Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Father Malcolm turned to Anita as though for help. But she only looked away again, unable to halt Mario’s determination. Father Malcolm felt Mario turning him around again.

  “You don’t believe in psychic projection, do you?” Mario shouted. “You really think this is Jesus Christ!”

  “Give me the tape, Mario!”

  “Go to hell, priest.”

  Father Malcolm moved to the arena of the blue lamps. One by one, he sent them crashing onto the church floor. The bulbs were so hot behind the cobalt coating that they exploded, sending heated slivers over the Jesuit’s legs.

  “I shall not go to hell,” he said decisively. “Nor shall this church.”

  Father Malcolm strode across the center of the church and began casting down the hot lamps there.

  Suddenly, Mario’s bulk crashed into him and a beefy forearm pinned the Jesuit’s throat to the church wall.

  “You bastard,” Mario hissed, eyes demoniac with rage. The Jesuit felt specks of red invade his vision, and breath came with difficulty. Vaguely, he saw Mario brandishing the tape cassette in front of his face.

  “Look on this tape, priest!” Mario yelled, inches from the Jesuit’s face. “I’ve taken the measure and shape of your belief! I’ve sealed it in a magnetic ribbon! Men swore by these images once. They’ll swear by them again, but not in your churches! In universities, in scientific institutes! Wherever free men gather in liberty to analyze the nature of man and his universe!”

  Mario released his pressure. The Jesuit crumpled slightly but did not fall, merely rubbing his bruised throat.

  “You are a vain, egotistical fool,” Father Malcolm shouted, suddenly breaking Mario’s grip. Circling around to the altar, eyes on Mario, rubbing his throat, he looked like a wolf dispossessed. Then his eyes fastened upon the altar, saw that it had been moved. For an instant, there was no sound but the rumbling of the generator. In the ghastly blue-white light, his hands and face looked like marble.

  “What have you done?” he said softly.

  “Oh, that. One of the lights got caught in the cables and fell.”

  Father Malcolm reached under the linen. The contact between the altar and its base was shifted.

  “YOU’VE BROKEN ITS CONTACT!” Father Malcolm roared.

  “I NEEDED THE SPACE!”

  Father Malcolm pointed a trembling finger at Mario.

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I know who you work for!”

  Father Malcolm advanced steadily under the altar lamp. He seized the videotapes and slides. Mario was suddenly all over him. The visual material clattered over the floor.

  Father Malcolm reached for the computer. Horrified, Mario leaped on him.

  Anita ran forward, but Mario shook her off. The Jesuit struggled forward, scattering electrodes and circuitry plates.

  Mario grabbed the priest’s blond hair in one hand. With the other, he slapped the livid cheeks, again and again. The Jesuit’s hands uselessly tried to protect his face. His lips spattered with blood. Mario held the man’s head, pushed and pulled the Jesuit clear down the aisle to the vestibule, slapping him with resounding cracks.

  “Mario!” Anita yelled.

  Mario shook the priest like a rag doll and threw him into the vestibule. Father Malcolm crashed against the holy water font, tried to hang on to it, and collapsed.

  Mario watched, a savage glint in his eyes.

  “Don’t you ever try that again,” he whispered.

  “Father Malcolm—” Anita cried.

  She ran past Mario and knelt beside the Jesuit as he moaned in humiliation and physical pain.

  “Leave the bastard alone,” Mario said.

  “Mario, get out of here!” Anita ordered harshly.

  “I’m not leaving my equipment while he’s here.”

  “Don’t worry about your equipment. I’m staying!”

  Mario stared at her. She was still holding the body of the Jesuit, who was trying to pull himself upright. A grim, awful realization went through Mario.

  “With him?” he asked slowly.

  Father Malcolm daubed at his nostrils. Crimson leaked down on his fingers. Involuntarily, horrified, he looked down at the holy water. The surface there contained great spreading stains of red.

  Father Malcolm crossed himself weakly.

  “I’m not leaving you here,” Mario insisted.

  “I’m not going to Harvard with you, or anywhere with you,” Anita said softly, resolutely, her eyes filling with tears. “Mario, you’ve gone completely manic. This church has gotten to you! You’ve been changed by something you can’t control!”

  The memory flashed into Mario’s brain. The invading shudder at the exorcism’s climax. A sense that it was more than a sympathetic muscular spasm.

  “Crap!”

  Anita looked hard at Mario.

  “I’m staying, Mario.”

  “When I met you,” he said coldly, “you had the best scientific mind I’d ever met. Like some dancing computer, Anita. I never dreamed you could go soft. Not after all you taught me.”

  “I’m not demanding anything from you, Mario, but common human decency!”

  Mario, outraged, fumbled for words.

  “You’ve fallen for his blood of the lamb epistemology!” he yelled. “You never lost your discipline before! What the hell has happened to you?”

  Anita turned from him.

  “Leave us alone, Mario,” she said.

  Mario hesitated, then put the tape into a satchel containing other videotapes and slide boxes. An indefinable mixture of pain, anguish, and outright anger passed over his face. It was not the first time they had fought and split. It was the worst.

  “Will you be here when I come back?” he asked.

  “I told you, I’ll watch the equipment.”

  He glared at her, found nothing more to say, then looked down at the dazed Jesuit.

  “Father,” Mario said.

  “Leave him alone, Mario.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Father. She’s really quite nice.”

  Father Malcolm looked up, confused. Mario winked conspira-torially, and leaned forward.

  “Like dipping it in warm honey.”

  “You bastard,” Anita hissed.

  Mario laughed crudely, then turned and charged out of the church into the dark. Soon, the echo of the Volkswagen floated over the valley.

  Anita helped Father Malcolm to his feet.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “I want to apologize for Mario, Father. He likes to hurt when he’s angry.”

  Father Malcolm said nothing.

  The generator ran out of gasoline. The rumble growled in a deeper tone, gasped, coughed, and finally died. Alone together, Father Malcolm and Anita saw the lights within the church begin to fade. Orange, and then red, and finally, like an infinitely bloody sunset, the lights cooled and extinguished. Only the gentle altar lamp illumined the interior, calm and imperturbable.

  A rising wind disturbed the birch woods. Milkweed floated restlessly past them at the church door.

  “Blood has been spilled—the altar profaned,” he said softly. “There is much to atone for. I had better perform a vigil.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes. And every night until it’s cleansed.”

  “All by yourself, Father?” she asked.

  “I am in no danger,” he said. “The church and its grounds are sanctified.”

  Nevertheless, the rising wind shook the birch trees, swayed the bushes across the river and rippled in the distant farms. Only in the compound of the church and its consecrated ground was it still.

  The rose in the cemetery hung still, heavy, looking black as dried blood in the night.

  Father Malcolm pulled a cardboard box from the north wall. From it he took long white candles and fit them into the candle­holders behind the altar.

  Anita scooped t
he broken glass into a crate, using a file folder. The gasoline stench was nearly gone. She picked up the fallen light stands and pushed them against the wall.

  In the computer image, silent and flickering, was the crucified shape. The interference had returned now the lights were gone. Anita could make out its ambiguous, rounded volumes.

  Father Malcolm cleared the area around the altar. She watched. He sank to his knees, crossed himself, and composed himself.

  The rising wind buffeted the adjacent fields. Anita anxiously paced the floor. The ions in the atmosphere wreaked havoc with the computer, throwing random arcs of flux through the image, obliterating it.

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right, Father?”

  “Yes, Anita. You may sleep in the rectory, if you wish.”

  After a while, Anita went through the vestibule and into the night. She was still angry at Mario, and dragged the sleeping bag toward the rectory, wondering what devil had gotten into him.

  She suddenly stopped, appalled. The metaphor, though unconscious, was too apt for comfort. A chill swept through her as the sonorous litany of Father Malcolm, the devil’s adversary, echoed through the Church of Eternal Sorrows.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mario lay on the bed in his tiny laboratory. A fever had somehow lodged in his throat. Everything sounded as though he was hearing it underwater. His heart raced, beating against his chest wall. What the hell is going on? he wondered. I’m thirty-eight years old and in perfect health. Am I having a stroke?

  Outside the laboratory a man operated a power floor polisher. An aged black whom Mario had befriended years ago, the man had provided him with access to the building during the campus strikes. Mario reflected fondly on those days. In Dean Osborne’s office handling a megaphone. Tear gas down through the Yard. Everything was so easy then. It was like floating downriver. None of these complications.

  Golgotha Falls dominated Mario. It breathed somehow in his liver like a live virus. It seemed to pound through the blood in his head. He was so close, so damn close to the ultimate nature of psychic projection.

  Groggily he took more aspirin, some Contac, and seltzer water. When he flushed the toilet at the side of the lab, he thought the noise would tear his head off. Under the table of slides, videotapes, and catalogued photographs were barbells of cast iron. He rolled them away with his foot and examined the material.

  Three cartridges of color slides, most of which were well exposed, the rest at least good enough for documentary work. The valley of Golgotha Falls, its altered season, the Siloam before and after the exorcism, the rose bush in the cemetery, and the interior of the church as they had first seen it, cluttered with rotted women’s clothing and fallen debris. Developed in Boston on a rush order, for which Mario wrote a check that was not, so far as he knew, good.

  Two brown plastic cases of videotapes. One transferred from the laser camera, showing architectural stress behind the Jesuit. The other, where Mario’s fingers lovingly rested, were the thermovision cassettes of the exorcism itself, including the first viridian suspended image in a cruciform structure, and the halogen-enhanced image.

  Large glossy photographs had been blown up from details Anita had taken of their equipment, the consecration of the cemetery showing the dead rose bush, and comparative photos showing the difference in ecology between Golgotha Falls and all its neighboring valleys.

  In addition he had a rough chart, on graph paper, of the precise times of sound events and seismic variations. He doubted the subcommittee wanted to get that detailed. The important thing was that they be enthused about the project and convinced it was a mere matter of months before the shield was ripped away from the image residing beside the altar and its true nature identified.

  He pored through five pages of neatly typed lecture. There were a couple of marginal notes to stress the Algonquin angle, since one of the faculty was from anthropology. The rest was tight as a Ph.D.’s asshole on dissertation defense day.

  Something was wrong with his body. There was a coldness in the pit of his stomach, an unnatural coldness. It came upward from his groin in slow pulses.

  Mario wore his tweed jacket. He brushed his unruly thick hair back. The slim black tie was ten years old, but suddenly back in fashion. He knew he looked damned good. It was irrelevant to science, but subtly important in public addresses. Mario had extended the invitation to the entire faculty committee and the Crimson and four New England newspapers. He had ordered wine and cheese for seventy and hoped that at least ten might show.

  “Well,” he muttered. “Freud, Nietzsche, and Gilbert, or do I wash out completely? Once and for all.”

  He gathered the material, clutched it against his side and left the laboratory.

  “Good luck,” said the black at the floor polisher.

  “Thanks, old friend. I’ll damn well need it.”

  Through the glass door Mario pushed his way into a bush-lined pathway under the campus lights. So close to success, he had never felt himself so nervous. He felt nearly faint, dry-mouthed. For an instant he was disoriented. He tried to tell himself there would be other projects, were this to fail, but he knew this was the watershed.

  As he walked past the library he reflected that Anita would have been a great asset at a function like this. He depended on her social graces, her family clout with the faculty. Well, she could stew in Golgotha Falls with the litanies of a loony.

  Suddenly he had the profound sensation that he was not really at Harvard at all. Instead he was at Golgotha Falls. It was as though he had become pure spirit, bodiless, among the night lights. Then the feeling passed.

  He ran up the cement steps into the lecture building and skipped up two floors to Room 220. His heart sank. Next to the black sign with movable white letters that read:

  An Assault on the Fourth Dimension

  Frontiers of the Paranormal: An

  Investigation of the Limits of Physical Science

  at Golgotha Falls

  were nearly one hundred faculty, graduate students, and several hard-bitten types, among whom he recognized the science editor of The New York Times.

  Before they greeted him he turned wildly to the men’s room because he knew he was going to vomit. Instead, the science editor approached and extended his hand.

  “A biochemist in nucleic acids, the recipient of the Bollington Prize, gave his acceptance speech tonight. We heard you were giving a lecture. Decided to stick around after the sherry. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “I’m flattered beyond describing.”

  Mario hoped his voice came out natural. The science editor smiled coldly and walked away into the crowd. Several reporters, having followed the more notable faculty, crowded around a white cloth-­covered table on which the refreshments looked meager indeed.

  Dean Osborne emerged from the loud confusion of voices greeting one another.

  “Where’s Anita?” he asked.

  “She’s home with the kids.”

  “You haven’t split up, have you?”

  “Listen. Can all these people fit inside?”

  “Sure. They don’t perspire much.”

  Mario counted the crowd roughly. There were over a hundred. After the acceptance speech of the biochemist, he would have his first real chance of rising to that level of credibility. Or drowning forever, judged mediocre once and for all. Hugging his material, recognizing a few of the graduate physicists and shaking hands, Mario pushed into the lecture hall.

  It was all too real now. The green sliding chalkboards. The overhead projector at his disposal. A secretary’s handwritten chalk script bearing his name and the title of the lecture. Twelve rows of plush brown chairs leading down to the lectern. Video cameras for in-house documentation.

  It was everything he had waited for. Mario sensed the bright radiance of the fluorescent lights overhead, a kind of visual analogue to the panic that flourished in his nerves, yet he thrived on it. It was better than speed. Mario went to the projection booth.


  An elderly man waited there, received the slide cartridges, then the videotapes, with Mario’s instructions. At the overhead projector he switched the mirror plate so it could throw a reasonable facsimile of the glossies onto a sparkling screen. Mario stepped behind the lectern and leaned toward the microphone.

  “Ready. Ready. Golgotha Falls,” he intoned.

  The elderly man adjusted the sound intake and signaled that he was ready.

  Mario’s eyes swept the empty, waiting seats, depersonalized and yet intoxicatingly hostile. All those mentalities, he reflected. Confused, resistant, prejudiced, untrained, or hypocritical. He had to penetrate each and every one. He had to fuck those minds and seed them with the idea of Golgotha Falls.

  “Okay,” he said into the microphone. “Let the bulls in.”

  The faculty came in first, in blocks, wearing suits. They naturally took the first rows and seated themselves with ease. Graduate students came next, both the short-haired ambitious types anxious to know what the latest venture was and long-haired, slovenly refugees of a past era looking to find anything at all to do. Several women came in together, pert, smart, and subtly aggressive, holding icy smiles and chatting with feigned irrelevance. Barracudas all, Mario thought.

  After ten minutes the elderly man turned the rheostat and the house dimmed. A glow from the roof permitted the taking of notes. Several of the women used pen lights.

  “The kind of biochemistry that was just explained at least partially to you in the Bollington lecture,” Mario began, “is an example of the extraordinary diversity of contemporary physical science. It has gained that diversity and that unprecedented expertise through series after series of shocks to its basic and most prized assumptions. Since the development of the experimental model, roughly during the Renaissance, assumption after assumption has had to be expelled in the face of sheer documentary and experimental data. Perhaps no assumption has been more deeply held until now than the materiality of temporal events.”

  Mario sipped from the glass of water on the edge of the lectern. The audience was engaged, with him, even rooting for him. They were not immune to ideas.

  “Until now,” he continued boldly, “any occurrence of immateriality was confined to the experience commonly called religious. In fact, religion may be said to be nothing more than an organized control over the experience of the immaterial.”