Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  “Shut up.”

  Father Malcolm sank back against the pillar. The cruciform on the thermovision seemed to pin him against the wooden column.

  “Mario,” he said calmly, “without parapsychology, you would be in a state of despair.”

  “Listen to him, Anita. You want to listen to a Jesuit debater when he gets wound up?”

  Anita had entered the church and was quietly observing the two men. Now the Jesuit turned to her, seeking her understanding.

  “A materialist, an atheist, a fatalist,” Father Malcolm said, “is always in despair. He has lost God and therefore himself. The devotion to, in this case, parapsychology is no more than a kind of crying out, an expression of need for what he has lost—his future, transcendence. . . .”

  Mario ground out his cigarette and dumped it into the can.

  “If despair is the condition of honest men,” he said, “I accept it.”

  “No, Mario—”

  “Let me tell you something. If Jesus Christ himself came to this valley I would not be as scared as you are now. Because I live according to the truth as I know it and do what I have to do to dig a few inches of clear, sane space for myself in this crapped-up world!”

  “Is that your motivation?”

  Mario dropped his pencil on the table in anger.

  “I never sold out to the Church!” he exclaimed. “I never sold out to the university! And if despair is the price, I gladly pay it!”

  Father Malcolm stirred himself from the pillar. He felt Anita’s eyes following him. The brilliance of the valley outside infused him with subtle confidence. He turned to Mario.

  “Your god is electronics, Mario,” he said quietly. “Restricted to wires and recorders. But my God is a summation of all things possible. God is He in whom all things are possible. Therefore it is I who have survived in a living condition.”

  Father Malcolm took a last look at the computer screen. Then he went outside toward the Oldsmobile.

  “He’s going to make a fool of himself,” Mario warned. “Sucker thinks he’s John the Baptist.”

  Anita ran after Father Malcolm. She caught up to him as he dropped a cardboard box onto the rear seat and put his hand on the door. He paused, seeing her.

  “Are you so sure you’re doing the right thing?” she asked.

  “We’ll soon know, Anita.”

  “Remember—Boston is not Golgotha Falls. What we think of here as a focus of the paranormal—a revelation—to them it’s just . . .”

  Father Malcolm smiled, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “I know what you’re saying. Revelations and miraculous interventions are anathema to the cosmopolitan powers of the Roman Church.” He withdrew his hand. “And yet, are not these things at the very heart of the Catholic faith? In Boston. In the Vatican. In the entire world.”

  With a trembling hand he indicated the blossoming pear tree, the wild and ecstatic irises, and the scintillating white of the reclaimed church. “Who can ignore such proofs as these?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Still there are many forms of the paranormal, and perhaps this does not mean what you think it does.”

  Father Malcolm turned on the ignition. The Oldsmobile roared into life, a barely visible fume of blue smoke vented from its muffler.

  “You want to protect me from the hardened hearts of the bishop and his secretaries,” he said knowingly. “You fear I shall make a fool of myself. Perhaps you’re right. Still I must communicate my findings to the bishop, and let him determine their meaning.”

  He shifted gears. The brake was on, and the Oldsmobile groaned powerfully against its restraints. He sobered only slightly, seeing the worry on Anita’s face.

  “Do not let your heart be shut away by your science,” he advised her. “Let this church and this valley speak to you. It is a testament full of signs, if you will only have the courage to read them.”

  In gentle dismay, seeing that nothing would stop him, Anita stepped from the Oldsmobile.

  “May God be with you, Anita,” he said with sincerity.

  “And with you, Father.”

  The Oldsmobile leaped out from its ruts. Father Malcolm waved gaily, nearly struck a dense stand of brush, laughed seeing her laugh too, and then the black car lumbered up onto the loop of the road.

  Anita waved back, but her anxiety had returned. The valley was beautiful, the Jesuit’s faith a contagious source of confidence. Where did the anxiety come from?

  Mario watched the Oldsmobile carry a cloud of dust with it, through the field, until it hit the only road and then disappeared into the birch woods on the ridge. Anita came back into the church.

  “Mario,” she said softly.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Going on?” Mario muttered, his attention focused on the thermovision console.

  “Yes,” Anita snapped, “with this church, this town, me! What the hell is happening?”

  Mario shrugged. “I think you’ve caught the refraction of Malcolm’s belief. The man’s a powerful psychic transmitter. That and your own suggestibility.”

  Unsatisfied, Anita walked down the aisle and stopped under the red altar lamp.

  “What about that?” she asked.

  “Come off it, Anita. We’ve had experience with pyrokinesis. The priest was completely charged and it self-combusted. And we’ve got the tapes to prove it.” His certainty irritated her. She walked to the Gothic window and leaned against the sill. The sunlight was warm on her face and the air was redolent of the apple blossoms. The rose bobbed peacefully over the fifth grave.

  “What came into the valley, Mario?”

  “Four months of drought. Growth cycle fucked up and blocked. Then the rains came. Everything blooms. Four months late.”

  Anita turned angrily.

  “What about the leukemia remission, damn you!” she said. “There was a woman dying of tuberculosis and today she’s singing!”

  Mario said nothing for a while, pretending to be absorbed in the computer.

  “I haven’t been to the old folks’ home,” he said defensively. “I don’t know what really happened.”

  Anita walked down the side aisle, finger idly trailing along the wall where the Jesuit had chrismed it. She stood at the vestibule, looking down at the glittering surface of the holy water.

  “Listen, babe,” Mario said, sounding worried. “When a place becomes this suggestive, a lot of things start getting real persuasive. So don’t let the priest get to you. Okay?”

  “I think I can handle it, Mario.”

  From the northern skies came a V-formation of dark birds, flying effortlessly over the autumnal foliage at the top of the north ridge. As the formation entered Golgotha Valley, individual birds began losing position. The V lost its shape. Confused, the flock circled erratically and came down among the fruit trees beside the church.

  Anita looked down. Spiderwebs glistened on the stones of the church path. Old webs were still covered in clay dust, radiating evenly from the inner circles, uniform, articulated lattices. Near the marks made by Father Malcolm’s shoes were new webs, still incomplete. Anita watched a long time.

  The webs were anarchic cruciform patterns.

  Within the church the tiny, discrete motions of Mario working at the thermovision made soft and sensuous ruby shadows over the floor, so pervasive was the glow of the kindled altar lamp above him. Mario studied the cruciform image on the tape, playing and replaying it a dozen times.

  A subtle, irremediable change had come over him.

  The days of being the campus weirdo, tolerated because of Anita, were over. Levitating yogis, Tarot cards, palm-reading, medium-led seances would never again be tied onto his coattails. The thermo­vision glowed brightly, source of his scientific justification. The gentle­men of Harvard could jeer, conspire, evade—and they would—but they could not, in the final analysis, refute the image on the thermovision.

  Nor, Mario realized with a deep del
ight, could the Catholic Church.

  He laughed aloud. Images of the obdurate Dean Osborne, sarcastic bishops, flowed through his mind. He would show them the thermo­vision tapes. And their smug faces would fall. A need to destroy the hypocrites made Mario tingle with anticipation.

  What if something went wrong? What if the thermovision didn’t convince? No. It had to. The days of living in an intellectual backwater, in dread doubts and self-questioning, scarcely concealed by a sardonic facade, must surely, at long last be over. Surely now, within weeks, even days, respectability was at hand.

  Still, Mario was apprehensive. Too much was at stake. Failure now meant consignment to science’s dustbin of the ludicrous.

  Because psychic projections do not die entirely, but fade with almost infinite slowness, the image in the thermovision screen was still faintly visible. Was there not some way of enhancing it? Mario knew that in a laboratory it was possible to augment an image by bathing it in a controlled electromagnetic frequency, the so-called “signature” frequency.

  Mario suspected that a frequency proximate to that of the blue luminescences would separate the image from background interference. It had worked in the laboratory with far vaguer projections. Perhaps it would work in the church. Transforming the church into a laboratory appealed to Mario’s sense of the ironic.

  In the van were light stands, floodlights, and filters through the blue spectrum. Quickly Mario ran to it and began hauling out the equipment. The priest was gone. The church, he realized with dread and excitement, was his.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Oldsmobile crossed the Charles. The north face of the urban sprawl glinted in the western twilight. Already the lights were on in the shadows of the alleys, and freighters at the wharves were faintly illumined by deck lights. Over the longshoremen’s tenement rose the great cathedral, massive and brooding like an artificial cliff.

  Through the twisted roads, bumping over broken stone, the Olds­mobile bounced into narrow neighborhoods already lost in the night.

  Father Malcolm parked behind a Chinese restaurant. A figure in the kitchen doorway eyed him suspiciously, then opened the screen door and threw soapy water into the lot. As Father Malcolm stepped out of the car, he noticed the fog carrying the orange lights of Boston in and around the hills.

  Walking up the stone pathway to the bishop’s residence, he suddenly saw the brilliant white of the apple boughs at the rectory door. The contrast could not have been more profound. Alley cats screamed and leaped noisily from garbage cans as he approached the ornately carved doors.

  Somewhere inside was the sound of a typewriter. Far away, in the dense city, came the echo of a police siren. Father Malcolm felt trapped in the misery of the world.

  He raised his hand once, and again, and then finally pushed the doorbell. The typing ceased.

  When the door opened, a slender priest in black cassock looked out at him, examining, appraising, superior and disdainful. Father Malcolm, self-conscious, his mouth dry, brushed down his unkempt hair and realized his trousers and shirt were stained with the clay of Golgotha Falls.

  The slender priest waited.

  “I must see His Grace,” Father Malcolm said uncertainly.

  The priest shook his head.

  “Bishop Lyons has retired. But if you come after ten o’clock tomorrow, you can make an appointment with his appointments secretary.”

  “It is a matter of great urgency.”

  “Yes?”

  “I am sorry for the late hour. I am sorry for my appearance. But something has happened that has great implications for the arch­diocese.”

  The priest raised a single eyebrow.

  Father Malcolm stepped inside. A curved walnut staircase led to the upper chambers, past framed engravings and a portrait of His Holiness, the Sicilian Baldoni, now the newly invested Pope Francis Xavier. The priest gestured to a hard wooden bench and walked down the corridor. Throughout the wood-paneled interior soft red lamps glowed, and a small golden crucifix hung over the priest’s desk and typewriter.

  Father Malcolm, restless, peered around at two other antique desks under leaded-glass windows. Volumes bound in red leather, codices, and black-bound appointment catalogues were filed under the cherrywood panels.

  Footsteps came back up the corridor. The slender priest introduced an older one whose rank was uncertain and retired smoothly to his desk. Sounds of typing filled the paneled lobby.

  The older priest sat next to Father Malcolm, uncomfortably close.

  “What purpose brings you to this residence?” he asked softly, his gray eyebrows heavy over darting black eyes.

  “What purpose?” Father Malcolm said. “How can I begin to say? I must speak directly with His Grace.”

  “But, you see, he has retired.”

  “Please tell His Grace that Father Eamon Malcolm has returned from Golgotha Falls. Tell him that something extraordinary has occurred. Tell him that only His Grace is equipped to deal with it now.”

  The elderly priest, offended by the unkempt black coat over the clay-stained, burr-infested shirt, sighed. He rose, then leaned subtly forward.

  “Be aware, Father Malcolm, that your cause had better justify this breach.”

  “As I have witnessed Christ, I assure you that it does.”

  The religious affirmation made no impression on the hawk-nosed man. Against his better judgment, the priest went up the curved staircase, past the Pope’s portrait, glaring at Father Malcolm.

  Father Malcolm buried his chin on his folded hands, then blew on the fingers, which were bone-chilling cold. He stood, paced the green carpet, and tried to distract himself. Outside the cross-paned windows, he saw vague figures walking in the fog, a kaleidoscope of human forms, lost and insecure, in an urban hell.

  The slender priest picked up the telephone, which had rung. With a smooth, cheerful voice, he began handling the call. Father Malcolm walked past the desk. As in a dark dream, impelled by a motor force, not of his own volition, more floating than walking, he saw the Pope’s picture advance, the curved stairwell straighten. He was noiselessly ascending the steps.

  Nervously, Father Malcolm scanned the gray eyes of the Sicilian Pope. The eyes seemed to regard him as well. A long-time organizer and trouble-shooter for the Vatican’s secretary of state, Baldoni, the man who became Pontiff, never lost his Sicilian origins. It was rumored that his mother’s rosary still hung over his bed in the Borgia Apartments. Francis Xavier had been a manual laborer in the fields of Sicily, and his edicts were replete with that imagery.

  In that last five years, the millennialist movement had gained strength and force within the Vatican. In response to the fervor spreading throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the cardinals urged Francis Xavier to prepare the Church for its ultimate purpose: the end of history in the second incarnation of Jesus Christ.

  Francis Xavier was known to be a staunch believer in the millen-nialist doctrine. Father Malcolm had always ignored the millennial-ists’ charisma, but now he was unnerved. The events in Golgotha Valley took on a meaning that made him dizzy.

  To have been the vessel of Christ, he felt, to have been used in wresting back to God a defiled church—an inexpressible and radiant destiny—but the Pope’s eyes stared down now and challenged his courage, his deeper hope, until the room began swimming—

  He climbed the stairs as though deep underwater and saw a long corridor with plush red carpeting. A crucifix gleamed dimly in the walnut panels. The lights of Boston threw vague latticeworks of shadow at his feet. At the corridor’s end burned a small desk lamp. There the elderly priest conferred with a young Jesuit.

  The elderly priest looked up, still leaning against the tiny desk at the bishop’s partially opened door, clearly shocked at Father Malcolm’s approach. Behind him, several amber lamps glistened over antique red upholstered chairs in the bedroom.

  “Do you realize your position here, Father Malcolm!” the priest whispered sternly.

  The Jesuit r
ose and smiled at Father Malcolm.

  “His Grace begs that you see his appointments secretary tomorrow morning.”

  In the bedchamber, there was the clearing of a throat. Father Malcolm found his way politely but firmly blocked by the other two men. There was a rustle of clothes inside as though a heavyset man shifted his weight on one of the antique chairs. Father Malcolm glimpsed the edge of the bed, an oaken four-poster, and engravings on the wall.

  “Tomorrow may be too late!” Father Malcolm stated.

  The Jesuit smiled again, an oily smile, but not without politeness.

  “Exactly what is your problem, Father Malcolm?” he demanded, frustrated.

  “I have seen that which ought not be seen,” Father Malcolm said, examining their faces.

  The Jesuit frowned, trying to maintain the illusion of a smile.

  “I fail to understand you, Father,” he said kindly, “but as you know, these matters are always screened before they come to His Grace’s attention.”

  The elderly priest looked at Father Malcolm with growing hostility.

  Father Malcolm watched them, the refined, tough lineaments of character in their faces. They knew the labyrinths of the archdiocese. They understood access to His Grace, which they guarded jealously. They were both sophisticated intellectuals. Their imaginations could never grasp Golgotha Falls.

  “Do return, Father Malcolm,” the hawk-nosed priest said, “before you have done your cause irrevocable harm.”

  Physically only inches from them, less than two feet from the open door, Father Malcolm strained to look inside. At a writing desk, fully dressed, white-haired and massive, Bishop Edward Lyons sealed a letter and pressed the wax with his ring.

  As the bishop turned, he saw Father Malcolm in the door. His black eyes squinted, more surprised than outraged at the intrusion. His leonine head rested on a heavy, assured neck, with a body almost too large for the delicate French furniture under him.

  Suddenly, Father Malcolm burst between the priest and the Jesuit, ran into the bedchamber, and fell at the bishop’s feet.

  “See here, Father Malcolm!” the Jesuit expostulated.

  Angrily, the elderly priest strode into the bedchamber after Father Malcolm.