Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“It was because he could find no equal to Ashley,” Villarde continued. “The devil had been promised a child of such perfection, such intelligence, depth, and beauty, it was proving impossible to find her replacement. Like finding a stand-in for an archangel. But Stanislas wouldn’t give up. He’d try and fail and try yet again. He’d do whatever it took to save her. No matter what amount of guilt and horror was left on his hands. He knew he was already beyond salvation. But she wasn’t.”

Villarde swallowed, lowering his head, his breath shallow. “A few months after I made this suggestion for a swap, I woke up in the middle of the night to the most unbearable pain. My bed was on fire. I was on fire. So were the clerical clothes in my closet, the curtains in my room. They were ablaze, writhing as if alive. I screamed, bumbling around, tried to get out to the bathroom, to water, but Ashley was blocking the doorway. Her left hand was on fire —and yet it wasn’t hurting her — a wild look in her eyes. Triumph. It was the last thing I remembered. When I regained consciousness, I was in a hospital and learned I’d been dropped off anonymously at an emergency room in Albany. I didn’t know who had driven me or how, but I had third-degree burns on eighty percent of my body. I received blood transfusions, skin grafts, and, months later, when I was at last allowed to leave, I knew I’d never go back. That thing she was turning into wanted me dead. She owned me, after all. I couldn’t save them anymore. But I could save myself. I disappeared. And so it remained, for eight years, until a few weeks ago, when she found me.”

So, everything Marlowe told us was true. Villarde was the burn victim in Astrid’s car, and Ashley was sent to Six Silver Lakes for what she’d done.

“When we arrived, why did you think we were the police?” Nora asked.

Villarde glanced at her. “I thought that … I thought you’d found evidence up on the property.”

“Evidence of what ?” I asked.

“What Cordova did. Trying to save her. When the clothing and the toys didn’t work, I thought … no, I panicked that he’d grown so desperate, he’d moved on to using the children themselves. I think they might be up there somewhere. Buried. Unless they were all burned, incinerated in the mill ovens to nothing.” He closed his eyes in anguish. “ ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ ” he whispered.

The implication of what he was saying rendered me mute.

The entire shop and everything in it seemed to freeze from the revulsion of it, darkening, sinking deeper into shadow, holding its breath. I was stunned by his mention of a single word: burned. It triggered a memory of something I had in my old notes, what Nelson Garcia, Cordova’s next-door neighbor in Crowthorpe Falls, had told me years ago.

Now they set fire to all their garbage, he’d told me. You can smell it when it’s hot at night. Burning. And sometimes when the wind’s blowing southeast I can even see the smoke.

“What did she do to you?” asked Hopper suddenly.

Villarde glanced up at him, uneasy.

“When she opened up that closet and found you cowering in the corner, what did she do ? You’re still alive, aren’t you? You’re still wearing that sacrilegious getup. What did Ashley do that you were so fucking afraid of?”

Villarde only lowered his head.

“You can’t even say it, can you?”

Villarde opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he gasped, a bizarre gagging sound that prompted disgust to flood through me. He was, without doubt, one of the most wretched beings I’d ever laid eyes on.

“She pulled me to my feet,” he whispered. “And she …”

“ She what ?” shouted Hopper.

“She …” Villarde was crying. “There’s really nothing more terrifying —”

“WHAT?”

“She told me she … forgave me.”

The words were so fragile and unexpected, no one spoke.

Villarde remained frozen on the stool, his shoulders hunched as if waiting for divine retribution, for God or even the devil to strike him from the world. I was about to break the silence, but abruptly, the man jerked his head up and stared right at me.

It was such a penetrating look it stunned me.

His eyes were completely dry.

For seconds, all I could think was that I’d misjudged his despair and self-loathing because his aged, carved-up face was unmistakably thrilled now, excited, his eyes pricked with light.

It was too quiet.

There was no whispering, nothing behind me. I whipped around.

The chair where Sam had been sitting was empty.

“Samantha!”

I lurched down the narrow passageway, knocking over stacks of magazines, a wooden walking stick clattering to the ground. I wheeled around, my heart pounding, staring into the hat racks and banker’s lamps, rocking chairs and vintage radios, and none of it was Sam.

“Samantha!” I shouted.

Suddenly, there was a rustling noise.

To my relief, Sam poked her head out of the junk. She’d been hiding under a dining-room table laden with animal taxidermy, elk heads with antlers, bobcats and lizards, monkey skulls. She was clutching the plastic horse tightly against her chest.

“Samantha! Get over here now !”

She blinked in alarm and obediently started toward me. But then there was a loud scraping sound.

A wooden Art Deco floor lamp with a wide crystal shade standing beside her — it was shuddering, tipping forward, drunken and alive.

“Sam! Don’t move!”

I scrambled over a steamer trunk, comic books, a bird skeleton under a glass dome smashing to the floor, but I knew I was too late.

Sam pitched forward, falling, and the lamp crashed right beside her, the shade exploding over her onto the floor seconds before her piercing screams. I climbed over a rolling stretcher, pushed aside globes and dolls to get to her, my Sam, my dearest Sam, barely aware of the chaos behind me, shouts and echoing footsteps of someone racing out of the shop.

The neon lights of the hospital washed out Cynthia’s face, made it pale and soft as she stared back at me as if she were underwater.

“The doctor said she’ll have bruising and black eyes for six weeks,” she said. “Some swelling under her chin.”

“What about the stitches?”

“Four on her hand where they removed some glass. But it will heal.”

I numbly stared down the hall to Sam’s curtained cubicle, fighting the lump in my throat.

Bruce was in there with her. Though he’d pulled the curtains, I could still see Sam through a crack between them. She was snug in bed under a mound of blue blankets, her face puffy and red, a square white piece of gauze taped to her chin. The hospital emergency room attending physician stood beside her, talking to Bruce.

The doctor was more comfortable speaking to him. I didn’t blame her. When I’d come running in here, shouting for help, Sam crying in my arms, the nurses had doubtlessly thought the worst, that I had hurt her.

And I had. Even when I was reassured that she’d be all right, I was still racked with the terrible understanding that I was responsible, bringing Sam into that hideous shop. Even more gutting was my growing certainty that Villarde had somehow orchestrated it. I didn’t know how and I didn’t understand it, but I sensed that he’d sat down and willingly talked to us only in order to put us under the black spell of his story, and all the while he was working on a way to hurt Samantha. I wondered if he’d done it as a means to distract us, make his escape, because in the chaos of her fall, Villarde had sprinted clear out of the shop. Hopper instantly took off after him, but when he reached Third Avenue, the man was gone.