Night Film(196)

But she was out, head lolling against my arm, hands on her lap as if holding an invisible clump of violets. At Perry Street I carried her upstairs so she could sleep, though Jeannie woke her up at seven to put her in her cloud pajamas. We watched Finding Nemo. I made egg-white omelets. When Jeannie went upstairs to take out her contacts, which seemed to be code for calling a boyfriend, Sam sat eating quietly at the kitchen table.

It was the chance to ask her more about Ashley, to fathom how on earth it had happened, but then, taking the seat beside her, she looked at me, chewing slowly with her mouth tightly closed, as if she knew very well what I was about to ask and she found it sad that I still did not understand. Swallowing, she set down her fork and took my right hand, patting it like it was a lonely rabbit in a pet store, before reaching for her glass of milk.

And I realized—of course—Sam had told me everything.





117


She was a magical.

When I said goodbye to Sam the following day, I gave her the tightest hug and kissed her cheek, and then her hot head.

“I love you more than—how much again?” I asked her.

“The sun plus the moon.”

I embraced Cynthia. She wasn’t expecting it.

“You’re glorious,” I whispered into her hair. “And you always were. I’m sorry I never said it.”

She stared after me in shock as I made my way out of the lobby, smiling at the two doormen, blatantly eavesdropping.

“Did you get that? This woman is glorious.”

The moment I got home, I pulled out the old sagging cardboard box again, spreading the few papers out on the floor.

What had I learned when I’d been trapped inside that hexagon box—about myself? You couldn’t even see where it opened. It was a hint that I wasn’t seeing all of it, not the full picture.

Maybe I still had it all wrong. Maybe I still wasn’t seeing something that even Sam had seen. And Nora. And Hopper.

All three of them believed in Ashley. And I didn’t.

But what if I did believe as blindly as Hopper, Nora—and Sam? Was it blindness, or did they all see in a way that I didn’t? What if I punted reason and common sense into the air, let them soar dumbly out of sight, and believed in witchcraft, in black magic, in Ashley? Burning the reversing candles had brought Sam back into my life. Yes, one could argue it was simply a coincidence that the moment they’d extinguished, Cynthia within a matter of seconds had called—but what if it wasn’t? Maybe it was the black magic again rearing its head, insisting it was real.

What if I took a leap of faith and simply accepted that the truth behind this entire investigation resided not with Inez Gallo, but with Ashley? What if she hadn’t been in an especially precarious mental state? The truth about her illness meant nothing. Why couldn’t cancer be yet another symptom of the devil’s curse, as Ashley herself had believed? I might not have collected sufficient evidence up at The Peak—the stained boy’s shirt and those animal bones—but that did not vindicate Cordova from what I’d suspected, that he practiced black magic with the townspeople, that his night films weren’t fictions, but real live horrors, that he’d used children to try and free his daughter from the curse, possibly even crossing the line into hurting one of them, as the Spider had hinted.

There’s nothing Gallo won’t do to protect him. I’d read it on the Blackboards. Yet, oddly enough, she’d chosen not to protect him from me. She’d directed me straight toward him.

Or had she?

Beckman had warned me that I might encounter a figure stationed at the intersection between life and death. It will be a decoy. A substitute to grant freedom to the real thing. He’s Cordova’s favorite character. He’s always there, when Cordova’s mind is at work, no matter what.

That figure could very well have been that man back at the nursing home, the stranger I’d sat down beside.

Bill Smith.

He could have been anyone—anyone with a hefty enough frame and build, just senile and soundless enough not to be aware he was passing for Cordova. That wheel tattoo wasn’t definitive proof. It could have been drawn there—even tattooed by Gallo into the man’s hand in the middle of the night, when no nurse was watching. There was no security at Enderlin Estates, nothing stopping Gallo from doing what she wanted to whatever elderly stranger she chose, so he might serve as a feasible stand-in for her lord and master—thereby granting freedom to the real thing.

She’d wanted him to go free.

Perhaps Gallo was Cordova’s paid executioner, waiting for anyone who got too close to his whereabouts, who knew too much. Maybe she’d been waiting for me to come clamoring up onto that final wooden platform, and it was her job to tuck the burlap bag over my head and then the noose, ruthlessly heaving the ground out from under me, sending me flying, kicking, gasping back to reality, where she was so certain I’d stay.

“I live in the real world,” she’d announced flatly. “And so do you.”

She’d meant it as an order, a directive. She was giving me instructions, certain I’d follow them on my own accord, because I was a realist, a skeptic, a practical man. And yet I’d noticed, too, there was something faintly scathing about the way she’d said real world, as if it were the most miserable of life sentences.

Ashley’s history will now forever remain where she wished it, where she believed in her heart it always was—beyond reason, between heaven and earth, land and sky, suspended much closer to legend than ordinary life—where the rest of us, including you, Mr. McGrath, must remain.