Night Film(141)

I knew what she was thinking, what we were all thinking: What if this plan we’d methodically prepared over the past twelve days was a mistake?

We had weighed the possibilities. There was no other option. If I called Sharon Falcone and told her that I suspected occult crimes had been taking place at The Peak, she’d tell me what I already knew: Police would need hard evidence for a warrant, evidence I did not have.

The one thing I did have was knowledge of a covert way to access the property. The Spider had claimed he’d cut open the fence for the townspeople along a narrow stream. Marlowe had mentioned it originated from Lows Lake.

Inspecting detailed maps of the area, I could find no such river. It was only after finding an Adirondack geological map that dated back to 1953 that we uncovered where it just might be—a frail, nameless rivulet that twisted off the lake’s north shore, meandering through dense forest, right onto The Peak grounds.

If we managed to locate this stream and covertly enter that way after nightfall, we could see what was at The Peak, once and for all—if there was evidence not just of occult practices but what the Spider had suggested, actual child killings. We’d gather what proof we could, exit the way we’d come before dawn, then get it into the hands of authorities.

The plan was a blind risk—not to mention illegal, immoral, crossing the line of even the slackest ethics of investigative reporting, totally outrageous. It could very well get one of us arrested—or injured. For me, it could mean a new low of professional disgrace. I could only imagine the headlines. Back for More: Fallen Journalist Caught Breaking Into Cordova Estate. Judge Orders Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation.

I’d explained all of this to Nora and Hopper, emphasizing that it was my decision, one that was personal, not professional, and they’d be better off remaining behind. But Hopper was as resolute as I was. He said grimly, “I’m in,” as if it were something he’d resolved long ago. Nora was also adamant.

“I’m coming,” she announced.

And so it was decided.

Over the course of the past week, however, as we’d memorized the plan, assembled supplies, even as we’d driven the seven hours to the Adirondacks, a bleak landscape of gray sky, roads smothered with trees—the reality of what we were doing seemed to swell exponentially in magnitude. It was a mountain we’d started climbing, which grew beneath us into a rambling skyscraping ridge, pushing us back, the summit snowcapped, lost in clouds.

Every word Nora chirped in her singsong voice—Mind if we stop at that gas station? I’ll have the French toast with maple syrup—sounded doomed, made me regret that I’d even allowed her to come along.

I was concerned that as much as we’d uncovered about Ashley and her father, I still didn’t have the complete picture. Cleo had warned me of this: The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing … it never stops.

It was possible The Peak—and Cordova himself—was like that locked hexagonal Chinese box of Beckman’s I’d tried to pry open years ago: something that should remain forever sealed, its contents hidden from the light of day for good reason.

Though Cleo had assured me the spell inside the leviathan was not malevolent, there was little solace in this. Even if Ashley had meant to protect Sam, even if Hopper had loved Ashley, she was still a shifting cipher, her movements that night at the Central Park Reservoir impossible to fathom. The mystery of how Sam came to have the figurine in her coat pocket, the idea that Ashley had once approached her, shook me awake in the middle of the night, filled me with anxiety made all the more acute by the knowledge that it was my fault.

I’d put her in harm’s way. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had shown me my true nature, a raw view as infinite and irrefutable as two facing mirrors, the selfish blind man I was and always would be. My countless phone calls to Cynthia to check on Sam went ignored.

And then there was the question of the Spider and The Broken Door.

I went back to the antiques shop after leaving Enchantments, the same day of Samantha’s fall. I found the store locked, windows black. Nora and Hopper returned with me the next day, and two days after that, every day after. We monitored the building from the shadows of the stoop across the street, waiting for a light in an upstairs window, a curtain gently pulled aside.

Yet the building remained inscrutable and silent.

The Spider had obviously come back, packed a suitcase, and vanished into the night—perhaps forever. It wasn’t hard to imagine; his past had caught up to him, after all, first with Ashley, then the three of us. Yet The Broken Door’s red crumbling fa?ade, the mystery of his absence, and even more chilling, what exactly had happened to Sam in his shop—all left questions that ate away at me, exhausting me, like a fever that wouldn’t break.

I wasn’t even confident I was thinking lucidly. Sam was a line that had been crossed. Staying so nimbly out of sight, letting us view only the twisted shadows he made on the wall, Cordova still existed primarily in my mind—the most powerful place for any enemy to hide. His very films told you that. The suspected but unseen threat, fueled by the imagination, was punishing and all-powerful. It’d devastate before you even left your room, your bed, before you even opened your eyes and took a breath.

That leviathan figurine with its quivering shadow, sliding along the table with a mind of its own—it was proof of a hidden world beyond the one I’d taken for granted all my life, the reality that science and logic assured me was ever constant and changing only within a fixed set of laws. That misbehaving shadow was the edge of the unknown. The world’s certainty and truth had revealed a fault line. It was a minute tear in the wallpaper, which could be ignored, chalked up to my mind playing tricks on me. Or it could be torn back, farther and farther, into an ever larger and grotesque piece, eventually tearing off completely—exposing what type of wall? And if that wall were knocked down, what lay beyond it?