Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  The clouds burst with a torrent of hail and sleet. The Victorian facades slid into Canaan Street.

  Dean Osborne, still shielding Anita and Mario from the storm, saw the timbers crash into the fissures of the asphalt. Dogs howled. The Siloam flowed over its banks, thrashing at the church foundation.

  Scientific objectivity tugged at his heart and so did another, inchoate, powerful feeling, leaving him divided, confused, and amazed.

  “Could it really be?” he whispered.

  Mario struggled to his knees, gazing in disbelief at the soft black loam shifting in the graveyard. Groaning coffins ruptured, emerging from the century-old hold of the earth.

  Then it came. A skeletal figure, rising from its Victorian casket, clutched with its bony fingers its gold cross. As the ground buckled, it raised the casket higher, and the skeleton raised the cross higher to the red cruciform shape, tightly clutched in the rigidity of death.

  “No!” Mario shouted defiantly. “I don’t believe!”

  Anita held him closer. “I believe in the power and the grace of that which can never be measured,” Anita whispered, lowering her head reverently, at peace with herself.

  Dean Osborne licked his lips, frozen in uncertainty.

  Mario turned desperately around him, face frozen in a rictus of incomprehension and denial. As though betraying him, the policemen were on their knees. And so were the news teams. Mario whirled to face the insignia of the storm.

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD!” he roared defiantly.

  But Anita heard the faltering in that roar. Indeed, the Church, or God, had sunk its shaft deep into Mario’s heart.

  Then the three—the atheist, the agnostic, and the believer—felt the deepest parts of their personalities drawn inexorably toward that spiraling, sediment-tinted figuration over the church.

  It was as though they were all dying and a final, immutable portion of their bodies were rising to the heavens.

  The asphalt on Canaan Street crumbled into bluish steam. Cars and trucks tilted, then crashed onto their sides. Balls of sleet bounced upon the earth.

  Through it all Anita’s face burned with an inner radiance.

  “Have mercy, dear Lord,” Anita breathed, raising her head, hair blown fiercely back by the roaring agony. “Have mercy on us all!”

  Anita saw, perfectly defined in the floating cloud above, the Figure bearing wounds in the red apocalypse.

  In that instantaneous liberation she felt a sense of soaring, as though flying out through a window, and then, on the brink of the last portals of human knowledge, amidst the wails and cries of the multitudes, all motion ceased.

  The storm abated suddenly.

  The force stilled, and the stillness was shattering.

  Cardinal Bellocchi, Cardinal Kennedy, Bishop McElroy, the Italian Jesuits, the undersecretary of state and his diplomatic assistant, in perfect unison, sang out over and over.

  “Benedictus vos omnipotens Deus! Benedictus vos omnipotens Deus!”

  Soon two thousand voices took up the chant.

  The thunderous litany penetrated Eamon’s tortured brain. Weakly his eyes lifted toward the Holy Father.

  Francis Xavier lay prostrate before the altar. He had sunk to the final retreat, where hope and decency live, in the fundamental child. And all for Eamon’s salvation.

  Eamon trembled with a joy he had never felt before, not in all the days of his childhood.

  Francis Xavier turned to gaze upon Eamon. His face reflected a loving heart.

  “Through Thy holy Resurrection!” Francis Xavier said ambiguously.

  Eamon stared at the Pontiff. Francis Xavier’s face. The gray eyes, nearly black in that light, brimmed with tears.

  Eamon suddenly looked overhead, and understood.

  “The lamp—” he breathed. “The lamp of Christ!”

  The altar lamp, partially covered by the cracked glass, glowed a deep and holy red.

  Through the interior of the church the atmosphere was a warm red, bathing the lazily circulating currents of dust in a gentle radiance.

  Francis Xavier rose, arms extended, and stumbled under the lamp.

  The vow made so long ago in San Rignazzi was finally, eternally answered.

  “We are in the very presence of Jesus Christ, Eamon!” Francis Xavier whispered, his cheeks running freely with tears. “Eamon— do you feel Him?”

  Suddenly something sucked down through Eamon’s being, a vile, corrosive substance, burning, destroying, leaving him pale and shaking in pain.

  “It burns! It burns!” Eamon shrieked, shielding himself from the lamp’s glow.

  Francis Xavier immediately bent down to pull Eamon’s hands away from his eyes.

  “Embrace the light, Eamon! Let it enter you! Receive Him Who sent it!”

  “I can’t! It burns! It burns inside!”

  “Yes! Yes! It burns, Eamon! It is the flame of Christ! Let it cleanse you as it has me!”

  Eamon twisted on his stomach, trying to crawl away. Then he saw the chair by the central aisle. In it lay the priceless gold ring, the heavy pectoral cross, and the embroidered, immaculate white and gold cape, all embossed with the Vatican insignia.

  For him Francis Xavier had shed the last remnant of worldly power, and offered himself, trusting in Christ.

  That the Pope should offer his own eternal soul as a sacrifice, to save the unworthiest priest in a desolate valley church, drawn by a mystery Eamon could not comprehend, was overwhelming.

  Tears of gratitude suddenly burst from the Jesuit. He turned, kissing the shoes of Francis Xavier.

  “Oh, Holy Father,” he wept, unashamed. “I have sinned! I have been proud of heart! I have been used as an instrument to mock the divinity of Christ!”

  Francis Xavier held Eamon’s head in both his assured peasant’s hands, raising the Jesuit’s face.

  “Do you renounce Satan, and all his pomps, and all his works?” Francis Xavier asked.

  “I do!”

  “Do you believe in Jesus Christ and the remission of sins?”

  The red light glowed warmly over them both, uniting them in a bond of extraordinary experience that could have but one answer.

  “Yes!”

  Francis Xavier gazed fondly at Eamon. The Jesuit, by his torment, had revealed the purity of the believing heart, had galvanized him, even from the gilded magnificence of the chair of Saint Peter, to acknowledge the simplest of all truths: that only he who is a child may walk in the fields of Christ.

  The constituent parts of Eamon’s conscience fell away. Ian, his uncle, the seminarians, and Elizabeth—all disintegrated and lost their hold on his heart. The loneliness of a child whose hunger for Christ had created fear of others evaporated. Eamon knew finally that his sacrifices for the priesthood were justified.

  That was the dual mission of Golgotha Falls.

  “Eamon,” Francis Xavier intoned, making the sign of the cross over the Jesuit, “I absolve thee!”

  The altar lamp trembled. Through the Gothic windows the two transfigured men saw the gathered people, and Anita, Mario, and the policemen and the newsmen on their knees in the late afternoon.

  The coastal storm that had inflicted its ravages on Golgotha Falls retreated into the stratosphere as the sun began its slow descent in the west.

  The cruciform red cloud, twirling ragged bolts of lightning at its base, rose high above Golgotha Falls with diminishing intensity.

  Francis Xavier and Eamon simultaneously lowered their faces, crossed themselves, and felt the radiance of the storm mingle with a sacred hush into the soft ruby of the altar lamp.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen,” Francis Xavier concluded.

  The cruciform shape, rising still higher in the heavens, slowly dispersed, casting veils of mist over the valley. Doubled rainbows glittered across the afternoon sky.

  Anita looked from the red cloud and onto the church. Whatever had passed between Francis Xavier and Eamon Malcolm would remain
forever secret. There were domains science could not penetrate, beyond the remotest external signs. And yet, as she looked from the suffused faces of the kneeling priests, one at the head of the Roman Catholic Church and the other at its most humble rank, she knew for certain there was a connection between what had transpired between them and the awesome configuration over the valley.

  A sense of someone beside her made Anita turn. Mario, still on his knees, wrists in handcuffs, face and arms bleeding, stared dazedly in shock at the church, his lips stammering.

  “G-Gerasima—P-P-P-Pontif-if-if o theralpy—py—Pronteus—oh, God—I’m dead—dead—bed—ted—med—ged—”

  Dean Osborne tried to comfort Mario.

  “It’s all right, Mario,” he whispered. “Don’t deny what you’ve seen, what you’ve felt.”

  But Mario had been taken past the boundaries of his strength.

  Dean Osborne looked mutely at Anita for assistance. She embraced Mario sadly, slowly, yet her heart was as much with the crowd as with Mario.

  For the great mass of people had discerned the movement of the two holy men inside the church, and a mighty cheer rose from their collective throats.

  Great shafts of sunlight penetrated the breaking clouds, spotlighting the church, and struck the door. Untouched, it glided smoothly open.

  Ahead of Anita, living proof for them all, stood the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, eyes radiant, in his splendid vestments, and beside him the joyous Jesuit, Eamon Malcolm.

  EPILOGUE

  “The Golgotha Effect” became communications slang for confusion and incompetence.

  From the four television crews and two radio teams, eight men and women were fired.

  Videotapes of the heavenly apparition showed only a massive cumulus cloud, split into two armatures, rising over the eastern edge of Golgotha Valley. Reporters examining the tapes could not explain the fever and dread and religious awe that had seized them in the paroxysm of that day in October.

  Nor did the Boston Municipal Police find a satisfactory explanation for the dereliction of duty of twelve motorcycle patrolmen and five squad car officers.

  The secret service refused to discuss the affair with TV reporters, the press, or anyone else.

  The videotapes of the church showed fluctuations of color, temperature, and light intensity within the interior, but nothing unexplainable. Sound recordings, though imperfect, revealed a multitude of Gregorian chants and litanies.

  An amnesia flowed through the multitudes who had attended Golgotha Falls that day. No one responded to reporters’ questions.

  Within a year only the photographs and videotapes remained, crammed among others, in the morgues of newspaper offices and the Boston television studios.

  Dean Osborne retired from the faculty of Harvard, having received a two-year grant to write a history of the psychological sciences.

  He performed the task with erudition and conscientiousness. In the process he reviewed the research of the previous ten years. It filled a deep void. His wife had died after a lingering bout with cancer.

  He worked late into the night, sipping sherry, at ease finally under the portraits of his ancestors in the firelight of his study. The desk and bookshelves, and even the carpet and chairs, were filled with the orderly confusion of folios, articles, and reference volumes. Dean Osborne became fascinated with the great epistemological question: what is the difference between what a human being sees and what he thinks he sees?

  It was a conundrum that would have baffled William James, despite all the great man’s research into religious experience.

  Often Dean Osborne’s sharpened mind drifted from the immediate task and he stared into the firelight. What had happened at Golgotha Falls? His training inclined him toward a materialist position, that he had witnessed a mass outpouring of faith that had resulted in a collective delusion.

  In fact, his own religious hunger had made him susceptible to the same delusion.

  But the dean had too much respect for Anita Wagner, whom he had supported in seeking a position at the University of Pennsylvania, to utterly dismiss the possibility, however remote, that extra-­subjective factors might have been operative.

  Particularly in the dawn, in the long winter dawn when he awoke and the housekeeper served him coffee and he gazed down the purity of the snow-covered estate toward the clouded sun, particularly then was he mindful of Anita’s attitude. For in that quiet hour, that almost timeless, silent hour of perpetual renewal, he felt that, at some level deeper than his research could ever take him, he too had experienced a vision of the Christian apocalypse.

  Mario Gilbert committed himself to the psychiatric unit of Boston General Hospital for two months’ observation.

  In those two months he filled twelve notebooks with observations, theories, and future experimental models. Mario wrote to Dean Osborne, to the president of Harvard, and to the National Science Foundation, demanding to have his laboratory restored. The Harvard Science Faculty rejected his claims and severed him from the university. However, upon the closing down of his department, the tapes, seismographic records, slides, and sound recordings taken from the Church of Eternal Sorrows were returned to him.

  Anita visited Mario several times at the hospital. Gradually both realized there was no relationship possible between them anymore.

  Released from the hospital, Mario worked on his notebooks, editing them, organizing his theories into a volume titled Golgotha Falls: An Assault on the Fourth Dimension. In it, he outlined with scrupulous care the developing power of a sick Jesuit priest to cast imagery into a thermovision tape, into a crowded lecture hall, and finally onto an emotional crowd of newsmen, police, urbanites, semiliterate farmers, and even the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. Mario never submitted the manuscript for publication.

  He took a job as an electronics maintenance engineer for the naval shipyards south of Boston. The rage and humiliation of Golgotha Falls gradually subsided. Mario never fought for parapsychology again.

  Sometimes, at night, in his small apartment, he thumbed through his notebooks and his boxes of slides and photographs. The handwriting was mainly unreadable. The ideas were random. They hurt his mind. Not a day went by that he did not reflect on that cataclysmic day in October. His only salvation lay in the scientific approach; in developing a legitimate rationale for the unexplainable. The red sediment, he reasoned, blown up by the cyclonic storm winds, had spread into a twin armature as it reached the upper, thinner levels of the atmosphere. The crowd, excited by the ritual and the costumes of the Vatican party, under the suggestiveness of Golgotha Valley, interpreted the natural event as a Christian vision. It was an analysis that satisfied Mario, further abetted by his research that revealed the military had been conducting secret tests of new jet engines in nearby Falmouth, which explained the shock waves and tremors that undermined the houses on Canaan Street. Then, too, the Siloam, rushing faster after the cloudburst, had eaten away at the clay banks at a quicker rate, weakening the ground, which would also account for the shifting of the old graves in the cemetery and the disintegration of the Victorian buildings adjacent to it.

  All these facts, combined with Eamon Malcolm’s unique powers of projection, had worked on the crowds, on the policemen, the news teams, Anita, Dean Osborne, Francis Xavier, and, Mario realized to his great chagrin, himself.

  Mario chuckled bitterly, swilling down his fourth bottle of beer. Everybody had blacked out.

  Francis Xavier probably thought the Incarnation of Christ was at hand.

  Mario seized his temples. The pain that pounded through his head always came when he thought about Golgotha Falls.

  At such times he reached for his weights and pressed up the old iron on the floor of his tiny room that smelled of sweat. Still the agony did not fade.

  What inexpressible trauma could have caused the Jesuit to pro­ject the goathead onto the thermovision screen? How and why did he manifest such an image?

  Gritting h
is teeth, nostrils flaring, Mario increased the weights, until the pain of muscles penetrated the pain of mind with a more bearable torment.

  Mario paused, blinking, sweating, alone in his perpetual isolation.

  The seven angelic figures reported by the eight-year-old boy. His ability to translate Latin into English. The figure rising from the grave, witnessed by no fewer than two thousand people.

  Were they indeed precursors to the Resurrection?

  Francis Xavier cut short the Quebec conference and reduced it to a conclave of North American cardinals and bishops. He returned to Rome, enthusiastic over the spectacular success of the American vigil. European delegations and Latin American prelates flooded into Rome, filled with the emotions of the impending second millennium. Triumphant and refreshed, Francis Xavier addressed over two hundred thousand of the faithful in St. Peter’s Square.

  In the evening he received word that his mother, while attempting to rescue her favorite lamb, the one with the single black ear, had stumbled, fallen, and drowned in the raging San Rignazzi River.

  Francis Xavier donned the coat and hat of a peasant and returned to San Rignazzi. Alone at her bier, guarded by his relatives and the local parish priest, he prayed deeply and loudly.

  Christ’s lieutenant he had vowed to be, and Christ’s lieutenant he had become. In the primacy of his innocence he had been touched by a destiny that transcended understanding. Yet even as the Church crossed relentlessly toward the third millennium, what had changed?

  Satan still battled daily with Christ, in terrains of tormented souls, touched with the bitterness of mortality.

  Francis Xavier’s fist formed around the worn black rosary. At Golgotha Falls he knew—utterly knew, beyond any possibility of doubt—the Second Coming was at hand.

  The great insight came from stripping away the vestments of office, and wrestling with Satan embedded in a man of passionate and corrupted faith.

  Had it been a salutory warning? That not only he, but the entire Roman Church look to its roots? Look back to its origins in the caves and groves at the dawn of history, when God moved among the generations, as at San Rignazzi?