Night Film(120)

“Give it to her.”

Marlowe practically lurched out of the chair to snatch the bottle from Nora. Her hands moving faster than a blackjack dealer’s in Vegas, she unscrewed it and chugged. Never before had I seen such thirst except in a Mountain Dew commercial. There was a soft clink of metal against the glass, and I noticed her spidery white fingers had slipped out of the long sleeve. She was wearing a single piece of jewelry, a ring with a large black pearl.

It was what her old fiancé Knightly had allegedly given her, the day he’d broken off their engagement. Though I’d fact-checked Beckman’s story before, it was startling to see evidence of that emblem of heartbreak, here, now, right in front of me.

Marlowe pulled the bottle from her lips with a gasp, wiping her mouth. She sat back, settling comfortably into the chair. She looked calm now and oddly lucid, clutching the bottle like a swaddled child in her arms.

“So, you’d like to know about Cordova, dearies,” Marlowe whispered.

“Yes,” said Nora.

“You sure? Some knowledge, it eats you alive.”

“We’ll take our chances,” I said, sitting in the chair across from her.

She seemed very pleased by this response, gearing up for something, preparing.

It was at least two or three minutes before she spoke again, her low voice, rutted with rocks and potholes only moments before, suddenly smoothly paved, winding its way effortlessly through the dark.

“What do you know about The Peak?” she whispered.





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.”