The Exorcist

  “Well, if there isn’t,” Chris said laughing, “then I’ll have one written in for you, Father!”

  Chris bade him a warm and fond good night.

  The last to leave were Mary Jo Perrin and her son. Chris held them at the door with idle chatter. She had the feeling that the psychic had something on her mind but was holding it back. To delay her departure, Chris asked her opinion on Regan’s continued use of the Ouija board and her Captain Howdy fixation. “Do you think there’s any harm in it?” she asked.

  Expecting an airily perfunctory dismissal, Chris was surprised when Mrs. Perrin frowned and looked down at the doorstep. She seemed to be thinking, and still in this posture, she stepped outside and joined her son, who was waiting on the stoop.

  When at last she lifted her head, her eyes were in shadow.

  “I would take it away from her,” she said quietly.

  She handed ignition keys to her son. “Bobby, start up the car,” she told him. “It’s cold.”

  He took the keys, told Chris shyly that he’d loved her in all her films, and then walked away swiftly toward an old, battered Mustang parked down the street.

  His mother’s eyes were still in shadow.

  “I don’t know what you think of me,” she said quietly and slowly. “Many people associate me with spiritualism. But that’s wrong. Oh, yes, I think I have a gift,” she went on, “but it isn’t occult. In fact, to me it seems perfectly natural. Being a Catholic, I believe that we all have a foot in two worlds. The one that we’re conscious of is in time, but now and then a freak like me gets a flash from the other foot, and that one, I think, is in eternity, where time does not exist and so the future and the past are both the present. So now and again when I’m feeling a tingling in that other foot, I believe that I’m seeing the future. Though who knows,” she said. “Maybe not.” She shrugged. “Well, whatever. But now the occult…” She paused, carefully picking her words. “The occult is something different. I’ve stayed away from that. I think dabbling with that can be dangerous. And that includes fooling around with a Ouija board.”

  Until now, Chris had thought her a woman of eminent good sense. And yet something in her manner now was causing Chris to feel a creeping foreboding. She tried to dispel it.

  “Oh, come on, Mary Jo,” Chris said with a smile. “Don’t you know how those Ouija boards work? It isn’t anything at all but a person’s subconscious, that’s all.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” Perrin answered. “Perhaps. It could all be suggestion. But in story after story that I’ve heard about séances, Ouija boards—all of that, Chris—they always seem to be pointing to the opening of a door of some sort. Oh, I know you don’t believe in the spirit world, Chris. But I do. And if I’m right, perhaps the bridge between the two worlds is what you yourself just mentioned, the subconscious mind. All I know is that things seem to happen. And, my dear, there are lunatic asylums all over the world filled with people who dabbled in the occult.”

  “Come on, you’re kidding, Mary Jo. I mean, aren’t you?”

  Silence. Then again the soft voice began droning out of darkness. “There was a family in Bavaria in nineteen twenty-one. I don’t remember the name, but they were a family of eleven. You could check it in the newspapers, I suppose. Just a short time following an attempt at a séance, they went out of their minds. All of them. All eleven. They went on a burning spree in their house, and when they’d finished with the furniture, they started on the three-month-old baby of one of the younger daughters. And that is when the neighbors broke in and stopped them.

  “The entire family,” she ended, “was put in an asylum.”

  “Oh, man!” Chris breathed as she thought of Captain Howdy, who had now assumed a menacing coloration. Mental illness. Was that it? Something. “I knew I should’ve taken Rags to see a psychiatrist!”

  “Oh, for heaven sakes!” said Mrs. Perrin, stepping forward into the light. “You never mind about me; you just listen to your doctor.” There was attempted reassurance in her voice that seemed to Chris to lack conviction. “I’m great at the future,” Perrin added with a smile, “but in the present I’m absolutely helpless.” She was fumbling in her purse. “Now then, where are my glasses? There, you see? I’ve mislaid them. Oh, here they are right here.” She had found them in a pocket of her coat. “Lovely home,” she remarked as she put on the glasses and glanced up at the upper façade of the house. “Gives a feeling of warmth.”

  “What a flipping relief,” said Chris. “For a second there, I thought you were going to tell me the house is haunted!”

  Mrs. Perrin glanced down to her, unsmiling.

  “Why would I tell you a thing like that?” she asked.

  Chris was thinking of a friend, a noted actress in Beverly Hills who had sold her home because of her insistence that it was inhabited by a poltergeist. Grinning wanly, Chris shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just kidding.”

  “It’s a good, friendly house,” Mrs. Perrin reassured her in an even tone. “I’ve been here before, you know; many times.”

  “Have you really?”

  “Yes, a friend of mine owned it, an admiral in the navy. I get a letter from him now and then. They’ve shipped him to sea again, poor dear. I don’t know if it’s really him that I miss or this house.” She smiled. “But then maybe you’ll invite me back.”

  “Mary Jo, I’d love to have you back. I mean it. You’re a fascinating person. Listen, call me. Will you call me next week?”

  “Yes, I would like to hear how your daughter’s coming on.”

  “Got the number?”

  “I do.”

  What was wrong? wondered Chris.

  Something in the psychic’s tone was off-center.

  “Well, good night,” said Mrs. Perrin, “and thanks again for a marvelous evening.” And before Chris could answer her, the psychic was rapidly walking down the street.

  Chris watched her and then slowly closed the front door as a heavy lassitude overcame her. Quite a night, she thought; some night.

  She went to the living room and stood over Willie, who was kneeling by the urine stain. She was brushing up the nap of the rug.

  “White vinegar I put on,” Willie muttered. “Two times.”

  “Comin’ out?”

  “Maybe now. I do not know. We will see.”

  “No, you can’t really tell until it dries.”

  Yeah, that’s brilliant there, punchy. That’s a brilliant observation. Judas priest, kid, go to bed!

  “C’mon, leave it alone for now, Willie. Get to sleep.”

  “No, I finish.”

  “Okay, then. And thanks. Good night.”

  “Good night, Madam.”

  Chris started up the stairs with weary steps. “Great curry, there, Willie,” she called down. “They all loved it.”

  “Thank you, Madam.”

  Chris looked in on Regan and found her still asleep. Then remembered the Ouija board. Should she hide it? Throw it away? Boy, Perrin’s really dingy when it comes to that stuff. Yet Chris was aware that the fantasy playmate was morbid and unhealthy. Yeah, maybe I should chuck it.

  Still, she was hesitant. Standing by the bedside and looking at Regan, she remembered an incident when her daughter was three, the night that Howard had decided she was much too old to continue to sleep with her baby bottle, on which she had grown dependent. He’d taken it away from her that night, and Regan had screamed until four in the morning, then behaved hysterically for days. Chris feared a similar reaction now. Better wait until I talk it all out with a shrink. Moreover, the Ritalin, she reflected, hadn’t had a chance to take effect, so at the last, she decided to wait and see.

  Chris retired to her room, settled wearily into bed and almost instantly fell asleep. Then awakened to the sound of Regan screaming. “Mother, come here! Come here quick, I’m afraid!”

  “I’m coming, Rags! I’m coming!”

  Chris raced down the hall to Regan’s bedroom. Whimpering. Crying. A sound of
bedsprings rapidly moving up and down.

  “Oh, my baby, what’s wrong?” Chris exclaimed.

  She flicked on the lights.

  Good Christ almighty!

  Her face stained with tears, contorted with terror, Regan lay taut on her back as she gripped at the sides of her narrow bed. “Mother, why is it shaking?” she cried. “Make it stop! Oh, I’m scared! Make it stop! Mother, please make it stop!”

  The bed’s mattress was violently quivering back and forth.

  The Edge

  In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

  —Aeschylus

  Chapter One

  They brought her to an ending in a crowded cemetery where the gravestones cried for breath.

  The Mass had been lonely as her life. Her brothers from Brooklyn. The grocer on the corner who’d extended her credit. Watching them lower her into the dark of a world without windows, Damien Karras sobbed with a grief he had long misplaced.

  “Ah, Dimmy, Dimmy…”

  An uncle with an arm around his shoulder.

  “Never mind, she’s in heaven now, Dimmy. She’s happy.”

  Oh, God, let it be! Ah, God! Ah, please! Oh, God, please be!

  They waited in the car while he lingered by the grave. He could not bear the thought of her being alone.

  Driving to Pennsylvania Station, he listened to his uncles speak of their illnesses in broken, immigrant accents.

  “… emphysema … gotta quit smokin’ … I ohmos’ died las’ year, you know dat?”

  Spasms of rage fought to break from his lips, but he pressed them back and felt ashamed. He looked out the window: they were passing by the Home Relief Station where on Saturday mornings in the dead of winter she would pick up the milk and the sacks of potatoes while he lay in his bed; the Central Park Zoo, where she left him in summer while she begged by the fountain in front of the Plaza. Passing the hotel, Karras burst into sobs, and then choked back the memories, wiped at the wetness of stinging regrets. He wondered why love had waited for this distance, waited for the moment when he need not touch, when the limits of contact and human surrender had dwindled to the size of a printed Mass card tucked in his wallet: In Memoriam … He knew. This grief was old.

  He arrived at Georgetown in time for dinner, but had no appetite. He paced inside his cottage. Jesuit friends came by with condolences. Stayed briefly. Promised prayers.

  Shortly after ten, Joe Dyer appeared with a bottle of Scotch. He displayed it proudly: “Chivas Regal!”

  “Where’d you get the money for it—out of the poor box?”

  “Don’t be an asshole, that would be breaking my vow of poverty.”

  “Where did you get it, then?”

  “I stole it.”

  Karras smiled and shook his head as he fetched a glass and a pewter coffee mug, rinsed them out in his tiny bathroom sink.

  “I believe you,” he said hoarsely.

  “Greater faith I have never seen.”

  Karras felt a stab of familiar pain. He shook it off and returned to Dyer, who was sitting on his cot breaking open the seal on the bottle of Scotch. He sat beside him.

  “Would you like to absolve me now or later?” asked Dyer.

  “Just pour and we’ll absolve each other.”

  Dyer poured deep into glass and cup. “College presidents shouldn’t drink,” he murmured. “It sets a bad example. I figure I relieved him of a terrible temptation.”

  Karras swallowed Scotch, but not the story. He knew the president’s ways too well. A man of tact and sensitivity, he always gave through indirection. Dyer had come, he knew, as a friend, but also as the president’s personal emissary.

  Dyer was good for him; made him laugh; talked about the party and Chris MacNeil; purveyed new anecdotes about the Jesuit Prefect of Discipline. He drank very little but continually replenished Karras’s glass, and when he thought he was numb enough for sleep, he got up from the cot and made Karras stretch out, while he sat at the desk and continued to talk until Karras’s eyes were closed and his comments were mumbled grunts.

  Dyer stood up, undid the laces of Karras’s shoes and slipped them off.

  “Gonna steal my shoes now?” Karras muttered thickly.

  “No, I tell fortunes by reading the creases. Now shut up and go to sleep.”

  “You’re a Jesuit cat burglar.”

  Dyer laughed lightly and covered him with a coat that he took from a closet. “Listen, someone’s got to worry about the bills around this place. All you other guys do is rattle your rosary beads for the winos down on M Street.”

  Karras made no answer. His breathing was regular and deep. Dyer moved quietly to the door and flicked out the light.

  “Stealing is a sin,” muttered Karras in the darkness.

  “Mea culpa,” Dyer said softly.

  For a time he waited, then at last decided that Karras was asleep. He left the cottage.

  In the middle of the night, Karras awakened in tears. He had dreamed of his mother. Standing at a window high in Manhattan, he’d seen her emerging from a subway kiosk across the street. She stood at the curb with a brown paper shopping bag and was searching for him, calling out his name. Karras waved. She didn’t see him. She wandered the street. Buses. Trucks. Unfriendly crowds. She was growing frightened. She returned to the subway and began to descend. Karras grew frantic, ran to the street and began to weep as he called her name; as he could not find her; as he pictured her helpless and bewildered in a maze of tunnels beneath the ground.

  He waited for his sobbing to subside, and then fumbled for the Scotch. He sat on the cot and drank in darkness. Wet came the tears. They would not cease. This was like childhood, this grief.

  He remembered a telephone call from his uncle:

  “Dimmy, da edema, it affected her brain. She don’t let a doctor come anywhere near her. Jus’ keeps screamin’ things. Dimmy, she even talk to da goddamn radio. I figure dat she got ta go Bellevue, Dimmy. A regular hospital won’t put up wit’ dat. I jus’ figure a coupla months an’ she’s good as new; den we take her out again. Okay? Lissen, Dimmy, we awready done it. Dey give her a shot an’ den dey take her in da ambulance dis mornin’. We didn’ wanna bodda you, excep’ dere is gonna be a hearin’ in da court and you gotta sign da papers. What? Private hospital? Who’s got da money for dat, Dimmy? You?”

  Karras didn’t remember falling asleep.

  He awakened in torpor, with memory of loss draining blood from his brain. He reeled to the bathroom; showered; shaved; dressed in a cassock. It was five-thirty-five. He unlocked the door to Holy Trinity, put on his vestments and offered up Mass at the left side altar.

  “Memento etiam…,” he prayed with bleak despair: “Remember thy servant, Mary Karras…”

  In the tabernacle door he saw the face of the nurse at Bellevue Receiving; heard again the screams from the isolation room.

  “You her son?”

  “Yes, I’m Damien Karras.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go in there. She’s pitchin’ a fit.”

  He’d looked through the port at the windowless room with the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; padded walls; no furniture save for the cot on which she raved.

  “… grant her, we pray Thee, a place of refreshment, light and peace…”

  As she saw him and met his gaze, she’d grown suddenly silent; then got out of the bed and slowly moved to the small, round, glass observation port, her expression baffled and hurt.

  “Why you do this, Dimmy? Why?”

  The eyes had been meeker than a lamb’s.

  “Agnus Dei…,” Karras murmured as he bowed his head and struck his breast with a fist. “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant her rest…” Moments later, as he closed his eyes and held up the Host, he saw his mother in the hearing room, her little hands clasped gentle in her lap, her expression docile and confused as the judg
e explained to her the Bellevue psychiatrist’s report.

  “Do you understand that, Mary?”

  She’d nodded; wouldn’t open her mouth; they had taken her dentures.

  “Well, what do you say about that, Mary?”

  She’d proudly answered him, “My boy, he speak for me.”

  An anguished moan escaped Karras’s lips as he bowed his head above the Host. He struck his breast as if it were the years that he wanted to turn back as he murmured, “Domine, non sum dignus. Say but the word and my soul shall be healed.”

  Against all reason, against all knowledge, he prayed there was Someone to hear his prayer.

  He did not think so.

  After the Mass, he returned to the cottage and tried to sleep.

  Without success.

  Later in the morning, a youngish priest that he’d never seen before came by unexpectedly. He knocked and looked in through the open door. “You busy? Can I see you for a while?”

  In the eyes, the restless burden; in the voice, the tugging plea.

  For an instant Karras hated him.

  “Come in,” he said gently. And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that so frequently rendered him helpless in the face of someone’s plea; that he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself out to rescue at the call of someone else’s need. It gave him no peace. Not even in sleep. At the edge of his dreams, there was often a sound like the faint, distant cry of someone in distress, and for minutes after waking, he would feel the anxiety of some duty unfulfilled.

  The young priest fumbled; faltered; seemed shy. Karras led him patiently. Offered cigarettes. Instant coffee. Then forced a look of interest as the moody young visitor gradually unfolded a familiar problem: the terrible loneliness of priests.

  Of all the anxieties that Karras encountered among the community, this one had lately become the most prevalent. Cut off from their families as well as from women, many of the Jesuits were also fearful of expressing affection for fellow priests; of forming deep and loving friendships.