Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“Morgan!”

It was Stace again. Her voice startled all of us, not just by its shrillness but its close proximity. We couldn’t see her, but heavy footsteps were coming nearer, heading down the dark gravel drive.

“ Morgan! Are those people still here?”

“You’d better go,” Morgan hissed at us.

Before I could stop him, he’d snatched the paper from me, racing back up the driveway.

I took off after him.

“That paper — we’d like to keep it—” I shouted.

But he was sprinting with remarkable speed. I could barely keep up.

Stace abruptly appeared at the top of the hill. I froze. She wasn’t brandishing a shotgun, but even more terrifyingly, she was brandishing children. The half-naked baby was still in her arms, and the girl wearing the nightgown was holding her mother’s hand, sucking her thumb.

“They’re going right now,” Morgan said. “They needed directions to the highway.” He put his arm around her, saying something inaudible as he moved them back toward the house, shoving the paper into his back pocket.

Damn. I’d wanted to keep it, compare the handwriting with that on the envelope mailed to Hopper.

They moved out of sight, though I could hear them walking through the leaves, Stace angrily saying something, the baby whimpering.

I turned, making my way back down the drive, Hopper and Nora in the beam of the headlights, waiting for me. I hadn’t taken ten steps when a rock scuttled behind me.

I turned around, startled, and saw I wasn’t alone.

That little girl in the nightgown was following me.

Her face in the darkness looked hard, her eyes hollowed black.

She was barefoot. The white of her nightgown glowed purple; the cherries looked like chain links and barbed wire. She was also, I realized, holding that rotten doll Morgan had exhumed from the swimming pool —Baby —clutching it in the crook of her arm.

My first reaction was revulsion, followed by the urge to run like hell.

She suddenly extended her arm. A chill shot down my spine.

Her hand was in a tight fist, her stare pointed. She was holding something black and shiny in her fingers. I couldn’t see exactly what it was, but it looked like a tiny doll.

Before I could react, she spun around and scampered back up the drive, vanishing over the top in a streak of white.

I stood there, staring at the empty space on the hill, sensing, for some reason, she’d reappear.

She didn’t. And yet it was oddly silent.

There was no trace of Stace’s harsh voice — no baby whimper, no footsteps, no screen door swinging open followed by a slam, nothing but the wind shoving through the shrubs.

Even that lonely hound in the distance had gone quiet.

I turned, jogging the rest of the way to the car.

“What was that?” asked Hopper.

“His little girl followed me.”

I unlocked the car, climbed in, and within minutes we were speeding back down Benton Hollow Road. They didn’t say so, but I suspected all three of us were relieved to be rapidly putting some serious distance between ourselves and the Devolds.

“ That’s what happens when you marry the wrong woman,” I said. “A wife sets the ambience of a man’s life. He can very easily get stuck listening to Michael Bolton Muzak droning in a loop from tin-sounding speakers for the rest of his life, if he doesn’t keep his wits about him. You can’t blame the guy for wanting to run.”

“He was a total loser,” said Hopper from the backseat.

“That’s another way to put it.” We were hashing over Morgan Devold and all we’d learned about Ashley at Briarwood, now driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, minutes from the city.

That was the wonderful thing about New York: You might spend a few nervous hours in rural landscapes with nurses who threw themselves in front of your car and strange families, but the closer you came to Manhattan and took one look at that bristling skyline —then took a look at the guy who just cut you off in a pimped-out Nissan blasting Tejano-polka — you realized that all was right with the world.

“Ash played him,” Hopper went on, without looking up from his phone, buzzing with texts. “She knew someone was watching her on the camera. So, she decided, whoever he was, he was her best bet for breaking out of there.”

“What about this fear of the dark?” I asked, glancing at Nora. “Which reminds me. How did you know that term, nyctophobia ?”

She’d dismantled her hair from those long braids and was absentmindedly staring out the window, untangling the ends. “Terra Hermosa,” she said. “A gentleman on the second floor named Ed. He used to go down this phobia list and boast about all the ones he’d had. He’d never had nyctophobia. But he had automatonophobia. ”

“What’s that?”

“Fear of ventriloquist dummies. Anything with a waxy face. He went to see Avatar and had to be hospitalized.”

“He should definitely stay away from the Upper East Side.”

“It’s bullshit,” said Hopper, shoving his hair out of his eyes. “Ash wasn’t scared of the dark. She probably just put that act on for the doctors, so they’d leave her alone.”

“What about the way she looked at Morgan from the train?” asked Nora. “Maybe she didn’t know him. Maybe she had amnesia or short-term memory loss.”

“No,” Hopper said. “He’d served his purpose and she was done with him. That was it.”

“One other thing kind of worried me,” Nora added.

“Only one other thing?” I asked.

“Morgan said Ashley read his daughter a bedtime story.”

“So?”

“You don’t let a stranger you just broke out of a mental hospital spend time with your child. Do you?”

“He’s not winning any awards for Father of the Year. What about that Bride of Chucky he fished out of the kiddie pool? Baby. Not to mention that little tyke that tailed me down the drive. When she grows up she’s going to need a long sojourn at Briarwood.”

Nora tilted her head. “You don’t think Morgan hurt Ashley, do you? When he took her to his house to change clothes — there was something about the way he described it, it gave me the creeps.”

“He didn’t lay a hand on her,” interjected Hopper.

“How do you know?” asked Nora, turning around to him.

“Because if he had, he’d be severely maimed right now.”

I glanced at him in the rearview mirror, startled by his tone of voice. He was staring out the window, his face gilded by lights of the passing cars. One thing I’d gathered in the past few hours was that his knowledge of Ashley— Ash , he’d called her — was significantly more intense than the casual acquaintance of years ago he’d claimed. He knew her better than he let on, or else he’d once observed her carefully, maybe even from a distance like Devold. I was tempted to press him on it, try and get him to admit he hadn’t been forthcoming, but decided against it — for the time being. He’d probably only glower and become defensive, and that wouldn’t get me anywhere.

I checked the clock on the dashboard: 9:42 P.M.

“So, where am I dropping you two off?” I asked.

Nora turned to me. “We’re not done yet. We still have to go to that hotel, the Waldorf, see if somebody noticed Ashley. He said she was going there. So we should go.”

“Sounds like a plan,” muttered Hopper, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.

“It’s a long shot,” I said. “But sure. Let’s check it out.”