Marisha Pessl - Night Film

It was cold. The air was subzero. My hands were numb.

Where the hell was I? I was flying. The draft on my face was the wind pummeling me as I swerved to avoid a cluster of black clouds, atmospheric particles, ice and dust and sharp snowflakes spraying my face. A shrill note was ringing in my ears, a painful sound like a long needle stitching my brain.

I tried to sit up, but my head hit something.

I reached out. It was a smooth wooden wall.

I was inside something, a capsule spinning upside down, vibrating with velocity. But it was only a dream. I let go of my fear. I stretched out my legs — I was still wearing boots — and they encountered another wall on both sides. This enclosure I was inside, this spaceship, was tight, yet a good foot or two larger than I was.

I opened my eyes, blinking, but there was nothing to see, as if I were suspended high above the Earth, between layers of atmosphere and outer space. The ringing in my ears went silent.

I had nothing to worry about, because eventually I’d wake up. That was what dreams were for, the waking, the floods of relief, shock that the mind could be so easily deceived, tangled sheets, sunlight streaming through a window. But then, what was the hurry ? If the dream was born of my subconscious fears and desires, why not remain inside here a little while longer, soaring through space, to explore the dream, ransack it, find out its laws and parameters and what I’d been so afraid of.

My arms reached out around me, groping at the sides.

Aha. Same as below and above. The coffin. I am in my coffin.

I opened my eyes. This wasn’t a dream, I realized with sudden horror.

I couldn’t wake. I was awake.

The pale white moth — somehow it had made it onto the ceiling and it was crawling in circles, as if it, too, were realizing it was trapped, that there was absolutely nowhere to go.

I began to shout, banging on the walls with my fists, pummeling and kicking.

It sounded as if I were only calling into an empty hole in the earth.

Oh, God, no. This couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be real.

Suddenly, I understood. I was meant to know where I was. To see. The fresh air would keep me alive for days, even weeks, as I struggled and fought the inevitable, so I could lucidly consider everything I was about to be ripped away from.

My mind froze as I tried to remember where I’d been only moments ago. I had the feeling I’d traveled miles. My arms felt as if they’d rowed across an ocean. Maybe I was dreaming, then, because dreams had so many layers, so many slippery departures and ends of ends I couldn’t find footing or the slightest edge for my fingers to grasp hold of.

I reached out, feeling the space around me.

Odd. The coffin appeared to have more than four sides. I maneuvered myself around on my back, using the heels of my boots to propel myself in a circle, counting the walls. But I had no endpoint, and when I’d counted twelve, I was certain I’d done more than one rotation.

I leaned down to my right foot, untied the laces around the metal hooks of my boot, and wrenched it off. I turned onto my stomach, inched myself close to a wall, feeling for a corner, leaving the shoe there as a marker, and then I slipped along the floor counterclockwise, my hands counting.

One. Two.

I spun on like this, a captive animal inspecting the boundaries of his cage.

Three. Four. Five. Six.

I touched the boot again. Six sides.

A hexagon.

Horror gripped me once again. It actually had a face and legs, a massive beast with skin of black rubber, a bony spine, and it was perched right beside me, waiting for me to give up hope so it could feast upon me. I struggled and kicked, banging my head multiple times, screaming for help— someone, anyone —though after a while, when there was no answer, when that shrill noise had returned, ricocheting inside my skull like a lazy bullet without the strength to make its way out, I could only lie back down, wheezing, in my six-sided coffin.

I closed my eyes, letting my fear wash over me. I had to bathe in it, accept it, drink it down, let it cover me like sludge, so it became nothing so extraordinary, nothing so fearsome— and I could think.

Images wafted through my head. Sam was there, playing hopscotch across a checkered floor. The Peak came into view, dark and colossal, rising up on its overgrown hill, and then I saw myself in an overcoat, running across a bridge, figures like a black fog overtaking me, blotting me out.

They must have dumped me in here, my oubliette. Why couldn’t I remember? My memories, they’d been hacked into, tinkered with, cut away, because there was nothing in my immediate past — nothing at all.

But if there was a way in, there was a way out.

I opened my eyes, realizing, in my wild flailing, I must have accidentally brushed the moth off the ceiling. It seemed to have sought refuge in a corner, and once again, fluttering its wings, it was trying to climb the wall.

Taking care not to squash the thing, I managed to put my boot back on, then spun on my back like the rotating minute hand of a clock. Each foot that I moved, I pounded downward on the walls with my feet. On and on I went, the beating noises oddly muffled, so much despair flooding through me it felt as if it were splashing off my elbows and feet.

When I heard the fifth panel crack, I struck it a second time. The wood buckled right in half, splintering, falling through. I looked down at my feet, my heart pounding.

A gray rectangular hole stared back at me.

I immediately twisted around, staring out the opening, my euphoria quickly sliding back into horror.

There was nowhere to go — only another wooden panel just two feet away.

It appeared to be another box.

I pulled myself through. There was incrementally more light and more space, though my old coffin took up most of it, sitting in the center. I couldn’t sit up in here, either, the ceiling just a few inches higher. I crawled on my stomach along the outside perimeter and when I scrambled past the hole I’d just crawled out of, I knew I was right, I was inside yet another hexagonal box.

What the hell was this? A hell of coffins built like Russian Matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, on and on, toward infinity? Or was it a mind game built from an M. C. Escher print? A scene from a Cordova film — I tried to think back through every scene of every film, but I knew I’d never seen anything like this.

If I broke out of the first, I could break out of the second. Wedging my back against the first hexagon, positioning my feet on the outer walls, I bashed each panel as I had before, making my way around the perimeter.

I did it once, twice, three times. Not one wall gave way.

I inspected the first coffin and could make out in the faint light smooth wood, the side panels painted black. The sight suddenly triggered a memory deep in the storm-flooded cellars of my head.

And then it hit me, exactly where I’d seen this before.

The realization was such a shock, I could feel myself falling away from whatever flimsy reality I’d just been grasping, and I dropped backward, spinning through cold, black space.

“There it is,” Beckman had said. “The mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe … Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.”