Window. Just beneath me along the wall were stained-glass windows, a three-inch ledge. I bent down, sliding down onto it, and with a silent Hail Mary, leapt across the divide— intending to grab the pillar and slide down.

I missed. I reached out, seizing some sort of mounted wood plaque to break my fall. It wrenched loose, tiles clattering around me as I crashed to the floor, the plaque skidding across the stones.