Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Mario stumbled toward Canaan Street. A small fire burned there, too. A dead puppy was being carried by the legs up the street. The tavern owner heaved it with a gloved hand into the flames. Then Mario saw the dog in the firelight; its face was not a dog’s face, but something bestial.

  Anita stood with a cigarette in her fingers, watching Mario, at the door of the dilapidated billiard hall.

  Mario stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “Anita, what the hell’s going on?”

  Anita looked back at him with dark, hollow eyes, unwilling or unable to speak.

  Mario crossed Canaan Street, past the flaming pyre. The rain­water dripped from his curled hair. The smoke particles had begrimed his face and the seams of the yellow raincoat.

  “The priest is gone,” she said slowly.

  Mario blinked at her, face ruddy in the firelight.

  “I know the priest is gone!” he shouted angrily. “His car is gone! The church is a mess! The cameras are covered with mold! What the hell happened?”

  Anita’s eyes gazed blankly back at him.

  Mario studied her closely, realized how much she had changed. All her idealism seemed charred.

  “Anita—” he said, still angry, but softer, “why did you let the equipment go to hell?”

  “Because nothing on earth will make me go back into that church.”

  Mario, surprised at the metallic flatness of the voice, simply stared at her.

  “Why?” he asked.

  The shock of something vile registered in her face, unnerved him. All she did was turn slowly and go inside the billiard hall.

  Mario followed her. It was deserted. Silent. Vague reddish light moved through the windows from the bonfires on Canaan Street. It smelled of damp, of dust, of the rotted beige curtains at the windows.

  Anita’s clothes and pieces of curtain for a bed lay now under steps that led into darkness. On the crumpled shirt used for a pillow glinted the black revolver.

  “Speak to me, Anita,” he whispered gently. “What’s happened in Golgotha Falls?”

  It was a naked, confused question. He sat down warily on the edge of the billiard table, eyes following her every motion.

  “What happened to the altar light? What changed?”

  Anita leaned against the steps. She watched him for a long time. In that brief period apart, they had both experienced events that now made them strangers.

  Then, in a voice devoid of inflection, almost childlike, she spoke.

  “It was the last night of the vigil. A terrible ordeal. I knelt with him. To give him encouragement. As he prayed, the church warmed. It was the soft, red glow from the altar lamp. We could see it with our eyes closed.”

  She paused, eyes wide, reliving each terrible moment that had followed.

  “It was about dawn,” she continued in the flat, hollow voice. “We had been through a lot together. He was in terrible mental pain.”

  Anita sank slowly onto a wooden box by the ancient Coke machine.

  The shadows etched at her eyes, as though boring into her face. Mario pulled a string and a tiny electric bulb over the table flickered on. It made Anita’s skin look strangely cadaverous.

  “He grew delirious,” she went on. “I tried to bring him out of it. Finally, he seemed to believe that everything had gone well. We prayed together.”

  Anita stood up from the Coke box and paced the area in front of the curtained windows.

  “Then . . . something happened,” she said in a broken voice. “Our affection—”

  “Affection?”

  “Turned to something else. He tried to make love to me.”

  Mario stared at her, incredulous.

  “Eamon Malcolm? Christ, that confirms it all. Oh, Jesus.”

  Mario stood at the billiard table, nervously rattling the ceramic balls down the length of the green felt.

  “He touched me. He put his hands under my blouse. We kissed.”

  Mario gazed at her, then savagely threw a handful of the balls clacking crazily over the table. He turned on her.

  “Well, did you fuck?” he demanded.

  She made no answer. He leaned, outraged, across the table.

  “Well—?” he shouted.

  “No. We didn’t make love.”

  Mario struck at the leather cups under the pockets. The rotted material gave way. Several balls fell onto his boots. The others careened across the floor and into the far darkness. He rubbed his hands into his matted, curled hair.

  Anita moved closer to him. She leaned forward. She took his shoulders and slowly turned him toward her. Gone was the flat, metallic voice and the hollow shell of a face. She was searching his face, demanding attention, warm and alive again.

  “Something left him,” she said softly.

  “What? Besides his virginity?”

  “Like a bird. Without wings. I felt it go out of him.”

  “I do not understand what you’re saying.”

  Her slender, pale hands gently drew him back to her.

  “It was his being, his self—his soul,” she said. “Call it what you want. It went out of him and left him empty.”

  “Is that when the beast’s image appeared?”

  Anita drew back.

  “Then you’ve seen it! Yes! It was at that very moment that the beast entered the church!”

  Anita recalled the moment with a shudder. Father Malcolm’s jaw had dropped, his eyes darkened in horror, and simultaneously she saw the cold, dark lamp over the altar. Something broke in him.

  “Mario,” she said slowly, “do you remember the studies of people dying? Witnesses at the instant of death often see something leave them, something wingless, formless, but perceptible.”

  “Eamon Malcolm is still alive.”

  “No. Partially, maybe. But not under his own will. Mario, he lost his soul.”

  “Since when do we believe in souls?”

  The sarcasm had no effect on Anita. She drew back from him, as adamant as he. She leaned against the far wall and in a distant, cool voice said, “Your theory of psychic projection is wrong, Mario.”

  This was the confrontation. It was not just an alternate hypo­thesis. It was a refutation of Mario, his reliance on equipment, and his almost inhuman need to destroy in order to find. The storm had been brewing for a long time, and now it had come.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.

  But Anita had the coolness of the days when he had first met her in the physics computer room. She was intuitive. There was a grace in her thinking, a reaching beyond the empirical, that put his teeth on edge. And now she was setting it, firmly and forever, between them.

  “That cruciform image, Mario,” she said, enunciating clearly. “It was no projection. It was a presence.”

  Mario felt his face go hot, in anger, in disbelief. Their break was complete. Very slowly he swung his legs while sitting on the green felt. He continued to look away from her, out the window at Canaan Street. He did not want her to see his face. For he felt an abyss of self-doubt opening in front of him.

  “That bestial image,” Anita said, increasingly assured, “is no projection either.”

  It felt like drowning on dry land. Mario flipped a cube of blue cue chalk against the far wall in feigned indifference. Since the campus rebellions had gone bust Mario had clung to science for refuge against his enormous insecurity. Subtly he had begun clinging to Anita. Golgotha Falls had split them like living wood from dead.

  What could he make of the project without Anita? Was his own future, his own life, worth a damn at all anymore? The worst was the almost physical pressure of impending chaos already crowding his brain.

  “What is it, then?” he asked casually.

  “The Antichrist.”

  Mario picked up another cube of chalk and angrily threw it at the door. An infantile, monumental rage was building within him.

  “Why, Anita?” he asked quietly. “Why the Antichrist? Why Golgotha Falls? There must be
a thousand more important places than this scabrous hole.”

  “It’s the priests, Mario. He feeds on the priests.”

  “Then he must be well fed by now,” he said. “He’s had three.”

  “They were only steppingstones. He wants more. I think he’s after bigger game.”

  Mario could hardly credit what he was hearing.

  “This is your idea of science, Anita?” he stuttered. “The Antichrist recruiting priests? Is that what you believe in now?”

  “It’s what animates the church.”

  Mario jumped to the floor. He pointed a trembling finger at her.

  “Listen, I was in a lecture hall with over a hundred faculty and reporters when Eamon Malcolm projected onto all of us. Every foul, sick emotion he keeps bottled up in that God-fearing Christ-­worshiping psyche of his. Nobody saw our slides! Nobody saw our tapes! It came out pornography!”

  Anita stared at him in shock.

  “A mass hallucination!” he shouted. “Naked bodies and a horse bashing some poor fucker to death! It was a complete debacle!”

  Mario slumped on the table again, defeated.

  “I felt like a tongue,” he added softly. “A big, fat, bloated tongue. Somebody else was trying to speak through me. Somebody else was showering us with Freudian pictograms. They took me screaming from the auditorium, Anita. We’re mud at Harvard. Dean Osborne has closed us down. Class, laboratory, project. Everything. One week to return the equipment.”

  Anita absorbed the news slowly. She came around the table to embrace him, but, ashamed, he moved away.

  “The priest,” Mario said slowly, “is a psychic killer. And I’m his target.”

  “You’re wrong, Mario.”

  He looked at her pitifully.

  “All the nights he spent in that vigil, Anita,” he said, “all that holy praying and moaning and desiring your ass. That’s the time he was transmitting, into me—and into that whole auditorium—”

  Anita leaned against the Coke machine. In a strange way, it was a relief to have the project canceled.

  “You’re fishing,” she said. “The priest is a victim. Like you. Like me. Like everybody in Golgotha Falls.”

  Mario paced, agitated and angry.

  “That cruciform shape—that bestial shape—” he insisted “—are like the images that assaulted my lecture—those are Freudian dream images of his own sickness—”

  “A shaggy, horned beast?” Anita countered. “Come off it, Mario! What does that represent?”

  “His uncle. His own lust. Or the bishop. He was deeply dependent on the bishop. It’s a malevolent metaphor of the bishop!”

  “Why so malevolent?”

  “HOW THE HELL SHOULD I KNOW? HE’S THE SICKIE! NOT ME!”

  Mario slammed the cue rack in the corner with his boot, and it shattered into sharp pieces, disgorging rusty nails.

  “Maybe he was pissed at the bishop. You know how it works in the unconscious. The psyche gets its revenge.”

  Mario tried to calm himself. Several times he turned to Anita. Each time she stood her ground, obdurately, unconvinced, staring back at him.

  “Face it, Anita,” he said unpleasantly. “You got pretty involved with Eamon Malcolm.”

  “He was screaming in agony. Of course I tried to help.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Mario sat near her on the closest edge of the table.

  “He was a father figure to you, Anita,” he said coolly. “Your own father died in an airplane crash before you even reached puberty. Add to that remnants of guilt, living freely with me. You needed a safe harbor to work out your own Oedipal problems. That’s why he is charismatic to you. That’s why you adopted his mythology.”

  Anita folded her arms and turned away from him.

  “It’s so easy, isn’t it?” she said. “Sooner or later, everything gets back to sex.”

  “That’s where idealization starts. For you and for him.”

  She shook her head very slowly.

  “I don’t know what’s made you like that, Mario. Freud has his place in our science. Instruments have their place. But Freud and instruments lead into a blind alley if you don’t keep your options open.”

  “The priest has seduced you, Anita. He’s fucked your head if not your body.”

  Anita retreated under the vulgarity.

  “To be a real scientist, Mario, you have to be more than a technician. You have to know when to trust yourself, when to leap beyond the instruments and grasp intuitively at the phenomena. And I know what I’ve experienced and I know it’s real.”

  Mario ignored her. He became very nervous, rubbing his hands. Anita saw that she had already slipped from his consciousness.

  “Otherwise it looks like science, Mario,” she continued. “But it isn’t.”

  Mario, stung, turned to look at her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A vendetta of some kind, masquerading as science.”

  For a long time they looked into each other’s eyes, as though they had passed from lovers to enemies by some unknowable alchemy. Mario turned away and peeked out the window at the dying embers of Canaan Street.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Fix the cameras. Keep going. There’s nothing else I can do.”

  “Without the priest?”

  “He’ll come back,” Mario murmured. “He’s got to. I’ve got one week to replicate the evidence on those tapes.”

  “If there is a God,” Anita said softly, “He won’t let Eamon Malcolm come back.”

  Mario picked up his leather jacket from the table. He looked at Anita.

  She had one of the most analytical minds he had ever known. Now she had tumbled into the mythology of a schizophrenic priest. Suggestion? Physical attraction? What did they share? What had really happened at Friday sunrise?

  Why did Anita stay at Golgotha Falls if she was afraid of the church? Was she waiting for Eamon Malcolm?

  Mario zipped his jacket.

  When he stepped out into Canaan Street, the vapor, struck by the moon, floated like translucent fingers down the sidewalks. Ahead, on the ridges, the rain squalls were blowing inward, sending long and lacy fingers of wet fog down over the tombstones.

  Mario stepped into the church. The beast’s image flickered vaguely in the thermovision screen, lord of all it surveyed. Overhead the altar lamp glowed pallidly.

  He cleaned two sensors with a chamois and inserted them into the altar lamp. He adjusted the threshold of the sound system: small, high-frequency sibilant sounds were passing through the church.

  . . . ni . . . ta . . . ni . . . ta . . .

  Mario seized the earphones. The echoes were being recorded. And he had the beast’s image. Could it convince Osborne?

  No. It wouldn’t. Who was to say how Mario had produced the tapes? Mario needed to correlate the formation of images and echoes with violent physical and emotional changes in the priest. The evidence had to be that tight.

  A wave of depression surged through him. What if the Jesuit did not come back? Eamon Malcolm was spewing out visions from the raw libido itself, but Mario needed skin receptors, sensors braided into the man’s hair across the temples, body thermometers. It had to be correlated. Osborne would accept nothing less.

  It was vaguely like the campus unrest. As the risks increased, so did Mario’s determination. He would get those images, though he destroy the priest in the process.

  And, just as in the days of unrest, the awful specter of utter failure swam all about him.

  What the hell did Osborne—or any authority—need from him? His guts? Served on a silver platter? Here. Take it. It’s my body, my soul, everything I’m made of. Now, is it acceptable? Can I keep my laboratory?

  Mario spat angrily on the floor.

  What if he brought Osborne the trussed and wriggling form of Christ? What would the granite old New Englander say? He doesn’t belong in my kind of science. Get Him out of my office. C
rucify Him again!

  Mario laughed out loud, a bitter laugh, with tears of rage in his eyes.

  C-crucify Him . . . C-crucify Him . . . C-crucify Him . . .

  The blasphemy died among the dark corners of the church.

  Mario’s bitter smile faded with an infinite slowness.

  He had said nothing out loud.

  C-crucify . . . C-crucify . . . C-crucify . . .

  The echo persisted deep down at the threshold of human hearing, a hissing threnody, steady and aggressive, like insects in a summer field.

  Mario put down the earphones and stared, transfixed, at the beast’s image grinning back to him.

  What had Anita said?

  “He feeds on priests.”

  A terrible uncertainty swept through Mario. Could his theory be rubbish?

  “He’s after bigger game.”

  Mario stood up defiantly.

  “What bigger game?” he shouted aloud, derisively, defensively at the image. “The fucking bishop? Pope Francis Xavier?”

  Mario chortled nastily, but the terrible chill of the church invaded him and robbed him of confidence.

  “Jesus Christ Himself?” Mario yelled.

  . . . Christ . . . Ch . . . rist . . . ist . . . st . . . t . . .

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bishop Lyons sat in an oakwood chair, in the bishop’s miter, head slightly cocked, and a long crucifix over his knees.

  He was in the grip of a déjà vu. In his own antechamber, he felt suddenly like a figure in a dream. His palms grew moist. A kind of invisible light, a resistant yet immaterial force, attended the motions of his hands and feet.

  It had stalked him since the morning, and now it surrounded and observed him.

  The bishop calmed himself. Suddenly, bustling figures came through the corridors.

  “His Eminence has arrived,” whispered a Franciscan.

  Bishop Lyons looked up, still pale.

  “Cardinal Bellocchi? The Nuncio?” he murmured.

  “The delegation has received him at the door.”

  Bishop Lyons sighed and rose from the scrolled, massive chair. The psychic disturbances were gone. He surveyed the corridors full of priests, the Jesuit secretaries and the Franciscans, the many antique desks with ornate telephones, the dossiers with gilded bindings; and the power of his high office reassured him.