Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“I’m Cleo,” she announced flatly. “Hear you found evidence of a black trick.”

“We don’t know what it is,” said Nora.

Cleo, clearly having heard this many times, pulled an upholstered armchair set against the wall over to the table, foam crumbling out of the seat. She sat down, folding one leg under her, the other knee up, linking her arm around it, so when she was finally still she was in a warped pose — something between an extreme-level yoga position and a dead twisted insect one finds along a windowsill.

“Get me up to speed?” she asked Dex with a touch of impatience.

He picked up the Ziploc bags and my BlackBerry and walked her through the evidence like an intern showing a specialist a confounding MRI.

“But see this?” he murmured, pointing at something. “And here ? I–I didn’t understand the symmetry. First I thought anvil dust or maybe rabbit feces? But then that ? I’ve never seen …” His voice trailed into doubtful silence. She grabbed the phone, narrowing her eyes as she zoomed in on one of the pictures.

“I got it,” she said with a glance at Dex. “You can go now.”

He nodded, and with a final look back at us — what appeared to be genuine worry — he darted around the curtain back into the store.

Cleo inspected the pictures for another minute, ignoring us.

She picked up the herbs, sniffing them — unaffected by the rank smell — and then studied the roots, the strand of feathers clipped into her hair rolling along her cheek as she leaned over the table.

“Tell me where you found all of this,” she said in a low voice.

“Inside the room that a friend of ours was renting,” said Nora. “The circles and the charcoal were under her cot.”

“Who is this friend?”

“We’d like that to remain anonymous,” I said.

“Man or woman?”

“Woman,” answered Nora.

“And where is she now?”

“That’s also something we don’t care to discuss,” I said.

“How is she?”

“Fine,” I answered. “Why?”

Cleo had been closely inspecting the bouquet of roots, but now she looked up at me. She had black eyes, so deeply embedded in her plump face I couldn’t see the whites, only the black irises sparking with light in spite of the dimness of the room.

“Your friend has a pretty severe curse on her.”

She didn’t elaborate, only set down the branches and sat back in the chair, patiently waiting for us to say something.

I stared back at her in silence. So did Nora.

Normally I would have shrugged off such a pronouncement, thinking it was pure superstition. Yet there was something about Cleopatra — her point-blank certainty — that wasn’t so easy to shrug off. First of all, the woman looked like Confucius’s punk sister. She also spoke in a bland expert neurosurgeon’s monotone.

“What type of curse?” I asked her.

“Not sure,” Cleo answered. “It wasn’t a simple jinx.” She grabbed my BlackBerry, holding up one of the pictures. “She performed a high-level uncrossing ritual. Vandal root in a circle mixed with sulfur, salt, insect chitin, dried human bones, probably some other stuff that’d make your stomach turn. All of that encircling asafoetida burned on a perfect pyramid of charcoal. There was probably a really repulsive smell.”

“ Yes, ” answered Nora quickly.

“That was the Devil’s Dung. Asafoetida. It repels evil and brings harm to enemies. Another way to undo a trick is to mix it with vandal root, black hen feathers, black arts powder, and a strand of hair off the person who cursed you. You urinate into it, put the mixture into a glass jar, and bury it in a place you know they’ll walk over again and again, like their front porch or garage. After that, they’ll pretty much leave you alone for the rest of your life.”

“Does it work on ex-wives?” I asked. “If she lives in a Fifth Avenue co-op, can I just leave it with the doorman?”

Nora shot me a look of rebuke, but Cleopatra only cleared her throat.

“If you don’t have access to a location where they’ll be,” she went on patiently, “you do what your friend did. Set up a Vandal Circle.”

“Did it work?” asked Nora. “Did it remove the curse from her?”

“No idea. Spells are like really crude antibiotics. You have to try different ones to see what’s responsive. Super-spells can be resistant like a strain of bacteria, one that constantly morphs to stay firmly attached to and thriving on the host. Have you talked to your friend lately? How’s she feeling?”

Nora eyed me uncomfortably.

“What about these twigs we found over the door?” I asked.

Cleo reclined in the chair as she considered the cluster on the table. “It’s Devil’s Shoestring. A natural-occurring root from the honeysuckle family. It grows in wild fields and forests. It’s used for protection. In the deep American South people make anklets out of it. Or they douse them in whiskey and bury them in the ground. You can also do what your friend did. Take nine pieces, some white string, tie a single knot around each piece — nine roots, nine knots — and then you stick it somewhere by your front door or under your porch. Some people bury it in their front yard.”

“What does it do?” I asked.

She stared at me for a moment before answering, her face unreadable.

“It trips up the devil.”

“ Trips him?”

“Stops him. Gives him pause.”

“I see,” I said, picking up the roots. “I don’t know why the U.S. spends six hundred billion on national defense. We should just make sure every American family has a set of these.”

Cleo was clearly used to — and totally unfazed by — skeptics and nonbelievers. She didn’t react, only interlaced her ring-laden fingers — skulls, Egyptian ankhs, a cat’s head — atop her raised knee.

“Did your friend take baths before sunrise?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Nora. “In really icy water.”

I was about to ask Nora what she was talking about when I suddenly remembered the strange incident Iona had described — the early morning when she’d come upon Ashley bathing in the tub.

“So she did cleansing rituals,” said Cleo, nodding.

“What are they for?” I asked.

“They grant purification from evil. For a time. They’re not permanent. More of a temporary Band-Aid. Did she wash her floors?”

Nora glanced at me. “We don’t know.”

“Was she cold to the touch?”

“No idea,” I answered.

“Did you notice if she had difficulty communicating? Almost as if she had a mouthful of peanut butter or sand?”

“We wouldn’t know.”

“What about an alarming heaviness?”

“Meaning?”

Cleo shrugged. “I’ve heard of some people, if they’re under a particularly severe curse for an extended period of time, when they step onto an ordinary scale they can weigh up to three hundred, sometimes even four hundred pounds, even though visibly they’ve grown very, very thin.”

“We wouldn’t know that, either,” I answered, though I had a sudden, unnerving vision of the first and only time I’d ever seen Ashley in person, when she was wandering around the Reservoir — that strange, trancelike bearing, the heavy sound of her footsteps cutting resoundingly through the rain.

Cleo, suddenly struck by a new thought, grabbed my BlackBerry again, frowning as she scrolled through the pictures.

“One thing I don’t see here is a reversal. When you’re dealing with black magic, you have to uncross but also reverse, so the curse boomerangs back onto the perpetrator.” She glanced up at us. “Spells are nothing more than energy. Think of it as charged particles that you’ve attracted to one concentrated place. You have to put them somewhere. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transferred. It’s the transfer I don’t see evidence of, and that’s troubling.” She tilted her head, thinking, twirling the tooth pendant in her fingers. “Notice any reversing candles in the room?”