Marisha Pessl - Night Film

It was the Saint Benedict necklace Nora had given me. I yanked it from my neck and, wedging the metal into the crack, inched it along the trench. After I’d gone all the way around it, I could see it was some type of circular door. I managed to lift up the wood a few centimeters, enough to wedge my fingers underneath. The door, a circular panel, came loose in my hands, falling away.

I was staring into a black pipe entirely devoid of light, nothing visible at the end. I reached out, running my hands along the smooth metal sides, accidentally grazing that moth.

It fell out onto my cheek.

I rolled over, collecting the insect into my hand, and then, making sure it was all right, tucked it in the inside pocket of my coat, where I hoped it’d remain safe and alive. Then I wedged myself up inside the pipe. It was tight, horrifyingly so, like being trapped in an old air vent. There were no rungs to climb, nothing to grab hold of. All I could do was inch blindly up into the thing by pressing against the sides as hard as I could, bracing myself with the soles of my boots. Within a few yards I encountered a wall.

I pressed against it. It opened easily and I shoved it back, blinking in the bright light.

The metal ladder was directly over my head, bolted to the ceiling.

I pulled myself out onto the top of the wooden hexagon, staring around me. This box I was standing on was a perfect replica of the box back at Beckman’s. Light was flooding in through narrow windows in the ceiling, though there were no trees visible and no sky, only white light. I couldn’t tell if it was artificial light or from the sun.

I took another step. Suddenly there was a jolt and a sharp snap.

I reached up, tightening my grip on the ladder’s rung just as the entire hexagon box swung out from under my feet, dangling for a moment by a piece of thread before breaking loose. And then the entire box was plunging, a spinning black box tumbling out of the sky. There was a sucking noise and then an explosion as the boxes shattered on the ground below.

I didn’t wait, and I didn’t look down. I swung from rung to rung, heading toward that wall in front of me where the ladder twisted downward. As I moved, I noticed with amazement that the tiny white moth had managed to escape my coat pocket. It was now crawling down my arm, over the cuff of my sleeve, slipping over my watch.

It was still only 7:58 .

Reaching the tower wall, I started my descent, the metal bars slipping eagerly into my hands and under my boots. But then, I began to realize in horror, the ground with its piles of demolished wood, it wasn’t getting any closer, no matter how long I went on. I was never going to reach the ground, never feel it hard under my feet, never wake up.

Suddenly I was no longer on a metal ladder.

I was tripping frantically down another black corridor. It looked exactly like the one leading to the crossroads. Had I been walking it for days and, reaching no end, simply lay down on the ground and fallen asleep?

Or was I passed out on the living-room couch back in Thumbscrew ?

Abruptly I reached a wall with a ladder, at the top, another wooden hatch. I climbed up, sliding aside the rails, and opened it.

I was in an abandoned factory surrounded by hulking machinery with rusted blades, piles of stripped logs and rubble. I scrambled out, racing across a floor strewn with wood chips and sawdust, heading for the small door—

What the hell was happening? I was outside, racing through a field of grasses up to my waist, across old railroad tracks. I was sprinting past a derelict caboose on which someone had spray-painted another red bird, when I realized in shock I’d been running the entire time with my eyes closed.

I opened them.

Blinding sun crashed into my eyes.

“I think he’s dead. ”

“Dude. Can you hear me?”

Something sharp poked my shoulder.

“Oh, my God. Don’t touch him. He’s covered in maggots.”

“That’s not a maggot. That’s a moth.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t. My throat felt like it’d been burned. Sight slowly came back into my eyes. I was lying on my side in a muddy ditch. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were staring down at me. The boy appeared to have been prodding me with a long branch. Behind them, a blue station wagon was parked on the shoulder of the road.

“Want us to call you an ambulance?” the girl asked.

I rolled upright, my head throbbing. I stared down at myself, dimly taking an inventory. I was wearing a heavy overcoat, corduroy slacks, hiking boots, argyle socks, all of which were caked in black mud. My right hand, covered with dirt, was clasping something. My fingers felt dead, as if the bones had been broken, the flesh swollen stiff around them, because they refused to loosen their grip on what they clutched so resolutely, what I realized was a brass compass with a shattered face.

And I was alive.

“You were gone for three days,” Nora said.

I could only stare back at her, unable to speak.

I’d been lost inside The Peak for three days. How was it possible?

And the fact that all three of us were together now, alive, unhurt, huddled in an isolated booth in the back of a country restaurant called Dixie’s Diner, was also bizarre. The last four hours had transpired in such a haze, I wondered if there was a minute’s delay between what was happening in the world and my brain perceiving it.

Struggling to my feet in that ditch, I’d managed to convince the two teenagers not to call the police but to give me a ride back to the Evening View Motel in Childwold. They seemed rather enthusiastic to oblige, probably due to their suspicion I could very well be the top developing story on the local news, themselves star witnesses. As we drove, they cheerfully informed me they’d been partaking in a cleanup project for their high school, picking up trash along the side of the road, when they’d found me.

“We thought you were dead,” said the boy.

“What day is it?” I managed to ask.

“Saturday,” the girl answered with a shocked glance at the boy.

Saturday? Jesus Christ. We’d broken into The Peak on a Wednesday night.

They’d found me along Mount Arab Road, close to New York Route 3 and Tupper Lake, which I knew from poring over so many maps of the area was about fourteen driving miles to Lows Lake, some twenty miles from The Peak. Had I been running through the wilderness and passed out? Or had someone driven me there, left me like a sack of garbage on the side of the road?

I had no idea. My memories seemed to have been trashed, ripped and crumpled, strewn haphazardly around my head.

When the teenagers asked me what had happened, I managed to put together an excuse about drinking too much the night before during a bachelor party, losing my friends. Yet the longer we drove, my confusion over where I’d just woken up and what in the hell had happened to me quickly slid into paranoia over my present, including these two kids who’d randomly found me. There was something about them that was a little too vivid —from the peace sign scribbled in blue ink on his arm, her bare feet propped up on the glove compartment, toenails painted yellow, the way he turned the radio way up, playing Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” They looked like brightly painted characters from another Cordova film. The suspicion made my heart begin to pound in alarm as I sat in the backseat, watching the marijuana leaf ornament swinging from the rearview mirror.