Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Father Pronteus laid a hand on Mario’s shoulder, down the arm, and on the thigh, even as he spoke of St. Augustine and the temptations of the flesh. Mario saw Father Pronteus’s face become flushed, his breathing harder. It was like razors sliding into their idealized world, tearing everything to shreds.

  Suddenly Mario struggled against his mentor. He felt the massive, warm weight over him. Somewhere, Father Pronteus succeeded with his hands, strong and yet subtle and sure.

  In that vile instant the entire superstructure of Platonic and Thomistic thought crashed into disintegration. Father Pronteus had used his idealism to mask a desperate genital need—to seduce Mario. Mario saw in a flash that the entire belief structure of the Church was built upon repression, sublimation, and glorification of sexual deprivation.

  Something worse: the incredible, repugnant thrill of being handled by another man.

  The Pope says, give me the child until he’s seven and I’ll have him the rest of his life, Mario thought bitterly, recalling the old epigram. Well, the Pope had me until I was fifteen. And that’s long enough for him to regret it.

  Beside him, Anita stirred.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  Anita lay against him, stroking his dark curled hair. The nightmare of the past receded in her warmth. Mario reached for her body with a strange desperation.

  Inside the rectory, Father Malcolm paused in his labors. Sitting on a ruined cane chair, he thought about the parapsychologists. He wondered if he had already been indiscreet, had compromised too much. True, the bishop had finally authorized the exorcism, but the price had been high; the meeting painful and abrasive.

  White-haired, with tiny blue veins in the nose and cheeks, Bishop Edward Lyons had regarded with a long, silent stare the new exorcist.

  “It is because of the great tragedy that befell your uncle that I’m allowing this,” he said. “I know what Golgotha Falls means to you.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace.”

  Bishop Lyons looked annoyed.

  “I’m trying to tell you, I have real misgivings about this adventure.”

  “The church is defiled, Your Grace. It wants acceptance into the bosom of Christ.”

  “There are many lost churches whose deeds are in our possession.”

  Father Malcolm found the crude directness irritating. The bishop motioned to an antique chair, one gleaned from a Venetian estate upon its foreclosure.

  “Father Malcolm,” he confided. “I know of your uncle more than I knew him. Yet I loved him even so. What happened to him at Golgotha Falls was a tragedy for me personally as much as for you and the Church.”

  Father Malcolm stirred uncomfortably.

  “Thank you, Your Grace.”

  The bishop’s thick white eyebrows lifted. The clever dog’s eyes regarded the young Jesuit.

  “But—” he shrugged his shoulders “—an exorcism?”

  “Why not?” Father Malcolm snapped. “The nature of his death—”

  The bishop held up a ringed finger for silence.

  “It was a scandal for the Church. And for me personally. And you must learn to avoid scandals.”

  “I have no intention of publicizing the rite.”

  Bishop Lyons studied him carefully. He smiled, but it chilled the young Jesuit.

  “No. You don’t. But you don’t understand the secular world. You rush headlong into things. You forget that the baser world watches us, judges us, and accuses us.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “I ask you to remember what I’ve said.”

  “I will, Your Grace.”

  Father Malcolm wondered now if the parapsychologists would publish their research. But then, who reads obscure journals? Still, he had received an injunction. The Jesuit combed back his blond hair with his fingers and sank into troubled reverie.

  It was broken by the sudden rush of an animal in the bushes. A bold, heavy, insistent pushing of the body, cracking branches. He stood and walked to the open window. He could see nothing beyond the Oldsmobile in the weeds. The hooves struck out from the rectory and thundered into the fields, into the dark, the mare pursued by the stallion.

  A woman’s laughter floated like a silvered butterfly out from the Volkswagen.

  Owls hooted in the apple tree. Heifers moved among the tombstones, throat bells clanking, great flanks passing. The Siloam made voices behind the church. A comprehensive force seemed to animate the valley, a bizarre communion between the church, the van, and the animals and birds. The rhythms passed from one to the other, through the Siloam, and back again. They were all part of an ecology of the damned.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Jesuit drank bitter coffee.

  Outside, the Oldsmobile was laden with heavy crates in the trunk and on the roof. Crossing through the weeds, his black trousers were stuck full of nettles. Winged beetles clung to his plaid shirt. Sweating, he lifted a long crate from the rear.

  Anita Wagner and Mario Gilbert swam nude under the willows. They were in the Siloam, in a clear, cool pool only fifteen feet from the north wall of the church. Their arms were muscular and with assured strokes they pulled through the blue water.

  The sight of a nude woman reminded the Jesuit, paradoxically, of his uncle, Father James Farrell Malcolm. He had been an expert on Renaissance painting, particularly the Venetians, and the heavy volumes of Titian were replete with white, well-rounded womanly forms. Titian had a thorough view of women. To him they were complex, intelligent, and ideal creations, in every way man’s equal.

  It was after his uncle’s death that Father Malcolm, in searching for an explanation, had been obliged to study the psychopathology of sex. It repulsed him.

  Father Malcolm carried a wooden crate on his shoulder from the Oldsmobile to the rectory. Through the willows he saw Anita reclining in the sun and Mario, the broad shoulders and heavily bunched genitals, climbing from the pool.

  In the rectory, the Jesuit heard the woman’s playful calls.

  The Garden of Eden might have had such inhabitants, he mused. Such frankness of the body, an ease with bodily love. His own upbringing had been a labyrinth of disguising the natural functions, modesty raised to an absolute imperative. Yet it was not without envy that the image of Mario’s shamelessly physical attributes came back to the Jesuit.

  But the Garden of Eden suffered the Fall of man. He acquired the consciousness of sin and shame. Therefore, the Church endeavored to direct that awareness and turn it to a praise of God. Therefore, also, the new generation, which rejected the notion of sexual inhibition, was an affront to the Church. For the new generation proclaimed that fulfillment could be found in the life on earth. Which, of course, was not true.

  A memory of the Potomac flickered quickly through his mind. Of a place, hot and humid, as at Golgotha Falls; of a hotel where elegant men took their women for pleasure. On the balcony, confused and unable to think—for one single afternoon he had stood not alone on this earth.

  Surprised by the vehemence of the memory, the Jesuit went back to the Oldsmobile. Apparently, it would take a good deal more time than he had thought to eliminate, or at least neutralize that scene. Involuntarily, he leaned to look at the willow banks.

  Mario and Anita were gone. Had they seen him watching? Would they have cared? Beyond the church and river rose the fields of the farms, too dry for this season, and over them the celestial white of swiftly moving clouds.

  The Jesuit wiped the perspiration from his eyes. The hot miasma rising from the bog recalled the same lethargy, the same sensual abandon, as had the roiling Potomac. That memory, and his uncle, were why he had come to Golgotha Falls.

  He walked into the church.

  Anita had set up the seismograph beyond the crypt door. Her hair was still wet from swimming. The cotton blouse was soaked at the collar. Her slender fingers worked effortlessly over the slowly turning drum and the fine black line coming from the inked scribe. She turned to smile at th
e Jesuit.

  “I picked up your footsteps in the rectory,” she said.

  “Did you?” Father Malcolm said, uncomfortable. “Are all these instruments so precise?”

  “Yes. We work in very small increments, Father Malcolm.”

  Father Malcolm stepped away. To hide his awkwardness, he surveyed the rotted debris on the floor.

  “I see real possibility for renewal,” he said. “Not so vile as it looked last night.”

  Mario came into the church, forearms bulging, teeth gritted from the weight of a black metal box against his bare chest. He pushed past the Jesuit and maneuvered down the aisle toward Anita.

  Mario unscrewed the top bolts. Carefully, he lifted out components of optical equipment from the thick lining. To Father Malcolm, the pieces rested like an alien presence on the church floor.

  Mario swung a dark red piece, a ruby laser, gently onto its grooves. He examined the beam-splitter and reference beam mirror, then replaced the plastic housing. It was a double-pulsed laser for which he had augmented the amplifier to provide an expanded viewing image.

  The Jesuit, transfixed, advanced closer to the camera. His shadow fell over Mario. Mario stopped working and looked up.

  “What’s the matter, Father Malcolm?”

  “All this equipment and miles of cables, too.”

  “So?”

  “Well, it is, after all, a church.”

  “It is, after all, a scientific investigation.”

  “One must render unto Harvard that which is due Harvard, Mr. Gilbert. But unto Christ—”

  “I know. Ten percent.”

  At a signal from Anita, Mario sank into silence.

  The Jesuit began shoveling the debris of rubble and pieces of women’s clothing into cardboard boxes. Anita leaned over toward Mario.

  “Let me handle him,” she whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Because you piss him off.”

  “Well, that makes two of us. The smug hypocritical bastard.”

  The morning proceeded in silence.

  Mario’s concentration on testing the laser camera was broken by the Jesuit’s incessant movements through the church as he carried out the broken pews and debris fallen from the ceiling. Finally, in the empty church, Mario watched the priest sweep the accumulated black grit of a century from the hardwood floor.

  Suddenly, Mario’s eyes became fixed on the viewing box of the laser camera. He made a sound of surprise.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Gilbert?”

  “The laser camera is picking up architectural stress. Behind you.”

  Father Malcolm looked up at the rafters. Only the northwest corner looked in disrepair. “I had thought the structure was still basically sound.”

  “So did I.”

  The priest swept the black debris into a box and took it into the hot sun. In the laser camera viewing box, the stress of the church reduced, and the curled patterns straightened to normal cross-ended beams.

  The priest came back in with a bucket of steaming soapy water. The stress followed him around the church.

  “You look really disturbed, Mr. Gilbert,” Father Malcolm said, mopping the floor.

  “Something is unstable,” Mario admitted.

  Father Malcolm swabbed the floor vigorously. Now the stress was greatest where the priest scrubbed the baseboards. When he paused, the stress continued to show up on the laser screen.

  “Anita,” Mario whispered. “Trade places with the priest.”

  Anita went to Father Malcolm and spoke briefly. Puzzled, he gave her the bucket and mop, but the stress now showed incongruent undulated lines over the door, away from Anita and over Father Malcolm.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mario replied. “Something is following you around in here.” He looked up with a sly grin. “Looks like we’re not alone.”

  Anita suddenly shivered as a frigid chill wafted through the church, followed by a pervasive odor, rank and foul. They all sensed it, but none spoke of it. Then it was gone, as were the stress lines.

  For the rest of the afternoon, despite Mario’s vigilance, no further chills, odors, or stress patterns were experienced.

  By early evening, the rubble mounds beyond the church yard were smoking thickly.

  Father Malcolm poked a dead branch into the blue rising smoke, which exuded a sickly, sweet odor, like decaying flesh. Gathered around the mounds of ragweed and broken brick, some of the townspeople of Golgotha Falls watched, mesmerized, hostile. The priest saw the expressions on their faces change with every puff of smoke from the filthy, burning cloth, as though they were trying to determine whether the intruders were for good, or for evil.

  The flames ate into the discarded clothing, hissing and snapping, through rotted church vestments, curling black through molded altar cloths. Red ants fled the heat, like animated drops of blood fleeing into the soil. Malcolm covered his face with a handkerchief.

  “The smoke!” cried an elderly woman. “It has the face of the first priest.”

  The Jesuit spun on his heel, but saw only the heavy particulate fumes flowing down low into the hollow.

  “Don’t mind her none, pastor,” cautioned the bartender. “Her right mind has left her.”

  But the woman was insistent.

  “It was there for a second,” she screamed, “and I seen it!”

  “I did, too!” echoed a short boy.

  Others laughed nervously. The old woman took the boy home.

  Mario came up from the church, loops of slender wire over his shoulder. He stopped to look at the fire. Its stench almost made him gag.

  The Jesuit stirred the black and rotted cloth where the buttons melted down to a liquid morass. “Sometimes we deal in a messy business,” he said softly, upending a box of sweepings from the church. “There is always a struggle with evil, a foul and filthy struggle that will continue until Christ’s final victory.”

  Mario adjusted the weight of the wire loops on his shoulder.

  “Is that right?” he said with a grin of disdain, and started off toward the van. Father Malcolm’s hand gripped his arm.

  “Wait,” he said softly. “You are here on an investigation of phenomena beyond normal understanding. Your instruments have recorded stresses beyond accounting. You can’t have failed to sense the pervasive, inhuman odors, the bone-chilling cold that seems to permeate every nook and crevice of the church. How do you explain these things, Mr. Gilbert?”

  “I observe, Father Malcolm. I measure. I don’t label. It takes courage not to provide easy explanations. To be able to say, yes, this happened, and this, and this too, and I don’t know what it means. Maybe someday I’ll know how it all ties up together. But not today. Not now. Now it’s pure experience and I record it as best I can. And that’s all, Father. No saints. No liturgies. No glib little Trinities.”

  Smiling, he walked off toward the van.

  Father Malcolm did not return to the church until the fire was dead and buried in sand. The smoke of the blackened earth drifted through the hollow, turning the sinking sun to mauve. The shadows disappeared and melded into the deep brown gloom.

  Anita ate her dinner behind the temperature systems console. Until things were stabilized, the instruments had to be watched and continually adjusted. The Jesuit was indefatigable, working at his chores of scrubbing and cleaning.

  Anita watched him curiously.

  “How did you become an exorcist?” she suddenly asked.

  Father Malcolm looked at her dark eyes, then shrugged slightly and examined the baseboard rot.

  “Every parish has an exorcist,” he said modestly. “It’s the third of four orders to becoming a priest.”

  “But you have a special expertise—I mean—aren’t exorcists rare and particular people?”

  He smiled, enjoying her friendly curiosity. “You’ve seen too many movies, Miss Wagner.” Then, soberly, “I studied. I became a candidate. Spiritualis imperater—then in Boston the
bishop handed me a book—instructed me—the words and the methods, you understand —That’s all it was.”

  “Have you ever performed an exorcism before?”

  “Yes. An old woman. I assisted, really. And it went quite well.”

  Anita found the subject esoteric, fascinating, but was slightly hesitant to pry. Nevertheless, she felt on comfortable terms with the inward-looking, quiet Jesuit.

  “Is it—like magic—?” she asked. “Secret formulas? Sacred words?”

  Father Malcolm laughed pleasantly, without ridicule. “The actual procedure has been fixed since the third century, and is often used. For example, in consecrating holy water, there is a ritual exorcism of evil.”

  “Is it really so simple?” Anita asked.

  Father Malcolm moved to the next area, ripped the baseboard from the wall, and dipped the mop into the bucket of water. Then he stopped.

  “No, Miss Wagner. It is never simple.” He paused, fashioning his thoughts into words. “A successful exorcism depends on the officiating priest. His faith. His power.”

  Anita nodded. The church was pleasantly quiet. Several of the consoles hummed. The river beyond the church burbled in a low voice. Mario entered carrying a case of video tapes.

  “Did you know that there is speculation that Lovell himself had been exorcised?” Father Malcolm volunteered.

  Mario put down the tapes and sat down on an optical components trunk.

  “I never ran across that,” he admitted.

  “According to the letters from Lovell—”

  “Wait a minute. You have letters of Bernard Lovell?”

  “I purchased them from the family. He wrote infrequently to his sister in Charlestown. In one letter he refers to an imperfect cure. Now, at first I assumed this was a reference to his limp. Lovell had suffered a mild attack of poliomyelitis and walked with a slight limp. It was only in the last few years, rereading those lines, seeing how circumspectly and unnaturally he phrased the sentences, that another possibility became stronger.”