The Exorcist

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I’m really not sure but I thought I heard signs of dissociation: ‘my pearl’ … ‘my child’ … ‘my flower’ … ‘the sow.’ I had the feeling she was talking about herself. Was that your impression too, or am I reading something into it?”

  As he mulled the question, Klein stroked his lower lip with a finger, then answered, “Well, frankly, at the time it never occurred to me, but then now that you point it out…” He made a sound in his throat, looking thoughtful. “Could be,” he said. “Yes. I guess it could.” Then he shrugged off the notion. “Well, I’ll do an LP right now while she’s out and then maybe we’ll know something. Sound right?”

  The neurologist nodded.

  Klein poked around in his medical bag, found a pill and as he tucked it into a pocket, he asked the neurologist, “Can you stay?”

  The neurologist checked his watch. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Let’s talk to the mother.”

  They left the room and entered the hallway.

  Their heads lowered, Chris and Sharon were leaning against the balustrade by the staircase. As the doctors approached them, Chris wiped at her nose with a moist and balled-up handkerchief. Her eyes were red and small from crying.

  “She’s sleeping,” Klein told her, “and she’s heavily sedated. She’ll probably sleep right through until tomorrow.”

  Gently nodding, Chris responded weakly, “That’s good … Look, I’m sorry about being such a baby.”

  “You’re doing just fine,” Klein assured her. “It’s a frightening ordeal. By the way, this is Dr. Richard Coleman.”

  Chris smiled at him bleakly. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Dr. Coleman’s a neurologist.”

  “Oh, yeah? And so what do you think?” she asked as she shifted her glance from one of the men to the other.

  “Well, we still think it’s temporal lobe,” Klein answered, “and—”

  “Jesus, what in the hell are you talking about!” Chris suddenly erupted. “She’s been acting like a psycho, like a split personality or something! I mean—” And then, “Oh!” she uttered softly and in pain as abruptly she pulled herself together and lowered her forehead into a hand. “Guess I’m all uptight,” she said quietly as she lifted a haggard look to Klein. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You were saying?”

  It was the neurologist who answered. “Mrs. MacNeil,” he said gently, “there haven’t been more than a hundred authenticated cases of split personality in all of medical history. It’s a very rare condition. Now I know the temptation is to leap to psychiatry, but any responsible psychiatrist would exhaust the somatic possibilities first. That’s the safest procedure.”

  “Well, okay, then; so what’s next?”

  “A lumbar tap,” said Coleman.

  “You mean a spinal?” Chris asked him with a look of distress.

  He nodded. “What we missed in the X-rays and the EEG could turn up there. At the least, it would exhaust certain other possibilities. I’d like to do it now, right here, while she’s sleeping. I’ll give her a local, of course, but it’s movement I’m trying to eliminate.”

  “Listen, how could she jump off the bed like that?” Chris asked, her eyes squinting in incomprehension.

  “Well, I think we discussed that before,” said Klein. “Pathological states can induce abnormal strength and accelerated motor performance.”

  “But you said you don’t know why.”

  “Well, it seems to have something to do with motivation,” Coleman answered. “But that’s about all we know.”

  “Well, now, what about the spinal?” Klein asked Chris. “Can we go ahead with that?”

  Abruptly sagging, Chris stared at the floor. “Go ahead,” she said softly. “Do whatever you have to. Just make her well.”

  “May I use your phone?” asked Klein.

  “Yeah, sure. Come on. There’s one in the study.”

  “Oh, incidentally,” said Klein as Chris turned around to lead them, “she needs to have her bedding changed.”

  Quickly moving away, Sharon briskly said, “I’ll do it right now.”

  “Can I make you some coffee?” asked Chris as the doctors followed her down the stairs. “I gave the housekeeping couple the afternoon off, so it’ll have to be instant.”

  They declined.

  “I see you haven’t fixed that window yet,” noted Klein.

  “No, we called, though,” Chris told him. “They’re coming out tomorrow with shutters you can lock.”

  They entered the study, where Klein called his office and instructed an assistant to deliver the necessary equipment and medication to the house. “And set up the lab for a spinal workup,” he instructed. “I’ll run it myself right after the tap.”

  When he’d finished the call, Klein asked Chris what had happened since last he saw Regan.

  “Let’s see now, last Tuesday”—Chris pondered—“no, on Tuesday there was nothing at all; she went straight up to bed and slept right through until late the next morning, and—oh, no, wait,” she amended. “No, she didn’t. That’s right. Willie mentioned that she’d heard her in the kitchen awfully early. I remember feeling glad that she’d gotten her appetite back. But she went back to bed then, I guess, because she stayed there the rest of the day.”

  “She was sleeping?” Klein asked her.

  “No, I think she was reading. Well, I started feeling a little better about it all. I mean, it looked as if the Librium was just what she needed. She seemed sort of far away, and that bothered me a little, but still it was a pretty big improvement. Then last night, again, nothing,” Chris continued. “Then this morning it started. Boy, did it start!”

  She’d been sitting in the kitchen, Chris recounted, when Regan ran screaming down the stairs to her, cowering defensively behind her chair as she clutched Chris’s arms and told her in a high-pitched, frightened voice that Captain Howdy was chasing her; had been pinching her; punching her; shoving her; mouthing obscenities; threatening to kill her. “There he is!” she had shrieked at last while pointing to the kitchen door. Then she’d fallen to the floor, her body jerking in spasms, as she gasped and wept and said that Howdy was kicking her. Then suddenly, Chris told the doctors, Regan had stood in the middle of the kitchen with her arms extended and had begun to spin rapidly around “like a top,” continuing the movements for almost a minute until she had fallen to the floor in exhaustion.

  “And then all of a sudden,” Chris finished distressfully, “I saw there was this … hate in her eyes, this hate, and she told me … She called me a … oh, Jesus!”

  Chris burst into convulsive sobbing.

  Klein moved to the bar, poured a glass of water from the tap and walked back toward Chris. The sobbing had ceased.

  “Oh, shit, where’s a cigarette?” she sighed tremulously, wiping at her eyes with the knuckle of a finger.

  Klein gave her the water and a small green pill.

  “Try this instead,” he advised.

  “That a tranquilizer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have a double.”

  “One’s enough.”

  Chris looked away and smiled wanly. “Big spender.”

  She swallowed the pill and then handed the empty glass to the doctor. “Thanks,” she said softly, and then rested her brow on quivering fingertips and gently shook her head. “Yeah, that’s when it started,” she picked up moodily. “All of that other stuff. It was like she was someone else.”

  “Like Captain Howdy, perhaps?” asked Coleman.

  Chris looked up at him in puzzlement. He was staring so intently. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a question.”

  She turned absent eyes to the fireplace. “I don’t know,” she said dully. “Just somebody. Somebody else.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Coleman stood up. He had another appointment, he told them, and, after some vaguely reassuring statements, said good-
bye.

  Klein walked him to the door. “You’ll check the sugar?” Coleman asked him.

  “No, I’m the Rosslyn village idiot.”

  Coleman smiled thinly. “I’m a little uptight about this myself,” he said. He looked away pensively, stroking his lips and his chin with thumb and fingers. “A strange case,” he brooded quietly. “Very strange.” He turned to Klein. “Let me know what you find out.”

  “You’ll be home?”

  “Yes, I will. Give a call, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Coleman waved and left.

  When the equipment arrived a short time later, Klein anesthetized Regan’s spinal area with Novocain, and as Chris and Sharon watched, he extracted the spinal fluid while keeping a careful watch on the manometer. “Pressure’s normal,” he murmured. When he’d finished, he went to the window’s light to see if the fluid was clear or hazy. It was clear.

  He stowed the tubes of fluid in his bag.

  “I doubt that she will,” Klein said, “but in case she awakens in the middle of the night and creates a disturbance, you might want a nurse here to give her sedation.”

  “Can’t I do it myself?” Chris asked.

  “Why not a nurse?”

  Chris shrugged. She did not want to mention her distrust of doctors and nurses. “I’d just rather do it myself,” she said simply.

  “Well, injections are tricky,” Klein cautioned. “An air bubble can be very dangerous.”

  “Oh, I know how to do it,” Sharon interjected. “My mother ran a nursing home up in Oregon.”

  “Oh, would you do that, Shar?” Chris asked her. “Would you stay here tonight?”

  “Well, beyond tonight,” Klein put in. “She may need intravenous feeding, depending on how she comes along.”

  “Could you teach me how to do it?” Chris asked him. She was staring at him anxiously. “I need to do it.”

  Klein nodded and said, “Sure. Sure. Guess I could.”

  He wrote a prescription for soluble Thorazine and disposable syringes, and gave it to Chris. “Have this filled right away.”

  Chris handed it to Sharon. “Shar, take care of that for me, would you? Just call and they’ll send it. I’d like to go with the doctor while he makes those tests.” Chris turned and looked up at the doctor wistfully. “Do you mind?”

  Klein noted the tightness around her eyes, the look of helplessness, of confusion. He said, “Sure. Sure, I know how you feel. I feel the same way when I talk to mechanics about my car.”

  Chris stared at him wordlessly.

  They left the house at precisely 6:18 P.M.

  In his laboratory in the Rosslyn medical building, Klein ran a number of tests. First he analyzed protein content.

  Normal.

  Then a count of blood cells.

  “Too many red,” Klein explained, “means bleeding. And too many white would mean infection.” He was looking in particular for a fungus infection that was often the cause of chronic bizarre behavior.

  And again drew a blank.

  At the last, Klein tested the fluid’s sugar content.

  “How come?” Chris asked.

  “Well,” he told her, “the spinal sugar should measure two-thirds of the amount of blood sugar. Anything significantly under that ratio would mean a disease in which the bacteria eat the sugar in the spinal fluid, and if so, it could account for your daughter’s symptoms.”

  But he failed to find it.

  Chris folded her arms and shook her head. “Here we are again, folks,” she murmured bleakly.

  For a while Klein brooded. Then at last he turned and looked to Chris. “Do you keep any drugs in your house?” he asked her.

  “Huh?”

  “Amphetamines? LSD?”

  Chris shook her head and said, “No. Look, I’d tell you. No, there’s nothing like that.”

  Klein nodded, looked down at his shoes, then somberly looked back up at Chris as he told her, “I guess it’s time we started looking for a psychiatrist.”

  Chris was back in the house at exactly 7:21 P.M., and at the door she called out, “Sharon?”

  No answer. Sharon wasn’t there.

  Chris went upstairs to Regan’s bedroom and found her still heavily asleep without even a ruffle in her covers. There was an odor of urine in the room, Chris noticed. She looked from the bed to the window. Cheezus, wide open! She thought Sharon must have opened it to air out the room. But where was she now? Where did she go? Chris walked over to the window, pulled it down shut and locked it, then went back downstairs just as Willie came through the front door.

  “Hi ya, Willie. Any fun today?”

  “Shopping, Missus. Movies.”

  “Where’s Karl, Willie?”

  Willie made a gesture of dismissal.

  “He lets me see Beatles this time. By myself.”

  “Good work!”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  Willie held up two fingers in a “V for Victory” sign.

  The time was 7:35 P.M.

  At 8:01, while Chris was in the study on the phone with her agent, she heard the front door coming open and closed again, high-heeled footsteps approaching, then saw Sharon entering the study with several packages in her arms, which she set on the floor. Sharon then flopped down into an overstuffed chair and waited while Chris continued talking.

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Chris when she’d finished.

  “Oh, didn’t he tell you?”

  “Oh, didn’t who tell me?”

  “Burke. Isn’t he here?”

  “He was here?”

  “You mean he wasn’t when you got home?”

  “Listen, start all over,” said Chris.

  “Oh, that nut,” Sharon chided with a head shake. “I couldn’t get the druggist to deliver, so when Burke came around, I thought, fine, he can stay here with Regan while I go get the Thorazine.” She shook her head again. “I should have known.”

  “Yeah, you should’ve. And so what did you buy?”

  “Well, since I thought I had the time, I went and bought a rubber drawsheet for Regan’s bed.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “No, I thought I’d fix a sandwich. Would you like one?”

  “Good idea.”

  “So what happened with the tests?” Sharon asked as they walked to the kitchen. “All negative,” Chris answered her damply. “I’m going to have to get a shrink.”

  After sandwiches and coffee, Sharon showed Chris how to give an injection. “The two main things,” she explained, “are to make sure that there aren’t any air bubbles, and then you make sure that you haven’t hit a vein. See, you aspirate a little, like this”—she was demonstrating—“and see if there’s blood in the syringe.”

  For a time, Chris practiced the procedure on a grapefruit, and seemed to grow proficient. Then at 9:28, the front doorbell rang. Willie answered. It was Karl. As he passed through the kitchen, en route to his room, he nodded a good evening and remarked that he’d forgotten to take his key.

  “I can’t believe it,” Chris said to Sharon. “That’s the first time he’s ever admitted a mistake.”

  They passed the evening watching television in the study.

  At 11:46, Sharon answered the phone, said, “Hold on,” and then passed the receiver to Chris, saying, “Chuck.”

  The young director of the second unit. He sounded grave.

  “Have you heard the news yet, Chris?”

  “No, what?”

  “Well, it’s bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “Burke’s dead.”

  He’d been drunk. He had stumbled. He had fallen down the steep flight of steps beside the house to the bottom, where a passing pedestrian on M Street watched as he tumbled into night without end. A broken neck. This bloody, crumpled scene, his last.

  As the telephone fell from Chris’s fingers, she was silently weeping and then stood up unsteadily. Sharon ran to her and caught her, steadied her, hung up the phone and then led her to
the sofa. “Chris, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Burke’s dead!”

  “Oh, my God, Chris! No! What happened?”

  But Chris shook her head. She couldn’t speak. She wept.

  Then, later, they talked. For hours. Chris drank. Reminisced about Dennings. Now laughed. Now cried. “Ah, my God,” she kept sighing. “Poor crazy old Burke … poor Burke…”

  Her dream of death kept coming back to her.

  At a little past five in the morning, Chris was standing moodily behind the bar with her elbows propped, her head lowered and her eyes very sad as she waited for Sharon to return from the kitchen with a tray of ice. Then at last she heard her coming. “I still can’t believe it,” said Sharon as she entered the study.

  Chris looked up. Then to the side. And froze.

  Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she sibilantly hissed and moved her head very slightly back and forth like a cobra.

  Staring numbly, Chris said, “Sharon?”

  Sharon stopped. So did Regan. Sharon turned and saw nothing. And then screamed and jumped away as she felt Regan’s tongue snaking out at her ankle.

  Chris threw a hand to her cheek, her face ashen.

  “Call that doctor and get him out of bed! Get him now!”

  Wherever Sharon moved, Regan would follow.

  Chapter Four

  Friday, April 29. While Chris waited in the hall outside the bedroom, Dr. Klein and a noted neuropsychiatrist were intently examining Regan, observing her for almost half an hour. Flinging. Whirling. Tearing at the hair and occasionally grimacing and pressing her hands against her ears as if blotting out a sudden and deafening noise. She bellowed obscenities. Screamed in pain. Then at last she flung herself face downward onto the bed and, tucking her legs up under her stomach, she began to moan softly and incoherently.

  The psychiatrist motioned Klein to come over to him. “Let’s get her tranquilized,” he whispered. “Maybe I can talk to her.”