Marisha Pessl - Night Film

Immediately I was hit by a smell: smoke.

I started up the drive. Some overgrown branches had been split backward and broken in half— as if a large truck had driven up here. The charred smell grew stronger, and when I crested the top I stopped, staring out at the lawn in front of me.

Morgan Devold’s ramshackle house had burned to the ground.

I headed toward it, light-headed with shock. Both cars were gone. All that remained was a charred air conditioner and half a splintered swing.

My guess was the fire had happened a week ago, maybe longer, and it wasn’t an accident. I climbed through it, looking for evidence, but the only identifiable objects I found were a blackened ceramic bathtub, the burnt base of a La-Z-Boy, and a plastic doll’s arm reaching out from the rubble. Seeing it made me wonder if it belonged to Baby, the doll Morgan had fished out of the kiddie pool. Immediately, I made my way across the overgrown grass toward the far corner of the yard.

I spotted it exactly where it’d been before, still partially inflated yet turned upside down. I flung it upright and saw, apart from the encrusted leaves, a sizable black splotch stained the bottom.

It had to be where Ashley had hidden the doll, so her spell inside the leviathan figurine would work. It was oddly overwhelming to see — as if that black mark was the last confirmation that what we’d learned about her life and death had been real.

Who had torched the house? Had Morgan and his family been inside when it happened or long gone, like every other witness Ashley had met?

I spent a half-hour roaming the debris trying to find answers, at once disbelieving and angered by the finality of it. It felt as if this scorched devastation wasn’t simply Devold’s house, but the entire investigation. Because all of it was gone, wasted, and me, the last man, too late, trawling through it, digging for an underlying truth now gone.

Starting back to my car, I spotted lying in the tall grass, something small and white.

It was a cigarette butt.

There were four. I picked up one and saw the strange, minute brand printed by the filter. I hastily collected all four butts and then, my head spinning, sprinted down the driveway.

Murad.

Beckman, dressed in black corduroys and a blue plaid flannel shirt, was speaking in front of a packed lecture hall. There were at least three hundred students, every one hanging on his every word.

“The film keeps the tension skin tight deep into the final minutes,” Beckman was saying, “when Mills learns the contents sealed inside the FedEx-delivered box — his wife’s severed head. The film ends on a cliffhanger and we’re left to wonder what the poor detective’s fate is. He was once so brash, so confident. Now he’s come face-to-face with the horrors that he was chasing. He has the chance to turn into horror himself. Will Mills be savaged or saved ? We have to evaluate the story’s moral universe, everything that’s come before, to know the answer. Does he make it out alive?”

Rather dramatically, Beckman turned on his heel, raising the remote — like a sorcerer pointing a magic wand — and a film clip appeared on the gigantic screen behind him. It was the final minutes of Se7en, which featured Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as Somerset and Mills, and Kevin Spacey as John Doe in the back of the police car.

I knocked a second time on the window, and this time Beckman heard me, jolted in evident surprise, glanced back at his students, and scurried over.

“McGrath, what the hell, ” he hissed, opening the door a crack.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something?”

“This is an emergency.”

His dark eyes blinked at me behind his glasses. He glanced over his shoulder. His students remained transfixed watching the clip, so he quickly darted out into the hall, silently closing the door behind him.

“What in Christ’s —you know I don’t like to be interrupted while I’m teaching. There’s a little something called creative flow —”

“I need the names of your cats.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your cats, your fucking cats. What are their names?”

A female student walking past turned, eyeing me warily.

“My fucking cats ?” Beckman repeated, glaring at me. “This is why I’ve never liked you, McGrath. Not only are you rude and demanding, but cats you’ve been introduced to fifteen, sixteen times you don’t have any recollection of, as if they’re somehow beneath you.” He opened his mouth, on the verge of berating me further, but must have noticed I was frantic, because he pushed his glasses farther onto the bridge of his nose.

“Their full birth names or their nicknames?”

“Full birth names. Start with the one you told me about the other day. Something about Murad Turkish cigarettes.”

Beckman cleared his throat. “Murad Cigarettes. Boris the Burglar’s Son. One-Eyed Pontiac. The Peeping Tom Shot. The Know Not What. Steak Tartare.” He kneaded his eyebrows. “How many’s that?”

“Six.” I was writing them down.

“Evil King. Phil Lumen. And last but not least, The Shadow. There you have it. Enjoy. ” With a matador’s olé, he started for the door.

“These are what, Cordova’s trademarks?”

He sighed. “McGrath, I’ve explained it to you countless times—”

“How do they work, exactly? Where do they appear?”

He closed his eyes. “In every story Cordova constructs, rain or shine, at least one or two, sometimes up to five of these trademarks — signatures, if you will — show up unannounced, like long lost family members on Christmas Eve. Naturally they cause a great deal of drama.” He squinted at me, observing my scribbling. “What’s this about, anyway?”

I reached into my pocket, holding out the cigarette butts. Beckman, frowning, picked up one, scrutinizing it, and then, probably reading the brand printed by the filter, stared at me in alarm.

“Where in God’s name did you find—”

“In the country. At the scene of a house fire.”

“But they don’t exist except in a Cordova film.”

“I’m in one.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think I’m inside a Cordova film. One of his narratives. And it’s not over.”

“What are you talking —?”

“He set me up. Cordova. Maybe Ashley, too. I don’t know why or how . All I know is that I tried to uncover the circumstances around Ashley’s death and every person I spoke to, everyone who met her, has disappeared. The man had a penchant for working with reality — manipulating his actors, pushing them to the brink. Now he’s done it with me.”

Beckman’s mouth was open, his eyes wide with disbelief. He appeared to have entered some kind of unresponsive fugue state.

“Just tell me about the cigarettes,” I said.

He took a breath. “McGrath, this is really not good.”

“Can you be a little more specific ?”

“Didn’t I tell you to leave him alo—?”

“The cigarettes!”

He tried to collect himself. “If you’re the first character who appears in the scene after the Murad cigarettes have been smoked, it means you’re marked, McGrath. You’re fated. You’re doomed.”

“But there’s some way out —”

“No.” He arched an eyebrow. “There is a very slim chance if you manage to make a huge and improbable leap of faith you will survive, but it’s like jumping from the top of one skyscraper to the next. It almost always ends with you splat on the sidewalk, either dead or caught forever in a sticky hell, struggling in your cocoon like Leigh at the end of La Douleur. ”