The Exorcist

  “Excuse me, please,” Karras said softly. “Is Karl in his room?”

  Chris looked up at him wanly and shook her head. “He’s on an errand,” she answered huskily and softly. Karras heard her sniffle. Then “There’s coffee there, Father,” Chris murmured. “It ought to perc in just a minute.”

  As Karras glanced over at the percolator light, he heard Chris getting up from the table, and when he turned he saw her moving quickly past him with her face averted. He heard a quavery “Excuse me,” and in a moment Chris had exited the kitchen. Karras looked down at the photo album. Candid shots. A young girl. Very pretty. With a pang, Karras realized he was looking at Regan: here, blowing out candles on a whipped-creamy birthday cake; here, sitting on a lakefront dock in shorts and a T-shirt, waving gaily at the camera. Something was stenciled on the front of the T-shirt: CAMP … He could not make it out. On the opposite page a ruled sheet of paper bore the script of a child:

  If instead of just clay

  I could take all the prettiest things

  Like a rainbow,

  Or clouds or the way a bird sings,

  Maybe then, dearest Mommy,

  If I put them all together,

  I could really make a sculpture of you.

  Below the poem: I LOVE YOU! HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! The signature, in pencil, was Rags.

  Karras shut his eyes. He could not bear this chance meeting. He turned away wearily and waited for the coffee to brew. With lowered head, he gripped the counter and again closed his eyes. Shut it out! he thought; shut it all out! But he could not, and as he listened to the thumping and bubbling of the percolating coffee, his hands began trembling again as compassion swelled suddenly and blindly into rage at disease and at pain, at the suffering of children and the frailty of the body and the monstrous and outrageous corruption of death.

  “If instead of just clay…”

  The rage ebbed away to sorrow and helpless frustration.

  “… all the prettiest things…”

  He could not wait for coffee. He must go. He must do something. Help someone. Try. He left the kitchen and as he came to the living room, he looked through the open door and saw Chris on the sofa, sobbing convulsively, while Sharon tried comforting her. He looked away and walked up the stairs, heard the demon roaring frenziedly at Merrin. “… would have lost! You would have lost and you knew it! You scum, Merrin! Bastard! Come back! Come and…”

  Karras blocked it out.

  “… or the way a bird sings.”

  As he entered Regan’s bedroom, Karras realized he had forgotten to put on his sweater. Slightly shivering from the cold, he turned his gaze to Regan. Her head was sideways and a little turned away from him as the demonic voice continued to rage.

  He went slowly to his chair and picked up a blanket, and only then, in his exhaustion, did he notice Merrin’s absence. Moments later, remembering that he needed to check Regan’s blood pressure, Karras wearily got up again, and was shambling toward her when abruptly he pulled up in shock. Limp and disjointed, Merrin lay sprawled facedown on the floor beside the bed. Karras knelt, turned him over, and seeing the bluish coloration of his face, he quickly felt for a pulse and in a wrenching, stabbing instant of anguish, Karras realized that Merrin was dead.

  “Saintly flatulence! Die, will you? Die? Karras, heal him!” raged the demon. “Bring him back and let us finish, let us…”

  Heart failure. Coronary artery. “Ah, God!” Karras groaned in a whisper. “God, no!” He shut his eyes and shook his head in disbelief, in despair, and then, abruptly, with a surge of grief, he dug his thumb with savage force into Merrin’s pale wrist as if to squeeze from its sinews the lost beat of life.

  “… pious…”

  Karras sagged back and took a breath. Then he saw the tiny pills scattered loose on the floor. He picked one up and with aching recognition saw that Merrin had known. Nitroglycerin. He’d known. His eyes red and brimming, Karras looked at Merrin’s face. “… go and rest for a little now, Damien.”

  “Even worms will not eat your corruption, you…!”

  Hearing the words of the demon, Karras looked up and began visibly trembling with an uncontrollable, murderous fury.

  Do not listen!

  “… homosexual…”

  Do not listen! Do not listen!

  A vein stood out angrily throbbing on Karras’s forehead, and as he picked up Merrin’s hands and started tenderly to place them in the form of a cross on his chest, he heard the demon croak, “Now put his cock in his hands!” as a glob of putrid spittle hit the dead priest’s eye. “The last rites!” mocked the demon. It put back its head and laughed wildly.

  Karras stared numbly at the spittle. Did not move. Could not hear above the roaring of his blood. And then slowly, in quivering, side-angling jerks, he looked up with a face that was a purpling snarl, an electrifying spasm of hatred and rage. “You son of a bitch!” Karras seethed in a burning whisper, and though he did not move, he seemed to be uncoiling, the sinews of his neck pulling taut like cables. The demon stopped laughing and eyed him with malevolence. “You were losing!” Karras taunted. “You’re a loser! You’ve always been a loser!” Regan splattered him with vomit. He ignored it. “Yes, you’re very good with children!” he said through gritted teeth. “Little girls! Well, come on! Let’s see you try something bigger! Come on!” He had his hands out like great, fleshy hooks, slowly beckoning, inviting. “Come on! Come on, loser! Try me! Leave the girl and take me! Come into me!”

  The next instant Karras’s upper body jerked sharply upright with his head bent back and facing up to the ceiling, and then convulsively down and forward again, with the Jesuit’s features twitching and contorting into a mask of unthinkable hatred and rage, while in strong, spasmodic jerks, as if pushing against some unseen resistance, the Jesuit’s large and powerful hands were reaching out to clutch the throat of a screaming Regan MacNeil.

  Chris and Sharon heard the sounds. They were in the study. Chris sat at the bar while Sharon was behind it, mixing them a drink, when both the women glanced up at the ceiling as they heard a commotion in Regan’s bedroom: Regan screaming in terror and then Karras’s voice fiercely shouting, “No!” And then stumblings. Sharp bumps against furniture. Against a wall. Chris knocked her drink over as she flinched at a violent crashing sound, a sound of breaking glass, and in an instant she and Sharon were racing up the stairs to the door of Regan’s bedroom where, bursting in, they saw the shutters of the window on the floor, ripped off their hinges! And the window! The glass had been totally shattered!

  Alarmed, they rushed forward toward the window, and as they did, Chris saw Merrin on the floor by the bed. She gasped, standing rooted in shock, and then she ran to him, kneeling beside him. “Oh, my God!” she whimpered. “Sharon! Shar, come here! Quick, come—”

  Sharon’s scream of horror cut her off. Chris looked up bloodlessly, gaping, and saw Sharon at the window staring down at the steps with both hands to her cheeks.

  “Shar, what is it?”

  “It’s Karras! Father Karras!” Sharon cried out hysterically, racing from the room. Her face ashen, Chris got up and moved quickly to the window. Looked below. And felt her heart dropping out of her body. At the bottom of the steps on M Street, Karras lay crumpled and bloody as a crowd began gathering around him.

  A hand to her cheek as she stared down in horror, Chris tried to move her lips. To speak. She couldn’t.

  “Mother?”

  A small, wan voice calling tearfully behind her. Chris partly turned her head, her eyes wide, not quite daring to believe what she had heard. Then the voice came again. Regan’s. “Mother, what’s happening? Come here! I’m afraid, Mom! Oh, please, Mom! Please! Please come here!”

  Chris had turned and seen the tears of confusion, and suddenly she was racing to the bed, weeping, “Rags! Oh, my baby, my baby! Oh, Rags! It’s really you! It’s really you!”

  Downstairs, Sharon lunged from the house and ran frantically to the Jesuit residenc
e hall, where she urgently asked to see Dyer. He came quickly to Reception. She told him. He stared at her in shock. “Called an ambulance?” he asked her.

  “Oh my God! No, I didn’t! I didn’t think!”

  Swiftly Dyer gave instructions to the switchboard operator, then he raced from the hall along with Sharon. Crossed the street. Raced down the steps.

  “Let me through, please! Coming through!” As he pushed his way through the bystanders, Dyer heard murmurs of the litany of indifference. “What happened?” “Some guy fell down the steps.” “Yeah, he must’ve been drunk. See the vomit?” “Come on, sweeties, we’re going to be late.”

  At last Dyer broke through, and for a heart-stopping instant he felt frozen in a timeless dimension of grief, in a space where the air was too painful to breathe. Karras lay crumpled and twisted, on his back, with his head in the center of a growing pool of blood. His jaw slack, an odd shine in his eyes, he’d been fixedly staring upward as if at the patiently waiting stars of some beckoning, mysterious horizon. But now his eyes shifted over to Dyer. Seemed to glow with an elation. Of completion. Of something like triumph.

  And then with some plea. Something urgent.

  “Come on, back now! Move it back!” A policeman. Dyer knelt and put a light, tender hand like a caress against the bruised, gashed face. So many cuts. A bloody ribbon trickled down from the mouth. “Damien…” Dyer paused to still the quaver in his throat, as in Karras’s eyes he saw that faint, eager shine; the warm plea.

  Leaning over, Dyer asked, “Can you talk?”

  Slowly Karras reached his hand to Dyer’s wrist. He clutched it and gave it a squeeze.

  Fighting back the tears, Dyer leaned down closer and, putting his mouth next to Karras’s ear, he asked softly, “Do you want to make your confession now, Damien?”

  A squeeze.

  “Are you sorry for all of the sins of your life and for having offended Almighty God?”

  The hand slowly releasing; and then a squeeze.

  Leaning back upright, Dyer slowly traced the sign of the cross over Karras as he emotionally recited the words of absolution: “Ego te absolvo…”

  An enormous tear rolled down from a corner of Karras’s eye, and now Dyer felt his wrist being squeezed even harder, continuously, as he finished the absolution: “… in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

  Dyer leaned over again with his mouth next to Karras’s ear. Waited. Forced the swelling from his throat. And then he murmured, “Are you…?” Dyer stopped short. The pressure on his wrist had abruptly slackened. He pulled back his head and saw the eyes filled with peace; and with something else: something like joy at the end of heart’s longing. The eyes were still staring. But at nothing in this world. Nothing here.

  Slowly and tenderly, Dyer slid the eyelids down. He heard the ambulance wail from afar. He began to say, “Good-bye,” but could not finish. He lowered his head and wept.

  The ambulance arrived. They put Karras on a stretcher, and as they were loading him aboard, Dyer climbed in and sat beside the intern. He reached over and took Karras’s hand.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him now, Father,” said the intern in a kindly voice. “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Don’t come.”

  His gaze holding on that chipped, torn face, Dyer slowly shook his head and said quietly, “No. I’m coming.”

  The intern looked up to the ambulance rear door, where the patiently waiting driver was standing and looking in with his eyebrows raised in a question. The intern mutely nodded and the rear door was raised and locked shut.

  From the sidewalk, Sharon watched numbly as the ambulance slowly drove away. She heard murmurs from the bystanders.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, well, who the hell knows.”

  The wail of the ambulance siren lifted shrill into night above the river. Then abruptly it ceased.

  The driver had remembered that time no longer mattered.

  Epilogue

  Thin June sunlight streamed through the window of Chris’s bedroom as she folded a blouse on top of the contents of a suitcase on her bed and then closed it. She moved quickly toward the door. “Okay, that’s all of it,” she told Karl, and as the Swiss came forward to lock the suitcase, Chris went out into the hall and toward Regan’s bedroom. “Hey, Rags, how ya comin’?” she called out.

  It was now six weeks since the deaths of the priests. Since the shock, since the closed investigation by Kinderman. And still there were no answers. There were only haunting speculations and frequent awakenings from sleep in tears. Merrin’s death had been caused by coronary artery disease, but as for Karras… “Baffling,” Lieutenant Kinderman had breathed out emphysematously. “No. Not the girl,” he’d decided. She hadn’t done it: she’d been firmly secured by restraining straps. Therefore, Karras had ripped away the shutters, leaping through the window to deliberate death. But why? An attempt to escape something horrible? Kinderman had quickly ruled that out, for had he wished to escape, the priest could have gone out the door. Nor was Karras in any case a man who would run. But then why the fatal leap?

  For Kinderman, the answer began to take shape in a statement by Dyer making mention of Karras’s emotional conflicts: his guilt about his mother; her death; his problem of faith; and when Kinderman added to these the continuous lack of sleep for several days; to the concern and the guilt over Regan’s imminent death; to the demonic attacks in the form of his mother, and then, finally, the shock of Merrin’s death, he sadly concluded that, shattered by guilts he could no longer endure, the Jesuit psychiatrist’s mind had snapped. Moreover, in the course of investigating the mysterious death of Burke Dennings, the detective had learned from his readings on possession that exorcists themselves had at times become possessed, and in circumstances much the same as had been present here: strong feelings of guilt and the need to be punished, these added to the power of autosuggestion. Karras had been ripe. Although Dyer had refused to accept it. Again and again he returned to the house during Regan’s convalescence to talk to Chris, asking over and over if Regan was now able to recall what had happened in the bedroom that night, but the answer was always a head shake or a no, and finally the case was closed.

  Chris poked her head into Regan’s bedroom. With two stuffed animals in her clutch, she was staring down with a child’s discontent at the packed and open suitcase on her bed. They were catching an afternoon flight to Los Angeles, leaving Sharon and the Engstroms to close up the house, and then Karl to drive the red Jaguar cross-country back home. “How are you coming with your packing, honey?” Chris asked. Regan tilted her face up to her. A little wan. A little gaunt. A little dark beneath the eyes. “There’s not enough room in this thing!” she said, frowning and with her lips in a pout.

  “Well, you can’t take it all, now, sweetheart. Come on, leave it and Willie will bring all the rest. Come on, baby. Gots to hurry or we’ll miss our plane.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “That’s my baby.”

  Chris left her and went quickly down the stairs. As she got to the bottom, the door chimes rang and she went to the door and pulled it open.

  “Hi, Chris.” It was a long-faced Father Dyer. “Just came by to say so long,” he said.

  “Come on in. I was just going to call you.”

  “No, that’s okay, Chris; I know you’re in a hurry.”

  She took his hand and drew him in. “Oh, come on! I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Have one with me.”

  “Well, if you’re sure…”

  She said that she was, and they went to the kitchen, where they sat at the table, drank coffee and spoke pleasantries, while Sharon and the Engstroms bustled back and forth. Chris spoke of Merrin: how awed and surprised she had been at seeing the notables and foreign dignitaries at his funeral; then for moments they were silent together while Dyer stared down into his cup and into sadness. Chris read his thought. “She still can’t remember,” she said gently. “I’m sorry.”
r />   Still downcast, the Jesuit nodded. Chris glanced to her breakfast plate. Nervous and excited, she hadn’t eaten. The rose was still there. She picked it up and pensively twisted it, rolling it back and forth by the stem. “And he never even knew her,” she murmured. Then she held the rose still and flicked her eyes up at Dyer. He was staring at her intently. “What do you think really happened?” he asked Chris softly. “I mean, as a nonbeliever. Do you think she was really possessed?”

  Chris pondered, looking down as she absently toyed with the rose again. “I don’t know, Father Dyer. I just don’t. You come to God and you have to figure if there is one, then he must need a million years’ sleep every night or else he tends to get irritable. Know what I mean? He never talks. But when it comes to the Devil…” She looked up at Dyer. “Well, the Devil’s something else. I could buy that; in fact, maybe I do. You know why? Because the creep keeps doing commercials.”

  Dyer stared at her with fondness for a moment, then said quietly, “But if all of the evil in the world makes you think that there might be a devil, Chris, how do you account for all of the good?”

  Chris held Dyer’s steady gaze. The words had made her squint and frown in thought until at last she looked aside and gently nodded her head. “Never thought of that,” she murmured. “Good point.” The sadness and shock of Karras’s death had settled on her mood like a melancholy haze, but she tried now to focus on this modest invitation to hope and to light by remembering what Dyer had said to her once as he had walked her to her car at the Jesuit cemetery on campus after Karras’s burial there. “Can you come to the house for a while?” she’d asked him. “Oh, I’d like to, but I can’t miss the feast,” he’d replied. She’d looked puzzled and so he’d explained, “When a Jesuit dies, we have a feast of celebration. For him it’s a beginning.”