Night Film

20

We followed Morgan Devold to the edge of the yard, where there were dense trees, close to the children’s pool filled with black water and leaves. The baby was still crying, though away from the house now the wind acted as a balm on the sound, easing it, folding it into the cold shivers of the night.

“How’d you find me?” Morgan asked rather resignedly, hooking his thumbs in his jean pockets.

“Through a nurse at Briarwood,” said Hopper.

“Which one?”

“She didn’t tell us her name,” I said. “But she was young. Red hair and freckles.”

He nodded. “Genevieve Wilson.”

“Is she a friend of yours?”

“Not really. But I heard she made a stink to administration when I got the ax.”

“You used to work at Briarwood?”

He nodded again.

“Doing what?”

“Security.”

“For how long?”

“ ’Bout seven years? Before that, I did security at Woodbourne. I was all set for a promotion at Briarwood. Thought I was going to be assistant head.” Smiling sadly, he looked up, staring past me to his own house. He looked bewildered, as if he didn’t recognize it or couldn’t remember how he’d come to live there.

“Who are you guys?” he asked.

“Private investigators,” said Nora with evident excitement.

Somewhere Sam Spade just rolled over in his grave. I was certain Morgan would call us out on this obvious lie, but he nodded.

“Who hired you?” he asked solemnly. “Her family?”

He meant Ashley.

“We work for ourselves,” I said.

“Everything you tell us can be off the record,” added Nora.

He seemed to accept this, too, staring into the dark water of the pool. I realized then, he didn’t care who we were. Some people were so burdened by a secret they’d give it away free to any willing stranger.

“Stace doesn’t know a thing about it,” he said. “She thinks I was fired ’cause Briarwood found out we’re Adventists.”

“It’ll stay that way,” said Hopper. “How did you know Ashley?”

But Morgan was no longer paying attention. Something had caught his attention in the kiddie pool. Frowning, he stepped a few feet away, picked up a fallen tree branch, and extended it into the water, trawling through the decaying leaves and mud.

A bulky object was actually floating there, bobbing along the bottom. He snagged it on the branch, pulling it toward him.

I thought it was a drowned animal — a squirrel or possum. So did Nora; she was staring at me with a stricken, horrified face as Morgan reached right in and pulled the thing out, dripping.

It was a plastic baby doll.

It was missing an eye, half bald, seeping blackened water, yet still smiling manically with puffy cheeks, what remained of its yellow hair matted with leaves. It was wearing a ruffled white dress, now mottled black, some kind of fungus growing like rancid heads of cauliflower out of the neck. Its fat little arms reached out at nothing.

“Last few weeks I turned the house upside down looking for this thing,” mumbled Morgan, shaking his head. “My daughter cried for three days straight when it went missing. Couldn’t find it. Was like the doll got fed up, walked clear outta the house. I had to sit her down, tell her it was gone now, went to be with God in heaven. Whole time, it was just out here.”

He chuckled at the irony of it, a tight, frustrated sound.

“How did Ashley break out of Briarwood?” Hopper asked, glancing at me, indicating he sensed something was off with the man.

“With me,” Morgan answered simply, still staring down at the doll.

Hopper nodded, waiting for him to go on. But he didn’t.

“How?” Hopper prompted in a low voice.

Morgan glanced at us again, as if remembering we were there, smiling sadly. “It’s funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.”

He let his arm fall to his side, holding the doll by its leg, its dress hanging over its head, exposing frilly underwear and drooling black water on the grass.

“I was coverin’ for a buddy of mine,” he said. “Working the night shift. Nine to nine. Stace hated when I took all-nighters, but I liked to watch the monitors at night. It’s easy work. I’m the only one in the back rooms of the center. Patients are asleep, the corridors so still and quiet, it’s like you’re the last man alive.” He cleared his throat. “I guess it was about three in the morning. I wasn’t paying much attention. I had some magazines. Wasn’t supposed to, but I’d done it a million times before. Nothing happens. There’s nothing ever going on except the nurses checkin’ the Code Reds.”

“And what are the Code Reds?” I asked.

“Patients on suicide watch.”

“What about Code Silver?” asked Hopper.

“Those are the patients kept apart ’cause they can hurt themselves and others. I’d been watching all night. It was like every other. Quiet. I’m flipping through a magazine when I glance up and something catches my eye on the monitor. One a’ them music rooms in Straffen. There’s somebody in there. As soon as I seen that, it switches to another. Video feeds are on a ten-second rotation. You can break the sequence to take a longer look at any live feed. I break, go back to that music room. I see there’s a girl in there. She’s a patient, ’cause she’s wearing the authorized white pajamas. She’s at the piano. Camera’s high in the corner of the ceiling, so I’m lookin’ down on her, a little over her shoulder. All I see are her skinny arms moving fast, her dark hair in a braid. Never seen her before. I work day shifts mostly, and you get to know the patients. I channel in audio, turn up the speaker …”

He fell silent, running a hand over the top of his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say.

“What?” I asked.

“It freaked me out.”

“Why?”

“It was like a recordin’. Most times we got patients poundin’ out ‘Heart and Soul.’ My first thought, she was one a’ those polter—uh—”

“Poltergeist,” interjected Nora eagerly.

“Yeah. Somethin’ not real. She was playin’ violent-like, head down, hands flippin’ so fast. My second thought was I was losin’ it. Seein’ somethin’ strange. I’m set to sound the alarm, but somethin’ makes me hesitate. She ends that music, starts another, and before I know it even though I got my finger on the switch to call a breach, a whole half-hour goes by, then another. When she stops playin’ she’s quiet for a long time. Then, real slow, she lifts her head. I could just see the side of her face, but it was like …”

He fell silent and shuddered uncomfortably.

“Like what?” Hopper asked.

“She knew I was there. Watching.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He gazed at me, serious. “She saw me.”

“She saw the camera in the ceiling?”

“It was more than that. She stood up, and when she got to the door she turned and smiled right at me.” He paused, incredulous, as he remembered. “She was like nothin’ I’d ever seen before. A black-haired angel. She slipped right out. And I tracked her. Watched her move down the hall and outside. She moved fast. I’m havin’ a hard time keepin’ up with her on all the different video feeds. I follow her down the paths all the way back to Maudsley. I figured for sure she was going to get caught, but she enters, and for some crazy reason, there’s no officer at the front desk.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “She hurries in and up the back stairs so fast it’s like her feet don’t touch the ground. She goes all the way up to the third floor, races inside her room. I can’t believe that, either. She’s Code Silver, which means she’s got a round-the-clock nurse detail. I keep watchin’. Twenty minutes later, I see the security officer and the nurse in charge of the third floor. They come smiling upstairs from the basement and something tells me they weren’t down there doin’ laundry. They got a little thing goin’. Somehow the girl knew about it.” He paused, wiping his nose. “First thing I do is wipe the tapes. They’re never checked, anyway. Not unless a problem’s reported. But I erase ’em, just in case. The next morning I put in a request for extra night shifts.”

“Why’d you do that?” asked Hopper with faint accusation.

“I had to see her again.” He shrugged bashfully. “She went there to play piano every night. And I watched. The music …” He seemed unable to find the right words. “It’s what you’ll hear in heaven if you’re lucky enough to get there. The whole time she ignored me, ’cept for the very end, when she’d look at me.” Morgan smiled to himself as he surveyed the ground. “I had to find out who she was. I wasn’t authorized to look into the files of patients. But I didn’t care. I had to know.”

“What’d you find out?” I asked.

“She had a fear of darkness. This thing called nycta somethin’—”

“Nyctophobia?” blurted Nora.

“That’s it. I looked it up. People who got it go crazy in the dark. They start shakin’. Convulsin’. Think they’re drownin’ and dyin’. Sometimes they pass out. Or kill themselves—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Wasn’t Ashley in the dark when you watched her on the camera?”

Morgan shook his head. “Briarwood’s bright at night. The sidewalks and central grounds are kept lit for security purposes. Interior building lights are on energy-saving motion detectors, so they’d light up around her as she came and went. Some of them are on a delay. I began to notice she’d wait for a light to go on before she’d continue. When she was outside she’d keep to the bright side of every path. Like she couldn’t step on a shadow or she’d melt or somethin’. She was real careful about it.”

I frowned, trying to imagine such a manner of moving, skipping from one patch of light to another. I recalled the ascent through the Hanging Gardens up to the roof of the warehouse in Chinatown — had there been enough weak light to step through all the way up? And yet around the Central Park Reservoir, where she’d flickered in and out of the lamplight in that red coat, it was mostly pitch black.

“The other thing I found out,” Morgan went on, “was the doctor treatin’ her sent out a hospital-wide memo barring her from playing the piano. Said it brought on manic episodes. The date the order went out was the first night I saw Ashley. So, it was like she had to play. Like nothing could stop her from it.”

He fell silent for a moment.

“On the eighth night I watched, on her way out of the music room I noticed she removed something from her pocket and stopped for a second right over the top of the piano. It happened fast. I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. I rewound the tape and saw she’d stuck something in there. I waited till the end of my shift and headed over to Straffen, up to the music room on the second floor. When I walked in, the smell of her, the feel of her was still there. A perfume and like a warmth, I guess. I went over to the piano, checked under the lid. Inside, tucked in the strings, was a folded-up piece of paper. I took it but waited until I was safe in my car to read it.”

He paused, visibly uneasy.

“What did it say?” I asked.

“Morgan!”

A screen door slammed.

“What’re you still doin’ out here?”

Stace was on the front porch, cradling the baby against her chest, shading her eyes in the glare of the light. Stepping after her was another child, a little girl of about four, wearing a white nightgown covered with what appeared to be cherries.

“They’re not gone yet?”

“Everything’s fine!” Morgan shouted. He turned to us, whispering, “Drive down the driveway and wait for me there, okay?”

He hurried back across the lawn.

“Oh my God. I told you to get rid of them!”

“They’re from Human Resources. Doing a survey. Hey. Look what I found.”

“But we’re not supposed to — what is that?”

“Baby. I just rescued her from the pool.”

“Are you insane?”

The little girl screamed, no doubt upon taking a look at that doll. Nora and Hopper were already making their way across the grass. I headed after them, and when we climbed back into my car the Devolds had returned inside, though their shouting could still be heard above the wind.