Mario dropped the tabloid into the wastebasket.
“I need my tapes and slides,” he said.
Dean Osborne shook his head.
“University property.”
“I made them, for Christ’s sake.”
“On Harvard equipment. For a Harvard project. Presented at Harvard. You know the rules.”
Mario rubbed his lips as though a foul taste had settled there. He leaned forward.
“I’ve got to have them,” he said softly.
“Why?”
“Because what is on those slides is not what you and one hundred other people saw.”
Dean Osborne’s face twitched. The austere facade of the scion of a distinguished New England family was cracking. In its place appeared a flushed and angry man personally humiliated, even threatened, by a debacle he had sponsored.
“What I saw was filth!”
“I know you did. But it’s not on the visual material.”
Dean Osborne swiveled away, trying to control his temper. Mario saw the vein pulse in the dean’s neck. Gradually he swiveled back, polite, chilly, and courteous as usual.
“What manner of nonsense are you presenting to me, Gilbert?” he asked.
Mario leaned forward to the desk, fingers jabbing the blotter for emphasis.
“Mass hallucination.”
Dean Osborne stared at him for a long time.
“It was a telepathic transmission of imagery!” Mario said enthusiastically. “From a source over one hundred miles away! And I can prove it if you’d only give me the slides!”
Dean Osborne shook his head. There was a look of disbelief in the older man’s face. Disbelief in Mario’s preposterous claims. Disbelief that he himself could have gotten caught in such a web of insanity. He did not know what to say.
“Dean Osborne,” Mario continued rapidly, “I have found a most extraordinary individual at Golgotha Falls. A Jesuit.”
The dean winced.
“A very intelligent man,” Mario went on. “But emotionally disturbed. Far more disturbed than even he understands.”
“That makes two of you.”
Mario took a deep breath, ignoring the dean’s sarcasm.
“The Jesuit, unconsciously, is the source of that imagery.”
Dean Osborne licked his lips. Mario realized the man had grown pale. An involvement with the Catholic Church only deepened the dean’s administrative embarrassment.
“That’s it?” Dean Osborne said, voice quivering. “This is the scientific breakthrough you bring me? This is what justifies making an ass of me in front of the press and our most distinguished faculty?”
Mario retreated to the back of his chair.
“I’ve already captured an image of one of his psychic obsessions,” he said defiantly.
Dean Osborne’s head jerked back.
“When? Where?” he challenged.
“On the videotape.”
“Mario, that videotape showed nothing but a horse battering the life out of some poor farmer!”
“Go and look!” Mario shouted.
Instead, Dean Osborne swiveled in alternate directions, then drummed his fingers on the massive arms of his chair. Mario was making him lose his temper. Dean Osborne felt a certain vulgarity rise inexorably inside him.
“What damn psychic obsession?” he asked.
“Christ. I recorded it at the climax of an exorcism. It’s an undeniable image of the cruciform shape!”
Dean Osborne had been involved in many disputes, met many men he disliked. But none had the power that Mario had for disturbing his equanimity. Something about the aggressive face made Dean Osborne want to smash it. Some deeper antagonism than an administrative humiliation brought out a deplorable lack of manners in the distinguished professor.
“Do you know what I think?” Dean Osborne asked.
“What?”
“That it’s all bullshit. And you are insane ”
Mario, furious, pounded a fist on the desk top.
“Go look at the visual materials!” he demanded. “Unless you’re afraid,” he added with sudden recognition.
Angrily, Dean Osborne stood up.
“Did you see those portraits out there as you entered?” he said quickly. “Eminent men. Substantial men. Men who have shaped our very thought. Men who have created our modern world. Nobel Prize winners. Deans of great universities. Men who split atoms and invented space travel.”
“They had their detractors, too.”
“Perhaps. But they didn’t traffic with sick priests, and dilapidated churches, and—and—mass hallucinations—”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s intellectually repugnant!” Dean Osborne said. “Mario, you are a has-been revolutionary, a perpetual student who got derailed in mid-identity crisis by old ladies at seances!”
Mario rose, tears in his eyes.
“You bastard,” he whispered. “Give me my tapes and slides!”
Dean Osborne sat heavily in his seat. He dumped tobacco ash into the wastebasket, over the crumpled tabloid. As far as he was concerned, Mario Gilbert did not exist.
Mario leaped forward and pounded both fists on the desk top.
“You can’t shut down an experiment because you don’t believe in its premise!” he shouted.
“Get out.”
“You participated in one of the most sensational events in the history of the paranormal and you won’t even examine the evidence!”
“GET OUT!”
Mario’s head snapped back at the bellow. The dean’s face was livid. Gone was all the gentlemanly politeness. Pure rage was left.
“Even if it were true,” he whispered hoarsely, “I would close you down. These psychic abnormalities repulse me, as they would every serious scientist.”
Mario backed toward the door, his eyes filled with tears of frustration and rage.
“Send Hendricks to Golgotha Falls,” he pleaded.
“No.”
“Come yourself. It’s a different world out there.”
“No.”
Dean Osborne hunched over the desk, pointing the pipe stem at Mario. “Your world deals with tea leaves and embroidered pillows. Sitar music and joss sticks. And that’s fine. If that’s what you want to do. But you can’t do it here.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t science!”
Mario, defeated, turned toward the door.
“I protected you for years. On Anita’s account. Well, I can’t do it anymore. Not with crap like you’re spewing. And sensational articles like this.”
Mario opened the door.
“I want that equipment, Gilbert!” Osborne called after him. “Bring it in by the end of the week.”
Mario turned sharply.
“A week?”
“That’s right. Your project is canceled. The cameras cost a fortune. So bring them in.”
“But I’m in the middle of a viable experiment!”
“Then rent your own equipment,” Dean Osborne said coolly. “Harvard needs it back.”
Mario stared at him, wide-eyed at the absolute antagonism directed at him.
“In perfect condition,” Dean Osborne added. “I’ll send the campus police in a week if I have to.”
Mario slammed the door so hard the oil portrait of Dean Osborne’s predecessor tilted on its wall.
The dean rose and straightened the painting. He deeply regretted having lost his temper. It had lowered him to Mario’s level. Loss of dignity was unforgivable. Gradually the austere orderliness of the office, its calm reassurance, restored his tranquility.
And a pang of guilt. For Mario Gilbert’s personal tragedy was that he had been protected long after everybody else got the message that parapsychology was being closed down all over the country. It was Dean Osborne who had shielded the laboratory. And not for scientific reasons. Personal reasons involving Anita’s mother.
Dean Osborne peered out through slightly parted blinds. Mario crossed the Yard toward muddy
streets. It looked almost as though the young man were crying. Dean Osborne let the blinds snap shut.
Mario was not only going to die academically, he was going to die alone. Dean Osborne had a strong premonition that things were changing between Anita and Mario. Otherwise it would have been Anita in the office arguing for the visual materials, and he would have found it nearly impossible to refuse her. Their splitting up would be the only positive outcome of the wretched Golgotha Falls project.
But the guilt did not die. Maybe he owed Mario a look at the slides.
Dean Osborne walked from his office to the steel safe. It was Friday. The staff had left early. He twirled the tumblers and the massive stubby door slid open.
Payroll checks. Legal drafts for an endowment. A piece of fiber optics shared between physics and biochemistry. On the highest shelf, a carton labeled Golgotha Falls containing three boxes of slides and two tape cassettes.
It was uncanny, the sheer driving force of curiosity. He had felt nothing like it since he himself had been a graduate student attending the lectures of the great B. F. Skinner and a whole new universe seemed to be opening for him personally. Dean Osborne perspired freely. If a man’s obsession could be recorded, even vaguely, suggestively, what extraordinary implications for the psychological sciences!
The emulsion of the slide gleamed almost green. Blue veils of reflections shimmered on the cassettes. Dean Osborne stared, hypnotized, his face trembling.
It was a fraud. Such ideas did not belong in a well-run administration. Mario was a crude showman, and Dean Osborne was damned if he was going to fall for any tricks. The screaming match had unpleasantly excited the dean’s imagination. But it didn’t work. Dean Osborne regained control of himself and slammed the steel door shut.
The evidence was swallowed up in the safe’s darkness. The tumblers clicked. Mario Gilbert did not exist. Golgotha Falls remained shut off from the world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the ridge of Golgotha Valley a screen of rain squalls all but obscured the town.
The clay banks crumbled into the swollen, swift Siloam, rising over the land and eroding the substructure of the church. The heavy rains flooded the cellars, disgorged iron tools and heavy glass jars from the days of Bernard Lovell. Bare iron of the old church gate was visible where mud washed away at the head of the church path.
Mario stood on the crest of the valley, peering down its length with a pair of binoculars, face nearly hidden by his yellow oilskin rain hood.
The flowers and blossoms of the trees seemed blasted away, dried and withered, curled and sodden; the ground littered with a black, tarry fruit fallen from the branches.
As the earth soaked in the rain, as the Siloam worked into the soft and porous earth, the graveyard was rising and sinking, and the tombstones were now irregularly tilted like broken teeth.
There was no sign of Anita.
The Jesuit’s Oldsmobile was gone. Even from the heights, Mario could see where the big car had sped wildly through the underbrush, gouging erratic ruts across the fields.
Rising from the eerie mass of blowing, bending, shrieking, rainwater-spraying brambles and dead trees, the main structure of the Church of Eternal Sorrows stood inviolate. Thick, brown layers of smoke curled around it, snakelike, from pyres in the valley.
All through the valley farms, small brown pillars of smoke rose, then abruptly flattened in the rain and wind, spread down onto the fields, toward the white church.
What had happened? Mario wondered, as he threaded his way through crushed brambles, dead vines, and thorn bushes. Visibility was terrible on the ridge. Fog and swirling rain mixed in conflicting gusts over the dripping, hollow birch woods. Mario put the binoculars back into his raincoat pocket and got into the Volkswagen.
The van spun its wheels in the mud. Brown streaks smeared the panels and the grill. Great clumps of mud clung to the bumpers. When Mario crossed down into the valley, there was no fog or rain, only a metallic, low cloud cover.
The church was sealed within its valley, curtained from the neighboring valleys.
Mario parked the Volkswagen at the loop of the road, on firmer soil.
As he trod down, his boots left sucking gouges in the soil. The withered blossoms and dead, brown irises had drifted over the rocks and slimy clay, as though victims on some kind of battlefield.
“Anita!” Mario yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth.
He stumbled. At his boots the rain and shifting earth had disgorged remnants of the women’s clothing and the deformed crucifix, once burned and then buried. All that was left of Christ’s image was a long leg and a molten, grimaced face.
“ANITA!”
There was no response. The streets of Golgotha Falls were deserted. Only the dogs roamed there, backs hunched, tails low between their legs.
Dead birds, victims of an altered migratory instinct, now littered the base of the bell steeple.
Mario pulled a red plastic flashlight from his raincoat pocket and stepped over warped bits of iron toward the church.
As he stood in the dank vestibule, he played the yellow beam slowly down the interior.
In the dark twilight, glinting when struck by the flashlight beam, were twelve cruciform shapes on the walls: Father Malcolm’s chrismed consecration.
The altar lamp gave off a sickly ocher light that flickered weakly onto the floor and walls. Mario walked down the aisle and shined the light into the altar lamp. A heavy black floss hung down from it, making it look almost genital. There was an odor of creosote.
In the apse the seismograph drum continued feebly to turn, though the paper had long come to an end, and the inked pen kept inscribing more lines on an already dense and unreadable black mess.
“ANITA!” he called.
An echo took up the name, transformed it, and sent it reverberating through the rafters.
—ni-ta ni-ta . . . ni-ta . . .
It was a slurred echo. Was it Mario’s voice?
“ANITA!”
—ni-ta . . . ni . . . ta . . .
A lugubrious, doleful mockery of his call.
Mario walked past the seismograph. The sound recording system was weakly on, the battery light low and flickering.
The laser camera stood, leaning backward against a wall. Blue mold grew up its cables, glittering under Mario’s flashlight beam.
. . . ni . . . ta . . . ni . . . ta . . .
An echo now without an initial sound? Or had he called again?
Mario swept the ceiling with the flashlight beam. Where the rainwater had broken through, the black floss hung down in clumps.
The flashlight beam struck the thermovision. A cross had been inscribed in its light coating of dust. Upside down.
Mario strode over the littered floor toward the thermovision camera. His boots crushed berrylike fruits and broken glass. A heavy, oily tar leaked from the broken fruits, and smelled of the creosote.
Quickly, he flicked on the thermovision. The batteries were still operative. The viewing lens showed the interior architecture, cold and stable, with convection currents of colder winds from outside.
When Mario flipped the toggle switch to tape, the attached video screen showed only the same dark, brooding interior. The tape was frozen at its last image, having run to the end of its spool. Mario switched the tape into reverse. A melange of varicolored images glittered on the screen.
Mario flicked the switch. The tape stopped.
A squealing sound caused Mario to play the flashlight beam around the church. On the altar linen, popping in and out of the flashlight beam, tiny mice ran in and out of the tabernacle.
“ANITA!”
Came the soft, diminuendo echo.
. . . ita . . . ita . . . whore . . . whore . . .
Mario’s eyes gravitated to the thermovision. It was inching very slowly backward of its own volition, pushing different visualizations onto the screen.
Mario put his beam on the convex screen. The tape inched in reve
rse, toward a violent flux, and a slow flicker of maroon. Mario flicked off the flashlight. In the dark church the imagery came sharper, highly defined, unmistakable.
The coils of form resolved into an image: a shaggy beastlike form on a chair, head cocked, and a black crucifix across its knees.
Mario instantly punched the silver button, freezing the image.
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured, sitting very slowly, staring.
Mario played the videotape backward and forward. The images of the beast appeared for only a few frames, about as long as the cruciform shape had lasted.
The beast seemed cognizant, mocking, grinning insolently.
Mario abruptly left the church.
He slogged through the thistles blown against the church foundation, pushing toward the rectory.
On the rectory floor was Anita’s sleeping bag. It was ripped by tiny claws, the stuffing floated through the kitchen, and bits of canvas were scattered over the table, sills, and chairs.
“ANITA!” Mario roared.
There was no answer. Only the smoke-filled wind. Mario stepped over broken branches at the rectory threshold and stomped into the kitchen. The Jesuit’s mattress was a nest of small willow snakes, curled and snuggled into the molded canvas for warmth.
The aspergill, used to dash holy water from its vial, lay on the floor, broken by panicked feet. Everywhere the kitchen dishes, towels, and food packages had been tossed, as though someone had fled in hysteria through the rectory toward the waiting Oldsmobile.
When Mario looked out the kitchen window at the ruts and ripped segments of underbrush left by the escaping Oldsmobile, he saw the vial of holy water, the vial of sacramental oil, and bits of the wooden container, scattered in the grass and mud.
Mario crossed through the rectory, back onto the south path of the church.
In the darkness, he saw the silhouettes of farmers dragging an object to a smoky pyre. It did not take long to realize what it was: a dead newborn calf, hideously deformed. With stern, passionless faces, the farmers heaved the mutant onto the fire and watched it burn. Several carried shotguns and looked anxiously over their shoulders.
As Mario passed the church windows, he saw the image of the beast, back-illuminated in the thermovision screen. By a trick of the angle it seemed to regard him as he walked.
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