Golgotha Falls

by Frank De Felitta

  Then neighbors were at the door in raincoats. Without breakfast he was dressed, stuffed into raingear, and driven headlong toward the industrial parking lot beyond the last cul-de-sac. Crowds already milled on the asphalt. The masses of nuns, priests, and parochial students with hastily made banners frightened him.

  “Francis Xavier!” chanted the throng.

  Suddenly the crowd cheered. Eddie turned. Up the suburban roads came a black limousine preceded and followed by police cars and motorcycles.

  The crowd surged forward in expectation and the priests tried ineffectually to maintain a semblance of order. Eddie felt the collective joy come into his heart. The black limousine momentarily ducked out of sight behind a knoll.

  In the limousine, Francis Xavier pressed his fingers to his temples.

  The vision of the skeletal figure rising burgeoned in his mind.

  Dreamlike, Francis Xavier saw the crowds under a sea of umbrellas lining the roads. Mutely, those faces expressed a potent hunger. Francis Xavier had broken from his itinerary, and he moved on an expedition of great risk.

  The crowds grew as the entourage circled toward the parking lot of the industrial complex, ablaze with perimeter lights. Cafeteria workers, assembly-line men, mothers with children, several hundred priests and nuns, cheered as the limousines were sighted. But when Francis Xavier examined the faces again, he saw the same dark, spiritual dread.

  “Do they sense it?” he whispered. “Do they sense something in their souls?”

  Francis Xavier suddenly lowered his face into his hands.

  “Cardinal Bellocchi. I have no strength. My knees tremble like an old woman’s.”

  Cardinal Bellocchi grasped Francis Xavier’s forearm.

  “To him whom the Holy Spirit elects,” Cardinal Bellocchi whispered fervently, repeating what he had said the morning of Baldoni’s election, “to him the Holy Spirit gives strength.”

  And just as savagely, Francis Xavier, in a sudden agony of selfdoubt, retorted again, “But is it the Holy Spirit?”

  The déjà vu, with its skeletal figure rising, became unbearable.

  “Stop the limousine!”

  Francis Xavier stepped unsteadily from the limousine, assisted by his Nuncio.

  In the parking lot, an extraordinary cheer shook the ground. Feverishly, Francis Xavier scrambled up a grassy knoll where he was in plain sight of nearly three thousand people. In a gesture transmitted instantaneously throughout the world, the elegant white robes flapping in the wet wind, he spread both arms and blessed the surging crowds.

  “Deliver us not into the power of evil!” Francis Xavier prayed. “We feel Thy holy presence, and look for a sign of Thy holy will!”

  The workers, sleepy children, and management officials saw the strained, white face on the grassy slope, and something surged through them, something altering, raising their relationship to the material earth.

  “Forgive those deceived by false signs!” Francis Xavier thundered. “At the final hour, open their hearts to the mystery of Thy sacred love!”

  Francis Xavier lowered his head.

  “Give us the power to endure the terrors that shall precede Thy Second Coming,” he prayed. “Lead us through the storm into the final harbors of eternal peace.”

  Many of the crowd had fallen to their knees and, hats in hand, listened, then crossed themselves. Eddie Fremont felt an electric thrill at the sight of the Pontiff and an irrepressible desire to go forward and touch him, to be touched by him, to share that sense of blessing. Eddie was not alone. The entire crowd surged forward and the secret service began to panic.

  “They feel it!” Francis Xavier said, raising two fists to his chest in his esctasy. “It is soon! And it is very near!”

  The police were pushing the church officials back into the limousine. Police lines were breaking down, and figures darted over the mud to seize and kiss the papal hand.

  “Bishop Lyons has slipped into a coma,” Cardinal Kennedy said, holding the telephone on its curled extension cord. “His final word was . . . ‘Absolve’ . . .”

  Francis Xavier anxiously scanned the skies. A leaden dawn was breaking over the metropolis, heavy with the grief of centuries and generations of unfulfilled promises.

  “Could it be—the priest he was referring to—?” Francis Xavier wondered aloud, stepping away, watching the northern cloud conformations. Within the boiling gray silhouettes were the winged shadows Francis Xavier had seen over his uncle, over the dying woman, on his father’s coat. Francis Xavier gripped his mother’s rosary until his knuckles were white.

  “So long have I sought you,” he whispered. “In San Rignazzi. In Boulogne. In the Bolivian mountains. But never, never have I been so close!”

  The gloom of the wet fields and forests seemed suddenly animated. Shadows crept closer to the limousines. Francis Xavier felt the chill of an observing power.

  “And when I find the snake,” he said in Sicilian dialect, “I will cut off its head!”

  Cardinal Kennedy touched Francis Xavier’s arm.

  “The weather has cleared,” Cardinal Kennedy said. “We can return to the airport.”

  “We are not going to the airport.”

  “But, Your Holiness. The Quebec conference has already been postponed a day!”

  “We are answering a summons, Cardinal Kennedy.” Francis Xavier turned to Cardinal Bellocchi. “The priest—Eamon Malcolm, I believe—where is his parish?”

  “Golgotha Falls, Your Holiness,” replied the Nuncio.

  Cardinal Kennedy stepped immediately forward.

  “It’s an isolated church in a poor valley, hours away in that direction,” he complained, pointing toward the azure patch beyond the wooded hills where the dark shapes circled in the sky. “It was defiled, then attempts were made to consecrate it again. But all attempts failed.”

  Cardinal Bellocchi and Francis Xavier exchanged glances.

  “Then we shall go to Golgotha Falls,” said the Pope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mario groped through dark mud. A stench of moldered stubble and dried blood entered his nostrils. Thistles. Black beetles on his hands and shirt.

  . . . Sucker . . .

  Gradually he saw again, in the mind’s eye made vivid by panic, the Jesuit standing at the church door, revolver in hand. The priest’s face was foxlike with a smug malignancy.

  . . . Sucker . . .

  Why? How had he been used? By whom?

  Percussive reports seemed to go off inside his head. The shrubs floundered around him as he flailed up the ridge. His boots dug into the wet clay. The Jesuit’s insinuating laughter ricocheted in his imagination.

  The first time Eamon Malcolm projected, during the exorcism, a shaft of that energy had struck Mario. The second time Eamon Malcolm projected, Mario had fallen in delirium on the Harvard lecture floor. But this time—the image of the rising dead—was like a firestorm in his head. There was no telling hallucination from reality. All Mario knew was that he had been hit with the full force of an extraordinary and insane rage.

  Men’s hands grabbed his arms. Mario’s boots trailed over the mud.

  “What . . . What the hell—?”

  Overalled farmers, grim-faced and spattered with mud, were dragging him toward a weatherbeaten barn.

  Mario kicked furiously, panicked.

  “Let me go, you bastards! What do you think you’re doing?”

  But the farmers only held harder to his legs and arms, wrestling him, pushing him, carrying him toward the old structure.

  “It almost happened when that priest Lovell was here,” whispered a farmer with a terrifying bitterness.

  “What did? What are you talking about?”

  Brutally Mario felt a thistle bush smash into his ribs. The farmers carried him relentlessly over the muddy road. From time to time they looked back, ashen-faced, at the church.

  “And it nearly come to pass when that white-haired man come out to Boston,” said a younger farmer. “Bless
ed be God he died before it happened.”

  “Before what happened?”

  Mario wrestled against their hold. Then he saw that two farm boys were opening the barn doors. A yawning black void greeted him.

  Shouting at his captors, Mario kicked. The strong farmers’ hands made him still.

  “Then you come along,” said the first farmer, breathing into Mario’s face. “You and this new priest. Oh, you two done it all right!”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  The farmer seized Mario by the collar, dragging him upward.

  “We know who you been working for, mister!”

  Then suddenly, Mario was catapulted into darkness. A stench of manure, wet hay, and mud enveloped him. Mario whirled and ran to the door. It was too late. The exterior wooden bar slammed into place.

  Mario desperately rattled the door.

  A farmer’s eye appeared in a knothole.

  “Taint nothing left now but to go and be divided,” the farmer muttered in a voice of dread and fear.

  The voice paralyzed Mario with its undeniable horror. Again he remembered all that Anita had said about what brought the images into the thermovision, the events into the church, and the fear into the Jesuit. Mario pounded on the door.

  “Divided into what?” he yelled, comprehending in spite of every fiber of his being.

  The twin barrels of a shotgun poked slowly through a crack in the gray timbers.

  “Into the righteous and the damned!” came the grim voice.

  Mario tumbled backward, over the bales of hay. Voices of the Jesuit, of Anita, of Father Pronteus roared at him through the thunder of the flying heavy-gauge buckshot.

  The percussive shots reverberated twice into the dark woods south of Dowson’s Repentance, east of Golgotha Valley. Anita slammed on the brakes. A third muffled report reached her ears.

  “My God,” Anita whispered starkly, “they’re coming from Golgotha Falls.”

  Anita surveyed the valley. Blue fog rolled up from the Siloam and spread out, hugging the fields. It was nearly 6:00 a.m.

  The van had outrun the storm. Black clouds raged outward from the coastline toward the sea. Wind gusts still buffeted the oaks and the fields, and barn doors slammed, breaking the eerie silence. Occasionally an owl called and a black form flew with great loops of its wings into the forest.

  “It’s so desolate,” Dean Osborne muttered nervously. “It’s what hell must be like.”

  “That road,” Anita said, pointing. “I don’t know if the van can get over it.”

  The asphalt leading into fallen branches was badly rutted. Crevices loomed like chasms under the headlights. Vague fingers of the blue fog drifted over the road from the wetter woods.

  Anita started the van. Resolutely she drove into the grit and broken asphalt, the branches snapping under the wheels and flying out from the rear. Dean Osborne instinctively ducked, holding on to the dashboard as he bounced.

  The gloom of the predawn light filled the valley with a blanket of stillness.

  “Anita,” Dean Osborne said.

  “Yes?”

  “I never believed in God.”

  Anita did not answer.

  “I tried to,” he said, assuaging his unease by talking. “I went to church regularly until I was thirteen. I even studied comparative religion in college. But it made no sense to me. Not logical. You know what I mean?”

  He opened his eyes and turned to her. Anita, intent on the road, wiped away the moisture from the inside of the windshield.

  “Did you, Anita?” he asked gently. “Did you ever believe?”

  Anita kept her eyes on the dark, wooded path among the ferns.

  “I met a man who believed in God,” she finally said. “It’s changed my mind.”

  Dean Osborne held on to the dashboard as the van rolled over black branches.

  “The Jesuit?”

  She nodded.

  “Through him I experienced some . . . some kind of force, some kind of love. I felt it in him and now it’s in me.” She looked at him. “It’s like a small captured bird deep inside.”

  Impressed, his eyes turned back toward the road.

  “My wife is not well,” he said. “The doctors don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve searched again, Anita, for some divine answer. But all I find is a great emptiness.”

  Anita slowed the van down. She was approaching Golgotha Falls from the north, the far side of the Siloam, having swung around the edge of the valley. The road gradually disappeared into a short morass of hard mud and decayed trunks. She brought the van to a sudden stop.

  “What is it?” Dean Osborne asked.

  In the glare of the headlights a raccoon stood on its hind legs. The blinding beams froze the animal. Its tiny forelegs wavered, mesmerized.

  Anita got out and gently pushed her boot at the raccoon. It stumbled sideways into the ferns. Then it waddled into the dense mushrooms and fallen logs of the blue fog.

  Sharp, glistening holly grew along the logs. Red berries were ripe and bright at the center of the leaves.

  “Strange,” Dean Osborne said as Anita got behind the wheel. “It’s not the season for holly.”

  “I know,” Anita said softly.

  Puzzled, Dean Osborne looked at her. Then Anita gunned the engine, the Volkswagen shot forward, and they pushed into the cold ultimate dawn unfolding at the far end of Golgotha Valley.

  Mario awoke with a piercing pain in his side. His groan filled the blue-gray light of a cloudy dawn. For an instant he had no recollection of where he was or who he was or why he lay in a filthy barn.

  Then the nightmare of a Jesuit who was not a Jesuit came back to him, and he remembered.

  The farmers were gone. Why hadn’t they come into the barn, making sure of killing him, just as they had destroyed a score of deformed calves and lambs? The buckshot had torn out heavy timbers in the rear of the barn, but had gone over his head.

  Maybe, Mario realized, they were running out of time.

  He pulled himself loose from the straw and manure heap where he lay. He slapped the crud from his shirt and trousers, his eyes searching the upper regions of the hayloft. A solitary window offered a possible avenue of escape.

  Mario piled bales over a broken harrow and climbed on top. He reached the sturdy steps of a rickety ladder, swung his weight onto it, and hoisted himself painfully into the loft. From the window he had an unobstructed view of Golgotha Valley.

  The fog had lifted. The morning was clear. The farmers and townspeople were nowhere in sight. The church seemed empty. Mario could not see any of his instruments from his angle. Eamon Malcolm was nowhere in sight.

  “Sick bastard!” Mario muttered.

  A peculiar sound drifted over the south ridge, a droning like a slurred version of bees in flight.

  Mario turned, craning his neck. Over the birch woods he saw only the turbulent clouds of the storm far to the east. Birds flew up from the branches. The drone grew louder.

  A motorcycle crested the ridge and drove down the looping road.

  Astounded, Mario leaned further out the window. The motorcycle glinted in the sun, far away, and the rider wore boots. It was a policeman. Mario ducked back into the barn.

  Had Anita sent the police after him? Maybe someone from Golgotha Falls had alerted the police to the danger of Eamon Malcolm?

  Slowly he looked again.

  A second motorcycle crested the ridge and followed the first down the looping road. Then a third and a fourth policeman entered the valley.

  Four cops to pick up—who?

  But the policemen stopped at the large loop in the road to confer. They pointed at spots around the church and the town with their gloves. One spoke into a radio. They acted efficiently, quickly, and the motorcycles fanned out to take up stations along Canaan Street.

  Had they been summoned by the priest’s projective power?

  Mario flung bales onto the ground below the window. Grabbing the rope from a pulley he swung
down over the bales, then dropped painfully to the ground.

  He walked slowly along the grassed slope of the south ridge. Two more motorcycles, then a single one abruptly crested the birch woods. Mario ducked into the shrubs. When they had passed he loped along the hillside, head down, for a better view of the entire town.

  A deer, caught in the shadows of interlaced branches, stared at Mario. Where the bony antlers came together on the head a white cruciform glowed, halolike, in the rising sunlight.

  “Oh, Christ!” Mario breathed.

  He ran furiously toward the top of the ridge. A different kind of drone came, faded, then came stronger through the redolent air. Mario crouched among the thick ferns.

  A Boston Municipal Police car sent dust flying as it curved up over the ridge.

  Did Anita tell some precinct about his revolver? Still, it seemed unlikely so many police would have come.

  A second squad car, skidding slightly on the loose gravel and pebbles, came past the break in the birch woods. Mario watched. The two policemen looked very professional, scanning Golgotha Valley before descending into it.

  Mario stood up. What the hell was going on?

  Behind a third and fourth squad car, glinting in a sun-flecked patch of road, came a black Cadillac limousine bearing the Catholic insignia of the Boston diocese. Mario stumbled out into the road in total confusion. Lamely, he waved his arms.

  But the limousine roared relentlessly past. Mario stepped back, coughing in the dust. Three Jesuits in the rear seat stared at him, clutching wooden boxes. Mario stared at the Cadillac.

  Had the cathedral sent its Jesuits to reconsecrate the Church of Eternal Sorrows, not realizing the manic powers of Eamon Malcolm, perhaps not suspecting he was even there?

  “Go back!” he shouted.

  Then he saw in the distance two motorcycle police veer about and head his way. Mario could see the aggressive clamp of their jaws, the hard eyes prepared for violence. He backed quickly down the road.

  A second limousine roared around a loop in the road, coming up from the birch shadows.

  Cardinal Kennedy, seated in the rear, glared at the figure in the road, the wild matted hair, the scratched face, the fiery eyes. Mario stopped, shocked by the sight of a cardinal in the desolate valley.