The Exorcist

  Through the window, Karras stared darkly up the street. Through the branches of trees he could see the MacNeil house and the large bay window of Regan’s bedroom. From his readings he had learned that when possession was voluntary, as with mediums, the new personality was often benign. Like Tia, brooded Karras, the spirit of a woman who’d possessed a man, a sculptor, intermittently and for only an hour or so at a time, until a friend of the sculptor fell desperately in love with Tia and pleaded with the sculptor to permit her to permanently remain in possession of his body. But in Regan, there’s no Tia, the priest reflected grimly, for the seemingly “invading personality” was malevolent and typical of cases of demonic possession where the new personality sought the destruction of the body of its host.

  And frequently achieved it.

  Moodily the Jesuit walked back to his desk, picked up a package of cigarettes and lit one. So okay, she’s got the physical syndrome of demonic possession. Now how do you cure it? He fanned out the match. That depends on what caused it. He sat on the edge of his desk and reflected on the case of the nuns at the convent of Lille in early-seventeenth-century France. Allegedly possessed, they had “confessed” to their exorcists that while helpless in the state of possession, they had regularly attended Satanic orgies at which they had varied their erotic fare: Mondays and Tuesdays, heterosexual copulation; Thursdays, sodomy, fellatio and cunnilingus with homosexual partners; Saturday, bestiality with domestic animals and dragons. And dragons? The Jesuit ruefully shook his head. As with Lille, he thought the causes of many possessions were a mixture of fraud and mythomania, with still others caused by mental illness: paranoia; schizophrenia; neurasthenia; psychasthenia; and this was the reason, he knew, that the Church had for years recommended that the exorcist work with a psychiatrist or neurologist present during the rite. Yet not every possession had a cause so clear. Many had led Oesterreich to characterize possession as a separate disorder all its own; to dismiss the explanatory “split personality” label of psychiatry as no more than an equally occult substitution for the concepts “demon” and “spirit of the dead.”

  Karras rubbed the side of an index finger in the crease beside his nose. The indications from Barringer, Chris had told him, were that Regan’s disorder might be caused by suggestion; by something that was somehow related to hysteria. And Karras thought it likely so. He believed the majority of the cases he had studied had been caused by precisely these two factors. For one thing, it mostly hits women. For another, all those outbreaks of possession epidemics. And then those exorcists … Karras frowned. The exorcists themselves at times became the victims of possession, as had happened in 1634 at the Ursuline Convent of nuns at Loudun, France. Of the four Jesuit exorcists sent there to deal with an epidemic of possession, three—Fathers Lucas, Lactance and Tranquille—not only became seemingly possessed, but died soon after of apparent cardiac arrest caused by unrelenting hyper-psychomotor activity—the constant cursing and bellowing in rage, the unceasing fits of thrashing about in their beds—while the fourth, Père Surin, who at the time of the possessions was thirty-three years of age and one of Europe’s foremost intellectuals, became insane and was sequestered in a mental institution for the subsequent twenty-five years of his life. Karras broodily nodded. If Regan’s disorder was rooted in hysteria and the onset of the symptoms of possession was the product of suggestion, then the only likely source of the suggestion was the chapter on possession in the witchcraft book. He pored over its pages. Had Regan read it? Were there striking similarities between any of its details and Regan’s behavior? He found some correlations:

  … The case of an eight-year-old girl who was described in the chapter as “bellowing like a bull in a thunderous, deep bass voice.” Regan lowing like a steer.

  … The case of Helene Smith, who’d been treated by the great psychologist Flournoy; his description of the changing of her voice and her features with “lightning rapidity” into those of a variety of personalities. She did that with me. The personality who spoke with a British accent. Quick change. Instantaneous.

  … A case in South Africa, reported firsthand by the noted ethnologist Junod; his description of a woman who’d vanished from her dwelling one night to be found on the following morning “tied to the top” of a very tall tree by “fine lianas,” and then afterward “gliding down the tree, head down, while hissing and rapidly flicking her tongue in and out like a snake. She hung there suspended, for a time, and proceeded to speak in a language that no one had ever heard.” Regan gliding like a snake when she was following Sharon. The gibberish. An attempt at an “unknown language”?

  … The case of Joseph and Thiebaut Burner, aged eight and ten; a description of them “lying on their backs and suddenly whirling like tops with the utmost rapidity.” Sounds either totally made up or greatly exaggerated, but pretty close to Regan whirling like a dervish.

  There were other similarities, still other reasons for suspecting suggestion: a mention of abnormal strength and obscenity of speech, plus the accounts of possession in the gospels, which perhaps were the basis, speculated Karras, of the curiously religious content of Regan’s ravings at the Barringer Clinic. Moreover, in the chapter there was mention of the onset of possession in stages: “… The first, infestation, consists of an attack through the victim’s surroundings: noises, odors, the displacement of objects without visible cause; and the second, obsession, is a personal attack on the subject designed to instill terror through the kind of injury that a person might inflict on another through blows and kicks.” The rappings. The flingings. The attacks by Captain Howdy.

  All right, maybe … maybe she read it, Karras thought. But he wasn’t convinced. No, not at all! And even Chris. She had seemed so uncertain about it.

  Karras walked to the window again. What’s the answer, then? Genuine possession? A demon? He looked down and shook his head. Oh, come on! No way! But paranormal happenings? Sure. Why not? Too many competent observers had reported them. Doctors. Psychiatrists. Men like Junod. But the problem is how do you interpret the phenomena? He thought back to Oesterreich’s mention of a shaman of the Altai in Siberia who had deliberately invited possession as a means of performing a “magical act.” Examined in a clinic just prior to performing the act of levitation, his pulse rate had spurted to one hundred, and then, afterward, leaped to an amazing two hundred while there were also marked changes in his bodily temperature and respiration. So his paranormal action was tied to physiology! It was caused by some bodily energy or force! But as proof of possession, Karras had learned, the Church wanted clear and exterior verifiable phenomena that suggested … He’d forgotten the wording, but tracing a finger down the page of the Satan book lying on his desk, Karras found it: “… verifiable exterior phenomena which suggest the idea that they are due to the extraordinary intervention of an intelligent cause other than man.” Was that the case with the shaman? No, not necessarily. And what of Regan? Is that the case with her?

  Karras turned to a passage he had bracketed in pencil in his copy of The Roman Ritual: “The exorcist will simply be careful that none of the patient’s manifestations are left unaccounted for.” Karras thoughtfully nodded. Okay, then. Let’s see. Pacing, he ran through the manifestations of Regan’s disorder along with their possible explanations. He ticked them off mentally, one by one:

  The startling change in Regan’s features.

  Partly her illness and partly undernourishment, although mostly, he concluded, it was due to physiognomy being an expression of one’s psychic constitution.

  The startling change in Regan’s voice.

  He had yet to hear her “real” voice, Karras thought. And even if that had been light, as reported by her mother, constant shrieking would thicken the vocal cords with a consequent deepening of the voice, the only problem here being the unexplained booming volume of that voice, for even with a thickening of the cords this would seem to be physiologically impossible. And yet, he considered, in states of anxiety or pathology, displays
of paranormal strength in excess of muscular potential were known to be a commonplace. Might not vocal cords and voice box be subject to the same mysterious effect?

  Regan’s suddenly extended vocabulary and knowledge.

  Cryptomnesia: buried recollections of words and data she had once been exposed to, even in infancy, perhaps. In somnambulists—and frequently in people at the point of death—the buried data often came to the surface with almost photographic fidelity.

  Regan’s recognition of him as a priest.

  A good guess. If she had read the chapter on possession, she might have expected a visit by a priest. And according to Jung, the unconscious awareness and sensitivity of hysterical patients could sometimes be fifty times greater than normal, which Jung thought accounted for seemingly authentic “thought-reading” via table-tapping by mediums, for what the medium’s unconscious was actually “reading” were the tremors and vibrations created in the table by the hands of the person whose thoughts were supposedly being read. The tremors formed a pattern of letters or numbers. Thus Regan might conceivably have “read” his identity merely from his manner or even from the scent of holy oils on his hands.

  Regan’s knowledge of the death of his mother.

  Another good guess. He was forty-six.

  “Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?”

  Textbooks in use in Catholic seminaries accepted telepathy as both a reality and a natural phenomenon.

  Regan’s precocity of intellect.

  This was by far the most difficult of all to explain. But in the course of personally observing a case of multiple personality involving alleged occult phenomena, the psychiatrist Jung had concluded that in states of hysterical somnambulism not only were unconscious perceptions of the senses heightened, but also the functioning of the intellect, for the new personality in the case in question seemed clearly more intelligent than the first. And yet did merely reporting the phenomenon explain it?

  He abruptly stopped pacing and hovered by his desk, brought up short, as it suddenly dawned upon him that Regan’s pun on Herod was even more complicated than at first it had appeared, for when the Pharisees told Christ of Herod’s threats, the Jesuit remembered, Christ had answered: “Go and tell that fox that I cast out devils!”

  Karras glanced at the tape of Regan’s voice, and then wearily sat down at the desk, where he lit another cigarette and blew out a ragged cone of bluish-gray smoke as he thought once again of the Burner boys and of the case of the eight-year-old girl who had manifested symptoms of full-blown possession. What book had this girl read that had enabled her unconscious mind to simulate the symptoms of possession to such perfection? And how did the unconscious of victims in China communicate the symptoms to the various unconscious minds of people possessed in Siberia, in Germany, in Africa and everywhere else in every culture and period of time, so that the symptoms were always the same?

  “Incidentally, your mother is in here with us, Karras.”

  The Jesuit was staring straight ahead, unseeing, wisps of smoke from the cigarette held between his fingers wafting up into life and then instant death like mistaken recognitions and one’s memory of dreams. He looked down at the left-hand bottom drawer of his desk, holding silent and still for several moments before at last leaning over, pulling open the drawer and extracting a faded English language exercise book for an adult education course. His mother’s. He set it on the desk, waited and then thumbed through the pages with a tender care. At first letters of the alphabet, over and over. Then simple exercises:

  LESSON VI

  MY COMPLETE ADDRESS

  Between the pages, an attempt at a letter:

  Dear Dimmy,

  I have been waiting

  Then another beginning. Incomplete. He looked away. Saw her eyes at the window … waiting…

  “ ‘Domine, non sum dignus.’ ”

  The eyes became Regan’s.

  “ ‘Speak but the word…’ ”

  Karras glanced again at the tape of Regan’s voice.

  He left the room and took the tape to a campus language lab, found a tape recorder and sat down, carefully threaded the tape to an empty reel, clamped on earphones, turned a switch to the on position and then, exhausted and intense, he leaned forward and listened. For a time, only tape hiss. Squeaking of the mechanism. Suddenly, a thumping sound of activation. Noises. “Hello?” Then a whining feedback. Chris MacNeil, her tone hushed, in the background: “Not so close to the microphone, honey. Hold it back.” “Like this?” “No, more.” “Like this?” “Yeah, okay. Go ahead now, just talk.” Giggling. The microphone bumping a table. Then the sweet, clear voice of Regan MacNeil:

  “Hello, Daddy? This is me. Ummm…” Giggling; then a whispered aside: “Mom, I can’t tell what to say!” “Oh, just tell him how you are, honey. Tell about all of the things you’ve been doing.” More giggling. “Umm, Daddy … Well, ya see … I mean, I hope you can hear me okay, and, umm—well, now, let’s see. Umm, well, first we’re—No, wait! See, first we’re in Washington, Daddy, ya know? It’s where the president lives, and this house—ya know, Daddy?—it’s—Darn! Daddy, wait, now; I better start over. See, Daddy, there’s…”

  Karras heard the rest only dimly and as if from afar and through the roaring of blood in his ears, as through his being there swelled an overwhelming intuition:

  The thing that I saw in that room wasn’t Regan!

  Karras returned to the Jesuit residence hall, where he found an unoccupied cubicle and said his Mass before the early morning rush. As he lifted the Host in consecration, it trembled in his fingers with a hope that he dared not hope, that he fought with every particle and fiber of his will. “ ‘For this—is—My Body,’ ” he intoned with a whispered intensity.

  No, it’s bread! It’s nothing but bread!

  He dared not love again and lose. That loss was too great, that pain too keen. The cause of his skepticism and his doubts, his attempts to eliminate natural causes in the case of Regan’s seeming possession, was the fiery intensity of his yearning to be able to believe. He bowed his head and placed the consecrated Host in his mouth, where in a moment it would stick in the dryness of his throat. And of his faith.

  After Mass, he skipped breakfast, making notes for his lecture, then met with his class at the Georgetown University Medical School, where he managed to thread hoarsely through the ill-prepared lecture: “… and in considering the symptoms of manic mood disorders, you will…”

  “Daddy, this is me … this is me…”

  But who was “me”?

  Karras dismissed the class early and returned to his room, where he immediately sat at his desk and intently reexamined the Church’s position on the paranormal signs of demonic possession. Was I being too hard-nosed? he wondered. He scrutinized the high points in Satan: “Telepathy … natural phenomenon … even telekinesis, the movement of objects from a distance … our forefathers … science … nowadays we must be more cautious, the seeming paranormal evidence notwithstanding.” As he came to what followed, Karras slowed down the pace of his reading: “All conversations held with the patient must be carefully analyzed, for if they present the same system of association of ideas and of logicogrammatical habits that he exhibits in his normal state, the possession must then be held suspect.”

  Karras gently shook his head. Doesn’t cut it. He glanced to the plate on the facing page. A demon. His gaze flicked down idly to the caption: “Pazuzu.” Karras shut his eyes and envisioned the death of the exorcist, Father Tranquille: the final agonies: the bellowing and the hissing and the vomiting, the hurlings to the ground from his bed by his “demons,” who were furious because soon he would be dead and beyond their torment. And then Lucas! My God! Father Lucas! Lucas kneeling at the dying Tranquille’s bedside, praying, and, at the moment of his death, Lucas instantly assuming the identity of Tranquille’s demons and viciously kicking at the still-warm corpse, at the shattered, clawed body strongly reeking of excrement and vomit, while four strong men were
attempting to restrain him, for he did not stop, it was reported, until the corpse had been carried from the room. Could it be? wondered Karras. Could the only hope for Regan be the ritual of exorcism? Must he open up that locker of aches? He could not shake it or leave it untested. He must know. And yet how? Karras opened his eyes. “… conversations with the patient must be carefully…” Yes. Yes, why not? If discovery that Regan’s speech patterns and that of the “demon” turned out to be markedly different, that would leave possession open as a possibility, whereas if the patterns were the same, it would have to be ruled out.

  Karras stood up and paced the room. What else? What else? Something quick. She—Wait a minute! Karras stopped in his tracks, staring down in thought. That chapter in the book on witchcraft. Had it mentioned…? Yes! Yes, it had! It had stated that demons invariably reacted with fury when confronted with the consecrated Host or with holy relics or even … Karras lifted his head and stared ahead with a sudden realization: And with holy water! Right! That could nail it one way or the other! He feverishly rummaged through his black valise. He was looking for a holy-water vial.

  Willie admitted him to the house, and in the entry he glanced up toward Regan’s bedroom. Shouts. Obscenities. And yet not in the deep, coarse voice of the demon. Much lighter. Raspy. A broad British … Yes! It was the manifestation that had fleetingly appeared when Karras had last seen Regan.

  Karras looked at a waiting Willie. She was staring in puzzlement at the round Roman collar, at the priestly robes.

  “Where’s Mrs. MacNeil, please?”

  Willie motioned him upstairs.

  “Thank you.”

  Karras moved to the staircase. Climbed. Saw Chris in the hall. She was sitting in a chair near Regan’s bedroom, head lowered, her arms folded across her chest. As the Jesuit approached, she heard the swishing of his robes, turned and saw him and quickly stood up. “Hello, Father.”

  Karras frowned. There were bluish sacs beneath her eyes.