The Exorcist

  “It’s not a Jesuit residence hall? You’re not a Jesuit?”

  Karras turned his head and stared through the windshield as the squad car slowly headed for the campus front gates. “Yeah, right,” he said softly. He had moved his quarters to the residence hall from his Holy Trinity courtyard location just a few days before in the hope it might encourage the men he had counseled to continue to seek his help.

  “You like movies, Father Karras?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’ve seen Lear with Paul Scofield?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Me, I’ve seen it. I get passes.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I get passes for the very best shows, but Mrs. K., she gets tired very early. She never goes.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yes, I hate to go alone. You know, afterward I love to talk film; to discuss; to critique.”

  Silent, Karras nodded, then looked down at his large and powerful hands that he was holding clasped between his legs. Moments passed. And then Kinderman asked in a wistful tone of voice, “Would you like to see a film with me sometime? It’s free.”

  “Yes, I know. You get passes.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “As Elwood P. Dowd says in Harvey, ‘When?’ ”

  “Oh, I’ll call you!” The detective was beaming.

  “Okay, do that. I’d like that.”

  They had exited the campus front gates, taken a right and then left on Prospect Street and had arrived at the residence hall and parked. Karras opened the door on his side partway and, looking back at the detective, said, “Thanks for the ride,” got out of the car, shut the car door and, leaning his forearms on the open window jamb, said, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t be of very much help.”

  “No, you were,” said the detective. “And thank you. In the meantime, I’ll give a call about a film, I really will.”

  “I’ll look forward,” said Karras. “Take care, now.”

  “I will. And you too.”

  Karras pulled back from the car, straightened up, turned around and was moving away when he heard, “Father, wait!”

  Karras turned and saw Kinderman emerging from the car and beckoning him to come to him. Karras did, and met Kinderman on the sidewalk. “Listen, Father, I forgot,” the detective told him. “It completely slipped my mind about the card. You know, the card with the writing in Latin on it? The one that was found in the church?”

  “Yes, the altar card.”

  “Whatever. It’s still around?”

  “Yes, I’ve got it in my room. I was checking out the Latin but I’m finished now. You want it?”

  “It could show something. Yes. May I have it?”

  “Sure. Hold on and I’ll go get it for you now.”

  “I’m obliged.”

  While Kinderman leaned back against the squad car and waited, the Jesuit went quickly to his ground-floor room, found the card, placed it inside a manila envelope, came back out to the street and handed the envelope to Kinderman.

  “Here you go.”

  “Father, thank you,” said Kinderman as he lifted the envelope to his scrutiny. “There could be some fingerprints, I’m thinking.” Then he looked up at Karras with incipient dismay. He said, “Oy! You’ve been handling the card, Kirk Douglas, replaying your role in Detective Story? No gloves? Your bare hands.”

  “I plead guilty.”

  “And without an explanation,” grumbled Kinderman. Shaking his head and eyeing Karras dismally, he added, “Father Brown you are not. Never mind, maybe still we could find something from it.” Here he held up the envelope. “Incidentally, you studied this, you say?”

  Karras nodded. “Yes, I did.”

  “And your conclusion? I await with bated breath.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Karras told him, “except whatever the motive was—hatred of Catholicism, maybe. Who knows? But what’s certain is the guy who did this is deeply disturbed.”

  “How do you know it was a man?”

  Karras shrugged and looked away, his gaze following a passing Gunther beer truck as it rumbled on the cobblestones of the street. “Oh, well, I don’t,” he said.

  “And it couldn’t be some teenage lout?”

  “No, it couldn’t.” Karras turned to look at Kinderman again. “It’s the Latin,” he said.

  “The Latin? Oh, you mean on the altar card.”

  “Yes. The Latin’s flawless, Lieutenant, and more than that, it’s got a definite style that’s extremely individual.”

  “That’s so?”

  “That’s so. It’s as if whoever wrote it can think in Latin.”

  “Can priests?”

  “Oh, come on!” Karras scoffed.

  “Just answer the question, please, Father Paranoia.”

  Karras turned his stare back to Kinderman and, after a pause, admitted, “Okay, yes. There comes a point in our training when we do—at least the Jesuits and maybe a couple of the other orders. At Woodstock Seminary in Maryland, our philosophy courses are taught in Latin.”

  “Why is that?”

  “For precision of thought. It expresses nuances and subtle distinctions that English can’t handle.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Looking suddenly grave, his stare intense, the priest leaned his face in close to the detective’s. “Look, Lieutenant, can I tell you who I really think did it?”

  The detective’s eyebrows furrowed with interest.

  “Yes, who!”

  “The Dominicans. Go pick on them.”

  Karras smiled, and as he turned and walked away, the detective called after him, “I lied! You look like Sal Mineo!”

  Karras turned with a grin and a friendly wave and then opened the door to the residence hall and entered, while outside on the sidewalk the detective stood motionless, speculatively staring as he murmured, “He hums like a tuning fork held under the water.” For a few seconds more he continued staring pensively at the residence entry door. And then abruptly he turned and, opening the right front door of the squad car, he slid into the passenger seat, closed the door and told the driver, “Back to headquarters. Hurry. Break laws.”

  Karras’s new quarters in the Jesuit residence hall was sparely furnished: bookshelves built into one wall, a single bed, two comfortable chairs, plus a desk with a straight-backed wooden chair. On the desk was an early photo of his mother, and on the wall above his bed, in silent rebuke, hung a bronze-colored metal crucifix. For Karras, the narrow room was world enough. He cared little for possessions; only that those he had be clean.

  He showered, scrubbing briskly, slipped on a white T-shirt and khaki chinos, then ambled to dinner in the priests’ refectory, where he spotted pink-cheeked Dyer. Wearing a faded Snoopy sweatshirt, he was sitting alone at a table in a corner. Karras moved to join him.

  “Hi, Damien.”

  “Hey, Joe.”

  Standing in front of his chair, Karras blessed himself and closed his eyes while inaudibly murmuring a rapid grace, then sat down at the table and spread a napkin on his lap.

  “How’s the loafer?” Dyer asked him.

  “Whaddya mean? I’m working.”

  “One lecture a week?”

  “It’s the quality that counts. What’s dinner?”

  “Can’t you smell it?”

  Karras grimaced. “Oh hell, is it dog day?”

  Knockwurst and sauerkraut.

  “It’s the quantity that counts,” said Dyer; then, as Karras reached out for a pitcher of milk, the young priest quietly warned, “I wouldn’t do that,” while he buttered a slice of whole wheat bread. “See the bubbles? Saltpeter.”

  “I need it.” As Karras tipped up his glass to fill it, he heard the scrape of a chair as someone pulled it back and joined them at the table.

  “Well, I finally read that book,” said the newcomer brightly.

  Karras glanced up and felt instant dismay, felt the soft crushing weight, press of lead, press of b
one, as he recognized the young priest who had come to him recently for counseling, the one who could not make friends.

  “Oh, and what did you think of it?” Karras asked as if with interest. He set down the pitcher of milk as if it were the booklet for a broken novena.

  The young priest talked and, half an hour later, Dyer was table-hopping, spiking the refectory with laughter. Karras checked his watch. “Want to pick up a jacket and walk across the street?” he asked the young priest. “I like to watch the sunset every night if I can.”

  Soon they were leaning against a railing at the top of the steps that plunged steeply down to M Street. End of day. The burnished rays of the setting sun flamed glory on the clouds of the western sky before shattering in gold and vermilion dapples on the darkening waters of the river. Once Karras met God in this sight. Long ago. Like a lover forsaken, he still kept the rendezvous.

  Drinking it in, the young priest said, “So beautiful. Really.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The campus tower clock boomed out the hour: 7:00 P.M.

  At 7:23, Lieutenant Kinderman was pondering a spectrographic analysis showing that the paint from Regan’s sculpture matched a scraping of paint from the desecrated statue of the Virgin Mary, and at 8:47, in a slum in the northeast section of the city, an impassive Karl Engstrom emerged from a rat-infested tenement building, walked three blocks south to a bus stop where he waited alone for a minute, expressionless, then clutched at a lamppost with both his hands as he crumpled against it, racked with tears.

  At the time, Lieutenant Kinderman was at the movies.

  Chapter Six

  On Wednesday, May 11, they were back in the house. They put Regan to bed, installed a lock on the shutters and stripped all the mirrors from her bedroom and bathroom.

  “… fewer and fewer lucid moments, and now there’s a total blacking out of her consciousness during the fits, I’m afraid. That’s new and would seem to eliminate genuine hysteria. In the meantime, a symptom or two in the area of what we call parapsychic phenomena have…”

  Dr. Klein came by, and Chris attended with Sharon as he drilled them in proper procedures for administering Sustagen feedings to Regan during her periods of coma. He inserted the nasogastric tubing. “First…”

  Chris forced herself to watch and yet still not see her daughter’s face; to grip at the words that the doctor was saying and push away others that she’d heard at the clinic.

  “Now you stated ‘No religion’ here, Mrs. MacNeil. Is that right? No religious education at all?”

  “Oh, well, maybe just ‘God.’ You know, general. Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, the content of much of her raving—when it isn’t that gibberish she’s been spouting—is religiously oriented. Now where do you think she might have gotten that?”

  “Well, first give me a for instance.”

  “Okay, then: ‘Jesus and Mary, sixty-nine,’ for example.”

  Klein had guided the tubing into Regan’s stomach. “First you check to see if fluid’s gotten into her lungs,” he instructed, pinching on the tube in order to clamp off the flow of Sustagen. “If it…”

  “… syndrome of a type of disorder that you rarely ever see anymore, except among primitive cultures. We call it somnambuliform possession. Quite frankly, we don’t know much about it except that it starts with some conflict or guilt that eventually leads to the patient’s delusion that his body’s been invaded by an alien intelligence; a spirit, if you will. In times gone by, when belief in the devil was fairly strong, the possessing entity was usually a demon. In relatively modern cases, however, it’s mostly the spirit of someone dead, often someone the patient has known or seen and is able unconsciously to mimic as to the voice and the mannerisms, even the features of the face at rare times.”

  After a gloomy Dr. Klein had left the house, Chris telephoned her agent in Beverly Hills and announced to him lifelessly that she definitely wouldn’t be directing “Hope.” Then she called Mrs. Perrin. She was out. Chris hung up the phone with a mounting dread. Who was it who could help her, she desperately wondered. Was there anyone? Anything? What?

  “… Cases where it’s spirits of the dead are easier to deal with; you don’t find the rages in most of those cases, or the hyperactivity and motor excitement. However, in the other main type of somnambuliform possession, the new personality’s always malevolent, always hostile toward the first. Its primary aim, in fact, is to damage and sometimes even kill it.”

  A set of restraining straps had been delivered to the Prospect Street house and Chris stood watching, wan and spent, while Karl affixed them, first to Regan’s bed and then to her wrists. As Chris moved a pillow in an effort to center it under Regan’s head, the Swiss straightened up and looked pityingly at the child’s ravaged face. “She is going to be well?” he asked.

  Chris didn’t answer. As Karl was speaking, she had slipped out an object from under Regan’s pillow and was holding it up to her mystified gaze. Then her glance flicked to Karl as she snapped at him sternly, “Karl, who put this crucifix here?”

  “The syndrome is only the manifestation of some conflict, of some guilt, so we try to get at it, find out what it is. Well, the best procedure in a case like this is hypnotherapy; however, we can’t seem to put her under. So then we took a shot at narcosynthesis, but it looks like another dead end.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “Mostly time. We’ll just have to keep trying and hoping there’s a change. In the meantime, she’s going to have to be hospitalized.”

  Chris found Sharon in the kitchen setting up her typewriter on the table. She had just brought it up from the basement playroom. Willie sliced carrots at the sink for a stew.

  With a current of tension and strain in her voice, Chris asked, “Was it you who put the crucifix under her pillow, Shar?”

  Sharon looked befuddled. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Chris, I don’t even know what you’re talking about! Look, I told you before, Chris, I told you on the plane, all I’ve ever said about religion to Rags is stuff like ‘God made the world’ and maybe things about—”

  “Fine, Sharon, fine. I believe you, but—”

  “Me, I don’t put it!” growled Willie defensively.

  “Dammit, somebody put it there!” Chris suddenly erupted. Then she wheeled on Karl, who had entered the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. “Karl!” she called out to him sharply.

  “Yes, Madam,” Karl answered her calmly without turning around. He was folding ice cubes into a face towel.

  “Well, I’m asking you one more time,” Chris said grittily, her voice cracking and at the edge of shrillness: “Did you put that freaking crucifix under Regan’s pillow?”

  “No, Madam. Not me. I don’t do it,” Karl answered as he plopped another ice cube into the towel.

  “That fucking cross didn’t just walk up there, goddammit!” Chris shrieked as she spun around to Willie and Sharon. “Now which one of you is lying? Tell me!”

  Karl stopped what he was doing and turned to study Chris. Her sudden rage had stunned the room, and now abruptly she slumped down into a chair, convulsively sobbing into trembling hands. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing!” she said tremulously as she wept. “Oh, my God, I don’t know!”

  While Willie and Karl stood silently watching, Sharon came up behind Chris and started kneading her neck and shoulders with comforting hands. “Hey, okay. It’s okay.”

  Chris wiped at her face with the back of a sleeve. “Yeah, I guess whoever did it”—she found a handkerchief in a pocket and blew her nose, then continued—“Whoever did it was only trying to help.”

  “Look, I’m telling you again and you’d better believe it, I’m not about to put her into an asylum!”

  “Ma’am, it isn’t an—”

  “I don’t care what you call it! No way! I’m not letting her out of my sight!”

  “I’m so sorry. We all are.?
??

  “Yeah, sure. Jesus, eighty-eight doctors and all you can tell me with all of your bullshit is…!”

  Chris tore the cellophane off a blue packet of Gauloises Blondes, an imported French cigarette, took a few deep puffs and then tamped it out rapidly in an ashtray and went upstairs to look in on Regan. When she opened the door, in the gloom of the bedroom, she made out a male figure by Regan’s bedside sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair, his arm outstretched and his hand over Regan’s brow. Chris moved closer. It was Karl. When Chris reached the bedside, he neither looked up at her, nor did he speak, but kept his gaze intently on the child’s face. There was something in the hand on Regan’s brow. What was it? Then she saw it was an improvised ice pack.

  Surprised and touched, Chris appraised the stolid Swiss with a look of fondness that she had long ago misplaced; but when he neither moved nor acknowledged her presence, she turned away and quietly left the room. She went down to the kitchen, sat in the breakfast nook, drank coffee and stared off distantly in thought until, on a sudden impulse, she stood up and walked briskly toward the cherrywood paneled study.

  “Possession is loosely related to hysteria insofar as the origin of the syndrome is almost always autosuggestive. Your daughter might have known about possession, believed in it, and possibly known about some of its symptoms, so that now her unconscious is producing the syndrome. Follow? Now if that can be firmly established, and you still won’t agree to hospitalization, you might want to take a stab at something that I’m going to suggest. It has only an outside chance of a cure, I would think, but still it’s a chance.”

  “Oh, well, name it, for God’s sake! What is it?!”

  “Have you ever heard of exorcism, Mrs. MacNeil?”

  Chris was unfamiliar with the books in the study—they were part of the furnishings that came with the house—and now she was carefully scanning the titles.

  “It’s a stylized ritual pretty much out of date in which rabbis and priests tried to drive out an evil spirit. It’s only the Catholics who haven’t discarded it yet, but they keep it pretty much in the closet as sort of an embarrassment, I think. But to someone who really thinks he’s possessed, I’d have to say that the ritual’s pretty impressive, and it used to work, in fact, although not for the reason they thought; it was purely the force of suggestion. The victim’s belief in possession helped cause it, and in just the same way his belief in the power of the exorcism can make it disappear. It’s—I see that you’re frowning. Well, of course; I know it sounds far-fetched. So let me tell you something similar that we know to be a fact. It has to do with Australian aborigines. They’re convinced that if some wizard thinks a ‘death ray’ at them from a distance, why, they’re definitely going to die. And the fact is that they do! They just lie down and slowly die! And the only thing that saves them, most times, is a similar form of suggestion: a counteracting ‘ray’ by another wizard.”