The Exorcist Read online

  Chris entered her bedroom, and as she slipped off her robe before dressing for work, she murmured softly, “Yeah, maybe cat better … much better.”

  When she grinned, her entire face crinkled up.

  The filming went smoothly that day. Later in the morning, Sharon came by the set and during breaks between scenes, in her portable dressing room, she and Chris handled items of business: a letter to her agent (she would think about the script); “okay” to the White House; a wire to Howard reminding him to telephone on Regan’s birthday; a call to her business manager asking if she could afford to take off a year; and then plans for a dinner party April twenty-third.

  Early in the evening, Chris took Regan to a movie, and the following day they drove around to points of interest in Chris’s red Jaguar XKE. The Capitol. The Lincoln Memorial. The Cherry Blossoms. A bite to eat. Then across the river to Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where Regan turned solemn, while later, at the grave of John F. Kennedy, she seemed to grow distant and sad. She stared at the “eternal flame” for a time, and then, mutely reaching up to grip her mother’s hand, she said tonelessly, “Mom, why do people have to die?”

  The question pierced her mother’s soul. Oh, Rags, you too? You too? Oh, no! And yet what could she tell her? Lies? No, she couldn’t. She looked at her daughter’s upturned face, at her eyes misting up with tears. Had Regan sensed her thoughts? She had done it so often before. “Honey, people get tired,” she told Regan tenderly.

  “Why does God let them?”

  Looking down at her daughter, Chris was silent. Puzzled. Disturbed. An atheist, she had never taught Regan religion. She thought it would have been dishonest. “Who’s been telling you about God?” she asked.

  “Sharon.”

  “Oh.”

  She would have to speak to her.

  “Mom, why does God let us get tired?”

  Looking down at the pain in those sensitive eyes, Chris surrendered; couldn’t tell her what she really believed. Which was nothing. “Well, after a while God gets lonesome for us, Rags. He wants us back.”

  Regan folded herself into silence. She stayed totally quiet all during the drive home, her mood persisting all the rest of that day and then, disturbingly, all through Monday.

  On Tuesday, Regan’s birthday, the spell of strange silence and sadness seemed to break. Chris took her along to the filming, and when the shooting day was over, a huge cake with twelve lighted candles on it was brought out while the film’s cast and crew sang “Happy Birthday.” Always a kind and gentle man when sober, Dennings had the lights rewarmed and, loudly calling it a “screen test,” filmed the scene as Regan blew out the candles and cut the cake, and then promised he would make her a star. Regan seemed cheerful, even gay. But after dinner and the opening of presents, the mood seemed to fade. No word from Howard. Chris placed a call to him in Rome, and was told by a clerk at his hotel that he hadn’t been there for several days and that he had left no forwarding number. He was somewhere on a yacht.

  Chris made excuses.

  Regan nodded, subdued, and shook her head to her mother’s suggestion that they go to the Hot Shoppe for a shake. Without a word, she went down to the basement playroom, where she remained until time for bed.

  The following morning when Chris opened her eyes, she found Regan in bed with her, half awake.

  “Well, what in the … Regan, what are you doing here?” Chris said chuckling.

  “Mom, my bed was shaking.”

  “Oh, you nut!” Chris kissed her and pulled up her covers. “Go to sleep. It’s still early.”

  What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night.

  Chapter Two

  He stood at the edge of the lonely subway platform, listening for the rumble of a train that would still the ache that was always with him. Like his pulse. Heard only in silence. He shifted his bag to the other hand and stared down the tunnel. Points of light. They stretched into dark like guides to hopelessness.

  A cough. He glanced to the left. A gray-stubbled derelict, numb on the ground in a pool of his urine, was sitting up, his yellowed eyes fixed on the priest with the chipped, sad face.

  The priest looked away. He would come. He would whine. Couldjya help an old altar boy, Father? Wouldjya? The vomit-flaked hand pressing down on the shoulder. The fumbling in his pocket for the holy medal. The reeking of the breath of a thousand confessions with the wine and the garlic and the stale mortal sins belching out all together, and smothering … smothering…

  The priest heard the derelict rising.

  Don’t come!

  Heard a step.

  Ah, my God, let me be!

  “Hi ya, Faddah.”

  He winced. Sagged. Couldn’t turn. He could not bear to search for Christ again in stench and hollow eyes; for the Christ of pus and bleeding excrement, the Christ who could not be. In an absent gesture, he felt at his coat sleeve as if for an unseen band of mourning. He dimly remembered another Christ.

  “I’m a Cat’lic, Faddah!”

  The faint rumbling of an incoming train. Then sounds of stumbling. The priest turned and looked. The bum was staggering, about to faint, and with a blind, sudden rush, the priest got to him; caught him; dragged him to the bench against the wall.

  “I’m a Cat’lic,” the derelict mumbled. “I’m a Cat’lic.”

  The priest eased him down; stretched him out; saw his train. He quickly pulled a dollar from out of his wallet and placed it in the pocket of the derelict’s jacket. Then decided he might lose it. He plucked out the dollar, stuffed it into a urine-damp trouser pocket, then picked up his bag and boarded the train, sitting in a corner and pretending to sleep until the end of the line, where he climbed up to the street and began the long walk to Fordham University. The dollar had been meant for his cab.

  When he reached the residence hall for visitors, he signed his name on the register. Damien Karras, he wrote. Then examined it. Something was wrong. Wearily he remembered and added “S.J.,” the abbreviation for Society of Jesus. He took a room in Weigel Hall and, after an hour he at last fell asleep.

  The following day he attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. As principal speaker, he delivered a paper titled “Psychological Aspects of Spiritual Development,” and at the end of the day, he enjoyed a few drinks and a bite to eat with some other psychiatrists. They paid. He left them early. He would have to see his mother.

  From a subway stop, he walked to the crumbling brownstone apartment building on Manhattan’s East Twenty-First Street. Pausing by the steps that led up to the dark oak door, he eyed the children on the stoop. Unkempt. Ill-clothed. No place to go. He remembered evictions: humiliations: walking home with a seventh-grade sweetheart and encountering his mother as she hopefully rummaged through a city garbage can on the corner of the street. Karras slowly climbed the steps. Smelled an odor like cooking. Like warm, damp, rotted sweetness. He remembered the visits to Mrs. Choirelli, his mother’s friend, in her tiny apartment with the eighteen cats. He gripped the banister and climbed, overcome by a sudden, draining weariness that he knew was caused by guilt. He should never have left her. Not alone. On the fourth-floor landing he reached into a pocket for a key and slipped it into the lock: 4C, his mother’s apartment. He opened the door as if it were a tender wound.

  Her greeting was joyful. A shout. A kiss. She rushed to make coffee. Dark complexion. Stubby, gnarled legs. He sat in the kitchen and listened to her talk, the dingy walls and soiled floor seeping into his bones. The apartment was a hovel. Social Security and every month a few dollars from her brother.

  She sat at the table. Mrs. This. Uncle That. Still in immigrant accents. He avoided those eyes that were wells of sorrow, eyes that spent days staring out of a window.

  I never should have left her.

  She could neither read nor write any English, and so, later, he wrote a few letters for her, and afterward he worked at repairing the tuner on a crackling plastic rad
io. Her world. The news. Mayor Lindsay.

  He went to the bathroom. Yellowing newspaper spread on the tile. Stains of rust in the tub and the sink. On the floor, an old corset. These the seeds of vocation. From these he had fled into love, but now the love had grown cold, and in the night he heard it whistling through the chambers of his heart like a lost and gently crying wind.

  At a quarter to eleven, he kissed her good-bye; promised to return just as soon as he could.

  He left with the radio tuned to the news.

  Once back in his room in Weigel Hall, Karras gave some thought to writing a letter to the Jesuit head of the Maryland province. He’d covered the ground with him once before: request for a transfer to the New York province in order to be closer to his mother; request for a teaching post and relief from his counseling duties. In requesting the latter, he’d cited as a reason “unfitness” for the work.

  The Maryland Provincial had taken it up with him during the course of his annual inspection tour of Georgetown University, a function closely paralleling that of an army inspector general in the granting of confidential hearings to those who had grievances or complaints. On the point of Damien Karras’s mother, the Provincial had nodded and expressed his sympathy; but the question of the Jesuit’s “unfitness,” he thought, was contradicted by Karras’s record. Still, Karras had pursued it, had sought out Tom Bermingham, the Georgetown University president. “It’s more than psychiatry, Tom. You know that. Some of their problems come down to their vocation, to the meaning of their lives. Tom, it isn’t always sex that’s involved, it’s their faith, and I just can’t cut it. It’s too much. I need out.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Tom, I think I’ve lost my faith.”

  Bermingham didn’t press him on the reasons for his doubt. For which Karras was grateful. He knew that his answers would have sounded insane. The need to rend food with the teeth and then defecate. My mother’s nine First Fridays. Stinking socks. Thalidomide babies. An item in the paper about a young altar boy waiting at a bus stop; set on by strangers; sprayed with kerosene; ignited. No. No, too emotional. Vague. Existential. More rooted in logic was the silence of God. In the world there was evil and much of it resulted from doubt, from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a reasonable God refuse to end it? Not finally reveal Himself? Not speak?

  “Lord, give us a sign…”

  The raising of Lazarus was dim in the distant past.

  No one now living had heard his laughter.

  And so why not a sign?

  At various times Karras longed to have lived with Christ: to have seen him; to have touched him; to have probed his eyes. Ah, my God, let me see you! Let me know! Come in dreams!

  The yearning consumed him.

  He sat at the desk now with pen above paper. Perhaps it wasn’t time that had silenced the Provincial. Perhaps he understood, Karras thought, that finally faith was a matter of love.

  Bermingham had promised to consider the requests, to try to influence the Provincial, but thus far nothing had been done. Karras wrote the letter and went to bed.

  He sluggishly awakened at 5 A.M., went to the chapel in Weigel Hall to secure a Host for the saying of Mass, then returned to his room. “ ‘Et clamor meus ad te veniat,’ ” he prayed with murmured anguish: “ ‘And let my cry come unto Thee…’ ” He lifted the Host in consecration with an aching remembrance of the joy it once gave him; felt again, as he did each morning, the pang of an unexpected glimpse from afar and unnoticed of a long-lost love. He broke the Host above the chalice. “ ‘Peace I leave you. My peace I give you.’ ” He tucked the Host inside his mouth and swallowed the papery taste of despair. When the Mass was over, he carefully polished the chalice and then placed it in his bag. He rushed for the seven-ten train back to Washington carrying pain in a black valise.

  Chapter Three

  Early on the morning of April 11, Chris made a telephone call to her doctor in Los Angeles to ask him for a referral to a local psychiatrist for Regan.

  “Oh? What’s wrong?”

  Chris explained. Beginning on the day after Regan’s birthday—and following Howard’s failure to call—she had noticed a sudden and dramatic change in her daughter’s behavior and disposition. Insomnia. Quarrelsome. Fits of temper. Kicked things. Threw things. Screamed. Wouldn’t eat. In addition, her energy seemed abnormal. She was constantly moving, touching, turning; tapping; running and jumping about. Doing poorly with schoolwork. Fantasy playmate. Eccentric attention-getting tactics.

  “Such as what?” the physician inquired.

  Chris started with the rappings. Since the night she’d checked the attic, she’d heard them again on two occasions, and in both of these instances, she’d noticed, Regan was present in the room and the rappings would cease at the moment Chris entered. Secondly, she told him, Regan would “lose” things in the room: a dress; her toothbrush; books; her shoes. She complained about “somebody moving” her furniture. Finally, on the morning following the dinner at the White House, Chris saw Karl in Regan’s bedroom pulling a bureau back into place from a spot that was halfway across the room. When Chris had inquired what he was doing, he repeated his former “Someone is funny,” and refused to elaborate any further; but shortly thereafter, Chris had found Regan in the kitchen complaining that someone had moved all her furniture during the night when she was sleeping, and this was the incident, Chris explained, that had finally crystallized her suspicions. It was clearly her daughter who was doing it all.

  “You mean somnambulism? She’s doing it in her sleep?”

  “No, Marc, she’s doing it when she’s awake. To get attention.”

  Chris mentioned the matter of the shaking bed, which had happened twice more, each time followed by Regan’s insistence that she sleep with her mother.

  “Well, that could be physical,” the internist ventured.

  “No, Marc, I didn’t say that the bed was shaking; what I said was that Regan said it was shaking.”

  “Do you know that it wasn’t?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Well, it might be clonic spasms,” he murmured.

  “What was that?”

  “Clonic spasm. Any temperature?”

  “No. Listen, what do you think?” Chris asked him. “Should I take her to a shrink or what?”

  “Chris, you mentioned her schoolwork. How is she doing with her math?”

  “Why?”

  “How’s she doing?” he persisted.

  “Just rotten. I mean, suddenly rotten.”

  “I see.”

  “Why’d you ask?” Chris repeated.

  “Well, it’s part of the syndrome.”

  “Syndrome? Syndrome of what?”

  “Nothing serious. I’d rather not guess about it over the phone. Got a pencil?”

  He wanted to give her the name of a Washington internist.

  “Marc, can’t you come out here and check her yourself?” She was remembering Jamie and his lingering infection. Chris’s doctor at that time had prescribed a new, broad-spectrum antibiotic. Refilling a prescription at a local drugstore, the pharmacist was wary. “I don’t want to alarm you, ma’am, but this … well, it’s quite new on the market, and they’ve found that in Georgia it’s been causing aplastic anemia in young boys.” Jamie. Gone. Dead. Ever since, Chris had never trusted doctors. Only Marc, and even that had taken years. “Marc, can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t, but don’t worry. This guy I’m recommending is brilliant. He’s the best. Now get a pencil.”

  Hesitation. Then “I’ve got one. What’s the name?”

  She wrote it down and then the telephone number.

  “Call and have him look her over and then tell him to call me,” the internist advised. “And forget the psychiatrist for now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He delivered a blistering statement regarding the readiness of the general public to recognize psychosomatic illness, while failing to recognize the rev
erse: that illness of the body was often the cause of seeming illness of the mind. “Now what would you say,” he proposed as an instance, “if you were my internist, God forbid, and I told you I had headaches, recurring nightmares, nausea, insomnia and blurring of the vision; and also that I generally felt unglued and was worried to death about my job? Would you say I was neurotic?”

  “I’m a bad one to ask, Marc; I know you’re neurotic.”

  “Those symptoms I gave you are the same as for brain tumor, Chris. Check the body. That’s first. Then we’ll see.”

  Chris telephoned the internist and made an appointment for that afternoon. Her time was her own now. The filming was over, at least for her. Burke Dennings continued, loosely supervising the work of the “second unit,” a special crew filming scenes that were of lesser importance, mostly helicopter shots of various exteriors around the city, as well as stunt work and scenes without any of the principal actors. But Dennings wanted every foot of it to be perfect.

  The doctor was in Arlington. Samuel Klein. While Regan sat crossly in an examining room, Klein seated her mother in his office and took a brief case history. She told him the trouble. He listened; nodded; made copious notes. When she mentioned the shaking of the bed, he appeared to frown dubiously, but Chris continued:

  “Marc seemed to think it was kind of significant that Regan’s doing poorly with her math. Now why was that?”

  “You mean schoolwork?”

  “Yeah, schoolwork, but math in particular. What’s it mean?”

  “Well, let’s wait until I’ve looked at her, Mrs. MacNeil.”

  He then excused himself and gave Regan a complete examination that included taking samples of her urine and her blood. The urine was for testing of her liver and kidney functions; the blood for a number of checks: diabetes; thyroid function; red-cell blood count looking for possible anemia and white-cell blood count for exotic diseases of the blood.