Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I unzipped my backpack, stuffed the dress inside, zipped it back up, and shuffled on. After a time, I worried that I’d accidentally turned around and was blindly rushing back to the gatehouse, but I didn’t stop. It was just disorientation, the dark bullying the mind. How flimsy was a single person’s authority, his confidence about his place in the world. Give him fifteen minutes of this, even Einstein would start to doubt the laws of the physical world, who he was, where he was, if he were alive or dead.

To my horror, I kicked something again. It scuttled noisily across the floor, something hard. It sounded like a piece of wood.

No. It was a bone. I lit another match.

It was a woman’s black leather pump with a square scuffed heel, covered in dust.

I checked my watch without thinking: 7:58 .

I stood up again, holding the match out in front of me.

The view was a carbon copy of the one from before — a wizened brick corridor disappearing infinitely in both directions.

It looked like I hadn’t moved.

I continued on, trying to remain calm. Why was the dress down here? A woman had tried to escape? Very much like the boy’s blood-soaked plaid shirt in my pocket, the dress looked like the vestiges of violence. To die here, alone and cold, to never be found, never be loved again. Sam would think I’d abandoned her. I tried to wrench my mind away from these thoughts, chuck my attention onto something cheerful, but this place, so black and cold, extinguished levity within seconds.

I stepped on something.

Pebbles.

I stopped, feeling so many of them — hard and round — rolling underneath my boot. Children’s teeth? Molars, sprinkled here like crumbs ?

I fumbled with another match, lighting it.

They weren’t teeth, but the red round plastic buttons of the dress.

I bent down to inspect them. A few feet away, lying along the wall, was the other black shoe. I grabbed a handful of the buttons, shoved them into Brad’s overcoat pocket, and stood up again.

It was exactly the same view — a black tunnel extending in front of me and behind me, eternal. I was on a treadmill, running in place. I was trapped in a fourth dimension, purgatory, where there was no time or progression, only inert floating.

The match, I realized, was burning my fingers.

I let go of it, lurched forward, faster now. I could feel my mind faltering as if on a tightrope, threatening to lose its balance. I lit another match and saw with relief only a few yards ahead — a break in the tunnel. In my haste to get there, the match blew out. I hurried on. When I felt the wall open up to my right, I lit another.

I was in a small circular alcove, gaping mouths of more tunnels fanning out, seemingly in all directions. I slipped past them, seeing faint words scrawled above each opening in crude white paint.

GATEHOUSE. MANSION. LAKE. STABLES. WORKSHOP. LOOKOUT. TROPHY. PINCOYA NEGRO. CEMETERY. MRS. PEABODY’S. LABORATORY. THE Z. CROSSROADS.

Pincoya Negro? Laboratory? The Z? I remembered the Spider had mentioned there existed at this central point other secret passageways, which led to other hidden parts of the estate. I lit another match, holding it up to the word painted on the wood right in front of me.

Crossroads.

It was what the Spider had called the clearing where he’d taken Ashley.

Crudely nailed planks, once blocking the passage, had been hacked away with an ax. It was what Villarde had done for the townspeople. Only bits of splintered wood and twisted nails had been left, some strewn on the ground.

This corridor was cruder than the others, barely three feet wide, and looked as if it cut straight through granite, the walls slick from water seeping in from somewhere. Taking a step down it, I could see more words had been scrawled on the rocks in the same white paint. Farther down, there were drawings of stick figures with protruding noses and screaming mouths.

I stepped forward to read some of it. If y go father leave all your love right HERE at the floor. WARNING: ye will leav this path neither amimal, vegetabl, or mineral. Say goodbi to ye lamb. May the Lord help y

The match flickered out.

I lit another and forced myself to take one more step inside, holding the flame out. It swiftly extinguished, a subzero wind blasting my face, swelled and quickly dispersed. Then, I heard sizzling in my ears, so deafening and close, I lurched backward, stumbled on the uneven floor back into the alcove, dropping the box of matches.

Fuck. My heart pounding, I knelt down, groping for it along the floor.

It had disappeared.

Something was with me here, standing behind me, toying with me.

Trying not to panic, I wheeled around unsteadily, getting down on my hands and knees, fumbling for the matches in the dirt.

Calm down, McGrath. The box has to be here.

The side of my left hand hit something. Matches. I grabbed them. But somehow, impossibly, the box had been tossed far behind me, wedged against the opposite wall between two passageways. It was like the leviathan’s shadow. It had a mind of its own.

I got to my feet, ignoring that thought, lit a match, and stepped back to the opening.

Crossroads. The tunnel twisted sharply left and out of sight.

I took another step down the passage, the flame burning calmly now. Just for the hell of it, I groped in my pocket and removed the compass, curious to see what direction I’d be heading in.

I could only stare down at it, incredulous.

The red needle was going berserk, spinning madly counterclockwise.

I shook it, but the needle wouldn’t stop rotating, around and around.

It was too much for my mind to compute, so I dropped it back into Brad Jackson’s herringbone coat pocket and, trying to forget I’d ever looked at the thing, I took off down the corridor.

I didn’t know how long I walked.

I had the distinct feeling I wasn’t alone.

It was a bone-chilling understanding that I was in close proximity to something alive and was seconds from running headlong into it. And yet when I shoved the flickering flame in front of me, expecting to see a face, animal eyes —there was only darkness in every direction.

The Spider’s insidious voice began to worm its way into my head, growing louder with every step, as if that day at The Broken Door, he’d been narrating not his own secret, but the future, this walk, my walk. I can still remember the sound of her bare feet, how soft and clean they were, padding along the filthy ground next to mine.

Was that what I was hearing, what I sensed beside me? Ashley?

I kept walking, listening, but there was only my own boots, trudging on.

After a time, the Spider’s voice faded and my mind became blank, a dirty chalkboard, smeared with half-erased thoughts.

Ashley had come this way.

And Cordova. He walked this, every time he had a new child to try and barter with the devil. Anything to save his daughter.

I could discern a strong smell of metal mixed into the heavy moisture and mud. At one point, I heard distant rumbling, as if, overhead, animals were thundering in a stampede across the property, fleeing in terror. I touched the slippery rocks, warm water trickling through my fingers. The walls felt as if they were vibrating. Pebbles came loose from the ceiling, rattling to the ground. But then the noise was gone, the tunnel as silent as before, and I was left wondering if my anxiety, needing some type of outlet, had conjured the whole thing.