The Exorcist

  “Are you telling me to take my daughter to a witch doctor?”

  “As a last-ditch, desperate measure—well, yes. I suppose that I’m saying exactly that. Take her to a Catholic priest. That’s a rather bizarre little piece of advice, I know, and maybe even a little bit dangerous, unless we can definitely ascertain whether or not your daughter knew anything at all about possession, and particularly exorcism, before any of her symptoms came on. Do you think she might have read it somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Seen a movie about it? Something on the radio? TV?”

  “No.”

  “Read the gospels, maybe? The New Testament?”

  “No, she hasn’t. Why are you asking?”

  “There are quite a few accounts of possession in them and of exorcisms by Christ. The descriptions of the symptoms, in fact, are the same as in possession today, so—”

  “Look, it’s just no good. Okay? Just forget it! That’s all I need is to have her father hear I called in a…!”

  Chris’s fingertips moved from book to book, searching but so far finding nothing until—Hold it! Her eyes darted quickly back to a title on the bottom shelf. It was the book about witchcraft that Mary Jo Perrin had sent to her. Chris plucked it out and turned quickly to the table of contents, running her thumbnail slowly down the list until abruptly she stopped and thought, There! There it is! Soft thrills of surmise rippled through her. Were the doctors at Barringer right after all? Was this it? Had Regan plucked her disorder and her symptoms through autosuggestion from the pages of this book?

  The title of a chapter was “States of Possession.”

  Chris walked to the kitchen where Sharon was seated reading her shorthand from a propped-up notepad while typing a letter. Chris held up the book. “Have you ever read this, Shar?”

  Still typing, Sharon asked, “Read what?”

  “This book about witchcraft.”

  Sharon stopped typing, turned her glance to Chris and the book, said, “No, I haven’t,” and turned back to her work.

  “Never seen it? Never put it on a bookshelf in the study?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s Willie?”

  “At the market.”

  Chris nodded and stood silently pondering, then went back upstairs to Regan’s bedroom, where Karl still kept vigil at her daughter’s bedside.

  “Karl!”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  Chris held up the book. “By any chance did you find this lying around and then put it with the rest of the books in the study?”

  The houseman turned to Chris, expressionless, shifted his gaze to the book and then back to her. “No, Madam,” he said; “not me.” Then he turned his gaze back to Regan.

  Okay then, maybe Willie.

  Chris returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and, opening the book to the chapter on possession, she began to search for anything relevant, anything the doctors at Barringer Clinic thought might have given rise to Regan’s symptoms.

  And found it.

  Immediately derivative of the prevalent belief in demons was the phenomenon known as possession, a state in which many individuals believed that their physical and mental functions had been invaded and were being controlled by either a demon (most common in the period under discussion) or the spirit of someone dead. There is no period of history or quarter of the globe where this phenomenon has not been reported, and in fairly constant terms, and yet it is still to be adequately explained. Since Traugott Oesterreich’s definitive study, first published in 1921, very little has been added to the body of knowledge, the advances of psychiatry notwithstanding.

  Chris frowned. Not fully explained? She’d had a different impression from the doctors at Barringer.

  What is known is the following: that various people, at various times, have undergone massive transformations so complete that those around them feel they are dealing with another person. Not only the voice, the mannerisms, facial expressions and characteristic movements are sometimes altered, but the subject himself now thinks of himself as totally distinct from the original person and as having a name—whether human or demonic—and a separate history of its own. In the Malay Archipelago, where possession even now is an everyday, common occurrence, the possessing spirit of someone dead often causes the possessed to mimic its gestures, voice and mannerisms so strikingly, that relatives of the deceased will burst into tears. But aside from so-called quasi-possession—those cases that are ultimately reducible to fraud, paranoia and hysteria—the problem has always lain with interpreting the phenomena, the oldest interpretation being the spiritist, an impression that is likely to be strengthened by the fact that the intruding personality may have accomplishments quite foreign to the first. In the demoniacal form of possession, for example, the “demon” may speak in languages unknown to the first personality.

  There! Regan’s gibberish! An attempt at a language? Chris read on quickly:

  … or manifest various parapsychic phenomena, such as telekinesis for example: the movement of objects without application of material force.

  The rappings? The flinging up and down on the bed?

  … In cases of possession by the dead, there are manifestations such as Oesterreich’s account of a monk who, abruptly, while possessed, became a gifted and brilliant dancer although he had never, before his possession, had occasion to dance so much as a step. So impressive, at times, are these manifestations that Jung, the psychiatrist, after studying a case at first hand, could offer only partial explanation for what he was certain could “not have been fraud”…

  Chris frowned. The tone of this was worrisome.

  … and William James, the greatest psychologist that America has ever produced, resorted to positing “the plausibility of the spiritualist interpretation of the phenomenon” after closely studying the so-called “Watseka Wonder,” a teen-aged girl in Watseka, Illinois, who became indistinguishable in personality from a girl named Mary Roff who had died in a state insane asylum twelve years prior to the possession…

  Riveted, Chris did not hear the doorbell chime; did not hear Sharon stop typing and go to the door.

  The demoniacal form of possession is usually thought to have had its origin in early Christianity; yet in fact both possession and exorcism pre-date the time of Christ. The ancient Egyptians as well as the earliest civilizations of the Tigris and the Euphrates believed that physical and spiritual disorders were caused by invasion of the body by demons. The following, for example, is the formula for exorcism against maladies of children in ancient Egypt: “Go hence, thou who comest in darkness, whose nose is turned backwards, whose face is upside down. Hast thou come to kiss this child? I will not let thee…”

  “Chris?”

  “Shar, I’m busy.”

  “There’s a homicide detective wants to see you.”

  “Oh, Christ, Sharon, tell him to—” Abruptly Chris stopped, then looked up and said, “Oh. Yeah, sure, Sharon. Tell him to come in. Let him in.” Sharon left and Chris stared at the pages of the book, unseeing, gripped by some formless yet gathering premonition of dread. Sound of a door being closed. Sound of walking this way. A sense of waiting. Waiting? For what? Like the vivid dream one can never remember, Chris felt an expectancy that seemed known and yet undefined.

  His hat brim crumpled in his hands, he came in with Sharon, wheezing and listing and deferential. “I am really so sorry,” Kinderman said as he approached. “Yes, you’re busy. I can see that. I’m a bother.”

  “How’s the world?” Chris asked him.

  “Very bad. And how’s your daughter?”

  “No change.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Breathing adenoidally, Kinderman was standing by the table now, his drooping beagle eyes moist with concern. “Look, I wouldn’t even bother; I mean, your daughter; it’s a worry. God knows, when my little girl Julie was down with the—What, now? What was it? Can’t remember. It—”

  “Why don’t you sit down,” Chris cut in.
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  “Oh, yes, thank you very much,” the detective exhaled gratefully while settling his bulk in a chair across from Sharon, who, seemingly oblivious, continued to type.

  “Sorry. You were saying?” Chris asked.

  “Well, my daughter, she—oh, well, no. Never mind. I get started, I’ll be telling you my whole life story, you could maybe make a film of it. No, really! It’s incredible! If you only knew half the crazy things that used to happen in my family, you would—No. No, never mind. All right, one! I’ll tell one! Like my mother, every Friday she would make for us gefilte fish, all right? Only all week long—the whole week—no one gets to take a bath on account of my mother has the carp in the bathtub, it’s swimming back and forth, back and forth, because my mother said this cleaned out the poison in its system. I mean, really, who knew! Who knew that carp the whole time are all thinking all these horrible and evil, vindictive thoughts! Oh, well, enough now. Really. Only now and then a laugh just to keep us from crying.”

  Chris studied him. Waiting.

  “Ah, you’re reading!” The detective was looking down at the book on witchcraft. “For a film?”

  “No, just passing the time.”

  “Is it good?”

  “I just started it.”

  “Witchcraft,” Kinderman murmured, his head angled to the side as he read the book’s title at the top of a page.

  “So okay now, what’s doin’?” Chris asked.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. You’re busy. I’ll finish. As I said, I wouldn’t bother you, except…”

  “Except what?”

  Looking suddenly grave, the detective clasped his hands together on the polished pine tabletop. “Well, it seems that Burke—”

  “Damn it!” snapped Sharon irritably as she ripped out a letter from the platen of the typewriter, crumpled it up in her hands and then errantly tossed it at a wastepaper basket close to Kinderman’s feet. He and Chris had turned their heads to stare at her, and when the secretary saw them, she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even know you were there!”

  “You’re Miss Fenster?” asked Kinderman.

  “Spencer,” Sharon corrected him as she slid her chair back and got up to retrieve the balled-up letter from the floor with a murmured “I never said I was Julius Erving.”

  “Never mind, never mind,” the detective told her as, reaching to the floor near his foot, he picked up the crumpled page.

  “Oh, thanks.” Sharon stopped and went back to her chair.

  “Excuse me—you’re the secretary?” Kinderman asked her.

  “Sharon, this is—” Chris turned to Kinderman. “Sorry,” she said to him. “Your name again?”

  “Kinderman. William F. Kinderman.”

  “This is Sharon; Sharon Spencer.”

  With a courtly tilt and nod of the head, the detective told Sharon, “It’s a pleasure.” Sharon was now bent forward, eyeing him curiously, her chin resting on folded arms atop the typewriter. “And perhaps you can help me,” the detective added.

  Her arms still folded, Sharon sat up and said, “Me?”

  “Yes, perhaps. On the night of Mr. Dennings’s demise, you went out to a drugstore and left him alone in the house, am I correct?”

  “Well, not exactly. Regan was here.”

  “That’s my daughter,” Chris clarified.

  “Spelling?”

  “R-e-g-a-n,” Chris told him.

  “Lovely name,” said Kinderman.

  “Thank you.”

  The detective turned back to Sharon. “Now Dennings had come here that night to see Mrs. MacNeil?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “He expected her shortly?”

  “Yes, I told him I expected her back pretty soon.”

  “Very good. And you left at what time? You remember?”

  “Let’s see. I was watching the news, so I guess—oh, no, wait—yes, that’s right. I remember being bothered because the pharmacist said the delivery boy had gone home and I said, ‘Oh, come on now,’ or something about it only being about six-thirty. Then Burke came along just ten, maybe twenty minutes after that.”

  “So a median,” concluded the detective, “would have put him here at six-forty-five. Not so?”

  “And so what’s this all about?” Chris asked him.

  The nebulous tension she’d been feeling had mounted.

  “Well, it raises a question, Mrs. MacNeil. To arrive at the house at, say, quarter to seven and leave only twenty minutes later…”

  Chris shrugged. “Oh, well, that was Burke,” she said. “Just like him.”

  “Was it also like him,” Kinderman asked, “to frequent the bars down on M Street?”

  “No. Not at all. Not that I know of.”

  “No, I thought not. I made a little check. And so he wouldn’t have had a reason to be at the top of those steps beside your house after leaving here that night. And was it also not his custom to travel by taxi? He wouldn’t call a cab from your house when he left?”

  “Yes, he would. At least, he always did.”

  “Then one wonders—not so?—why or how he came to be there that night. And one wonders why taxicab companies do not show a record of calls from this house on that night, except for the one that picked up your Miss Spencer here at precisely six-forty-seven.”

  Her voice drained of color, Chris said softly, “I don’t know.”

  “No, I doubted that you would,” the detective told her. “In the meantime, the matter has now grown somewhat serious.”

  Chris was breathing shallowly. “In what way?”

  “The report of the pathologist,” Kinderman recounted, “seems to show that the chance that Dennings died accidentally is still very possible. However…”

  “Are you saying he was murdered?”

  “Well, it seems that the position…” Kinderman hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said; “this will be painful.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The position of Dennings’s head and a certain shearing of the muscles of the neck would—”

  Shutting her eyes, Chris winced and said, “Oh, God!”

  “Yes, as I said, it’s very painful. I’m so sorry. Really. But you see, this condition—I think we can skip the details, perhaps—it never could happen unless Mr. Dennings had fallen some distance before he hit the steps; for example, maybe twenty, thirty feet before he went rolling down to the bottom. So a clear possibility, plainly speaking, is that maybe…” Kinderman turned to Sharon. Arms folded across her chest, she had been listening, mesmerized and wide-eyed. “Well, now, first let me ask you something, Miss Spencer. When you left, he was where, Mr. Dennings? With the child?”

  “No, he was down here in the study fixing a drink.”

  “Might your daughter remember”—he turned to Chris—“if perhaps Mr. Dennings was in her room that night?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Might your daughter remember?”

  “How could she? Like I told you, she was heavily sedated and—”

  “Yes, yes, you did tell me; that’s true; I recall it; but perhaps she awakened.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Chris told him.

  “She was also sedated when last we spoke?”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “I thought I saw her at her window that day.”

  “Well, you’re mistaken.”

  “It could be. Perhaps so. I’m not sure.”

  “Listen, why are you asking all this?”

  “Well, a clear possibility, as I was saying, is maybe the deceased was so drunk that he stumbled and fell from the window in your daughter’s bedroom. Not so?”

  “No way. In the first place that window was always closed, and besides, Burke was always drunk, but he never got sloppy. Burke used to direct when he was drunk. Now how could he stumble and fall out a window?”

  “Were you maybe expecting someone else here that night?”

  “Someone else? No, I wasn’t.”

  “Have you friends wh
o drop by without calling?”

  “Only Burke.”

  The detective lowered his head and shook it. “So strange,” he breathed out wearily. “Baffling.” Then he lifted his glance to Chris. “The deceased comes to visit, stays only twenty minutes without even seeing you, and leaves all alone here a very sick girl? And speaking plainly, as you yourself say, it’s not likely he would fall from a window. Besides, a fall wouldn’t do to his neck what we found except maybe a chance in a hundred; in a thousand.” He motioned with his head at the witchcraft book. “You’ve read in that book about ritual murder?”

  Her chill prescience mounting, Chris quietly said, “No.”

  “Maybe not in that book,” said Kinderman. “However—forgive me; I mention this only so maybe you’ll think just a little bit harder—poor Mr. Dennings was discovered with his neck wrenched around in the style of ritual murder by so-called demons, Mrs. MacNeil.”

  Chris’s complexion visibly paled.

  “Some lunatic killed Mr. Dennings and—” Kinderman halted. “Something wrong?” he asked. He had noticed a tension in her eyes, her sudden pallor.

  “No, nothing’s wrong. Go ahead.”

  “I’m obliged. Now at first, I never told you, to spare you the hurt. And besides, it could technically still be an accident. But me, I don’t think so. My hunch? My opinion? I believe he was killed by a powerful man: point one; and the fracturing of his skull—point two—plus the various things I have mentioned would make it very probable—probable, not certain—your director was killed and then afterward pushed from your daughter’s window. But no one was here except your daughter. So then how could this be? Well, it could be one way: if someone came calling between the time Miss Spencer left and the time you returned. Not so? Now I ask you again, please: who might have come?”