The women flicked sidelong stares at each other.
“You feel it too?” Sharon asked.
Chris nodded. Something in the house. A tension. A gradual pulsing and thickening of the air, like opposing energies slowly building. The lilting of the door chimes sounded unreal.
Sharon turned away. “I’ll get it.”
She walked to the entry hall and opened the door. It was Karras. He was carrying a cardboard laundry box.
“Father Merrin’s in the study,” Sharon told him.
“Thanks.”
Karras moved quickly to the study, tapped lightly and cursorily at the door and then entered with the box. “Sorry, Father,” he was saying, “I had a little—”
Karras stopped short. Merrin, in trousers and T-shirt, was kneeling in prayer beside the rented bed, his forehead bent low to his tightly clasped hands, and for a moment Karras stood rooted, as if he had casually rounded a corner and suddenly encountered his boyhood self with an altar boy’s cassock draped over an arm and hurrying by without a glance of recognition.
Karras shifted his eyes to the open laundry box, to the speckles of rain on starch. He moved to the sofa, where he soundlessly laid out the contents of the box, and when he’d finished, he took off the raincoat and draped it carefully over a chair. Glancing back toward Merrin, he saw the priest blessing himself and he hastily looked away. He reached down for the larger of the white cotton surplices and had begun to put it on over his cassock when he heard Merrin rising and coming toward him. Tugging down his surplice. Karras turned to face him as the old priest stopped in front of the sofa, his eyes brushing tenderly over the contents of the laundry box.
Karras reached for a sweater. “I thought you might wear this under your cassock, Father,” he said as he handed it over. “Her room gets extremely cold at times.”
Looking down at the sweater, Merrin touched it with his fingertips. “That was thoughtful of you, Damien. Thank you.”
Karras picked up Merrin’s cassock from the sofa and as he watched him pull the sweater down over his head, only then, and very suddenly, while watching this homely, prosaic action, did he fully feel the staggering impact of the man; of the moment; of a thickening stillness in the house, crushing down on him, choking off breath and his sense of a world that was solid and real. He came back to full awareness with the feeling of the cassock being tugged from his hands. Merrin. He was slipping it on. “You’re familiar with the rules concerning exorcism, Damien?”
“I am.”
Merrin began buttoning up the cassock. “Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon.”
The demon! thought Karras.
He’d said it so matter-of-factly. It jarred him.
“We may ask what is relevant,” Merrin continued. “But anything beyond that is dangerous. Extremely.” He lifted the surplice from Karras’s hands and began to slip it over the cassock. “Especially, do not listen to anything he says. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us; but he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien. And powerful. Do not listen. Remember that. Do not listen.”
As Karras handed him the stole, the exorcist added, “Is there anything at all you would like to ask me now, Damien?”
Karras shook his head. “No. But I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities that Regan has manifested. So far, there seem to be three.”
While slipping the stole around his shoulders, Merrin said quietly, “There is only one.” Then he reached for the copies of The Roman Ritual and gave one to Karras. “We will skip the Litany of the Saints. You have the holy water, Damien?”
Karras slipped the slender, cork-tipped vial from his pocket. Merrin took it, then nodded serenely toward the door. “If you will lead, please, Damien.”
Upstairs, by the door to Regan’s bedroom, Sharon and Chris stood waiting. Tense. Bundled in heavy sweaters and jackets, they turned at the sound of a door coming open and looked below to see Merrin, with Karras behind him, approaching the staircase in solemn procession. How striking they looked, Chris thought: Merrin so tall, and Karras with the dark of that rock-chipped face above the innocent, altar-boy white of the surplice. She watched them steadily ascending the stairs, and although her reason said they had no unearthly powers, still she felt deeply and strangely moved as something whispered to her soul that perhaps they did. She felt her heart begin to beat faster.
At the door of the room, the Jesuits stopped. Karras frowned at the sweater and jacket Chris wore. “You’re coming in?”
“You think I shouldn’t?”
“Please don’t,” Karras urged her. “Don’t. You’d be making a mistake.”
Chris turned questioningly to Merrin.
“Father Karras knows best,” said the exorcist quietly.
Chris looked to Karras again. Dropped her head. “Okay,” she said despondently. She leaned her back against the wall. “I’ll wait out here.”
“What is your daughter’s middle name?” Merrin asked.
“It’s Teresa.”
“What a lovely name,” the old priest said warmly. He held Chris’s gaze for a moment, reassuringly, and when he turned his head and looked at the door to Regan’s bedroom, Chris again felt that tension, that thickening of coiled darkness behind it. In the bedroom.
Beyond that door.
Merrin nodded. “All right,” he said softly.
Karras opened the door, and almost reeled back from the blast of stench and icy cold. In a corner of the room, bundled up in a faded green sheepskin hunting jacket, Karl sat huddled in a chair. He turned expectantly to Karras, who had quickly flicked his glance to the demon in the bed. Its gleaming eyes stared beyond him to the hall. They were fixed on Merrin.
Karras moved forward to the foot of the bed while Merrin, tall and erect, walked slowly to the side, where he stopped and stared down into hate. And now a smothering stillness hung over the room. Then Regan licked a wolfish, blackened tongue across her cracked and swollen lips. It sounded like a hand smoothing crumpled parchment. “Well, proud scum!” the demonic voice croaked. “At last! At last you’ve come!”
The old priest lifted his hand and traced the sign of the cross above the bed, and then repeated the gesture toward all in the room. Turning back, he plucked the cap from the vial of holy water.
“Ah, yes! The holy urine now!” the demonic voice rasped. “The semen of the saints!”
Merrin lifted up the vial and the demonic face grew livid and contorted as the voice seethed, “Ah, will you, bastard? Will you?”
Merrin started shooting holy water sprinkles, and the demon jerked its head up, the mouth and the neck muscles trembling with rage. “Yes, sprinkle! Sprinkle, Merrin! Drench us! Drown us in your sweat! Your sweat is sanctified, Saint Merrin! Bend and fart out clouds of incense! Bend and show us the holy rump that we may worship and adore it, Merrin! Kiss it! Make—”
“Be silent!”
The words were flung forth like thunderbolts. Karras flinched and jerked his head around in wonder at Merrin, now staring commandingly at Regan. And the demon was silent. Was returning his stare.
But the eyes were now hesitant. Blinking. Wary.
Merrin capped the holy-water vial routinely and returned it to Karras. The psychiatrist slipped it into his pocket and watched as Merrin kneeled down beside the bed and closed his eyes in murmured prayer. “ ‘Our Father…’ ” he began.
Regan spat and hit Merrin in the face with a yellowish glob of mucus. It oozed slowly down the exorcist’s cheek.
“ ‘… Thy kingdom come…’ ” His head still bowed, Merrin continued the prayer without a pause while his hand plucked a handkerchief out of his pocket and unhurriedly wiped away the spittle. “ ‘… and lead us not into temptation,’ ” he ended mildly.
“ ‘But deliver us from evil,’ ” responded Karras.
He looked up briefly. Regan’s eyes were rolling upward into their soc
kets until only the white of the sclera was exposed. Karras felt uneasy. Felt something in the room congealing. He returned to his text to follow Merrin’s prayer:
“ ‘God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, I appeal to your holy name, humbly begging your kindness, that you may graciously grant me help against this unclean spirit now tormenting this creature of yours; through Christ our Lord.’ ”
“Amen,” responded Karras.
Now Merrin stood up and prayed reverently: “ ‘God, Creator and defender of the human race, look down in pity on this your servant, Regan Teresa MacNeil, now trapped in the coils of man’s ancient enemy, sworn foe of our race, who…’ ”
Karras glanced up as he heard Regan hissing, saw her sitting erect with the whites of her eyes exposed, while her tongue flicked in and out rapidly, her head weaving slowly back and forth like a cobra’s, and once again he had that feeling of disquiet. He looked down at his text.
“ ‘Save your servant,’ ” prayed Merrin, standing and reading from the Ritual.
“ ‘Who trusts in you, my God,’ ” answered Karras.
“ ‘Let her find in you, Lord, a fortified tower.’ ”
“ ‘In the face of the enemy.’ ”
As Merrin continued with the next line—“Let the enemy have no power over her”—Karras heard a gasp from Sharon behind him, and turning quickly around, he saw her looking stupefied at the bed. Puzzled, he looked back. And was electrified.
The front of the bed was rising up off the floor!
Karras stared incredulously, transfixed. Four inches. Half a foot. A foot. Then the back legs began to come up.
“Gott in Himmel!” Karl whispered in fear. But Karras did not hear him or see him make the sign of the cross on himself as the back of the bed lifted level with the front.
It’s not happening! he thought.
The bed drifted upward another foot and then hovered there, bobbing and listing gently as if it were floating on a stagnant lake.
“Father Karras?”
Regan undulating and hissing.
“Father Karras?”
Karras turned. The exorcist was eyeing him serenely, and now motioned his head toward the copy of the Ritual in Karras’s hands. “The response, please, Damien.”
Karras looked blank and uncomprehending, unaware that Sharon had run out of the room.
“ ‘Let the enemy have no power over her,’ ” Merrin repeated.
Hastily, Karras glanced back at the text and with a pounding heart breathed out the response: “ ‘And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her.’ ”
“ ‘Lord, hear my prayer,’ ” continued Merrin.
“ ‘And let my cry come unto Thee.’ ”
“ ‘The Lord be with you.’ ”
“ ‘And with your spirit.’ ”
Merrin embarked upon a lengthy prayer and Karras again returned his gaze to the bed, to his hopes of his God and the supernatural hovering low in the empty air. An elation thrilled up through his being. It’s there! There it is! Right in front of me! He looked suddenly around at the sound of the door coming open and Sharon rushing in with Chris, who stopped, unbelieving, and gasped, “Jesus Christ!”
“ ‘Almighty Father, everlasting God…’ ”
The exorcist reached up his hand in a workaday manner and traced the sign of the cross, unhurriedly, three times on Regan’s brow while continuing to read from the text of the Ritual:
“ ‘… who sent your only begotten Son into the world to crush that roaring lion…’ ”
The hissing ceased and from the taut-stretched O of Regan’s mouth came the nerve-shredding lowing of a steer.
“ ‘… snatch from ruination and from the clutches of the noonday devil this human being made in your image, and…’ ”
The lowing grew louder, tearing at flesh and shivering through bone.
“ ‘God and Lord of all creation…’ ” Merrin routinely reached up his hand and pressed a portion of the stole to Regan’s neck while continuing to pray: “ ‘… by whose might Satan was made to fall from heaven like lightning, strike terror into the beast now laying waste your vineyard…’ ”
The bellowing ceased, and at first there ensued a ringing silence, and then a thick and putrid greenish vomit began to pump from Regan’s mouth in slow and regular spurts that oozed over her lip and flowed in thin waves onto Merrin’s hand. But he did not move it. “ ‘Let your mighty hand cast out this cruel demon from Regan Teresa MacNeil, who…’ ”
Karras was dimly aware of a door being opened, of Chris bolting from the room.
“ ‘Drive out this persecutor of the innocent…’ ”
The bed began to rock lazily, then to pitch, and then suddenly it was violently dipping and yawing, and with the vomit still pumping from Regan’s mouth, Merrin calmly made adjustments and kept the stole firmly to her neck.
“ ‘Fill your servants with courage to manfully oppose that reprobate dragon lest he despise those who put their trust in you, and…’ ”
Abruptly, the movements subsided and as Karras watched, mesmerized, the bed drifted featherlike and slowly to the floor, where it settled on the rug with a cushioned thud.
“ ‘Lord, grant that this…’ ”
Numb, Karras shifted his gaze. Merrin’s hand. He could not see it. It was buried under mounded, steaming vomit.
“Damien?”
Karras glanced up.
“ ‘Lord, hear my prayer,’ ” said the exorcist gently.
Karras turned. “ ‘And let my cry come unto Thee.’ ”
Merrin lifted off the stole, took a slight step backward and then jolted the room with the lash of his voice as he commanded, “ ‘I cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every power of the enemy! every specter from hell! every savage companion!’ ” Merrin’s hand, at his side, dripped vomit to the rug. “ ‘It is Christ who commands you, who once stilled the wind and the sea and the storm! Who…’ ”
Regan stopped vomiting and sat silent and unmoving, the whites of her eyes gleaming balefully at Merrin. From the foot of the bed, Karras watched her intently as his shock and excitement began to fade, as his mind began feverishly to thresh, to poke its fingers, unbidden, compulsively, deep into corners of logical doubt: poltergeists; psychokinetic action; adolescent tensions and mind-directed force. He frowned as he remembered something. He moved to the side of the bed, leaned over, reached down to grasp Regan’s wrist. And found what he’d feared. Like the shaman in Siberia, Regan’s pulse was racing at an unbelievable speed. The fact drained him suddenly of sun, and, glancing at his watch, Karras counted the heartbeats, now, like arguments against his life.
“ ‘It is He who commands you, He who flung you headlong from the heights of heaven!’ ”
Merrin’s powerful adjuration pounded off the rim of Karras’s consciousness in resonant, inexorable blows as the pulse came faster now. And faster. Karras looked at Regan. Still silent. Unmoving. Into icy air, thin mists of vapor wafted from the vomit like a reeking offering. Then the hair on Karras’s arms began prickling up as, with nightmare slowness, a fraction at a time, Regan’s head was turning, swiveling like a manikin’s, and creaking with the sound of some rusted mechanism, until the dread and glaring whites of those ghastly eyes were fixed on his.
“ ‘And therefore, tremble in fear, now, Satan…’ ”
The head turned slowly back toward Merrin.
“ ‘… you corrupter of justice! you begetter of death! you betrayer of the nations! you robber of life! you…’ ”
Karras glanced warily around as the lights in the room began flickering, and dimming, and then faded to an eerie, pulsing amber. Karras shivered. The room was getting even colder.
“ ‘… you prince of murderers! you inventor of every obscenity! you enemy of the human race! you…’ ”
A muffled pounding jolted the room. Then another. Then steadily, shuddering through walls, through the floor, through the ceiling, splintering, and throbbing at a ponderous rate like the beating of
a heart that was massive and diseased.
“ ‘Depart, you monster! Your place is in solitude! Your abode is in a nest of vipers! Get down and crawl with them! It is God himself who commands you! The blood of…’ ”
The poundings grew louder, began to come ominously faster and faster.
“ ‘I adjure you, ancient serpent…’ ”
And faster…
“ ‘… by the judge of the living and the dead, by your Creator, by the Creator of all the universe, to…’ ”
Sharon cried out, pressing her fists against her ears as the poundings grew deafening and now suddenly accelerated and leaped to a terrifying tempo.
Regan’s pulse was astonishing. It hammered at a speed too rapid to gauge. Across the bed, Merrin reached out calmly and with the end of his thumb traced the sign of the cross on Regan’s vomit-covered chest. The words of his prayer were swallowed up in the poundings.
Karras felt the pulse rate suddenly drop, and as Merrin prayed and traced the sign of the cross on Regan’s brow, the nightmarish poundings abruptly ceased.
“ ‘O God of heaven and earth, God of the angels and archangels…’ ” Karras could now hear Merrin praying as the pulse kept dropping, dropping…
“Prideful bastard, Merrin! Scum! You will lose! She will die! The pig will die!”
The flickering haze had grown gradually brighter and the demon had returned to rage hatefully at Merrin. “Profligate peacock! Ancient heretic who dares to believe that the universe will one day become Christ! I adjure you, turn and look on me! Yes, look on me, you scum!” The demon jerked forward and spat in Merrin’s face, croaking afterward, “Thus does your master cure the blind!”
“ ‘God and Lord of all creation…’ ” prayed Merrin, reaching placidly for his handkerchief and wiping away the spittle.
“Now follow his teaching, Merrin! Do it! Put your sanctified cock in the piglet’s mouth and cleanse it, swab it with the wrinkled relic and she will be cured, Saint Merrin! Yes, a miracle! A—”
“ ‘… deliver this servant of…’ ”
“Hypocrite! You care nothing at all for the pig. You care nothing! You have made her a contest between us!”