Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“What are reversing candles?” Nora asked.

“White wax on the bottom, black at the top.”

Nora shook her head.

“What about a cardboard box filled with objects?”

“No.”

“No mirror box,” whispered Cleo to herself.

“What’s a mirror box?” I asked.

She glanced at me. “For straightforward reversals. You get a black candle, inscribe the enemy’s name into it, bury it in a graveyard with pieces of a broken mirror. Whatever negativity or evil aimed at you will reflect back onto them.” She cleared her throat, raising an inky black eyebrow. “Let’s go back to her room. Were there any powders or chalk marks on the floor?”

“It was dark inside,” Nora said. “But no. We would have noticed something like that.”

“But the floor was sticky,” I added.

Cleo looked at me. “Sticky?”

“As if a soft drink had been spilled all over it. Plus a couple of plastic wrappers.”

Cleo unwound herself from the twisted way she was sitting, leaning across the table, jutting out her chin.

“Did you pick up one of the wrappers?” She demanded it so intensely I caught a whiff of her breath, hot and garlicky and pungent, like she’d been drinking some strange herbal tea. She had small tobacco-stained teeth crowded together, quite a few in the back capped in gold.

“No,” I said.

“Then how do you know they were plastic wrappers?”

“That’s what they sounded like.”

She took a deep agitated breath. “Did you go inside the room?” she asked, sitting back in the chair.

“Of course. How do you think we found that thing under her bed?”

“How long ago was this?”

“Just last night.”

She looked underneath the table. “Are those the shoes you were wearing?”

“Yes.”

She stood up and strode to the back counter, returning with a pair of latex gloves and a pile of faded newspapers. She snapped the gloves onto her hands and spread the newspaper across the table’s surface.

“Take one shoe off and slowly hand it to me, please.”

Glancing at Nora — she looked stricken — I pulled off one of my black leather boots, handing it to Cleo.

Carefully — as if handling a rabid animal — she placed the boot on its side on the newspaper, the sole facing her. She fumbled in her jean pocket and produced a four-inch pocket knife, the handle intricately carved out of some type of animal bone. She opened the blade with her teeth and, holding down the boot with her other hand, scraped it slowly along the sole. She did this for minutes, ignoring us, and when she stopped, inspecting the blade inches from her nose, there was a thick brownish-black paste collected along the edge. It looked like dried molasses.

“This is the reversal,” she whispered. “It’s a sophisticated foot-track spell. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What’s a foot-track spell?” asked Nora.

“Something for your enemy to walk through. A trap.”

“But we walked through it,” I said.

Cleo’s eyes darted from the knife to me.

“Does she have any reason to believe you’re her enemy?” she asked.

“No,” I said, though as soon as I did, I felt an uneasy chill. I had the sudden memory of Ashley stalking me at the Reservoir, her hard face staring down at me when she’d appeared abruptly by the gatehouse. Had she considered me a threat? But what had I ever done to her, to her father, except seek the truth? Maybe that alone made me an adversary. But how could the family be so hypocritical, when nearly every hero in a Cordova film was desperately searching for the same thing? Didn’t that matter? Didn’t the art in some albeit small way reflect the values of the creator’s life? Not necessarily. People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

“Whatever her reasoning,” Cleo whispered, as if reading my mind, her gaze returning to the dark glue coating the knife, “one thing is clear.”

“What?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

“You’ve been crossed. ”

“You mind expounding on that?”

Cleo only carefully set down the knife and stood up, striding to the bookcase at the back of the room.

“Look,” whispered Nora, inspecting the cracked soles of her own motorcycle boots. They were spangled with the same dark blotches, like wads of black gum. She yanked off one, scrutinizing the sole in the overhead light. I could see sand and thread, maybe even fingernails, mixed into the paste, glittering splinters of what looked like glass.

Cleo returned with a hulking stack of encyclopedias. Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork by Harry Middleton Hyatt, read the spines. They looked ancient, with orange covers tied together with a frayed black ribbon. She sat down, picking up volume one and flipping to the contents page, slipping her index finger down the entries. When she came to the end — apparently not finding what she was looking for — she slammed it shut, moving on to volume two.

I grabbed the book she’d just put down. It reeked of mildew, the pages yellowed. It was published in 1970, and a splotch of red liquid — tomato sauce or blood —had dried along the seam of the title page. Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork. Beliefs accepted by many Negroes and white persons, these being orally recorded among Blacks and whites.

General Description of Beliefs p.1. Belief in spirits, ghosts, the Devil, and the like p. 19. Timing of spells and recurrence of the effects of spells over time p. 349 .

The book appeared to be an encyclopedia of spells, some of the entries short, others extensive. They were transcribed interviews with backwater southerners with thick accents, their accounts written out phonetically. For example, on p. 523 under the title heading Mojo hands grouped somewhat alphabetically according to their major ingredient ( e.g. buckeye nuts, needles, black cat bone ) was the following entry:

669. Jest a — yo’ see yo’ git a snake — yo’ can take a rattlesnake an’ dry his haid up, pound it up, an’ den yo’ kin go to work an’ use dat as goofer dust. Kill anybody.

[ Waycross, Georgia]

“I found something similar,” muttered Cleo, inspecting the bottom of my boot before returning her attention to the page in front of her. I craned my neck to read what she was looking at.

Volume four, More conjure work utilizing human body parts and waste.

“ ‘The Black Bone trick,’ ” she whispered, tucking a chunk of purple hair behind her ears. “ ‘Frayed hemp rope, gum arabic, and goofer dust.’ Your friend used a slight variation. I see some dark brown sand in here, some seaweed, too. She must have picked this up someplace exotic. You put it down on the floor in a quincunx, which is a makeshift crossroads. Your enemy unknowingly walks through it. Immediately it sticks to his shoes, and within hours it’s eating away at his life.”

“Eating away ?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

She shrugged. “I’ve heard of comas. Heart attacks. Abruptly losing everything you love, like your job or family. Sudden paralysis from the neck down.” She raised an eyebrow. “Have you felt any strange sensations in your legs?”

“I woke up with my foot asleep this morning,” said Nora worriedly.

Cleo nodded as if expecting this bad news. She then tilted her head, grabbing that tiger-tooth pendant around her neck, rolling it in her fingers.

“One thing that troubles me is something you said before. The plastic wrappers all over the floor. I don’t think they were plastic wrappers.”