The Exorcist Read online

  “Like I’d like to put my arm around another guy’s shoulder, but right away I’m scared he’s going to think I’m queer. I mean, you hear all these stories about so many latents attracted to the priesthood. So I just don’t do it. I won’t even go to somebody’s room just to listen to records; or to talk; or to smoke. It’s not that I’m afraid of him; I’m just worried about him getting worried about me.”

  Karras felt the weight shifting slowly from the young priest and onto him. He let it come; he let him talk. He knew he would return to him again and again to find relief from aloneness, to make Karras his friend, and when he’d realized he had done so without fear and suspicion, perhaps he would go on to make friends among the others.

  Growing weary, Karras found himself drifting into private sorrow. He glanced at a plaque that someone had given him the previous Christmas: MY BROTHER HURTS. I SHARE HIS PAIN. I MEET GOD IN HIM. A failed encounter. He blamed himself. He had mapped the streets of his brother’s torment, yet never had walked them; or so he believed. He thought that the pain he felt was his own.

  At last the visitor looked at his watch. It was time for lunch in the campus refectory. He rose and as he started to leave, he glanced at the cover of a current novel on Karras’s desk.

  “Oh, you’ve got Shadows,” he said.

  “Have you read it?” asked Karras.

  The young priest shook his head. “No, I haven’t. Should I?”

  “I don’t know. I just finished it and I’m not at all sure that I really understand it,” Karras lied. He picked up the book and handed it over. “Want to take it along? You know, I’d really like to hear someone else’s opinion.”

  “Oh, well, sure,” said the Jesuit, examining the copy on the inner flap of the dust jacket. “I’ll try to get it back to you in a couple of days.”

  His mood seemed brighter.

  As the screen door creaked with the young priest’s departure, Karras felt relief. And peace. He picked up his breviary and stepped out to the courtyard, where he slowly paced and said his daily Office prayers.

  In the afternoon, he had still another visitor, the elderly pastor of Holy Trinity Church, who took a chair by the desk and offered condolences on the passing of Karras’s mother.

  “Said a couple of Masses for her, Damien, and one for you as well,” he wheezed with a lilting Irish brogue.

  “That was thoughtful of you, Father. Thanks so much.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Seventy.”

  “Ah, well, that’s a good old age.”

  Karras felt a faint flash of anger. Oh, really?

  He turned his gaze to an altar card that the pastor had carried in with him. One of three employed in the Mass, it was covered in plastic and inscribed with a portion of the prayers that were said by the priest. Karras wondered why the pastor had brought it in. The answer came soon.

  “Well, Damien, we’ve had another one of those things here today. In the church, y’know. Another desecration.”

  A statue of the Virgin Mary at the left side altar of the church had been painted over and made to look like a harlot, the pastor told him. Then he handed the altar card to Karras. “And then this was found in mid-morning right after you’d gone, y’know, to New York. Was it Saturday? Yes. Yes, it was. Well, take a look at it, will you? I just had a talk with a sergeant of police, and—ah, well, never mind that now. Have a look at this card for me, Damien, now would you?”

  As Karras examined the card, the pastor explained that someone had slipped in a typewritten sheet between the original card and its cover. The ersatz text, though containing some strikeovers and various typographical errors, was in fluent and intelligible Latin and described in vivid, erotic detail an imagined homosexual encounter involving Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  “That’s enough, now, you don’t have to read it all,” said the pastor, snapping back the card as if fearing that it might be an occasion of sin. “Now that’s excellent Latin; I mean, it’s got style, a church Latin style. Well, the sergeant says he talked to some fellow, a psychologist, and he says that the person’s been doin’ all this—well, he could be a priest, y’know, a very sick priest. Could he be right?”

  Karras thought for a while. Then nodded. “Yes. Yes, it could. Acting out a rebellion, maybe, in a state of complete somnambulism. I don’t know. But it could be. Sure. Maybe so.”

  “Can you think of any candidates, Damien?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Well, now, sooner or later they come and see you, wouldn’t you say? I mean, the sick ones, if there are any, from the campus. Do y’know any like that, Damien? I mean with that sort of illness.”

  “No, I don’t, Father.”

  “No. No, I didn’t think you’d tell me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t, but on top of that, Father, somnambulism is a way of resolving any number of possible conflict situations, and the usual form of resolution is symbolic. So I really wouldn’t know. And if it is a somnambulist, he’d probably have total posterior amnesia about what he’s done, so that even he wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “What if you were to tell him?” the pastor asked cagily. He lightly plucked at an earlobe, a habitual gesture, Karras had noticed, whenever he thought he was being wily.

  “I know of no one who fits the description,” said Karras.

  “Yes, I see. Well, it’s just as I’d expected.” The pastor stood up and started shuffling toward the door. “Y’know what you’re like, you people? Like priests!”

  As Karras gently chuckled, the pastor returned and dropped the altar card on his desk. “I suppose you could study this thing, don’t ya think? Go ahead,” he said as he turned and started away again, his shoulders hunched over with age.

  “Did they check it for fingerprints?” Karras asked him.

  The elderly pastor stopped and looked back. “Oh, I doubt it. After all, it’s not a criminal we’re after, now, is it? More likely it’s only a demented parishioner. What do you think of that, Damien? Do you think that it could be someone in the parish? You know, I’m thinking now maybe that’s so. No, it wasn’t a priest at all, not at all; it was someone among the parishioners.” He was pulling at his earlobe again. “Don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Father.”

  “No. No, I didn’t think you’d tell me.”

  Later that day, Karras was relieved of his duties as counselor and assigned to the Georgetown University Medical School as a lecturer in psychiatry. His orders were to rest.

  Chapter Two

  Regan lay on her back on Dr. Klein’s examining table with her arms and legs bowed outward. Taking her foot in both his hands, Klein flexed it toward her ankle, held it there in tension and then suddenly released it. The foot relaxed into normal position. He repeated the procedure several times but without any variance in the result. He seemed dissatisfied. When Regan abruptly sat up and spat in his face, he instructed a nurse to remain in the room and returned to his office to talk to Chris.

  It was April 26. He’d been out of the city both Sunday and Monday and Chris hadn’t reached him until this morning to relate the happening at the party and the subsequent shaking of the bed.

  “It was actually moving?”

  “It was moving.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe ten, maybe fifteen seconds. I mean, that’s all of it I saw. Then she sort of went stiff and wet the bed. Or maybe she’d wet it before. I don’t know. But then all of a sudden she was dead asleep and never woke up till the next afternoon.”

  Klein entered his office thoughtfully.

  “Well, what is it?” Chris asked. Her tone was anxious.

  When she’d first arrived, he’d reported his suspicion that the shaking of the bed had been caused by a seizure of clonic contractions, an alternating tensing and relaxing of the muscles. The chronic form of such a condition, he’d told her, was clonus, which often indicated a lesion in the brain.

  �
��Well, the test was negative,” he said, then described the procedure, explaining that in clonus the alternate flexing and releasing of the foot would have triggered a run of clonic contractions. But as he sat at his desk, Klein still seemed worried. “Has she ever had a fall?” he asked.

  “Like on the head?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “Childhood diseases?”

  “Just the usual: measles and mumps and chicken pox.”

  “Sleepwalking history?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Now? She was walking in her sleep at the party?”

  “Well, yes; I thought I told you. She still doesn’t know what she did that night. And there’s other stuff, too, that she doesn’t remember.”

  Regan asleep. An overseas telephone call from Howard.

  “How’s Rags?”

  “Thanks a lot for the call on her birthday.”

  “I was stuck on a yacht. Now for chrissakes, lay off me! I called her the minute I was back in the hotel!”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “You talked to her?”

  “Yes. That’s why I thought I’d better call you. What the hell’s going on with her, Chris?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She just called me a ‘cocksucker’ and hung up the phone.”

  Recounting the incident to Klein, Chris explained that when Regan had finally awakened, she had no memory whatever of either the telephone call or of what had happened on the night of the dinner.

  “Then perhaps she wasn’t lying about the moving of the furniture,” Klein hypothesized.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Well, she moved it herself, let’s say, but perhaps while in a state of automatism. It’s like a trance state. The subject doesn’t know or remember what he’s doing.”

  “But there’s this great big heavy bureau in her room made out of teakwood. It must weigh half a ton. I mean, how could she have moved that?”

  “Extraordinary strength is pretty common in pathology.”

  “Oh, really? How come?”

  Klein shrugged. “Who knows. Now, besides what you’ve told me,” he continued, “have you noticed any other bizarre behavior?”

  “Well, she’s gotten real sloppy.”

  “Bizarre,” Klein repeated.

  “Doc, for Regan that’s bizarre. Oh, now wait a second! Wait! Yeah, there’s this: You remember that Ouija board she’s been playing with? Captain Howdy?”

  The internist nodded. “The fantasy playmate.”

  “Well, now she can hear him.”

  The doctor leaned forward, folding his arms atop the desk, his eyes narrowed, his manner alert. “She can hear him?”

  “Yes. Yesterday morning, I could hear her talking to Howdy in her bedroom. I mean, she’d talk, and then seem to wait, as if she were playing with the Ouija board, but when I peeked inside the room, there wasn’t any Ouija board there; just Rags; and she was nodding her head, Doc, just like she was agreeing with what he was saying.”

  “Did she see him?”

  “I don’t think so. She sort of had her head to the side, the way she does when she listens to records.”

  The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Yes, I see. Any other phenomena like that? Does she see things? Smell things?”

  “Yeah, smell,” Chris remembered. “She keeps smelling something bad in her bedroom.”

  “Something burning?”

  “Hey, that’s right! How’d you know that?”

  “Well, it’s sometimes the symptom of a type of disturbance in the chemicoelectrical activity of the brain. In the case of your daughter, in the temporal lobe, you see.” He put an index finger to the front of his skull. “Up here, in the forward part of the brain. Now it’s rare but it does cause bizarre hallucinations and usually just before a convulsion. I suppose that’s why it’s mistaken for schizophrenia so often; but it isn’t schizophrenia: it’s produced by a lesion in the temporal lobe. So since the test for clonus wasn’t conclusive, I think I’d like to give her an EEG—an electroencephalograph. It will show us the pattern of her brain waves. It’s a pretty good test of abnormal functioning.”

  “But you think that’s it, huh? Temporal lobe?”

  “Well, she does have the syndrome, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, the untidiness; the pugnacity; behavior that’s socially embarrassing; the automatism; and of course, the seizures that made the bed shake. Usually, that’s followed by either wetting the bed or vomiting, or both, and then sleeping very deeply.”

  “You want to test her right now?” Chris asked.

  “Yes, I think we should do it immediately, but she’s going to need sedation. If she moves or jerks it will void the results, so may I give her, say, twenty-five milligrams of Librium?”

  “Jesus, do what you have to,” a shaken Chris told him.

  She accompanied him to the examining room, and when Regan saw him readying the hypodermic, she screamed and filled the air with a torrent of obscenities.

  “Oh, honey, it’s to help you!” Chris pleaded. She held Regan still while Klein administered the injection.

  “I’ll be back,” Klein said, and while a nurse wheeled the EEG apparatus into the room, he left to attend to another patient. When he returned a short time later, the Librium still had not taken effect. Klein seemed surprised. “That was quite a strong dose,” he remarked to Chris.

  He injected another twenty-five milligrams; left; came back and, finding Regan now tractable and docile, he placed saline-tipped electrodes to her scalp. “We put four on each side,” he explained to Chris. “That enables us to take a brain-wave reading from the left and right side of the brain and then compare them. Why? Well, deviations could be significant. For example, I had a patient who used to hallucinate. He’d see things and hear things. Well, I found a discrepancy in comparing the left and right readings of his brain waves and discovered that actually the man was hallucinating on just one side of his head.”

  “That’s wild!” Chris marveled.

  “Sure is. The left eye and ear functioned normally; only the right side had visions and heard things. Well, all right, now, let’s see,” Klein said as he turned on the EEG machine and then pointed to the waves on the fluorescent screen. “Now that’s both sides together,” he explained. “What I’m looking for now are spiky waves”—he patterned in the air with his index finger—“especially waves of very high amplitude coming at four to eight per second. If they’re there, then it’s temporal lobe.”

  He studied the pattern of the brain wave carefully, but discovered no dysrhythmia, no spikes, no flattened domes. And when he switched to comparison readings, the results were negative as well. Klein frowned. He couldn’t understand it. He repeated the procedure.

  And found no change.

  Klein brought in a nurse to attend to Regan and returned to his office with her mother. Chris sat down and said, “Okay, so what’s the story?”

  Pensive, arms folded across his chest, Klein was sitting on the edge of his desk. “Well, the EEG would have proved that she had it,” he said, “but the lack of dysrhythmia doesn’t prove to me conclusively that she doesn’t. It might be hysteria, but the pattern before and after her convulsion was much too striking.”

  Chris furrowed her brow. “You know, you keep on saying that, Doc—‘convulsion.’ What exactly is the name of this disease?”

  “Well, it isn’t a disease,” Klein said somberly and quietly.

  “Well then, what do you call it, Doc? I mean, specifically.”

  “You know it as epilepsy.”

  “Oh, good Christ!”

  “Now, let’s hold it,” soothed Klein. “I can see that like most of the general public your impression of epilepsy is exaggerated and probably largely mythical.”

  “Isn’t it hereditary?” Chris said, wincing.

  “That’s one of the myths,” Klein told her calmly. “At least, most
doctors seem to think so. Look, practically anyone can be made to convulse. You see, most of us are born with a pretty high threshold of resistance to convulsions; some with a low one; so the difference between you and an epileptic is a matter of degree. That’s all. Just degree. It is not a disease.”

  “Then what is it, a freaking hallucination?”

  “It’s a disorder: a controllable disorder. And there are many, many types of it, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, you’re sitting here now and for a second you seem to go blank, let’s say, and you miss a little bit of what I’m saying. Well, now that’s a kind of epilepsy. It’s a true epileptic attack.”

  “Yeah, well, that isn’t Regan, Doc. I don’t believe it. And how come it’s happening just all of a sudden?”

  “Look, you’re right. I mean we still aren’t sure that’s what she’s got, and I grant you that maybe you were right in the first place; very possibly it’s psychosomatic. But I doubt it. And to answer your question, any number of changes in the function of the brain can trigger a convulsion in the epileptic: worry; fatigue; emotional stress; even a particular note on a musical instrument. I had a patient who never used to have a seizure except on a bus when he was a block away from home. Well, we finally discovered what was causing it: flickering light from a white slat fence reflected in the window of the bus. Now at another time of day, or if the bus had been going at a different speed, he wouldn’t have convulsed, you see. He had a lesion, a scar in the brain that was caused by some childhood disease. In the case of your daughter, the scar would be forward—up front in the temporal lobe—and when it’s hit by a particular electrical impulse of a certain wavelength and periodicity, it triggers a burst of abnormal reactions from deep within a focus in the lobe. Do you see?”

  “I’ll take your word,” Chris sighed, dejected. “But I’ll tell you the truth, Doc: I don’t understand how her whole personality could have changed.”

  “In the temporal lobe, that’s extremely common, and can last for days or even weeks. It isn’t rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by a devil.”