Golgotha Falls
Page 36
In the presence of his mother Francis Xavier was reassured. Unafraid, trusting, the very vulnerability and selflessness of her intimate faith had been the fortress against which Satan crumbled. In Golgotha Falls, in the Vatican, and now, back in San Rignazzi.
Gently he performed the last litanies. Francis Xavier blessed her body and her soul. Even though sorrow struck him, remembering her self-sacrifice for him through all the years of poverty, there was a great reassurance: For the Christian, death was but the portal to eternal salvation.
Golgotha Falls had proved that.
It was a clear morning in September at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anita Wagner pointed to the triptych of projected images on the screen behind the lectern.
In the darkened auditorium the cruciform shape, the goathead, and the skeletal figure rising from the grave glittered toward the students.
“The background flux in all three cases is identical,” Anita pointed out. “Characteristic of thermovision renderings. The projections themselves are highly defined. It has been conjectured that they were formed by a human mind, not generated in some manner from either the flux, or some other, perhaps discarnate, agency.”
Anita turned back to her lecture notes under a tiny lamp. Her black hair was cut short, and gold earrings sent the light flickering over her tweed jacket. She had changed, matured, since Golgotha Falls, into a professional lecturer.
“In the unpublished Gilbert treatise, Golgotha Falls: An Assault on the Fourth Dimension, it is stated that the projector of these images was a Jesuit priest,” Anita said. “A sophisticated man, well educated, and with a refined, sensitive nature. The projections occurred, Mr. Gilbert believed, during extreme psychological crises. Having been an intimate part of this experiment, I must say that I do not hold with his opinion.”
Anita turned toward the enigmatic trio of psychic emblems. They hung resplendent in space, icons of the nonmaterial universe. Captivated, the students stopped taking notes.
“The extraordinary variety and definition of these images,” Anita continued, “are a testimony, I believe, to a power and a source beyond the human imagination.”
The students studied the three images, which remained somehow unfathomed, hypnotic, and relentlessly foreboding.
“Still, in partial defense of Mr. Gilbert’s theory, the paranormal is often experienced by people involved in situations of great emotional stress.”
The campus bell rang. Students gathered their notebooks and filed noisily toward the doors. The auditorium lights came on slowly, a soft amber, and the projected images faded.
Eamon Malcolm stood alone among the seats. He looked at Anita with a soft despair, a fatalism of time passing.
Anita went quickly down the steps, toward him, paused, and then took his hand in hers.
“What happened to you, Eamon?” she whispered. “I called the cathedral. I checked the newspapers. You just disappeared.”
Eamon flushed deeply.
“They put me in a seminary in Vermont,” he confessed. “A kind of resting station for troubled Jesuits. Very disciplined.”
Eamon smiled nervously. Meeting Anita was a greater shock than he had anticipated. His awkwardness was momentarily relieved when a pimply-faced youth came down from the projection booth with the lecture slides.
When the boy left Eamon felt the impasse return.
“And Mario?” he asked. “Where is he?”
Anita’s face grew somber.
“Mario won’t answer my letters,” she said. “Nobody has heard of him since.”
Eamon nodded in sympathy.
“I didn’t like Mario,” he confessed. “But the man was brilliant. Aggressive, uncouth perhaps, even reckless, but he had his own kind of courage.”
Anita sensed Eamon’s floundering. She put her hand into the crook of his elbow and escorted him into the autumn sunlight. Eamon paused on the threshold, dazzled by the blazing red and yellow trees.
“Eamon, why didn’t you write?” Anita asked. “You could have found where I was through Harvard.”
“I was ashamed.”
Another class was beginning. Students pushed past them into the auditorium. Eamon and Anita walked onto the asphalt path that led under a canopy of elms.
“After—after that Friday dawn,” Eamon confessed, “I thought it best—that is, I felt uneasy about contacting you.”
Eamon kept his eyes averted. When he turned to Anita she answered him thoughtfully.
“I never despised you, Eamon,” she said. “In fact, it was seeing you through the church window that gave me the strength to survive the storm.”
Eamon smiled ironically.
“Anita, what do you believe happened that day?”
Anita’s brow furrowed. “I can’t say, really. I’ve thought about it so often. At the time I felt certain that it was a truly religious experience.”
“And now?”
“At some level,” she said, “in the deepest levels of awareness, there may be no difference between the paranormal and the religious.”
Eamon nodded, his voice still troubled.
“I can’t talk about this with anyone else,” he said. “But these last few months, alone in my cell, working in the gardens, meditating, I’ve come to the same conclusion.”
They walked under an oak that stood bare but defiant under the azure skies. The grass was covered with brown and red leaves. The air was redolent of autumn dust, an invigorating and nostalgic fragrance.
“I was in a kind of tunnel,” he said thoughtfully. “It was a cave, until Francis Xavier kept chipping away at the other end. Finally, the light came through and I was freed.”
Anita took his arm again. Eamon knew he was talking fast now, earnestly, about all those things pent up by nearly a year of hard discipline and enforced silence.
“The extraordinary thing,” he said enthusiastically, “was the charisma of Francis Xavier. It was like a field of pure light that came into the church. I was clinically dead, and yet he breathed life into me.”
Eamon turned to Anita, looked hard into her eyes.
“Where did Francis Xavier get such a force?”
“From his belief, of course,” Anita replied, smiling.
Eamon nodded. He seemed suddenly abstracted. He stopped near the campus rose garden.
“Do you know what my penance is?” he asked. “The penance from the Apostolic Penitentiary? It is to work two years in a hospital as a menial laborer. The lowest of the orderlies.”
Eamon shrugged.
“I accept the wisdom of the Church,” he said. “Intellectuals need to learn to work with suffering, to channel their emotions, to learn humanity.”
The sun glistened on his forehead.
“Anita, the hospital I’ve been sent to is near Rome.”
“Is that unusual?”
“No. But . . . I just can’t help thinking that Francis Xavier is behind this penance.”
“Why?”
“Because the direction of the Church turned one hundred eighty degrees after Golgotha Falls. There have been purges and realignments. The whole impetus toward rethinking the Second Incarnation is gathering force.”
Eamon faltered, then took a deep breath.
“My guess is that Francis Xavier wants to talk to me about Golgotha Falls.”
Anita paused.
“Eamon, what about the Church of Eternal Sorrows? What became of it?”
“It’s functioning, I hear. Simply and effectively. A Jesuit named Joseph Casper oversees a small parish.”
“Strange. After all that happened there, I imagined it would have become a shrine. Another Lourdes.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. Mortals have a need for icons and shrines. But I suppose the destiny of that church was never in the hands of mere mortals.”
Anita gazed at him, puzzled.
“Then whose?”
“Why, you said it before in your lecture. ‘A power and a source far beyond the human imagination.’
”
When they said farewell at the train taking Eamon back to New York, they felt like brother and sister taking leave. Anita’s religious instincts, and Eamon’s newfound respect for the paranormal, had blossomed in the wake of Golgotha Falls.
“The day will come,” Eamon predicted, “when science and religion, matter and spirit, will reveal their unfolding purpose to mankind simultaneously.”
“When, Eamon?”
He smiled gently.
“Why, the last day, of course.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank De Felitta was born in New York in 1921. He served as a pilot in World War II and in 1945 returned to New York, where he began to write scripts. His first effort, for the weekly radio program The Whistler, a popular thriller series, earned him $350 and started him on his writing career. He continued to write radio scripts before turning to television, in which medium he was successful as a writer, producer, and director, winning Emmy nominations in 1963 and 1968 for his documentaries as well as a Peabody Award and several Writers Guild nominations.
De Felitta’s first novel, Oktoberfest (1973), a thriller, though not a bestseller nonetheless earned him enough to finance the year and a half he devoted to his next—and most famous—book, Audrey Rose (1975). This novel, a horror story involving reincarnation, was a smash bestseller, selling more than 2.5 million copies and spawning a successful 1977 film adaptation (scripted by De Felitta) and a sequel, For Love of Audrey Rose (1982). The Entity (1978), based on the real-life case of a woman named Doris Bither who claimed to have been haunted by a spectral rapist, was also a bestseller and was adapted by De Felitta for a 1982 film starring Barbara Hershey. Other successes include the novel Golgotha Falls (1984) and the cult classic horror film Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), directed by De Felitta.
Frank De Felitta’s most recent work is L’Opera Italiano, published as an e-book in 2012. He lives in Los Angeles.