Night Film by Marisha Pessl
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Well, she thought she was cursed. She tried hard to stop it, reverse it back onto the executioner. She wanted to kill him. That’s what it looks like to me. So maybe she didn’t expect you to walk through it, but someone else, maybe someone who put the curse on her. I suggest tracking your friend down and asking her.”
Nora shot me a wary look.
“Here’s what I can tell you,” Cleo went on, clearing her throat. “Scrape the trick off with a knife or razor blade. Make sure it doesn’t touch your skin. Wrap it in newspaper and throw the materials away at a crossroads or a freshwater river.”
“Guess that rules out the Hudson.”
“I’ll also give you some reversing candles.” She headed to the back again, crouching beside a cabinet, digging through shelves. “Again, I really don’t have experience with this. You should consult a witch doctor with a specialty in black magic.”
“Where do we find one of those? Disney World?”
“Google it. Some names will come up. But all the really legit ones are in the Louisiana bayou.” Cleo returned to the table, handing Nora two candles, black by the wick, white at the base.
“How much are those setting us back? A couple hundred bucks?”
“No charge. It’s unethical to charge people who come in suffering from dark magic, kind of like someone coming into the emergency room with a fatal gunshot wound. You do what you can to save their life. Money’s irrelevant.”
Thoughtfully rolling her tiger’s-tooth pendant between her fingers, Cleo watched us pull on our shoes. Nora, collecting the candles, explained that it had actually been three of us who’d been inside the room, so Cleo dug out a third reversing candle and then escorted us back through the store.
It was even more crowded. A dapper elderly couple inspected the skull candles. Four teenage girls browsed incense. A young man with the desperately preppy look of an unemployed Wall Street analyst perused a pamphlet: Enchantments’ Fall Class Schedule.
Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes.
Dexter must have given the orange-haired kid at the register the lowdown, because they stared in fascination as we filed past them.
Cleo opened the door for us, shooing away the Persian cat.
“Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Nora bleakly, stepping outside. I paused.
“What if I don’t buy any of this? I was raised Catholic.”
Cleo stared at me blankly, though for a moment, I swore I caught an amused gleam in her black eyes.
“Then I guess you have nothing to worry about.”
She slammed the door closed with a preoccupied expression and darted through the milling crowd, doubtless racing to her red-light lair at the back of the shop.
46
“You think we’re going to die?” asked Nora nervously as we moved up the Enchantments steps.
“Everyone tends to.”
“In the next few days. That goofer stuff she was talking about. She said it can kill you without you even realizing.”
“Ex-wives do the exact same thing. The most interesting thing she said was the knowledge of dark magic passed from generation to generation.”
“You think that’s what the Cordovas are hiding? That they’re all witches or something?”
I said nothing, the notion sounding absurd. But then—Cordova was a creative eccentric holed up in an isolated estate, basically a petri dish for cultivating the weird and outlandish. Cleo had testified that Ashley was quite proficient in spells. She’d learned how to assemble those materials from someone.
But for whom had she intended this Black Bone killing curse—me? Had she laid it knowing I’d investigate her death and eventually show up at Henry Street? What about Hopper? He’d been sent that stuffed monkey and had somehow known she’d frequented Klavierhaus. Or did she intend it for someone else entirely? Iona, if she could be believed, claimed she’d seen two men outside Ashley’s door. One might have been Theo Cordova. Maybe it was her family Ashley considered the enemy and she’d put down the killing curse for them. Hopper’s inclination was to hold them accountable. Maybe they’d been chasing her, trying to find her, fearing she was on the verge of exposing them. She had, after all, been following me—which doubtless would have made the family quite nervous.
Nora was thinking it over, nibbling her thumbnail. “It could be why Ashley took her life. She couldn’t handle the guilt of what the family had done for years, practicing black magic.” She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe that’s what the housekeeper at the Waldorf noticed when she saw that mark in her eye. Maybe she could tell Ashley practiced black magic.”
“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.”
47
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 Black
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.
48
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.
I turned to Hopper, but he’d wandered down to the water, standing there, immobile, his coat whiplashing behind him, seawater frothing inches from his feet. He looked so dark and melancholy, contemplating the thundering waves, I wondered if he was considering walking right into them—letting them swallow him.
“It’s this way!” I shouted, my voice scarcely audible above the wind.
He must have heard me, because he turned and started after me.
The walk was slow going.
The sand was littered with debris after a recent storm—tangled ropes of seaweed, smashed shells, bottles and rocks, long bony arms of driftwood reaching out of the sand. The wind picked up as we trudged on, trying to shove us back, the salty air abrasive and biting. We hiked past blocks of boxy condos with empty porches and parking lots, motels with dark welcome signs. I scrutinized every battered flight of stairs leading down to the beach, looking for some sign of life—but there was nothing.
We were alone out here.
After twenty minutes, we’d walked beyond the town of Montauk and had reached Ditch Plains, the surfing beach. It was empty, nothing but a surfboard’s lost ankle strap half buried in the sand. As I scaled some rocks, I didn’t move out of the way in time as a wave crashed to shore and I got soaked up to my shins in icy water. I could forget about a Russian vor; I was going to look like Tom Hanks in goddamn Cast Away by the time I arrived.
If I arrived.
Here, the beach narrowed considerably, the massive cliffs like muscular knotted shoulders bulging down the coast. Ahead, there were only multimillion-dollar beachfront estates, and it certainly wasn’t a stretch to imagine that a secret party took place at one. But looking far ahead, my eyes watering in the fierce wind, I could see black silhouettes of beach houses perched high on the bluffs, but not a single light.
Oubliette. The forgotten place.
Maybe that meant they partied in the dark.
Hopper had moved ahead of me. He’d been silently striding along with dogged resolve, staring at the sand—unaware, it seemed, of the cold or the tide drenching his Converse sneakers, the hem of his coat now soaked. I picked up my pace to catch up, my flashlight whipping over the rocks, empty crab shells, the chains of seaweed. I could see he’d stopped and was waiting for me beside a flight of wooden steps.
They stretched from the sand up the cliff to a house, hidden high above us over the precipice.
“Think this is it?” he shouted.
There was nothing about those stairs that reminded me of the painting.
I shook my head. “Let’s keep going!”
We moved on and within ten minutes, we reached the next flight, this one half demolished. Though at first glance I saw nothing here either that brought to mind Duchamp, I inspected it with the beam of the flashlight and saw with surprise that the steps above actually did look Cubist. Pieces of splintered driftwood had been nailed crudely together, zigzagging randomly up the sheer rock face and disappearing over the top. It wasn’t so much stairs as a rickety ladder barely attached to the rock.
It was, however, the second staircase we’d passed. And the title of the painting included No. 2.
“This might be it,” I shouted.
Hopper nodded and leapt up onto the first step. It was five feet off the ground, the lower stairs, including part of the railing, strewn in mangled pieces across the sand. The structure shuddered dangerously under his weight as he climbed farther up, eventually reaching a part where the handrail was intact so he could use that to balance himself.
I stepped up onto the first platform and, making a mental note not to look down, took off after him. Every wooden plank felt damp and rotten, sagging under my feet. At one point, a plank Hopper stepped onto snapped in half, his leg going through two more rotten planks below that, so he hung by the railings and I had to duck so the wood didn’t nail me in the face as it careened past, crashing onto the beach below.
He managed to scramble onto the next step, which held his weight, and took off
We were in someone’s backyard.
Beyond manicured grass, a covered swimming pool, and clusters of black cherry trees sat a massive cedar-shingled mansion—entirely dark and still.
I checked my watch. It was after one.
“Maybe we’re too late,” I whispered.
Hopper eyed me. “Sounds like you need to get out more.”
He took off deliberately through the shadbush onto the path, making his way toward the house. I followed him, though when we were some twenty yards from the back patio, without warning, a door opened. Dense, throbbing music filled the air. Pale white light flooded the flagstones.
Hopper and I froze, pressing our backs into the hedge along the path.
A lanky kid sporting a black bar apron emerged, dragging numerous garbage bags.
He hauled them across the patio, tossing each one against a low wall stretching around the side of the house, the sound of shattering glass bottles exploding through the night. After he tossed the last bag, he retreated back into the mansion, slamming the door hard.
Silence again engulfed the house.
Hopper and I waited for a minute, the only noise the wind, the faint roar of the ocean far below.
With a nod to each other, we sprinted the final distance to the patio and up the steps. Hopper tried the door. It opened easily, and we slipped inside.
49
It was some kind of backroom storage area.
The overhead lights had been switched off, and it was freezing inside. We appeared to be alone. Stacked all around us were large wooden crates and boxes, a two-wheeled cart propped against the wall. I stepped over to the crates to read the labels. RÉMY MARTIN. DIVA VODKA. CHATEAU LAFITE. WRAY AND NEPHEW LTD. JAMAICAN RUM.