Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Anita settled herself on the bed, and Mario brought her a cold beer from the refrigerator.

  “Is the van loaded?” she asked.

  He nodded, and settled by the open window, putting on his heavy work shoes.

  “All the wiring?” she asked. “The sensors and gauges?”

  “All there.”

  Mario slipped into his beaten brown leather jacket. Despite the heat, it relaxed him. It was virtually his alter ego. Days on the barricades, nights in strange terrain, and his first afternoons with Anita, seven years ago—now the sheepskin lining was spilling out of the collar, but it was still a prized possession. Mario relaxed at the window and put his feet up on the sill.

  “So get changed,” he said, sipping his beer. “I’d like to arrive there before dark.”

  He noted the boxes of notes and correspondence, neatly folded reference charts, statistical graphs, and catalogues from electronics firms, all arranged under the red-checkered-clothed kitchen table.

  Over his desk was a long shelf of their own field investigations. Tidewater Basin, Virginia: luminescences reported by illiterate shack dwellers, descendants of runaway slaves. Five months of time-lapse photography, interviews, temperature gauges embedded in the sandy dunes and low-lying flat basins of reeds and swamp growth. Result: two rolls of questionable incandescent billows over the eastern edge of the sea, with a vague correlation to the erratic tides of late autumn. Nothing more. Except a bad case of swamp fever that still made him anemic.

  Atlanta, Georgia: an odor of decay in an abandoned railway terminal. Several derelicts had disappeared and others mumbled incoherently about a “something” that came out of the clapboards of the ruined switching shed. Research revealed it as the site of a former slaughterhouse, now covered by weed-grown rails. Three months of all-night vigils with infrared cameras and ultrasensitive sound recorders, of digging through dead cats, spiders, and rich detritus under the switching shed, and all they got was a brief correlation between the growth of the odor and some static pick-up from the sound microphones. That and copious police harassment. The net result was a single article in Modern Parapsychology.

  There were dozens more field investigations, each in its separate dossier. Ball lightning, immunity of ecstatic snake-handlers during gospel service in Appalachia, a comparison of ESP among IBM executives and unemployed Italian dockworkers. Probability studies. A paradigmatic outline of the observer-experiment problem. A refutation of particle-wave theory as an explanation of dream transference. Notes toward the study of organized religion as a monopoly of suggestibility. All dead ends.

  “Something’s eating you,” Anita said, interrupting his thoughts, “more than Osborne.”

  Mario slipped a folded letter from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Read it.”

  As she read, Mario went to the refrigerator, brought back two more beers, and popped them open. Anita read the letter with a sense of impending disaster.

  “It came this morning,” he said. “I didn’t want to show it to you before the presentation.”

  Anita shook her head, disbelieving.

  “This is incredible,” she said softly. “Herbert Broudermann is the top man on the West Coast.”

  “Was. They just took his lab from him.”

  Anita reread the letter. The handwriting was tiny, cramped and filled to the margins, an ironic but desperate warning from a distant colleague. The letter ended with several feeble jokes, but pain was evident in every line.

  Mario sat heavily in the chair beside the window. He wiped a fleck of beer from his upper lip.

  “In April it was Charles Simpson,” Anita said soberly.

  “At Tulane.”

  “And in January, it was Jessup and Weinstein at the University of Chicago.”

  “Refused tenure. That was a real blow.”

  “Mario—what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know—I just don’t know—some kind of witch hunt—”

  Out from the kitchen came Anita’s cat, a female amber named Dr. Lao, and it leaped onto the desk and slithered around a sugar-and-sand model of Golgotha Falls.

  “And now today,” Mario confessed. “I mean, the dean—it hit me like a bombshell—Anita, we could lose the whole lab!”

  “Nonsense. My mother knows the chairman of the anthropology department. They’re tennis partners.”

  “Good. We’ll put our lab on your mother’s tennis court”

  “Believe in me, Mario. We haven’t lost a damn thing.”

  Mario lit a cigarette. Dr. Lao leaped into his lap. He stroked the cat’s ears as he stared out at the violent cascades of dust brewing in the north.

  “Hell,” Anita offered. “Maybe it’s more than campus politics.”

  “It’s the new materialism. We’re on the outs now.”

  Mario swiveled in the chair, as Anita slipped on her work shoes, and his eyes examined the scale model of Golgotha Falls. Three feet in diameter, it rested on a plaster base, and tiny wooden blocks among twigs simulated the ruined Catholic edifice on the banks of the Siloam Creek, the Church of Eternal Sorrows.

  The laboratory was Anita’s. Originally she had been assigned space in the behavioral psychology department. As her research moved away from behavioralism and into belief systems, and then into receptivity to ESP and other forms of suggestion, she inveigled Dean Osborne into giving her a place near the physics department so she could use its more powerful computers in statistical work. There she met Mario Gilbert.

  Aggressive, uncouth, deliberately offensive when he wanted to be, he was driven into the sciences by some personal demon.

  The young man’s energy, his determination, were extraordinary. It was as though he wanted to strip away everything, destroying as he went, trying to find out what animated the universe. His genius for electronics dovetailed neatly with Anita’s more cautious examination of the subliminal. Mario became her technical assistant and soon the laboratory was as much his as hers. Night after night he stayed late, recalculating, devising new experiments, reading the professional journals. Whether he desperately needed to destroy his intuitive belief in the paranormal, Anita did not know. Lately she wondered if Mario himself knew.

  Mario first embarrassed her when he exposed thirteen Boston mediums, engendering five lawsuits against the university. Undaunted, he rooted out two bogus mind-readers in Albany, and a notorious metal-bender giving exhibits in Manhattan. Then he assailed the claims of a wealthy yogi from Bombay and brought down on Anita’s laboratory the wrath of an influential religious community based in Boston.

  Anita’s contacts protected the laboratory. The professors admired her as much as they universally loathed Mario. But Mario was secretly hurt by his abrasive contact with charlatans and professors alike. He disdained the unqualified need to believe, and just as fiercely ridiculed the obstinate refusal to accept quantified evidence of the paranormal. He threw himself into the development of electronic sensors.

  ESP studies proliferated when Mario found how to use the massive capability of the physics computer for probability analyses. He also found means of adapting the latest microtechnology from the medical school to help measure the brain during altered states of consciousness. An extraordinary force propelled him into components, transistors, and lenses, as though the inanimate tools would provide some sort of personal transfiguration.

  Probably Anita knew by the second week that they would become lovers. Probably Mario knew it right away. But they delayed, they moved slowly, warily, toward that commitment of the body, sensing that in each other they had found their equal.

  Anita yielded in Mario’s apartment, as a willow bends to the unstoppable flood of a river, overwhelmed, drowned, but not broken. The experience transformed her. For there was a violence, even a savagery in Mario’s physicality that shocked her, then raised in her an entirely different, suppressed aspect of her nature. The sensual in her blossomed. It disturbed her at times
. The crudity of Mario repeatedly embarrassed her. In his arms, though, she dived deeply into an ocean where she and Mario ecstatically drowned.

  But Mario was changing. He was approaching forty. The promise of his undeniable gifts was receding. The field investigations had yielded virtually nothing. His lack of manners had alienated him from everyone who should have been able to promote his career. And now universities throughout the country were clamping down on parapsychology itself. For Mario, time was running out. He was growing tense, bitter, less stable.

  For Mario’s self-esteem, Anita desperately wanted some tangible success at Golgotha Falls.

  Mario stood and closed the window. The cat leaped to the floor. Distant shouts of children died.

  “Bill and Dede promised to look after the cat,” Anita said.

  “She’s a scrounger. Don’t worry about her.”

  Mario picked up a canvas bag of film, spare lenses, and light meters. Something in the apartment seemed unsettled, but he did not know what. He looked at her and he seemed nervous. There was always anxiety before a project.

  “Let’s move,” he said, forcing a smile.

  Outside, the white Volkswagen van stood brilliant in the midday heat.

  Mario had reworked the van’s interior. It was now fitted with shelves, straps, and small enclosed built-in metal boxes. The electronic sensors were neatly aligned within the padded boxes according to size, and three temperature gauges were also buckled within felt-lined boxes against the walls. Super-sensitive sonic microphones rested in heavy wooden cases. On racks were rolls of red wiring, black electrician’s tape, and a dented tool chest including soldering materials, needle-nose pliers, wire strippers, and a motley assortment of screws, templates, glues, and small crystals. Mario had converted two small computers from Navy parts, bought through Harvard’s liaison with MIT, and they lay, with spare parts for the tiny solid-state circuitry, in specially buttressed caskets, lined with folded blankets, behind the sleeping bags.

  Next to the sleeping bags was a long canvas bag of clean clothes, and on hooks were yellow oilskins and rubber boots. A Coleman lantern was nailed to a projecting wooden shelf. A small butane heater was behind the passenger seat. Various metal eating utensils, canteens, and emergency foodstuffs were crammed neatly under the canvas clothes bag.

  Anita checked off the items, one by one, on three pages attached to a clipboard.

  Small rolling drums, equipped with reams of graph paper, pen-needles, and spare black ink, were secured under a tiny red fire extinguisher behind the driver’s seat. A camera tripod was strapped longitudinally where the wall curved to become the roof. On a built-in shelf over a rear wheel were logbooks, clipboards, and a few reference works on similar sites.

  A dozen battery packs and a heavy green generator, badly rusted and smelling of gasoline, occupied the space at the rear. It was covered by an Army blanket. Behind it, thickly wrapped in towels and tough canvas, was a thermovision camera with video screen, snug in the shadows of the van.

  By the sleeping bags Mario had put an entire case of Italian dry white wine. Two large pillows occupied the space behind the front seats, and even with a full load of equipment there was now room for both sleeping bags to be unrolled completely on a small but thick carpet that ran the length of the van.

  Anita found the glove compartment in the front heavily equipped with knives, small batteries, work gloves, lighter fluid, and county and surveyor’s maps of the Golgotha Falls area. Under the van, secured with sturdy wire and bolted to plates, were long-handled spades, a shovel, and a multipurpose pole for probing sensors into areas too slender for the human hand. Rope, wire, and a small hatchet hung from the driver’s door. Concealed in the map compartment, a black revolver, unlicensed.

  “It’s all here,” she said finally. “Except my sunglasses.”

  “On the sunshade.”

  “Oh.”

  Mario closed the van doors and got into the front seat beside her. The vinyl upholstery was hot and sticky, and the sunlight glittered glassily on the road.

  Mario started the engine. He looked up the road and then eased the van forward. The Volkswagen was underpowered, and the full load made it sluggish. As he drove, he listened for anything sliding loose behind him, but it was all strapped down tightly. All he could hear was the gentle sloshing of the water and extra gasoline in two separate tanks under the front seats.

  To go north, the van had to recross the Anderson Bridge and pass the university. Anita watched the massive red brick and strangling ivy roll by, and, behind the ancient Yard, the more modern steel-and-glass facilities. It was like a fortress in the center of a medieval town.

  “Mario,” she said softly, her eyes closing against the warmth of the sun.

  “What?”

  “This site—Golgotha Falls. We might find nothing at all.”

  Mario’s jaw clenched but he said nothing, just shrugged with feigned indifference. Her eyes opened, the deep black eyes that contrasted so startlingly with the pale, lovely angular face.

  “It could be a documentation of delusions,” she said. “Architectural stress and wind that farmers hear as ghosts. Spooks among the tombstones that are really just rabbits jumping in the moonlight.”

  Mario grinned as the van cleared the north end of campus, and he drove into the shabby, dusty streets north of Cambridge. His optimism—or was it his necessity?—overrode his worries. He reached for his sunglasses and slipped them on.

  “Could be, love,” he said brightly. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s the trouble. It wouldn’t.”

  Though Mario seemed relaxed, his mind was churning. What indeed did he expect to discover this time? He considered the many places in North America and Europe where sites, usually abandoned, yielded small findings of the paranormal. Occasionally, blue luminescences were reported, as at Golgotha Falls. Quite often minute changes of inertial states—stationary objects set in motion, moving objects that veered—were reported. Almost always the native inhabitants, whether American, Irish, or Yugoslav, incorporated these aberrant events into their mythologies.

  In addition to small physical events, there was often reported a kind of “mental atmosphere” or suggestibility that at some sites remained active. It was this that Mario hoped to document and correlate. Golgotha Falls would depend to some extent on the people who lived nearby, on their abnormalities, their obsessions, for such emotions fed the physical events.

  Indeed, several theories worked on the assumption that highly charged individuals, driven to commit acts of murder, incest, or suicide, could project sufficient psychic energy to inaugurate paranormal events that might outlive the individual who was their catalyst.

  Mario shifted into top gear and pulled out from behind a truck laden with long, black pipes. He leaned closer to Anita and shouted over the roar of the Volkswagen churning into the open highway.

  “Negative findings,” he yelled. “Just as valuable as positive findings.”

  “If we could just—get our hands for once—on something—something tangible. Too tangible for them to dismiss.”

  Mario squeezed her knee affectionately.

  “I’ll have a ghost on Osborne’s desk by Christmas,” he chuckled, but deep within him the dread of failure assailed his flagging confidence. This would be it, he knew. No more reprieves. This time it truly was publish or perish.

  The highway flew by. Anita grew drowsy and settled back, arms folded, and closed her eyes. He looked at her from time to time as he drove. She had made him complex. Her inbred refinement, the inexplicable and abrupt brilliance of her research—it all transformed him. Once the strident Marxist on the barricades, he now was complicated, almost too complicated, as though her more socialized personality had invaded his and not all his rough defensiveness could ever drive her out again.

  The hills twisted, and from time to time small factory roofs were visible among clusters of dusty trees. Mario smiled as Anita, asleep
, slid gracefully onto his shoulder.

  The heat was intense and small beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead, under the paisley bandanna that kept the silky black hair straight. She jerked awake.

  “What’s wrong with the countryside?” she asked. “It looks dead.”

  “Summer heat. Drought, really.”

  Anita wet a tissue with water from Mario’s Army canteen and daubed her face, neck, and upper chest. She dropped the crumpled tissue into a bag hanging from the dashboard. She leaned back against the warm upholstery.

  “How far are we from Golgotha Falls?” she asked.

  “About an hour.”

  She watched the gray, weather-beaten farms roll by, farms and fences that would have looked pretty in early spring or in autumn, but now an arthritic dehydration seemed to have sucked them dry. Several bay horses ran magnificently through the tall grass and disappeared into a wooded valley.

  Anita rubbed her eyes and had another drink of water.

  “God, I had the worst dream,” she shuddered.

  “What was it?”

  “I was crawling in the fissured bedrock of the Golgotha Falls church,” she said. “It was full of red lava and hair. It was repulsive.”

  Mario looked ahead at the unwinding curves of the asphalt highway. Some small rodents scampered across into the rough grass.

  “Do you ever have dreams like that?” Anita asked. “Images that are foul?”

  “Hell, yes. Worse.”

  Anita turned around in her seat, then unbuckled the seat belt and got on her knees to fish for something in the van. She finally found two plastic cups and a bottle of the white wine. Mario admiringly patted her derriere before she sat back down.

  “It was like the Church of Eternal Sorrows—was reaching out to me—” she said, laboriously uncorking the bottle. “Like a message. It had that flavor.”

  She handed Mario a cup of wine, which he drank, looking over the rim onto the highway. He held out the cup for more. Anita held the green bottle over it and half-filled it a second time.

  “You know what it is,” Mario said. “It’s your own sexual nature. Your conscience is warning you—”