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  GOLGOTHA FALLS

  An Assault on the Fourth Dimension

  FRANK DE FELITTA

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Golgotha Falls by Frank De Felitta

  First published New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984

  First Valancourt Books edition, 2014

  Copyright © 1984 by Frank De Felitta Productions, Inc.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover by Lorenzo Princi

  to the memory of

  JENNY, PAT, RAY and JACK

  And He bearing His cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: where they crucified Him. . . .

  John 19:17

  I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

  Albert Einstein

  (Recalled in reports of his death, April 19, 1955)

  PROLOGUE

  Golgotha Falls, 1890, north Massachusetts. The town lay in a hollow of hard, obdurate terrain where the stagnant ponds bred crawling mites on browned, drooping reeds. Siloam Creek choked on detritus from the woolen mill and there, on the clay bank, the Catholic merchants from the nearby town of Lawrence decided to build their church.

  The ground when broken was sandy. Indians, long dead and disinterred from the loose soil, had to be carted away in skeletal heaps. Workmen finally hit bedrock and put cloth over their mouths and noses. The granite was deeply fissured and it issued a stench like soured milk. When the rock fractured, four workmen died under collapsing timbers. Two more paled and wasted from diphtheria. A subcontractor fell delirious with malaria. By the time the iron gate was erected, seven fresh graves rose from the poorly drained churchyard.

  Yet it was a delicate, white-steepled edifice that rose from the miasma. Lilacs rustled and bees murmured at the small Gothic windows. Traceries of light shifted like butterfly wings over the varnished wood floor. Paintings of the Passion hung at regular intervals on the white interior walls. Over the church rose the bell tower, and its deep, reverberating hollow-voiced iron rang a new presence over Golgotha Falls.

  Old men of the grist mill and canal locks, veterans of the Civil War, peered into the outpost of the Church of Rome, named the Church of Eternal Sorrows. Behind the ruby-red and viridian stained-glass windows, the priest, Bernard K. Lovell, carefully prepared the chalice, pyx, and vestments from the sacristy. Lawrence money saw to it that walnut carvings elaborated the pews. Angels were embossed on transept pillars and the cornice molding undulated like white ribbon around the interior. It was too resplendent, too exotic for Golgotha Falls. The veterans shook their heads and predicted the crass display of wealth would lead to ruin.

  Father Lovell dutifully laid the heavily ornamented Gospel on the altar. Behind him the embroidered roodscreen caught the reflections of brass candlesticks and censers. The entire chancel bathed in the eastern sun. Over the altar, visible sign of the presence of Christ, a brass and consecrated lamp burned steadily, a warm ruby glow in the birdsong of morning.

  Lovell was a shy man, barely past thirty. A slight diminution of his left leg gave him a limp. He was blond, with eyes pink and watery, like a rabbit’s. It was his first church and he had the air of one striving to bury ancient humiliations.

  The Lawrence Catholics rode into Golgotha Falls, uncomfortably, ostentatiously, in their black cabriolets. The Irish farmhands and loom girls milled into the plain, unpillowed pews, gossiping in a low brogue. Lovell envied the merchants their prestige. The loom girls upset him with their calloused hands and unclean English. His reedy, fluted tenor proclaimed the service of God. When it was over, the merchants left, vaguely disappointed.

  The winter was harsh, unimaginably harsh. The Lawrence merchants, protected by their wealth, still did not believe such a harsh winter was possible for them. For Golgotha Falls, it was catastrophic, for the town lay in the track of every major storm that crossed the continent. The Siloam blocked with unpassable ridges of saw-toothed ice. Bridges grew treacherous. Needles of ice slammed down savagely on cattle huddled under dead oaks. The populace shivered in their furs and not the largest coal footwarmers kept the dank chill from their bodies. By the time the winter was over, twelve families had contracted pleurisy.

  Came spring, and the mud outside the church abounded with insects crawling, slithering, and brown toads leaping up into the sills of the Gothic windows. White cabbage butterflies hovered over the graves. Father Lovell trapped a nest of six garden snakes within the sacristy. In the evenings, low clouds of dense, boglike vapor hugged the clay banks of the creek and seeped into the church foundations, leaving dark stains on the interior floors.

  The summer wore on, and the Sunday masses were dank with human perspiration. Mosquitoes hovered in clouds and lit on unprotected hands and faces. Mold infected the paint of the exterior walls. The mill folk of Golgotha Falls refused to assist, so the Lawrence merchants privately contributed yet more sums to the white church.

  Gradually, the fine ladies refused to leave Lawrence. Even the simple textile mill girls and stolid Irish farmhands began to loathe the incessant badgering of Lovell for more contributions. For, by accident or design, and Lovell thought by covert persuasion on the part of the Lawrence merchants, communication with the Boston archdiocese had dried up. Lovell cursed them all for abandoning the church, and with new vigor continued sermonizing those stalwarts who still came. But as he looked out on the aged men trembling in their denims, at the large empty spaces in the pews, he knew that his was a dying congregation.

  As the years passed, an economic depression devastated the mill towns and the Lawrence merchants refused further investment. The looms fell silent. The once-busy canal fed by Siloam Creek was filled with stinking algae and wild irises. Infuriated, Golgotha Falls found its scapegoat, the crumbling Catholic Church of Eternal Sorrows.

  Lovell disdained the town’s bigotry, its obsession with money. He retired to his small room in the adjacent rectory, his books of etymology, the portrait of his mother on a black marble-topped dresser. He wrote elegant letters to the Holy See in Rome, describing a bustling congregation in a growing town. In truth, Golgotha Falls too had begun to die.

  In the rectory, the silence grew. The amber of the night lamp shone over the unkempt quarters. Requests for funds lay on his desk, refused by the merchants. Out of bitter pride, Lovell continued to lie to his ecclesiastical superiors. Drinking red burgundy, he stared through his reflection at the dark hills of the Massachusetts interior. His mission was as obscure and bleak as the Siloam sucking at the church’s cornerstone.

  One wintry day, Lovell, his hair wispy and gray, hacked alone at the rock-hard earth and then with frayed rope tried to lower the casket of the last parishioner. The weight was too much for his frail arms. It tumbled in sideways. He had to step down into the open grave and wrestle the casket upright.

  After that winter, no new gravestones appeared by the banks of the creek. The incoming mist discolored the clapboard walls, and Lovell let the iron gate rust shut. Property adjacent to the church fell into disrepair. Weeds grew between the church and the town. Nobody heard the priest’s lusty, reedy voice, not on the calmest, most silent black summer night.

  In the tenth hard winter, Lovell allowed himself to be captivated by the strange traceries of frost against the stained-glass windows. Silvered and amethyst light-flickers touched th
e abused music of his soul. Distracted, unshaven, he mumbled a litany to empty pews. There was solace in the reflections of light that shifted of their own accord on the damp floors. The paintings of the Passion, abused by mold, made a humpback of the Man of Sorrows. Lovell found amusement in the delicate light and shade of the walls, and he prayed to the great indifference outside the hollow.

  For something had entered the church. Subtle as windblown seeds on a spring afternoon. As immaterial as the onset of disease. It was an absence, come floating into the interior of the ruined varnish and spore-spotted walls. It was nothingness, and yet it was palpable.

  It came in the manner of a shadow drifting over the hills.

  Unredeemably drunk, Lovell held midnight mass in fevered, devotional ecstasy to rid his mouth of the foul taste that intoxicated him to the marrow. The organ thundered, the stained walls signified, and the flickering tapers seemed on the verge of voice. Lovell’s vestments glittered in vibrant splendor, his cheeks flushed in an uncertain light. Degree by degree, unknowing, he drifted to a pact so subtle it was as gossamer. Yet so strong, it broke the man.

  Over the altar, unnoticed in the paroxysm of a new service, the red glow of Christ’s lamp gasped for oil, flared wildly, creating shadows, and died.

  Golgotha Falls, culpable through ignorance, absorbed in its economic woes, abjured the church, and saw nothing, heard nothing, as though Lovell too were dead.

  In 1913, the archdiocese of Massachusetts began the laborious procedures of restructuring their parish jurisdictions. A committee of Boston clerics, examining records of the interior, discovered an inconsistency in the communication from a small congregation near the New Hampshire border. Inquiries produced no replies. An envoy was sent.

  It was hot, early summer. The dust clung over the yellow roads as the envoy advanced on horseback toward Golgotha Falls. The Siloam Creek was clogged with reeds and logs, and the bullfrogs echoed raucously through the hollow. Shocked, the envoy stopped and looked down at the church.

  The walls were cracked, blistered, and stained with mud that, in the muggy distance, resembled dried blood. Ragweed and scrub brush infested the churchyard. The once-erect gate hung at an ob­lique angle into the yellowed grass.

  The envoy dismounted. He peered into the rectory windows. Nobody was home. Yet piles of clothing proved it was inhabited. Cautiously, he stepped over the uneven ground and looked into the dark church interior. The envoy called, pounded, and shouted, but the heavy door was fused shut on rusted hinges.

  He wiped the sweat from his neck. A stench emanated from the church. With a violent cry, he launched himself at a side door and tumbled inside. Seconds later, sickly and white as salt, he stumbled back into the hot sun. He screeched for the police.

  Farm boys heard the cries and dragged the envoy to the shade of the elm trees. Others stepped slowly into the church. There, in the gloom, they saw the distraught and emaciated Lovell, mucus running from his nostrils, a crucifix smeared in beeswax, incoherent at the pulpit. Then, very slowly, they turned to look at the pews.

  Corpses embalmed in varnish, ragged flesh stuffed in tweeds, gloves, and millinery, grinned stiffly at the service through a cloud of black flies.

  Lovell was wrestled to the floor. That night, the police transported him by wagon through the humid, gnat-hung midnight to Boston. The envoy observed a reburial of the dead. Even the furthest lilac and forsythia were filled with a rank, nauseating stink of decayed flesh.

  Vandals now ripped through the rectory looking for macabre mementos. Under the rectory was found a one-armed choirboy, halfway prepared by Lovell’s varnish into a gesture of benediction. It was one of the McAliskey twins, missing since the previous year. No amount of digging uncovered the second twin.

  But the odor filtered down through the cracks in the bedrock and reemerged under the center of Golgotha Falls. Before a rain, as the atmospheric pressure grew, a thick stench rose in the brambles. Passersby were obliged to cover their faces. The church became known as the Church of Eternal Damnation and was shunned.

  The Boston archdiocese let it decay untended. Ivy worked into the wall cracks. Tendrils twisted in the warping sacristy. Rats left fecal material in the clothes of Lovell’s grotesque “congregation” under the pews. Fragments of stained glass fell onto the buckled floors, and the weather blew unresisted into the interior.

  During long autumn sunrises, the entering rays of the sun illumined the broken brass candlesticks and bits of glass until they gleamed with an alien, triumphant power.

  Orange mushrooms grew on the stone steps of the church path. Spores flourished on the remnants of flocked ecclesiastical garments dumped in the chancel. Dead leaves piled in the southwest corner of the interior. Slowly, slowly, the long strings of cobwebs moved over the darkened debris.

  In November 1914, Bernard K. Lovell, en route to a smaller and better-equipped asylum, escaped from his orderlies. The defrocked priest committed suicide under the wheels of a beer transport wagon on the cobblestones of Boston.

  The same night at Golgotha Falls, two male goats burst into the church door, rampaged through the clothing mildewed on the floor, and mounted one another in furious bouts of copulation.

  Two nights later, November 23, 1914, the English instructor of Gol­gotha Valley Elementary School, a Robert Wharton, saw two illumined blue globes move slowly over the west wall of the church.

  November 24, and no fewer than twenty townspeople swore before a notary public that they had heard choral music echo in the dark and empty church.

  The next morning, Silas E. Gutman, owner of the adjacent property, slit the throats of his two prize heifers because of their low, voicelike gutturals after grazing among the tombstones.

  On November 25, the wife of the real estate agent, a Mrs. Gerald T. K. Hodges, complained to her husband that she heard the untended bell slowly tolling in the vapory hollow. Two hours later, she was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Thus began the legend of Golgotha Falls. The events continued, in memory and fear, in the collective imaginations of the dying valley. Blue luminescences, disembodied voices at night, and animals gone mad from grazing too near the church were observed well into the next generation.

  Parapsychology then was in its infancy. Records were few and scantily documented. But the data available indicated that during November 1914, a cyclic increase in sightings of the paranormal had occurred far from Golgotha Falls. A threefold increase in the manifestations of apparitions was plainly observed in the British Isles. Five archeological expeditions to the Mideast documented glowing winds and maddened animals circling the ancient tombs of Jerusalem.

  The Catholic Church’s archives were swamped with parish priests claiming visitations, stigmata, and miracles in Guatemala, Brazil, and France.

  Indeed, veterans of the Battle of the Marne in the First World War released incomprehensible stories of entire battalions panicked by ethereal visions sweeping close over the blasted trenches.

  Deeper in the Church’s archives, hidden from laic eyes, lay the unnerving spectacle of Pope Pius X, the “blessed shepherd of souls,” who fell into catatonia during a consistory of cardinals and whose writhing feet and wrists fibrillated in horror, a crude mockery of the Crucifixion.

  And in more recent Vatican memory, noted in the records of the Holy See and buried in secrecy, lingered the bizarre events surrounding the election of incumbent Pope Francis Xavier.

  Rome was wild with rumors. The cameras of the world were perched over the heads of one hundred thousand faithful packed in St. Peter’s Square to view the pomp and splendor of the gathering College of Cardinals. The College had assembled from around the world to elect a new Pope under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It was a grave occasion. It was a joyous occasion. The tension ran high among the journalists, religious orders, and the staff of the curia and foreign archbishops.

  The visiting cardinals had split into two camps. One was the conservative Roman curia. The other was a new movement of ecstat
ic preparation for the second millennium—Christ’s long-prophesied Second Coming upon earth—a group called the “millennialists.” The College was deadlocked between the two groups, with a vast number of undecided votes.

  On the twenty-first day of balloting, the ninety-two-year-old archbishop of Genoa suddenly rose in the Sistine Chapel and wandered away from his chair with its tasseled canopy, called the balda­chino. The entire College of Cardinals, over one hundred men in crimson robes, stared thunderstruck as the old man staggered across the marble floor, gazing upward at Michelangelo’s magnificent ceiling.

  Suddenly he pointed upward at the finger of God awakening Adam.

  “It is chosen—It is chosen—It is chosen—” he whispered.

  The cardinals gasped at the violation of the rule of silence. But, transfixed, they watched as his hand tremblingly moved from the fres­coed divine finger, across the vaulted ceiling, down, down the wall. Involuntarily, over one hundred pairs of eyes followed that rigid, bony finger.

  The archbishop pointed at the shock-white face of the barely known Sicilian, Giacomo Baldoni.

  “It is you— It is you—” he rasped, and collapsed into the arms of two frightened chamberlains.

  That night the Borgia Apartments, divided into simple cells like a huge dormitory of cots for the attending cardinals, was awash with rumor and passionate argument. The Roman curia tried desperately to restore a sense of logic and pragmatism. But the millennialists, sensing an intervention of the Holy Spirit, fiercely converted the undecided votes.

  The next morning at breakfast, the Nuncio Cardinal Bellocchi walked behind the pale Giacomo Baldoni and whispered in Latin, “He whom the Holy Spirit elects, to him the Holy Spirit gives strength.”

  But the ruggedly handsome Sicilian, the strangely bright gray eyes at odds with his complexion, looked back as out of a deep tunnel of apprehension.

  “But is it the Holy Spirit?” he whispered in agony.