The Exorcist

  Chris looked away, slightly shaking her head. “Boy, isn’t this beautiful?” she said with weary irony. “Here I am an atheist and here you are a priest and—”

  “The best explanation for any phenomenon,” Karras gently cut in, “is always the simplest one available that accommodates all the facts.”

  “Oh, really?” Chris retorted, in her red-veined eyes a look of pleading and despair and confusion. “Well, maybe I’m dumb, Father Karras, but telling me some unknown gizmo in somebody’s head throws dishes at a wall seems to me even dumber! So what is it? Can you tell me what it is? And what’s ‘split personality,’ anyway? You say it. I hear it. What is it? Am I really that stupid? Will you tell me what it is in a way I can finally get it through my head?”

  “Look, there’s no one who pretends to understand it. All we know is that it happens, and anything beyond the phenomenon itself is just pure speculation. But think of it this way, if you like.”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “The human brain contains something like seventeen billion cells, and when we look at them we see that they handle approximately a hundred million sensations that are bombarding your brain every second, and your brain not only integrates all of these messages, they do it efficiently—they do it without ever stumbling or getting in each other’s way. Now then, how could they do that without some form of communication? Well, they couldn’t, so apparently each of these cells has a consciousness, maybe, of its own. Are you with me?”

  Chris nodded. “Yeah, a little.”

  “Good. Now imagine that the human body is a gigantic ocean liner, and that all of your brain cells are the crew. Now one of these crew cells is up on the bridge. He’s the captain. But he never knows precisely what the rest of the crew belowdecks is doing; all he knows is that the ship keeps running smoothly and the job’s getting done. Now the captain is you—it’s your waking consciousness. And what happens in dual personality—maybe—is that one of those crew cells down belowdecks comes up on the bridge and takes over command of the ship. In other words, mutiny. Does that help you understand it?”

  Chris was staring in unblinking incredulity. “Father, that’s so far out of sight that I think it’s almost easier to believe in the flipping Devil!”

  “I—”

  “Look, I don’t know about all of these theories and stuff,” Chris overrode him in a low, intense voice; “but I’ll tell you something, Father: you show me Regan’s identical twin—same face, same voice, same smell, same everything down to the way she dots her i’s—and still I’d know in a second that it wasn’t really her! I’d just know it, I’d know it in my gut, and I’m telling you that thing upstairs is not my daughter! Now you tell me what to do,” she said, her voice slowly rising and quivering with tightly held emotion. “You tell me that you know for a fact there’s nothing wrong with my daughter except in her head; that you know for a fact that she doesn’t need an exorcism and that you’re absolutely sure it wouldn’t help her! Go ahead! You tell me that, Father! You tell me!”

  At the end, it was almost a scream.

  Karras looked aside, and for long, pensive seconds, he was still. Then he turned a probing glance back to Chris. “Does Regan have a low-pitched voice?” he asked her quietly. “I mean, normally.”

  “No. In fact, I’d say it’s very light.”

  “Would you consider her precocious?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Her IQ?”

  “About average.”

  “Reading habits?”

  “Nancy Drew and comic books, mostly.”

  “And her style of speech right now: how much different would you say it is from normal?”

  “Completely. She’s never used half of those words.”

  “I don’t mean the content of her speech; I mean the style.”

  “Style?”

  “The way she puts words together.”

  Chris’s eyebrows lowered. “I’m still not really sure what you mean.”

  “Do you have any letters she’s written? Compositions? A recording of her voice would be—”

  “Yes. Yes, there’s a tape of her talking to her father. She was making it to send to him as a letter but she never got it finished. You want it?”

  “Yes, I do. And I’ll also need her medical records, especially the file from Barringer.”

  Chris looked aside and shook her head. “Oh, Father, I’ve been that route and I—”

  “Yes. Yes, I know, but I’ll have to see the records for myself.”

  “So you’re still against an exorcism?”

  “No. I’m only against the chance of doing your daughter more harm than good.”

  “But you’re talking now strictly as a psychiatrist, right?”

  “No, I’m talking now also as a priest. If I go to the Chancery Office, or wherever it is I have to go to get permission for an exorcism, the first thing I’d have to have is a pretty substantial indication that your daughter’s condition isn’t a purely psychiatric problem, plus evidence that the Church would accept as signs of possession.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to go and look it up.”

  “Are you kidding? I thought you were supposed to be an expert.”

  “There aren’t any experts. You probably know more about demonic possession right now than most priests. Now, how soon can you get me those Barringer records?”

  “I’ll charter a plane if I have to!”

  “And that tape?”

  Chris stood up. “I’ll go see if I can find it.”

  “And just one other thing.”

  “What?”

  “That book that you mentioned with the section on possession: do you think you can remember now if Regan might have read it prior to the onset of the illness?”

  Looking down, Chris concentrated. “Gee, I seem to remember her reading something the day before the shi—before the trouble really started, but I really can’t be sure. But she did read it, I think. I mean, I’m sure. Pretty sure.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  Chris started away. “Sure, I’ll get it for you, Father. And the tape. It’s in the basement, I think. I’ll go and look.”

  Karras nodded absently, staring at a pattern in an Oriental area rug, and then after many minutes he got up and walked slowly to the entry hall, where, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, he stood motionless in the darkness as if in some other dimension as he listened to the grunting of a pig from upstairs, then the yelping of a jackal, and then hiccupping and snakelike hissing.

  “Oh, you’re there! I went looking in the study.”

  Karras turned to see Chris flicking on the entry hall lights. “Are you leaving?” she asked as she came forward with the witchcraft book and Regan’s tape-recorded letter to her father.

  “Yes, I’ve got to. I’ve got a lecture to prepare for tomorrow.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  “At the med school,” Karras answered, accepting the book and the tape from Chris’s hands. “I’ll try to get by here sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening. In the meantime, if anything urgent develops, you be sure that you call me, no matter what time. I’ll leave word at the switchboard to let you ring through. Listen, how are you fixed for medication?”

  “We’re okay. They’re all on refillable prescriptions.”

  “You won’t call your doctor in again?”

  The actress lowered her head. “I can’t,” she said barely above a whisper; “I just can’t.”

  “You know, I’m not a GP,” Karras cautioned.

  “It’s okay.”

  Chris still hadn’t looked up and Karras studied her intently and with concern. He could almost hear her anxiety pulsing and throbbing. “Well, now, sooner or later,” he said to her gently, “I’m going to have to tell one of my superiors what I’m up to, most especially if I’m going to be coming by here at various unusual hours of the night.”

  Chris looked up at him, worriedly frown
ing.

  “Do you have to? I mean, tell them?”

  “Well, if I don’t, don’t you think it might look a bit odd?”

  Chris looked down again, nodding. “Yeah, I see what you mean,” she said wanly.

  “Do you mind? I’ll tell them only what I have to. And don’t worry, it won’t get around.”

  She lifted a helpless, tormented face to the strong, sad eyes. Saw the strength. Saw the pain. “Okay,” she said weakly.

  She trusted the pain.

  “We’ll be talking,” Karras told her.

  He started outside, but then hung in the doorway, head down with the back of a fist to his lips, as if thinking; and then he looked up at Chris. “Did your daughter know a priest was coming over here tonight?”

  “No, nobody knew but me.”

  “Did you know that my mother had died just recently?”

  “Yes. I’m very sorry.”

  “Is Regan aware of it?”

  “Why?”

  “Is she aware of it?”

  “No, not at all. Why do you ask?”

  Karras shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said; “I just wondered.” He examined Chris’s features with a faint look of worry. “Are you getting any sleep?”

  “Oh, well, some.”

  “Get pills, then. Are you taking any Librium?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten milligrams, twice a day.”

  “Make it twenty. In the meantime, try to keep away from your daughter. The more you’re exposed to her present behavior, the greater the chance of some permanent damage being done to your feelings about her. Stay clear. And slow down. You’d be no help to Regan with a nervous breakdown.”

  Her head and eyes lowered, Chris nodded despondently.

  “Now go to bed,” Karras told her. “Will you please go to bed right now?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Chris said softly; “I promise.” She looked up at him with warmth and the trace of a smile. “Good night, Father Karras. And thanks. Thanks so much.”

  For a moment Karras studied her clinically again, then said, “Okay, now, good night,” and then, turning, he moved quickly away. Chris stood watching from the doorway. As he crossed the street, it occurred to her that he’d probably missed his dinner, and then she worried that he might be cold: he was rolling his shirt sleeve down. As he was passing the 1789 Restaurant, he dropped something, possibly the witchcraft book or the tape of Regan’s voice. He stooped to retrieve it, and at the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street and P, he turned left and vanished from her sight. Chris abruptly was aware of a feeling of lightness.

  She didn’t see Kinderman sitting alone in an unmarked car.

  Half an hour later, Damien Karras hurried back to his room in the Jesuit residence hall with a number of books and periodicals taken from the shelves of the Georgetown campus library. Hastily, he dumped them on top of his desk and then rummaged through drawers for a package of cigarettes, and then, finding a half-empty pack of stale Camels, he lit one, drew on it deeply and held the smoke in his lungs as his mind went to Regan. Hysteria, he thought; that had to be it. He exhaled the smoke, hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked down at the books. He had Oesterreich’s Possession; Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun; Parapraxis in the Haizman Case of Sigmund Freud; McCasland’s Demon Possession and Exorcism in Early Christianity in the Light of Modern Views of Mental Illness; and extracts from psychiatric journals of Freud’s “A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the 17th Century,” and “The Demonology of Modern Psychiatry.”

  “Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?”

  The Jesuit felt at his brow, and then looked at a sticky sweat on his fingers. Then he noticed that he’d left his door open. He crossed the room and closed it, and then went to a shelf for his red-bound copy of The Roman Ritual, a compendium of rites and prayers. Clamping the cigarette between his lips, he squinted through smoke as he turned to the “General Rules” for exorcists, looking for the signs of demonic possession. He first skimmed it and then started to read more slowly:

  … The exorcist should not believe too readily that a person is possessed by an evil spirit; but he ought to ascertain the signs by which a person possessed can be distinguished from one who is suffering from some illness, especially one of a psychological nature. Signs of possession may be the following: ability to speak with some facility in a strange language or to understand it when spoken by another; the faculty of divulging future and hidden events; display of powers which are beyond the subject’s age and natural condition; and various other conditions which, when taken together as a whole, build up the evidence.

  For a time Karras pondered, then he leaned against the bookshelf and read the remainder of the instructions. When he had finished, he found himself glancing back up at instruction number 8:

  Some reveal a crime which has been committed.

  A light knocking at the door. “Damien?”

  Karras looked up and said, “Come in.”

  It was Dyer. “Hey, Chris MacNeil has been trying to reach you,” he said as he entered the room. “Did she ever get hold of you?”

  “When? You mean, tonight?”

  “No, this early afternoon.”

  “Oh, yes, Joe. Thanks. Yes, I spoke to her.”

  “Good. I just wanted to be sure you got the message.”

  The pixieish priest was prowling the room as if searching for something. “What do you need, Joe?” Karras asked.

  “Got any lemon drops? I’ve looked all through the hall but nobody’s got any and man do I crave one, maybe two,” Dyer broodingly uttered, still prowling. “I once spent a year hearing children’s confessions, and I wound up a lemon-drop junkie. The little shitheads keep breathing it on you along with all that pot and between the two I’ve come to think it’s addictive.” Dyer lifted the lid of a pipe-tobacco humidor half filled with pistachio nuts. “What are these?” he asked. “Dead Mexican jumping beans?”

  Karras turned to his bookshelves, looking for a title. “Listen, Joe, I’m sort of busy right now and—”

  “Hey, isn’t that Chris really nice?” interrupted Dyer, flopping down on Karras’s cot and stretching out full-length with his hands clasped comfortably behind his head. “Neat lady. Have you met her? I mean, seen her in person?”

  “We’ve talked,” answered Karras as he plucked out a green-bound volume titled Satan, a collection of articles and Catholic position papers by various French theologians. He carried it back with him toward his desk. “Now then—”

  “Plain. Down-to-earth. Unaffected,” Dyer ruminated obliviously while staring up at the room’s high ceiling. “She can help us with my plan for when we both quit the priesthood.”

  Karras looked at Dyer sharply. “Who’s quitting the priesthood?”

  “Gays. In droves. Basic black has gone out.”

  Karras shook his head in bemused disapproval as he set down the books on his desk. “Hey, come on, Joe,” Karras chided him, “take it to some lounge act in Vegas. Come on, scoot! I’ve got a lecture to prepare for tomorrow.”

  “First we go to Chris MacNeil,” the young priest persisted, “with this notion that I’ve got for a screenplay based on the life of Saint Ignatius Loyola that for now I’m calling Brave Jesuits Marching.”

  Tamping out his cigarette in an ashtray, Karras lifted his head to Dyer with a scowl. “Would you get your ass out of here, Joe? I’ve got some heavy work to do.”

  “So who’s stopping you?”

  “You!” Karras had started to unbutton his shirt. “I’m going to jump in the shower and when I come back in here I expect you to be gone.”

  “Oh, well,” grumbled Dyer reluctantly as he rose and swung his legs around so that he was sitting on the side of the bed. “Didn’t see you at dinner, by the way. Where’d you eat?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s foolish. Why diet when you only wear frocks?”

  “Is there a tape recorder here in the hall?”


  “There isn’t even a lemon drop here in the hall. Use the language lab.”

  “Who’s got a key? Father President?”

  “No. Father Janitor. You need it tonight?”

  “Yes, I do,” Karras answered as he draped his shirt on the back of the desk chair. “Where do I find him?”

  “Want me to get it for you, Damien?”

  “Would you, Joe? I’m really in a bind.”

  Dyer stood up.

  “No sweat!”

  Karras showered and then dressed in a T-shirt and trousers. Sitting down to his desk, he discovered a carton of Camel non-filters, and beside it a key that was labeled LANGUAGE LAB and another tagged REFECTORY REFRIGERATOR. Appended to the latter was a note: Better you than the rats and Dominican cat burglars. Karras smiled at the signature: The Lemon Drop Kid. He put the note aside, then unfastened his wristwatch and placed it in front of him on the desk. The time was 10:58 P.M.

  He read. First, Freud; then McCasland; parts of Satan; parts of Oesterreich’s exhaustive study, and at a little after 4 A.M., he had finished and was rubbing at his face and at his eyes: they were smarting and smoke was hanging thick in the air while the ashtray on Karras’s desk was mounded high with ashes and the twisted butts of cigarettes. He stood up and walked wearily to a window, slid it open, gulped in the coolness of moist early morning air and then stood there thinking about Regan. Yes, she had the physical syndrome of possession. About that he had no doubt. In case after case, irrespective of geography or period of history, the symptoms of possession were substantially a constant. Some of them Regan had not evidenced as yet: stigmata or the desire for repugnant foods, or insensitivity to pain as well as frequently loud and irrepressible hiccupping; but some others she had clearly manifested: the involuntary motor excitement; foul breath; furred tongue; the wasting away of the bodily frame; the distended stomach; the irritations of the skin and mucous membrane; and most significantly present were the basic symptoms of the hard core of cases that Oesterreich had characterized as “genuine” possession: the striking change in the voice and in the features, plus the manifestation of a new personality.