Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“Where is he now?” Nora asked after a moment. “Cordova, I mean.”

“The jackpot question. No one has ever answered it right.”

She mumbled this distractedly and didn’t speak again for such a long time, her chin lowered to her chest, that I wondered if she’d actually dozed off.

“I imagine he’s still there,” she croaked at last. “Or he’s sailed away on his pirate ship out into the sea, never to return. With Ashley dead, I imagine, whatever last bit of humanity he had, my Stanny, he’s let go of it. Let it fly. There’s nothing holding him back now. Not anymore.”

Marlowe made an odd choking noise and, bending over, began to cough, a violent hacking sound.

“My bed,” she whispered. “Take me to my bed. I’m so … so very tired.”

Nora glanced at me. It was my cue to assist Marlowe, though I hesitated. It was the fear of seeing her ravaged face close-up, the worry she was too fragile to touch. She’d retreated again, gone far away, folded up like an old deck chair, so weathered it seemed possible she’d come apart in raw splintered beams in my hands. Nora gently took the Heaven Hill bottle from her — Marlowe was reluctant to let it go, like a child unwilling to part with a doll — and then, bending over her, she gave her a hug.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” Nora whispered.

I stepped beside her, and as carefully as I could, gathered Marlowe into my arms. She clamped her elbows tightly around my neck as I carried her out and down the hall, her face hidden deep inside the hood. When I set her down in her bed, Nora and Hopper stepping in behind me, instantly she buried herself under the covers like a beetle hiding in the sand.

“Don’t leave me yet,” Marlowe whispered hoarsely from under the sheet. “You must read to me so I can sleep. Oh. Swallow. That was it.”

“ Read to you?” asked Nora.

“I have a boy who comes. Every night at eight he comes and reads me asleep. There’s The Count. Read me just a little little …”

“What book?” whispered Nora.

“In the drawer. There, there. The Count of Cristo. He’s waiting.”

Glancing at me uncertainly, Nora reached for the handle of the bedside table. And I found myself hoping that Marlowe was telling the truth. She seemed to be referring to the drug dealer both Harold and Olivia had mentioned. It was a fantastic misreading of the world, that someone mistaken for a drug dealer was simply coming up here to read books aloud to an old woman, lightness mistaken for dark, heaven mistaken for hell.

But when Nora pulled open the drawer, there was nothing inside, no book, nothing but wads of Kleenex and fan mail.

Hopper and I searched some of the other drawers, but we could find no copy of The Count of Monte Cristo —no books in her bedroom at all, only celebrity magazines and rubber-banded stacks of hundreds of fan letters addressed to Miss Marlowe Hughes. Hopper asked if she wanted him to read one of those aloud, but she didn’t answer.

At last she was asleep.

“I can actually understand it,” I said, downing the rest of my scotch, pacing beside the living-room couch. “Cordova confined himself to a claustrophobic compound in the wilderness. He never left. He was king of a three-hundred-acre kingdom. He surrounded himself with people who idolized him, those hangers-on, allies, people who doubtlessly reminded him every day he was a god. He comes to buy into it, this so-called power. He cavorts in the woods in the middle of the night with locals who worship the devil. It’s only logical that eventually the entire family, including Ashley, comes to believe in it. And that belief destroys them.”

“What if it is real?” asked Nora quietly from the couch. Hopper was at the other end, pensively smoking a cigarette.

“You mean the powers Cordova harnessed on the property?”

“Yes.”

“In the forty-three years I’ve been alive, I’ve never seen a ghost. Never had a cold chill pass through me. Never seen a miracle. Every time my mind wanted to jump to some mystical conclusion, I’ve always found that inclination was simply born of fear and there was a rational explanation behind it.”

“For someone who investigates, you’re blind,” Nora said.

I didn’t know what had gotten into her. From the moment we’d left Marlowe’s apartment and come back here, ordering Chinese takeout and hashing it out, she’d been utterly convinced that everything Marlowe had told us, including this curse of the devil, was categorically true, and any suggestion otherwise, including simple skepticism, infuriated her.

“It all makes sense, don’t you see?” Her face was turning red. “Ashley came to the city to track down this Spider. We don’t know why. But she knew it was finally happening. This transformation. She knew the devil was coming for her at last.”

“Ashley believed it was happening, but it was only in her head.”

“Then how do you explain that maid at the Waldorf seeing evil’s footprint in her eye? How Ashley magically made Morgan Devold break her out of Briarwood? Peter at Klavierhaus said the way she moved was otherworldly. Even Hopper’s story about her with the rattlesnake fits in with this. And what about the couple who lived at The Peak before Cordova arrived?”

“Countless British aristocrats are eccentric. They marry their cousins. They’re inbred.”

“How do you explain what happened to Olivia?”

“She had a stroke. People have them every day.”

She sighed. “How much evidence do you need before you wonder if it just might be real?”

“There will never be hard evidence that people get sold to the devil.”

“You don’t know that.”

“This is New York. If people found out worshipping the devil actually worked, every ambitious type A would be practicing it in their studio apartments.”

She glared at me. “You’re an idiot. ”

“All of a sudden I’m an idiot?”

“Not all of a sudden. You’ve been one for a while. ”

“Because I don’t buy into the power of some ceremony performed by a couple of country bumpkins? Because I ask questions? Need proof?”

“You think you know everything. But you don’t. Life and people are right in front of you and you act superior and make jokes but it’s just a cover for the fact that you’re scared. If you were a child in first grade and a teacher gave you a crayon and asked you to draw yourself? You’d draw yourself this big !” She indicated a millimeter with her thumb and forefinger.

“And you at nineteen, you know everything. Back in Saint Cloud near Kissimmee you figured it all out. Maybe I should shack up with Moe and Old Grubby Bill and that parakeet — which, by the way, doesn’t have magical powers unless you call shitting all day magic !”

“ You wouldn’t know magic if it kicked you in the ass.”

“The answer’s simple,” Hopper said.

I turned to him. “What?”

“We have to break into The Peak.”

He announced it calmly, inhaling his cigarette.

“What you guys are arguing. It’s irrelevant. We don’t know where people’s belief ends and what’s real begins. Is there even a difference? But we do know three things.”

“What?” asked Nora.

“One. Ash was tracking down this Spider, and that makes at least some of what Hughes told us sound right. Ash wouldn’t let that guy off the hook, not if he was responsible for the devil’s curse. So if one thing Hughes said is right, logically the other stuff should at least be considered. Two. If Cordova was involved in that black magic, whether it’s real or not, Ash got sucked into it because of him. And that makes me want to kill him. Three. If any of this is true, people will want to know about it. That doesn’t make any difference to me. I care about Ash and nothing else. She sent me that monkey because I think she wanted me to find out the truth about her family. It was her way of confiding in me, the way she knew about Orlando.”