Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“To this concrete lot. An old-fashioned truck was parked there. At the center were these gigantic metal boxes. Five in a row. At first I thought it had to be an electrical plant used for powering the estate. Or maybe they were traps for wild animals. They looked cruel. But then I smelled smoke. I got closer and, shining my flashlight on them, I saw each one had a rusty door and a chimney sticking up into the air. Strewn all over the ground was a pale gray powder. I didn’t realize until I’d walked through it that it was ashes. The boxes were incinerators. And they’d been used recently, because I could still feel heat coming off them.”

Incinerators.

The word made me suddenly recall those tunnels originating from the underground alcove, those blackened entryways and the rudimentary words scrawled above the openings in white paint. I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t know how, but I remembered every one, as if they were the refrain of a nursery rhyme I’d sung as a child, the lyrics lodged in my head forever.

Gatehouse. Mansion. Lake. Stables. Workshop. Lookout. Trophy. Pincoya Negro. Cemetery. Mrs. Peabody’s. Laboratory. The Z. Crossroads.

Nora frowned. “I remembered the next-door neighbor in the trailer that you’d interviewed, Nelson Garcia, how he told you the Cordovas set fire to all their garbage. I went up to one and unlatched the door. There was nothing but black walls, piles and piles of ashes. The smell was awful. Synthetic, but sweet. I opened the other doors, raked a tree branch through the ashes to see if there was anything left. There was nothing, not one hair. I started combing the ground, trying to find some piece of evidence of what they were going to so much trouble to destroy. It wasn’t until I inspected the truck that I found something.”

“What?”

“A glass vial used for drawing blood at a doctor’s office. It was wedged along the side in the rear bed. It looked empty, but there was a tiny pink label on the side with a biohazard symbol. They must use the truck to transport medical waste or toxic garbage from somewhere at The Peak to burn in those ovens. The vial must have accidentally fallen out.”

She took a breath. “It made me wonder if the whole area was contaminated. I began to feel sick, so I ran.” She stared at the table in front of her. “I had the feeling someone was following me, but every time I looked around, there was no one. When I reached the fence, I didn’t even think about it, I went right over it. I didn’t care if I died or got electrocuted or cut up. I climbed right through the razor wire, didn’t feel a thing. I just wanted to get out, and nothing would stop me.”

“How’d you get back to the motel?”

“I reached this paved road — this was about four in the morning — and a red station wagon pulled up, a tiny old lady behind the wheel. She offered me a ride. I was petrified. I thought for sure she was one of the townspeople. She even looked like a witch, with a green blouse and all these rings on her fingers. But I was so tired and she looked so fragile, I got in. She drove me straight back to the motel and said, ‘Take care of yourself, girl.’ And that was it. Nothing happened. I staggered into the room and slept for thirteen hours.”

I stared at her. I could feel the outskirts of another headache coming on, but I tried to focus, to think. A glass vial used for drawing blood? Medical waste ? Why would Cordova have such things — for use in another film?

Her mention of Nelson Garcia made me remember the other incident he’d told me about, the UPS delivery of medical equipment intended for The Peak, but accidentally arriving at his own trailer. Nothing we’d learned over the course of the investigation, no one we’d interviewed had mentioned a detail that validated this story or Garcia’s suspicion, that there was someone injured or ill up at The Peak — except perhaps now, Nora and these incinerators she’d just described.

Hopper had been listening to her with annoyed detachment, occasionally glaring at her over some specific detail she mentioned — the word incinerators, the glass vial labeled biohazard .

“What about you?” I asked him. “What happened?”

“Hopper got inside the mansion,” blurted Nora excitedly. “He found Ashley’s room —”

“I don’t know it was her room for sure,” Hopper countered.

“But — of course you do.” Clearly surprised by his sudden reticence, she turned to me, leaning in. “He found letters that he’d written Ashley, ones she’d never answered. They were kept safe, in order, right beside her bed. It looked like she’d read through them a million times. And there were pictures of them together on top of her desk. Then he found her practice room—”

“I don’t know it was her practice room—”

“But you found a piece on the piano she’d written, called Tiger Foot. ”

“ Tiger Foot ?” I asked, puzzled.

“Hopper’s tribe name from Six Silver Lakes.”

Hopper looked livid. “I don’t know what I found up there, okay. I don’t know.”

“How did you get inside the house?” I asked him.

“Climbed up onto the roof. Found a window unlatched.”

“What was it like inside? Abandoned?”

“No. It was … nice. ” He brushed his hair out of his eyes and seemed unwilling to elaborate, but, as I was waiting expectantly, he sighed. “It was a castle. Gigantic. Gloomy as fuck. Mahogany walls. Tapestries with unicorns. Snarling bear heads. Paintings depicting floods and mayhem and people in pain. Wooden chairs, big as thrones. Knights’ swords hanging on the wall, and an iron chandelier with burned white candles covered in wax. Not that I had much time to browse. Someone let the dogs back in. I found a back staircase, headed to the basement, ducked inside the first room I found that was unlocked. I hid in there for hours.”

“It was filled with thousands of filing cabinets, ” added Nora.

“Filing cabinets?” I asked. “Containing what?”

“Actors’ head shots. Millions of pictures and résumés with weird notes written on the back.” She waited for Hopper to explain it to me, but, again, he looked infuriated by her candor.

“What kind of notes?” I pressed when neither of them spoke.

“Personal details,” said Hopper.

“Such as?”

“Background. Phobias. Secrets.”

“They had to be actors Cordova had considered for roles,” said Nora. “It reminded me of the audition Olivia Endicott described. Remember how he asked her those weird personal questions?” She glanced at Hopper. “What was the one you told me about? That woman named Shell Baker?”

“Her picture looked like it dated back to the seventies,” he said. “Someone had written on the back of it, ‘No family except a brother in the Navy, hates cats, diabetic, doesn’t like to be alone, sexually inexperienced.’ Another was, like, ‘Raised in Texas, car accident as a five-year-old child, left her in a back brace for a year, painfully shy.’ ”

“Did you take anything with you?” I asked.

He seemed irritated by the question. “Why?”

“For evidence?”

“ No. I put it back and got the hell out of there.”

“Then Hopper found a torture chamber,” Nora blurted.

“It wasn’t a torture chamber,” he countered angrily. He looked at me. “Another room in the basement just had a bunch of wooden stretchers and planks, metal bridles, antiques — I didn’t know what half the shit was. I slipped out, snuck upstairs to the third floor. I found what I think was Ashley’s room, was looking around when I accidentally knocked over a lamp. Someone must have heard me, because I could hear someone coming up the stairs. I darted into a closet while this person, it sounded like a woman, wandered around. She righted the lamp and then she left. Only she locked me in. I couldn’t unlock the door from the inside. I was going to unscrew the doorknob, but then I heard one of the dogs outside the door. He had to have known I was in there. But he didn’t bark. There were giant bay windows in the room, overlooking the hill and Graves Pond, but when I climbed out, there was a sheer drop. I stayed in the room all night, silent, waiting for the dog to leave. About five in the morning someone whistled and it ran downstairs. I unscrewed the doorknob, managed to get out of the house without encountering anyone. I made a beeline for the canoe, but naturally it was gone. So I just followed the same stream that we’d come in on. I got lost, though. I wandered deep into a swamp, ended up in mud chest-high. I came upon a group of campers who looked at me like they thought I was the Loch Ness Monster. They told me I was in a section called the Hitchins Pond Primitive Area, which is all the way east of Lows Lake. It was about six at night when I made it back to the Jeep.”