Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Mystified, Mario nodded, putting the key into his pocket.

  “Also, I must ask you not to enter the church tonight.”

  It was an order, not a request.

  “Not even to check your equipment,” Father Malcolm said.

  “All right.”

  Father Malcolm looked back at the closed door. The moonlight was weak, and slanted down over the weathered wood.

  “Perhaps your instruments will bring us luck,” he said, smiling. “Good night, Mario.”

  “Good night, Father Malcolm.”

  Mario watched Father Malcolm walk past the graveyard, head down, to prepare for the exorcism.

  Mario found Anita at the van, staring intently out beyond the bog.

  Mario stopped short. “What’s the matter?”

  Anita pointed out at the graveyard. The pebbles in the ragweed were trembling, rolling forward like Mexican jumping beans.

  “Undifferentiated RSPK,” she said softly. “It’s been going on ever since you brought that altar into the church.”

  The pebbles rolled in waves, crisscrossing, making a bonelike rattling noise when they touched. Then they sifted back into the dust.

  “Do you think it’s the priest?” she asked.

  Mario slumped, rubbing his face, fighting the weariness. “Well, he’s certainly catalyzed things since he arrived. I think his own emotional troubles are being projected.” Mario slipped his leather jacket over his bare shoulders. “Anyway, the worse off he is, the better for us. Tomorrow’s little exercise ought to keep our needles jumping.”

  For the first time since she’d known him, his quickness, his mental agility, his calculating acumen deviated fundamentally from what she felt. There was a harshness in Mario’s thinking that masqueraded as charm. She wondered if that harshness blinded him, if it made him pursue the wrong theory out of misplaced stubbornness.

  Mario held up his hand.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  They listened. The Jesuit’s voice traveled from the rectory over the dry mounds of rubble. It was a voice in full vigor, laid bare in an awful nakedness. Anita felt it enter her heart.

  “Enemy of the human race—source of death—robber of life—root of evil—seducer of men—serpent of filth—why do you resist?—you know that Christ the Lord has destroyed your plan—”

  The rest was lost as the Siloam, driven to a frenzy by the sudden circling of the southerly wind, drove up over the clay banks and soaked into the church’s foundations.

  “What is he doing?” Anita whispered.

  Mario grinned without warmth. “He’s invoking Satan.”

  In the rectory, the darkness appeared to flow out from the glass-less windows, as though it was the source of night. The church, too, despite the red monitor lights of the instruments, poured darkness out along the windowsills.

  “But that’s—that’s black magic,” she objected.

  “Only if improperly used. According to Catholic doctrine, all these disturbances are merely reflections of their master, Satan. So, like any good priest, he has to invoke the original evil in order to expel it.”

  “For which he needs Jesus Christ.”

  Mario grinned.

  “You catch on fast, my love. That’s what it’s all about tonight.”

  They watched the fields and the church, but the southerly wind had stabilized. The Jesuit’s voice continued in a monotonous whisper.

  “Poor bastard doesn’t know who or what could be an agent of the Antichrist,” Mario said with sympathy. “The pebbles. The Siloam. Might even be you.”

  Anita turned. Mario was smiling, but the smile was ambiguous and the eyes were hard.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You could be an agent of the Antichrist. Without your knowing it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’ve seen him looking at you.”

  “Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Mario shrugged, turned away, and plucked a stalk of yellowed grass. He stuck it between his front teeth.

  “You’re triggering something off in him, Anita.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. He may be a priest, but he was a man first.”

  “I really find this distasteful, Mario.”

  “Since when is Anita Wagner a prude?”

  Anita said nothing, though the anger in her eyes was enough to make Mario turn away.

  “Go down and take a look,” he suggested. “See the Catholic Church in action.”

  “I’d rather not disturb his privacy.”

  “I’d say as a scientist it’s your duty to observe the crucial participant. Particularly in a case of psychoprojection.”

  Anita caught an edge of sarcasm in Mario’s voice. What was he accusing her of? As often happened when Mario needled her, she did precisely as she felt. She walked through the nettles of the rectory path and peered into the window.

  The candle was nearly out. White paraffin dripped onto the floor. In the darkness she could see his crucifix slanted on the table, the outstretched arms of Christ glinting toward her in the heat lightning rising from the ridge. Anita smelled the fragrance of incense. Then, like a whispering breeze, came Father Malcolm’s intense, barely audible prayer. It reminded her of the subjects she and Mario had studied under the influence of trances.

  Father Malcolm knelt, facing the crucifix, lost in a world foreign to her.

  So this is what a man’s soul looks like, Anita thought. Hands and arms soiled with flecks of dirt, tiny blood scratches on the forearms, the dust tracked in rivulets down his cheeks. The blond hair was matted and unkempt. The eyes were closed. Anita backed against the windowsill. Could Mario be right? Could a woman appear, to a praying priest, as an agent of the ultimate enemy?

  Father Malcolm grew silent. He seemed to be waiting. In fact, she knew he was waiting. They were all waiting. If Mario was right, the priest would become the vehicle of their most intense study of psychoprojection. But now, as she looked at the man kneeling on the filthy floor, it occurred to Anita that the priest was just as likely to be the object, even the victim, of the paranormal, and not its psychic cause.

  The Jesuit stared fixedly out past the crucifix at the bands of lightning dancing among the clouds. There was an extraordinary intimacy, and it included her. There seemed to be such a thing as soul, and it lent an exceptional sense of peace and waiting to that tired room.

  Anita felt its purifying effect. It was chaste as the Siloam, she thought. Intricate and delicate as the lovely night clouds. Deep as the Golgotha Falls well.

  It was a dimension of herself growing again.

  At that moment on the ridge road, a Ford pickup truck rumbled by. The grizzled driver leaned from the cab and shook a fist at her.

  “You’ll die, you fools!” came the shout. “All of you!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The silence of the night was inexplicable. Though the Siloam moved, brushing dead branches into the banks, there was no sound. It was lividly black and gleaming, like a dream, and white moths fluttered up from the bog in vague contours of light.

  In the rectory, on his knees, Father Malcolm waited. The final barriers of pride had been destroyed and yet he was not emptied. Formless guilts rose into his mind, were purified, and disappeared. Memories of pettiness, of anger, of ambition burned clean in the fervent devotion.

  The groping ego clung to its memories, but the prayer lifted them away and made him unified, sanctified.

  A stormy day in the Atlantic when he was twelve and had hit his brother Ian with a sailing spar. The organ booming in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and him hating the sound and fearing death.

  The subconscious memories disentangled themselves.

  The childhood carpet, an angry father, and Uncle James who was a Jesuit, rotund and jocular, half bald and smiling. Uncle James explaining the Society of Jesus. The gold ring. The cross at the lapel. That complicated man, who had also loved art and sensual b
eauty, the volumes of the Renaissance, the idealized women in luxurious gardens, painted for the Medici princes.

  A stick among the garden rocks, and on the stick two snakes curled, twisted in copulation. Uncle James pointed out the snakes, explained the sexual division of male and female, and went on among the daisies with a certain sadness. For the passions were lovely, he said, but they drew man away from his natural form of love, the spiritual.

  But there were other memories. A long hotel with a white balustrade. Below the second floor, the steamy Potomac. Walking along the path among the willows was a woman in a green hat. It was his mirror image, he thought, watching from his bedroom balcony. As Plato wrote, a single nature had been divided into two, the male and the female, and Eamon needed the fulfillment of that union as much as salvation.

  Her name was Elizabeth Albers, and she taught at Georgetown University, in the Department of Moral History. Their seminars extended through two terms. In the course of that time, they sensed their mutual respect. By the late summer, it turned to deep affection. By fall, Malcolm knew he had come to a crucial crossroads in his life, and he agonized over his options. There were but two: marriage to Elizabeth, or marriage to the church.

  Malcolm lost weight, his studies foundered, and the Jesuits counseled him to break off the relationship. He refused, and stayed one week with the Albers family in Norfolk. That failed to provide an answer. Their plans for marriage foundered; he returned to the seminary, and threw himself into scholarship.

  During that period, he visited a psychoanalyst. They discussed his idealization of his uncle and the Society of Jesus. They examined religion as a sublimation of manly love. At the end of the semester, he graduated with honors.

  Elizabeth’s letter remained unopened, an icon of their love. While going through the preparations for initiation into the Society, he suffered a nervous relapse and returned to Boston. There he found solace in the mementos of his uncle, all his voyages to Venice, his erudite writings, until the horror at Golgotha Falls.

  Another letter came from Norfolk. This time he answered. The loneliness of his future spread before him like a chasm. He asked to be suspended as a candidate for the Society. He met Elizabeth on a humid, steamy day on the Potomac. It was at the Cavern’s Inn, an expensive resort frequented by congressmen and their mistresses, a fact he discovered after booking his room.

  He watched her come down the willow path. In tweeds, with the dark green hat, she was stylish in a way that intimidated him.

  When supper was served on the balcony, he suddenly told her he had changed his mind. He had reapplied for candidacy. There was no life for him outside the Church. Elizabeth did not eat her supper, and his tasted like sawdust.

  “Why didn’t you write the first time?” she asked. “I needed you. You needed me. Where was the harm in that?”

  The word “need” was so ambiguous, he forced himself to look at the brilliant sunset over the Potomac.

  “I was afraid,” he said.

  “Why are you so afraid of yourself?” she asked. “Eamon, is it love that you’re afraid of?”

  Unable to speak, terribly ashamed, he could only stare mutely at the river.

  “It’s—the physical expression of love,” he finally said softly. “It is that I fear.”

  He turned. To his surprise, nothing angered her, nothing made her ashamed of him.

  “And yet it would be the seal of our souls,” she said gently. “And where would be the shame in that?”

  “None,” he admitted. “None at all.”

  Her green hat lay on the white bedspread. It was a symbol of her, her sophistication, her vulnerability. He was longing for love, he had lived all his life in love’s absence, and she was waiting for him.

  “None,” he said again.

  It was dawn when he jerked awake. The linen on the cold supper table was moist with dew. Seated on the sofa, Elizabeth rested against his chest, her white hand on his shoulder. Her pulse beat gently in her pale throat. Her lips moved and she was half awake and dreaming. He realized that he had been praying through the night, praying and sleeping and praying again, fighting every ravaged fiber of his paralyzed body.

  Her breasts suddenly pressed against him. With a motion as natural as caressing an infant, she had reached behind his neck to hold him.

  He moved to gently push her back. But when his hands held her shoulder, they pulled her forward instead and he closed his eyes and grew dizzy in an intoxication that frightened him.

  “Oh, Eamon,” she whispered, crying. “Don’t deny me. For in denying me, you deny yourself.”

  In the full light of morning, they received an elegant breakfast. The leering bellboy, confused by the green hat on an undisturbed white bedspread, served cinnamon toast, omelette, and coffee with a silver service. But Eamon felt dead now, and he knew it. Elizabeth’s eyes were bleak as he escorted her back through the hotel lobby. She embraced him suddenly and then was gone, taking the Amtrak back to Norfolk.

  That was what precipitated the second, and ruinous breakdown. Somehow, after another suspension, he was able to focus on continuing his uncle’s work, and on Golgotha Falls. He passed from candidacy to the Society of Jesus, but the victory remained singularly hollow.

  As though to compensate for the suspensions, as though to test the remnants of his ties to Elizabeth, he began the long campaign to consecrate the fallen church at Golgotha Falls.

  The Jesuit examined his conscience to see whether he coveted glory in bringing the church back into sanctity. He admitted that he did, and prayed that Christ relieve him of that burden. He examined his heart to see whether there was not a trace of revenge in his need to purify the church, a revenge for the obscene defilement of his uncle. He conceded there was, and prayed to be relieved of that burden as well.

  But it wasn’t enough. Something lurked below these confessions. The success of the exorcism, he knew, depended on rooting it out. So he prayed that the dizzying happiness of being so close to woman also be removed from him, that the momentary pleasure he had known in Georgetown be expunged from his soul, that Christ strengthen him against his vulnerability.

  Slowly he began to dress.

  First he stripped off the trousers and flannel shirt, the briefs and shoes and socks. Using the cold water in the basin, he scrubbed his forearms, face, chest, and legs, soaping out the grit and paint. He lathered his hair and rinsed. He dried himself vigorously.

  From a nail protruding over the hall, he took the tunics of his office, wrapped in white cloth. He slipped on the alb trimmed in lace, reaching to his knees.

  “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my heart that, made white by the blood of the lamb, I may be able to serve You.”

  He tied the white tunic with the tasseled cincture.

  The black shoes were gleaming in the predawn gray light, and the black ridged biretta fit comfortably on his blond hair. The red chasuble was thick, brocaded, and stiff. The stole fit comfortably, reassuringly, behind his neck, embroidered with the archaic name of Christ.

  Strange, he thought. It was almost exactly a year since he had spent the night with Elizabeth.

  Moving out of his reverie, he saw Mario staring in disbelief at the doorway.

  “You look great, Father Malcolm. Unrecognizable.”

  Indeed, the Jesuit was transformed. The gold and silver of the cross at his neck, the gold stitching in the chasuble, the white tracery of the alb made him a visible representative of the Church.

  The Jesuit took a long pole from behind the armoire. He had wrapped it in a clean sheet. As he unrolled the silver pole, Mario saw it was topped by a small, heavy, ornate silver crucifix. He held himself erect, the crucifix before him.

  “The silver case, Mario,” he said in a different voice. “Bring it to the graveyard.”

  Mario reached under the cobwebs of the wall and hoisted a heavy case to his chest. The Jesuit walked steadily out into the open air. He was a magnificent figure in the crimson chasuble, like a creature
from another planet. He went slowly as though testing the earth, but Mario knew he was simply concentrating, focusing on the struggle ahead.

  The scent of decayed leaves and rotted fruit reminded Mario of the demented Lovell. Now the impassioned, barely repressed Jesuit before him was another of those priests whose missions border on the maniacal. It was an intuition by Mario, an observation of the tell-tale flickers at the eyes, the nervous fingers that belied the outward control. Mario knew priests. Their platitudes like ivy-covered snake pits of unconquerable ids. Maybe, just maybe, he thought, this priest, with emotions similar to Lovell’s, could really aid their research.

  In any case, the Jesuit was already sending out waves of fear and belief that Mario detected almost palpably in the sultry, sunless morning.

  At the graveyard path, Anita stood. She wore blue jeans and a white blouse trimmed in light blue.

  “Good morning, Father,” she said kindly. “Were you able to sleep?”

  The Jesuit did not answer, but pointed to the ground. Mario laid the case at his feet.

  “Please hold the crucifix,” he said to Mario, “but do not let it touch ground.”

  As Mario held the heavy pole, the Jesuit knelt down and opened the case. He pulled from the velvet linings the censer, brass and ornate with a fine mesh of interlocking design. In the plate of the censer, he dropped a small pile of resin grains. Then he lit them with a silver wick. The incense billowed up around his head.

  In the second compartment of the case was a stoppered chalice.

  “Mario, I will need you to hold the holy water.”

  Mario stared at him, blinking. The idea was vaguely indecent, considering his apostasy.

  “Do you expect me to be your altar boy?” Mario whispered.

  The Jesuit turned to him. His face was stern, the lines deepened, the eyes almost hollow from pain.

  “Mario, in the name of anything you love and hold sacred—”

  Mario licked his lips. He looked at Anita, and with a repressed expression of distaste, lifted the chalice of holy water.

  “Thank you, Mario.”