Night Film(160)

When I heard the fifth panel crack, I struck it a second time. The wood buckled right in half, splintering, falling through. I looked down at my feet, my heart pounding.

A gray rectangular hole stared back at me.

I immediately twisted around, staring out the opening, my euphoria quickly sliding back into horror.

There was nowhere to go—only another wooden panel just two feet away.

It appeared to be another box.

I pulled myself through. There was incrementally more light and more space, though my old coffin took up most of it, sitting in the center. I couldn’t sit up in here, either, the ceiling just a few inches higher. I crawled on my stomach along the outside perimeter and when I scrambled past the hole I’d just crawled out of, I knew I was right, I was inside yet another hexagonal box.

What the hell was this? A hell of coffins built like Russian Matryoshka dolls, one inside the next, on and on, toward infinity? Or was it a mind game built from an M. C. Escher print? A scene from a Cordova film—I tried to think back through every scene of every film, but I knew I’d never seen anything like this.

If I broke out of the first, I could break out of the second. Wedging my back against the first hexagon, positioning my feet on the outer walls, I bashed each panel as I had before, making my way around the perimeter.

I did it once, twice, three times. Not one wall gave way.

I inspected the first coffin and could make out in the faint light smooth wood, the side panels painted black. The sight suddenly triggered a memory deep in the storm-flooded cellars of my head.

And then it hit me, exactly where I’d seen this before.

The realization was such a shock, I could feel myself falling away from whatever flimsy reality I’d just been grasping, and I dropped backward, spinning through cold, black space.

“There it is,” Beckman had said. “The mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe … Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.”

Right now, a box like this was sitting on top of Beckman’s coffee table in Beckman’s living room, beside piles of faded newspapers and a tray of tea. It was the infamously locked box that had belonged to the killer in Wait for Me Here, his prized possession containing the thing that had destroyed him as a child, a box that had never been opened. Beckman had caught me trying to pick the lock. And just a few weeks ago when I’d visited him, I’d held it in my hands, shaking it, amused to hear the same old mysterious thumps inside, wondering what in the hell they could be.

They were me. Those rattles were my own bones. What I’d wanted to see inside, I was now locked in.

I heard myself gasp out loud at the irony of it. I could feel tears welling in my eyes, sliding off my face. It was too cruel an ending to fathom, a punishment that was pure Cordova. The man was showing me that some mysteries were best left untouched, that the truth of them was the unknown. To try and wrestle them open, letting their contents come to light, was only to destroy oneself.

Suddenly filled with such rage, I began to pound every wall around me, over and over again, like a reptile trying to hatch. I shoved my back against the ceiling, heard it crack, and, thrusting my shoulder against it again, felt it give way. I climbed up, emerging onto a floor, blinking in the increased light at a third black hexagon boxing me in. How long would it go on? How many cages were there? I pounded every panel until another gave way, and another. I kept on escaping, crawling through walls that broke down, one box giving way to another, clambering forward and backward, up and down, so disoriented at times, I had to sit, letting my legs and arms settle on the ground, feel which direction gravity was coming from, so I’d know which way was up and which was down.

I didn’t know how many boxes I’d crawled through—it felt like dozens, the light increasing with each one, inching ever closer—when, pressing against a ceiling, abruptly the floor gave way.

Bright light, and I was plummeting, plummeting straight down—

I reached out, grabbed the edge of the box seconds before it flew past, desperately hanging on as the panel I’d just smashed struck the ground.

I looked down, blinking.

Maybe it was just my faltering vision, my eyes unable any longer to register great depths or space, because it appeared as if I were hanging off the top of a skyscraper, the concrete ground about a mile below.

Bright light was pouring in from somewhere, through a window out of sight. Craning my neck upward, I could see that I was inside a vast metal tower, dangling like a bit of snagged thread out of a hole in the bottom of a large wooden structure, which appeared to be suspended from the ceiling.

There was nothing else here except a single metal ladder, which extended from the ground, up the steel wall, disappearing from view over the top of this box.

I had to get up there. I couldn’t go around the outside. The only way to climb out was to climb back in. I swung myself up onto my elbows, the entire structure swaying dangerously from the movement. The cables or ropes, which were keeping this thing suspended in the air, emitted off-putting creaks, as if the whole thing were literally hanging by a thread—as if I were hanging by a thread.

I managed to heave myself back inside the box, and then, trying to keep my movements easy so as not to dislodge the entire structure, I crawled back through every hole in every hexagon that I’d made. It felt nauseating to do this, to be breaking back inside the boxes from which I’d just liberated myself, my mind protesting as the light around me fell away, as if, with it went my every hope for escape. For life.