Night Film

80

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.