Night Film

117

She was a magical.

When I said goodbye to Sam the following day, I gave her the tightest hug and kissed her cheek, and then her hot head.

“I love you more than — how much again?” I asked her.

“The sun plus the moon.”

I embraced Cynthia. She wasn’t expecting it.

“You’re glorious,” I whispered into her hair. “And you always were. I’m sorry I never said it.”

She stared after me in shock as I made my way out of the lobby, smiling at the two doormen, blatantly eavesdropping.

“Did you get that? This woman is glorious.”

The moment I got home, I pulled out the old sagging cardboard box again, spreading the few papers out on the floor.

What had I learned when I’d been trapped inside that hexagon box — about myself? You couldn’t even see where it opened. It was a hint that I wasn’t seeing all of it, not the full picture.

Maybe I still had it all wrong. Maybe I still wasn’t seeing something that even Sam had seen. And Nora. And Hopper.

All three of them believed in Ashley. And I didn’t.

But what if I did believe as blindly as Hopper, Nora — and Sam? Was it blindness, or did they all see in a way that I didn’t? What if I punted reason and common sense into the air, let them soar dumbly out of sight, and believed in witchcraft, in black magic, in Ashley? Burning the reversing candles had brought Sam back into my life. Yes, one could argue it was simply a coincidence that the moment they’d extinguished, Cynthia within a matter of seconds had called — but what if it wasn’t? Maybe it was the black magic again rearing its head, insisting it was real.

What if I took a leap of faith and simply accepted that the truth behind this entire investigation resided not with Inez Gallo, but with Ashley? What if she hadn’t been in an especially precarious mental state? The truth about her illness meant nothing. Why couldn’t cancer be yet another symptom of the devil’s curse, as Ashley herself had believed? I might not have collected sufficient evidence up at The Peak — the stained boy’s shirt and those animal bones — but that did not vindicate Cordova from what I’d suspected, that he practiced black magic with the townspeople, that his night films weren’t fictions, but real live horrors, that he’d used children to try and free his daughter from the curse, possibly even crossing the line into hurting one of them, as the Spider had hinted.

There’s nothing Gallo won’t do to protect him. I’d read it on the Blackboards. Yet, oddly enough, she’d chosen not to protect him from me. She’d directed me straight toward him.

Or had she?

Beckman had warned me that I might encounter a figure stationed at the intersection between life and death. It will be a decoy. A substitute to grant freedom to the real thing. He’s Cordova’s favorite character. He’s always there, when Cordova’s mind is at work, no matter what.

That figure could very well have been that man back at the nursing home, the stranger I’d sat down beside.

Bill Smith.

He could have been anyone — anyone with a hefty enough frame and build, just senile and soundless enough not to be aware he was passing for Cordova. That wheel tattoo wasn’t definitive proof. It could have been drawn there — even tattooed by Gallo into the man’s hand in the middle of the night, when no nurse was watching. There was no security at Enderlin Estates, nothing stopping Gallo from doing what she wanted to whatever elderly stranger she chose, so he might serve as a feasible stand-in for her lord and master—thereby granting freedom to the real thing.

She’d wanted him to go free.

Perhaps Gallo was Cordova’s paid executioner, waiting for anyone who got too close to his whereabouts, who knew too much. Maybe she’d been waiting for me to come clamoring up onto that final wooden platform, and it was her job to tuck the burlap bag over my head and then the noose, ruthlessly heaving the ground out from under me, sending me flying, kicking, gasping back to reality, where she was so certain I’d stay.

“I live in the real world,” she’d announced flatly. “And so do you.”

She’d meant it as an order, a directive. She was giving me instructions, certain I’d follow them on my own accord, because I was a realist, a skeptic, a practical man. And yet I’d noticed, too, there was something faintly scathing about the way she’d said real world, as if it were the most miserable of life sentences.

Ashley’s history will now forever remain where she wished it, where she believed in her heart it always was — beyond reason, between heaven and earth, land and sky, suspended much closer to legend than ordinary life — where the rest of us, including you, Mr. McGrath, must remain.

Where the mermaids sing, I’d muttered.

Mermaids. There was something about that word that had bothered Gallo. And if it unnerved her, it could only mean one thing: It was too close for her comfort to the real Cordova.

It took me all night, all day, and one more night after that to find the connection. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t need to. I retyped the notes that had been stolen, detailing every witness we’d tracked down who’d encountered Ashley, everything I’d encountered at The Peak, every word I’d heard whispered about Cordova.

When I did see it, I realized, it had been right in front of me, all along.

Gatehouse. Mansion. Lake. Stables. Workshop. Lookout. Trophy. Pincoya Negro. Cemetery. Mrs. Peabody’s. Laboratory. The Z. Crossroads.

The word had been scribbled above one of the thirteen blackened doorways down in the underground tunnels at The Peak.

Pincoya. It was a kind of mermaid.

“Long blond hair, incomparable beauty, luscious and sensual, she rises from the depths of the sea,” read the entry on Wikipedia. “She bestows riches or choking scarcity, and all of the mortals on land live in answer to her whims.” The creature had been spotted in one remote place on Earth and only one — an isolated island off the coast of South America called Chiloé.

La Pincoya was just one of a throng of mythical creatures that haunted the island’s land and shores, which remained shrouded in heavy mist and rain eleven months of the year. It was a bleak and inhospitable place, one of the remotest islands on Earth, an island with a legendary history of witchcraft.

I suddenly remembered, a detail Cleo had mentioned back at Enchantments the first time we’d gone to see her, when she was inspecting the materials we’d given her of Ashley’s Black Bone killing curse.

I see some dark brown sand in here, some seaweed, too, she’d told us. She must have picked this up someplace exotic.

There wasn’t much information about this island, Chiloé, but when I was reading a Spanish backpacker’s blog, I came across another connection.

Puerto Montt.

It was the last city on Chile’s mainland, before the country breaks up like a cookie into hundreds of crumbled islands. The backpacker had traveled from Puerto Montt to another town, Pargua, and from Pargua took the ferry to Chiloé. The only way to access the island was by boat, apart from a few rudimentary airfields.

I knew I’d recently read about the city and after an hour of searching, I found where: in The Natural Huntsman, the article posted on the Blackboards about Rachel Dempsey’s vanishing from Nepal — Rachel Dempsey, who’d played Leigh in La Douleur. Although there’d been no sign of her after she’d disappeared from her hunting expedition, nine days after she was reported missing, her satellite phone had been turned on in Santiago, Chile, and she’d made a brief phone call to a number that was traced to Puerto Montt.

I’d retyped the interview with Peg Martin in Washington Square Park and recalled Martin had mentioned that Theo Cordova had been carrying on an affair with a woman ten years older than he, a woman named Rachel who had appeared in one of Cordova’s films.

Checking the dates, I saw Rachel Dempsey would have been twenty-seven in the spring of 1993, the year Peg Martin attended the picnic. Theo would have been only sixteen, an eleven-year age difference.

It was close enough. So Rachel and Theo had seemingly been together. But what, exactly, had Rachel Dempsey planned for her hunting expedition in Nepal — to vanish off the face of the Earth? Disappear without a trace so she might resurface somewhere on that island in order to—what? Reunite in paradise with her lover, Theo? What was on that island?

The houses there had a singular style of architecture. Called palafitos, they were modest cottages built atop rickety stilts and painted vibrant pinks, blues, and reds, so they resembled long-legged water bugs swarming the coastline, which was not a tropical paradise, but thorny and gray, with sharp rocks and dark water that seeped across the beach.

I’d seen those stilt houses before.

It was when I’d been inside Wait for Me Here, in the Reinhart family greenhouse, in Popcorn’s work shed. I’d noticed a postcard tacked to a bulletin board — those very same stilt houses pictured on the front of it. Thankfully I’d the prescience to take it down and read the back, where someone had scribbled four words.

Someday soon you’ll come.

There was more: The churches on Chiloé looked like no others in the world, a combination of European Jesuit culture and the native traditions of the indigenous people on the island. They were austere, covered in wooden tiles like flaking dragon scales and jutting steeples topped with a spindly cross. Like the palafitos, they, too, were painted wild colors, though this brightness evoked not jubilation, but the sinister cheer of a clown’s face.

I’d seen one somewhere before. I raced back over to the floor, trawling the papers until I found it.

In the Vanity Fair article, Ashley’s freshman-year roommate had mentioned, when Ashley abruptly moved out with no word, all she’d left were three Polaroids, which had slipped, forgotten, behind her dresser. The snapshots had been included in the article — artifacts of Ashley’s lost existence, portholes into her world. I’d barely glanced at them.

Now, staring down at the first one, I felt light-headed with shock.

It featured a small, morose-looking church. It wasn’t an exact match, but it had the same architecture as all the others on the island.

The second Polaroid featured a massive black boulder on a beach, seagulls circling overhead. The boulder had a mystical hole through the center, as if God had punched his thumb through it, making an impish void in the world. I didn’t recognize it.

But the third featured a flock of black-necked swans, one of them carrying a cygnet on its back. Black-necked swans, I read on Wikipedia, were prevalent in South America. Yet they bred and hatched their young only in a few specific areas, one of which was Chile’s Zona Sur, which included Chiloé.

Ashley could very well have been on the island. It seemed to have been where she’d taken the Polaroids.

I opened up Google Earth, staring at a satellite view. Parts of the main island, Isla Grande, and almost all of the smaller islands around it freckling the blue sea were concealed by silvered clouds.

Had all this evidence been silently leading me there?

Gallo had been so adamant about keeping me down in the real world, ordinary life, making sure that I didn’t keep chasing Cordova — into what?

Warning voices echoed resoundingly through my head, one of the loudest of which was that old grizzled alcoholic reporter back at the bar in Nairobi. Slumped over his drink, wearing his stained khaki jacket and fatigues, he’d warned me about the fates of the three reporters who’d worked the cursed case, the case without an end, the tapeworm.

One had gone mad. Another quit the story and a week later, hanged himself in a Mombasa hotel room. The third simply disappeared into thin air, leaving his family and a prime post at an Italian newspaper.

“It’s infected,” the man had mumbled. “The story. Some are, you know.”

I sat back thoughtfully in my desk chair. Septimus, I saw with disbelief, had chosen to fly as I’d never seen him do before. He was crashing drunkenly into the ceiling and windows, the Le Samouraï poster, his wings fluttering against the glass in excitement — or was it alarm at what I was about to do, where I was about to go?

Because I noticed now, the fates of those three reporters were not unlike the actors who’d worked alongside Cordova, those who, once they left The Peak, never returned to ordinary lives, but scattered to the outer reaches of the world, most never heard from again, becoming unfathomable and unseen, beyond reach.

It was happening to me now.

Wasn’t it? I was following in their footsteps, sending myself to the outer reaches of the world. Was I fleeing something or had I been set free?

I wouldn’t know until I saw what was there, if anything at all.