Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s one of the most distinguished groups ever assembled for a lecture.”

  Hendricks was baffled. A long-time supporter of Mario, once Mario’s professor before the student riots, Hendricks found his former teaching assistant had hardened over the years.

  “I don’t follow you at all,” he said softly.

  Mario rose to his elbows. The patient behind them groaned. Mario bent closer to Hendricks.

  “Because they all saw what you and I saw,” Mario whispered heatedly.

  “Of course they did. So what?”

  Mario came even closer, making sure no one else overheard him.

  “Those images were not on my slides or my tapes,” he hissed.

  Hendricks looked down at the floor, discomfited. Mario gripped the older man’s arm.

  “Understand what I’m saying? Those images did not come from my tapes!”

  Hendricks looked away. A nurse came to feed the adjacent patient a red capsule from a paper cup. She left on soft rubber-soled shoes. Hendricks watched where she had gone.

  “You don’t believe me,” Mario said.

  “I’d have to see the slides and tapes, Mario.” Hendricks looked back at Mario’s distraught face. “Where are they?” he asked, his face blank, signifying the absolute control he kept over his feelings.

  Mario shook his head. “I figure they’re still in the projection booth.”

  Hendricks stood up. “Well, I’m not sure what I hope to see on them,” he admitted. “What you’re saying is it was some kind of . . . what? . . . mass—”

  “Hallucination. That’s it exactly, Professor Hendricks. That’s why I need those affidavits.”

  Hendricks nodded sympathetically. They shook hands. “Get some rest,” he said gently. “You look very tired. When you’re feeling better, get the tapes and come see me. Okay, Mario?”

  “Sure. And thanks for dropping by.” Mario collapsed back onto the pillow. He was weaker than he had imagined. Of course Hendricks couldn’t believe what he had told him. He’d simply have to show him, face him with the evidence on the tapes. Mario sighed, mechanically picked up the newspaper. As he turned the political pages, a section he rarely read, an article caught his attention.

  A secretary to the Vatican financial office had been implicated in arrangements with Sicilian and Brazilian mobsters. There was a photograph of the cardinal involved, resplendent in ebony buttons and pectoral cross, holding his wide-brimmed hat in front of his face like a common criminal. Mario carefully ripped out the photograph. It summed up all the splendor, all the duplicity of that institution.

  The Church had an infinite talent for survival, despite its scandals, its heresies, its mercenaries and illegitimate Popes. What was its secret? How did it suck up generation after generation of sons for its medieval and arcane mysteries? Where did its energy come from?

  Mario was certain it came from repression. The id was subtly but inexorably metamorphosed with guilt, strange ideas of sexuality, and a host of neo-Freudian nightmares. Only one outlet was provided: reverence to Church authority. It was like hypnotism. A priest became a dreamer, and his images of salvation were but the measure of the id’s excruciating agony.

  Even a normal man, in solitary confinement, will hallucinate and grow dependent on his delusions.

  In isolation, pressurized beyond the normal psychic bounds, an id like Eamon Malcolm’s broke out and cast a materialized image of its self-contradictions and pain.

  Mario watched the rain pushing veils of wet dirt down the slanted skylight. He barely noticed the man in the adjacent bed being wheeled away for surgery. Instead, he tried to focus on Eamon Malcolm.

  Golgotha Falls, its peculiar terrain, its collective fears, its isolation, had twisted Bernard K. Lovell into a necrophiliac. Next it had cracked James Farrell Malcolm and turned him into a bestialist. But Eamon Malcolm, high-strung and highly educated, an idealist in a crude world, had suffered the most incomprehensible fate of all: he had metamorphosed into one of the most remarkable psychic transmitters ever known.

  Incredible as it seemed, he had cast his dream net of psychic obsessions over a distance of one hundred miles onto a hundred unsuspecting and sophisticated observers. Was it even remotely possible? If so, why? The images that had been manifest at the lecture were easily decipherable: dreamlike visions of lust and rage. The hostility and the abnormal sexuality appeared in Freudian, that is, disguised form. The stallion assaulting the fleeing man was most likely a metaphor for sexual jealousy and hatred of Mario.

  It was a silent psychic scream of pain.

  Eamon Malcolm was no doubt unconscious of all this. To him, it was still a moral battle between Christ and Satan, fought through his own unworthy mind and body.

  Two unsettling questions were left: Why such violent imagery in the lecture hall? Why not the cruciform shape, symbol of his salvation? Classically, the priest’s id should continue to sublimate its hostility into benign imagery.

  Unless something had changed in Golgotha Falls.

  Another question: were there other potential victims of the priest’s unconscious projections?

  For the first time, Mario began to feel that Anita might be in danger.

  Mario slipped from the hospital bed and reached for his dress shirt on a hook. It was still smeared where he had been wrestled to the auditorium floor.

  Dr. Cummins, a young physician, came into the ward.

  “Are you leaving, Mr. Gilbert?”

  Mario, buttoning his shirt, looked at him. It was an elegant face. The kind bred for generations on the estates of Long Island or Cape Cod, the private school education and impeccable diction, the kind Mario loathed.

  “I’ve got to retrieve something and get the hell out of here,” Mario said.

  Dr. Cummins was younger than Mario. Taken aback by Mario’s tone of voice, he grew flustered and looked down at his clipboard.

  “There was some question of a brain scan for epilepsy.”

  “I haven’t got epilepsy,” Mario said, slipping into his dress trousers. Unaccountably, they were striped with mud. Probably fell from the stretcher on the way out of the auditorium. All he remembered now was chaos and shooting red streaks in his vision.

  “Mr. Gilbert,” Dr. Cummins said, leaning forward slightly, “we think you are suffering from a form of hysteria. You are overworked and overmotivated about your project. You buckled emotionally.”

  Mario glared at him.

  “Is that your diagnosis?” he asked. “I had a breakdown?”

  Dr. Cummins licked his lips nervously.

  “You were taken screaming and incoherent from a lecture,” he said earnestly. “The next time might be even worse.”

  “What next time?”

  “Hallucinations. Violence. It could burst into a real epilepsy for all we know.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Fully dressed, Mario tried to push past the doctor.

  “You are advised to break off your project,” Dr. Cummins said, blocking the way. “I’ll give you tranquilizers. And we recommend psychotherapy.”

  Mario looked at him balefully. For an instant, Dr. Cummins thought Mario would throw a punch and he backed off.

  “It has nothing to do with my psyche,” Mario said. “It’s a kind of experience you don’t know anything about.”

  Mario pushed past Dr. Cummins toward the door.

  “Showing pornographic materials to a Harvard audience is hardly the behavior of a rational man!” Dr. Cummins shouted.

  Mario turned angrily at the door. “We’re dealing with irrational phenomena here, Doctor! But you wouldn’t understand!”

  Mario left quickly down the corridor.

  Dr. Cummins shouted after him, “At least have the decency to sign out!”

  Mario went into the blue elevator. The doors closed and took him down to the ground floor.

  It took fifteen minutes to run, slipping through mud and wet hedges, across t
o the campus.

  The projection room of the auditorium was locked. Angrily, Mario rattled the doorknob. Down below were crumpled papers and chalked handwriting on the blackboards.

  Mario pounded on the door and kicked it with frustration.

  The elderly man came into the auditorium, carrying slide boxes and sheets of paper in his arms.

  “Didn’t expect to see you again,” he muttered, fumbling for the key on a steel link chain at his belt.

  “I need my slides. My tapes,” Mario said eagerly, brushing the water out of his curled hair.

  The projectionist opened the door and carefully set the slides on a table next to twin interlocked projectors.

  “Visual material from old lectures are on that bottom shelf,” he said.

  Mario shoved the slide boxes around on the bottom shelf.

  “They’re not here,” he said.

  “Well, check inside the boxes. Sometimes things get mislabeled.”

  Mario plucked out the initial slides of several lecture programs. Engineering: hydraulic systems. Chemistry: polymers and chain structures. Metallurgy: metal fatigue. And a series from the architectural department: E. R. Robson and the London Board Schools.

  “They’re not here!” Mario yelled.

  “Well, maybe they got mixed up with today’s lectures.”

  Mario looked at the shelves next to the twin projectors. All the slide boxes were clearly labeled in other people’s handwriting. In any case, there were no plastic cassettes of the thermovision tapes or slide boxes.

  At that moment, the undergraduate audiovisual assistant, the one who had worked the projector at the lecture, entered pushing a trolley of acetate diagrams.

  Mario bounded up to him and seized his jacket lapels.

  “Where are they?” Mario demanded, inches from the boy’s face.

  “Where are what?”

  “My slides. My photographs and tapes.”

  Mario shoved him painfully against the wall. The undergraduate winced, his temples throbbing in fear.

  “I never touched them,” he protested.

  “Then who did?”

  “The campus police.”

  Mario very slowly eased back from the boy.

  “The campus cops?” Mario said incredulously.

  “Well, it was pornography.”

  Mario stared at the undergraduate with loathing, then stepped over the crumpling acetate sheets on the floor, and went quickly down the stairs.

  It was raining harder. A driving, malicious rain beating over his head and shoulders. Mud oozed from hedges, and umbrellas all over campus were being bent backward. A chill invaded him now. It did not ease when he entered the basement of the campus police department.

  Electric lights hung from the tall ceilings. Echoes wound through the cement corridors. On the walls were photostats of FBI-wanted terrorists.

  Campus police would remember him well. Three times they had dragged him screaming from occupying the president’s office. Twice, without warrants, they had searched his apartment for subversive material. It was two decades ago. But nobody forgot, not deep down.

  When Mario entered the corridor leading to the captain’s office, he recognized the lurid lighting, the slick and moldy smell of varnished furniture and wall damp, the endless tedium and melancholy of officers who secretly hated the intellectual life and once had hated him.

  The captain, a man in his mid-fifties with wrinkled eyelines and sharp gray eyes, received Mario right away. It was clear from his smirk that he knew what had happened at the lecture. He swiveled in his wooden chair, looking at the forlorn, dripping figure in front of him.

  “I’d love to nail you on a vice charge, Gilbert,” he grinned. “But nobody filed a complaint.”

  “I’ve come for my tapes. Campus cops were in the projection booth, and they took them. A witness saw them.”

  The captain raised an eyebrow, then pressed the button of the intercom. Soon a campus policeman came in and the two engaged in a whispered discussion. Mario had seen the charade before.

  “They’re not in lost-and-found,” the captain said. “And we don’t have ’em in our headquarters.”

  The tone of voice was final, flat and metallic. The captain rose and escorted Mario to the door.

  “I’ll sue you if I have to,” Mario said quietly. “You know I will.”

  The captain grinned and opened the door. “Fine, Gilbert. You just go do that.”

  Mario left sullenly. He felt the captain and the policeman watching after him with barely contained humor.

  Mario ran into the cold, pounding rain, into the sciences building, and down the long muddy corridor to Anita’s laboratory.

  A new padlock glinted on the door.

  Mario rattled it, but the padlock held firm. He ran to their stockroom and it, too, had a shining new padlock bolting the door into place.

  There were no windows to the parapsychology laboratory. There was no access through the physics department. It was an unheated cubicle that Dean Osborne had given Anita years ago, gradually transformed into a dense experimental chamber.

  Finally, Mario smashed at the padlock with a heavy red fire extinguisher, and chips of wood cracked and splintered onto the floor.

  “It’s no use, Mario,” he heard behind him. “Dean Osborne has closed you down.”

  Breathing hard, still holding the extinguisher, Mario turned and saw Henry, the black janitor, mopping the mud from the corridor.

  “Dean Osborne?” he said, barely audible.

  Henry nodded, avoiding Mario’s eyes.

  “After the lecture, he took everything out of your laboratory. Then he padlocked it. There was cops here and everything. I thought you’d killed somebody.”

  Mario sagged bleakly against the door.

  “He can’t do that. The project—my class—it’s authorized until the end of the semester.”

  “He done it.”

  Mario looked up slowly. Nervous, Henry edged away, sloshing the mop into the far corners of the hall.

  “What about my slides?” Mario whispered. “My tapes?”

  Henry shrugged but avoided Mario’s glare.

  “Better speak to Dean Osborne about them.”

  Mario continued to stare at him. Then he pushed himself from the wall, rubbed the rain from his face, and breathed heavily into his fists.

  A shudder ran through Mario’s back. Henry watched him go across the quad, then slowly up the white stone steps to the administration offices.

  Mario walked up the poorly lit corridor, heels echoing, to the pebbled glass of the door window that read: Sciences Administration, Dean Harvey Osborne.

  Mario opened the door. A soft whirr and clacking of electric typewriters ceased. The door closed behind him. Under an annoyingly blinking fluorescent light, the receptionist looked up, startled.

  “Mario Gilbert,” she smiled. “I thought you were in the hospital.”

  Mario bent forward onto the desk, leaning on both straight arms.

  “I want to see Dean Osborne,” he said coldly.

  Her smile faded. She spoke into the intercom. There was a whispered conversation. Then she gestured to a straight-backed, leather-covered chair under the wall clock.

  “Please be seated,” she said.

  As he sat there, dripping water into a puddle on the floor, he surveyed the bulletins stapled to a cork board, wire baskets of memoranda, the pigeonholes where faculty collected their mail. Where once a fireplace had been built, but was now boarded over, a scrolled, heavy safe with steel locks stood.

  “Is that where my slides and tapes are?” Mario asked.

  The receptionist stopped typing.

  “You’d better speak to Dean Osborne about that,” she said, and resumed her work.

  After twenty minutes, Dean Osborne’s door opened. A woman in her mid-forties, brunette and worried, emerged. Mario figured her for some mother pleading that her son not be kicked out of basic chemistry. Dean Osborne’s door closed.
r />   Then a skinny man with an unlit pipe barged past Mario and, unannounced, went into the dean’s office.

  Twenty-five minutes passed. Though it was only a little past noon, the rainy sky had turned the day to a dim twilight.

  An odd thought struck Mario: If Dean Osborne refused him his tapes, if the lecture went down as a debacle, ridiculed and unexamined, the results of the experiment at Golgotha Falls would never reach the outside world. Mario began to pace the area between the safe and faculty letter boxes.

  “Sooner or later, he’s going to see me,” Mario said slowly. “Tell him that.”

  The receptionist spoke a second time into the intercom. The skinny man with the unlit pipe came by, nodded and smiled, and went into the corridor.

  “You may go in now.”

  Mario headed toward the closed oak door, where gold letters spelled out Osborne’s name. On both sides, on the paneled walls, were portraits in oils of former deans and eminent Harvard alumni. The entire series of rooms, receptionist, mail room, and two secretaries’ rooms, fell silent as Mario walked by.

  When Mario opened the door, Dean Osborne was examining several papers against the waning light from the window.

  Mario closed the door behind him and sat in the chair in front of the massive desk.

  Dean Osborne frowned, initialed something on the two pages, then added a note at the bottom. It finally pleased him. He pressed a button. The receptionist came in, took the pages from him, and left. Dean Osborne swiveled to face Mario.

  “Mario,” he said amiably. “You no longer exist at Harvard.”

  Dean Osborne shoved a tabloid across the varnished desk top.

  PSYCHIC RESEARCHER FALLS TO EVIL INFLUENCE

  Mario Gilbert, a parapsychologist and lecturer at Harvard University, fell Thursday night to the evil influences of his own research. A lecture about the raising of wandering spirits in a remote north Massachusetts church turned to pandemonium when the young scientist fell screaming to the floor.

  Witnesses described his tongue as “swollen black” and others described him as “speaking in tongues” while in a “diabolic fit.”

  The incident occurred shortly after the presentation of pornographic slides taken at the project.