Night Film(123)

“Is that why you fell in love with him?” Nora asked tentatively.

Marlowe sat up, jolted by the question, jutting out her chin. “Everyone fell in love with him, child. You’d be mere putty in his hands. That goes for every one of you. Who can resist the man who understands and appreciates your every cell? We married during the production of Lovechild.” She said it with a sad wave of her hand, staring down at the Heaven Hill bottle, now almost empty.

“Let’s just say, when it was over, I saw that our love was a hothouse flower. Thriving and vivid indoors, in very specific conditions; outside the enclave, in the real world, dead. I couldn’t live at The Peak, not forever. Because by then Stanny refused to leave it. It was his private dimension, his personal netherworld. He wanted to remain forever on this magical planet. I had to get back to Earth.”

“He really refused to leave?” Nora whispered, incredulous.

Marlowe stared her down. “Zeus was loath to leave Olympus, was he not, unless he had mortals to torment? Occasionally during shooting, Stanny would vanish somewhere for weeks at a time and couldn’t be found. Not anywhere. So we often wondered if there was some other place he went. The secret place within the secret place. When he did finally show up again, he had strange rocky sand in his boots and he reeked of the open sea. He was also especially voracious in the sack, if you catch my drift—like he’d sailed away for a time on his pirate ship, invaded villages, burned them to the ground, raped and stole and murdered, and then he came back to The Peak with the salt still encrusting his hair, and all that mist, sweat, and blood soaked into his skin.” She smiled dreamily. “Those were the nights he split me in half.”

“Hold on,” Hopper interjected, sitting forward, elbows on his knees. “These intruders from town. You’re saying Cordova became one of them?”

Marlowe looked exasperated. “I said I didn’t know the exact nature of his involvement, Tarzan. But at some point he was doing more than just observing. It was the reason for his wife’s suicide. Genevra. He never told me exactly what happened. But I imagine that the poor, rather fragile woman found out about his nightly activities. You see, that priest—he was still there, hanging on, silently waiting at the perimeter. An oily shadow, always around. It was too much for her mentally. One gray afternoon, she drowned herself in a lake on the property. The police ruled it an accident, but Stanny knew the truth. Genevra hadn’t gone swimming. She boarded a small boat, rowed out to the center of the lake, and climbed right in, pockets of her dress filled with stones. They found the boat later, destroyed it. Stanny adored her, of course. But not enough to be ordinary. He couldn’t be contained by one woman. Or one man. You’ll find that great artists don’t love, live, f*ck, or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they’re never too gutted, because they need only to pour that tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.”

Marlowe fell silent, abruptly weary. For a minute, she did nothing but fumble with the robe, pinching at the fabric.

“Rumors about what Cordova did at The Peak swirled, of course. Especially among us actors. One story I heard was from Max Hiedelbrau. Max played Father Jinley’s father in Crack in the Window and that prick of a patriarch in To Breathe with Kings.”

I remembered Max from both films; he was Australian, a tall, portly actor with a drooping bloodhound face.

“Max is a notorious insomniac. At four in the morning during the shooting of Crack in the Window, he was outside, taking a walk through the gardens, rehearsing his lines. He saw a figure hurrying to the front entrance, up the steps, vanishing inside the manor. It was Stanny. He appeared to be coming back from the woods, and he was carrying a black bundle in his arms. When Max followed he noticed on the handle of the front doors there were reddish-brown streaks. It was blood. Tiny droplets trailed through the marble foyer and up the stairs. Max went to bed. By morning the droplets had all been cleaned up.”

Marlowe slurped down the last drop of Heaven Hill.

“People did whisper,” she went on, eyeing me. “But the Warner Brothers executives who periodically visited the set said nothing. And yet—and this is rather telling—even though The Peak was one of the most luxurious private residences they’d ever set foot in, with a full-time staff and a French chef, not one of those slick Hollywood suits ever spent a single night at the mansion. No matter how late shooting went, they always retired to a hotel in Tupper Lake well over an hour away.”

“They were afraid?” Nora asked.

She smiled wryly. “They didn’t have the der Sacke. As long as Stanny made them money, produced films the public was dying to see, they didn’t give a damn about his personal life. If he drank blood? Chanted? Decapitated animals? They’d dealt with trouble before. There was an incident they had to hush up involving one of the actresses—apparently she went mad working with Stanny. So scared out of her skin, the poor girl climbed out of her fourth-floor bedroom window in the dead of night, scaled to the ground like a centipede, and was never seen again.”

“Who was she?” asked Nora.

Marlowe shrugged. “Her name escapes me. You see, whatever he was doing to unleash this creativity, get his actors to hack into their own souls and bleed out for the camera so the world could drink it—as long as everyone kept their mouths shut, it was business as usual. They looked the other way. We all did.”