Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“At this point, it’s all conjecture.”

Closing the metal gate behind us, I realized my phone was buzzing. I assumed it was Hopper, but instead it was an email notification from the Blackboards, indicating someone had answered my post, though to read the response I needed my laptop with the Tor browser.

“You might think this magic stuff is hogwash, but I don’t,” Nora said, scraping the soles of her boots on the curb. “This curse is like cement.”

“We need to go back to the apartment.” I stepped onto the street, hailing an approaching cab.

“What about going to Rising Dragon tattoos and asking about that receipt?”

“We’ll do it later. Someone on the Blackboards answered my post.”

Oubliette.

There was no mention of it as a private nightclub on the Internet, nothing to verify the claims of Special Agent Fox. According to Wikipedia, the word derived from the French verb oublier and meant forgotten place. Historically, an oubliette was the most claustrophobic and hidden section of a castle dungeon, where there was only an iron trapdoor in the ceiling and no light — a cell so minuscule, it was often impossible for the prisoner to turn around or even move, a casket for the alive but damned. It was reserved for the most reviled prisoners, those the captors wanted to forget.

My guess was it was some type of sex club. It didn’t appear to make for a particularly fun-filled Saturday night, but Iona had claimed Ashley was going to the club, so it was certainly worth a shot to try and find someone there who’d encountered her.

At eight o’clock that night, the October weather chilly and overcast, Nora and I left Perry Street to pick up Hopper. He’d finally responded to our messages and wanted to join, which was fine by me; with that coup he’d produced with Klavierhaus, he was proving to be an unexpected asset to the investigation.

He told us to pick him up at the corner of Bowery and Stanton. We waited more than twenty minutes, and just when I was thinking we’d have to leave without him — it was a three-hour drive to Montauk, the easternmost town of the Hamptons on Long Island — Hopper emerged from the Sunshine Hotel.

It was an infamous place, one of the city’s last flophouses where rooms — more like stalls suited for barnyard mules — went for $4.50 a night. I could only assume Hopper had been doing business there, dropping off candy for quite a few customers with a sweet tooth, because the men around the entrance smiled with jittery appreciation as he ambled past them.

“How’s the Sunshine?” I asked as he sank into the backseat.

Not bothering to acknowledge us, he took out a wad of crumpled bills, counted them, and then tucked them inside his coat pocket.

“Awesome,” he muttered.

Within minutes, we were speeding down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Nora breathlessly filling Hopper in on everything we’d learned at Enchantments, including the Black Bone killing curse we’d stepped on, thanks to Ashley. She pointed out the splotches on Hopper’s own Converse sneakers — he had a sizable black wad on his left heel. His reaction was little more than cynical disbelief.

“What about that tattoo parlor?” he asked her. “Rising Dragon.”

“We didn’t make it there yet, ” she said. “When we saw we’d gotten a response on the Blackboards about Oubliette, we headed straight back to Perry Street.”

Hopper said nothing, squinting thoughtfully out the window.

Three hours later, Hopper was passed out cold in the backseat and Nora was scanning satellite radio. I was doing eighty on Route 27, the empty highway like a gray tear ripping through the salt marshes and brackish meadows. I’d been out here quite a few times back in my married days, but never at five after midnight on a mission like this.

“I want to come,” said Nora.

“We went over this,” I said.

“But Ashley went. I can easily pass for a boy. I brought pants to change into and a baseball cap.”

“This isn’t Boys Don’t Cry. And after your performance at Briarwood, we’ve established you’re no Hilary Swank.”

Within minutes, we were driving through Montauk, so dark, and still it looked like an evacuated fairground, the brightly lit sidewalks strewn with sand and empty plastic bottles, deserted. Shingled beach cottages, so cheerful in the summer, now hunched sullenly on the hill, dark and dour, bracing themselves for the winter. Even the locals were nowhere to be found.

I made a right onto South Emery Street and a left onto Emerson, accelerating past darkened shops and inns, Ocean Resort, Born Free Motel, signs reading SEE U NEXT YEAR, and then: the Sea Haven Diner, its blue twenty-four-hour neon sign bright in the window, a few cars parked in the lot out front. I sped past it and turned onto Whaler’s Way, edging past a cluster of beach condos and pulling up behind a dented pickup.

When I cut the engine, I could hear the roar of the ocean, somewhere in the dark in front of us.

“Okay, troops,” I said. “Let’s move.”

We climbed out, Hopper yawning and stretching. I locked the car and handed the keys to Nora as we headed back to Emerson Street.

“You want Hopper to go in with you?” I asked her.

“I can handle it,” she said, incensed. Slinging her gray purse onto her shoulder, she spun on her heel and shuffled away.

We watched her go, her footsteps crunching down the sidewalk, the hem of her dress flashing green as she passed under the streetlight. She was dressed like Lily Munster meets Cinderella by way of punk in a pea-green velvet dress, black crocheted tights, Moe’s motorcycle boots, and black fingerless gloves.

“Maybe you should catch up with her,” I said. “Make sure she’s okay waiting in there.”

Hopper shrugged. “She’ll be fine.”

“Glad to know chivalry’s not dead.”

He only squinted after her. Nora pulled open the door to the diner, disappearing inside. When she didn’t emerge, I zipped up my jacket.

“Let’s get going,” I said.

We walked down Whaler’s Way, along the wood fence to the beach, beyond the reach of the streetlamps. I took out my pocket flashlight. We trudged through the sand and up the sloping hill, a freezing headland wind hitting us hard, slicing right through my clothes. Not knowing Oubliette’s dress code, I was wearing all black — leather jacket, slacks, button-down — hoping the Russian vor look ( vor being Russian slang for crime lord) would be enough for people to sense I should be left alone.

The wind grew stronger, the rumbles of the Atlantic deafening as we crested the knoll. The beach looked deserted. The ocean was rough, choppy with whitecaps, the waves crashing along the shore violently, their white explosions the only interruption in the dome of darkness surrounding us.

Staring eastward, far ahead of us down the coast, were condos and houses — all of them looked dark, boarded-up for the winter — and beyond the streetlights of town, Montauk’s steep cliffs rising along the shore.

Duchamp’s staircase.

It was an ambiguous clue, to say the least. I knew the modernist Cubist painting of 1912 it seemed to refer to: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 . Nora and I had Googled the work before leaving Perry Street, though how I was going to associate that with something on this beach, I had no idea.