Night Film

86

“It’s Cordova’s legendary estate,” I said. “It sits north of Lows Lake in the wilderness.”

“Did you know it was built on a Mohawk massacre site?”

“No. I didn’t.”

She excitedly licked her lips. “Sixty-eight women and children were slaughtered there, their bodies thrown in a pit on a hill and set fire to. This was where they constructed the foundation for the house. Stanny naturally didn’t know that when he bought the place. He told me all he knew was that the couple living there, some British lord and his idiot wife, had gone bankrupt. But they failed to disclose the wife went completely loony living there. When they sold the estate, returning to England, the lord had no choice to put his poor mad wife into an institution. Within days, she stabbed a doctor in the ear with scissors. She was transferred to Broadmoor, hospital for the criminally insane. Shortly thereafter, the lord dropped dead of a heart attack. And that, as they say, is a wrap.”

Stanny—it was obviously her pet name for Cordova. She paused to take another long drink from the bottle. It was as if with every swig she was resuscitating herself, coming slowly back to life. She even seemed to grow less bony, filling in.

“My Stanny,” she went on, clearing her throat, “without knowing a thing about any of this, moved right into his lovely mansion with his lovely wife, and his baby son. Now, I’m a cynical old bitch, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t believe. Religion? Humans desperate to take out infinity insurance. Death? The great big nada. Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt. Nevertheless, knowledge of those two simple facts, massacre and madness? It would have kept even me away.”

She took another swig, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

“Stanny told me, the very first day they arrived, after the movers had gone, his wife disappeared to take a nap upstairs and he went for one of his long walks. He always walked alone in the woods when he needed an idea for a picture. And he needed one. Somewhere in an Empty Room had come out. It was so good it broke hearts. Everyone was dying to see what he’d do next.”

She paused, her bony hands crawling out of the sleeves to fiddle with the white Heaven Hill label on the bottle.

“He’d been walking for an hour, following one path and then another deep into the forest when he noticed a knotted red string dangling from a tree branch. A single red string. Do you know what it means?”

Nora shook her head. Marlowe nodded with a wave of her hand.

“He untied it, thinking nothing of it, and continued on until the trail opened up into a circular clearing beside a wild rushing river. Within the clearing, nothing grew. Not a stray leaf or pinecone or twig. Only dirt in a perfect—inhuman—circle. Outside of it on the ground he found a sheet of plastic, letters written backward across it, the words indecipherable. There was a naked, headless doll with its feet nailed to a wooden board, its wrists tied with more red string. Stanny assumed it had been left by local pranksters who frequented his property. He collected the junk and threw it away. But when he checked the same area three weeks later, he saw black charred circles on the ground where there had been evident burning. It smelled recent. He complained to local police. They wrote up a report and assured him they’d patrol the area and let locals know the house was no longer vacant. Stanny put up no-trespassing signs along the perimeter of his property. A month later, he and his wife woke to piercing screams in the dead of night. They didn’t know if they were animal or human. In the morning he went to the area. There, at the center of a perfect circle, was an altar with a newborn fawn on it, its eyes gouged out, its mouth tied shut. Carved into its dappled body with a knife were strange symbols. Stanny was livid. He reported it to the local police. Again they wrote up the report. And yet? There was something in their expression, the way they glanced at each other. Stanny realized they not only already knew who was doing such things, they were in on it themselves. They, along with countless people in the town, were using his property for sadistic rituals. Not that Stanny should have been surprised. He was living amongst country kooks, after all, white-trash crazies, in-bred Deliverance freakazoids.”

She grinned impishly, her eyes bright.

“You get the idea. And you can imagine what Stanny’s dear wife, Genevra, from a swank Milanese family, thought about such backwoods heathens. She pleaded with him to erect a fence around the property for protection, to keep them out. So he did. He put up a twenty-foot electric fence, spent a fortune on it. The problem was, what he’d actually done was, rather than keeping them out, he’d barricaded himself and his family in.”

She fell silent for a moment.

“I don’t know how he fell into experimenting with it,” she went on. “He never told me. Stanny wasn’t afraid of the unknown. Within the universe. Within ourselves. It was the subject he plumbed endlessly. He took submarines down there. He went down, down into the dark crags and muck of human desire and longing into the ugly unconscious. No one knew when he’d come back, if he ever would. When he was working on a project he disappeared. He breathed it. He’d write all night for days and days until he was so tired he slept for two weeks like a hibernating monster. He could be agony to live with. I, of course, experienced it firsthand, up close and personal.”

Visibly proud of this pronouncement, she gulped down the Heaven Hill, a drop sliding off her chin.

“The problem with Stanny,” she went on, wiping her mouth, “as with so many geniuses, was his insatiable needs. For life. For learning. For devouring. For fucking. For understanding why people did the things they did. He never judged, you see. Nothing was categorically wrong. It was all human in his eyes and thus worthy of inquiry, of examining from all sides.”

She squinted at us.

“You’re his fans, are you not?”

I couldn’t immediately answer. I was too stunned, not just by what she was saying but by her sudden energy and sanity, both of which seemed to increase in direct ratio to the amount of Heaven Hill she guzzled — now almost half the bottle.

“What do you know about his early life?” she demanded.

“He was the only child of a single mother,” I said. “Grew up in the Bronx.”

“And he was amazing at chess,” Nora added. “He used to play for money at the tables in Washington Square Park.”

“That was Kubrick. Not Cordova. Get your geniuses straight, for fuck’s sake.” Marlowe surveyed us. “That’s it?”

When we said nothing, she scoffed.

“That’s what I’ve always found so pathetic about fans. They weep when they have a live glimpse of you, frame the fork you touched. Yet they’re impervious to doing anything with that inspiration, like enriching their own lives. It drove Stanny-boy crazy. He used to say to me, ‘Huey’—it was his nickname for me—‘Huey, they see the films five times, write me fan letters, but the underlying meaning is lost on them. They take nothing away. Not heroism. Not courage. It’s all just entertainment.’ ”

Huey sighed, taking another swig.

“Stanny was raised to be a good Catholic. His mother, Lola, worked two jobs as a maid in one of the big New York hotels. She was from a small village outside of Naples. Yet she knew a great deal about stregheria. You’ve heard of it, I suppose?”

“No,” Nora said, shaking her head.

“It’s an ancient Italian word for witchcraft. A seven-hundred-year-old tradition, passed along mostly in wives’ tales, yarns to scare children, make them eat their vegetables and go to bed early. Cordova’s father was from the Catalan region of Spain, a blacksmith. The family lived together in a small town outside Barcelona before they were due to immigrate to the States when Stanny was three years old. The day they were meant to leave, the father decided he couldn’t go. He didn’t want to leave his homeland. So, Lola took her son and set out for America. Within a year the father had a new family. Stanny never spoke to his father again. But he remembered his Spanish grandmother telling him about bruixeria, the Catalan tradition of witchcraft. He said she told him on New Year’s Eve witches have the utmost power, and that’s when they kidnap children. She told him to put the fire tongs in the form of a cross over the embers in the fireplace, sprinkle them with salt, and the boy would prevent a witch’s entry via the chimney. So, you see, my dears, Stanny grew up with superstition. Certainly not taken seriously, yet it was nevertheless present on both his mother’s and his father’s side of the family. And Stanny’s imagination on the worst of days is stronger than our realities. I think with a background like that, he was sadly predisposed to it … susceptible, you might say.”

She gazed at us, her fingers fiddling with the pearl ring, twisting it around and around her finger.

“He never told me how it happened. But shortly after building the fence around the property, he realized the townspeople were still trespassing.”

“How?” I asked.

“They came by boat. The estate is north of Lows Lake. If you leave from the public shore and make your way to the northern side and along a narrow river, eventually it will feed into a lake on The Peak property. When Stanislas found this breach, he had his men build a chain-link patch straight down to the bottom of the riverbed so only a thimble could get past. A week later he and his wife woke up to the sound of drumming. Voices. Screams. The next morning he went back to the fence and saw that the spot barring the way by the river had been sawed straight through. And he could see from the way the wires were cut it’d been done by somebody on the inside of the property, not the out.”

“Someone living there,” I said.

She nodded but didn’t elaborate.

“Who? A servant?”

“Every paradise has its viper.” She smiled. “If Stanny had one weakness it was his belief that personality was fluid. He didn’t believe people could be evil, not in some pure form. He always liked a lot of people around him. Hangers-on, groupies, you’d call them, though he called them his allies. He hadn’t been living at The Peak a month when he met in town, quite by accident, a handsome young priest who’d also just moved to Crowthorpe to set up his parish. Stanny needed a religious adviser for a script he was working on, Thumbscrew, and the two men became friends. Within weeks, the priest was shacked up at The Peak. Genevra was furious. She loathed the man. He was hot as hell, a brawny Tyrone Power type with gold hair, blue eyes. Probably had one hell of a der Schwanz, if you catch my drift. He claimed to have been raised in the Iowan cornfields. But something was rancid about the man. Genevra tried to convince Stanny he was dangerous. An impostor. A leech. She was Italian, a staunch Catholic, and had noticed rather gaping holes in the man’s knowledge of the Church. She also believed he was unnaturally obsessed with her husband. Stanny told her to relax, that the man was fascinating, an inspiration.”

Marlowe took another long drink.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “I suspect one night Stanny went down to the crossroads to confront these townspeople and ended up hiding, watching them. By the time he returned to the mansion at dawn, he had a wildly different perspective on the entire business. I don’t know what he saw or what they did. Nothing was proven, but Genevra always believed that the priest had everything to do with it. That he’d made some kind of deal with these people, was perhaps even one of them.”

She sighed.

“So Stanny began his life there. Creatively, he came into his own. Certainly, his previous pictures were electrifying, but this new body of work he was producing at The Peak, it was a different dimension. He began to craft his night films. He explained it once. ‘Huey,’ he said to me. ‘I love to put my characters in the dark. It’s only then that I can see exactly who they are.’ ”

She fumbled with her long satin sleeves, smoothing the fabric over her knees. I didn’t say anything, mesmerized by what she was telling us about Cordova, and also by Marlowe herself. She’d grown so lucid and animated, she seemed entirely different from the woman we’d encountered before.

“Eventually there was no need for him ever to leave that property,” she continued. “Everything, everyone, came to him. He had three hundred acres. He built his sets there, edited his films there. When he had to leave, it was because he’d found a shooting location close to Crowthorpe. It was as if he’d come to believe his power could only be harnessed when he was on those grounds. And it was true. The quality of performances he was able to capture was astounding. His energy had no bounds. He was Poseidon, his actors his school of minnows. When you were working with Stanny on a picture you stayed at The Peak. You ate your meals there, you never left, were allowed no contact with the outside world. You turned your life over to him, handed him the keys to your kingdom. That meant your mind as much as your body. It was all agreed to beforehand. You showed up on the first day of production, ignorant and blind. You knew nothing about the film, or who your character was, or really anything at all except that your life as you’d known it was over. You were setting off on a new journey down a wormhole into something unknown. When you finally emerged three or four months later and returned home, you were changed. You realized before, you’d been asleep.”

“Why would anyone agree to such a thing?” Hopper asked, as she took another drink. “Signing away your life, your mind and body, to one man? He sounds like Charles Manson.”

She looked amused by his vehemence, narrowing her eyes at him.

“There’s the human desire to exert free will, yes. But there’s an equally strong desire to be tied up, gagged, and bound. Naturally, there was the glory that came with appearing in a Cordova picture. You were made. You would get the best roles after working with him. Even when he went underground. It gave you cachet. You were a warrior. Yet the true value of working with Stanny was not money or acclaim, it was the afterward. All us actors spoke of it. When you finally returned to your real life after working with Cordova, it was as if all of the colors had been turned way up in your eyes. The reds were redder. Blacks blacker. You felt things profoundly, as if your very heart had grown giant and tender and swollen. You dreamed. And what dreams. Working with that irascible man was the most grueling time of my life. I accessed the deepest, most tormented parts of myself, parts I was petrified of opening because I doubted I’d ever get them closed again. Perhaps I never have. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. You were making a film. Something that would outlast you. Something wild. A powerful piece of art that wasn’t a commercial concoction, but something to slice into people, make them bleed. Living at The Peak, you were as underground as any resistance, working for the last true rebel. You were also learning how far you could go — in love and fear, in resilience and sex, in euphoria. To throw off what you’d been taught by society and make it all up for yourself. To live from scratch. Can you imagine the intoxication of such a thing? You come back from this and you realize the rest of the world is asleep, in a coma, and they don’t even know.”

“Is that why you fell in love with him?” Nora asked tentatively.

Marlowe sat up, jolted by the question, jutting out her chin. “Everyone fell in love with him, child. You’d be mere putty in his hands. That goes for every one of you. Who can resist the man who understands and appreciates your every cell? We married during the production of Lovechild.” She said it with a sad wave of her hand, staring down at the Heaven Hill bottle, now almost empty.

“Let’s just say, when it was over, I saw that our love was a hothouse flower. Thriving and vivid indoors, in very specific conditions; outside the enclave, in the real world, dead. I couldn’t live at The Peak, not forever. Because by then Stanny refused to leave it. It was his private dimension, his personal netherworld. He wanted to remain forever on this magical planet. I had to get back to Earth.”

“He really refused to leave?” Nora whispered, incredulous.

Marlowe stared her down. “Zeus was loath to leave Olympus, was he not, unless he had mortals to torment? Occasionally during shooting, Stanny would vanish somewhere for weeks at a time and couldn’t be found. Not anywhere. So we often wondered if there was some other place he went. The secret place within the secret place. When he did finally show up again, he had strange rocky sand in his boots and he reeked of the open sea. He was also especially voracious in the sack, if you catch my drift — like he’d sailed away for a time on his pirate ship, invaded villages, burned them to the ground, raped and stole and murdered, and then he came back to The Peak with the salt still encrusting his hair, and all that mist, sweat, and blood soaked into his skin.” She smiled dreamily. “Those were the nights he split me in half.”

“Hold on,” Hopper interjected, sitting forward, elbows on his knees. “These intruders from town. You’re saying Cordova became one of them?”

Marlowe looked exasperated. “I said I didn’t know the exact nature of his involvement, Tarzan. But at some point he was doing more than just observing. It was the reason for his wife’s suicide. Genevra. He never told me exactly what happened. But I imagine that the poor, rather fragile woman found out about his nightly activities. You see, that priest — he was still there, hanging on, silently waiting at the perimeter. An oily shadow, always around. It was too much for her mentally. One gray afternoon, she drowned herself in a lake on the property. The police ruled it an accident, but Stanny knew the truth. Genevra hadn’t gone swimming. She boarded a small boat, rowed out to the center of the lake, and climbed right in, pockets of her dress filled with stones. They found the boat later, destroyed it. Stanny adored her, of course. But not enough to be ordinary. He couldn’t be contained by one woman. Or one man. You’ll find that great artists don’t love, live, fuck, or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they’re never too gutted, because they need only to pour that tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.”

Marlowe fell silent, abruptly weary. For a minute, she did nothing but fumble with the robe, pinching at the fabric.

“Rumors about what Cordova did at The Peak swirled, of course. Especially among us actors. One story I heard was from Max Hiedelbrau. Max played Father Jinley’s father in Crack in the Window and that prick of a patriarch in To Breathe with Kings.”

I remembered Max from both films; he was Australian, a tall, portly actor with a drooping bloodhound face.

“Max is a notorious insomniac. At four in the morning during the shooting of Crack in the Window, he was outside, taking a walk through the gardens, rehearsing his lines. He saw a figure hurrying to the front entrance, up the steps, vanishing inside the manor. It was Stanny. He appeared to be coming back from the woods, and he was carrying a black bundle in his arms. When Max followed he noticed on the handle of the front doors there were reddish-brown streaks. It was blood. Tiny droplets trailed through the marble foyer and up the stairs. Max went to bed. By morning the droplets had all been cleaned up.”

Marlowe slurped down the last drop of Heaven Hill.

“People did whisper,” she went on, eyeing me. “But the Warner Brothers executives who periodically visited the set said nothing. And yet — and this is rather telling — even though The Peak was one of the most luxurious private residences they’d ever set foot in, with a full-time staff and a French chef, not one of those slick Hollywood suits ever spent a single night at the mansion. No matter how late shooting went, they always retired to a hotel in Tupper Lake well over an hour away.”

“They were afraid?” Nora asked.

She smiled wryly. “They didn’t have the der Sacke. As long as Stanny made them money, produced films the public was dying to see, they didn’t give a damn about his personal life. If he drank blood? Chanted? Decapitated animals? They’d dealt with trouble before. There was an incident they had to hush up involving one of the actresses — apparently she went mad working with Stanny. So scared out of her skin, the poor girl climbed out of her fourth-floor bedroom window in the dead of night, scaled to the ground like a centipede, and was never seen again.”

“Who was she?” asked Nora.

Marlowe shrugged. “Her name escapes me. You see, whatever he was doing to unleash this creativity, get his actors to hack into their own souls and bleed out for the camera so the world could drink it — as long as everyone kept their mouths shut, it was business as usual. They looked the other way. We all did.”

“But not Ashley.”

Hopper whispered it, his voice so quiet and resolute, it sliced through the room, through Marlowe herself, rendering her silent, even a little unnerved.

“She’d never look the other way,” he said.

“No,” Marlowe answered.