Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Now the audience sensed the undertone of attack in the lecture and began to settle in, taking the measure of Mario’s intellect.

  “The project at Golgotha Falls was an experimental model designed to test the ability of modern technology to crack that borderline between the material and the immaterial. In so doing, our notions of that borderline have received the kind of shock that alters the development of future method and experimentation.”

  The audience sensed now the high risk Mario put into the presentation. For a lecturer not on the tenure track to put grandiloquent claims to his research was a breach of university etiquette. That privilege was reserved for those who had received honorary chairs or national or international prizes. But the audience was game, and willing to give Mario the shot.

  Indeed, there was a rapt quiet in the lecture hall.

  “Could we project the large photographs, please?” he asked, sipping more water, checking his notes.

  The lights dimmed further. Men rustled in their chairs. Reporters bent over for the light of aisle lamps. Gradually it calmed.

  Behind Mario the sparkling screen lowered to the appropriate height. He could not see the person who fed the first photograph into the apparatus, but saw only the brightly illuminated hands and arms. He turned to face the screen.

  Spreading nearly ten feet across was a picture of Anita in a foamy bathtub.

  Nervous laughter began, died, then swelled as the audience realized Mario had taken the wrong batch of glossies.

  Mario felt sparks shooting at the sides of his vision.

  “The next photograph!” he said.

  Giggles continued, and men’s voices circulated through the room, causing women’s laughter.

  The next photograph showed Anita coyly sitting at the foot of Mario’s bed, knees apart, hand decorously placed, nude.

  There was more laughter, but it was slightly nervous.

  “I didn’t take those pictures!” Mario yelled, and ran to the edge of the stage.

  He saw a frightened undergraduate, trying to earn a minimum wage as an audiovisual operator.

  “Show the next one, damn it!” Mario said.

  There were more pictures. They showed Anita in a variety of poses. With a variety of household utensils. They were not coy. They were hard-core pornography and full of genital shots. The audience was shocked.

  Mario jumped down beside the projector. He grabbed the photographs and stared at them. They showed the cemetery at Golgotha Falls, the church, and the neighboring valleys.

  “I’m fucked,” Mario whispered. “What the hell is going on?”

  The audiovisual operator backed away, terrified he had lost his job.

  Mario violently signaled to the elderly operator in the booth behind the audience. By using his hands the operator asked whether to project the video or slides. Mario pointed his finger at the slides.

  Mario climbed back onto the stage. He drank long and hard from the glass of water.

  “That isn’t the kind of shock I had in mind,” he said. “I apologize completely. In all humility, I did not take those photographs. I am as completely repulsed by their puerility as are you. Please accept my most sincere apology.”

  The audience wavered, and settled restlessly into the plush of their chairs. They were making up their collective mind whether they had been insulted.

  “It was your associate, or should I say your mistress,” came Osborne’s chilly voice.

  Mario had the clammy sensation, at the back of his neck, that Osborne had somehow sabotaged the lecture. A violent rage flew upward before his eyes, so violent he knew that if it was true he would hunt the dean down and physically rend him.

  “The slides, please,” Mario said.

  The screen shifted upward, to take into account the larger projection format. A raucous cough broke out in the middle rows. The first slide, by mistake, was blinding white light. People hid their eyes. Then came the second slide.

  It showed a chameleon, the kind of white chameleon that had scuttled across the grounds at Golgotha Falls.

  Mario looked at his notes. He did not remember taking the slide and he could not now recall the purpose of the image.

  “Some of the local wildlife,” he said lamely. “Could we have the next image, please?”

  This time two chameleons on what seemed to be the church floor.

  Mystified, Mario stepped out from behind the lectern to see the entire projected image. The audience realized his puzzlement. Whatever was going on was morbidly fascinating. Mario raised his hand, indicating the next slide.

  The two chameleons were now much closer, one at the tail of the other.

  The next slide showed them mating, pressed belly to belly, with a slight froth of seminal slime visible at the rear of the female.

  The science editor of The New York Times excused himself to those around him and walked out.

  Mario turned to face the projection booth.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded. “I didn’t take those slides!”

  The elderly operator angrily held up the slide cartridge. It was unmistakably Mario’s.

  “Go to the end! Take one of the last slides!”

  It showed the rectum of a goat.

  Several women giggled. Several others left ostentatiously. The reporters had stopped trying to take notes. A few of the senior members of the faculty waited patiently, but the junior members were outraged.

  “What is this shit, Gilbert?” one of them asked plaintively.

  “I didn’t take these—”

  “Well, somebody did.”

  “J-Just a minute . . . P-Please don’t go—!” he pleaded.

  Mario held up his arms, trying to still the angry and ribald conversations, trying to keep people in their seats. The lights went on.

  “I d-don’t know any more than you what’s going on,” he said, fighting tears. “It’s uh weal nightmare—”

  The tongue was getting thick. The fever was growing. He felt as though he was floating.

  “The—thermovision—real good—” he stuttered.

  Shocked, concerned, yet strangely fascinated, the audience was transfixed by the catastrophe of a junior lecturer losing his career before their eyes. Even when the lights went down their eyes were as much fixed on Mario as on the screen.

  “Thermo-thermowision—it’s Christ—we caught it—we caught it—”

  Mario grabbed his throat, trying to work free the spasmodic pulses of the muscles at the base of his tongue.

  “Oh, God—it’s got me—!”

  On the screen the thermovision showed, in inverted colors, a horse galloping across deep grass, chasing a man. In horrified silence the audience saw the horse trap the man against a clapboard wall, leap high, and strike with its front hooves. There was a splash of crimson and an intake of breath in the audience. Repeatedly the horse reared high and came down, full force, on the dying man’s skull. Bits of brains splashed up against the wall. The eyeballs were ground into ruined sockets. The blood flowed over the hooves even in the air, and when they came down again there was less and less of a recognizable face. Only the arms fibrillated in nervous convulsions.

  It was undeniably, revoltingly, sickeningly real. Women made their way quickly to the exit. Even Dean Osborne went white. The reporters, hardened as they were, sat paralyzed by the utter viciousness of the moving image.

  “No—no—” Mario stuttered. “I d-d-didn’t—thermo—wermo—not mine—it followed me here—s-s-sick—s-s-sick—prick—prick—lick—”

  Mario’s tongue moved thickly, protruding from his mouth in a grotesque of the human face.

  “Greba—greba—wallsa—d-d-doonda—makoftoo—m-m-mammalia—yes—yes—yes—sweet Jesus—m-m-mary—togood—yeldaw —rallow—rallow—d-d-doonda—”

  Several of the men stood, unable to decide what to do.

  “P-p-p-rick—a—lick—s-s-sick sick—”

  A young man from the sociology department leaped to the stage, tryi
ng to restrain Mario.

  Mario battered at him with both fists in rage and frustration, eyes bulging, drooling.

  “It’s epilepsy,” the sociologist announced. “Could I have some help, please?”

  Several more men climbed with difficulty onto the stage. They seemed afraid of the wildly kicking Mario, trying to tear himself loose from their grasp as though he were drowning in the ocean.

  Mario saw their faces, their alien, blanched faces, come for him. It was the annihilation he had always feared. A man’s persona, the facade of the self-made man cannot endure certain assaults. Now it was caving in, and the brute animal rage was all that was left.

  In the fever Mario saw the thermovision, still running. As the men wrestled him down to the floor, as he choked on his own tongue, felt the bulging muscles constrict at his throat, he saw the black stallion with bloody feet bounding across the thick grass gloriously.

  “F-fitalta—magaserata—perima—hed—barestra—” Mario heard from a thousand miles away.

  “It’s not epilepsy,” said the sociologist.

  “Whatever it is, it’s got him good.”

  On the screen a white mare leaped furiously over the brush, saliva falling, pursued by those bloody hooves.

  Mario reached incoherently for that screened image, as though to ward off an icon, as though to preserve a lucidity that he was losing forever.

  “Gerosma—J-J-J-es—theralpy—o—theralpy—now—perima—ima—ima.”

  Mario did not feel the hands he saw pin him to the podium floor. Even the panic around him barely entered the fiery storm that had invaded his brain. There was only the ambiguous, suspended image of a cosmos that had suddenly disowned him.

  “Gentlemen,” said the sociologist, in awe, “he’s speaking in tongues.”

  On the glittering screen, distorted and elongated but all too clear, the long erectile penis of the horse flared out in crimson heat. On its hind legs it rose, a beast driven and yet triumphant, and the mare, trapped in the high brush, turned in wild-eyed fear.

  “G-G-G-Gerosma—meta—laffa—now—”

  “Anyway, so much for parapsychology,” muttered a reporter.

  Mario felt himself falling into the substructure of his personality. It was a psyche with a trick door, a weak foundation. He floundered in the primitive origins of soulless life, where rape and violation of being were the natural order, cruelty the mode of existence.

  At the bottom of the basement was complete blackness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Father Malcolm remained steadfast at his vigil inside the Church of Eternal Sorrows. It had been three days of solitary meditation and prayer.

  Anita brought him water and fruit and cheese, which he accepted absentmindedly. Sometimes he knelt in a mild trance and so she left the plate and cup at his side. He looked to be in no pain, but something was unresolved. He had lost so much weight he looked hollow at the eyes.

  Anita watched over him as he meditated. From time to time she adjusted the instruments, replaced the videotapes, or put fresh graph paper in the seismograph. The church interior was completely stabilized. The computer image showed the familiar, subtly iridescent, ambiguous cruciform shape.

  People had begun to gather, during the day and into the night, on the slopes around the church.

  At times Father Malcolm sang, and the plainchant tenor floated intimately among the pink and white blossoms. Sometimes the evensong was taken up by those watching. Sometimes the voices twirled unaccompanied through the irises and lilacs.

  The red altar lamp burned steadily, casting a delicate sheen on the Jesuit’s slightly thinning blond hair below.

  Around Golgotha Valley the plowed fields were covered in shoots and the dry, cool wind blew tiny buds across the hard ground. The ridges deepened into russet-colored autumnal foliage. An agricultural expert from the Haverford County Farmers’ Union came down in his green pickup truck to investigate the scintillating blooming plants of Golgotha Valley. Tests of the soil showed a low alkali content, and almost no breakup of the top layers. The nutrient level was unusually high for New England.

  Anita gathered testimony of other anomalous occurrences.

  From Dowson’s Repentance at the west end of Golgotha Valley the two remission cases were discharged from the clinic for the elderly. Subsequent blood counts in the leukemia showed slight fluctuation and then stabilization just within the proper range. The tuberculosis patient, an eighty-seven-year-old farmer named Henry “Hank” Edmondson, returned to his room in the house of his family on a knoll overlooking the dead town of Kidron. In their interviews with Anita they both told her they visualized clearly the rose hanging from its bush in the cemetery of the Church of Eternal Sorrows.

  Both were anxious to visit the church.

  Harvey Timms, aged eight, was deaf from birth, but he perceived rumbling deformations along the inmost of the ear bones in the ear canal. On Sunday afternoon he was in the kitchen of his home, taking lessons from the speech therapist from Dowson’s Repentance. The therapist held Harvey’s fingers against his throat, inducing him to make vocables. Harvey suddenly turned away and became impatient.

  It took half an hour through sign language to understand that the rumblings had suddenly grown defined. They were low-pitched rumblings with a metallic echo. Medical examination in Dowson’s Repentance showed no softening of the inner ear tissues. But coming home past Golgotha Falls, Harvey suddenly shrieked with delight.

  The Jesuit had been ringing the bell at the Church of Eternal Sorrows.

  Anita lay on her sleeping bag in the rectory. Outside the window the apple petals hovered, brushed against the crucifix, and beyond the fields the ridges steamed with soft traveling vapors. Mario would be back soon, she realized. The frayed fibers of their relationship would either reknit or sever.

  Mario had created a role for himself, aggressive, sexual, and almost frighteningly charming. But in the last two years, the role had trapped him. It seemed to him more important to humiliate Dean Osborne than to prepare a watertight case around the project.

  Father Malcolm represented a threat to Mario, not just because of his Catholicism, not just because of the home for wayward boys, but because Father Malcolm represented a level of personality development Mario had refused. Anita had taken Mario to the threshold of that level, to the interconnections of society and their immutable, mysterious operations, but Mario took one look at a world without physical risk, without the vigor of antagonism, unmediated by sex, and he became disgusted and withdrew.

  Anita fell into a light dream, a dream that had come to her three nights in succession. In that dream, a man of shadows came up a long path to the rectory door. He came from beyond the grave. He seemed to take off a hat and brush his hair back. He wanted to speak gently with her, saw that she might be asleep, and gradually he grew transparent, until Anita saw the church clearly through him.

  Then the dream faded. She was awake. She knew who the man was. It was the last memory she had of her father, the night he left for the airport. He had come into her bedroom, peered under the delicate canopied four-poster bed and mistakenly thought she was asleep. Rather than wake her he merely smiled, turned and left. She never saw him again. The airplane lost altitude out of Boston and ditched in the freezing Atlantic.

  Anita listened carefully to Father Malcolm’s quiet, melodic voice.

  According to the principles of the experimenter-effect, Mario’s absence and her presence might alter any of the findings in the instruments. For the subject of a study responds, semiconsciously, to the wishes and feelings of those near him. And what, semi­consciously, was she telling Father Malcolm now that Mario was gone?

  Did Anita believe in God? Did she earnestly desire to see Him? To find such undeniable proof of His existence that she need never be troubled by agnostic doubts again?

  Or would she feel satisfied with a kind of Heisenberg principle of uncertainty? Perhaps there was a zone in which powerful emotions, suggestibility, and th
e paranormal intersected, and became detectable at different times in different guises.

  The one connection in common, she realized, was love. Repressed love. Yearning love. Ethereal and sublimated love. Love of an ideal. Fear of love. The binding power of man’s ultimate need and ultimate weakness, love.

  Father Malcolm’s voice broke suddenly into a strangulated cry.

  “Anita—”

  Anita sat up abruptly. She dressed quickly and went to the church window. Father Malcolm still knelt on the floor, his hands composed on his lap. But his head was bowed at an angle, the face grimaced in agony.

  She ran into the church.

  “Father—”

  He seemed aware of her, but unable to turn. She walked down the aisle to see his face. His nostrils were flared, as though the church had an insufficiency of oxygen. His eyes showed white where the lids were partly raised.

  She leaned forward and touched his cheek.

  “Are you all right, Father?” she whispered.

  Suddenly, the lids flew open. The eyes were rolled back. Then slowly, he regained the power of focus. He saw Anita. He tried to smile and then squeezed her hand in his.

  “Everything is good, Anita,” he whispered.

  “I’m glad.”

  “Kneel, Anita!”

  Slowly she knelt at his side, hands on her thighs, and it seemed to comfort him.

  Father Malcolm lowered his head again, crossed himself, and listened. His head shook vigorously in a denial. His lips began moving. Anita leaned forward, but could not make out the words.

  “Pray, Anita,” he suddenly rasped, in pain.

  Confused, Anita tried to keep him from falling.

  “Please, Father, I—”

  “Pray!”

  Anita, feeling a terrible tension, folded her hands together. Then it was not so terrible, assuming the posture of prayer. It was like a posture of encouragement during group therapy. Or psychic concentration during yoga. Nevertheless, she felt in her guilt that some kind of irreparable divide was forming between her and Mario.