Karras reacted with surprise. “The MacNeils?” he marveled. “Listen, how could you possibly know about that? There’s no way that Tom would ever let that out. No, no way. It would be harmful to the family.”
“There are sources.”
“What sources? Such as who? Such as what?”
“Does it matter?” said the priest. “No, not at all. All that matters is your health and your emotional stability, both of which are clearly already in danger, and this thing with the MacNeils will only stress it all the more, so the Provincial is ordering you to break it off. Break it off for your own sake, Karras, as well as for the good of the Order!” The priest’s bushy eyebrows had gathered inward, almost touching, and he’d lowered his head so that his stare and his visage seemed threatening. “Break it off!” he warned, “before it leads to some greater catastrophe; before things get even worse, much worse! We don’t want any more desecrations now, Damien, do we?”
Karras stared at his visitor in bafflement, and then shock.
“The desecrations? Ed, what are you talking about? What does my mental health have to do with them?”
Lucas leaned back in his chair. “Oh, come on!” he scoffed cynically. “You join the Jesuits and leave your poor mother to die all alone and in abject poverty? And so who would someone hate for all of that unconsciously if not the Catholic Church!” Here, the priest leaned forward again, hunching over as he hissed, “Don’t be obtuse! Stay away from the MacNeils!”
His eyes tight, his head angled in surmise, Karras rose and stared down at the priest, demanding huskily, “Who in the hell are you, pal? Who are you?”
The soft ringing of the telephone on Karras’s desk drew a swift, alarmed glance from Father Lucas. “Watch out for Sharon!” he warned Karras sharply, and then abruptly the phone was ringing loudly so that Karras awakened and realized he’d been dreaming. Groggy, he got up from his cot, stumbled over to a light switch, flicked it on, and then moved to the desk and picked up the phone. It was Sharon. What time was it? he asked her. A little after three. Could he come to the house right away? Ah, God! Karras inwardly groaned, and yet, “Yes,” he said. Yes. He would come. And once again he felt trapped; smothered; enmeshed.
He lurched into his white-tiled bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face and, drying off, he suddenly remembered Father Lucas and the dream. What did it mean? Perhaps nothing. He would think about it later. When about to leave his room, at the door Karras stopped, turned around and came back for a black woolen sweater, pulling it over his head, and as he tugged it down, he abruptly stopped, numbly staring at the end table by the corner chair. Taking a breath and then a slow step forward, he reached down to the ashtray, picked up a cigarette butt and then stood motionless for a time as he held it up to his stunned surmise. It was a Gauloise. Racing thoughts. Suppositions. A coldness. Then an urgency: “Watch out for Sharon!” Karras placed the Gauloise butt back into the ashtray, hurried from his room and down the hall and then out onto Prospect Street, where the air was thin and still and damp. He passed the steps, crossed over to the opposite side diagonally and found Sharon watching and waiting for him at the MacNeil house’s open front door. Looking frightened and bewildered, one hand held a flashlight while a hand at her neck held together the edges of a blanket that was draped around her shoulders. “Sorry, Father,” she huskily whispered as the Jesuit entered the house, “but I thought you ought to see this.”
“See what?”
Sharon soundlessly closed the door. “I’ll have to show you,” she whispered. “Let’s be quiet, now. I don’t want to wake up Chris. She shouldn’t see this.” She beckoned and Karras followed her, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs to Regan’s bedroom. Entering, the Jesuit felt chilled. The room was icy. Frowning, he turned a questioning look to Sharon, and she nodded her head and whispered, “Yes, Father. Yes. The heat’s on.” They turned and stared at Regan, at the whites of her eyes glowing eerily in dim lamplight. She seemed to be in a coma. Heavy breathing. Motionless. The nasogastric tubing was in place and the Sustagen was slowly seeping into her body.
Sharon moved quietly toward the bedside. Karras followed, still staggered by the cold. When they were standing by the bed, he saw beads of perspiration on Regan’s forehead; glanced down and saw her wrists gripped firmly in the leather restraining straps. Sharon bent over the bed, gently pulling the top of Regan’s pink and white pajama top wide apart, and an overwhelming pity hit Karras at the sight of the wasted chest, the protruding ribs where one might count the remaining weeks or days of her life. He felt Sharon’s haunted stare upon him. “I don’t know if it’s stopped,” she whispered. “But watch: just keep looking at her chest.”
Sharon turned on the flashlight and shone it on Regan’s bare chest, and the Jesuit, puzzled, followed her gaze. Then silence. Regan’s slightly whistling breathing. Watching. The cold. Then the Jesuit’s brows knitted tightly together as he saw something happening to the skin of Regan’s chest: a faint redness, but in sharp definition. He peered down closer.
“There, it’s coming!” Sharon whispered sharply.
Abruptly the gooseflesh on Karras’s arms was not from the icy cold in the room, but from what he was seeing on Regan’s chest; from the bas-relief script rising up in clear letters of raised and blood-red skin. Two words:
help me
Her wide stare riveted to the words, Sharon’s breath came frosty as she whispered, “That’s her handwriting, Father.”
At 9:00 that morning, Karras went to the president of Georgetown University and asked for permission to seek an exorcism. He received it, and immediately afterward went to the Bishop of the diocese, who listened with grave attention to all that Karras had to say. “You’re convinced that it’s genuine?” the Bishop asked finally.
“Well, I’ve made a prudent judgment that it meets the conditions set forth in the Ritual,” Karras answered evasively. He still did not dare to believe. Not his mind but his heart had tugged him to this moment: pity and the hope for a cure through suggestion.
“You would want to do the exorcism yourself?”
Karras felt elation; saw the door swinging open to fields, to escape from the crushing weight of caring and that meeting each twilight with the ghost of his faith. And yet, “Yes, Your Grace,” he answered.
“How’s your health?”
“My health is fine, Your Grace.”
“Have you ever been involved with this sort of thing before?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well, we’ll see. It might be best to have a man with experience. There aren’t too many these days but perhaps someone back from the foreign missions. Let me see who’s around. In the meantime, I’ll call you as soon as we know.”
When Karras had left him, the Bishop called the president of Georgetown University, and they talked about Karras for the second time that day.
“Well, he does know the background,” said the president at a point in their conversation. “I doubt there’s any danger in just having him assist. In any case, there should be a psychiatrist present.”
“And what about the exorcist? Any ideas? I’m a blank.”
“Well, now, Lankester Merrin’s around.”
“Merrin? I had a notion he was over in Iraq. I think I read he was working on a dig around Nineveh.”
“Yes, down below Mosul. That’s right. But he finished and came back around three or four months ago, Mike. He’s at Woodstock.”
“Teaching?”
“No, he’s working on another book.”
“God help us! Don’t you think he’s too old, though? How’s his health?”
“Well, it must be all right or he wouldn’t still be running around digging up tombs, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“And besides, he’s had experience, Mike.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, at least that’s the word.”
“And when was that? This experience, I mean.”
r /> “Oh, maybe ten or twelve years ago, I think, in Africa. Supposedly the exorcism lasted for months. I heard it damn near killed him.”
“Well, in that case, I doubt that he’d want to do another one.”
“We do what we’re told here, Mike. All the rebels are over there with you seculars.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Look, I’ll leave it up to you and the Provincial.”
Early that quietly waiting evening, a young scholastic preparing for the priesthood wandered the grounds of Woodstock Seminary in Maryland. He was searching for a slender, gray-haired old Jesuit. He found him on a pathway, strolling through a grove. He handed him a telegram. His manner serene, the old priest thanked him and then turned to renew his contemplation, to continue his walk through a nature that he loved. Now and then he would pause to hear the song of a robin, to watch a bright butterfly hover on a branch. He did not open and read the telegram. He knew what it said. He had read it in the dust of the temples of Nineveh. He was ready.
He continued his farewells.
“And let my cry come unto thee…”
He who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him…
—Saint John
Chapter One
In the breathing dark of his quiet office, Kinderman brooded above his desk. He adjusted the desk-lamp beam a fraction. Below him were records, transcripts, exhibits; police files; crime lab reports; scribbled notes. In a pensive mood, he had carefully fashioned them into a collage in the shape of a rose, as if to belie the ugly conclusion to which they had led him; that he could not accept.
Engstrom was innocent. At the time of Dennings’s death, he had been visiting his daughter, supplying her with money for the purchase of drugs. He had lied about his whereabouts that night in order to protect her and to shield her mother, who believed Elvira to be dead and past all harm and degradation.
It was not from Karl that Kinderman had learned this. On the night of their encounter in Elvira’s hallway, the houseman had kept obdurately silent. It was only when Kinderman apprised the daughter of her father’s involvement in the Dennings case that she volunteered the truth. There were witnesses to confirm it. Engstrom was innocent. Innocent and silent concerning events that involved the MacNeils.
Kinderman frowned at the collage: something was wrong with the composition. He shifted a petal point—the corner of a deposition—a trifle lower and to the right.
Roses. Elvira. He had warned her grimly that failure to check herself into a clinic within two weeks would result in his dogging her trail with warrants until he had evidence to effect her arrest. Yet he did not believe she would go. There were times when he stared at the law unblinkingly as he would the noonday sun in the hope it would temporarily blind him while some quarry made its escape. Engstrom was innocent. What remained? Gently wheezing, the detective shifted his weight and, closing his eyes, he imagined he was soaking in a sudsy hot bath. Mental Closeout Sale! he bannered at himself: Moving to New Conclusions! Everything Must Go! Then, Positively! he added sternly, and with that the detective opened his eyes and examined afresh the bewildering data.
Item: The death of director Burke Dennings seemed somehow linked to the desecrations at Holy Trinity. Both involved witchcraft and the unknown desecrator could easily be Dennings’s murderer.
Item: An expert on witchcraft, a Jesuit priest, had been seen making visits to the home of the MacNeils.
Item: The typewritten sheet of paper containing the text of the blasphemous altar card discovered at Holy Trinity had been checked for latent fingerprints. Impressions had been found on both sides. Some had been made by Damien Karras. But still another set had been found that, from their size, were adjudged to be those of a person with very small hands, quite possibly a child.
Item: The typing on the altar card had been analyzed and compared with the typed impressions on the unfinished letter that Sharon Spencer had pulled from her typewriter, crumpled up and tossed at a wastepaper basket, missing it, while Kinder-man had been questioning Chris. He had picked it up and smuggled it out of the house. The typing on this letter and the typing on the altar card sheet had been done on the same machine. According to the report, however, the touch of the typists differed. The person who had typed the blasphemous text had a touch far heavier than Sharon Spencer’s. Since the typing of the former, moreover, had not been “hunt and peck” but skillfully accomplished, it suggested that the unknown typist of the altar card text was a person of extraordinary strength.
Item: Burke Dennings—if his death was not an accident—had been killed by a person of extraordinary strength.
Item: Engstrom was no longer a suspect.
Item: A check of domestic airline reservations disclosed that Chris MacNeil had taken her daughter to Dayton, Ohio. Kinderman had known that the daughter was ill and was being taken to a clinic. But the clinic in Dayton would have to be Barringer. Kinderman had checked and the clinic confirmed that the daughter had been in for observation. Though the clinic refused to state the nature of the illness, it was obviously a serious mental disorder.
Item: Serious mental disorders at times caused extraordinary strength.
Kinderman sighed, closed his eyes and shook his head. He was back to the same conclusion. Then he opened his eyes and stared at the center of the paper rose: a faded old copy of a national newsmagazine. On the cover were Chris and Regan. He studied the daughter: the sweet, freckled face and the ribboned ponytails, the missing front tooth in the grin. He looked out a window into darkness, where a drizzling rain had begun to fall.
He went down to the garage, got into the unmarked black sedan and then drove through rain-slick, shining streets to Georgetown, where he parked on the eastern side of Prospect Street and for minutes sat silently staring up at Regan’s window. Should he knock at the door and demand to see her? Lowering his head, he rubbed at his brow. William F. Kinderman, you are sick! he thought. You are ill! Go home! Take medicine! Sleep! Get better! He looked up at the window again and ruefully shook his head. To this place had his haunted logic led him. He shifted his gaze as a cab pulled up to the house. He started his engine and turned on the windshield wipers in time to see a tall old man stepping out of the cab. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless under a misty streetlamp’s glow, staring up at a window of the house like a melancholy traveler frozen in time. As the cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street, Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. As he turned the corner, he blinked his headlights, signaling the taxi to stop, while inside the MacNeil house at that moment Karras and Karl were pinning Regan’s emaciated arms while Sharon injected her with Librium, bringing the total amount injected in the last two hours to four hundred milligrams, a dosage, Karras knew, that was staggering; but after a lull of many hours, the demonic personality had awakened in a fit of fury so frenzied that Regan’s debilitated system could not for very long endure it.
Karras was exhausted. After his visit to the Chancery Office that morning, he returned to the house to tell Chris what had happened, and after setting up an intravenous feeding for Regan, he’d gone back to his room in the Jesuit residence hall, where he fell facedown and limp onto his bed and instantly into a profound and deep sleep. But after barely two hours, the strident ringing of his telephone had wrenched him awake. Sharon. Regan was still unconscious and her pulse had been gradually slipping lower. Karras had then rushed to the house with his medical bag and pinched Regan’s Achilles tendon, looking for reaction to pain. There was none. He pressed down hard on one of her fingernails. Again, there was no reaction. Karras grew alarmed: though he knew that in hysteria and in certain states of trance there was sometimes an insensitivity to pain, he now feared coma, a state from which Regan might so very easily slip into death. He checked her blood pressure: ninety over sixty; then her pulse rate: sixty. He had waited in the room then, and checked her again every fifteen minutes for an hour and a half bef
ore he was satisfied that both her blood pressure and pulse rate had stabilized, meaning Regan was not in shock but rather in a state of stupor. Sharon was instructed to continue to check Regan’s pulse every hour. Then Karras had returned to his room and his sleep. But now again a ringing telephone awakened him. The exorcist, the Chancery Office told him, would be Lankester Merrin, with Karras to assist.
The news had stunned him. Merrin! the philosopher-paleontologist! the soaring, staggering intellect! His books had stirred ferment in the Church, for they interpreted his faith in terms of matter that was still evolving and destined to be spirit that at the end of time would join with Christ, the “Omega Point.”
Karras had immediately telephoned Chris to give her the news, but found that she’d heard from the Bishop directly that Merrin would arrive the next day. “I told the Bishop he could stay at the house,” Chris said. “It’ll just be a day or so, won’t it?” Before answering, Karras had paused, then said quietly, “I don’t know.” And then, pausing again, he said, “You mustn’t expect too much.” “If it works, you mean,” Chris had answered. Her tone had been subdued. “I didn’t mean to imply that it wouldn’t,” the priest reassured her. “I just meant that it might take time.” “How long?” “It varies.” Karras knew that an exorcism could take weeks, even months; knew that frequently it failed altogether. He expected the latter; expected that the burden, barring cure through suggestion, would fall once again, and at the last, upon him. “It can take a few days or weeks,” he’d then told her, and she’d answered him numbly, “How long has she got, Father Karras?”
When he’d hung up the phone, he’d felt heavy, tormented; stretched out on his bed, he thought of Merrin. Merrin! An excitement and a hope had seeped into him, although a sinking disquiet had followed. He himself had been the natural choice for exorcist, and yet the Bishop had passed him over. Why? Because Merrin had done this before? As he’d closed his eyes, he’d recalled that exorcists were selected on the basis of “piety” and “high moral qualities”; that a passage in the gospel of Matthew related that Christ, when asked by his disciples the cause of their failure in an effort at exorcism, had answered, “Because of your little faith.” The Provincial had known about his problem, as had also Tom Bermingham, the Georgetown president. Had either of them mentioned it to the Bishop?