Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  It had once been pretty. Most of the clapboard was still white and brilliant. The steeple rose picturesquely over the Siloam and the low scrub on the opposite bank. But in the heat of the late afternoon, there was a glimpse of something unnatural about it, as though reality had become disoriented in a vain attempt to conceal the horror of a previous age.

  “That priest,” Mario said, shaking his head. “He left his mark on this town.”

  Anita collapsed on a tuft of mossy ground, gazed balefully back toward the church and the black void beyond the shattered door.

  “What do you think actually happened in there?”

  “Who knows?” Mario shrugged. “While the myths proliferate, no one’s ever been able to ferret out exactly what did go on here.”

  They had both researched the church’s history thoroughly, but had little to show for their efforts save that in 1921 a secondary school teacher from Providence came on his own funding to study the violent folklore emanating from Golgotha Falls. The result, two years later, was a comprehensive collection of original observations. There had been three cases in which the priest’s silhouette had been observed along the walls, one case of his insane choral music emanating from the destroyed loft, and several cases of disease or even death associated with proximity to the church.

  Next, during the Depression, came the Olgivy Report. It included Golgotha Falls in its purview of northern Massachusetts phenomenology. Olgivy was a spiritualist and had attempted communication with the suicidal priest. He also tried to photograph the luminescence he saw climbing the north wall. All he achieved were badly overexposed plates. Two months later, he suffered a bleeding disease of the ears and died.

  Then, just before the Second World War, a well-funded excursion sponsored by a Boston theosophy organization came with electric probes and infrared cameras. Prayers failed to raise the priest. Surrounding the graveyard with the black lights failed to produce the slightest responses. But the cattle, maddened by the eerie lights, stampeded and trampled the generators into the sandy soil. The theo­sophists never returned but wrote to the town, asking it to burn the church to the ground.

  It all belonged to the ludicrous, gullible days of early parapsychology. No more than witchcraft, Mario thought. Yet they all, intuitively, had searched for the priest. Something of the priest’s passion. Something unresolved among the desecrated dead. Was it all folklore?

  Mario turned back from the church. Ahead, the long, yellow grass rustled among the stone crosses and fungus-stained stone angels in the graveyard.

  Almost all the stones were effaced by decades of rain, but two bore the date 1897. One showed a faint name, Clare or O’Clare. Thrown dirt from two burial sites had formed a mound from which a rose bush grew without a single bloom.

  Two stones were roughly Gothic in shape, one was square-topped, and the rest were crosses, now toppled on their sides in the dirt. A few of the pedestals had ornamental scrolls worked into the vertical lines. Mario dug at the base of a standing stone. The initials of the stonecutter appeared clearly in the daylight.

  “These two look more recent,” Anita said, pointing to the two Gothic stones.

  “Maybe those are the twins. The priest is supposed to have murdered twin boys.”

  Anita shuddered.

  “Let’s check the rectory,” Mario said. “Before the sun goes down.”

  The rectory lay behind the east wall of the church, under the broken roseate window from which the stained-glass image of the Savior had collapsed decades ago. It was a small stone structure with a low, wooden roof. A dead apple tree hung over the ruined chimney.

  Mario stepped on a rock and peered into the window. An oval mahogany table had tilted over and was now splinters over the remnants of a small blue rug. A basin and pitcher lay on the floor, badly chipped.

  “It’s amazing that the townspeople have left this place alone,” Anita whispered. “Some of this stuff looks valuable.”

  “Bad reputation,” Mario grinned.

  Anita tried the door. It bulged fast against the jambs. Mario put his shoulder to the rotting wood. It gave like papier-mâché.

  In the shadows of the interior, the bookshelves, denuded now except for gray sawdust eaten from the ceiling by insects, lined the wall over the bed. The bed itself had utterly dissolved under a leaking roof. Only the crude, rusted springs remained in disarray over the floor among tatters of mattress stuffing. The headboard and foot­board lay savagely warped among dead leaves.

  There was no evidence of a crucifix on the wall. An armoire with an inlaid scrolling along its bottom strip and along the vertical doors stood against a wall. Rat droppings were visible under it, among rotted galoshes and some fallen strips of fabric.

  “It’s the most uneasy place I’ve ever seen,” Anita said.

  “Something about the decay here,” Mario suggested. “The ants. The spiders. The bog heaving up and down. It’s too alive to be so dead. We’d better put a sensor here. Just in case.”

  Mario brushed the red soil from Anita’s jeans. He put an arm over her shoulder.

  “Are you ready for supper?” he asked.

  “I sure am.”

  “Then let’s go into town and see what we can scare up. There’s no hurry about the seismograph.”

  She put her arm around his waist, her slender hand in his rear pocket, and leaned against him as they walked to the Volkswagen among the rubbish mounds where Canaan Street died.

  Inside, they changed quickly, Mario smiling at the delicacy of Anita’s movements, her graceful modesty despite all the years together. Then Mario closed the van doors behind them and secured the locks.

  Golgotha Falls had only seven active buildings, yet it sufficed to service the local farmers and the few remaining inhabitants. Besides the tavern, grocery store, and real estate office, there were a small hardware store, an all-purpose dry-goods shop, a garage with functioning air pump and diesel pump, and a men’s clothing store. Other houses occupied Canaan Street, but they were either boarded up or collapsed into timbers and concrete supports.

  They walked slowly onto Canaan Street. The street itself was empty. Only one pickup truck and a farmer’s vehicle stood in front of the grocery store.

  At the far end of the road sat a squat building with a red neon light in the shape of a martini glass. As they neared the building, a low grumble of voices drifted over the parked pickup. An old man emerged from the screen door and hobbled away on a knobbed wooden cane.

  Mario tucked in his shirt and tried to smooth down his unruly hair. Anita combed down her long, silky black hair.

  “You look lovely,” he said, smiling.

  “I feel like a horse blanket.”

  Mario pushed open the screen door.

  Inside, a jukebox stood on a wooden platform, and a pool table with red bumpers, its green baize badly warped, indifferent to players. Two farmers on chairs sat at a black-painted door laid over two heavy crates. That was the bar. In the far end of the long, narrow room were piles of broken chairs and pool cues, a vending machine, and the men’s-room door under a naked bulb.

  It smelled like the church. Dank, closeted, and full of the fine-sifted powder blown up from the drying Siloam.

  “Evening,” said the bartender.

  “Evening,” Mario replied. “Two draft beers, please.”

  The bartender had a round, pinkish face, and when the floodlights over the single tap hit him, he looked vaguely piggish. The rosebud mouth opened in a tuneless whistle as the beer slid into the two glasses.

  The two farmers in dirt-encrusted overalls gazed shamelessly at Anita.

  Anita stepped to the bar, slightly behind Mario. She kept her eyes on the single tap, from which a translucent hose led directly to the keg on wooden blocks.

  “Where you from?” the bartender asked.

  “Cambridge,” Mario said politely.

  There was a long silence. The farmers turned back to their mus-ings, fingering their beer glasses. The first of the farm
ers was so skinny his elbows bulged.

  Mario ordered two ham and cheese sandwiches, potato chips, and two more beers.

  “You got enough electric equipment in your van to sink a submarine,” the bartender said suddenly, looking directly at Mario. “What do you need it for?”

  The farmers gazed ahead moodily, but they were clearly listening.

  “We’re parapsychologists,” Anita said boldly. “We’ve come to investigate the church.”

  A nervous chain-reaction went through the men. They looked at one another.

  “Ghost-hunters,” spat one of the men in derision.

  The bartender turned away from Mario and began to wash beer glasses in a frenzy of anxiety.

  “We should’ve burned that goddamn church down, Frank,” said the skinny man. “Like them theoso-people wanted us to.”

  The bartender shook his head vigorously. “It’s property of the Catholic Church. Nobody wants trouble out of Boston.”

  The skinny farmer tapped his glass. Quickly, the bartender placed it under the tap and the amber beer began to flow into it with excruciating slowness.

  “People is a little upset,” the bartender explained to Mario. “Being made fun of.”

  “Nobody’s making fun of anybody,” Anita said.

  “Not at all,” Mario said. “Things have been happening. We want to find out why, that’s all.”

  The farmers and the bartender now studied Anita and Mario with surprisingly frank stares. The bartender leaned forward.

  “Can you get rid of what’s there?” he asked quietly.

  “What is there?” Mario asked.

  The men drew into a sullen, conspiratorial silence. Outside, the headlights of trucks and battered cars retreated up Canaan Street toward the farms on distant ridges. The headlights sent long searching brightnesses into the tavern.

  The men seemed unresolved, silently trying to make up their minds about the two interlopers.

  “Can you get rid of things?” the bartender said.

  Mario leaned forward to include them all in a confident, friendly masculine camaraderie in which there was no pretense, no shyness.

  “Depends,” Mario said. “What have you seen?”

  The bartender looked positively frightened. He glanced down to the dark corner of the tavern as though a sensibility there listened to his every word.

  “Oh, hell, tell him,” said the skinny farmer.

  “I never seen a damn thing,” the bartender mumbled.

  The skinny farmer wheezed an abrupt laugh and slapped the black-painted bar so that the glasses shook.

  “You hairy-assed liar!” he exploded. “You seen the altar boy with no arm!”

  “You said he come down out of the graveyard and headed for the church,” solemnly added his companion, staring at the bartender.

  The skinny man could only shake his hawk-nosed face back and forth, wheezing with laughter.

  “I had these dreams,” the bartender said, blushing, to Mario. “And one day I got really pissed and sort of saw one of my dreams.”

  The skinny man leaned closer to Mario.

  “He dragged us all out to the church,” he said. “But we didn’t find a damn thing.”

  “I gave up drinking for a year, too,” the bartender added.

  “Do you still have these dreams?”

  “No.”

  Anita saw the bartender gaze into the suds of the interior of the glass, blankly, as though remembering something else, something revived on a frosty morning in a late December he could not forget.

  “They found a one-armed altar boy, you know,” he said to Anita. “One year after.”

  “After what?”

  The farmers now looked darkly away, at the black windows. There were no lights on in Golgotha Falls outside the tavern. The red martini neon tubing cast its glow out onto the cracked asphalt.

  “You know about the priest?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Mario said.

  “They found out about him in 1914. Well, one year later, the man who owned this here bar found the remains of an altar boy under the rectory.”

  “The priest had this mixture of beeswax and varnish,” the skinny fanner confided to Mario. “To preserve the flesh.”

  Mario nodded, encouragingly.

  “They thought it was one of the McAliskey twins,” the other man said, swiveling in his seat to face Anita and Mario. “But a lot of the face flesh was gone. Nobody could tell which one.”

  “Never found the other twin,” the skinny man said softly, moodily.

  “Nope,” the bartender added. “But they put two headstones in the ground anyway.”

  There was a reflective silence. The bartender’s face was softer, revealing a deep-felt sadness. “There’s a legend in Golgotha Falls,” he said. “That rose bush in the graveyard—it won’t bloom until the other twin is buried next to his brother.”

  Mario lit a cigarette and exhaled away from the men. It was the only movement in the room.

  “People seen flashing lights,” the skinny man said to the darkness. “Sometimes they move like they was looking for something.”

  “Harriet—she runs the grocery store—seen the priest’s shadow,” the bartender added. “When she was a girl. Tried to rape her.”

  The skinny man nodded and leaned back in the broken chair. “My mother saw thistles in the churchyard change into birds,” he said in a faraway, flat voice. “Black birds with scarlet throats. They flew into the steeple.”

  Mario let the smoke issue from his mouth and float upward toward the ceiling, where it moved in sluggish currents.

  “Why do these things happen?” he asked softly.

  It seemed to break the spell. The farmers finished their drinks and pushed them toward the wash basin.

  “Oh, hell, everybody knows,” the skinny farmer said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

  “I don’t.”

  “Figure it out, mister,” said his companion, rising and walking toward the door.

  The skinny farmer waved grandly to the bartender and also went out the screen door into the night. Outside the dark window the headlights of a pickup truck flared into Mario’s eyes. The engine revved, and the shock absorbers rattled over the rutted road out of Golgotha Falls.

  The bartender flicked a switch on a white cord. The red martini sign went off.

  “Why do they happen?” Anita persisted in a silky, persuasive voice.

  The bartender smiled.

  “It’s only a story,” he said, embarrassed. “Some people here aren’t too educated, you know.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re interested in,” Anita said. “The full story.”

  The bartender blushed, stacked the dirty plates into the wash basin, and turned off the floodlights.

  “Closing hour,” the bartender whispered politely.

  “Yes, but why do they happen?” Mario insisted.

  “Let me escort you to the door.”

  As they went to the screen door, where the grasshoppers threw themselves raucously against it, the bartender studied Mario openly.

  “The priest,” the bartender said quietly. “He perverted the dead.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you understand what I mean? He perverted them. After he dug them up.”

  Mario nodded encouragingly.

  “You see, even the dead have to have their revenge,” the bartender said.

  The bartender had opened the door for them, and now they stood, all three, on the cracked sidewalk where the weeds grew at the curb. The crickets in the fields screamed under the stars, and the smell of the sediment was thick in their nostrils.

  “That’s the story,” the bartender said. “You can believe it or not.”

  “Well, I appreciate your telling us,” Mario said.

  “That’s quite all right. Good night.”

  The bartender went back into the tavern, looking up and down the street as he did so.

  Mario and Anita walked hand in
hand up the deserted, dry, dust-polluted Canaan Street. Their reflections dimly followed them in the dead, dark store windows.

  “What do you think?” she whispered.

  “I think we should finish our work in the rectory.”

  Mario opened the van doors. He slung yellow loops of low-amperage wiring over his elbow and lifted the delicate seismograph to his chest. Anita turned on the small light on the van wall and took up the metal box of pens, inks, and the graph paper in rolling drums.

  Slight tremors ran along Mario’s neck as they carefully picked their way back to the rectory.

  “Don’t trip on the gravestones,” he grunted.

  Anita’s flashlight played over the thistle scrub that led to the open, dark doorway of the church.

  It was hollow-sounding inside. The Coleman lantern had been stationed at the head of the altar. Now it rested on top of the broken pews. Who had moved it?

  Anita played the flashlight beam slowly over the church interior. The shadows elongated, merged, and elongated again as the yellow beam moved down over the stained walls.

  “Turn the light off,” he whispered.

  She flicked the switch. After a few seconds, they could see the stars through the Gothic windows and in the cracks of the roof. The pale moonlight bathed the church floor in a barely perceptible glow.

  Waves of heat came in from the graveyard, and with them a steady stream of white insects in the currents of heated air.

  They heard the sound of restless birds in the steeple, the soft wings rattling against the fallen iron bell.

  “Mario—” Anita whispered.

  Even with the flashlight turned off, the fragments of stained glass in the roseate frame behind the altar shifted abruptly and glittered.

  Mario turned his head, listening.

  “Anita—” he whispered tensely. “Come away from the door!”

  Around the southwest corner of the church, a figure appeared—a tall, slim silhouette of a man wearing the flowing, flapping robes of a Catholic priest.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mario flung himself past Anita, over the fallen church door, into the brambles of the church path.

  The silhouette moved at the rectory entrance.