The Exorcist

  Chris plunged down the hall and burst into the bedroom, then gasped and stood rooted in paralyzing shock as the rappings boomed massively, shivering through walls; as Karl lay unconscious on the floor near the bureau and as Regan, with her legs propped up and spread wide on a bed that was violently bouncing and shaking, her eyes wide and bulging with terror in a face smeared with blood that was dripping from her nose where the nasogastric tubing had been violently ripped out as she stared at a bone-white crucifix clutched and held poised in the air just above and aimed directly at her vagina. “Oh, please! Oh, no, please!” she was shrieking as her hands brought the crucifix closer while seeming to be straining to hold it back.

  “You’ll do as I tell you, filth! You’ll do it!”

  The threatening bellow, the words, came from Regan, in a voice coarse and guttural and bristling with venom, while in an instantaneous flash her expression and features hideously transmuted into those of the feral, demonic personality that had appeared in the course of hypnosis, and as Chris watched, stunned, both the faces and voices interchanged with rapidity:

  “No!”

  “You’ll do it!”

  “No! Please, no!”

  “You will, you little bitch, or I will kill you!”

  And now the switch back to Regan with her eyes wide and staring as if flinching from the rush of some hideous finality, her mouth agape and shrieking until, again, the demonic personality possessed her, filled her, the room suddenly filling with a stench in the nostrils, with an icy cold that seemed to seep from the walls as the rapping sounds ended and Regan’s piercing cry of terror elided into a guttural, yelping laugh of malevolent spite triumphant while she thrust down the crucifix into her vagina, then again and again, as she masturbated with it ferociously while roaring in that deep, coarse, deafening voice, “Now you’re mine, you bitch, you stinking cow! Yes, let Jesus fuck you, fuck you fuck you!”

  Chris stood rooted to the floor in horror, her hands pressing tightly against her cheeks as again the demonic, loud laugh cackled joyously as from Regan’s vagina her blood gushed onto white linen sheets, and then abruptly, with a shriek coming raw and clawing from her throat, Chris rushed at the bed, grasping blindly at the crucifix while, her features contorted infernally, Regan flared up at her in fury and, reaching out a hand, clutched Chris’s hair and, powerfully yanking her head down, firmly pressed Chris’s face against her vagina, smearing it with blood as Regan undulated her pelvis.

  “Aahhh, little pig mother!” Regan crooned with a guttural eroticism. “Lick me, lick me, lick me! Aahhhhh!” Then the hand that was holding Chris’s head down jerked it upward while the other arm smashed a blow across her chest that sent Chris reeling across the room and crashing to a wall with stunning force while Regan mockingly laughed.

  Chris crumpled to the floor in a daze of horror, in a swirling of images, of sounds in the room, as her vision spun, blurring, unfocused, her ears ringing loud with chaotic distortions as she weakly tried to raise herself, pushing up with her hands on the floor, and, faltering, looked toward the bed, toward Regan with her back to her, thrusting the crucifix gently and sensually into her vagina, then out, then in, with that deep, bass voice crooning, “Ahh, there’s my sow, yes, my sweet honey piglet, my—”

  Chris started crawling painfully toward the bed, her face smeared with blood, her eyes still unfocused, limbs aching, and then cringed, shrinking back in incredulous terror as she thought she saw hazily, as if in an undulating fog, her daughter’s head turning slowly and inexorably completely around on a motionless torso until at last Chris was looking directly into the foxlike, angry eyes of Burke Dennings.

  “Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?”

  Chris screamed until she fainted.

  The Abyss

  They said, “What sign can you give us to see, so that we may believe.”

  —John 6:30–31

  “You do not believe although you have seen.”

  —John 6:36–37

  Chapter One

  She was standing on the Key Bridge walkway, arms atop the parapet, fidgeting, waiting, while homeward-bound traffic stuttered thickly behind her as drivers with everyday cares honked horns and bumpers nudged bumpers with scraping indifference. She had reached Mary Jo. Told her lies.

  “Regan’s fine. By the way, I’ve been thinking of another little dinner party. What was the name of that Jesuit psychiatrist again? I thought maybe I’d include him in the…”

  Laughter floated up from below her: a blue-jeaned young couple in a rented canoe. With a quick, nervous gesture, she flicked ash from her cigarette, the last in her pack, and glanced up the walkway of the bridge toward the District. Someone hurrying toward her: khaki pants and blue sweater; not a priest; not him. She looked down at the river again, at her helplessness swirling in the wake of the bright red canoe. She could make out the name on its side: Caprice.

  Footsteps: the man in the chinos and sweater coming closer, slowing down as he reached her. Peripherally, she saw him rest a forearm on the top of the parapet and quickly averted her gaze toward Virginia. Another autograph seeker? Or worse?

  “Chris MacNeil?”

  Flipping her cigarette butt into the river, Chris said coldly, “Keep moving, or, I swear, I’ll yell for a cop!”

  “Miss MacNeil? I’m Father Karras.”

  Chris started, then reddened, jerking swiftly around to the chipped, rugged face. “Oh my God! Oh, I’m so sorry!” She was tugging at her sunglasses, flustered, then immediately pushing them back as the sad, dark eyes probed hers.

  “I should have told you that I wouldn’t be in uniform.”

  The voice was cradling, stripping her of burden. The priest had clasped his hands together on the parapet, veined Michelangelos, sensitive and large. “I thought it would be much less conspicuous,” he continued. “You seemed so concerned about keeping this quiet.”

  “Guess I should have been concerned about not making such an ass of myself,” Chris retorted. “I just thought you were—”

  “Human?” Karras finished with a faint, wry smile.

  Chris appraised him, and then, nodding and returning the smile, she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I knew that the first time I saw you.”

  “When was that?”

  “On the campus one day while we were filming. Got a cigarette, Father?”

  Karras reached into the pocket of his shirt.

  “Can you go a nonfilter?”

  “Right now I’d smoke rope.”

  “On my allowance, I frequently do.”

  Smiling tightly, Chris nodded. “Yeah, right. Vow of poverty,” she murmured as she slipped out a cigarette from the packet the priest was holding out to her. Karras reached into a trouser pocket for matches.

  “A vow of poverty has its uses,” he said.

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “Makes rope taste better.” Again, a half smile as he watched Chris’s hand that was holding the cigarette. It was trembling, the cigarette wavering in quick, erratic jumps, and without pausing, he took it from her fingers, put it up to his mouth and, cupping his hands around the match, he lit the cigarette, puffed, and then gave it back to Chris, saying, “Awful lot of breeze from all these cars going by.”

  Chris looked at him appraisingly, with gratitude, and even with hope. She knew what he’d done. “Thanks, Father” she said, and then she watched as he lit up a Camel for himself. He forgot to cup his hands. As he exhaled, they each leaned an elbow on the parapet.

  “Where are you from, Father Karras? I mean, originally.”

  “New York,” he said.

  “Me too. Wouldn’t ever go back, though. Would you?”

  Karras fought down the rise in his throat. “No, I wouldn’t.” He forced a little smile. “But I don’t have to make those decisions.”

  Chris shook her head and looked aside. “God, I’m dumb,” she said. “You’re a priest. You have to go where they send you.”

  “That’s right.”

>   “How’d a shrink ever get to be a priest?”

  He was anxious to know what the urgent problem was that she’d mentioned when she called him at the residence. She was feeling her way, he sensed—but toward what? He must not prod. It would come. “It’s the other way around,” he corrected her gently. “The Society—”

  “Who?”

  “The Society of Jesus. Jesuit is short for that.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “The Society sent me through medical school and through psychiatric training.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, well, Harvard; Johns Hopkins. Places like that.”

  He was suddenly aware that he wanted to impress her. Why? he wondered; and immediately saw the answer in the slums of his boyhood; in the balconies of theaters on the Lower East Side. Little Dimmy with a movie star.

  Chris nodded her head in approval. “Not bad,” she said.

  “We don’t take vows of mental poverty.”

  She sensed an irritation; shrugged; turned front, facing out to the river. “Look, it’s just that I don’t know you, and…” She dragged on the cigarette, long and deep, and then exhaled, crushing out the butt on the parapet and then flipping it out to the river “You’re a friend of Father Dyer’s, that right?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Pretty close?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “Did he talk about the party?”

  “At your house?”

  “At my house.”

  “Yes, he said you seemed human.”

  She missed it; or ignored it. “Did he talk about my daughter?”

  “No, I didn’t know you had one.”

  “She’s twelve. He didn’t mention her?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t tell you what she did?”

  “He never mentioned her.”

  “Priests keep a pretty tight mouth, then; that right?”

  “That depends,” answered Karras.

  “On what?”

  “On the priest.”

  At the fringe of the Jesuit’s awareness drifted a warning about women with neurotic attractions to priests, women who desired, unconsciously and under the guise of some other problem, to seduce the unattainable.

  “Look, I mean like confession. You’re not allowed to talk about it, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And outside of confession?” she asked him. “I mean, what if some…” Her hands were now agitated; fluttering. “I’m curious. I … No. No, I’d really like to know. I mean, what if a person, let’s say, was a criminal, like maybe a murderer or something, you know? If he came to you for help, would you have to turn him in?”

  Was she seeking instruction? Was she clearing off doubts in the way of conversion? There were people, Karras knew, who approached salvation as if it were at the end of a flimsy bridge overhanging an abyss. “If he came to me for spiritual help, I’d say, no,” he answered.

  “You wouldn’t turn him in?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. But I’d try to persuade him to turn himself in.”

  “And how do you go about getting an exorcism?”

  There was a pause while Karras stared.

  “Beg pardon?” he said at last.

  “If a person’s possessed by some kind of a demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?”

  Karras looked off, took a breath, then looked back to her. “Oh, well, first you’d have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century.”

  Puzzled, Chris frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it just doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “Oh, really? Since when?”

  “Since when? Since we learned about mental illness and schizophrenia and split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Chris’s voice had wavered, sounding helpless, confused, and Karras instantly regretted his flipness. Where had it come from? he wondered. It had leaped to his tongue unbidden.

  “Many educated Catholics,” he said in a gentler tone, “don’t believe in the Devil anymore; and as far as possession is concerned, since the day I joined the Jesuits I’ve never met a priest who’s ever in his life performed an exorcism. Not one.”

  “Oh, are you really a priest or from Central Casting?” Chris blurted with a suddenly bitter, disappointed sharpness. “I mean, what about all of those stories in the Bible about Christ driving out all those demons?”

  Karras answered spontaneously with heat, “Look, if Christ had said those people who were supposedly possessed had schizophrenia, which I imagine they did, they would probably have crucified him three years earlier.”

  “Oh, really?” Chris put a shaking hand to her sunglasses, deepening her voice in an effort at control. “Well, it happens, Father Karras, that someone very close to me is probably possessed and needs an exorcism. Will you do it?”

  To Karras, it suddenly seemed unreal: Key Bridge; motor traffic; across the river, the Hot Shoppe with frozen milk shakes and beside him a movie star asking for an exorcism. As he stared at her, groping for an answer, she slipped off her oversized dark sunglasses and Karras felt a wincing shock at the redness, at the desperate pleading in those haggard eyes. And suddenly realized that the woman was serious. “Father Karras, it’s my daughter,” she pleaded. “My daughter!”

  “Then all the more reason,” he said to her soothingly, “to forget about getting an exorcism and—”

  “Why?” Chris suddenly burst out in a voice that was cracking and strident and distraught. “Tell me why! God, I don’t understand!”

  Karras took hold of her wrist in an effort to calm her. “In the first place,” he told her, “it could make things worse.”

  Incredulous, Chris scrunched up her face and said, “Worse?”

  “Yes, worse. That’s right. Because the ritual of exorcism is dangerously suggestive. It could implant the notion of possession where it didn’t exist before, or if it did, it could tend to fortify it.”

  “But—”

  “And secondly,” Karras overrode her, “before the Catholic Church approves an exorcism, it conducts an investigation to see if it’s warranted, and that takes time. In the meantime, your—”

  “Couldn’t you do it yourself?” Chris’s lower lip was slightly trembling now, her eyes filling up with tears.

  “Look, every priest has the power to exorcise, but he has to have Church approval, and frankly, it’s rarely ever given, so—”

  “Can’t you even look at her?”

  “Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could, but—”

  “She needs a priest!” Chris cried out suddenly, her features contorted with anger and fear. “I’ve taken her to every god-damn, fucking doctor, psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you; now you send me to them?”

  “But your—”

  “Jesus Christ, won’t somebody help me?”

  The heart-stopping shriek bolted raw above the river, sending startled flocks of birds shooting up into the air from its grassy banks with a sound of cawing and a thousand flapping wings. “Oh my God, someone help me!” Chris moaned as, sobbing convulsively, she crumpled to Karras’s chest. “Oh, please help me! Please! Please, help!”

  The Jesuit looked down at her, and then lifted up comforting hands to her head as the riders in traffic-locked automobiles glanced out windows to watch them with passing disinterest.

  “It’s all right,” Karras told her. He wanted only to calm her; to stem her hysteria. “My daughter?” No, it was Chris who needed psychiatric help, he believed. “It’s all right. I’ll go see her,” he told her. “I’ll see her right now. Come on, let’s go.”

  With that sense of unreality still lingering, Karras let her lead him to the house in silence and with thoughts of his next day’s lecture at the Georgetown Medical School. He had yet to prepare his notes.

  As they climbed the front stoop, Karras glanced at his watch. It was ten befor
e six. He looked down the street at the Jesuit residence hall as he realized he would now miss dinner. “Father Karras?” The priest turned to look at Chris. About to turn her key in the front door lock, she had hesitated and turned to him. “Do you think you should be wearing your priest clothes?” she said.

  Karras eyed her with a pity that he tried to conceal. Her face and her voice: how helplessly childlike they were. “Too dangerous,” he told her.

  “Okay.”

  Chris turned back and started opening the door, and it was then that Karras felt it: a chill, tugging warning. It scraped through his bloodstream like particles of ice.

  “Father Karras?”

  He looked up. Chris had entered.

  For a hesitant moment the priest stood unmoving; then slowly and deliberately, as if he had made a decision to do so, he went forward, stepping into the house with an odd sense of ending.

  Karras heard commotion. Upstairs. A deep, booming voice was thundering obscenities, threatening in anger and in hate and frustration. Taken aback, he turned to Chris with a look of wonderment. She was staring at him mutely. Then she moved on ahead. He followed her upstairs and along a hall to where Karl was standing with his head bent low over folded arms just opposite the door to Regan’s bedroom. At this close range, the voice from the bedroom was so loud that it almost seemed amplified electronically. As Karl looked up at their approach, the priest saw bafflement and fright in his eyes as in an awed and cracking voice he said to Chris, “It wants no straps.”

  Chris turned to Karras. “I’ll be back in a second,” she told him, the words coming dully from a worn-out soul. Karras watched her as she turned and walked away down the hall and then into her bedroom. She left the door open behind her.

  Karras turned his glance to Karl. The houseman was staring at him intently. “You are priest?” he asked.

  Karras nodded, then looked quickly back to Regan’s bedroom door. The raging voice had been abruptly displaced by the long, strident lowing of some animal that might have been a steer. Something prodding at Karras’s hand. He looked down. “That’s her,” Chris was saying; “that’s Regan.” She was handing him a photograph and he took it. Young girl. Very pretty. Sweet smile.