Night Film(149)

It would explain Cordova’s popularity—nothing moved people, made them gawk, like the truth. It also explained why none of the people who worked with Cordova ever spoke of the experience. Perhaps they were complicit—to disclose what horrors occurred during filming would only incriminate themselves. It was feasible that at the end of shooting, Cordova had something on every one of his actors, something that guaranteed their silence. I recalled a remark of Olivia Endicott’s, which at the time had struck me as rather strange—Cordova’s interrogation of her when she visited him for a potential role in Thumbscrew: I began to suspect the underlying purpose of the questions wasn’t so much to know me or see if I was right for the part, but to learn how isolated a person I was, who would notice if I ever vanished or changed in some way.

Undoubtedly, Cordova looked for people he could manipulate. He had an obsession with capturing what was real; he’d forced his son, Theo, to appear in Wait for Me Here, rather than sending him to the emergency room so they could reattach his severed fingers. I also knew from the Blackboards—and Peg Martin—that Cordova used a film crew of illegal immigrants, a complicit squad of men and women who would never speak of what they’d seen.

I suddenly felt wild exhilaration over the thought. How easily it fit in with everything I’d learned about the man, following in his daughter’s final footsteps.

Cordova obviously took great care in assembling his players, every one from different backgrounds, some with no acting experience at all. He brought them here to live in his remote world, locking them inside it, allowing them no contact with the outside. Who would willingly agree to such a thing, signing away their life to one man?

Hopper had asked Marlowe this. Yet did he need to? Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes.

What exactly did Cordova make them endure? Everything his characters did? Then his night films were documentaries, live horrors, not fiction.

He was even more depraved than I’d realized. A madman. The devil himself. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but it was what he’d become living here. But if his films were real, how easy it would be for the man to slip into harming real children, in order to save Ashley.

I rummaged through the remaining papers in the briefcase. There were only lectures and notes, a typewritten letter from Simon & Schuster, dated January 13, 1978. Dear Mr. Jackson: I regret to inform you that your novel, Murder in the Barbican, will not fit within our current list of fiction titles. I remembered Brad had a wall safe he was always unlocking, but it was in his home office, which didn’t appear to be attached to this set. There was a door off the bedroom, which in the film opened into a bathroom, but when I opened it, there was only the black wall of the soundstage.

I locked the briefcase, returning it to its infamous spot under the bed, and then rolled up the child’s blood-soaked shirt, tucked it into my back pants pocket; I didn’t want to lose it, so it was safest to keep it on me. I switched off the lamp and headed back down the hall.

I rooted through my sodden clothes scattered beside the couch, finding my camera in the jacket. Thankfully I’d had the forethought to keep it dry, because it still worked, unlike my cellphone and flashlight. Both were dead. I took a few shots of the living room and kitchenette—fully stocked with seventies-era food: Velveeta cheese (still edible after thirty years), Dr Pepper, Swift Sizzlean Pork Strips—then stepped to the edge of the living room, staring out.

From the lamp, I could see the soundstage extended far in front of me. Beyond the couch, a wall of steel pipe scaffolding was supporting something—probably another set—constructed on the opposite side.

I realized, after a dazed moment, that I was still shivering. My jacket was still soaked, so after lacing up my boots, I strode to the front door, grabbed Brad Jackson’s herringbone overcoat off the chair, and put the thing on—again, not letting my mind consider the absurdity of it, that I was donning the coat of a probable psychopath.

Hopefully, it wasn’t contagious.

I checked my watch but saw it had stopped after being submerged in the pool. It read 7:58, which couldn’t be right. It had to be later.

And then, heaving my backpack over my shoulder, I stepped out of Thumbscrew, following along the scaffolding to see what else was in this massive soundstage, what other worlds plucked from Cordova’s treacherous head I could sift through like an archaeologist searching for bones.



When it became too dark to see anything, I took a picture, looking at it in the camera’s screen.

An enormous red bird had been crudely spray-painted across the concrete wall to my left. I’d seen it in articles about Cordova. It was what Cordova’s fans used as a way to invoke the man’s presence, an anonymous sign calling for him to return. I moved on, stepping around the end of the scaffolding, entering what appeared to be a vast room. I could dimly make out an enormous mountain in front of me strewn with boulders. I took another photo and realized the mountain was garbage, the boulders corroded gasoline barrels, sprouting like giant mushrooms across the expanse.

I took off across it, knocking right into a wooden sign.



MILFORD GREENS LANDFILL

DO NOT ENTER

HAZARDOUS