The thermovision showed the deep viridian green of the cold church flowing into the figure of the Jesuit, filling it entirely.
“What—? What’s happening—?”
Mario backed away, tripped over braided cables, and crashed downward through clipboards, coffee cups, and blank videotapes. The figure on the church floor rose. The Jesuit’s blue eyes faded. Deep inside was a glow of pure evil, the red of molten lava. Mario stared at Eamon Malcolm’s lips pulled back in a death-head’s rictus —a hypnotic amalgam of satanic derision and amusement.
Trembling spasmodically, Mario could not choke forth the scream of terror that welled from the depths of his soul. He stared at the screen, groping desperately for a logical answer. The Jesuit’s projection had undoubtedly gotten into his own mind as well as the infrared tape. Worse than the invading fever at the exorcism, stronger than the mass hallucinations at the lecture, Mario felt the full force of an undisguised psychic hatred emanating from the Jesuit.
Through a roaming, unstable haze of warped vision, Mario warily watched Eamon Malcolm at the altar.
. . . Evil . . . Evil . . . Evil . . .
The Jesuit’s lips did not move. But the sound system needle moved. The projections were audible.
The Jesuit then deftly sliced a thin bloodline in his palm with a shard of the altar lamp glass. A drop fell into the wine. A second drop he rubbed around the paten until it was thoroughly melded into the ornamental scrollwork.
“You’re defiling your own mass, you fool!” Mario stammered weakly.
The figure was lost in its private nightmare. But the nightmare was contagious. Mario felt the room undulate slowly, as the Jesuit rustled down the aisle and washed the bloodied hand in the holy water font in the vestibule. Mario staggered after him, holding on to the pillar.
“Come back, goddamnit!” he shouted, fighting the disorientation. “I’m not through with you!”
The Jesuit glanced at him. It was a glance from a different planet. Malign eyes narrowed at him. In his fist was a black revolver. Mario recognized it as his. Mario backed away.
“I am through with you,” Eamon said simply.
The disorientation returned in a savage rush, multiplied by panic. Mario edged backward past his instruments. The red glint in the priest’s eyes was the color of drops of blood.
. . . Evil . . . is the . . . systematic breakdown of good . . . in a man . . .
Again, the lips did not move. The church echoed sounds thought, not uttered. Eamon followed Mario carefully through the shadows of the instruments.
“We . . . we could use each other—” Mario said lamely, white and shaking.
Eamon grinned knowingly.
“I don’t need you at all,” he said, raising the revolver in both hands.
Mario tripped. Something struck him on the head. It was the thermovision lens. The thermovision was disgorging images. Cruciform shapes, goatheads, and through it all, the skeletal figure desperately raising the crucifix on a mission not of this earth.
A shot rang out. Mario heard the bullet whistle down the Gothic nave.
The seismographic paper unrolled, hiccuping over the church floor.
“Oh, Jesus—” Mario blurted. “My instruments—”
Mario’s final defense, his final retreat, collapsed with the sight of instruments in revolt, of science under the power of illusion.
Mario crashed over the sound recording system. The playback was on.
Gerasma—J-J-J-es—theralpy—o—theralpy—now—perima—ima—ima—
It was his own voice, speaking in tongues, on the Harvard auditorium floor.
G-G-G-Gerasma—meta—laffa—now—
“NO!” Mario screamed.
The needle in the temperature recording system moved back and forth, back and forth, lazily swinging, under the control of the Jesuit.
Eamon grinned. A bluish vapor was expelled from his lips. As he raised the revolver a second time, Mario saw that the color of the blue luminescences was the same as the Jesuit’s breath.
Objective reality and psychic distortion suddenly fused.
Mario found himself running, running out of the vestibule, sucking in great draughts of chill night air.
“Anita! Anita! Help me!” he yelled, all semblance of rational control gone.
Mario tripped on the church path. In the doorway, Eamon stood. The visage was barely human. It had the malevolence of the goat-head. Very slowly, it raised its revolver in a preternatural, steady fist.
“Thank you, sucker! You’ve done your job well!”
Lightning flashed, the Jesuit’s eyes glistened red, and the valley echoed with his savage, resonant laughter as the gun discharged.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Vatican jet reached a cruising height of 34,000 feet and swung out over the Atlantic Ocean.
In the forward cabin sat six Jesuits, an administrative assistant, and the undersecretary of state for the Vatican. The Jesuits busily typed or wrote at their desks or conversed in whispers. The undersecretary and his assistant penciled notations on the Quebec agenda.
In the rear cabin, two suede chairs were embossed with the crown and keys. On the left sat Cardinal Bellocchio writing paragraphs in the margins of typed documents. He snapped his fingers and a Jesuit came immediately. Soon the clicking of the typewriter filled the air.
In the other chair, Francis Xavier removed his spectacles, rubbing the bridge of the nose, letting his documents down to the desk top.
“Such heavenly perfection,” he mused, staring at the clouds tinged pink and orange in the early evening sun-glow. “Such confusion below.”
Cardinal Bellocchi smiled. “True, Your Holiness. Our mission is to dispel that confusion.”
Francis Xavier sank into a fatigued, somnolent state, at rest and warm in the sunlight piercing the double thickness of the window. Visions from the past came to his mind.
A scene from San Rignazzi: an explosion of black snakes, escaping from white rocks under the olive groves.
It was the afternoon, over forty years ago, that Guido Baldoni, the uncle of Giacomo, scythed in half a nest of vipers in the heat of the sun. The slender, deeply religious peasant screamed and ran into San Rignazzi. Bitten thrice on one leg and twice in the arm, he fell shivering like a dog at the church door. Then he went into deeper convulsions and died with a fire in his brain.
It was the first time Giacomo saw Satan.
Another scene from the sterile, hot land: Giacomo’s neighbor, a mother of a priest, wrapped in black rags and throttled in her own sputum, writhing on a mattress of straw. Over the mottled wall at her face moved a winged shadow. Giacomo had seen it before: over his uncle’s dead body. When the wings settled on the woman, she stopped breathing.
The bitter struggle to win back territory for Christ was filled with setbacks. In the spiders infesting the sacks of olives, in the death of unbaptised infants, in the rotted trunks of diseased groves, young Giacomo saw the steady advance of Satan in the landscape.
The song of Satan burbled up from the gorges where black rivers sped past twisted dead trees and white rock.
Sun-bleached bones of goats shimmered triumphantly with flies in the hills.
The Vatican jet jolted in a turbulence. Francis Xavier saw Cardinal Bellocchi leaning toward him, gently touching his arm.
“You have slept, Your Holiness.”
Francis Xavier rubbed his eyes.
“I dreamed I was a child again in San Rignazzi. The child perceives the evil and the Christlike with pure eyes.”
Cardinal Bellocchi smiled. Francis Xavier drifted into a calm, receptive state.
A scene from Bologna seminary: the headstrong Sicilian priest, Giacomo Baldoni, late at night in the sweltering library, trapped by clever Jesuit debaters into a position of heresy.
Returning to San Rignazzi, he saw the winged shadow resting on his father’s coat. That midnight, the powerful peasant Luigi Baldoni, rising from bed, began to scream. Spitting blood, he stumbled crashing among kit
chen plates, kicking through iron kettles, but the lungs ruptured more swiftly than seemed possible. Giacomo’s father fell, stretched halfway into the dusty street of San Rignazzi, over fifty yards from the church.
The winged shadow, as it faded into the opposite alley, looked back at the priest Giacomo with a knowing smile.
“Your Holiness,” whispered the assistant to the Pope.
Startled, Francis Xavier opened his eyes. Then, with a gracious smile, he took the sheaf of papers, read through them cursorily, and initialed them. The assistant bowed and took them into the forward cabin.
The Vatican jet bumped gently into dance wisps of cloud and then burst into the maroon sunset glow.
“Is your dear mother still with us?” asked Cardinal Bellocchi, seeing the fingers of Francis Xavier wound around the black rosary.
Francis Xavier smiled.
“Yes. She is eighty-three years old and still works the olive groves. A formidable woman.”
Cardinal Bellocchi grinned amicably.
“She was the one who gave me my faith,” Francis Xavier confided. “Many years ago.”
The cardinal watched the subtly mercurial face of the Pope. Capable of the sweetest gestures and most graceful phrases, he was nonetheless obsessed with the decisive Quebec conclave.
“And you have given that faith to millions,” Cardinal Bellocchi observed.
“I am only a priest.”
Cardinal Bellocchi chuckled.
“But only the bishop of Rome is infallible,” he said gently.
“No one is infallible.”
At his first mass, Francis Xavier recalled with chagrin, out of sheer nervousness, the stumbling priest Baldoni spilled consecrated wine on the stone floor of the San Rignazzi church.
“But Your Holiness trusts directly in the Holy Spirit in a manner far closer than the parish priest.”
“I am only a priest.”
Cardinal Bellocchi appreciated the sincerity of Francis Xavier’s humility. It endeared him to the masses who perceived in the Sicilian something nearer a saint than a man.
“It is to you, and to you alone, that the Church and a billion souls look.”
“Others watch us, too.” A foreboding crept into the Pope’s voice.
From Boulogne: In the crypt of the great church, Bishop Baldoni, incognito, prayed on his knees with the other pilgrims, and the torch-lit shadows moved on the stone floor, and he murmured in a state of ecstasy.
It was a night vigil, and he sank into deeper and deeper levels of meditation. Suddenly, a whisper pierced his brain.
Leave this place, for thou shalt be Pope.
Baldoni’s heart trembled. Wrapping his black cloak about his shoulders, he exited quickly, climbing through the tangled shoes and legs of the simple French pilgrims. The crypt was dank and infected. In three weeks, seventeen people caught the viral infection. Before the contagion burned itself out, ten were dead.
Was it the message of Christ? Or was it Satan’s secret test of his ambition, for which ten souls were lost?
Francis Xavier opened his eyes wide. His fists clenched. He stared out the window at the night clouds.
Suddenly, ink flew up from the bottle of the nearest Jesuit. The fingers of the startled priest dripped with black.
“Jesu figlio, Maria,” the Jesuit whispered, and began wiping his hand with a tissue.
The jet droned on, sleepily, bouncing into stormy night clouds.
Then, in rapid succession, all the ink bottles of the eight remaining desks blew their caps. Black fountains spurted and stained the robes, the walls, and the carpet with the Vatican insignia.
The Jesuits stared in amazement at the mess.
“It’s the new pressurized ink caps,” the undersecretary, a hawk-nosed Florentine intellectual, announced. “The pressure of the cabin has fallen in the storm.”
Lightning flashes illumined Jesuits, on hands and knees, cleaning the carpet and chairs with sponges and towels from the lavatory.
Francis Xavier nudged Cardinal Bellocchi and pointed to the cardinal’s ink bottle. Instantly, the Nuncio covered it with a white towel. A muffled pop was heard, and a blue-black stain oozed up between the cardinal’s ring and middle fingers.
“Mankind was not meant to rise so high toward God,” Francis Xavier said softly. “Our proximity has resulted in the signed protest of the Holy Spirit.”
Indeed, the spattered filaments of ink on the walls resembled the spidery calligraphy of monastic handwriting.
Cardinal Bellocchi chuckled heartily, grinned at Francis Xavier with affection, and gently deposited the soiled towel and ink bottle in a plastic receptacle under the desk.
The earliest memory: Giacomo’s mother, prematurely grayed, explained in the dark, stony house that Christ battled constantly in the skies, in the seas, and in the cities against Satan. By candlelight, she explained to Giacomo, suffering from a child’s fever, that when Christ should triumph, the good and the decent would live forever without sickness or pain, in glory and righteousness at Christ’s right hand.
In the mild delirium, Giacomo, aged five, promised to become a priest and to be Christ’s lieutenant.
When his mother stroked his hair, her forehead creased in worry: she saw the vulnerability in her youngest son’s proud gray eyes.
The Vatican jet whined against strong headwinds. In the forward cabin, the Jesuits buckled their seatbelts.
Cardinal Bellocchi pretended to sleep. It was no use. He turned his face. Francis Xavier was deep in thought, reviewing the strange course of events that had accompanied his long rise to the papacy, and that shadowed him even now, on the eve of the Quebec conference.
“The day I was raised to the cardinalcy,” he said, “I arrived in Bogotá and celebrated an open-air mass with twenty-seven priests, many of them Indians, and all recently baptized by our missionaries in the mountains.”
Francis Xavier turned to the cardinal.
“All twenty-seven were shot in two weeks by the military government. Why? Why did Satan celebrate my cardinalcy with twenty-seven souls?”
Cardinal Bellocchi recognized the melancholy mood returning. He tried to smile encouragingly.
“I hear from Sicily that wax figurines of Your Holiness have been set in the churches with ferns and small flowers. Aged couples have been cured of glaucoma. Surely this is a truer sign.”
Francis Xavier gently stroked the black rosary. Its weight, momentarily absent in the papal chapel, now was comforting in his fingers.
All he said was, “The millennium, Cardinal Bellocchi, is coming.”
If he slept in the bucking, struggling jet, Francis Xavier was not aware of it. The air simply grew darker and the wind shrieked over the steel wings.
The storm pushed the jet south, and the pilots continually banked back into the howling rain.
A series of explosions startled him into awareness. The amber lights on the walls had gone off, one after the other, in cadenced destruction. The Jesuits stared, disbelieving, at the shards of plastic on the papal insignia of the floor.
Several crossed themselves.
As the lights died away, a curious silence permeated the Vatican jet, despite the sleet smashing over the trembling wings and windows.
Blue luminescences, cold and oval, slid down the leather walls and suede chairs of the forward cabin, hunting, gliding, searching rearward in the chill atmosphere.
The prelates watched as the ovals grew transparent, slithered over the typewriters on desks, across the chest of the undersecretary, and down from the cockpit door.
Francis Xavier raised two fingers of his right hand, signifying the authority of his office.
“It is a sign,” he said, “which we do not fear.”
The luminiscences glittered at the thick windows and disappeared into the hail and sleet of the night.
The Jesuits exchanged glances and fought their way over the plush carpet to their seats. For a moment, they sat in the dark. The lights began to flicker and glow a
gain. Still, no one was able to work.
The cockpit door opened. The copilot leaned over the undersecretary, who nodded, and the Jesuits watched the copilot return to the cockpit.
“Do not be frightened,” Francis Xavier said to Cardinal Bellocchi.
The cockpit door opened again. The copilot gestured animatedly toward the rear cabin. The undersecretary whispered to his assistant, who pulled a small white telephone and directory from the cabinet, and rose heavily from his seat.
Against the sickening, unpredictable drops of altitude, the undersecretary balanced his way toward the Pope through the forward cabin, fighting vertigo.
“Your Holiness,” he said in a sudden absence of shrieking wind. “The fuel is no longer sufficient to reach Quebec.”
The Jesuits stared panic-stricken at the undersecretary.
“Our radio contact is poor. The copilot is searching for an alternate airport in Newfoundland.”
“We shall not land in Newfoundland,” Francis Xavier replied.
Uncertain what His Holiness meant, the undersecretary looked at Cardinal Bellocchi. The Nuncio gave him no clue.
“I will inform Your Holiness,” he said, “of what is happening.”
The undersecretary returned to his assistant, who was trying to raise the cathedral of Quebec without success.
The drone of the jet was erratic, banging into blocks of massed air, pushed ever south, and frost now formed a further drag on the white steel wings.
“Our brothers are frightened,” Cardinal Bellocchi said.
Whispered panic circulated rapidly in the forward cabin. Despite the undersecretary rapping his pencil and then his knuckles on his desk, the Jesuits gazed at the hail-battered windows and moaned.
The copilot opened the cockpit door. His face was white, and with a dry mouth and cracked lips, he whispered to the undersecretary.
The undersecretary made his way to the rear cabin door.
“There is no fuel to reach Newfoundland!”
Francis Xavier said nothing.
The undersecretary made his way past the staring Jesuits.
Cardinal Bellocchi nervously fingered his own rosary at his frosted window.
There was a gliding sensation as the jet lost altitude. The winds lessened.
Golgotha Falls Page 28