Night Film(133)

“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 f*ck 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 vein that twisted on and on in front of us. When we reached the central area she told me she hurt her foot. It was bleeding. I think she’d stepped on a nail. But I pulled her on and down the narrow tunnel that would lead us to the clearing. And the crossroads. I’d never been there before. I’d never dared go.”

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.