Night Film

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The other incidents were similarly haunting — so many last-seens and symbolic details: Sophie Hecta’s locket necklace, Jessica Carr’s crayon drawing of a black fish discovered in her bed when she was found missing by her parents. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly, given that Cordova would probably know how to obscure his tracks), no detail I read overtly linked any of these cases to the director — no parallels to his films, no sighting of a mysterious man wearing black lenses that stamped out his eyes.

Nothing—but then, one tenuous clue.

Laura Helmsley’s locker had been ransacked a week before she ran away from home, and she’d reported her journal stolen to the school office. This detail was vaguely reminiscent of the incidents John, the anonymous caller, had described. Had Cordova stolen the girl’s journal, hoping she might serve as an equal exchange for Ashley? Police believed Laura had simply run off with her older boyfriend. They’d been caught on camera at a White Castle drive-thru two days after she disappeared.

But there’d been no word from her in more than ten years.

Before I’d read about the hallucinogenic plants, I might have believed in an alternate possibility, that the world had simply opened up and swallowed these people whole. It actually seemed the only logical explanation in the case of Kurt Sullivan, who disappeared across thirty yards of an easy hiking trail in the Moose River Plains Wild Forest (ninety-four miles from The Peak). He left his family, skipping around the bend back to the campsite to put on longer socks — and was never seen again. A six-hundred-man search, which included help from the U.S. Air Force, elicited not one clue as to what had happened to the boy.

Shadows with wills of their own, killing curses and devil’s curses, rivers that ran black and beasts with bark for skin, a world with invisible fissures that anyone could accidentally fall down into at any time — I could have actually considered it after what had happened to me at The Peak. Hadn’t this investigation of Cordova been hinting at the outskirts of such a reality — a world that was infinitely mysterious, shrouded with the questions that were impossible to explain? Cordova might very well be a madman, have fatally erased all boundaries between fantasy and reality in his life and work, but hadn’t he been legitimately able to harness some kind of power up there, whatever it was? Hadn’t that been true? Hadn’t I witnessed it with my own eyes?

Now I didn’t know what I believed. It was logical I’d simply been exposed to too many Mad Seeds. And anyway, what was Cordova — or Popcorn — doing, keeping that greenhouse thriving with enough toxic plants to wipe out an army?

The more missing-persons cases I read, the more those mysteries seemed to fray into a million threads. Still, I jotted down the various details, vague developments mentioned by local newspapers and missing-person blogs. Then, my mind overloaded, I tore myself away from the computer — deciding to head uptown to Klavierhaus.

If Ashley had frequented the shop as a child, as Hopper had told us, I wanted to talk to someone who knew her from those early days. The manager we’d spoken to, Peter Schmid, might be helpful finding such a person.

When I arrived, however, I was shocked to learn something odd had happened — or else, it wasn’t odd at all, given what I’d been researching the past three days.

Peter Schmid was gone.