Night Film by Marisha Pessl
“But you’re not technically a priest,” I muttered.
“I attended two years of seminary. But yes, I dropped out.”
“Yet you wear the outfit. Isn’t that sacrilegious?”
He only smiled weakly, slowly rubbing his palms together.
“Why’d you drop out?” asked Nora.
“I didn’t have what it takes to make it in the Catholic Church.”
“Funny, I’ve noticed scum flourishes with surprising ease through the top dioceses,” I said.
Villarde didn’t answer, and I turned to check on Sam. She was dancing the plastic horse along the surface of the table.
“So, what was this mutually beneficial arrangement?” Hopper asked.
“I’d help them get onto the property,” said Villarde. “It was simple. All I had to do was cut open a bit of the wire military fencing on the southern perimeter of the property, which would allow access to The Peak by canoe via a narrow rivulet which emptied into one of the lakes on the property. I was also asked to open up the tunnels.”
“The tunnels?” I asked.
“A labyrinth of underground passageways exists beneath the entire Peak property. They’ve been there since the mansion’s construction, so servants could move easily throughout the grounds, avoiding bad weather. Stanislas didn’t know they existed when he purchased the estate. The British couple who lived at The Peak before Stanislas had sealed them off, and the realtor had no clue of their existence. I was asked by this bearded stranger to unseal them. It was fairly easy to do, took me no more than a few nights’ work. They were crudely barricaded with random bits of wood and nails, snippets of poetry and odd verse scribbled backward on the brick, almost as if the person who’d done the job had been totally insane. The other thing I was asked to do was open the front gate. Every Wednesday night at midnight, I’d walk down the tunnel that led to the property’s gatehouse—about two miles—and unlock the gate. Then I’d simply go back to bed. The tunnels are vast, laid out like a spider’s web. There is a central point where one can see the many different tunnels diverging to other secret parts of the property. I didn’t know what they all were. I always stuck to the tunnel leading to the gatehouse. It was the only one I dared go down. And that was it. Certainly, what I did to Cordova was a betrayal. But honestly I really didn’t see the harm. The property was immense. Why not let these poor locals, who had nothing, use the grounds for their pagan rituals if it made them happy?”
“Did you participate in the rituals?” asked Hopper.
Villarde seemed insulted. “Of course not.”
“But Cordova did,” I suggested bluntly.
Villarde closed his eyes for a moment, as if in pain.
“The night he discovered the tunnels, he caught a lone woman running through them on her way to the site they used. Stanislas followed her, the idea being he’d confront them all. Instead, he somehow became involved.” He smiled feebly. “ ‘For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.’ ”
“What did these rituals entail?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Stanislas refused to tell me.”
“What exactly was the nature of your friendship with Stanislas?”
The question made him shy. “We had a … a bond.”
“According to you,” muttered Hopper. “It’s funny how one-sided those can be.”
Villarde bristled. “I didn’t do anything to Cordova. He was the vampire. He made you feel like he loved you, like you were the dearest person in the world to him; all the while he was sucking you dry, leeching your life out of you. You’d spend an hour with him. Afterward you were a carcass. You lost all sense of yourself, all dimension, as if there were no difference between you and the chair you were sitting in. He’d be more alive, of course, invigorated for a week, writing, filming, insatiable, so wildly alive. Art, language, food, men, women—they had to be constantly fed to him as if he were a ravenous beast that could barely be contained within human walls. There was no end to his appetites.”
He blurted all of this heatedly and was about to go on but caught himself, abruptly falling silent.
“How long did you live with Cordova at The Peak?” I asked.
“Not long. Our friendship became strained after the death of his first wife. Genevra. She was so jealous of our bond. I thought it best to leave. I traveled abroad. But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars. In fact, their grip on you grows even stronger. I was gone for fifteen years. When I returned to Crow, I went to The Peak and asked Stanislas if I might stay with him again. I hoped we could turn over a new leaf, go back to how things had been before the death of his first wife. But he had a new one now, Astrid, and a beautiful child. Ashley. Also a new film he was hacking out of nothingness into wild being. There were a great many people living there, writers, artists, scientists. Yet after a month he pulled me aside and said I should think about my future, where I was finally going to set up the church I’d always dreamed of. Surely it would be far away from him. ‘Time to let the vines take over,’ he was fond of saying, which meant there was no use keeping parts of the house manicured and well lit, not when he had no intention of ever entering those rooms again. He lived his life like that. He was the sprawling mansion of grown-over chambers, trees winding through the broken ceiling, plants twisting up through the floors. I understood what he meant. He’d done it so many times before me. He was dismissing me. Giving me my orders to dissolve. Fade to black. Stanislas was always moving on, always warring, always loving, galloping toward the next mysterious stranger, the next island, the next sea. And what he left behind was always ruins. But he never turned around to see it. He never looked back. I was deeply wounded. He was at once the kindest and the most barbaric man. He shifted between these traits arbitrarily, when it suited him. With Cordova you felt as if you were following a beautiful twinkling light, luring you into the woods. As soon as you lost all sense of direction, were unable to find the way back, it turned on you viciously, exposed your nakedness, blinded you, burned you. I couldn’t move on. I hadn’t moved on from Stanislas in fifteen years. I don’t know why the fuck he thought I would then.”
He snarled this, spitting, unable to control himself, but then just as quickly silenced himself. He took a breath to regain his composure.
I could only stare. Marlowe Hughes had called him oily—such a strange description. But he was an insidious trickle of oil oozing out of a loosened pipe, dripping silently, relentlessly, to the floor. The stain it made barely visible at first, but over time immense, repugnant.
And yet for all his pathetic self-pity, I sensed a very real and very deep gash of pain inside him, which had never healed.
“Shortly after his dismissal of me,” he went on, “I slipped into his little girl’s room in the middle of the night. It was so absurdly easy. Ironic, really, that he’d done nothing to protect his most cherished creation—Cordova, of all people, Cordova who always warned us we should be afraid of our own shadow, that there was nothing scarier in the world.” He smiled. “She wasn’t afraid when I shook her awake. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and asked if I’d had a bad dream. Quite the understatement. I told her something terrible had happened. I needed her help. I said her father had been kidnapped by trolls and we had to travel deep, deep down into the darkest wood to rescue him. I pulled her roughly out of bed, telling her that she had to be silent or they’d come for her mother and her brother and they’d kill them. She didn’t say a word. I took her straight to the basement and down the steps, right down into the tunnels. I didn’t even bother to put her little shoes on or give her a coat. But Ashley wasn’t afraid. Oh, no. She was Cordova’s daughter, after all. Five years old and she was so certain, so devoid of all fear. I can still remember the sound of her bare feet, how soft and clean they were, padding along the filthy ground next to mine, how my flashlight touched the hem of her white nightgown, scalding it as we followed that passage. It was like a black v
He shook his head, clasping his hands, interlacing his fingers as if in prayer. I turned to check on Sam. She’d placed the horse atop the stack of magazines and was quietly chatting with him and stroking his mane. Just a few minutes longer.
“At last,” Villarde whispered almost inaudibly, “just when I started to imagine we’d descended not into the woods but to the very core of the Earth, we reached the end. There was only a dirt wall with a metal ladder. I climbed up first and unfastened the hatch. It opened up into a dense section of woods, and far to my right, beyond what appeared to be a bridge over a rushing river, I could see them. A crowd. And a bonfire. Orange light like a strobe on their pitch-black robes. And yet the sound they were making—like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was like animals, but no animal I could identify. Like a goat, a pig, and a man, all in one beast. I was petrified. I couldn’t go farther. I reached down and grabbed that little girl roughly by the arm, hauling her up the ladder. She cried out from the pain. I shoved her out of the hole. And I told her now was her only chance to save her father from burning in hell. I pointed toward the fire and I said her daddy was right there, at the end of that bridge. All she had to do was run to him, run as fast as her little feet could carry her, and she’d save him. She listened with such wisdom in her eyes, gray eyes that were really his eyes. It was as if she knew what I was doing, as if she understood completely.”
He paused to catch his breath. “I couldn’t watch her do it. I didn’t dare. I descended the ladder, pulled the hatch into place, locking it so she wouldn’t be able to get back in. Then I sprinted back through the tunnel. I hadn’t gone two minutes when I heard the most gutting screaming. I recognized the voice. It was his. My love’s. Cordova. It sounded as if he were being mauled, as if his beloved dogs were ripping him apart, tearing off his arms and legs. It was his love destroying him. I didn’t stop. I ran back through the tunnel to the house, all the way upstairs to my room. I hid under the covers all night, my heart pounding in horror over what I’d done. I was waiting for him to come for me. I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me for retribution. And yet … I was wrong. Dawn came. It was sunny. The sky was blue, the clouds like candy, as if nothing had happened at all. As if it’d all been a dream.”
He took another beleaguered breath, moved his other foot to the top rung of the stool, tucking his arms into his lap, hunching over, as if he were trying to collapse himself.
“The transformation that started taking place …”
His voice cut out in apparent incredulity.
“Before, I never believed, you see. Of course not. Yet I couldn’t help it now. There could be no other explanation. Stanislas was devastated. Yet he had no idea about my role in the whole thing. Ashley, for some reason, did not tell him. And yet, if I found myself in the same room with her, I’d catch that little girl watching me. I knew she was thinking about that night and what I’d done to her. But Stanislas, entirely ignorant, was desperate for me to stay on. He needed me because he wanted to cling to God now. God, the boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious favor.”
He smiled.
“I made myself indispensable. For the next ten years, I lived with the family. I gave my life to him. I educated Stanislas on Catholic theology. I helped him study and pray, pray for his own soul, but especially Ashley’s, which was slowly, inveterately turning dark. I suggested an exorcist. But then, it wasn’t possession, was it? No. It was a promise. A deal. After researching legendary pacts made with the devil throughout history, I came across a potential solution. If Stanislas found another child to take Ashley’s end of the bargain. An even exchange. One pure soul for another. Ashley might go free. And I’d read that if one were to try such a thing, a simple transfer of debt, one needed not harm the other child in the process. One needed only an article of clothing or object that had belonged exclusively to this new child. I told Cordova about the idea quite arbitrarily, not thinking he’d actually try such a thing. Cordova, for all his flaws, loved children. But he began to leave The Peak in the middle of the night. He had his chauffeur drive him to different schools in the area, where he’d wander the playgrounds and the athletic fields and the hallways, looking for some child’s small lost belonging. When he returned to the house with his loot of little shirts and little shoes, plastic soldiers and teddy bears, he’d stick them in a bag and take them down to the crossroads. And there he tried to exchange her, night after night, week after week. I was the only one who knew. But it wouldn’t work. Nothing did.”
I was too stunned to speak. It was, of course, exactly what the anonymous caller, John, had described to me years ago.
It had been real, after all. I had not been set up. The man had been telling me the truth.
I felt dizzying exhilaration at the realization that I had not been deceived. There’s something he does to the children, John had claimed. And it was true. The reason Cordova had visited those schools in the middle of the night was that he was hoping to use them, exchange them, save Ashley’s soul by condemning theirs.
“It was because he could find no equal to Ashley,” Villarde continued. “The devil had been promised a child of such perfection, such intelligence, depth, and beauty, it was proving impossible to find her replacement. Like finding a stand-in for an archangel. But Stanislas wouldn’t give up. He’d try and fail and try yet again. He’d do whatever it took to save her. No matter what amount of guilt and horror was left on his hands. He knew he was already beyond salvation. But she wasn’t.”
Villarde swallowed, lowering his head, his breath shallow. “A few months after I made this suggestion for a swap, I woke up in the middle of the night to the most unbearable pain. My bed was on fire. I was on fire. So were the clerical clothes in my closet, the curtains in my room. They were ablaze, writhing as if alive. I screamed, bumbling around, tried to get out to the bathroom, to water, but Ashley was blocking the doorway. Her left hand was on fire—and yet it wasn’t hurting her—a wild look in her eyes. Triumph. It was the last thing I remembered. When I regained consciousness, I was in a hospital and learned I’d been dropped off anonymously at an emergency room in Albany. I didn’t know who had driven me or how, but I had third-degree burns on eighty percent of my body. I received blood transfusions, skin grafts, and, months later, when I was at last allowed to leave, I knew I’d never go back. That thing she was turning into wanted me dead. She owned me, after all. I couldn’t save them anymore. But I could save myself. I disappeared. And so it remained, for eight years, until a few weeks ago, when she found me.”
So, everything Marlowe told us was true. Villarde was the burn victim in Astrid’s car, and Ashley was sent to Six Silver Lakes for what she’d done.
“When we arrived, why did you think we were the police?” Nora asked.
Villarde glanced at her. “I thought that … I thought you’d found evidence up on the property.”
“Evidence of what?” I asked.
“What Cordova did. Trying to save her. When the clothing and the toys didn’t work, I thought … no, I panicked that he’d grown so desperate, he’d moved on to using the children themselves. I think they might be up there somewhere. Buried. Unless they were all burned, incinerated in the mill ovens to nothing.” He closed his eyes in anguish. “ ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ ” he whispered.
The implication of what he was saying rendered me mute.
The entire shop and everything in it seemed to freeze from the revulsion of it, darkening, sinking deeper into shadow, holding its breath. I was stunned by his mention of a single word: burned. It triggered a memory of something I had in my old notes, what Nelson Garcia, Cordova’s next-door neighbor
Now they set fire to all their garbage, he’d told me. You can smell it when it’s hot at night. Burning. And sometimes when the wind’s blowing southeast I can even see the smoke.
“What did she do to you?” asked Hopper suddenly.
Villarde glanced up at him, uneasy.
“When she opened up that closet and found you cowering in the corner, what did she do? You’re still alive, aren’t you? You’re still wearing that sacrilegious getup. What did Ashley do that you were so fucking afraid of?”
Villarde only lowered his head.
“You can’t even say it, can you?”
Villarde opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he gasped, a bizarre gagging sound that prompted disgust to flood through me. He was, without doubt, one of the most wretched beings I’d ever laid eyes on.
“She pulled me to my feet,” he whispered. “And she …”
“She what?” shouted Hopper.
“She …” Villarde was crying. “There’s really nothing more terrifying—”
“WHAT?”
“She told me she … forgave me.”
The words were so fragile and unexpected, no one spoke.
Villarde remained frozen on the stool, his shoulders hunched as if waiting for divine retribution, for God or even the devil to strike him from the world. I was about to break the silence, but abruptly, the man jerked his head up and stared right at me.
It was such a penetrating look it stunned me.