Marisha Pessl - Night Film

From my vantage point, it was impossible to know if it was freedom or fear that drove them — or perhaps it was neither of these things and they’d been unleashed by Cordova onto the world, his devoted disciples, sent out to do his bidding, his work, which was God knew what.

Whatever their motivations, I wondered if they felt anything similar to what I was feeling — the exhaustion, the nightmares, the sense of dislocation — as if somehow I’d swollen beyond ordinary life and could no longer fit back down into it.

I was looking into this, searching the Blackboards not so facetiously for “aftereffects of Cordova” and “known symptoms,” when I was abruptly ejected from the site.

No matter how many times I unplugged my laptop, restarted the settings, got a new IP address, tried a new user name — it resulted in the same exit page. Had I been banned, shut out — or found out?

I turned my attention to looking into those plants that I’d hacked through inside the Reinhart greenhouse. The emergency room doctor’s last words had been that I’d encountered a potent irritant and it’d be helpful to know what it was, in case the rash didn’t improve. It was improving, had practically vanished within twenty-four hours of my taking the steroid medication. Yet one search for Mad Seeds was enough to set off alarm bells.

Mad Seeds was one of many nicknames for Datura stramonium, or jimsonweed, a plant so poisonous one cup of the tea could kill a grown man. According to Wikipedia, side effects of either sucking the juice or eating the seeds produced “an inability to differentiate reality from fantasy, delirium and hallucinations, bizarre and possibly violent behavior, severe mydriasis ”—dilation of the pupils—“resulting in painful photophobia ”—intolerance to light—“that can last several days.” It gave men a sense of their upcoming deaths, turned ordinary people to “natural fools.”

It was possible that, under the heat of those oppressive lights, sweating like a goddamn pig, I’d gotten drenched with the pollen and had unwittingly ingested it.

I looked up every other name that I remembered: Tongue Tacks, Death Cherries, Blue Rocket, Eye-Prickles. I couldn’t find tongue tacks or eye-prickles anywhere, but blue rocket was aconitum —one of the deadliest plants on Earth. It could be “absorbed through the skin, resulting in convulsions, and within an hour, a prolonged and excruciating death similar to strychnine poisoning.” Death Cherries was belladonna, also lethal and known for its fantastic hallucinatory properties, many of which came from one’s hopes and mental wishes, turning them to wild reality.

I hadn’t realized it, but when I’d unwittingly wandered into that Reinhart greenhouse, it was akin to stepping inside a nuclear waste plant with a slight leak in one of the reactors or swimming blindly into a reef of great white sharks. It was a wonder that I wasn’t dead, hadn’t passed out somewhere on the property, fallen down a gorge — even jumped off the devil’s bridge, imagining I could fly. Beyond the obvious horror of my safety — it now called into question everything I’d seen and experienced up there. I could no longer trust a single recollection after I’d entered that greenhouse.

Had I actually seen that stick man or been trapped inside those hexagons? Had I seen that deep ditch in the ground, or had my own overpowering hope to find tangible evidence up there conjured it right before my eyes? Those people in black cloaks who’d swarmed me — one of them waiting inside that church confessional — had they been real? Or a drug-induced incarnation of my fear?

Now I couldn’t prove it either way. I might as well have smoked a goddamn crack pipe. It was an infuriating development, to say the least.

Disgusted, vaguely enraged at myself for not being more careful, I decided to turn my attention instead to something concrete, something categorically real —researching missing persons in the Adirondacks.

Within a few hours, using the database from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, I’d compiled a list of individuals who’d gone missing within a three-hundred-mile radius of The Peak between 1976—the year Cordova had moved into the estate — and the present day.

There was a markedly higher incidence of missing persons after 1992, the year of Ashley traversing the bridge and the devil’s curse.

There was also a young boy who went missing in Rome, New York (114 miles from The Peak), on May 19, 1978, the year that Thumbscrew had been shot at the estate. The four children reported killed in Thumbscrew were between the ages of six and nine. It was a flimsy lead, but if Falcone got back to me with confirmation that it was human blood, Brian Burton was a worthwhile place to start. He was six years old when his mother, a waitress at Yoder Motel and Restaurant, parked illegally on the curb and popped inside the restaurant to pick up a check, leaving her son alone in the backseat. She’d locked the car but left the back windows cracked. When she returned less than ten minutes later, the car was unlocked and her son was gone. He was never seen again.

The other incidents were similarly haunting — so many last-seens and symbolic details: Sophie Hecta’s locket necklace, Jessica Carr’s crayon drawing of a black fish discovered in her bed when she was found missing by her parents. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly, given that Cordova would probably know how to obscure his tracks), no detail I read overtly linked any of these cases to the director — no parallels to his films, no sighting of a mysterious man wearing black lenses that stamped out his eyes.

Nothing —but then, one tenuous clue.

Laura Helmsley’s locker had been ransacked a week before she ran away from home, and she’d reported her journal stolen to the school office. This detail was vaguely reminiscent of the incidents John, the anonymous caller, had described. Had Cordova stolen the girl’s journal, hoping she might serve as an equal exchange for Ashley? Police believed Laura had simply run off with her older boyfriend. They’d been caught on camera at a White Castle drive-thru two days after she disappeared.

But there’d been no word from her in more than ten years.

Before I’d read about the hallucinogenic plants, I might have believed in an alternate possibility, that the world had simply opened up and swallowed these people whole. It actually seemed the only logical explanation in the case of Kurt Sullivan, who disappeared across thirty yards of an easy hiking trail in the Moose River Plains Wild Forest (ninety-four miles from The Peak). He left his family, skipping around the bend back to the campsite to put on longer socks — and was never seen again. A six-hundred-man search, which included help from the U.S. Air Force, elicited not one clue as to what had happened to the boy.

Shadows with wills of their own, killing curses and devil’s curses, rivers that ran black and beasts with bark for skin, a world with invisible fissures that anyone could accidentally fall down into at any time — I could have actually considered it after what had happened to me at The Peak. Hadn’t this investigation of Cordova been hinting at the outskirts of such a reality — a world that was infinitely mysterious, shrouded with the questions that were impossible to explain? Cordova might very well be a madman, have fatally erased all boundaries between fantasy and reality in his life and work, but hadn’t he been legitimately able to harness some kind of power up there, whatever it was? Hadn’t that been true? Hadn’t I witnessed it with my own eyes?