Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Anita walked softly into the main part of the church. Father Malcolm heard each footstep, felt almost palpably the weight of the slender woman over the floor.

  “Mario,” she said. “He fled his absolution to come back.”

  “His what?”

  “I wrote a confession for Cardinal Bellocchi,” Father Malcolm muttered, eyes transfixed by the goathead taunting him silently. “But I—broke out of the cathedral—blindly—it seems that a power­ful and arrogant stranger lies within me and corrupts my very thoughts!”

  “I’m taking him back,” Anita stated.

  Mario looked, dismayed, at Anita. Incredibly, she wanted to return the Jesuit to Boston for the fiction of absolution. The last thing Mario needed was to have the priest’s superego bolstered by Catholic mythology.

  “Why did you flee?” Mario asked. “Why didn’t you just walk away?”

  “I—I became infested with violence—anger—”

  “There must be a reason why you were angry at them.”

  Father Malcolm looked up, eyes flashing.

  “They had no conception of what I had been through!”

  Mario smiled softly and walked closer to the Jesuit.

  “And what was that?” he asked with a dangerous slowness.

  “A religious experience,” Father Malcolm said, blinking. “They were bookmen. Library sitters. Toadies to the bishop. Mere administrators. But I—”

  Mario suddenly leaned forward and shouted, “Had a sexual experience!”

  Father Malcolm backed away. He looked, confused, at Anita, at the thermovision screen, at the flickering yellow altar lamp, and vigorously shook his head.

  “You despised them for their sexlessness!” Mario said, pursuing him. “She was right there. Available. Willing. Up against you! And it was delicious!”

  “Mario—for God’s sake—” Anita protested.

  But Mario came even closer to the Jesuit.

  “That emotional explosion sent sensations and ideas into your brain that scared the shit out of you! That’s what you ran from, Father Malcolm! It’s what you’ve run from all your life!”

  Father Malcolm, backed against the aisle pillar, gazed back at Mario with repugnance.

  “But it followed you to the cathedral!” Mario shouted. “Of course it followed you to the cathedral! Because it’s part of you! You’ll never escape it!”

  A malignant glance came from Father Malcolm, the glance of a cornered man.

  Anita watched the sweating Jesuit and Mario, and the strange electricity between them. It was as though their personal antagonism was but the juncture of a far more annihilating confrontation.

  “Your own sexuality drove you back to Golgotha Falls!” Mario taunted.

  Father Malcolm pointed vigorously to the blue crosses of mold that glittered in twelve places on the walls.

  “Is that the work of sex?” he demanded heatedly.

  “No.”

  “Blasphemous mockeries of the Crucifixion . . . The finger of the hand of Evil has been here and inscribed his mark!”

  Mario sneered. “You chrismed the walls. The chrism contains moisture. Contains a nutrient. Obviously, mildew will grow on it.”

  Father Malcolm, checked, turned away in disgust. Suddenly, he gestured at the desolate landscape outside the Gothic window.

  “Who has sucked the life out of the valley?” he asked in a strong, assured, yet worried voice.

  “It’s October. Things get desolate in October.”

  The Jesuit laughed harshly.

  “Ridiculous! You blind yourself like a child!”

  “After the drought came rains. Dormant fruit trees blossomed. Now it’s cold October. The valley is dead. Why search for Satan in rhythms of nature?”

  The linchpin was being worked loose from the Jesuit’s brain. Darker, less coherent impulses rose to the surface.

  Anita saw him suffer, the trembling of the face that mutely expressed a loss of all moorings. As she took a single step toward him, he feared her and whirled away.

  “Who lit the lamp?” he rasped, pointing at the sick, pulsing yellow flame.

  For a moment, they watched the tongues of saffron licking out from the oil basin. As the day grew darker, the strength of the lamp increased, and sent its hollow light flickering over the tabernacle, the cameras and instruments, and onto their faces.

  “Anita lit it.”

  Father Malcolm advanced confidently.

  “But why is it so sick?” he demanded. “Who makes the red lamp of Christ sick with sin?”

  “Anita cracked the red glass while lighting it.”

  Mario dragged a chair under the lamp, quickly stood on it, and dislodged a wedge of red glass. He held it in his fingers to show the Jesuit. Then he let it crash to the floor. The yellow lamp flared more powerfully over his face.

  “And it pulses because it’s nearly out of fuel,” Mario said, eyes dark in the yellow flicker.

  He tapped the oil basin with his fingers, snapping at it, until the empty ping ricocheted softly in the darkening church.

  “No Satan,” Mario said, smiling quietly.

  Father Malcolm staggered backward against the altar, clutching at it, but reluctant to touch the holy cloth. The result was that he stumbled down the length of the sacrificial table.

  “The lamp was extinguished,” the Jesuit shouted, “at the hour of sin!”

  “It was the wind,” Anita said softly. “The wind changed.”

  In horror, Father Malcolm looked at Anita. Mario had momentarily seduced her again. The cold, cruel logic of his science let her betray what she had felt the dawn of that Friday. Father Malcolm, unmoored, felt himself groping in the same hallucinatory universe he had fled on the Charles bridge.

  Fighting collapse, Father Malcolm felt all the idealism in his early life, his brother Ian, his uncle James Farrell Malcolm, Elizabeth, even Christ Himself, observing his downfall, an irrevocable downfall without mercy or salvation.

  His lips bled profusely.

  Mario advanced slowly until he was near the Jesuit. Father Malcolm backed away, afraid. Mario gently touched the wounded mouth. The Jesuit’s head jerked back in pain.

  “I kissed the cardinal’s crucifix,” he whispered hoarsely, “and my lips bled. As you can see, my very body is tormented by Satan.”

  Father Malcolm fell on his knees in front of the altar. His lips moved rapidly, and he breathed raspingly. Anita crossed the floor toward him, but Mario roughly caught her by the shoulder and held her back.

  The thermovision showed increased crimson flares. Mario knew the Jesuit’s resistance was breaking down.

  “Mario . . . he’s dangerously ill—”

  “He’s ready to project,” Mario whispered, eyes gleaming. “But he’s holding back.”

  “Mario—he’s not an animal!”

  Mario laughed in her face.

  “Of course he’s an animal! We’re all animals!”

  Mario turned back to the Jesuit, who with every failure of concentration threw himself more violently into his prayer.

  “What kind of saint do you think you are?” Mario taunted. “There are no saints in this world!”

  Father Malcolm paused.

  “I do not abjure God,” he said quietly.

  He turned slowly to Mario, his face drawn.

  “Or His saints,” he added softly.

  Father Malcolm turned back and once again moved his lips in prayer. Mario stepped closer to him.

  “Are you trying to be God?” Mario shouted. “Do you think you’re Christ?”

  “No.”

  “Who else?” Mario demanded. “Who else in all of history was so damn sacred as you pretend to be?”

  Father Malcolm stopped in mid-prayer.

  “My brother Ian,” he said gently. “Ian was gifted by the grace of God.”

  “Well, where is this saint now?”

  “He’s dead. He drowned when he was twelve.”

  “So your parents beatified him.” />
  Father Malcolm paused.

  “My family owed a son to the Church. I was sent to take Ian’s place.”

  “But you hated it.”

  Father Malcolm, unable to concentrate, let his hands fell. He no longer had defenses.

  “Every mass you performed,” Mario pointed out, “was in the chains of your dead brother!”

  Mario advanced.

  “But you’re not Ian! You’re Eamon Malcolm! Somewhere under that saintly posture lives a real man, and that real man has sexual needs and wants! Let him loose!”

  Father Malcolm rubbed his face wearily. He had not slept since his collapse in the cathedral. Somewhere, deep in the subconscious, Mario had struck home. The repressed anger of a foreign being rose in inarticulate rebellion.

  “My uncle was a saintly man,” he said firmly.

  “Yes, and you spent many a fine afternoon on his lap, looking at Renaissance nudes!”

  “Mario, your puerility astonishes me!”

  But Mario sensed something crumbling in the Jesuit finally. He leaned over the kneeling man.

  “Feelings arose that frightened you,” Mario said, enunciating with exaggerated care. “So you idealized him. You desexualized him. And yourself!”

  Anita tried to pull Mario away, but he roughly shook off her hands.

  “Then you heard how he died!” Mario shouted. “You found out he was no saint at all!”

  The thermovision flared violent crimson, swirled, but formed hybrid shapes and died again into the red flux.

  Father Malcolm, unable to pray, stood up angrily and pushed Mario away. Suddenly, in mid-stride toward the vestibule, he extended his right arm. He leaned against the pillar. In terrible moans, his breath escaped him, and his shoulders heaved. Anita heard the awful timbre of a crushed voice, issuing from a broken personality.

  “It’s true—” Father Malcolm wept hoarsely. “What you say is true! Oh, God!”

  Father Malcolm tried to stagger out of the church, away from the twin mockeries of the grinning beast and Mario’s insights piercing his vital being.

  “What happened to Bernard Lovell—is happening to me—”

  “Just abnormal psychology,” Mario said, snapping a fresh videotape into the thermovision.

  Father Malcolm, coughing, stumbled down the center aisle, his back illumined by the full force of the yellow lamp. He looked at it in terror. Anita saw that he no longer knew where he was. He groped like a blind man, avoiding, yet transfixed by, the cool lamp that glowed throughout the dark church.

  “Lovell . . . Lovell . . . I am Lovell . . .” he muttered.

  Anita pushed past Mario.

  “I’m getting him out of here,” she said defiantly.

  “I’m not through with him!”

  “Yes, you are.”

  Mario pointed at the orange, crimson, and white-hot flares in the thermovision screen.

  “Not now, Anita! For Christ’s sake, he’s volatile!”

  Anita struggled to put the Jesuit’s arm over her shoulder. The warmth of her body made him dizzy.

  “I am Lovell,” he whispered. “I am James Farrell Malcolm. I am sin incarnate!”

  The horrible force of Mario’s universe, the aggressive nothingness, penetrated him again and again, and he shuddered repeatedly. Anita’s voice dimly rose over the rising chaos.

  “Eamon Malcolm is too sick for any experiments!” she pleaded. “I’m driving him back to Boston!”

  Suddenly, a barrage of suggestive imagery reared inside the red-orange flux of the thermovision. Anita and Mario turned and saw shapes form and disintegrate.

  “This is it!” Mario hissed. “Direct projection! Don’t leave me now!”

  “It’s not worth it, Mario. Nothing is worth it.”

  She backed away with Father Malcolm. Mario followed her and grabbed her arm painfully.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Anita,” he said softly. “Once I’d have given the world for you. But this bastard has changed you—”

  “It’s you, Mario . . . You’ve lost all decency—”

  She broke away, and again he followed her toward the door and held her back.

  “Science makes a sacrifice of us all, damn it!” he said. “I’ve given my life and half my sanity for this. Don’t take it from me now!”

  She glared at him. The barrier between them was complete.

  “No, Mario,” she said. “Love makes sacrifices, too.”

  Astounded, he watched her. Then a violent corona of energy burst within the thermovision viewfinder, illuminating the walls, reflecting red over the altar linen, glittering on the blue crosses.

  Mario stumbled closer to the thermovision, the way a priest stumbles, reverent and fearful, to his image of Christ. In that instant, she guided the distracted priest out of the church.

  They were crossing the mounds of rubble, toward the Volkswagen at the end of Canaan Street, when Mario ran out of the church door, looking right and left, brandishing the revolver.

  “Come back!” he roared.

  Eamon Malcolm turned back toward the stocky figure in the frame of the door, a figure entrapped in an evil so large, so overwhelming, that it warped the very roof and steeple of the church.

  A shot rang out.

  “Come back!”

  Anita pulled and pushed the Jesuit down the street and opened the Volkswagen door.

  Eamon’s teeth chattered. Premonitions of the catastrophe of death—an unconsecrated, unabsolved death—assailed his soul.

  Damnation loped at him in the form of the outraged scientist rushing over the rubble mounds.

  “Get in, Father!” Anita hissed.

  But she was too late. Mario lunged forward, took hold of the Jesuit’s coat, and whirled him from the front seat.

  Anita screamed and ran to the other door. Father Malcolm moaned on the ground, covered in dust. He tackled Mario’s legs, and Mario brought the butt of the revolver down on the priest’s hands.

  The engine roared, broken branches shot from the rear wheels, the front end of the van lifted, and as the vehicle moved ahead in a cloud of dust, Mario was thrown in a circle from the open passenger door.

  Aiming at the tires, on one knee, Mario pulled the trigger three times. The shots echoed dully in the twilight. Slowly, very slowly, came thrice the mocking answer: The bell tolled gently from the steeple.

  “God have pity on you,” Father Malcolm moaned.

  The van looped around the field and caught the road. Mario put the revolver into his belt. The Jesuit stared at him in disbelief, whitefaced and trembling.

  The Jesuit crawled away, crablike, toward the town. Mario jerked him up from the ground.

  “We’re not finished, Father!” he hissed into the priest’s ear. “We’re going back into that church!”

  Dragging the Jesuit after him, Mario savagely threw him inside toward the altar.

  The ceiling glittered with a strange light.

  Mario walked slowly toward the thermovision. For a long time, he stared into it. Father Malcolm noted Mario’s horrified expression.

  “What . . . what is it?” he whispered. “WHAT IS IT?”

  Mario turned the thermovision camera slowly on its hinge.

  The Jesuit crawled toward the thermovision screen, stared in shock at the clearly defined image of a skeletal figure, with flesh hanging onto its ribs and forehead, clawed out of the grave’s depth, holding high a crucifix.

  “It’s my death—” he whispered.

  Mario sank back against the pillar, fumbling for a cigarette in his shirt pocket.

  The videotape recorded the dark, fading image. It was ghastly in its struggle against the holding earth. The skeletal teeth grimaced in effort, thrusting the cross high into the dark air.

  “You projected without religion,” Mario said, regaining his calm and assurance at the moment of triumph. “No rituals. No litanies. The raw stuff.”

  Father Malcolm stared dully in despair.

  “The image is my
penance—” he tried to say.

  “It’s your depression. Your despair.”

  The half-decomposed figure bore a striking resemblance to Eamon Malcolm, down to the dark coat and the wisps of blond hair. The agony of the face was unmistakably his own.

  “No Christ; no Satan,” Mario said coolly, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Just your own very human problems.”

  Father Malcolm slumped in brokenhearted comprehension before the altar. Mario felt sorry for him.

  “I believed in the sign of the cross,” he groaned.

  “A fantasy.”

  Father Malcolm’s head lowered toward the floor.

  “I believed the church to be filled with the holy presence.”

  “Sexual sublimation.”

  Mario smoked calmly, waiting for the final weight of the truth to enter the priest and claim him. Removing the repressive idea of God had opened the pathway to direct projection. It would cripple the miraculous claims of religion. It would prove where those miracles began. In the unsatisfied drives of sexual beings.

  The Jesuit’s voice became more and more slurred, drunken, groveling. “Holy—men—believe—signs—”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m sorry, Father. It was your own naive nature that believed in the images. It’s just psychology. Nothing more.”

  Mario flicked away the driving, unseen insects from his face. A fever rose into his forehead. He felt the pressure of a mild blackout approach.

  Father Malcolm slumped very close to the ground.

  “Holy men—will—believe—signs—”

  Annoyed, Mario slapped away more of the insects. Sweat rolled down his forehead. The cigarette fell to the floor. He steadied himself against the thermovision.

  “What are you moaning about, goddamn it?” he said.

  The Jesuit’s voice seemed to come from the far walls and rafters of the church.

  “As—you—did—”

  Mario looked at the sound recording system. In the slightly undulating church, the stability of the machines gave him assurance. The needles gently moved at the priest’s voice. Yet the priest’s lips were not moving.

  “What? What the hell is going on?” Mario shouted.

  . . . Evil . . . is the destruction . . . of good . . . in a man . . .

  The words resonated deep within Mario’s brain.