Marisha Pessl - Night Film

He fell silent, running a hand over the top of his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say.

“What?” I asked.

“It freaked me out.”

“Why?”

“It was like a recordin’. Most times we got patients poundin’ out ‘Heart and Soul.’ My first thought, she was one a’ those polter —uh—”

“Poltergeist,” interjected Nora eagerly.

“Yeah. Somethin’ not real. She was playin’ violent- like, head down, hands flippin’ so fast. My second thought was I was losin’ it. Seein’ somethin’ strange. I’m set to sound the alarm, but somethin’ makes me hesitate. She ends that music, starts another, and before I know it even though I got my finger on the switch to call a breach, a whole half-hour goes by, then another. When she stops playin’ she’s quiet for a long time. Then, real slow, she lifts her head. I could just see the side of her face, but it was like …”

He fell silent and shuddered uncomfortably.

“Like what ?” Hopper asked.

“She knew I was there. Watching.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He gazed at me, serious. “She saw me.”

“She saw the camera in the ceiling?”

“It was more than that. She stood up, and when she got to the door she turned and smiled right at me. ” He paused, incredulous, as he remembered. “She was like nothin’ I’d ever seen before. A black-haired angel. She slipped right out. And I tracked her. Watched her move down the hall and outside. She moved fast. I’m havin’ a hard time keepin’ up with her on all the different video feeds. I follow her down the paths all the way back to Maudsley. I figured for sure she was going to get caught, but she enters, and for some crazy reason, there’s no officer at the front desk.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “She hurries in and up the back stairs so fast it’s like her feet don’t touch the ground. She goes all the way up to the third floor, races inside her room. I can’t believe that, either. She’s Code Silver, which means she’s got a round-the-clock nurse detail. I keep watchin’. Twenty minutes later, I see the security officer and the nurse in charge of the third floor. They come smiling upstairs from the basement and something tells me they weren’t down there doin’ laundry. They got a little thing goin’. Somehow the girl knew about it.” He paused, wiping his nose. “First thing I do is wipe the tapes. They’re never checked, anyway. Not unless a problem’s reported. But I erase ’em, just in case. The next morning I put in a request for extra night shifts.”

“Why’d you do that?” asked Hopper with faint accusation.

“I had to see her again.” He shrugged bashfully. “She went there to play piano every night. And I watched. The music …” He seemed unable to find the right words. “It’s what you’ll hear in heaven if you’re lucky enough to get there. The whole time she ignored me, ’cept for the very end, when she’d look at me.” Morgan smiled to himself as he surveyed the ground. “I had to find out who she was. I wasn’t authorized to look into the files of patients. But I didn’t care. I had to know.”

“What’d you find out?” I asked.

“She had a fear of darkness. This thing called nycta somethin’—”

“ Nyctophobia? ” blurted Nora.

“That’s it. I looked it up. People who got it go crazy in the dark. They start shakin’. Convulsin’. Think they’re drownin’ and dyin’. Sometimes they pass out. Or kill themselves—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Wasn’t Ashley in the dark when you watched her on the camera?”

Morgan shook his head. “Briarwood’s bright at night. The sidewalks and central grounds are kept lit for security purposes. Interior building lights are on energy-saving motion detectors, so they’d light up around her as she came and went. Some of them are on a delay. I began to notice she’d wait for a light to go on before she’d continue. When she was outside she’d keep to the bright side of every path. Like she couldn’t step on a shadow or she’d melt or somethin’. She was real careful about it.”

I frowned, trying to imagine such a manner of moving, skipping from one patch of light to another. I recalled the ascent through the Hanging Gardens up to the roof of the warehouse in Chinatown — had there been enough weak light to step through all the way up? And yet around the Central Park Reservoir, where she’d flickered in and out of the lamplight in that red coat, it was mostly pitch black.

“The other thing I found out,” Morgan went on, “was the doctor treatin’ her sent out a hospital-wide memo barring her from playing the piano. Said it brought on manic episodes. The date the order went out was the first night I saw Ashley. So, it was like she had to play. Like nothing could stop her from it.”

He fell silent for a moment.

“On the eighth night I watched, on her way out of the music room I noticed she removed something from her pocket and stopped for a second right over the top of the piano. It happened fast. I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. I rewound the tape and saw she’d stuck something in there. I waited till the end of my shift and headed over to Straffen, up to the music room on the second floor. When I walked in, the smell of her, the feel of her was still there. A perfume and like a warmth, I guess. I went over to the piano, checked under the lid. Inside, tucked in the strings, was a folded-up piece of paper. I took it but waited until I was safe in my car to read it.”

He paused, visibly uneasy.

“What did it say?” I asked.

“Morgan!”

A screen door slammed.

“What’re you still doin’ out here?”

Stace was on the front porch, cradling the baby against her chest, shading her eyes in the glare of the light. Stepping after her was another child, a little girl of about four, wearing a white nightgown covered with what appeared to be cherries.

“They’re not gone yet?”

“Everything’s fine!” Morgan shouted. He turned to us, whispering, “Drive down the driveway and wait for me there, okay?”

He hurried back across the lawn.

“Oh my God. I told you to get rid of them!”

“They’re from Human Resources. Doing a survey. Hey. Look what I found.”

“But we’re not supposed to — what is that?”

“ Baby. I just rescued her from the pool.”

“Are you insane ?”

The little girl screamed, no doubt upon taking a look at that doll. Nora and Hopper were already making their way across the grass. I headed after them, and when we climbed back into my car the Devolds had returned inside, though their shouting could still be heard above the wind.

“It’s obvious Morgan fell in love with Ashley,” Nora said.

“Can you blame him?” I asked. “He is married to It. I’m referencing the Stephen King book.”

“He’s a freak is what he is,” said Hopper.

I turned around to him in the backseat. “You remember Ashley having nyctophobia at Six Silver Lakes?”

Glaring at me, he exhaled cigarette smoke out the window. “No way.”

We were in my car, sitting at the end of Devold’s driveway. We’d been waiting for him to reappear for forty-five minutes. Apart from my headlights illuminating the unmarked road, which twisted around the dense shrubs in front of us, it was pitch black out here, totally deserted. The wind had picked up. It whistled insistently against the car, making the branches nervously tap the windshield.