The Exorcist

  Karras stared, his throat dry. “Do you speak it?” he asked.

  “Oh, well, so-so. I took two years of it in college, that’s all.”

  Karras sagged. Then Regan did pick the Latin from my brain! Staring bleakly, he lowered his brow into his hand and into doubt: Telepathy more common in states of great tension: speaking always in a language known to someone in the room: “… thinks the same things I’m thinking…”: “Bon jour…”: “La plume de ma tante…”: “Bonne nuit…” With thoughts such as these, Karras sadly watched blood turning back into wine.

  What to do? Get some sleep. Then come back and try again … try again … He stood up and looked blearily at Sharon. She was leaning with her back against the sink, her arms folded, as she pensively and curiously watched him. “I’m going over to the residence,” he told her. “As soon as Regan’s awake, I’d like a call.”

  “Yes, I’ll call you.”

  “And the Compazine. Okay? You won’t forget?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ll take care of it right away.”

  Karras nodded and with his hands in hip pockets, he looked down, trying to think of what he might have forgotten to tell Sharon. Always something to be done; always something overlooked when even everything was done.

  “Father, what’s going on?” he heard the secretary asking him somberly. “What is it? What’s really going on with Rags?”

  Karras lifted up eyes that were haunted and seared. “I don’t know,” he said emptily; “I really don’t know.”

  He turned and walked out of the kitchen.

  As he passed through the entry hall, Karras heard footsteps coming up rapidly behind him. “Father Karras!”

  Karras turned and saw Karl with his sweater.

  “Very sorry,” said the houseman as he handed it over. “I was thinking to finish much before. But I forget.”

  He handed the sweater to Karras. The vomit stains were gone and it had a sweet smell. “That was thoughtful of you, Karl,” the priest said to him gently. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you, Father Karras,” said Karl with a tremor in his voice, his eyes full. “Thank you for your helping Miss Regan.” Then averting his head, self-conscious, Karl turned and walked swiftly away.

  As Karras watched him, he remembered him in Kinderman’s car. Why? More mystery now; more confusion. Wearily, Karras turned around and opened the door. It was night. Despairing, he stepped out of darkness into darkness.

  He crossed to the residence, groping toward sleep, but decided to stop by Dyer’s room. He knocked on the door, heard “Advance and be proselytized!” from within, and, entering, found Dyer typing on his IBM Selectric. Karras flopped down on the edge of Dyer’s cot as the younger Jesuit continued to type.

  “Hey, Joe!”

  “Yeah, I’m listening. What is it?”

  “Do you happen to know of anyone who’s done a formal exorcism?”

  “Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, June twenty-second, 1938.”

  “Joe, get serious.”

  “No, you get serious. Exorcism? Are you kidding me?”

  Karras made no answer and for moments he watched expressionlessly as Dyer continued to type, until at last he got up and walked to the door. “Yeah, Joe,” he said, “I was kidding.”

  “I thought so.”

  “See ya round the campus.”

  “Find funnier jokes.”

  Karras walked down the hall and as he entered his room he looked down and saw a pink message slip on the floor. He picked it up. From Frank. A home number. “Please call…”

  Karras picked up the telephone and requested that a call be put through to the Institute director’s number, and as he waited, he looked down at his free hand, the right one. It was trembling with desperate hope.

  “Hello?” Piping voice. A young boy.

  “May I speak to your father, please.”

  “Yes. Just a minute.” Phone clattering. Then quickly picked up. Still the boy. “Who is this?”

  “Father Karras.”

  “Father Karits?”

  “Karras. Father Karras…”

  Down went the phone again.

  Karras lifted the tremulous hand, lightly touching his finger-tips to his brow.

  Phone noise.

  “Father Karras?”

  “Yes, hello, Frank. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve been working on your tapes at the house.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Yes, I am. By the way, this is pretty weird stuff.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Karras as he strained to flatten the tension in his voice. “So what’s the story so far? What have you found?”

  “Well, this ‘type-token’ ratio, first…”

  “Yes, Frank?”

  “Now I didn’t have enough of a sampling to be absolutely accurate, you understand, but I’d say it’s pretty close, or at least it’s as close as you can get with these things. Well, at any rate, the two different voices on the tapes, I would say, are probably separate personalities.”

  “Probably?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to swear to it in court; in fact, the variance is really pretty minimal.”

  “Minimal…,” Karras repeated dully. Well, there goes the ball game. “And what about the gibberish?” he asked. “Is it any kind of language?”

  Frank chuckled.

  “What’s funny?” asked the Jesuit moodily.

  “Was this really some sneaky psychological testing, Father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I guess you got your tapes mixed around or something. It’s—”

  “Frank, is it a language or not?” cut in Karras.

  “Oh, I’d say it was a language, all right.”

  Dumbfounded, Karras stiffened. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “What’s the language?”

  “It’s English.”

  For a moment, Karras stared blankly, and when he spoke there was an edge to his voice. “Frank, we seem to have a very poor connection; or would you like to let me in on the joke?”

  “Got your tape recorder there?”

  It was sitting on his desk. “Yes, I do.”

  “Has it got a reverse-play position?”

  “Why?”

  “Has it got one?”

  “Just a second.” Irritable, Karras set down the phone and took the top off the tape recorder to check it. “Yes, it’s got one. Frank, what’s this all about?”

  “Put your tape on the machine and play it backward.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got gremlins.” Frank chuckled good-naturedly. “Look, play it and I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night, Father.”

  “Night, Frank.”

  “Have fun.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Karras hung up. He looked baffled. He hunted up the gibberish tape and placed it into the recorder. First he ran it forward and nodded his head. No mistake. It was gibberish.

  He let it run through to the end and then played it in reverse. He heard his voice speaking backward. And then Regan’s demon voice: Marin marin karras let us be let us…

  English! Senseless! But still English!

  How on earth could she do that? Karras marveled.

  He listened to it all, rewound the tape and played it through again. And again. And then realized that the order of speech was inverted. He stopped the tape, rewound it, and with a pencil and a writing tablet at hand, he sat down at the desk and began to play the tape from the beginning while transcribing the words, working laboriously and long with almost constant stops and starts of the tape recorder. When finally it was done, he made another transcription on a second sheet of paper, reversing the order of the words. Then he leaned back and read it:

  … danger. Not yet. [unintelligible] will die. Little time. Now the [unintelligible]. Let her die. No, no, sweet! It is sweet in the body! I feel! There is [unintelligible]. Better [unintel
ligible] than the void. I fear the priest. Give us time. Fear the priest! He is [unintelligible]. No, not this one: the [unintelligible], the one who [unintelligible]. He is ill. Ah, the blood, feel the blood, how it [sings?].

  Karras asked on the tape, “Who are you?” with the answer:

  I am no one. I am no one.

  Then Karras: “Is that your name?” And the answer:

  I have no name. I am no one. Many. Let us be. Let us warm in the body. Do not [unintelligible] from the body into void, into [unintelligible]. Leave us. Leave us. Let us be. Karras. Merrin. Merrin.

  Again and again Karras read his transcription over, haunted by its tone, by the feeling that more than one person was speaking, until finally repetition itself dulled the words into commonness and he set down the transcription and rubbed at his face, at his eyes, at his thoughts. Not an unknown language. And writing backward with facility was hardly paranormal or even unusual. But speaking backward: adjusting and altering the phonetics so that playing them backward would make them intelligible; wasn’t such performance beyond the reach of even a hyperstimulated intellect, the accelerated unconscious referred to by Jung? No, something … something at the rim of memory. Then he remembered. He went to his shelves for a book: Jung’s Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena. Something similar here, he was thinking as he rapidly searched through the pages of the book. What was it?

  He found it: an account of an experiment with automatic writing in which the unconscious of the subject seemed able to answer his questions with anagrams. Anagrams!

  He propped the book open on the desk, leaned over and read an account of a portion of the experiment:

  3RD DAY

  What is man? Tefi hasl esble lies.

  Is that an anagram? Yes.

  How many words does it contain? Five.

  What is the first word? See.

  What is the second word? Eeeee.

  See? Shall I interpret it myself? Try to!

  The subject found this solution: “The life is less able.” He was astonished at this intellectual pronouncement, which seemed to him to prove the existence of an intelligence independent of his own. He therefore went on to ask:

  Who are you? Clelia.

  Are you a woman? Yes.

  Have you lived on earth? No.

  Will you come to life? Yes.

  When? In six years.

  Why are you conversing with me? E if Clelia el.

  The subject interpreted this answer as an anagram for “I, Clelia, feel.”

  4TH DAY

  Am I the one who answers the questions? Yes.

  Is Clelia there? No.

  Who is there, then? Nobody.

  Does Clelia exist at all? No.

  Then who was I talking to yesterday? With nobody.

  Karras stopped reading and shook his head. There was nothing paranormal here, he thought, only proof of the limitless abilities of the mind. He reached for a cigarette, sat down and lit it. “I am no one. Many.” Where did it come from, Karras wondered, this eerie content of Regan’s speech? From the same place Clelia had come from? Emergent personalities?

  “Merrin … Merrin…” “Ah, the blood…” “He is ill…”

  His eyes haunted, Karras glanced at his copy of Satan and moodily leafed to the opening inscription: “Let not the dragon be my leader…” Closing his eyes as he exhaled smoke, Karras lifted a fist to his mouth as he coughed, and, aware of his throat feeling raw and inflamed, he crushed out the cigarette in an ashtray. Exhausted, he slowly and awkwardly got up, flicked out the room light, shuttered his window blinds, kicked off his shoes and collapsed facedown on his narrow cot. Fevered fragments spun and tumbled through his mind: Regan. Kinderman. Dennings. What to do? He must help! He had to help! But how? Try the Bishop with what little he had? He did not think so. He could never convincingly argue the case.

  He thought of undressing, of getting under the covers.

  Too tired. This burden. He wanted to be free.

  “… Let us be!”

  As he began the slow drift into granite sleep, Karras’s lips moved almost imperceptibly, forming the soundless words “Let me be.” And then suddenly he was lifting his head, awakened by adenoidal breathing and the soft sound of cellophane being crinkled, and opening his eyes he saw a stranger in his room, a slightly overweight, middle-aged, freckle-faced priest with thin strands of red hair that were combed straight back on a balding head. Sitting in an overstuffed corner chair, he was watching Karras and tearing off the seal from a packet of Gauloises cigarettes. The priest smiled. “Oh, well, hello.”

  Karras swung his legs around and sat up.

  “Yeah, hello and good-bye,” Karras growled. “Who are you and what the fuck are you doing in my room?”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but when I knocked and you didn’t answer, I saw the door was unlocked so I just thought I’d come in and wait. And then there you were!” The priest gestured to a pair of crutches tilted and leaned against the wall near the chair. “I couldn’t wait for very long in the hall, you see; I can stand for so long but then at some point I just have to sit. I do hope you’ll forgive me. I’m Ed Lucas, by the way. Your Father President suggested that I see you.”

  Slightly frowning, Karras tilted his head to the side.

  “You said ‘Lucas’?”

  “Yes, it’s Lucas all the time,” said the priest, his grin displaying long and nicotine-stained teeth. He’d extracted a cigarette from the packet and was slipping a hand into his pocket for a lighter. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “No, go ahead. I’m a smoker.”

  “Oh, well, yes,” Lucas said as he glanced at a crush of cigarette butts in an ashtray on the end table next to his chair. The priest held out the cigarette packet to Karras. “Try a Gauloise?”

  “Thanks, no. Look, you said that Tom Bermingham sent you?”

  “Good old Tom. Yeah, we’re ‘buds.’ We were in the same high school class at Regis, and after that we did our Tertianship together at St. Andrews on Hudson. Yes, Tom recommended that I see you, so I took a Greyhound from New York. I’m at Fordham.”

  Karras’s mood abruptly lifted. He said, “Oh, New York! Is this about my request for reassignment?”

  “Reassignment? No, I know nothing at all about that. It’s a personal matter,” said the priest.

  Karras’s shoulders slumped with his hopes. “Well, okay then,” he said in a tone more subdued. He stood up and walked over to the straight-backed wooden chair behind his desk, turned it around, sat down and began to measure Lucas with a clinically appraising eye. To Karras, from this closer vantage, the priest’s black suit looked rumpled and baggy, even seedy. There was dandruff on the shoulders. The priest had pulled a cigarette out of its package and now he lit it with the leaping, tall flame of a Zippo lighter that he seemed to have produced unnoticed from a pocket, like a magician’s sleight-of-hand, and then blew out a stream of moody bluish gray smoke, which he watched with what looked like a deep satisfaction as he drawled, “Ah, there’s just nothing like a Gauloise for the nerves!”

  “Are you nervous, Ed?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, okay, then let’s get to it. Go ahead and lay it out for me, Ed. How can I help you?”

  Lucas studied Karras with a look of concern. “You look exhausted,” he said. “Perhaps it’s best if we meet up tomorrow. What do you say?” Then he quickly added, “Yes! Yes, most definitely tomorrow! Could you hand those to me, please?”

  He had reached out a hand to the crutches.

  “No, no, no!” Karras told him. “I’m fine, Ed! Just fine!”

  Leaning forward with his hands clasped together between his knees, Karras scanned the priest’s face as he told him, “Procrastination is what we often call ‘resistance.’ ”

  Lucas lifted an eyebrow, in his eyes a faint hint of what might have been bemusement. “Oh, is that so?”

  “Yes, it’s so.”

  Karras lowered his gaze to Lucas’s legs.

/>   “Does that depress you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean? Oh, my legs! Oh, well sometimes, I suppose.”

  “Congenital?”

  “No. No, it happened in a fall.”

  For a moment Karras studied his visitor’s face. That faint, secret smile. Had he seen it yet again? “That’s too bad,” Karras murmured sympathetically.

  “Oh, well, that’s the world we’ve inherited, not so?” reacted Lucas, the Gauloise cigarette still dangling from a corner of his mouth. He took it from his lips between two fingers and lamented amid an exhale of smoke, “Ah, well.”

  “So okay, Ed, let’s get to it. Okay? You didn’t come here all the way from New York to play dodgeball with me, that’s for sure, so let’s open up now. Tell me everything. Okay? Open up.”

  Lucas gently shook his head and looked aside. “Oh, well, it’s such a long story,” he began, but then he had to put a fist to his mouth as a new spell of coughing racked him.

  “Want a drink?” Karras asked.

  His eyes watering, the priest shook his head. “No, no, I’m fine,” he said chokingly, “Really!” as the spasm seemed to pass. He looked down and brushed cigarette ash from the front of his jacket. “Filthy habit!” he grumbled as Karras noticed now what looked to be a soft-boiled egg stain on the black clergy shirt the priest wore beneath his jacket.

  “Okay, what’s the problem?” Karras asked.

  Lucas lifted his gaze to him and said, “You.”

  Karras blinked. He said, “Me?”

  “Yes, Damien, you. Tom’s terribly worried about you.”

  Karras stared at Lucas steadily now with the beginning of realization, for in his eyes and in his voice there was a deep compassion. “Ed, what do you do up at Fordham?” Karras asked.

  “I counsel,” said the priest.

  “You counsel.”

  “Yes, Damien. I’m a psychiatrist.”

  Karras stared. “A psychiatrist,” he echoed blankly.

  Lucas looked aside. “Oh, well, now where do I begin?” he breathed out reluctantly. “I’m not sure. It’s so tricky. Very tricky. Ah, well then, let’s see what we can do,” he said softly, leaning over and tamping out his Gauloise in the ashtray. “But then again you’re a pro,” he said, looking up, “and at times it’s best to put things on the table straightaway.” The priest began coughing into his fist again. “Damn! I’m so sorry! Really!” The coughing ended, Lucas eyed Karras somberly. “Look, it’s all this crazy business with you and the MacNeils.”