Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“I did,” Villarde said, smiling wanly, grateful for her kindness.

“How did it work, exactly?” I asked. “You made a deal with them?”

“I did,” he whispered meekly.

“With who ?”

He shook his head. “I never knew. There were so many of them. I–I’d just moved to Crow. I met Stanislas for the first time, quite by accident, at the General Store. His wife had sent him into town to buy her gardening gloves. He asked me what I thought of the selection. ‘Which of these gloves are fit for a fairy queen?’ It was the first thing he said to me. We had an instant attraction. When men desire each other, they crash together like wrecking balls, quenching their need right then and there, as if the world were about to end. We began to meet around town, and within the month he invited me to his estate. He gave me my own suite in the top tower, mahogany with red damask curtains, the most beautiful room I’d ever seen. Several weeks later, I was back in town, having lunch at a diner, when a bearded man in overalls slid into the seat right across from me, a toothpick in his mouth. He asked if I had any interest in a mutually beneficial arrangement. I didn’t have any money at the time. I felt that if I built up some goodwill with the locals it would help me setting up my ministry.”

“But you’re not technically a priest,” I muttered.

“I attended two years of seminary. But yes, I dropped out.”

“Yet you wear the outfit. Isn’t that sacrilegious?”

He only smiled weakly, slowly rubbing his palms together.

“Why’d you drop out?” asked Nora.

“I didn’t have what it takes to make it in the Catholic Church.”

“Funny, I’ve noticed scum flourishes with surprising ease through the top dioceses,” I said.

Villarde didn’t answer, and I turned to check on Sam. She was dancing the plastic horse along the surface of the table.

“So, what was this mutually beneficial arrangement ?” Hopper asked.

“I’d help them get onto the property,” said Villarde. “It was simple. All I had to do was cut open a bit of the wire military fencing on the southern perimeter of the property, which would allow access to The Peak by canoe via a narrow rivulet which emptied into one of the lakes on the property. I was also asked to open up the tunnels.”

“The tunnels?” I asked.

“A labyrinth of underground passageways exists beneath the entire Peak property. They’ve been there since the mansion’s construction, so servants could move easily throughout the grounds, avoiding bad weather. Stanislas didn’t know they existed when he purchased the estate. The British couple who lived at The Peak before Stanislas had sealed them off, and the realtor had no clue of their existence. I was asked by this bearded stranger to unseal them. It was fairly easy to do, took me no more than a few nights’ work. They were crudely barricaded with random bits of wood and nails, snippets of poetry and odd verse scribbled backward on the brick, almost as if the person who’d done the job had been totally insane. The other thing I was asked to do was open the front gate. Every Wednesday night at midnight, I’d walk down the tunnel that led to the property’s gatehouse — about two miles — and unlock the gate. Then I’d simply go back to bed. The tunnels are vast, laid out like a spider’s web. There is a central point where one can see the many different tunnels diverging to other secret parts of the property. I didn’t know what they all were. I always stuck to the tunnel leading to the gatehouse. It was the only one I dared go down. And that was it. Certainly, what I did to Cordova was a betrayal. But honestly I really didn’t see the harm. The property was immense. Why not let these poor locals, who had nothing, use the grounds for their pagan rituals if it made them happy?”

“Did you participate in the rituals?” asked Hopper.

Villarde seemed insulted. “Of course not.”

“But Cordova did,” I suggested bluntly.

Villarde closed his eyes for a moment, as if in pain.

“The night he discovered the tunnels, he caught a lone woman running through them on her way to the site they used. Stanislas followed her, the idea being he’d confront them all. Instead, he somehow became involved.” He smiled feebly. “ ‘For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.’ ”

“What did these rituals entail?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Stanislas refused to tell me.”

“What exactly was the nature of your friendship with Stanislas?”

The question made him shy. “We had a … a bond.”

“According to you, ” muttered Hopper. “It’s funny how one-sided those can be.”

Villarde bristled. “ I didn’t do anything to Cordova. He was the vampire. He made you feel like he loved you, like you were the dearest person in the world to him; all the while he was sucking you dry, leeching your life out of you. You’d spend an hour with him. Afterward you were a carcass. You lost all sense of yourself, all dimension, as if there were no difference between you and the chair you were sitting in. He’d be more alive, of course, invigorated for a week, writing, filming, insatiable, so wildly alive. Art, language, food, men, women — they had to be constantly fed to him as if he were a ravenous beast that could barely be contained within human walls. There was no end to his appetites.”

He blurted all of this heatedly and was about to go on but caught himself, abruptly falling silent.

“How long did you live with Cordova at The Peak?” I asked.

“Not long. Our friendship became strained after the death of his first wife. Genevra. She was so jealous of our bond. I thought it best to leave. I traveled abroad. But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars. In fact, their grip on you grows even stronger. I was gone for fifteen years. When I returned to Crow, I went to The Peak and asked Stanislas if I might stay with him again. I hoped we could turn over a new leaf, go back to how things had been before the death of his first wife. But he had a new one now, Astrid, and a beautiful child. Ashley. Also a new film he was hacking out of nothingness into wild being. There were a great many people living there, writers, artists, scientists. Yet after a month he pulled me aside and said I should think about my future, where I was finally going to set up the church I’d always dreamed of. Surely it would be far away from him. ‘ Time to let the vines take over, ’ he was fond of saying, which meant there was no use keeping parts of the house manicured and well lit, not when he had no intention of ever entering those rooms again. He lived his life like that. He was the sprawling mansion of grown-over chambers, trees winding through the broken ceiling, plants twisting up through the floors. I understood what he meant. He’d done it so many times before me. He was dismissing me. Giving me my orders to dissolve. Fade to black. Stanislas was always moving on, always warring, always loving, galloping toward the next mysterious stranger, the next island, the next sea. And what he left behind was always ruins. But he never turned around to see it. He never looked back. I was deeply wounded. He was at once the kindest and the most barbaric man. He shifted between these traits arbitrarily, when it suited him. With Cordova you felt as if you were following a beautiful twinkling light, luring you into the woods. As soon as you lost all sense of direction, were unable to find the way back, it turned on you viciously, exposed your nakedness, blinded you, burned you. I couldn’t move on. I hadn’t moved on from Stanislas in fifteen years. I don’t know why the fuck he thought I would then. ”