The Exorcist

  “Oh, it’s terrible,” it whined at the specialist. “Just awful! Oh, I do hope there’s something you can do! Is there something? We’ll have no place to go, you see, otherwise, and all because … Oh, damn the stubborn devil!” As the specialist stared with wide eyes while taking Regan’s blood pressure, Dennings looked to Karras and complained, “What the hell are you doing! Can’t you see the little bitch should be in hospital? She belongs in a madhouse, Karras! Now you know that! For heaven’s sakes, why can’t we stop all this cunting mumbo-jumbo! If she dies, you know, the fault will be yours! Yes, all yours! I mean, just because God’s self-anointed second son is being stubborn doesn’t mean that you have to behave like a snot! You’re a doctor! You should know better, Karras! Now come along, dear heart, have compassion. There’s just a terrible shortage of housing these days!”

  And now back came the demon, howling like a wolf. Expressionless, the specialist undid the sphygmomanometer wrapping and, still a little wide-eyed and bewildered, he nodded at Karras. He was finished.

  They went out into the hall, where the specialist looked back at the bedroom door before turning back to Karras and asking, “What the hell is going on in there, Father?”

  The Jesuit averted his glance. “I can’t say,” he said softly.

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  Karras turned his gaze back to him.

  “Maybe both,” he said. “So what’s the story with her heart?”

  The specialist’s manner was somber. “She’s got to stop that activity. To sleep … to sleep before her blood pressure drops.”

  “Is there anything I can do, Mike?”

  “Pray.”

  As the specialist walked away, Karras watched him, his every artery and nerve begging rest, begging hope, begging miracles, even though he felt certain that there would be none. And then shutting his eyes, he winced as he remembered, “You should not have given her the Librium!” He put a fist to his mouth as his throat made a soft, convulsive sound of regret and stinging self-recrimination. He took a deep breath, then another, and then, opening his eyes and moving forward, he pushed open the door to Regan’s bedroom with a hand less heavy than his soul.

  Merrin stood by the bedside, watching while Regan neighed shrilly like a horse. He heard Karras enter and turned to look at him inquiringly, and Karras somberly shook his head. Merrin nodded. There was sadness in his face; then acceptance; and as he turned back to Regan, there was grim resolve.

  Merrin knelt by the bed. “Our Father…,” he began.

  Regan splattered him with dark, stinking bile, and then croaked, “You will lose! She will die! She will die!”

  Karras picked up his copy of The Roman Ritual. Opened it. Looked up and stared at Regan.

  “ ‘Save your servant,’ ” prayed Merrin.

  “ ‘In the face of the enemy.’ ”

  Go to sleep, Regan! Sleep! shouted Karras’s will.

  But Regan did not sleep.

  Not by dawn.

  Not by noon.

  Not by nightfall.

  And not even by Sunday, when her pulse rate was one hundred and forty and ever threadier, while the fits continued unremittingly, and while Karras and Merrin kept repeating the ritual, never sleeping, Karras feverishly groping for remedies: a restraining sheet to hold Regan’s movements to a minimum; keeping everyone out of the bedroom for a time to see if lack of provocation might terminate the fits. Neither method was successful. And Regan’s shouting was as draining as her movements. Yet the blood pressure held. But how much longer? Karras agonized. Ah, God, don’t let her die! The aching prayer of his mind was repeated so often it was almost a litany.

  Don’t let her die! Let her sleep! Let her sleep!

  At approximately 7 P.M. that Sunday, Karras sat mutely next to Merrin in the bedroom, exhausted and racked by the demon’s scathing attacks: his lack of faith; his medical incompetence; his flight from his mother in search of status. And Regan! Regan! His fault!

  “You should not have given her the Librium!”

  The priests had just finished a cycle of the ritual and were resting, listening to Regan singing “Panis Angelicus” in that same sweet choirboy’s voice. They rarely left the room; Karras once to change clothes and to shower. But in the cold it was easier to stay wakeful, even in the stench that since early morning had altered in character to the gorge-raising odor of decayed, rotted flesh.

  Staring feverishly at Regan with reddened eyes, Karras thought he heard a sound. Something creaking. Then again each time Karras blinked. And then he realized it was coming from his own crusted eyelids. He turned his head to look at Merrin. Through the hours, the elderly exorcist had said very little: now and then a homely story of his boyhood. Reminiscences. Little things. A story about a duck he once owned named Clancy. Karras was profoundly worried about him. His age. The lack of sleep. The demon’s verbal assaults. After Merrin closed his eyes and let his chin rest on his chest, Karras glanced around at Regan, and then wearily stood up and trudged over to the bed, where he checked her pulse and then began to take a blood pressure reading. As he wrapped the black sphygmomanometer cloth around her arm, he blinked repeatedly to clear away a blurring of his vision.

  “Today Muddir Day, Dimmy.”

  For a moment, the priest could not move as he felt his heart being wrenched from his chest; and then slowly, very slowly, he looked into eyes that didn’t seem to be Regan’s anymore, but rather eyes that were sadly rebuking. His mother’s.

  “I not good to you? Why you leave me to die all alone, Dimmy? Why? Why you—”

  “Damien!”

  Merrin’s hand was clutching tightly at Karras’s arm. “Please go and rest for a little now, Damien.”

  “Dimmy, please!”

  “Do not listen, Damien! Go! Go now!”

  With a lump rising dry to his throat, Karras turned and left the bedroom, and for a time he stood in the hallway, weak and irresolute. Coffee? He craved it. But a shower even more. But when he’d left the MacNeil house and returned to his room in the residence hall, it took only one look at his bed for Karras to change his priorities. Forget the shower, man! Sleep! Half an hour! As he reached for the telephone to ask Reception to give him a wake-up call, it rang.

  “Yes, hello,” Karras answered hoarsely.

  “Someone here to see you, Father Karras: a Mr. Kinderman.”

  Karras briefly held his breath, and then he exhaled in resignation. “Okay, tell him I’ll be out in just a minute,” he said weakly. As he hung up the telephone, Karras saw a carton of nonfilter Camel cigarettes on his desk. A note from Dyer was attached.

  A key to the Playboy Club has been found on the chapel kneeler in front of the votive lights. Is it yours? You can claim it at Reception.

  Joe

  With a fond expression, Karras set down the note, quickly dressed in fresh clothing and walked out of the room and to Reception, where Kinderman was standing at the telephone switchboard counter, delicately rearranging the composition of a vase full of flowers. As he turned and saw Karras, he was holding the stem of a pink camellia.

  “Ah, Father! Father Karras!” Kinderman greeted him cheerfully, his expression quickly changing to concern when he saw the exhaustion in the Jesuit’s face. He replaced the camellia and came forward to meet him. “You look awful!” he said. “What’s the matter? That’s what comes of all this schlepping around the track? Give it up, Father, you’re going to die anyway. Listen, come!” He gripped Karras by the elbow and an upper arm and propelled him toward the exit to the street. “You’ve got a minute?” he asked as they passed through the door.

  “Just barely,” Karras murmured. “What is it?”

  “A little talk. I need advice, nothing more; just advice.”

  “What about?”

  “In just a minute. For now we’ll just walk. We’ll take air. We’ll enjoy.” He hooked his arm through the Jesuit’s and guided him diagonally to the other side of the street. “Ah, now, look at that! Beautiful! Gorg
eous!” He was pointing to the sun sinking low on the Potomac, and in the stillness sudden laughter rang out, and then the talking-all-together of Georgetown undergraduates in front of a drinking hall near the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street. One punched another one hard on the arm, and the two began amicably wrestling. “Ah, college…,” breathed out Kinderman ruefully as he glanced at the lively gathering of young men. “I never went … but I wish…” Turning his gaze back to Karras, he frowned with concern. “I mean, seriously, you really look bad,” he said. “What’s the matter? You’ve been sick?”

  When would Kinderman come to the point? Karras wondered.

  “No, just busy,” the Jesuit answered.

  “Slow it down, then,” wheezed Kinderman. “Slow. You saw the Bolshoi Ballet, incidentally, at the Watergate?”

  “No.”

  “No, me neither. But I wish. They’re so graceful … so cute!”

  They had come to the Car Barn’s low stone wall, where the view of the sunset was unimpeded, and they stopped, Karras resting a forearm on top of the wall and turning his glance from the sunset to Kinderman.

  “Okay, what’s on your mind?” Karras asked him.

  “Ah, well, Father,” said Kinderman, sighing. He turned, then, hunching forward with his hands clasped on top of the wall as he moodily stared across the river and said, “I’m afraid I’ve got a problem.”

  “Professional?”

  “Well, partly; only partly.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, mostly it’s—” Kinderman hesitated, then continued: “Well, mostly it’s ethical, you could say, Father Karras. A question—” His voice trailing off, the detective turned around and, leaning his back against the wall, he looked down at the sidewalk and frowned. “There’s just no one I could talk to about it; not my captain in particular, you see. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him. So I thought…” Here, abruptly, the detective’s eyes lit up. “I had an aunt—you should hear this; it’s funny. She was terrified—terrified—for years of my uncle. The poor woman, she never dared to say a word to him—never!—much less to ever raise her voice. So whenever she got mad at him for something, right away, she’d run quick to the closet in her bedroom, and then there in the dark—you won’t believe this!—in the dark, by herself, with all the clothes hanging up and the moths, she would curse—she would curse!—at my uncle and tell him what she thought of him for maybe twenty minutes! Really! I mean, yelling! She’d come out, she’d feel better, she’d go kiss him on the cheek. Now what is that, Father Karras? That’s good therapy or not!”

  “It’s very good,” Karras answered with a wan, bleak smile. “And I’m your closet now? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “In a way,” the detective answered gravely. “But more serious. And the closet must speak.”

  “Got a cigarette?”

  Kinderman stared at Karras blankly, incredulous.

  “A condition like mine and I would smoke?”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Karras murmured as he turned to face the river and clasped his hands atop the wall. It was to make them stop trembling.

  “Some doctor! God forbid I should be sick in some jungle and instead of Albert Schweitzer, there is with me only you! You cure warts still with frogs, Doctor Karras?”

  “It’s toads,” Karras answered, subdued.

  Kinderman frowned. “You’re not smiling jaunty jolly today, Father Karras. Something’s wrong. Now what is it? Come on, tell me.”

  Karras lowered his head and was silent. Then, “Okay,” he said softly. “Ask the closet whatever you want.”

  Sighing, the detective faced out to the river. “I was saying…,” he began. He scratched his brow with a thumbnail, then continued: “I was saying—well, let’s say I’m working on a case, Father Karras. It’s a homicide.”

  “Dennings?”

  “No, you wouldn’t be familiar with it, Father. It’s something purely hypothetical.”

  “Got it.”

  “Like a ritual witchcraft murder, this looks,” the detective continued broodingly, picking his words very carefully and slowly. “And let us say that in this house—this hypothetical house—there are living five people, and that one must be the killer.” With his hand, he made flat, chopping motions of emphasis. “Now I know this. I know this—I know this for a fact.” Then he paused, slowly exhaling breath. “But then the problem—all the evidence—well, it points to a child, Father Karras; a little girl maybe ten, twelve years old … just a baby; she could maybe be my daughter. Yes, I know: sounds fantastic … ridiculous … but true. Now there comes to this house, Father Karras, a very famous Catholic priest, and this case being purely hypothetical, Father, I learn through my also hypothetical genius that this priest has once cured a very special type illness. An illness which is mental, by the way, a fact I mention just in passing for your interest.”

  Karras mournfully lowered his head and nodded. “Yes, go on,” he said bleakly. “What else?”

  “What else? A great deal. It also seems that there is … well, satanism involved in this illness, plus also strength … yes, incredible strength. And this … hypothetical girl, let us say, then, could so easily twist a man’s head around.” Head lowered, the detective was nodding now. “Yes … yes, she could. And so the question…” Breaking off, the detective grimaced thoughtfully, then went on: “You see … you see, the girl is not responsible, Father. She’s insane, Father, totally demented and also just a child, Father Karras! A child! And yet the illness that she has … it could be dangerous. She could kill someone else. Who’s to know?” Once again the detective turned and squinted out across the river. “It’s a problem,” he said quietly and morosely. “What to do? Hypothetically, I mean. Just forget it? Forget it and hope she gets”—Kinderman paused—“gets well?” He reached for a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Oh, well, I just don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a terrible decision,” he said as he searched for a clean, unused section of the handkerchief. “Yes, it’s awful. Just awful. Horrific. And I hate to be the one who has to make it.” He again blew his nose, lightly dabbed at a nostril, then stuffed the damp handkerchief back into a pocket. “Father, what would be right in such a case?” he asked, turning back to Karras. “Hypothetically, I mean. What do you believe would be the right thing to do?”

  For an instant, Karras throbbed with a surge of rebellion, with a dull, weary anger at the piling on of weight upon weight. He let it ebb away into calm, and firmly meeting the detective’s gaze, he answered softly, “I would put it in the hands of a higher authority.”

  “I believe it is there at this moment.”

  “Yes. And I would leave it there, Lieutenant.”

  For some moments their gazes stayed locked. Then Kinder-man nodded, saying, “Yes, Father. Yes. Yes, I thought you would say that.” He turned to again observe the sunset. “So beautiful,” he said. “And so what makes us think such a thing has beauty while the Leaning Tower of Pisa does not. Also lizards and armadillos. Another mystery.” He tugged back his sleeve for a look at his wristwatch. “Ah, well, I have to go. Any minute, Mrs. K. will be schreiing that the dinner is cold.” He turned back to Karras. “Thank you, Father. I feel better … much better. Oh, incidentally, you could maybe do a favor? Give a message? If by chance you should ever meet a man last name Engstrom, please tell him—well, just say to him, ‘Elvira is in a clinic. She’s all right.’ He’ll understand. Would you do that? I mean, if by some crazy chance you should meet him.”

  Faintly puzzled, Karras answered, “I will.”

  “Look, we couldn’t make a film some night, Father?”

  Karras cast his eyes down and, nodding, murmured, “Soon.”

  “You’re like a rabbi when he mentions the Messiah: always ‘Soon.’ Listen, do me yet another favor please, would you?” Glancing up, Karras saw that the detective looked gravely concerned. “Stop this running round the track for a little. Just walk. Okay, Father? Slow it down. Could you do that for me, please?”
br />   Karras smiled faintly and said, “I will.”

  Hands in the pockets of his coat, the detective looked down at the sidewalk in resignation. “Yes, I know,” he said, nodding. “Soon. Always soon.” As he started away, he stopped, reached up a hand to the Jesuit’s shoulder and squeezed, saying, “Elia Kazan, your director, sends regards.”

  For a time, Karras watched him as he listed down the street; watched with fondness and with wonder at the heart’s labyrinthine turnings and improbable redemptions. He looked up at the clouds washed in pink above the river, then beyond to the west, where they drifted at the edge of the world, glowing faintly like a promise remembered. There’d been a time when he often saw God in such sights, felt His breath in the tinting of clouds, as now the lines of a poem he’d once loved returned to haunt him:

  Glory be to God for dappled things,

  For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow;

  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

  Fresh-fire-coal chestnut falls; finches’ wings…

  He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.

  Praise Him.

  Karras pressed the side of a fist against his lips and looked down against the sadness and the pain of loss welling up from his throat toward the corners of his eyes as he thought of a line from a psalm that once filled him with joy. “Oh, Lord,” he remembered achingly, “I have loved the beauty of Thy house.”

  Karras waited. Dared not risk another glance at the sunset.

  Instead, he looked up at Regan’s window.

  Sharon let him in and told him nothing had changed. She was carrying a bundle of foul-smelling laundry. She excused herself. “I’ve got to get this into the washing machine.”

  Karras watched her. Thought of coffee. But now he heard the demon croaking viciously at Merrin. He started toward the staircase, but then stopped as he remembered the message he was supposed to give Karl. Where was he? He turned to ask Sharon and glimpsed her disappearing down the basement steps. He went looking for the houseman in the kitchen. He wasn’t there. Only Chris. Her elbows propped and hands cupped at her temples, she was sitting at the breakfast table looking down at … What was it? Karras quietly moved closer. Stopped. A photo album. Scraps of paper. Pasted photos. Chris hadn’t seen him.