Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  The darkness was utterly gone. The breaking clouds of the afternoon showed blue skies and bird calls echoed through the refreshed valley.

  In the camera, the afterimage on the screen faded to a uniform view of the church interior.

  “Mario,” Father Malcolm said in a quavering voice.

  Mario rubbed his eyes and stared, blinking, at the convex screen.

  “What is it?”

  “The altar lamp.”

  Overhead, the ruby-red glass of the altar lamp, the symbol of Christ’s presence, burned in a clear, quiet splendor.

  The Jesuit stepped forward insistently, his face pale and frightened.

  “I didn’t light it!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Father Malcolm, his eyes fixed reverently on the lamp overhead, poised between doubt and ecstasy, pointed at the ruby glow in the frontal glass.

  “Christ has won,” he whispered.

  Anita placed a hand on Mario’s arm. In the silence, the altar lamp radiated points of reflection on the Jesuit’s chasuble, on them, and over their cameras.

  “It didn’t light itself,” Mario muttered.

  Father Malcolm turned, emphatic.

  “I didn’t light it, Mario!”

  Mario punched a silver button at the base of the thermovision monitor.

  “There’s one way to find out,” he said.

  The black videotape glowed in a reddish band as it flashed in reverse, reflecting the altar lamp. Father Malcolm felt himself drawn toward the screen, magnetically, without breathing. A confusion of crimson flares and a black cross moved down the church aisle in jerked motions. To Father Malcolm, it resembled a soul in purgatory.

  Mario played the tape forward at normal speed.

  The Jesuit’s chasuble was clearly defined, a dark silhouette against the heated convections rising from the joints of his body and at the face. The Jesuit held up the long, black pole of the silver wick. To Mario, it looked like a picture of medieval monks, a heretical fire-service in the caves of Sicily.

  “What is that wick?” Mario asked. “What actually lights it?”

  “It’s flint against steel.”

  At the tip of the black pole now appeared a white point as the Jesuit lighted it.

  Father Malcolm teetered, the pole dipped and struggled, but the lamp remained hard and dark.

  “Now do you believe me, Mario?” he whispered. “He was too strong for me then.”

  Mario set the tape into motion again. Twice more, Father Malcolm raised the silver pole with its wick, and twice more he grappled as with an unseen force. Twice more the lamp remained unlit.

  Mario stopped the tape. Bioluminescence, like most forms of psychic luminescence, is cold. Even when red or orange in hue, upon measurement they are barely above room temperature. But he could feel the light of the altar lamp above him warm his face from fifteen feet away.

  “Father Malcolm— What was going through your mind when you were trying to light the lamp?”

  The Jesuit glared at Mario as though grossly insulted.

  “Please, Father Malcolm,” Anita said quietly, understanding the drift of Mario’s question. “It’s important.”

  Father Malcolm looked at her, his face flushed, and then he turned back to Mario.

  “Fantasies,” he murmured.

  “What kind?” Anita asked.

  “Sexual,” he whispered.

  Mario punched the button and the tape began to inch forward. At times, the convections rose to obscure the lamp, but each time when the view was clear again, the lamp was as before, hard and dark.

  Then the figure of the Jesuit threw the pole away. His arms went for his head. Then the camera followed his figure collapsing toward the church floor. The camera swung wildly, corrected itself, and showed the altar area.

  The lamp now had a white point of heat within, and from it streamed an ocher grid of undisturbed heat radiance.

  “It was a burning heat that I suddenly felt,” Father Malcolm said. “As soon as it hit me, I knew what it was. I looked up and the lamp was lit. It glorified me.”

  Mario reversed the tape until the Jesuit was standing. Then he inched it forward by hand. In the screen, Father Malcolm began reaching for his temples.

  Anita’s finger pointed out the crimson wave of heat that illuminated the Jesuit’s back.

  Inch by inch, the figure crumpled and the camera jerked down after him. With each frame, the altar lamp, cold and hard, drifted up toward the top frame line. When the lamp was pushed half out of the frame, a white point of light appeared in the spout of its oil basin.

  An ocher radiance began to spill from the shape of the lamp.

  Anita knew from the experiments of Dodge and Tippet at Duke that an emotionally hysterical subject could induce momentary suggestibility in receptive persons. But the thermovision had no feelings. It was utterly objective. And now the lamp was hot and the combustion was a chemical union of oil and oxygen. Pyrokinetic combustions had rarely been recorded so unambiguously from a subject undergoing deep stress.

  Mario saw Anita’s face, and knew her mind was racing through the collective data of previous studies and experiments, trying to find a place for what had happened.

  Impulsively, aggressively, Mario pulled his chair toward the lamp.

  “What are you doing?” Father Malcolm demanded.

  “I’m going to look at the lamp, of course.”

  Father Malcolm came closer, taking hold of Mario’s arm.

  “Don’t do that, Mario.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a holy object.”

  Mario shook off the Jesuit’s hands and stepped onto the chair. He peered into the ruby glass. The flame within burned so tranquilly it was like a blue and yellow cone. He opened the small ruby-glass door.

  “Mario—no—” Father Malcolm whispered.

  The glass door was sharp and cut into Mario’s hand, which he ignored in his excitement.

  Mario sniffed around the lamp. It was not a petrochemical. He passed his fingers through the flame. It was cool, efficient. The kind of lamp that would have been used eons ago in the Mediterranean.

  “What does it burn?”

  “Sanctified oil.”

  Mario smiled. “Ah. Sanctified. That makes all the difference.”

  From the articles by LaCade at Baton Rouge, Anita knew that very few liquids could self-combust, even in the strongest field of psychic turbulence. She knew the Russian experiments with mediums and volatile liquids had utterly failed. She began to have an uneasy sensation that something altogether different had occurred.

  As Mario stepped down from the chair, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to stop the bleeding where the glass door had cut him.

  He looked up. Father Malcolm had set the thermovision into forward. The screen’s glow flared over the Jesuit’s hypnotized face, the metamorphic glow of the last moments of documentation.

  Slowly coruscating, the viridian figure of the crucified man hung near the hard outlines of the altar. Emblem of the mystery generated out of the Eucharist, it glowed defiantly with subtle deep greens and browns.

  Father Malcolm sank slowly to his knees.

  “Do Thou grant me judgment, humility, and purity to discern Thy will and be the vessel of Thy grace. Grant me the strength to do Thy bidding, the clear sight to perceive Thy purpose.”

  Mario studied the kneeling Jesuit. Father Malcolm was praying toward the altar, but it was the cruciform image on the thermo­vision that had driven him to his knees. He seemed to have abandoned himself to it totally, and a curious sense of relief showed on his face.

  Anita indicated to Mario that they leave him to his prayers. The voice of the priest followed them, fading sonorously as they walked toward the van.

  It was not yet sunset, but already the skies over Golgotha Falls were deep and ragged purple. The storm had broken the old logjam at the mouth of the bog, and the Siloam was pouring into the spongy morass, breaking it up, sweeping it down i
nto the valley.

  Beyond the Volkswagen, several children watched them apprehensively. They were strangely still, like woodland creatures caught in an unnatural light.

  Over the roofs of Golgotha Falls rose the thunderclouds, rimmed in violet hues, gilded by the sinking sun below. The roofs of the town shimmered in pools of gold.

  “Everything looks different,” she whispered.

  Mario looked at the cemetery. Some of the milkweed had blossomed from the rain. The tombstones dripped with rainwater, glittered in mauve and crimson from the dying sun. Even the birch forest above seemed abnormally white, touched by the freak incandescence of the sun so soon after the storm.

  “What’s happened, Mario?” she asked.

  “The rainstorm. Swept all the dust out of the air.”

  Anita stared at Mario in amazement. At a time like this, with a stunning success at their fingertips, his infuriating objectivity rankled her to the core.

  “What about the pictures?” she demanded.

  “I . . . I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

  Anita maintained her calm. “A self-combusting oil lamp, and a cruciform that looks suspiciously like Jesus on the cross. All firmly preserved on three-quarter-inch tape. What’s to think about?”

  Mario turned from her. Anita’s face softened, her voice lost its bite. “Mario, please . . . After all these years, we’ve finally got something definitive!”

  Mario said nothing. Anita moved around to face him. There was a terrible dark antipathy in his eyes. He sank slowly against the wall of the church, rubbing his face with his hands.

  “What’s wrong, Mario?”

  “I don’t even remember taking those pictures,” he groaned. “I don’t know what happened.” He looked up at her. “Didn’t you feel it?” he asked, stupefied.

  “Feel what?”

  “Anita—I—I could hardly hang on to the camera . . . When the priest went down—”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “I didn’t feel anything!”

  Mario closed his eyes and tried to collect himself.

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe I was just emotionally involved in the experiment. A kind of sympathetic response.”

  At 4:37, the moment of the priest’s collapse, the instant of the spontaneous illumination of the overhead lamp, Mario had felt, from the groin upward into the solar plexus, a shudder go through him. It pulsed, then died out. It was like a mild electric current. Or an incomplete orgasm.

  Now he felt a slight fever rising. It might be due, he thought, to the long hours, the damp miasma of the clay grounds.

  Anita touched him gently on the cheek. He smiled and stood up. They heard the soft litany filter through the church. It seemed vaguely in harmony with the peculiar light qualities of the rain-­dripping valley.

  “I’m beat. Would you go in there and monitor the instruments?” he asked gently.

  “All right.”

  Mario stepped through the sucking mud toward the van. The children did not scatter.

  As he stepped into the van, pushing away a black metal case, he sensed the children peering inward, under his arms.

  “Is Jesus in the church?” a boy with glasses asked.

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Where will the devil go now?” asked a shy girl.

  “Back where he belongs. In people’s imaginations.”

  “The devil will come back,” a child called.

  “He’ll suck out your soul,” yelled another.

  Mario pulled the door shut.

  In the church, Anita replaced the drum of graph paper in the seismograph, watching the Jesuit clean the floor around the altar.

  Father Malcolm put the vessels back into their boxes. The chalice and paten he carefully put into the tabernacle. The monstrance and humeral veil he gently lay beside the altar. Anita saw that his hands shook more and more, until he suddenly clutched them to his chest.

  Gently, Father Malcolm was crying.

  Anita went to him and took his arm. He shivered violently, deliriously happy and yet totally drained by the terror of his experience.

  “Father Malcolm,” she whispered, “you need rest now.”

  “Oh, Anita . . . Faith comes . . . That it should come through me—”

  “Yes. The exorcism was successful. But God needs you to rest now.”

  Anita tried to coax the Jesuit from the altar. Gradually, he allowed himself to be led up the aisle. He looked again around the walls, now tinged with the ruby of the lamp. Then he went through the vestibule.

  The dying sun gilded the top of the holy water font through the open door.

  Outside, over the roofs of Golgotha Falls, a double rainbow arched into the dark ridges on either side. High among new cirrus clouds were the evening stars.

  “Like a river of light, He moves through us all.”

  Father Malcolm turned, and saw Anita, half in the shadow.

  “Anita, do you feel the presence of Christ?”

  “Something has happened, Father Malcolm. But I don’t know what.”

  “Christ lives, Anita. Through you, as well as through me.”

  Anita smiled. “I wouldn’t know about that, Father. We rely on data. Statistics. Correlations. Our theories have to be proven. Our experiments have to be replicated by others.”

  “God is the source of all our proofs, Anita. Doesn’t this church now prove it?”

  “Well, I’m not sure Mario would agree.”

  “Have you given your soul unto Mario?”

  Anita suddenly saw the pain in Father Malcolm’s face. It was the pain of separation from her.

  “The soul,” he said softly, “has needs. Just like the body. Just like the mind. You ignore those needs at great peril, Anita.”

  “I understand you, Father. I appreciate everything that you say. But it’s so very foreign to my thinking.”

  “But you will think about it, Anita. Look around you. Feel. Learn to receive.”

  “I will, Father. Good night.”

  Mario couldn’t sleep. At two in the morning, he returned to the church. Sitting before the thermovision, he played back the tape on the screen. There it was, the palpable image, vaguely cruciform in shape. Anita was, of course, right. What they had here was truly immense. Everything they had worked for, struggled for, fought for these past seven pitiless years would finally pay off. And it was all worth it, all the hard times and battered pride, the ignoble years that stretched out behind him like a tattered carpet.

  Mario studied the image of the thermovision. The incredible image. Projected, spewed out, emanated from a believer nearly sick with his belief. A palpable image. Not to another mind, but to the heat-seeking thermovision. For the first time, an image fixed in materials that could be shown to the entire world. Or at least that part of it willing to look with an open mind.

  Ideas of an address to the Harvard committee on the sciences came to Mario.

  Anita would have to work up a psychiatric profile and history on the Jesuit. From abnormal psychology, Mario would move into the Kirlian studies. Kirlian photography recorded different light patterns from meditating yogis than from normal subjects. Also, schizophrenic subjects transmitted altered electrochemical signals compared to normal subjects. There were studies of charisma, its influence on emotions, and studies of telepathy, or thought transference between two minds.

  But never, in discrete imagery, the replication of a subject’s psychic obsession.

  First the priest, Lovell, and then the Jesuit’s uncle. Disturbed, highly libidinous individuals who broke apart in their self-­destructive dementia. Around the church, the collective imaginations of the natives of Golgotha Valley. Frightened, interpreting the luminescences, obsessed with the church, all adding their emotional energy. Perhaps the geology of the church itself, its strange placement in the clay hollow by the blue river, fissured granitic foundations that had frightened even the Algonquin shamans. All together, a r
ich psychic humus, a bell jar of volatile gases, into which the third priest, Eamon Malcolm, entered. And by the extraordinary power of his belief and his doubt fired some kind of spark. That spark, that psychic crisis, was now rendered as an image by the very heat of his own repressed thoughts.

  Mario shook his head in wonderment.

  Golgotha Falls. This sickly, obnoxious site, ill-smelling and morally repellent, was revealing treasures the like of which he had never dared dream.

  Meditating on his knees, facing the crucifix, Father Malcolm felt the flush of excitement on his own cheeks. The emotion was overwhelming.

  Yet what had happened? That the heat had come into him was beyond question. It came at his back like a whirlwind and then entered, filled the chest walls, and spread rapidly to the brain, and only then did he feel it pass into his limbs. Was this, Father Malcolm wondered, what the old Church Fathers called the “fire of God”? Or was it a diabolic simulacrum of that ecstatic wind?

  And how to know the signs? That he was inhabited even now he knew. The interior of the body no longer his own, a fever not his own, and the mind was fueled on an exotic potency he had never known. Were they signs of diabolic infestation, the augury of arrogance and corruption? Or were they inward metamorphoses that proclaimed the presence of Christ?

  A worthless, twice-broken, heavy-hearted Jesuit in the wilderness of a poor valley at an abandoned church. Was this the kind of target easily struck by Satan? Or was it precisely the empty vessel that Christ filled at the extreme instant of need?

  For surely he was not himself any longer. He served somebody. And it was a lovely, exalted feeling that transfigured him. Dared he trust that image on the scientists’ machine? Could Christ in any form be caught in mere mechanical screens? Was not science anti-Christ, a system of atheists? Whoever he served, His emblem was in the extraordinary colored visions of the scientists’ thermovision.

  Father Malcolm did not fall asleep so much as he passed into increasingly visual doubts, until they became dreams, ravishing dreams of a surpassing loveliness that led him toward the dawn.

  Anita sat in the van, notebooks on her knees. Through the partially open rear door she saw the Church of Eternal Sorrows. It rose now like a diadem from the dark valley floor. Its steeple gleamed in the rising moon, pure and radiant. A phallic symbol, according to Mario. A yearning toward God, according to the Roman Catholic Church.