The Exorcist

  “That was taken four months ago,” Chris said dreamily. She took back the photo and motioned with her head at the bedroom door. “Now you go and take a look at her now.” Chris leaned back against the wall beside Karl, and with her eyes cast down, her arms folded across her chest, she said hopelessly and quietly, “I’ll wait here.”

  “Who’s in there with her?” Karras asked.

  Chris looked up at him, expressionless. “No one.”

  The priest held her haunted gaze and then turned with a frown to the bedroom door, and as he grasped the doorknob, the sounds from within abruptly ceased. In the ticking silence, Karras hesitated, then slowly entered the room, almost flinching backward at the pungent stench of moldering excrement that hit his face and his nostrils like a palpable blast. Reining in his revulsion, he closed the door and then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back on the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite, as they fixed upon his; as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal mask of unthinkable malevolence. Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled and thickly matted hair; to the wasted arms and legs and distended stomach jutting up so grotesquely; then back to the eyes: they were watching him … pinning him … shifting now to follow as he moved to a desk and chair near the large bay window. Karras fought to sound calm, even warm and friendly. “Hello, Regan,” he said. He picked up the chair and took it over by the bed. “I’m a friend of your mother’s,” he said, “and she tells me that you’re very, very sick.” Karras sat down. “Do you think you’d like to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked. “I’d like to help you.”

  Regan’s eyes gleamed fiercely, unblinking, as a yellowish saliva dribbled down from a corner of her mouth to her chin, to her lips stretched taut into a feral grin of bow-mouthed mockery.

  “Well, well, well,” she gloated sardonically and hairs prickled up on the back of Karras’s neck at a voice that was deep and thick with menace and power. “So it’s you … they sent you!” she continued as if pleased. “Well, we’ve nothing to fear from you at all.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Karras answered; “I’m your friend and I’d like to help you.”

  “You might loosen these straps, then,” Regan croaked. She had tugged up her wrists so that now Karras noticed they were bound with a double set of leather restraining straps.

  “Are the straps uncomfortable for you?”

  “Extremely. They’re a nuisance. An infernal nuisance.”

  The eyes glinted slyly with secret amusement.

  Karras saw the scratch marks on Regan’s face; the cuts on her lips where apparently she’d bitten them. “I’m afraid you might hurt yourself, Regan,” he told her.

  “I’m not Regan,” she rumbled, still with that taut and hideous grin that Karras now guessed was her permanent expression. How incongruous the braces on her teeth looked, he thought. “Oh, I see,” he said, nodding. “Well, then, maybe we should introduce ourselves. I’m Damien Karras. Who are you?”

  “I’m the Devil!”

  “Ah, good.” Karras nodded approvingly. “Now we can talk.”

  “A little chat?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Yes, I would like that,” Regan said, drooling a little from a corner of her mouth. “However, you will find that I cannot talk freely while bound with these straps. As you know, I’ve spent much of my time in Rome and I’m accustomed to gesturing, Karras. Now then, kindly undo the straps.”

  What precocity of language and thought, reflected Karras. He leaned forward in his chair with a mixture of amazement and professional interest. “You say you’re the Devil?” he asked.

  “I assure you.”

  “Then why don’t you just make the straps disappear?”

  “Come, that’s much too vulgar a display of power. After all, I’m a prince! ‘The Prince of This World,’ as some very strange person said of me once. Can’t quite remember who.” A low chuckle. Then, “I much prefer persuasion, Karras; togetherness; community involvement. Moreover, if I loosen the straps myself, I deny you the opportunity of performing a charitable act.”

  Incredible! thought Karras. “But a charitable act,” he parried, “is a virtue and that’s what the Devil would want to prevent; so in fact I’d be helping you now if I didn’t undo the straps. Unless, of course”—Karras shrugged—“unless of course you really aren’t the devil, and in that case I probably would undo them.”

  “How very foxy of you, Karras. If only dear Herod were here to enjoy this.”

  Karras stared with narrowed eyes and an even deeper interest. Was she punning on Christ’s calling Herod “that fox”? “Which Herod?” he asked. “There were two. Are you talking about the King of Judea?”

  “No, I am talking about the tetrarch of Galilee!” Regan shot back at Karras in a voice raised to blast him with scorching contempt; then abruptly she was grinning again as she quietly cajoled in that soft and sinister voice, “There, you see how these damnable straps have upset me? Undo them. Undo them and I’ll tell you the future.”

  “Very tempting.”

  “My forte.”

  “But then how do I know you really can read the future?”

  “Because I’m the Devil, you ass!”

  “Yes, you say so, but you won’t give me proof.”

  “You have no faith.”

  Karras stiffened. Paused. “No faith in what?”

  “Why in me, my dear Karras; in me!” Something mocking and malicious danced hidden in those eyes. “All these proofs, all these signs in the sky!”

  Karras barely had a grip on his composure as he answered, “Well, now, something very simple might do. For example, the Devil knows everything, correct?”

  “No, in fact I know almost everything, Karras. There, you see? They keep saying that I’m proud. I am not. Now then, what are you up to, sly fox? Spit it out!”

  “Well, I thought we might test the extent of your knowledge.”

  “Very well, then. How’s this? The largest lake in South America,” the Regan-thing japed, her eyes bulging with mocking glee, “is Lake Titicaca in Peru! Will that do it?”

  “No, I’ll have to ask something only the Devil would know.”

  “Ah, I see. Such as what?”

  “Where is Regan?”

  “She is here.”

  “Where is ‘here’?”

  “In the piglet.”

  “Let me see her.”

  “Why, Karras? Do you want to fuck her? Loose these straps and I will let you go at it!”

  “I want to see if you’re telling me the truth. Let me see her.”

  “Very succulent cunt,” Regan leered, her furred and lolling tongue licking spittle across dry, cracked lips. “But a poor conversationalist, my friend. I strongly advise you to stay with me.”

  “Well, it’s obvious you don’t know where she is”—Karras shrugged—“so apparently you aren’t the Devil.”

  “I am!” Regan bellowed with a sudden jerk forward, her face contorting with rage. Karras shivered as the terrifying voice boomed and crackled off the walls of the room. “I am!”

  “Well, then, let me see Regan. That would prove it.”

  “There are much better ways! I will show you! I will read your mind!” the Regan creature seethed furiously. “Think of a number between one and one hundred!”

  “No, that wouldn’t prove a thing. I would have to see Regan.”

  Abruptly it chuckled, leaning back against the headboard.

  “No, nothing would prove anything at all to you, Karras. That is why I love all reasonable men. How splendid! How splendid indeed! In the meantime, we shall try to keep you properly beguiled. After all, now, we would not wish to lose you.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Karras probed with a quick, alert interest.

  “We are quite a little group in the piglet,” came the
answer.

  “Ah, yes, quite a little multitude. Later I may see about discreet introductions. In the meantime, I am suffering from a maddening itch that I cannot reach. Would you loosen one strap for a moment? Just one?”

  “No, just tell me where it itches and I’ll scratch it.”

  “Ah, sly, very sly!”

  “Show me Regan and perhaps I’ll undo one strap,” offered Karras. “That’s providing she’s—”

  Abruptly the priest flinched in shock as he found himself staring into eyes filled with terror and a mouth gaping wide in a soundless shriek for help; but then quickly the Regan identity vanished in a blurringly rapid remolding of features as, “For pity’s sakes, won’t you kindly remove these cunting straps?” asked a wheedling voice in a clipped British accent just before, in a flash, the demonic personality returned. “Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?” it croaked, and then it threw back its head in wild and high-pitched laughter.

  Stunned, Karras leaned back, as he felt the glacial hands at the back of his neck again, more palpable now, and more clearly something more than suggestion.

  The Regan-thing broke off its laughter and fixed him with taunting eyes. “Feeling icy hands? Oh, incidentally, your mother is in here with us, Karras. Would you like to leave a message? I will see that she gets it.” Mocking laughter. And then suddenly Karras was leaping out of his chair as he dodged a projectile stream of vomit. It caught a portion of his sweater and one of his hands.

  His face drained of color, the priest looked down at the bed; at Regan cackling with glee as his hand dripped vomit onto the rug. “If that’s true,” he said numbly, “then you must know my mother’s first name.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  The Regan-thing hissed at him, mad eyes gleaming, and the head gently undulating from side to side like a cobra’s.

  “What is it?” Karras repeated.

  With her eyes rolling upward into their sockets, Regan lowed like a steer in an angry bellow that pierced the shutters and shivered through the glass of the large bay window. For a time Karras watched as the bellowing continued; then he looked at his hand and walked out of the room.

  Chris pushed herself quickly away from the wall as she glanced with distress at the Jesuit’s sweater. “What happened? Did she vomit?”

  “Got a towel?” Karras asked her.

  “There’s a bathroom right there!” Chris said hurriedly, pointing at a hallway door. “Karl, go in and take a look at her!” she instructed over her shoulder as she followed the priest to the bathroom. “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed.

  The Jesuit moved to the washbasin.

  “Have you got her on tranquilizers?” he asked.

  Chris turned on the water taps and answered, “Yes, Librium. Here, take off that sweater and then you can wash.”

  “What dosage?” Karras asked as he tugged at the sweater with his clean left hand.

  “Here, I’ll help you.” Chris pulled at the sweater from the bottom. “Well, today she’s had four hundred milligrams, Father.”

  “Four hundred?”

  Chris had the sweater pulled up to his chest. “Yeah, that’s how we got her into those straps. It took all of us together to—”

  “You gave your daughter four hundred milligrams at once?”

  “She’s so strong you can’t believe it. Get your arms up, Father.”

  “Okay.”

  He raised them and Chris pulled the sweater up and off, pulled back the shower curtain and tossed the sweater into the bathtub. “I’ll have Willie get it cleaned for you, Father.” She dejectedly sat down on the edge of the bathtub and slipped a pink towel off a towel bar, her hand inadvertently covering the word Regan embroidered in navy blue script. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” Karras unbuttoned the right sleeve of his starched white shirt and rolled it up, exposing a matting of fine brown hairs on a thickly muscled forearm as he asked, “Is she taking any nourishment at all?” He held his hand underneath the hot-water tap to rinse away the vomit.

  “No, Father. Just Sustagen when she’s been sleeping. But she ripped out the tubing.”

  “Ripped it out? When?”

  “Today.”

  Disturbed, Karras soaped and rinsed his hands, and after a thoughtful pause he said gravely, “Your daughter really needs to be in a hospital.”

  Chris lowered her head. “I just can’t do that, Father,” she said in a soft, flat, toneless voice.

  “Why can’t you”

  “I just can’t,” Chris repeated in a husky, dead whisper. “She … she’s done something, Father, and I can’t take the risk of someone else finding out. Not a doctor … not a nurse … not anyone.”

  Frowning, Karras turned off the water taps. “What if a person, let’s say, was a criminal.” Troubled, he looked down at the wash-basin, gripping its sides. “Who’s been giving her the Sustagen? the Librium? her medicines?”

  “We are. Her doctor showed us how.”

  “You need prescriptions.”

  “Well, you could do some of that, couldn’t you, Father?”

  His thoughts now spinning, Karras turned to her, his hands upraised, as he met Chris’s haunted, vanquished gaze. He nodded toward the towel in her hands, and said, “Please.”

  Chris stared at him blankly and said, “What?”

  “The towel, please,” Karras said softly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Very quickly, Chris fumbled it out to him, and as the Jesuit dried his hands, she asked him with a tightly searching expectancy, “So now, Father, what’s it look like? Do you think she’s possessed?”

  “Look, how much do you know about possession?”

  “Just a little that I’ve read and some things that some doctors told me.”

  “What doctors?”

  “At Barringer Clinic.”

  “I see,” said Karras, gently nodding his head. He had folded the towel and was carefully draping it back onto the towel bar as he asked, “Miss MacNeil, are you a Catholic?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “Not her either.”

  “What religion, then?”

  “None.”

  Karras stared at her speculatively.

  “Why did you come to me, then?” he asked.

  “Because I was desperate!” Chris blurted in a quavering voice.

  “I thought you said psychiatrists advised you to come to me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I was saying! I’ve been practically out of my head!”

  Karras turned and, folding his arms and leaning his weight against the washbasin’s white marble counter, he looked down at Chris and told her with a carefully tempered intensity, “Look, the only thing I care about is doing what’s best for your daughter. But I’ll tell you right now that if you’re looking for an exorcism as an autosuggestive cure, you’d be much better off if you had Central Casting, Miss MacNeil, because Catholic Church authorities aren’t going to buy it and you’ve wasted precious time.”

  Karras felt his hands trembling slightly.

  What’s wrong with me? he wondered. What’s happening?

  “Incidentally, it’s Mrs. MacNeil,” Chris corrected him tartly.

  Karras gentled his tone. “My apologies. Look, whether it’s a demon or a mental disorder, I’ll do everything I possibly can to help your daughter. But I’ve got to have the truth, the whole truth. It’s important. It’s important for Regan. Mrs. MacNeil, right now I’m groping. I’m completely overwhelmed by what I’ve just seen and heard in your daughter’s bedroom. Now why don’t we both get out of this bathroom and go downstairs where we can talk.” With a faint, warm smile of reassurance, Karras reached out his hand to help Chris up. “I could use a cup of coffee.”

  “I could use a ‘Sea and Ski’ on the rocks.”

  While Karl and Sharon looked after Regan, Karras and Chris sat in the study, she on the sofa and Karras
in a chair beside the fireplace as Chris went through the history of Regan’s illness, though she carefully withheld any mention of phenomena relating to Dennings. The priest listened, saying little: an occasional question, a nod or a frown, as Chris admitted that at first she’d considered an exorcism as shock treatment. “But now I don’t know,” she said. Shaking her head, she looked down at her freckled, clasped fingers subtly twitching in her lap. “I don’t know.” She lifted a helpless look to the priest. “What do you think, Father Karras?”

  Lowering his head, the priest took in a breath, shook his head and said quietly, “I don’t know, either. Compulsive behavior produced by guilt, perhaps, put together with split personality.”

  “What?” Chris looked appalled. “Father, how can you say that after all you’ve just seen up there!”

  Karras looked up at her. “If you’ve seen as many patients in psychiatric wards as I have, you can say it very easily,” he said. “Come on, now! Possession by demons? Okay, listen: Let’s assume it’s a fact and that it sometimes happens. But your daughter doesn’t say she’s a demon; she insists she’s the Devil himself, and that’s the same thing as saying you’re Napoleon Bonaparte!”

  “Then explain all those rappings and things.”

  “I haven’t heard them.”

  “Well, they heard them at Barringer, Father, so it wasn’t just here in the house.”

  “Maybe so, but we’d hardly need a devil to explain them.”

  “So explain them!”

  “Well, psychokinesis, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve heard of poltergeist phenomena, haven’t you?”

  “Ghosts throwing dishes and acting like assholes?”

  “It’s not that uncommon and usually happens around an emotionally disturbed adolescent. Apparently, extreme inner tension of the mind can sometimes trigger some unknown energy that seems to move objects around at a distance. But there’s nothing supernatural about it. Same with Regan’s abnormal strength—in pathology, that’s common. Call it mind over matter, if you like, but in any case it happens outside of possession.”