Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  “Knock it off.”

  “It’s true. A family background like yours—”

  “I don’t buy that Freudian line.”

  Mario smiled and finished the wine. With a slight shake of his head, he declined more. Anita put the bottle on the dark vinyl floor and pressed the cork back in.

  They left the coastal plain and entered the Massachusetts interior. Subtle valleys rose slowly toward the Berkshires in the west. It was as though a blunt pitchfork had once been dragged over the stony soil, leaving shallow, infertile ridges.

  Anita referred to a map on her knees. The towns they were heading for had names like Kidron, Zion Hill, Golgotha Falls, New Jerusalem, and Dowson’s Repentance. Bridges crossed the Siloam Creek at a juncture still called Sinai Crossing. As the heat of the dying sun blasted inward through the windshield, Anita watched the brooding, sun-burned farms roll by in a heated haze of sulfur-yellow, violently twisting fields.

  No one worked the fields. There were no horses, no cattle under the trees.

  “People here came to accept the Bible in its most literal sense,” Mario said. “And these are their monuments. Broken barns and debris.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Anita observed. “Wasn’t Bethlehem just a poor, dirty town in a desolate country?”

  “Nothing wrong with it. If you don’t mind living in illusion.”

  A pile of broken stones and a rusted crank marked the well that once had been the center of Kidron. Mario stopped the van. The weather-beaten boards of a nearby mound had sunk into a decay so complete it was almost loam and the ragweed grew from it in dense profusion.

  Mario took several photographs with his thirty-five-millimeter Leica. The heat was overwhelming. Nothing moved but undulations of rising air. It was a messianic landscape. As a wilderness, it had been peopled by Christ-seekers, patient and fanatic, but the millennium had never come.

  “Saddest landscape I’ve ever seen,” Mario murmured.

  The van began to climb the last ridge and the asphalt gave way in patches to a fine, powdery dust. The tires lost traction. Mario tensed. The steel radial Pirellis whined, the van swerved, and Anita’s hand rested gently on his arm.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” Mario said. “We won’t get stuck.”

  But the van slipped sideways, and only then caught traction. Mario drove the oblique road up the long slope, half on the shoulder, half in the field.

  Anita rolled up her window, but the choking, pink-brown dust sifted through, hanging in the sun-brought reflections of the dashboard.

  Abruptly, the van went into the deep shade of a stand of birch trees. The white, mottled bark stood out abruptly from the night-dark depths of the woods. Caterpillars hung from silk threads, twirling, and as the Volkswagen passed by, the pale green segmented bodies smeared over the windshield.

  “God,” Mario swore, “I’m blinded.”

  The spray nozzles under the wipers were clotted with arcs of wriggling, crushed bodies.

  The Volkswagen shuddered out from the woods. Mario stopped. Anita stepped out with a thermos of water and a paper towel. It was quiet. The sun was down. Vermilion clouds covered the west and an amber glow seemed to rise from the fields of the ridges. A mournful owl cry echoed through the darkness on the valley floor below them.

  A mauve-brown smoke curled along the dark, serpentine Siloam. Night was settled in the ruined shacks and from the clay and limestone hollow, through the moving smoke, rose the derelict steeple of the Church of Eternal Sorrows under the evening star.

  Mario climbed from the van and looked down into the valley, but save for the steeple, the smoke obscured everything. Distraught, restless, he paced the edge of the ridge, looking through binoculars, but saw nothing but broken silhouettes.

  Down in the hollow, where there should have been the town’s lights, there was nothing but an oval of even darker blackness. An odor of unclean water rose to the Volkswagen. The blackness was overwhelming. Through the broken branches over him, Mario could see the cold stars. But down beyond the dried, cooling fields, there was not even the vaguest rectilinear form that could have been a street, a building, or even a rock. There was nothing visible at all.

  Anita came to his side.

  “Welcome to Golgotha Falls,” he murmured.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Golgotha Falls in the morning steamed with a heated white mist that rose from the clay and spread out to the yellow fields.

  Anita boiled water over the propane stove for coffee while Mario went again to the last row of trees and stared down at the miasmic valley floor.

  The church, on the right, rested in a gray hollow where the Siloam behind it was bright and restless. On the left, where the creek became a muddy, bramble-infested bog, were the remnants of the town. In between was nearly an acre of dessicated thistles and broken ground. It was difficult to escape the impression that the town had crawled from the church and had died in the process.

  Anita came slowly, carrying two cups top-heavy with coffee.

  “Thanks, honey,” he said, kissing her.

  “You didn’t sleep, either, did you?”

  “I had the same kind of dreams you did. Broken rocks, filled with blood, or lava, or something.”

  “The caterpillars kept dropping on the roof. I could hear them wriggling.”

  Mario handed her his cup and raised the binoculars. The white clapboards of the church were oddly bright behind the haze. The Gothic windows were devoid of glass, black shapes in the heated brightness. Behind the ruined ornamental gate Mario saw the Siloam rise and fall, as though it were breathing.

  Closer to the birch woods, nearly lost in the yellow grass, were twelve gravestones, leaning down toward the hollow. Some of them still had crosses, but all were badly marred by fungus and brown lichen.

  Like a psychiatrist who needs to pinpoint why a patient is unpleasant in order to remain objective, Anita studied the site in front of her. The more she looked, the less she liked it.

  From the birch woods a red-brown dirt road made a long loop past the graveyard and went into the town of Golgotha Falls.

  It was not yet hot, but the atmosphere had a humid, cloying quality that sucked the energy from them. In the shadows of collapsing buildings, the dogs moved as though underwater, with a lolling, doll-like swaying of the heads.

  The shadows of the storefronts hung down. A grocery store sign obliquely touched the chipped white-painted clapboards. Everywhere the town was striated by conflicting angles of black shade against the sunlit morning of bright wood and milk-white air.

  Off the main street, Canaan Street, they saw early Victorian houses, many with newspapers covering broken windows. The town was calm, too calm, and the morning glories had the enervated stare of the dogs whose vitality had been totally depleted.

  “Not a very healthy-looking place, is it?” Mario said.

  “It looks terminal.”

  Canaan Street led into the field that intervened between Golgotha Falls and the Catholic church. Mario parked the van where the road disappeared into the tall brush and thistles.

  When they stepped out, the full force of the humid, acrid air curled around them. It was clear, from the rising steeple out of the hollow in front of them, how the church still dominated the town.

  They crossed to the edge of Siloam Creek, between the hollow and the town. There the water had backed up and silted into a dense, gray, heaving bog. June bugs in massive invasions covered the muddy, glistening reeds, streaming out from the church grounds.

  The heat was now beginning to rise. It breathed up out of the bog, until the bramble thorns and humpbacked branches wavered in the rising waves.

  Mario stripped off his shirt. The subtle muscles interplayed along the forearms, shoulder, and strong neck, as he wiped the sweat from his face. Mario had a physical presence that no one missed. His students called him “Mr. Cambridge.”

  “Weird, isn’t it?” Mario said. “An atheist like me—and my professional career depends
on a nineteenth-century Catholic church.”

  The church door was wooden, cut in a Gothic shape. The paint had peeled badly in the sun, leaving the oak panels bare.

  “Do you suppose it’s still sanctified?” Anita asked, as they approached it.

  Mario shook his head. “A church that suffers a defamation—and this one certainly has—loses the presence of Christ.” He turned to Anita, grinning broadly. “Well, I was a Catholic once . . .”

  He sized up the door, calculating its probable strength, then, suddenly and violently, smashed his boot heel against it. It sprang back on its hinges, revealing a drafty, black interior.

  “. . . so I know what I’m up against,” he said, his smile less droll.

  Inside, it took many seconds for their eyes to adjust. When they did, Mario and Anita saw a jumble of pews broken on a spider-active hardwood floor, and hanging debris of curtains where the altar should have been.

  “God, it smells awful,” Anita muttered.

  “I suppose every animal in the countryside has stopped here to pay its respects.”

  Mario put on his shirt against the damp chill.

  The door of the church, now that it had been opened, sent a strong, Gothic-shaped wedge of sunlight streaking to the altar. At the far end of the church was the ruined rood screen, and a rat’s nest of wood and fabric, and brass candle-holders jammed and fallen against the floor. It was all barely perceptible in the gloom.

  There were no side chapels. Against the opposite wall, and facing the graveyard, was a single confessional booth. The black curtain had fallen and now housed bits of straw and, strikingly, the remains of a woman’s high-heeled slipper.

  The pews also contained remnants of women’s clothing. A piece of feathered hat and curved velvet, a bit of a mink collar, tatters of yellowed lace, cotton prints smudged by dirty rain falling through the room, now lay in piles or trapped under the collapsed benches.

  Mario picked up a piece of an old-fashioned corset, the eyeholes still in place, the hooks dangling by threads.

  “A bit kinky, our celibate priest,” he said.

  The pulpit, carved from wood and with a short spiral staircase, ornamented with scenes of the Passion, was now completely gray. The damp had rotted off the paint, leaving a sick, colorless hulk.

  A wooden angel, wings partly upraised, gazed down from the pillar closest to the chancel. The bolt holding it had partially given way, so that its face was downcast in defeat. It, too, was uniformly gray, and small white insects crawled over the dry wood.

  The gold-embroidered cloth on which was designed IHS, the name of Christ, had fallen from the choir loft and, with repeated storms blowing through the church, tangled among the rotted kneeling bars and bits of Gothic Revival wood decoration fallen from the roof.

  Behind the chancel was a roseate window. The glass was littered in shards over the interior. Only a few sharp razorlike fragments remained in the frame. Mario looked up at the sky through the window. Instead of a stained-glass image of Christ, there was a twisted, dead tree branch against the sickly white haze.

  “See?” Mario said, nudging a pile of rubble with his boot. “Christ is not present.”

  “What do you mean?” Anita asked.

  She came closer. Among the brown, grossly moldered cloth and wood splinters was the brass chain of a lamp. The lamp itself was small and flattened on the bottom, like a small bowl. The red glass that would have made the lamp glow ruby was shattered, with only slivers remaining.

  “This lamp,” Mario said. “It’s supposed to be over the altar. When lit, it signifies Christ’s presence.”

  Anita turned to examine the remnants of the twelve paintings of the Passion along the walls. Nine of the paintings miraculously held, while three had tumbled to the baseboard debris. A minor artisan had dutifully painted an uninspired series of scenes, and the scenes now were dark and warped. An oval, spreading stain had transformed the Man of Sorrows into a hunchback.

  When she turned around, Mario had placed himself at the altar, arms outspread in a mockery of the Crucifixion, grinning.

  “Oh, Mario—” she laughed, “cut it out.”

  Mario grinned and rolled his eyes.

  “You have no idea,” he said, “no idea what the nuns and priests do to you as a kid.”

  “I’m surprised you let them.”

  “They scare hell out of you. They heap you with guilt and shove God and the devil down your throat until you want to vomit.”

  “A lot of people seem to get something out of it.”

  Mario noted the dead ivy that had twisted its way in from the graveyard and then died in the church.

  “Yes, and they pay a bloody fortune for it, too,” Mario said.

  He held down the altar cloth with one boot and with the other tested the strength of the fungus-dappled velvet. It shredded without resistance.

  “The Roman Catholic Church is the largest private property owner in the world,” he said, fingering the debris at his feet. “Did you know that? Assets in the billions.” Various bits of brass and mahogany wood came up in his hands. He threw them into the chancel.

  “It owns gold bullion, silver, jet aircraft, real estate, art treasures, not to mention diplomatic privileges that it abuses.”

  A small gargoyle head, a grimace of a wood face, appeared on the floorboards. Mario smiled and put the head on a tilted pew. The face seemed forlorn, as though overwhelmed by whatever had thrown it down from the high ceiling.

  “And it’s all based on belief,” he said sadly. “Which means gulli­bility.”

  The sacristy was ruined. A hole in the roof had let in generations of water, grime, and leafy detritus. Pieces of ornate yellow robes had turned brown and stiff. A hymnal had reverted to an organic heap in a wet stain.

  Anita scraped the wood along the Gothic window frames with her jacknife. The wood on the sunny south side was brittle and flaked easily. On the north windows the wood was fibrous and moist from the vapors of the Siloam.

  Wooden stairs led up toward the steeple, but the supports had given way and weeds grew at the joints.

  Mario scraped through the dirt at the baseboard and studied the uniform gray clay that united the clay ground to the foundation stones.

  “The church is in contact with the bedrock,” he announced. “Anything going by on the dirt road, even a passing tractor, would send tremors right up to the bell tower.”

  “And that’s what the people heard?” Anita asked.

  “Afraid so. That’s probably all it was.”

  Disappointed, Mario walked the north aisle, measuring the church. It was modest, dark, and something in it was unresolved. Mario felt a kind of anxiety in the jumble of debris and religious artifacts. Something was uneasy.

  “The priest must have gone mad slowly,” he said. “Maybe it took years. Degree by degree.”

  On the confessional booth was a small crucifix. The top screw had fallen off, so it had fallen upside-down and backward. Mario reached for it.

  “Mario—”

  Mario turned, his face obliquely hit by the long, hard shadow cut by the brilliant south windows.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know.”

  Mario turned the crucifix right side up and began to screw the brass screw into the top hole.

  The low, groaning echo of the bell filled the church and gradually died away. Mario grinned.

  “Never touch an upside-down crucifix,” he said. “That’s what the nuns told us.”

  Now the atmosphere of the church interior changed. Anita stood rooted. “Do you sense it?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “An ambience. Almost an intelligence. As if the church knows we’re here.”

  Mario shrugged and muttered, “Let’s bring in the equipment.”

  They carried in several heavy consoles from the Volkswagen, a box of delicate sensors, rolls of red wiring, braided black cable, and the Coleman lantern.

 
“Let’s put the sensors along the north and south walls,” Anita said. “And one under the altar.”

  Mario unrolled slender green, yellow, and white braided wires from a leather case. These he attached to four ultrasensitive microphones. He laid out the microphones and wires along the baseboards. Then he set the built-in limiters to protect the delicate, almost fibrous wires within. The microphones could pick up mice running at fifteen feet.

  Every building has its own distinct characteristics of ambient sound, tremor, and temperature variation. It would be crucial to know those characteristics in order to detect any departure from them. It might take weeks, even months, but it was absolutely vital to any accurate experiment.

  Mario connected the microphones to a digital system assembled from medical equipment components. The system kept a steady time record for all sound below that limiter threshold.

  “Where should I put the temperature gauges?” Mario asked.

  Anita studied the dark, jumbled mountains of wood and cloth among the pews. The temperature gauges were extremely sensitive but had very short ranges. Placing them correctly was a matter of intuition as well as experience.

  “One behind the altar, near the sacristy,” she said. “The other at the northwest corner. The corner full of clay.”

  Mario joined the two gauges to a linear graph-analysis with a self-contained power source. Referenced against time, the countless minute changes of temperature in the daily cycle to night and back would begin to show characteristic patterns. Patterns that would then reveal deviations.

  Mario stretched his back, relieving the strain of bending and uncoiling the yards of wire. Anita’s blouse was covered with dropped twigs and curled leaves from the roof.

  “Let’s take a break, please,” Anita called, brushing off her sleeve.

  They stepped over fallen debris, past the clotted basin for holy water, and bathed their faces in the heat of the open sun. It was a relief after the claustrophobic, dank chill of the interior.

  “What about the seismograph?” Anita asked.

  “After dark.”

  Mario stretched, flexing his back and neck, and looked back at the church.