Golgotha Falls Read online

  Startled, the Nuncio could find no answer.

  That morning Giacomo Baldoni of Sicily received well over two-thirds of the votes. An aura of silence filled the Sistine Chapel. Into the Sicilian’s hands, for good or evil, the College of Cardinals placed the entire Roman Catholic Church, all its souls, its wealth, its very historical mission as the second millennium approached. On the basis of the mystical vision of the archbishop of Genoa.

  The president of the College hesitantly crossed the marble floor, sweating heavily in the tense atmosphere.

  “Dost thou accept the election of the College of Cardinals?” he asked, the prescribed question.

  In the deep-set, intelligent eyes the Nuncio Bellocchi saw again the profound doubt, amounting almost to horror, and the Sicilian’s hand trembled violently on the armrests of his chair.

  Disturbed, the president repeated the question, looking nervously at the assembled cardinals, as though for assistance.

  The Sicilian, in an agony of indecision, tried to rise, looked as though he wished to warn the assembled of a grave danger, but found no words. Instead, he stared mutely at the president.

  “Dost thou accept the election of the College of Cardinals?” he asked for the third time, his voice barely steady.

  The Sicilian’s face changed. He settled in the chair, an internal battle decided. Victorious or defeated, the Nuncio could not decipher it on that handsome, ambiguous, passionate face.

  “I do,” said the Sicilian clearly. It was as though Baldoni had almost known it was going to happen.

  “By what name shalt thou be called?” asked the president, the second prescribed question.

  “Francis Xavier,” came the immediate answer.

  Murmurs of approval and applause came from the millennialists. Francis, as in Francis of Assisi, the mystic and compassionate saint. Xavier, the name of the Lord. The name indicated allegiance to the cause of the Second Coming in all its significance. Under Francis Xavier and the spirit that guided him, the Church was taking a decisive new turn.

  The chamberlains lowered the baldachinos from every chair except Baldoni’s, signifying his enthronement. In less than ten minutes it was done. The Roman Catholic Church, the chair of Saint Peter, had passed into the care of the unknown and volatile temperament of Francis Xavier.

  That night after private devotions the spiral candles outside the papal chapel dripped perfumed wax red as blood. Frightened, the chamberlain destroyed the candles and replaced them before the new Pontiff emerged from prayer.

  Down the marbled corridors of the Borgia Apartments two Jesuits saw blue luminescent globes passing silently over the magnificent paintings on the long walls.

  Francis Xavier dreamed of a congregation, its pews filled with goats, donkeys, and horses. Did it refer to Saint Francis of Assisi? he wondered as he slept. Or was it a vision from somewhere beyond the far side of grace?

  That night in Golgotha Falls, after a storm, a dead sheep washed up on the grassy banks opposite the church. By coincidence a torn, tasseled fabric had been caught on the brambles of a shrub behind it, forming a canopy over the sheep. Opposite the dead and broken animal was a semicircle of over twenty dead roosters, crimson with blood still, washed down from the farms when the Siloam broke through the coops.

  The inhabitants of the town and the farmers gazed at the spectacle of the orderly death and could not decipher it. It was a new kind of sign. It was as though death created form now at Golgotha Falls.

  The town retreated to a terrified secrecy. And waited.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dust swirled down Boylston Street in the September heat and disgorged clouds of grit, bits of dead leaves, amber pollen, and winged seeds. It came down from the north. A dry, sulfurous heat rose from the drought there and sent great semicircles of haze as far south as Cambridge.

  The Harvard campus, silhouetted in the warped air, was covered in a thin scum of dust.

  Within a conference room, Mario Gilbert lectured. The red-brick and ivy-strangled Georgian walls stood as bulwarks against the heat wave and it was dark and still among the red plush chairs, the portraits on the wall, and the mahogany lectern.

  Seven men of the Harvard faculty, dressed in light summer suits, listened.

  At the leaded-glass windows, almost white with the morning glare, between the long vermilion curtains, the dust specks glittered, suspended in a Brownian motion. It was as though tiny flecks of matter were being strangled and shivered to nonexistence in the oblong heat of the hedge-shrouded window.

  Mario Gilbert turned the pages of his lecture and tried to keep his mind focused on his speech.

  “Lateral research into the Golgotha Falls site,” he continued, “uncovered clues from the aboriginal tribes. The Algonquin word for the hollow in which the church is found must be rendered as where the smoke rises. But the word is not exactly smoke, nor is it fog, or mist. Dr. Wilkes of the Department of Anthropology, an expert in Algonquin dialects, determined that the word is at best a derivative of the root for steam or vapor. And, in fact, the granitic limestone of the church foundations exudes a visible vapor in early spring and autumn.”

  Mario felt sweat forming on the back of his neck. The green wool tie he felt obliged to wear stifled him and his fingers played uncomfortably at its knot. He turned to pick up a glass of lukewarm water.

  Behind the slide carousel and folders of documentation, his colleague, Anita Wagner, sat, impassive as an ivory statue. She wore beige linen and small gold bracelets that tinkled with each movement of her slender wrist. She had the long, black hair that matched her startling black eyes, but the pale skin seemed to belong to someone else, to some ethereal being from a distant and superior world.

  Mario turned back to the impassive committee on interdisciplinary studies.

  “Thus we know that the Algonquin knew the place, gave it a name, and migrated carefully around it.”

  The portraits on the wall irritated Mario. They were dead men from a dead, liberal world, and like the faculty before him, they smiled, benign, complacent, insipid.

  Mario squared his stocky shoulders and leaned forward for emphasis.

  “They avoided it,” he declared. “From archeologists and anthropologists, we know that there were no slash-and-burn cleared forests, no fish-fertilized crop areas, no charred organic materials that would indicate fires, no lodge-poles, no animal-skin or tooth remains, and no pottery fragments. Whether en route to shamanistic conclaves or migrating for the berry season, the Algonquin systematically circumvented the hollow by at least five miles.”

  The men sat like stones.

  “We know, too,” Mario continued, turning another page, “that the first settlers, the English Separatists, avoided the area, though this is probably due to the disease potential of the Siloam Creek where it runs into the bog. Nevertheless, they practiced a primitive form of mining by dredging the nearby lake bottoms for deposits of iron ore, which they smelted in wood-fed furnaces on shore. Perhaps these fires, blazing into the night for material gain, originated many of the tales that subsequently came out of the area—tales that normally had a satanic or Christian-demonic quality.”

  Still, the men sat without a flicker of emotion. Mario felt a subtle cynicism behind their bland expressions. It made his skin crawl. The historical presentation was complete. It was Anita’s role to bring them up to date. Mario sat down, exchanging glances with her, and Anita smiled reassuringly. She calmly opened her folder on the lectern and leaned forward slightly.

  “The church itself,” she began, while Mario reached behind and closed the shade, then turned on the slide carousel, “the Church of Eternal Sorrows, was virtually abandoned by the Boston archdiocese. It has never been reconsecrated. This is most unusual for an area that retains a high Catholic population.”

  The first slide appeared. In the gloomy room the men squinted dutifully at the image: a picturesque, run-down white wood-frame church in a New England winterscape.

  “The cause of the n
eglect must relate to the mental breakdown, around 1913, of its first parish priest,” Anita continued, “Bernard K. Lovell.”

  Mario pressed a button and a vaguely focused, sepia-toned photograph, enlarged from a class graduation photograph near the turn of the century, appeared. The men in the room stirred uncomfortably. On the white screen the piercing eyes of a disturbed personality regarded them with an unnatural, almost catatonic rigidity.

  “Lovell was declared insane by the Municipal Court of Boston after a three-day hearing with no defense by the Roman Catholic Church,” Anita continued. “Details are still not available from the archives of the archdiocese. But it appears from folklore and legend that the unfortunate seminarian was seized by a mania for dressing dogs and goats and seating them in the pews as parishioners.”

  Anita watched the men look at the slide of Lovell, then slowly back at her.

  “Some versions have it that he dug up cadavers from the church grounds. And similarly dressed them as parishioners.”

  The case was beginning to bite. After the dull and lengthy exposition of the geographical and historical background, Mario felt the men fall under Anita’s persuasive spell. Even Dean Harvey Osborne, Mario’s nemesis, the most senior of the faculty men, chuckled as though embarrassed by his rising interest in the case.

  Mario pressed a button. A bluish copy of a bad photograph appeared, with white arrows superimposed. The men were rapt.

  “Father Lovell committed suicide while he was incarcerated,” Anita said. “This photograph, taken by an amateur astronomer from the valley ridge two weeks later, was but one of thirteen sightings of luminescent globes during the subsequent year.”

  Several more images followed, some merely sketches by feverish observers, others taken from cracked photographic plates and barely discernible. Still, it was clear that various kinds of brightnesses seemed to hover at the church roof and walls.

  “Local inhabitants have reported shaking of the church’s structural supports and shadowy motions within the nave. But the crucial thing is this,” Anita said, pausing dramatically.

  She looked each professor in the eye, directly challenging his disbelief, yet smiling softly and without rancor.

  “The sightings have begun again.”

  It worked. The old, the young, the cynical, and the suggestible—each member of the faculty was hooked.

  “Something exists there, gentlemen,” Anita concluded. “Something has caused the inhabitants of a dying town to experience sensations in and around a deserted church.”

  Dean Osborne took the moment to tap the contents of his pipe bowl against the lower leg of his chair. A thin, black residue of burned tobacco fell to the floor. The mood was broken. Sucking wetly, Dean Osborne relit his pipe.

  Anita immediately changed her voice to a matter-of-fact tone, closing the folder. Things were objective now. Everyday. Scientific.

  “As scientists of the paranormal,” she said gently, but insistently, “it is our duty to strip away the horror and the fear, the legend and the folklore, and to penetrate into whatever is there. Our job is to chart its existence by measurement or, without prejudice, to dismiss the previous documentation and the site as nothing more than a fraud.”

  Dean Osborne yawned ostentatiously. Yet the rest of the faculty found the raven-haired woman reasonable. Dean Osborne slumped a bit in his chair. Mario hid a smile.

  Anita turned directly to Dean Osborne.

  “By so doing,” she said, “we can add our input to one of the most potent and universal elements of man’s life on earth: the belief in the paranormal.”

  Mario switched off the slide projector, opened the curtains, and stood to face the men blinking from the sudden infusion of bright light.

  “Any questions?” he asked.

  Mario waited a second, several more seconds, but the faculty sat in the gloomy, dank conference room like living sculpture. Mario shielded his eyes against the brilliance of the September weather be­yond the portraits, the stained wall, the abused coffee urn dis­gorging brown drops onto a paper towel under the spigot.

  “Any questions?” he repeated.

  Mario’s palm had left an oval of sweat on the lectern’s edge. Distantly, in a classroom, a clock bonged feebly. It stirred the men, who now coughed, and chatted among themselves as they rose in a body and moved toward the door. Anita stood at the table behind Mario.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know—they’re acting weird—”

  Mario walked after them and cornered Dean Osborne in the corridor. At the end of the corridor, the door opened, the rest of the faculty was engulfed in the furnace of day, the brilliance of the atmosphere slowly receded, and the door closed again. It was quiet.

  “Is that it?” Mario demanded. “Is it yes or is it no?”

  Dean Osborne, in a striped seersucker suit, looked down the several inches to Mario. Both their faces were lined deeply in sweat. The dry, energy-absorbing dust and pollen gilded the air around them in a miasma of stuffy heat.

  Dean Osborne saw Anita emerge from the conference room with the slide carousels under her arm. He admired her tall, sleek form, the elegant carriage of her head and the long legs in the linen skirt. Anita had the stance of a distant bird, Osborne thought, bold, lovely, and proud.

  “I guess you pulled it off, Mario,” he said. “I would have bet my tenure against it.”

  Mario grinned.

  “The budget? Everything? Just as presented?”

  “Hell, it’s less than the coffee budget for the anthropology department. Don’t go thinking it’s the Nobel Prize.”

  Mario’s grin transformed into subtle defiance. The black eyes glinted.

  “All in due time, Dean Osborne.”

  “I’m going to give you some advice, Mario.”

  Now all that was left on Mario’s face was a hard, jutting suspicion. He felt Anita’s calming hand gently brush his elbow.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The interdisciplinary budget for these experimental classes is going to dry up. By spring term, I’d say.”

  “I appreciate the tip.”

  “Mario, how will you finance these, er, expeditions?”

  “I’ll sell heroin to the preppies.”

  Dean Osborne winced in spite of himself. He maintained his calm with difficulty.

  “Attach yourself to a department, Mario,” he advised.

  “Why?”

  “Because there are going to be some drastic cutbacks in every budget. And anything without important protection is liable to be eliminated.”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “No, you won’t, Mario. It doesn’t matter what department—zoology, psychology, or what. Just get under somebody’s umbrella before the spring term.”

  Mario’s fingers began to play nervously against the edge of the file folder, belying his sardonic smile. Dean Osborne’s calm, penetrating stare made him uneasy.

  Anita stepped forward.

  “Whose decision was this?” she asked.

  Her voice was cool, businesslike, faintly suave, the kind of voice that echoes of private girls’ schools, of established society, of family that wields influence when it needs to.

  “The board’s,” Dean Osborne said, modulating his voice respectfully. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Mario said testily.

  “Look, Mario. Harvard is a billion-dollar corporation. Money is very tight now. The feeling is that there must be no inefficiency. And experimental classes and laboratories like yours are not efficient. So take my advice and integrate yourself into a large department.”

  “I’m not giving up any independence,” Mario said instantly.

  “Explain it to him, Anita,” Dean Osborne said, frustrated. “It’s for your own good and his.”

  Dean Osborne walked away. The exterior door received him, a glare of yellow-white flooded the corridor. Mario and Anita were left alone.

  Mari
o savagely ripped the wool tie from around his neck as they quickly crossed the Yard.

  “If I presented Jesus Christ,” he shouted, “Ecce Homo himself—it wouldn’t fit their curriculum—”

  Several undergraduates, forced onto the grass by Mario’s furious pace, stared backward. Anita had to double-step to keep up with him.

  “They’re dead!” he said. “Up here. Between the ears. They can’t see—they can’t believe—!”

  Mario kicked a stone into the road. It careened into a metal garbage can. A cat leaped out of the debris and hurled itself up a fire escape.

  “Mario—we got the grant,” Anita said, as soothingly as she could.

  “Yeah—the last few crumbs before they close the store on us!”

  Mario walked, slower now, disconsolate, toward the Charles River. A faint odor of creosote, gasoline, and ragweed hung in the air. A fine, yellow powder carried down from the north enveloped the student housing.

  The university at his back was an almost palpable presence, a physical pressure of stone buildings and dead history. He stared ahead at the glare of the river. Small boats went by in a slithering reflection of the midday heat. It was all the difference between slavery and liberty—and yet he needed Harvard.

  Anita put her slender hand in his pocket, keeping pace with his silence as together they crossed the Anderson Bridge.

  Mario unlocked the white, slightly tilted door to their apartment. Inside, the bed was crumpled with fresh laundry. The two closet doors were open. One was filled with work shirts, jeans, and boots. Anita’s more expensive dresses and tweed suits bulged out from the other. The window was open, and beside it was Anita’s print of a Matisse, her favorite composition of the Fauvist days, but incomprehensible to Mario.

  From the low factory roofs far in the west came the tantalizing fragrance of drifting milkweed and the river past Cambridge.

  On shelves braced to the walls, immaculate and precisely organized, were hundreds of dossiers of field investigations, reference works, case histories, and volumes of bound journals from the University of Utrecht, the Rhine Institute at Duke University, the Stanford Research Institute, and the Frankfurt Institute.