Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“No wonder you didn’t trust me,” I said.

He shrugged. “I thought you might be working for her family.”

“How did you know to go to Klavierhaus?” asked Nora.

“I went there with Ash once. She used to practice there.”

Nora bit her fingernails, frowning. “And you didn’t come with us to Rising Dragon because … ?”

“I was paranoid I’d be recognized. It was a long time ago, but … I didn’t want to take the chance. Or be reminded.” He stared with resentment down at the tattoo. “I used to have dreams about cutting off my foot so I wouldn’t have to look at that thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “At some point, you must have noticed we were just as ignorant as you were as to what was going on.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t recognize the Ashley I knew in any of this, this witch we’ve been tracking. Curses on the floor? Nyctophobia? Ashley wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t afraid of anything.”

“Maybe she didn’t send it,” Nora suggested.

“It’s her handwriting on the envelope.”

“Someone in her family might have copied it. Maybe they’re afraid of something she told you and they sent it to scare you off.”

“I’ve been racking my brain for weeks. Trying to think of something she told me. But I never met anyone in her family, and she rarely talked about them, though I definitely sensed, particularly from that one phone call, she and her dad did not get along.”

“Nothing about witchcraft?” I suggested.

He looked puzzled. “The idea Ash would be involved in something like that is crazy. ”

“What about why she was sent to Six Silver Lakes?”

“She told me she’d lost her temper and burned herself on a candle. She had a bad burn scar on her left hand. That was it.”

“What about when you were inside the townhouse last night?”

He stared at me with evident unease before answering. “ It was the same. Like no one had set foot there since I’d broken in seven years ago. Same exact sheets tossed randomly over the furniture. Same Chopin music on Ashley’s piano, the lid open. The same rugs rolled up, same books piled on top of the tables, same drinking glass on the mantel above the fireplace, only there was about three inches of dust on everything. And this mildewed smell like a tomb. I was heading up to Ashley’s bedroom to see if she’d ever come back. I honestly expected to find her suitcase still packed and hidden in the closet where I’d left it. That was when the doorbell rang and I had to turn back. I was almost at the window when the lights came on and I heard a woman ordering me to put my hands up. She was wielding a fucking shotgun.”

“Inez Gallo,” I said. “Had you ever seen her before?”

He frowned. “I thought for a second I recognized her as the driver who picked up Ashley back at Six Silver Lakes. But I’m not positive.”

“Ashley went back to Rising Dragon for the picture of you together,” said Nora. “She wanted to have it, even though it was lost.”

He stared at her. “It’s not.” Slowly he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, removing a paper from the billfold.

He handed it to me.

It was a photograph, crinkled and worn, taken out and stared at a thousand times.

Even now, after everything he told us, it was startling to see them together, as if two people from two different worlds had collided. They sat in one folding chair, hands clasped. It was a captured moment of youth, of joy — a moment so free the camera couldn’t even hold on to it. It rendered them in streaks and blurs, hinting that they were so new and light there were no words to describe them, their ankles forming that fighting creature on fire, leaping to its death or its life.

I gave Hopper a pillow and blankets so he could crash on the couch. The rain was still coming down, and he didn’t seem to want to go home.

Nora drowsily said good night, slipping into Sam’s room.

I headed to bed myself. I was mentally and physically drained, though before turning out the light, I looked up Six Silver Lakes on my BlackBerry, just to verify the details of Hopper’s story. There were quite a few articles about the drowning, which had occurred July 2003, many of the actual newspaper clippings scanned and posted on a site called Thelostangels.com.

I read the other articles, every one confirming what Hopper had told us.

So, he had loved her. Of course, I’d known it already.

Ashley.

How elusive she was, how she shape-shifted, seemed composed of as many rival creatures as the tattoo. Head of a dragon, body of a deer. Inclinations of a witch. She was Orlando’s flashlight in the dark behind us, a pinprick of light in the violent downpour, dogging Hopper, dogging me. She was a beacon of mysterious origin and intention, impossible to determine if heading toward me or away. What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

I turned out the light, closing my eyes.

Do I dare?

I jerked upright, my heart pounding. The bedroom was dark, empty, and yet I had the distinct feeling someone had just whispered those words in my ear.

I grabbed my phone off the table, Googling Prufrock, my eyes blearily reading the poem.

It was as searing and sad as I’d found it to be in college — maybe more so, now that I was no longer an arrogant young man of nineteen, now that the lines about time and I grow old … I grow old … meant something. The poem’s narrator, Prufrock, was a sort of insect specimen, mounted and pinned, still squirming, to his tedious little life, a world of endless social gatherings and parties and inane observations; the modern equivalent would probably be man alone with his phones and screens, Tweeting and friending and status updating, the ceaseless chatter of Internet culture. The man’s thoughts veered between resignation, the stuttering, delusional belief that he had time, and a profound longing for more, for murder and creation.

The whole family lived in answer to that poem, Hopper had said.

If that was true, it was doubtlessly a ferocious, intoxicating way to live. It even corroborated the mystical afternoon Peg Martin had described at the dog run and some of those early stories about Ashley. But it could also be an enslavement, a hell, to keep searching for the enchanted, keep plunging down, down to the lonely chambers of the sea. To seek mermaids.

It was a tragic thing to do, like looking for Eden.

I closed my eyes, my limbs so heavy they seemed to melt into the bed, my mind untying all thoughts so they flew into the air, unattached and disordered.

She attacked a guest. He’s called the Spider. Knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form. You’ve no respect for murk, McGrath. The blackly unexplained. Within that family’s history there are atrocious acts. I’m certain of it. Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

The only sound was the rain, playing like an exhausted orchestra on the windows. Only when I was drifting to sleep did the storm let slip a few delicate notes — strands of some new song — and abruptly disband.