"No, I'm the Rosslyn village idiot."


David smiled thinly. "I'm a little up-tight about this myself," he said. He looked away in thought. "Strange case."


For a moment he stroked his chin and seemed to brood. Then he looked up at Klein. "Let me know what you find."


"You'll be home?"


"Yes, I will. Give a call." He waved a good-bye and left.


A short time later, after the arrival of the equipment, Klein anesthetized Regan's spinal area with Novocain, and as Chris and Sharon watched, extracted the spinal fluid, keeping watch on the manometer. "Pressure's normal," he murmured.


When he'd finished, he went to the window to see if the fluid was clear or hazy.


It was clear.


He carefully stowed the tubes of fluid in his bag.


"I doubt that she will," Klein told the women, "but in case she awakens in the middle of the night and creates a disturbance, you might want a nurse here to give her sedation."


"Can't I do it myself?" Chris asked worriedly.


"Why not a nurse?"


She did not want to mention her deep distrust of doctors and nurses. "I'd rather do it myself," she said simply. "Couldn't I?"


"Well, injections are tricky," he answered. "An air bubble's very dangerous."


"Oh, I know how to do it," interjected Sharon. "My mother ran a nursing home up in Oregon."


"Gee, would you do that, Shar? Would you stay here tonight?" Chris asked her.


"Well, beyond tonight," interjected Klein. "She may need intravenous feeding, depending on how she comes along."


"Could you teach me how to do it?" Chris asked him anxiously.


He nodded. "Yes, I guess I could."


He wrote a prescription for soluble Thorazine and disposable syringes. He gave it to Chris. "Have this filled right away."


Chris handed it to Sharon. "Honey, do that for me, would you? Just call and they'll send it. I'd like to go with the doctor while he makes those tests... Do you mind?" she asked him.


He noted the tightness around her eyes; the look of confusion and of helplessness. He nodded.


"I know how you feel." He smiled at her gently: "I feel the same way when I talk to mechanics about my car."


They left the house at precisely 6: 18 P. M.


In his laboratory in the Rosslyn medical building, Klein ran a number of tests. First he analyzed protein content.


Normal.


Then a count of blood cells.


"Too many red," Klein explained, "means bleeding. And too many white would mean infection."


He was looking in particular for a fungus infection that was often the cause of chronic bizarre behavior. And again drew a blank.


At the last, Klein tested the fluid's sugar content.


"How come?" Chris asked him intently.


"Well, now, the spinal sugar," he told her, "should measure two-thirds of the amount of blood sugar. Anything significantly under that ratio would mean a disease in which the bacteria eat the sugar in the spinal fluid. And if so, it could account for her symp-toms."


But he failed to find it.


Chris shook her head and folded her arms. "Here we are again, folks," she murmured bleakly.


For a while Klein brooded. Then at last he turned and looked to Chris. "Do you keep any drugs in your house?" he asked her.


"Huh?"


"Amphetamines? LSD?"


"Gee, no. Look, I'd tell you. No, there's nothing like that."


He nodded and stared at his shoes, then looked up and said, "Well---I guess that it's time we consulted a psychiatrist, Mrs. MacNeil."


She was back in the house at exactly 7: 21 P. M., and at the door she called, "Sharon?"


Sharon wasn't there.


Chris went upstairs to Regan's bedroom. Still heavily asleep. Not a ruffle in her covers. Chris noticed that the window was open wide. An odor of urine. Sharon must've opened it to air out the room; she thought. She closed it. Where did she go?


Chris returned downstairs just as Willie came in.


"Hi ya, Willie. Any fun today?"


"Shopping. Movies."


"Where's Karl?"


Willie made a gesture of dismissal. "He lets me see the Beatles this time. By myself."


"Good work."


Willie held up her fingers in a V. The time was 7: 35.


At 8: 01, while Chris was in the study talking to her agent on the phone, Sharon walked through the door with several packages, and then flopped in a chair and waited.


"Where've you been?" asked Chris when she'd finished.


"Oh, didn't he tell you?"


"Oh, didn't who tell me?"


"Burke. Isn't he here? Where is he?"


"He was here?"


"You mean he wasn't when you got home?"


"Listen, start all over," said Chris.


"Oh, that nut," Sharon chided with a headshake. "I couldn't get the druggist to deliver, so when Burke came around, I thought, fine, he can stay here with -Regan while I go get the Thorazine." She shrugged. "I should have known."


'Yeah, you should've. And so what did you buy?"


"Well, since I thought I had the time, I went and bought a rubber drawsheet for her bed." She displayed it.


"Did you eat?"


"No, I thought I'd fix a sandwich. Would you like one?"


"Good idea. Let's go and eat."


"What happened with the tests?" Sharon asked as they walked slowly to the kitchen.


"Not a thing. All negative. I'm going to have to get her a shrink," Chris answered dully.


After sandwiches and coffee, Sharon showed Chris how to give an injection.


"The two main things," she explained, "are to make sure that there aren't any air bubbles, and then you make sure that you haven't hit a vein. See, you aspirate a little, like this"---she was demonstrating---"and see if there's blood in the syringe."


For a time, Chris practiced the procedure on a grapefruit, and seemed to grow proficient. Then at 9: 28, the front doorbell rang. Willie answered. It was Karl. As he passed through the kitchen, en route to his room, he nodded a good evening and remarked he'd forgotten to take his key.


"I can't believe it," Chris said to Sharon. "That's the first time he's ever admitted a mistake."


They passed the evening watching television in the study.


At 11: 46, Chris answered the phone. The young director of the second unit, He sounded grave.


"Have you heard the news yet, Chris?"


'No, what?"


"Well, it's bad."


"What is it?" she asked.


"Burke's dead."


He'd been drank. He had stumbled. He had fallen down the steep flight of steps beside the house, fallen far to the bottom, where a passing pedestrian on M Street watched as he tumbled into night without end. A broken neck. This bloody, crumpled scene, his last.


As the telephone fell from Chris's fingers, she was silently weeping, standing unsteadily. Sharon ran and caught her, supported her, hung up the phone and led her to the sofa.


"Burke's dead," Chris sobbed.


"Oh, my God!" gasped Sharon. "What happened?"


But Chris could not speak yet. She wept.


Then, later, they talked. For hours. They talked. Chris drank. Reminisced about Dennings. Now laughed. Now cried. "Ah, my God," she kept sighing. "Poor Burke... poor Burke..."


Her dream of death kept coming back to her.


At a little past five in the morning, Chris was standing moodily behind the bar, her elbows propped, head lowered, eyes sad. She was waiting for Sharon to return from the kitchen with a tray of ice.


She heard her coming.


"I still can't believe it," Sharon was sighing as she entered the study.


Chris looked up and froze.


Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hissed sibilantly like a serpent.


"Sharon?" Chris said numbly, still staring at Regan.


Sharon stopped. So did Regan. Sharon turned and saw nothing. And then screamed as she felt Regan's tongue snaking out at her ankle.


Chris whitened. "Call that doctor and get him out of bed! Get him now!"


Wherever Sharon moved, Regan would follow.


CHAPTER FOUR


Friday, April 29. While Chris waited in the hall outside the bedroom, Dr. Klein and a noted neuropsychiatrist were examining Regan.


The doctors observed for half all hour. Flinging. Whirling. Tearing at the hair. She occasionally grimaced and pressed her hands against her ears as if blotting out sudden, deafening noise. She bellowed obscenities. Screamed in pain. Then at last she flung herself face downward onto the bed and tucked her legs up under her stomach. She moaned incoherently.


The psychiatrist motioned Klein away from the bed.


"Let's get her tranquilized," he whispered. "Maybe I can talk to her."


The internist nodded and prepared an injection of fifty milligrams of Thorazine. When the doctors approached the bed, however, Regan seemed to sense them and quickly turned over, and as the neuropsychiatrist attempted to hold her, she began to shriek in malevolent fury. Bit him. Fought him. Held him off. It was only when Karl was called in to assist that they managed to keep her sufficiently rigid for Klein to administer the injection.


The dosage proved inadequate. Another fifty milligrams was injected. They waited.


Regan grew tractable. Then dreamy. Then stared at the doctors in sudden bewilderment. "Where's Mom? I want my Mom!" she wept.


At a nod from the neuropsychiatrist, Klein left the room to go and get Chris.


"Your mother will be here in just a second, dear," the psychiatrist told Regan. He sat on the bed and stroked her head. "There, there, it's all right, dear, I'm a doctor."


"I want Mom!" wept Regan.


"She's coming. Do you hurt, dear?"


She nodded, the tears streaming down.


"Where?"


"just every place!" sobbed Regan. "I feel all achy!"


"Oh, my baby!"


"Mom!"


Chris ran to the bed and hugged her. Kissed her. Comforted and soothed. Then Chris herself began to weep. "Oh, Rags, you're back! It's really you!"


"Oh, Mom, he hurt me!" Regan sniffled. "Make him stop hurting me! Please? Okay?"


Chris looked puzzled for a moment, then glanced to the doctors with a pleading question in her eyes.


"She's heavily sedated," the psychiatrist said gently.


"You mean...?"


He cut her off. "We'll see." Then he turned to Regan. "Can you tell me what's wrong, dear?"


"I don't know," she answered. "I don't know why he does it to me." Tears rolled down from her eyes. "He was always my friend before!"


"Who's that?"


"Captain Howdy! And then it's like somebody else is inside me! Making me do things!"


"Captain Howdy?"


"I don't know!"


"A person?"


She nodded.


"Who?"


"I don't know!"


"Well, all right, then; let's try something, Regan. A game." He was reaching in his pocket for a shining bauble attached to a silvery length of chain. "Have you ever seen movies where someone gets hypnotized?"


She nodded.


"Well, I'm a hypnotist. Oh, yes! I hypnotize people all the time. That's, of course, if they let me. Now I think if I hypnotize you, Regan, it will help you get well. Yes, that person inside you will come right out. Would you like to be hypnotized? See, your mother's right here, right beside you"


Regan looked questioningly to Chris.


"Go ahead, honey, do it," Chas urged her. "Try It."


Regan turned, to the psychiatrist and nodded "Okay," she said softly. "But only a little."


The psychiatrist smiled and glanced abruptly to the sound of pottery breaking behind him. A delicate vase had fallen to the floor from the top of a bureau where Dr. Klein was now resting his forearm. He looked at his arm and then down at the shards with an air of puzzlement; then stooped to pick them up.


"Never mind, doc, Willie'll get it," Chris told him.


"Would you close those shutters for me, Sam?" the psychiatrist asked him. "And pull the drapes?"


When the room was dark, the psychiatrist gripped the chain in his fingertips and began to swing the bauble back and forth with an easy movement. He shone a penlight on it. It glowed. He began to intone the hypnotic ritual. "Now watch this, Regan, keep watching, and soon you'll feel your eyelids growing heavier and heavier...."


Within a very short time, she seemed to be in trance.


"Extremely suggestible," the psychiatrist murmured.


Then he spoke to the girl. "Are you comfortable, Regan?"


"Yes." Her voice was soft and whispery.


"How old are you, Regan?"


"Twelve."


"Is there someone inside you?"


"Sometimes."


"When?"


"Different times."


"It's a person?"


"Yes."


"Who is it?"


"I don't know."


"Captain Howdy?"


"I don't know."


"A man?"


"I don't know."


"But he's there."


"Yes, sometimes."


"Now?"


"I don't know."


"If I ask him to tell me, will you let him answer?"


"No!"


"Why not?"


"I'm afraid!"


"Of what?"


"I don't know!"


"If he talks to me, Regan, I think he will leave you. Do you want him to leave you?"


"Yes."


"Let him speak, then. Will you let him speak?"


A pause. Then, "Yes."


"I am speaking to the person inside of Regan now," the psychiatrist said firmly. "If you are there, you too are hypnotized and must answer all my questions." For a moment he paused to allow the suggestion to enter her bloodstream. Then he repeated it: "If you are there, then you are hypnotized and must answer all my questions. Come forward and answer, now: Are you there?"


Silence. Then something curious happened: Regan's breath turned suddenly foul. It was thick, like a current. The psychiatrist smelled it from two feet away. He shone the penlight on Regan's face.


Chris stifled a gasp. Her daughter's features were contorting into a malevolent mask: lips pulling tautly into opposite directions, tumefied tongue lolling wolfish from her mouth.


"Oh, my God!" breathed Chris.


"Are you the person in Regan?" the psychiatrist asked.


She nodded.


"Who are you?"


"Nowonmai," she answered gutturally.


"That's your name?"


She nodded.


"You're a man?"


She said, "Say."


"Did you answer?"


"Say"


"If that's 'yes,' nod your head."


She nodded.


"Are you speaking in a foreign language?"


"Say."


"Where do you come from?"


"Dog."


"You say that you come from a dog?"


"Dogmorfmocion," Regan replied.


The psychiatrist thought for a moment, then attempted another approach. "When I ask you questions now, you will answer by moving your head: a nod for 'yes,' and a shake for 'no.' Do you understand that?"


Regan nodded.


"Did your answers have meaning?" he asked her.


"Yes."


"Are you someone whom Regan has known?" No.


"That she knows of?" No.


"Are you someone she's invented?" No.


"You're real?" Yes.


"Part of Regan?" No.


"Were you ever a part of Regan?" No.


"Do you like her?" No.


"Dislike her?" Yes.


"Do you hate her?" Yes.


"Over something she's done?" Yes.


"Do you blame her for her parents' divorce?" No.


"Has it something to do with her parents?" No.


"With a friend?" No.


"But you hate her?" Yes.


"Are you punishing Regan?" Yes.


"You wish to harm her?" Yes.


"To kill her?" Yes.


"If she died; wouldn't you die too?" No.


The answer seemed to disquiet him and he lowered his eyes in thought. The bed springs squeaked as he shifted his weight. In the smothering stillness, Regan's breathing rasped as from a rotted, putrid bellows. Here. Yet far. Distantly sinister.


The psychiatrist lifted his glance again to that hideous, twisted face. His eyes gleamed sharply with speculation.


"Is there something she can do that would make you leave her?" Yes.


"Can you tell me what it is?"' Yes.


"Will you tell me?" No.


"But---"


Abruptly the psychiatrist gasped is startled pain as he realized with horrified incredulity that Regan was squeezing his scrotum with a hand that had gripped him like an iron talon. Eyes wide-staring he struggled to free himself. He couldn't. "Sam! Sam, help me!" he croaked.


Agony. Bedlam.


Chris looking up and then leaping for the light switch.


Klein running forward.


Regan with her head back, cackling demonically, then howling like a wolf.


Chris slapped at the light switch. Turned. Saw grainy, flickering film of a slow-motion nightmare: Regan and the doctors writhing on the bed in a tangle of shifting arms and legs, in a melee of grimaces, gasps and curses, and the howling and the yelping and the hideous laughter, with Regan oinking, Regan neighing, then the film racing faster and the bedstead shaking, violently quivering from side to side as Chris watched helplessly while her daughter's eyes rolled upward into their sockets and she wrenched up a keening shriek of terror torn raw and bloody from the base of her spine.


Regan crumpled and fell unconscious. Something unspeakable left the room.


For a breathless moment, no one moved. Then slowly and carefully, the doctors untangled themselves; stood up. They stared at Regan. After a time, the expressionless Klein took Regan's pulse. Satisfied, he slowly pulled up her blanket and nodded to the others. They left the room and went down to the study.


For a time, no one spoke. Chris was on the sofa. Klein and the psychiatrist sat near her in facing chairs. The psychiatrist was pensive, pinching at his lip as he stared at the coffee table; then he sighed and looked up at Chris. She turned her burned-out gaze to his. "What the hell's going on?" she asked in a mournful, haggard whisper.


"Did you recognize the language she was speaking?'


' he asked her.


Chris shook her head.


"Have you any religion?"


"No."


"Your daughter?"


"No."


And now the psychiatrist asked her a lengthy series of questions relating to Regan's psychological history. When at last he had finished, he seemed disturbed.


"What is it?" Chris asked him, white-knuckled fingers clenching and unclenching on a balled-up handkerchief. "What has she got?"


"Well, it's somewhat confusing," the psychiatrist evaded. "And frankly, it would be quite irresponsible of me to attempt a diagnosis after so brief an examination."


"Well, you must have some idea," she insisted.


The psychiatrist sighed, fingering his brow. "Well, I know you're quite anxious; so I will mention one or two tentative impressions."


Chris leaned forward, nodding tensely, Fingers in her lap started fumbling with the handkerchief, telling the stitches in the hem as if they were wrinkled linen rosary beads.


"To begin with," he told her, "it's highly improbable that she's faking."


Klein was nodding in agreement. "We think so for a number of reasons," the psychiatrist continued. "For example, the abnormal and painful contortions, and most dramatically, I suppose, from the change in her features when we were talking to the so-called person she thinks is inside her. You see, a psychic effect like that is unlikely unless she believed in this person. Do you follow?"


"I think I do," Chris answered, squirming her eyes in puzzlement. "But one thing I don't understand is where this person comes from. I mean, you keep hearing about 'split personality' but I've never really known any explanation."


"Well, neither does anyone else, Mrs. MacNeil. We use concepts like 'consciousness'---'mind'---'personality,' but we don't really know yet what these things are." He was shaking his head. "Not really. Not at all. So when I start talking about something like multiple or split personality, all we have are some theories that raise more questions than they give answers. Freud thought that certain ideas and feelings are somehow repressed by the conscious mind, but remain alive in a person's subconscious; remain quite strong, in fact, and continue to seek expression through various psychiatric symptoms. Now when this repressed, or let's call it dissociated material---the word 'dissociation' implying a splitting off from the mainstream of consciousness----well, when this type of material is sufficiently strong, or where the subject's personality is disorganized and weak, the result can be schizophrenic psychosis. Now that isn't the same, he cautioned, "as dual personality. Schizophrenia means a shattering of personality. But where the dissociated material is strong enough to somehow come glued together, to somehow organize in the individual's subconscious---why, then it's bees known, at times, to function independently as a separate personality; to take over the bodily functions."


He took a breath. Chris listened intently and he went on. "That's one theory. There are several others, some of them involving the notion of escape into unawareness; escape from some conflict or emotional problem. Getting back to Regan, she hasn't any history of schizophrenia and the EEG didn't show up the brainwave pattern that normally accompanies it. So I tend to reject schizophrenia. Which leaves us the general field of hysteria."


"I gave last week," Chris murmured bleakly.


The worried psychiatrist smiled thinly. "Hysteria," he continued, "is a form of neurosis in which emotional disturbances are converted into bodily disorders. Now, in certain of its forms, there's dissociation. In psychasthenia, for example, the individual loses consciousness of his actions, but he sees himself act and attributes his actions to someone else. His idea of the second personality is vague, however, and Regan's seems specific. So we come to what Freud used to call the 'conversion' form of hysteria. It grows from unconscious feelings of guilt and the need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, overt multiple personality. And the syndrome might also include epileptoid-like convulsions; hallucinations; abnormal motor excitement."


"Gee, that does sound a lot like Regan," Chris ventured moodily. "Don't you think? I mean, except for the guilt part. What would she have to feel guilty about?"


"Well, a cliché answer," the psychiatrist responded, -"might be the divorce. Children often feel they are the ones rejected and assume the full responsibility for the departure of one of their parents. In the case of your daughter, there's reason to believe that that could be the case. Here I'm thinking of the brooding and the deep depression over the notion of people dying: thanatophobia. In children, you'll find it accompanied by guilt formation that's related to family stress, very often fear of the loss of a parent. It produces rage and intense frustration. In addition, the guilt in this type of hysteria needn't be known to the conscious mind. It could even be the guilt that we call "free-floating,' a general guilt that relates to nothing in particular," he concluded.


Chris gave her head a shape. "I'm confused," she murmured. "I mean, where does this new personality come in?"


"Well, again, it's a guess," he replied, "just a guess---but assuming that it is conversion hysteria stemming from guilt, then the second personality is simply the agent who handles the punishing. If Regan herself were to do it, you see, that would mean she would recognize her guilt. But she wants to escape that recognition. Therefore; a second personality."


"And that's what you think she's got?"


"As I said, I don't know," replied the psychiatrist, still evasive. He seemed to be choosing his words as he would moss-covered stones to cross a stream. "It's extremely unusual for a child of Regan's age, to be able to pull together and organize the components of a new personality. And certain---well, other things are puzzling. Her performance with the Ouija board, for example, would indicate extreme suggestibility; and yet apparently I never really hypnotized her." He shrugged. "Well, perhaps she resisted. But the really striking thing," he noted, "is the new personality's apparent precocity. It isn't a twelve-year-old at all. It's much, much older. And then there's the language she was speaking...." He stated at the rug in front of the fireplace, thoughtfully tugging at his lower lip. "There's a similar state, of course, but we don't know much about it: a form of somnambulism where the subject suddenly manifests knowledge or skills that he's never learned---and where the intention of the second personality is the destruction of the first. However..." The word trailed away. Abruptly the psychiatrist looked up at Chris. "Well, it's terribly complicated," he told her, "and I've oversimplified outrageously."


"So what's the bottom line?" Chris aspect.


"At the moment," he told her, "a blank. She need an intensive examination by a team of experts; two or three weeks of really concentrated study in a clinical atmosphere; say, the Barringer Clinic in Dayton."


Chris looked away.


"It's a problem?"


"No. No problem." She sighed. "I just lost Hope, that's all."


"Didn't get you."


"It's an inside tragedy."


The psychiatrist telephoned the Barringer Clinic from Chris's study. They agreed to take Regan the following day.


The doctors left.


Chris swallowed pain with remembrance of Dennings, with remembrance of death and the worm and the void and unspeakable loneliness and stillness, darkness, underneath the sod, with nothing moving, no, no motion.... Briefly, she wept. Too much... too much... Then she put it away and began to pack.


She was standing in her bedroom selecting a camouflaging wig to wear in Dayton when Karl appeared. There was someone to see her, he told her.


"Who?"


"Detective."


"And he wants to see me?"


He nodded. Then he handed her a business card. She looked it over blankly. WILLIAM F. KINDERMAN, it announced, LIEUTENANT OF DETECTIVES; and tucked in the lower-left-hand corner like a poor relation: Homicide Division. It was printed in an ornate, raised Tudor typeface that might have been selected by a dealer in antiques.


She looked up from the card with a sniffing suspicion. "Has he got something with him that might be a script? Like a big manila envelope or something?"


There was no one in the world, Chris had come to discover, who didn't have a novel or a script or a notion for one or both tucked away in a drawer or a mental sock. She seemed to attract them as priests did drunks.


But Karl shook his head. Chris immediately grew curious and walked down the stairs. Burke? Was it something to do with Burke?


He was sagging in the entry hall, the brim of his limp and crumpled hat clutched tight with short fat fingers freshly manicured. Plump. In his middle fifties. Jowly cheeks that gleamed of soap. Yet rumpled trousers, cuffed and baggy, mocked the sedulous care that he gave his body. A gray tweed coat hung loose and old-fashioned, and his moist brown eyes, which dropped at the corners, seemed to be staring at times gone by. He wheezed asthmatically as he waited.


Chris approached. The detective extended his hand with a weary and somewhat fatherly manner, and spoke in a hoarse, emphysematous whisper. "I'd know that face in any lineup, Miss MacNeil."


"Am I in one?" Chris asked him earnestly as she took his hand.


"Oh, my goodness, oh, no," he said, brushing at the notion with his hand as if swatting at a fly. He'd closed his eyes and inclined his head; the other hood rested lightly on his paunch. Chris was expecting a God forbid! "No, it's strictly routine," he assured her, "routine. Look, you're busy? Tomorrow. I'll come again tomorrow."


He was turning away as if to leave, but Chris said anxiously, "What is it? Burke? Burke Dennings?"


The detective's drooping, careless ease had somehow tightened the springs of her tension.


"A shame. What a shame," the detective breathed, with lowered eyes and a shake of the head.


"Was he killed?" Chris asked with a look of shock. "I mean, is that why you're here? He was killed? Is that it?"


"No, no, no, it's routine." he repeated, "routine. You know, a man so important, we just couldn't pass it. We couldn't," he pleaded with a helpless look. "At least one or two questions. Did he fall? Was he pushed?" As he asked, he was listing from side to side with his head and his hand. Then he shrugged and huskily whispered, "Who knows?"


"Was he robbed?"


"No, not robbed, Miss MacNeil, never robbed, but then who needs a motive in times like these?" His hands were constantly in motion, like a flabby glove informed by the fingers of a yawning puppeteer. "Why, today, for a murderer, Miss MacNeil, a motive is only an encumbrance; in fact, a deterrent." He shook his head. "These drugs, these drugs," he bemoaned. "These drugs. This LSD."


He load at Chris as he tapped his chest with the tips of his fingers. "Believe me, I'm a father, and when I see what's going on, it breaks my heart. You've got children?"


"Yes, one."


"A son?"


"A daughter."


"Well..."


"Listen, come on in the study," Chris interrupted anxiously, turning about to lead the way. She was losing all patience.


"Miss MacNeil, could I trouble you for something?"


She turned with the dim and weary expectation that he wanted her autograph for his children. It was never for themselves. It was always for their children. "Yeah, sure," she said.


"My stomach." He gestured with a trace of a grimace. "Do you keep any Calso water, maybe? If it's trouble, never mind; I don't want to be trouble."


"No, no trouble at all," she sighed. "Grab a chair in the study." She pointed, then turned and headed for the kitchen. "I think there's a bottle in the fridge."


"No, I'll come to the kitchen," he told her, following. "I hate to be a bother."


"No bother."


"No, really, you're busy, I'll come. You've got children?" he asked as they walked. "No, that's right; Yes, a daughter;. you told me; that's right. Just the one."


"And how old?"


"She just turned twelve."


"Then you don't have to worry," he breathed. "No, not yet. Later on, though, watch, out." He was shaking his head. Chris noticed that his walk was a modified waddle. "When you see all the sickness day in and day out," he continued. "Unbelievable. Incredible. Crazy. You know, I looked at my wife just a couple of days ago---or weeks ago---I forget. I said, Mary, the world----the entire world---is having a massive nervous breakdown. All. The whole world." He gestured globally.


They had entered the kitchen, where Karl was polishing the interior of the oven. He neither turned nor acknowledged their presence.


"This is really so embarrassing," the detective wheezed hoarsely as Chris was opening the refrigerator door. Yet his gaze was on Karl brushing swiftly and questioningly over his back, and his arms and his neck like a small, dark bird skimming over a lake. "I meet a famous motion-picture star," he continued, "and I ask for some Calso water. Ah, boy."


Chris had found the bottle aced now was looking for an opener. "Ice?" she asked.


"No, plain; plain is fine."


She was opening the bottle.


"You know that film you made called Angel?" he said. "I saw that film six times."


"If you were looking for the killer," she murmured as she poured out the bubbling Calso, "arrest the producer and the cutter."


"Oh, no, no, it was excellent---really---I loved it!"


"Sit down" She was nodding at the table.


"Oh, thank you." He sat. "No, the film was just lovely," he insisted. "So touching. But just one thing," he ventured, "One little tiny, minuscule point. Oh, thank you."


She'd set down the glass of Calso and sat on the other side of the table, hands clasped before her.


"One minor flaw," he resumed apologetically. "Only minor. And please believe me, I'm only a layman. You know? I'm just audience. What do I know? How-ever, it seemed to me---to a layman---that the musical score was getting in the way of certain scenes. It was too intrusive." He was earnest now; caught up. "It kept on reminding me that this was a movie. You know? Like so many of these fancy camera angles lately. So distracting. Incidentally, the score, Miss MacNeil---did he steal that perhaps from Mendelssohn?"


Chris drummed her fingertips lightly on the table. Strange detective. And why was he constantly glancing to Karl?


"I wouldn't know," she said, "but I'm glad you liked the picture. Better drink that," she told him, nodding to the Calso. "It tends to get flat."


"Yes, of course. I'm so garrulous. You're busy. Forgive me." He lifted the glass as if in toast and drained its contents, his little finger arching demurely away from the others. "Ah, good, that's good," he exhaled, contented, as he put aside the glass, his eye falling lightly on Regan's sculpture of the bird. It was now the centerpiece of the table, its beak floating mockingly and at length above the salt and pepper shakers. "Quaint." He smiled. "Nice." He looked up. "The artist?"


"My daughter," Chris told him.


"Very nice."


"Look, I hate to be---"


"Yes, yes, I know, I'm a nuisance. Well, look, just a question or two and we're done. In fact, only one question and then I'll be going." He was glancing at his wristwatch as if he were anxious to get away to some appointment. "Since poor Mr. Dennings," he labored breathily; "had completed his filming in this area, we wondered if he might have been visiting someone on the night of the accident. Now other than yourself, Of course, did he have any friends in this area?"


"Oh, he was here that night," Chris told him.


"Oh?" His eyebrows sickled upward. "Near the time of the accident?"


"When did it happen?" she asked him.


"Seven-o-five," he told her.


"Yes, I think so."


"Well, that settles it, then." He nodded, turning in his chair as if preparatory to rising. "He was drunk, he was leaving, he fell down the steps. Yes, that settles it. Definitely. Listen, though, just for the sake of the record, can you tell me approximately what time he left the house?"


He was pawing at truth like a weary bachelor pinching vegetables at market. How did he ever make lieutenant? Chris wondered. "I don't know," she replied. "I didn't see him."


"I don't understand."


"Well, he came and left while I was out I was over at a doctor's office in Rosslyn."


"Ah, I see." He nodded. "Of course, But the how do you know he was here?"


'Oh, well, Sharon said---"


"Sharon?"' he interrupted.


"Sharon Spencer. She's my secretary. She was here when Burke dropped by. She---"


"He came to see her?" he asked.


"No, me."


'Yes, of course. Yes, forgive me for interrupting."


"My daughter was sick and Sharon left him here while she went to pick up some prescriptions. By the time I got home, though, Burke was gone."


"And what time was that, please?"


"Seven-fifteen or so, seven-thirty."


"And what time had you left?"


"Maybe six-fifteenish."


"What time had Miss Spencer left?"


"I don't know."


"And between the time Miss Spencer left and the time you returned, who was here in the house with Mr. Dennings besides your daughter?"


"No one."


"No one? He left her alone?"


She nodded.


"No servants?"


"No, Willie and Karl were---"


'Who are they?"


Chris abruptly felt the earth shift under her feet. The nuzzling interview, she realized, was suddenly steely interrogation. "Well, Karl's right there." She motioned with her head, her glance fixed dully on the servant's back. Still polishing the oven... "And Willie's his wife," she resumed. "They're my housekeepers." Polishing... "They'd taken the afternoon off and when I got home, they weren't back yet. Willie..." Chris paused.


"Willie what?"


"Oh, well, nothing." She, shrugged as she tugged her gaze away from the manservant's brawny back. The oven was clean, she had noticed. Why was Karl still polishing?


She reached for a cigarette. Kinderman lit it.


"So then only your daughter would know when Dennings left the house."


"It was really an accident?"


"Oh, of course. It's routine, Miss MacNeil, its routine.


Mr. Dennings wasn't robbed and he had no enemies, none that we know of, that is, in the District."


Chris darted a momentary glance to Karl but then shifted it quickly bade to Kinderman. Had he noticed? Apparently not. He was fingering the sculpture.


"It's got a name, this kind of bird; I can't think of it. something." He noticed Chris staring and looked vaguely embarrassed. "Forgive me, you're busy. Well, a minute and we're done. Now your daughter, she would know when Mr. Dennings left?"


"No, she wouldn't. She was heavily sedated."


"Ah, dear me, a shame, a shame." His droopy eyelids seeped concern. "It's serious?"


"Yes, I'm afraid it is."


"May I ask...?" he probed with a delicate gesture.


'We still don't know."


"Watch out for drafts," he cautioned firmly.


Chris looked blank.


"A draft in the winter when a house is hot is a magic carpet for bacteria. My mother used to say that. Maybe that's folk myth. Maybe." He shrugged. "But a myth, to speak plainly, to me is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn't otherwise swallow, like maybe lima beans," he said earnestly.


Chris relaxed. The shaggy dog padding fuddled through cornfields had returned.


"That's hers, that's her room"---he was thumbing toward the ceiling---"with that great big window looking out on these steps?"


Chris nodded.


"Keep the window closed and she'll get better."


"Well, it's always closed and it's always shuttered" Chris said as he dipped a pudgy hand in the inside pocket of his jacket.


"She'll get better," he repeated sententiously. "Just remember, 'An ounce of prevention...' "


Chris drummed her fingertips on the tabletop again.


"You're busy. Well, we're finished. Just a note for the record---routine---we're all done."


From the pocket of the jacket he'd extracted a crumpled mimeographed program of a high-school production of Cyrano de Bergerac and now groped in the pockets of his coat, where he netted a toothmarked yellow stub of a number 2 pencil, whose point had the look of having been sharpened with the blade of a scissors. He pressed the program flat on the table, brushing out the wrinkles. "Now just a name or two," he puffed. "That's Spencer with a c?"


"Yes, c."


"A c," he repeated, writing the name in a margin of the program. "And the housekeepers? John and Willie...?"


"Karl and Willie Engstrom."


"Karl. That's right, it's Karl. Karl Engstrom." He scribbled the names in a dark, thick script. "Now the times I remember," he told her huskily, turning the program around in search of white space. "Times I----Oh. Oh, no, wait. I forgot. Yes, the housekeepers. You said they got home at what time?"


'I didn't say. Karl, what time did you get in last night?" Chris called to him.


The Swiss turned around, his face inscrutable. "Exactly nine-thirty, madam."


"Yeah, that's right, you'd forgotten your key. I remember I looked at the clock in the kitchen when you rang the doorbell."


"You saw a good film?" the detective asked Karl. "I never go by reviews," he explained to Chris in a breathy aside. "It's what the people think, the audience."


"Paul Scofield in Lear" Karl informed the detective.


"Ah, I saw that; that's excellent. Excellent. Marvelous "


"Yes, at the Crest," Karl continued. "The six-o'clock showing. Then immediately after I take the bus from in front of the theater and---"


"Please, that's not necessary," the detective pro-tested with a gesture. "Please."


"I don't mind."


"If you insist."


"I get off at Wisconsin Avenue and M Street. Nine-twenty, perhaps. And then I walk to the house."


"Look, you didn't have to tell me," the detective told him, "but anyway, thank you, it was very considerate. You liked the film?"


"It was excellent."


"Yes, I thought so too. Exceptional. Well, now..." He turned back to Chris and to scribbling on the program. "I've wasted your time, but I have a job." He shrugged. "Well, only a moment and finished. Tragic... tragic..." he breathed as he jotted down fragments in margins. "Such a talent. And a man who knew people, I'm sure: how to handle them. With so many elements who could make him look good or maybe make him look bad---like the cameraman, the sound man, the composer, whatever.... Please correct me if I'm wrong, bud it seems to me nowadays a director of importance has also to be almost a Dale Carnegie. Am I wrong?"


"Oh, well, Burke had a temper," Chris sighed.


The detective repositioned the program. "Ah, well, maybe so with the big shots. People his size." Once again he was scribbling. "But the key is the little people, the menials, the people who handle the minor details that if they didn't handle right would be major details. Don't you think?"


Chris glanced at her fingernails and ruefully shook her head. "When Burke let fly, he never discriminated," she murmured with a weak, wry smile. "No, sir. It was only when he drank, though."


"Finished. We're finished." Kinderman was dotting a final i. "Oh, no, wait," he abruptly remembered. "Mrs. Engstrom. They went and came together?" He was gesturing toward Karl.


"No, she went to see a Beatles film," Chris answered just as Karl was turning to reply. "She got in a few minutes after I did."


"Why did I ask that? It wasn't important." He shrugged as he folded up the program and tucked it away in the pocket of his jacket along with the pencil. "Well, that's that. When I'm back in the office, no doubt I'll remember something I should have asked. With me, that always happens. Oh, well, I could call you," he puffed, standing up.


Chris rose along with him.


"Well, I'm going out of town for a couple of weeks," she said.


"It can wait" he assured her. "It can wait." He was staring of the sculpture with a smiling fondness. "Cute. So cute," he said. He'd leaned over and picked it up and was rubbing his thumb along is beak.


Chris bent over to pick up a thread on the kitchen floor.


"Have you got a good doctor?" the detective asked her. "I mean for your daughter."


He replaced the figure and began to leave. Glumly Chris followed, winding the thread around her thumb.


"Well, I've sure got enough of them," she murmured. "Anyway, I'm checking her into a clinic that's supposed to be great at doing what you do, only viruses."


"Let's hope they're a great deal better. It's out of town, this clinic?"


"Yes, it is."


"It's a good one?"


"We'll see."


"Keep her out of the draft."


They had reached the front door of the house. He put a hand on the doorknob. "Well, I would say that it's been a pleasure, but under the circumstances..." He bowed his head and shook it. "I'm sorry. Really. I'm terribly sorry."


Chris folded her arms and looked down at the rug. She nodded briefly.


Kinderman opened the door and stepped outside. As he turned to Chris, he was putting on his hat. "Well, good luck with your daughter."


"Thanks." She smiled wanly. "Good luck with the world."


He nodded with a gentle warmth and sadness, then waddled away. Chris watched as he listed toward a waiting squad car parked near the corner in front of a fire hydrant. He flung up a hand to his hat as a shearing wind sprang sharp from the south. The hem of his coat flapped. Chris closed the door.


When he'd entered the passenger side of the squad car, Kinderman fumed and looked back at the house. He thought he saw movement at Regan's window, a quick, lithe figure flashing to the side and out of view. He wasn't sure. He'd seen it peripherally as he'd turned. But he noted that the shutters were open. Odd. For a moment he waited. No one appeared. With a puzzled frown, the detective turned and opened the glove compartment, extracting a small brown envelope and a penknife. Unclasping the smallest of the blades of the knife, he held his thumb inside the envelope and surgically scraped paint from Regan's sculpture from under his thumbnail. When he had finished and was sealing the envelope, he nodded to the detective-sergeant behind, the wheel. They pulled away.


As they drove down Prospect Street, Kinderman pocketed the envelope. "take it easy," he captioned the sergeant, glancing at the traffic building up ahead. "This is business, not pleasure." He rubbed at his eyes with weary fingers. "Ah, what a life," he sighed. "What a life."


Later, that evening, while Dr. Klein was injecting Regan with fifty milligrams of Sparine to assure her tranquillity on the journey to Dayton, Lieutenant Kinderman stood brooding in his office, palms pressed flat atop his desk as he pored over fragments of baffling data. The narrow beam of an ancient desk lamp flared on a clutter of scattered reports. There was no other light. He believed that it helped him narrow the focus of concentration.


Kinderman's breathing labored heavy in the darkness as his glance flitted here; now there. Then he took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Mental Clearance Sale! he instructed himself, as he did whenever he wished to tidy his brain for a fresh point of view: Absolutely Everything Must Go!


When he opened his eyes, he examined the pathologist's report on Dennings: ... tearing of the spinal cord with fractured skull and neck, plus numerous contusions, lacerations, and abrasions; stretching of the neck skin; ecchymosis of the neck skin; shearing of platysma, sternomastoid, splenius, trapezius and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae and shearing of both the anterior and posterior spinous ligaments....


He looked out a window at the dark of the city. The Capitol dome light glowed. The Congress was working late. He shut his eyes again, recalling his conversation with the District pathologist at eleven-fifty-five on the night of Denning's death.


"It could have happened in the fall?"


"No, it's very unlikely. The sternomastoids and the trapezius muscles alone are enough to prevent it. Then you've also got the various articulations of the cervical spine to be overcome as well as the ligaments holding the bores together."


"Speaking plainly, however, is it possible?"


"Well, of course, he was drunk and these muscles were doubtless somewhat relaxed. Perhaps if the force of the initial impact were sufficiently powerful and---"


"Falling maybe twenty or thirty feet before he hit?"


"Yes, that, and if immediately after impact his head got stuck in something; to other words, if there were immediate interference with the normal rotation of the head and body as a unit, well maybe---I say just maybe---you could get this result."


"Could another human being have done it?"


"Yes, but he'd have to be an exceptionally powerful man."


Kinderman had checked Karl Engstrom's story regarding his whereabouts at the time of Denning's death. The show times matched, as did the schedule that night of a D. C. Transit bus. Moreover, the driver of the bus that Karl had claimed he had boarded by the theater went off duty at Wisconsin and M, where Karl had stated he alighted at approximately twenty minutes after nine. A change of drivers had taken place, and the off-duty driver had logged the time of his arrival at the transfer point: precisely nine-eighteen.


Yet on Kinderman's desk was a record of a felony charge against Engstrom on August 27, 1963, alleging he had stolen a quantity of narcotics over a period of months from the home of a doctor in Beverly Hills where he and Willie were then employed.


... born April 20, 1921, in Zurich, Switzerland. Married to Willie nee Braun September 7, 1941. Daughter, Elvira, born New York City, January 11, 1943, current address unknown. Defendant...


The remainder the detective found baffling: The doctor, whose testimony was sine qua non for successful prosecution, abruptly---and without any explanation---dropped the charges.


Why would he done so?


The Engstrom were hired by Chris MacNeil only two months later, which meant that the doctor had given them a favorable reference.


Why would he do so?


Engstrom had certainly pilfered the drugs, and yet a medical examination at the time of the charge had failed to yield the slightest sign that the man was an addict, or even a user.


Why not?


With his eyes still closed, the detective softly recited Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky": " 'Twas brillig and the slithy tones..." Another of his mind-clearing tricks.


When he'd finished reciting, he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on the Capitol rotunda, trying to keep his mind a blank. But as usual, he found the task impossible. Sighing, he glanced at the police psychologist's report on the recent desecrations at Holy Trinity: "... statue... phallus... human excrement... Damien Karras," he had underscored in red. He breathed in the silence and then reached for a scholarly work on witchcraft, turning to a page he had marked with a paper clip: Black Mass... a form of devil worship, the ritual, in the main, consisting of (1) exhortation (the "sermon") to performance of evil among the community, (2) coition with the demon (reputedly painful, the demon's penis invariably described as "icy cold"), and (3) a variety of desecrations that were largely sexual in nature. For example, communion Hosts of unusual size were prepared (compounded of flour, feces, menstrual blood and pus), which then were slit and used as artificial vaginas with which the priests would ferociously copulate while raving that they were ravishing the Virgin Mother of God or that they were sodomizing Christ. In another instance of such practice, a statue of Christ was inserted deep in a girl's vagina while into her anus was inserted the Host, which the priest then crushed as he shouted blasphemies and sodomized the girl. Life-sized images of Christ and the Virgin Mary also played a frequent role in the ritual. The image of the Virgin, for example---usually painted to give her a dissolute, sluttish appearance---was equipped with breasts which cultists sucked, and also a vagina into which the penis might be inserted. The statues of Christ were equipped with a phallus for fellatio by both the men and the women, and also for insertion into the vagina of the women and the anus of the men. Occasionally, rather than an image, a human figure was bound to a cross and made to function in place of the statue, and upon the discharge of his semen it was collected in a blasphemously consecrated chalice and used in the making of the communion host, which was destined to be consecrated on an altar coveted with excrement. This--- Kinderman flipped the pages to an underlined paragraph dealing with ritualistic murder. He read it slowly, nibbling at the pad of an index finger, and when he had finished he frowned at the page and shook his head. He lifted a brooding glance to the -lamp. He flicked it out. He left his office and drove to the morgue.


The young attendant at the desk wan munching at a ham and cheese sandwich on rye, and brushed the crumbs from a crossword puzzle as Kinderman approached him.


"Dennings," the detective whispered hoarsely.


The attendant nodded, filling in a five-letter horizontal, then rose with his sandwich and moved down the hall.


Kinderman followed him, hat in hand, followed faint scent of caraway seed and mustard to rows of refrigerated lockers, to the dreamless cabinet used for the filing of sightless eyes.


They halted at locker 32, The expressionless attendant slid it out. He bit at his sandwich, and a fragment of mayonnaise-speckled crust fell lightly to the shroud.


For a moment Kinderman stared down; then, slowly and gently, he pulled back the sheet to expose what he'd seen and yet could not accept.


Burke Dennings' head was turned completely around, facing backward.


CHAPTER FIVE


Cupped in the warm, green hollow of the campus, Damien Karras, jogged alone around an oval, loamy track in khaki shorts and a cotton T-shit drenched with the cling of healing sweat. Up ahead, on a hillock, the lime-white dome of the astronomical observatory pulsed with the beat of his stride; behind him, the medical school fell away with churned-up shards of earth and care.


Since release from his duties, he came here daily, lapping the miles and chasing sleep. He had almost caught it; almost eased the clutch of grief that gripped at his heart like a deep tattoo. It held him gentler now.


Twenty laps...


Much gentler.


More! Two more!


Much gentler...


Powerful leg muscles blooded and stinging, rippling with a long and leonine grace, Karras thumped around a turn when he noticed someone sitting on a bench to- the side where he'd laid out his towel, sweater and pants: a middle-aged man in a floppy overcoat and pulpy, crushed felt hat. He seemed to be watching him. Was he? Yes... head turning as Karras passed.


The priest accelerated, digging at the final lap with pounding strides that jarred the earth, then he slowed to a panting, gulping walk as he passed the bench without a glance, both hands pressed light to his throbbing sides. The heave of his rock-muscled chest and shoulders stretched his T-shirt, distorting the stenciled word PHILOSOPHERS inscribed across the front in once-blade letters now faded to a hint by repeated washings.


The man in the overcoat stood up and began to approach him.


"Father Karras?" Lieutenant Kinderman called hoarsely.


The priest turned around and nodded briefly, squinting into sunlight, waiting for Kinderman to reach him, then beckoned him along as once again he began to move. "Do you mind? I'll cramp," he panted. "Yes, of course." the detective answered, nodding with a wincing lack of enthusiasm as be tucked his hands into his pockets. The walk from the parking lot had tired him.


"Have---have we met?" asked the Jesuit.


"No, Father. No, but they said that you looked like a boxer; some priest at the residence hall; I forget." He was tugging out his wallet. "So bad with names."


"And yours?"


"William Kinderman, Father." He flashed his identification. "Homicide."


"Really?" Karras scanned the badge and identification card with a shining, boyish interest. Flushed and perspiring, his face had an eager look of innocence as he turned to the waddling detective. "What's this about?"


"Hey, you know something, Father?" Kinderman answered, inspecting the Jesuit's rugged features. "It's true, you do look like a boxer. Excuse me; that scar, you know, there by your eye?" He was pointing. "Like Brando, it looks like, in Waterfront, just exactly Marlon Brando. They gave him a scar"---he was illustrating, pulling at the corner of his eye---"that made his eye look a little bit closed, just a little, made him look a little dreamy all the time, always sad. Well, that's you," he said, pointing. "You're Brando. People tell you that, Father?"


"No, they don't."


"Ever box?"


"Oh, a little."


"You're from here in the District?"


"New York."


"Golden Gloves. Am I right?"


"You just made captain." Karras smiled. "Now what can I do for you?"


"Walk a little slower, please. Emphysema." The detective was gesturing at his throat.


"Oh, I'm sorry." Karras slowed his pace.


"Never mind. Do you smoke?"


"Yes, I do."


"You shouldn't."


"Well, now tell me the problem."


"Of course; I'm digressing. Incidentally, you're busy?" the detective inquired. "I'm not interrupting?"


"Interrupting what?" asked Karras, bemused.


"Well, mental prayer, perhaps."


"You will make captain." Karras smiled cryptically.


"Pardon me, I missed something?"


Karras shook his head; but the smile lingered. "I doubt that you ever miss a thing," he remarked. His sidelong glance toward Kinderman was sly and warmly twinkling.


Kinderman halted and mounted a massive and hopeless effort at looking befuddled, but glancing at the Jesuit's crinkling eyes, he lowered his head and chuckled ruefully. "Ah, well. Of course... of course... a psychiatrist. Who am I kidding?" He shrugged. "Look, it's habit with me, Father. Forgive me. Schmaltz---that's the Kinderman method: pure schmaltz. Well, I'll stop and tell you straight what it's all about."


"The desecrations," Karras said, nodding.


"So I wasted my schmaltz, the detective said quietly.


"Sorry"


"Never mind, Father; that I deserved. Yes, the things in the church," he confirmed. "Correct. Only maybe something else besides, something serious."


"Murder?"


"Yes. kick me again, I enjoy it."


"Well, Homicide Division." The Jesuit shrugged.


"Never mind, never mind, Marlon Brando; never mind.


People tell you for a priest you're a little bit smart-ass?"


"Mea culpa," Karras murmured. Though he was smiling, he felt a regret that perhaps he'd diminished the man's self esteem. He hadn't meant to. And now he felt glad of a chance to express a sincere perplexity. "I don't get it, though," he added, taking care that he wrinkled his brow. "What's the connection?"


"Look, Father, could we keep this between us? Confidential? Like a matter of confession, so to speak?"


"Of course." He was eyeing the detective earnestly. "What is it?"


"You know that director who was doing the film here, Father? Burke Dennings?"


"Well, I've seen him."


"You've seen him." The detective nodded. "You're also familiar with how he died?"


"Well, the papers..." Karras shrugged again.


"That's just part of it."


"Oh?"


"Only part of it. Part. Just a part. Listen, what do you know on the subject of witchcraft?"


"What?"


"Listen, patience; I'm leading up to something. Now witchcraft, please---you're familiar?"


"A little."


"From the witching end, not the hunting."


"Oh, I once did a paper on it" Karras smiled. "The psychiatric end."


"Oh, really? Wonderful! Great! That's a bonus. A plus. You could help me a lot, a lot more than I thought. Listen, Father. Now witchcraft..."


He reached up and gripped at the Jesuit's arm as they rounded a turn and approached the bench. "Now me, I'm a layman and, plainly speaking, not well educated. Not formally. No. But I read. Look; I know what they say about self-made men, that they're horrible examples of unskilled labor. But me, I'll speak plainly, I'm not ashamed. Not at all, I'm---" Abruptly he arrested the flow, looked down and shook his head. "Schmaltz. It's habit. I can't stop the schmaltz. Look, forgive me; you're busy."


"Yes, I'm praying."


The Jesuit's soft delivery had been dry and expressionless. Kinderman halted for a moment and eyed him. "You're serious? No."


The detective faced forward again and they walked. "Look, I'll come to the point: the desecrations. They remind you of anything to do with witchcraft?"


"Maybe. Some rituals used in Black Mass."


"A-plus. And now Dennings---you read how he died?"


"In a fall"


"Well, I'll tell you, and---please---confidential!"


"Of course."


The detective looked suddenly pained as he realized that Karras had no intention of stopping at the bench. "Do you mind?" he asked wistfully.


"What?"


"Could we stop? Maybe sit?"


"Oh, sure." They began to move back toward the bench.


"You won't cramp?"


"No, I'm fine now."


"You're sure?"


"I'm fine."


"All right, all right, if you insist."


"You were saying?"


"In a second, please, just one second."


Kinderman settled his aching bulk on the bench with a sigh of content. "Ah, better, that's better," he said as the Jesuit picked up his towel and wiped his perspiring face. "Middle age. What a life."


"Burke Dennings?-"


"Burke Dennings, Burke Dennings, Burke Dennings..." The detective was nodding down at his shoes. Then he glanced up at Karras. The priest was wiping the back of his neck. "Burke Dennings, good Father, was found at the bottom of that long flight of steps at exactly five minutes after seven with his head turned completely around and backward."


Peppery shouts drifted muffled from the baseball diamond where the varsity team held practice. Karras stopped wiping and held the lieutenant's steady gaze. "It didn't happen in the fall?" he said at last.


"Sure, it's possible." Kinderman shrugged. "But..."


"Unlikely," Karras brooded.


"And so what comes to mind in the contest of witchcraft?"


The Jesuit sat down slowly, looking pensive. "Well," he said finally, "supposedly demons broke the necks of witches that way. At least, that's the myth."


"A myth?"


"Oh, largely," he said, turning to Kinderman. "Although people did die that way, I suppose: likely members of a coven who either defected or gave away secrets. That's just a guess. But I know it was a trademark of demonic assassins."


Kinderman nodded. "Exactly. Exactly. I remembered the connection from a murder in London. That's now. I mean, lately, just four or five years ago, Father. I remembered that I read it in the papers."


"Yes, I read it too, but I think it turned out to be some sort of hoax. Am I wrong?"


"No, that's right, Father, absolutely right. But in this case, at least, you can see some connection, maybe, with that and the things in the church. Maybe somebody crazy, Father, maybe someone with a spite against the Church. Some unconscious rebellion, perhaps..."


"Sick priest," murmured Karras. "That it?"


"Listen, you re the psychiatrist, Father; you tell me."


"Well, of course, the desecrations are clearly pathological," Karras said thoughtfully, slipping on his sweater. "And if Dennings was murdered---well, I'd guess that the killer's pathological too."


"And perhaps had some knowledge of witchcraft?"


"Could be."


"Could be," the detective grunted. "So who fits the bill, also lives in the neighborhood, and also has access in the night to the church?"


"Sick priest," Karras said, reaching out moodily beside him to a pair of sun-bleached khaki pants.


"Listen, Father, this is hard for you---please!---I understand. But for priests on the campus here, you're the psychiatrist, Father, so---"


"No, I've had a change of assignment."


"Oh, really? In the middle of the year?"


"That's the Order," Karras shrugged as he pulled on the pants.


"Still, you'd know who was sick at the time and who wasn't, correct? I mean, this kind of sickness. You'd know that."


"No, not necessarily, Lieutenant. Not at all. It would only be an accident, in fact, if I did. You see, I'm not a psychoanalyst. All I do is counsel. Anyway," he commented, buttoning his trousers, "I really know of no one who fits the description."


"Ah, yes; doctor's ethics. If you knew. You wouldn't tell."


"No, I probably wouldn't."


"Incidentally---and I mention it only in passing---this ethic is lately considered illegal. Not to bother you with trivia, but lately a psychiatrist in sunny California, no less, was put in jail for not telling the police what he knew about a patient."


"That a threat?"


"Don't talk paranoid. I mention it in passing."


"I could always tell the judge it was a matter of confession," said the Jesuit, grinning wryly as he stood to tuck his shirt in. "Plainly speaking," he added.


The detective glanced up at him, faintly gloomy. "Want to go into business, Father?" he said Then looked away dismally. " 'Father'... what 'Father'?" he asked rhetorically. "You're a Jew; I could tell when I met you."


The Jesuit chuckled.


"Yes, laugh," said Kinderman. "Laugh." But then he smiled, looking impishly pleased with himself. He turned with beaming eyes. "That reminds me. The entrance examination to be a policeman, Father? When I took it, one question went something like: 'What are rabies and what would you do for them?' Know what some dumbhead put down for an answer? Emis? 'Rabies,' he said, 'are Jew priests, and I would do anything that I could for them.' Honest!" He'd raised up a hand as in oath.


Karras laughed. "Come on, I'll walk you to your car. Are you parked in the lot?"


The detective looked up at him, reluctant to move. "Then we're finished?"


The priest put a foot on the bench, leaning over, an arm resting heavily on his knee. "Look, I'm really not covering up," he said. "Really. If I knew of a priest like the one you're looking for, the least I would do is to tell you that there was such a man without giving you his name. Then I guess I'd report it to the Provincial. But I don't know of anyone who even comes close."


"Ah, well," the detective sighed. "I never thought it was a priest in the first place. Not really." He nodded toward the parking lot. "Yes, I'm over there."


They started walking.


"What I really suspect," the detective continued, "if I said it out loud you would call me a nut. I don't know. I don't know." He was shaking his head. "All these clubs and these cults where they kill for no reason. It makes you start thinking peculiar things. To keep up with the times, these days, you have to be a little bit crazy."


Karras nodded.


"What's that thing on your shirt?" the detective asked him, motioning his head toward the Jesuit's chest.


"What thing?"


"On the T-shirt," the detective clarified. "The writing. 'Philosophers.' "


"Oh, I taught a few courses one year," said Karras, "at Woodstock Seminary in Maryland. I played on the lower-class baseball team. They were called the Philosophers.'


"Ah, and the upper-class team?"


"Theologians."


Kinderman smiled and shook his head. "Theologians three, Philosophers two," he mused.


"Philosophers three, Theologians two."


"Of course."


"Of course."


"Strange things," the detective brooded. "Strange.- Listen, Father," he began on a reticent tack. "Listen, doctor.... Am I crazy, or could there be maybe a witch coven here in the District right now? Right today?"


"Oh, come on," said Karras.


"Then there could."


"Didn't get that."


"Now I'll be the doctor," the detective announced to him, punching at the air with an index finger. "You didn't say no, but instead you were smart-ass again. That's defensive, good Father, defensive. You're afraid you'll look gullible, maybe; a superstitious priest in front of Kinderman the mastermind, the rationalist'


' ---he was tapping the finger at his temple---"the genius beside you, here, the walking Age of Reason. Right? Am I right?"


The Jesuit stared at him now with mounting surmise and respect. "Why, that's very astute," he remarked.


"Well, all right, then," Kinderman grunted. "So I'll ask you again: could there maybe be witch covens here in the District?"


"Well, I really wouldn't know," answered Karras thoughtfully, arms folded across his chest. "But in parts of Europe they say Black Mass."


"Today?"


"Today."


"You mean just like the old days, Father? Look, I read about those things, incidentally, with the sex and the statues and who knows whatever. Not meaning to disgust you, by the way, but they did all those things? It's for real?"


"I don't know."


"Your opinion, then, Father Defensive."


The Jesuit chuckled. "All right, then; I think it's for real. Or at least I suspect so. But most of my reasoning's based on pathology. Sure, Black Mass. But anyone doing those things is a very disturbed human being, and disturbed in a very special way. There's a clinical name for that kind of disturbance, in fact; it's called Satanism---means people who can't have any sexual pleasure unless it's connected to a blasphemous action. Well, it's not that uncommon, not even today, and Black Mass was just used as the justification."


"Again, please forgive me, but the things with the statues of Jesus and Mary?"


"What about them?"


"They're true?"


"Well, I think this might interest you as a policeman." His scholarly interest aroused and stirring, Karras' manner grew quietly animated. "The records of the Paris police still carry the case of a couple of monks from a nearby monastery---let's see..." He scratched his head as he tried to recall. "Yes, the one at Crépy, I believe. Well, whatever." He shrugged. "Close by. At any rate, the monks came into an inn and got rather belligerent about wanting a bed for three. Well, the third they were carrying: a life-size statue of the Blessed Mother."


"Ah, boy, that's shocking," breathed the detective. "Shocking."


"But true. And a fair indication that what you've been reading is based on fact."


"Well, the sex, maybe so, maybe so. I can see. That's a whole other story altogether. Never mind. But the ritual murders now, Father? That's true? Now come on! Using blood from the newborn babies?" The detective was alluding to something else he had read in the book on witchcraft, describing how the unfrocked priest at Black Mass would at times slit the wrist of a newborn infant so that the blood poured into a chalice and later was consecrated and consumed in the form of communion. "That's just like the stories they used to tell about the Jews," the detective continued. "How they stole Christian babies and drank their blood. Look, forgive me, but your people told all those stories."


"If we did, forgive me."


"You're absolved, you're absolved."


Something dark, something sad; passed across the priest's eyes, like the shadow of pain briefly remembered. He quickly fixed his eyes on the path just ahead.


"Well, I really don't know about ritual murder," said Karras. "I don't. But a midwife in Switzerland once confessed to the murder of thirty or forty babies for use at Black Mass. Oh, well, maybe she was tortured," he amended. "Who knows? But she certainly told a convincing story. She said she'd hide a long, thin needle up her sleeve, so that when she was delivering tire baby, she'd slip out the needle and stick it through the crown of the baby's head, and then hide the needle again. No marks," he said, glancing at Kinderman. "The baby looked stillborn. You've heard of the prejudice European Catholics used to have against midwives?


Well, that's how it started."


"That's frightening."


"This century hasn't got the lock on insanity. Anyway--- "Wait a minute, wait now, forgive me. These stories---they were told by some people who were tortured, correct? So they're basically not so reliable. They signed the confessions and later, the machers, they filled in the blanks. I mean, then there was nothing like habeas corpus, no writs of 'Let My People Go,' so to speak. Am I right? Am I right?"


"Yes, you're right, but then too, many of the confessions were voluntary."


"So who would volunteer such things?"


"Well, possibly people who were mentally disturbed."


"Aha! Another reliable source!"


"Well, of course you're quite right, Lieutenant. I'm just playing devil's advocate. But one thing that sometimes we tend to forget is that people psychotic enough to confess to such things might conceivably be psychotic enough to have done them. For example, the myths about werewolves. So, fine, they're ridiculous: no one can turn himself into a wolf. But what if a man were so disturbed that he not only thought that he was a werewolf, but also acted like one?"


"Terrible. What is this---theory now, Father, or fact?


"Well, there's William Stumpf, for example. Or Peter I can't remember. Anyway, a German in the sixteenth century who thought he was a werewolf. He murdered perhaps twenty or thirty young children"


"You mean, he confessed it?"


"Well, yes, but I think the confession was valid."


"How so?"


"When they caught him, he was eating the brains of his two young daughters-in-law."


From the practice field, crisp in the thin, clear April sunlight, came echoes of chatter and ball against bat. "C'mon, Mullins, let's shag it, let's go, get the lead out!"


They had come to the parking lot, priest and detective. They walked now in silence.


When they came to the squad car, Kinderman absently reached out toward the handle of the door. For a moment he paused, then lifted a moody look to Karras.


"So what am I looking for, Father?" he asked him.


"A madman," said Damien Karras softly "Perhaps someone on drugs."


The detective thought it over, then silently nodded. He turned to the priest. "Want a ride?" he asked, opening the door of the squad car "Oh, thanks, but it's just a short walk."


"Never mind that; enjoy!" Kinderman gestured impatiently, motioning Karras to get into the car. "You can tell all your friends you went riding in a police car."


The Jesuit grinned and slipped into the back.


"Very good, very good," the detective breathed hoarsely, then squirmed in beside him and closed the door. "No walk is short," he commented. "None."


With Karras guiding, they drove toward the modern Jesuit residence hall on Prospect Street, where the priest had taken new quarters. To remain in the cottage, he'd felt, might encourage the men he had counseled to continue to seek his professional help.


"You like movies, Father Karras?"


'Very much."


"You saw Lear?'"


"Can't afford it."


"I saw it. I get passes."


'That's nice."'


"I get passes for the very best shows. Mrs. K., she gets tired, though; never likes to go."


"That's too bad."


"It's too bad, yes, I hate to go alone. You know, I love to talk film, to discuss, to critique' He was staring out the window, gaze averted to the side and away from the priest.


Karras nodded silently, looking down at his large and very powerful hands. They were clasped between his legs. A moment passed. Then Kinderman hesitantly turned with a wistful look. "Would you like to see a film with me sometime, Father? It's free... I get passes," he added quickly.


The priest looked at him, grinning. "As Elwood P. Dowd used to say in Harvey, Lieutenant. When?"


"Oh, I'll call you, I'll call you!" The detective beam eagerly.


They'd come to the residence hall and parked. Karras put a hand on the door and clicked it open "Please do. Look, I'm sorry that I wasn't much help."


"Never mind, you were help." Kinderman waved limply. Karras was climbing out of the car. "In fact, for a Jew who's trying to pass, you're a very nice man."


Karras turned, closed the door and leaned into the window with a faint, warm smile "Do people ever tell you look like Paul Newman?"


"Always. And believe me, inside this body, Mr. Newman is struggling to get out. Too crowded. Inside," he said, "is also Clark Gable."


Karras waved with a grin and started away.


"Father, wait!"


Karras turned. The detective was squeezing out of the car.


"Listen, Father, I forgot," he puffed, approaching "Slipped my mind. You know, that card with the dirty writing on it? The one that was found in the church?"


"You mean the altar card?"


"Whatever. It's still around?"


"Yes, I've got it in my room. I was checking the Latin. You want it?"


"Yes, maybe it shows something. Maybe."


"Just a second, I'll get it."


While Kinderman waited outside by the squad car, the Jesuit went to his ground-floor room facing out on Prospect Street and found the card. He came outside again and gave it to Kinderman.


"Maybe some fingerprints," Kinderman wheezed as he looked it over. Then, "No, wait, you've been handling it," he seemed to realize quickly. "Good thinking. Before you, the Jewish Mr. Moto." He was fumbling at the card's clear plastic sheath. "Ah, no, wait, it comes out, it comes out, it comes out!" Then he glanced up at Karras with incipient dismay. "You've been handling the inside as well, Kirk Douglas?"


Karras grinned ruefully, nodding his head.


"Never mind, maybe still we could find something else. Incidentally, you studied this?"


"Yes, I did."


'Your conclusion?"


Karras shrugged "Doesn't look like the work of a prankster At first, I thought maybe a student But I doubt it. Whoever did that thing is pretty deeply disturbed."


"As you said."


"And the Latin..." Karras brooded. "It's not just flawless, Lieutenant, it's---well, it's got a definite style that's very individual. It's as if whoever did it's used to thinking in Latin."


"Do priests?"


"Oh, come on, now!"


"Just answer the question, please, Father Paranoia."


"Well, yes; at a point in their training, they do. At least, Jesuits and some of the other orders. At Wood-stock Seminary, certain philosophy courses were taught in Latin."


"How so?"


"For precision of thought. It's like law."


"Ah, I see."


Karras suddenly looked earnest, grave. "Look, Lieutenant, can I tell you who I really think did it?"


The detective leaned closer. "No, who?"


"Dominicans. Go pick on them."


Karras smiled, waved good-bye and walked away.


"I lied!" the detective called after him sullenly. "You look like Sal Mineo!"


Kinderman watched as the priest gave another little wave and entered the residence hall, then he turned and got into the squad car. He wheezed, sitting motionless, staring at the floorboard. "He hums, he hums, that man," he murmured. "Just like a tuning fork under the water." For a moment longer he held the look; and then turned and told the driver, "All right, back to headquarters. Hurry. Break laws." They pulled away.


Karras' new room was simply furnished: a single bed, a comfortable chair, a desk and bookshelves built into the wall. On the desk was an early photo of his mother, and in silent rebuke on the wall by his bed hung a metal crucifix.


The narrow room way world enough for him. He cared little for possessions; only that those he had be clean.


He showered, scrubbing briskly, then slipped on khaki pants and a T-shirt and ambled to dinner in the priests' refectory, where he spotted pink-cheeked Dyer sitting alone at a table in a corner. He moved to join him.


"Hi, Damien," said Dyer. The young priest was wearing a faded Snoopy sweatshirt.


Karras bowed his head as he stood by a chair and murmured a rapid grace. Then he blessed himself, sat and greeted his friend.


"How's the loafer?" asked Dyer as Karras spread a napkin on his lap.


"Who's a loafer? I'm working."


"One lecture a week?"


"It's the quality that counts," said Karras. "What's dinner?"


"Can't you smell it?"


"Oh, shit, is it dog day?" Knackwurst and sauerkraut.


"It's the quantity that counts," replied Dyer serenely.


Karras shook his head and reached out for the aluminum pitcher of milk.


"I wouldn't do that," murmured Dyer without expression as he buttered a slice of whole wheat bread. "See the bubbles? Saltpeter."


"I need it," said Karras. As he tipped up his glass to fill it with milk, he could hear someone joining them at the table.


"Well, I finally read that book," said the newcomer brightly.


Karras glanced up and felt aching dismay, felt the soft crushing weight, press of lead, press of bone, as he recognized the priest who had come to him recently for counseling, the one who could not make friends.


"Oh, and what did you think of it?" Karras asked. He set down the pitcher as if it were the booklet for a broken novena.


The young priest talked, and half an hour later, Dyer was table-hopping, spiking the refectory with laughter. Karras checked his watch. "Want to pick up a jacket?" he asked the young priest. "We can go across the street and take a look at the sunset."


Soon they were leaning against a railing at the top of the steps down to M Street. End of day. The burnished rays of the setting sun flamed glory at the clouds of the western sky and shattered in rippling, crimson dapples on the darkening waters of the river. Once Karras met God in this sight. Long ago. Like a lover forsaken, he still kept the rendezvous.


"Sure a sight," said the younger man.


"Yes, it is," agreed Karras. "I try to get out here every night."


The campus clock boomed out the hour. It was 7: 00 P. M.


At 7: 23, Lieutenant Kinderman pondered a spectrographic analysis showing that the paint from Regan's sculpture matched a scraping of paint from the desecrated statue of the Virgin Mary.


And at 8: 47, in a slum in the northeast section of the city, an impassive Karl Engstrom emerged from a rat-infested tenement house, walked three blocks south to a bus stop, waited alone for a minute, expressionless, then crumpled, sobbing, against a lamppost.


Lieutenant Kinderman, at the time, was at the movies.


CHAPTER SIX


On Wednesday, May 11, they were back in the house. They put Regan to bed, installed a lock on the shutters and stripped all the mirrors from her bedroom and bathroom.


"... fewer and fewer lucid moments, and now there's a total blacking out of her consciousness during the fits, I'm afraid. That's new and would seem to eliminate genuine hysteria. In the meantime, a symptom or two in the area of what we call parapsychic phenomena have..."


Dr. Klein came by, and Chris attended with Sharon as he drilled them in proper procedures for administering Sustagen feedings to Regan during her periods of coma. He inserted the nasogastric tubing. "First..."


Chris forced herself to watch and yet not see her daughter's face; to grip at the words that the doctor was saying and push away others she'd heard at the clinic. They seeped through her consciousness like fog through the branches of a willow tree.


"Now you stated 'No religion' here, Mrs. MacNeil. Is that right? No religious education at all?"


"Oh, well, maybe just 'God.' You know, general. Why?"


"Well, for one thing, the content of much of her raving---when it isn't that gibberish she's been spouting---is religiously oriented. Now where do you think she might get that?"


"Well, give me a for instance."


"Oh, 'Jesus and Mary, sixty-nine,' for ex---"


Klein had guided the tubing into Regan's stomach. "First you check to see if fluid's gotten into the lung," he instructed, pinching on the tube in order to clamp off the flow of Sustagen. "If it..."


"... syndrome of a type of disorder that you rarely ever see anymore, except among primitive cultures. We call it somnambuliform possession. Quite frankly, we don't know much about it except that it starts with some conflict or guilt that eventually leads to the patient's delusion that his body's been invaded by an alien intelligence; a spirit, if you will. In times gone by, when belief in the devil was fairly strong, the possessing entity was usually a demon. In relatively modern cases, however, it's mostly the spirit of someone dead, often someone the patient has known or seen and is able unconsciously to mimic, like the voice and the mannerisms, even the features of the face, at times. They..."


After the gloomy Dr. Klein had left the house, Chris phoned her agent in Beverly Hills and announced to him lifelessly that she wouldn't be directing the segment. Then she called Mrs. Perrin. She was out. Chris hung up the phone with a mounting feeling of desperation. Someone. She would have to have help from...


"... Cases where it's spirits of the dead are more easy to deal with; you don't find the rages in most of those cases, or the hyperactivity and motor excitement.


However, in the other main type of somnambuliform possession, the new personality's always malevolent, always hostile toward the first. Its primary aim, in fact, is to damage, torture and sometimes even kill it."


A set of restraining straps was delivered to the house and Chris stood watching, wan and spent, while Karl affixed them to Regan's bed and then to her wrists. Then as Chris moved a pillow in an effort to center it under Regan's head, the Swiss straightened up and looked pityingly at the child's ravaged face. "She is going to be well?" he asked. A hint of some emotion had tinged his words; they were lightly italicized with concern.


But Chris could not answer. As Karl was addressing her, she'd picked up an object that had been tucked under Regan's pillow. "Who put this crucifix here?" she demanded.


"The syndrome is only the manifestation of some conflict, of some guilt, so we try to get at it, find out what it is. Well, the best procedure in a case like this is hypnotherapy; however, we can't seem to put her under. So then we took a shot at narcosynthesis---that's a treatment that uses narcotics---but, frankly, that looks like another dead end."


"So what's next?'"


"Mostly time, I'm afraid, mostly time. We'll just have to keep trying, and hope for a change. In the meantime, she's going to have to be hospitalized for a..."


Chris found Sharon in the kitchen setting up her typewriter on the table. She had just brought it up from the basement playroom. Willie sliced carrots at the sink for a stew.


"Was it you who put the crucifix under her pillow, Shar?" Chris asked with the strain of tension.


"What do you mean?" asked Sharon, fuddled.


"You didn't?"


"Chris, I don't even know what you're talking about. Look, I told you. I told you on the plane, all I've ever said to Rags is 'God made the world' and maybe things about---"


"Fine, Sharon, fine; I believe you, but---"


"Me, I don't put it," growled Willie defensively.


"Somebody put it there, dammit!" Chris erupted, then wheeled on Karl as he entered the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. "Look, I'll ask you again," she gritted in a tone that verged on shrillness: "Did you put that crucifix under her pillow?"


"No, madam," he answered levelly. He was folding ice cubes into a face towel. "No. No cross."


"That fucking cross didn't just walk up there, damn you! One of you is lying!" She was shrieking with a rage that stunned the room. "Now you tell me who put it there, who---"' Abruptly she slumped to a chair and began to sob into trembling hands. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know what I'm doing!" she wept. "Oh, my God, I don't know what I'm doing!"


Willie and Karl watched silently as Sharon came up beside her and kneaded her neck with a comforting hand. "Hey, okay. It's okay."


Chris wiped at her face with the back of a sleeve. "yeah, I guess whoever did it"---she sniffled---"was only trying to help."


"Look, I'm telling you again and you'd better believe it, I'm not about to put her in a goddamn asylum!"


"It's---"


"I don't care what you call it! I'm not letting her out of my sight!"


"Well, I'm sorry."


"Yeah, sorry! Christ! Eighty-eight doctors and all you can tell me with all of your bullshit is..."


Chris smoked a cigarette, tamped it out nervously and went upstairs to look in on Regan. She opened the door. In the gloom of the bedroom, she made out a figure by Regan's bedside, sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair. Karl. What was he doing? she wondered.


As Chris moved closer, he child not look up, but kept his gaze on the child's face. He had his arm outstretched and was touching it. What was in his hand? As Chris reached the bedside, she saw what it was: the improvised ice pack he had fashioned in the kitchen. Karl was cooling Regan's forehead.


Chris was touched, stood watching with surprise, and when Karl did not move or acknowledge her presence, she turned and quietly left the room.


She went to the kitchen, drank black coffee and smoked another cigarette. Then on an impulse she went to the study. Maybe... maybe...


"... an outside chance, since possession is loosely related to hysteria insofar as the origin of the syndrome is almost always autosuggestive. Your daughter must have known about possession, believed in possession, and known about some of its symptoms, so that now her unconscious is producing the syndrome. If that can be established, you might take a stab at a form of cure that's autosuggestive. I think of it as shock treatment in these cases, though most other therapists wouldn't agree, I suppose. Oh, well---as I said, it's a very outside chance, and since you're opposed to your daughter being hospitalized, I'll---"


"Name it, for Gods sake! What is it?!"


"Have you ever heard of exorcism, Mrs. MacNeil?"


The books in the study were part of the furnishings and Chris was unfamiliar with them. Now she was scanning the titles, searching, searching....


"... stylized ritual now out of date in which rabbis and priests tried to drive out the spirit. It's only the Catholics who haven't discarded it yet, but they keep it pretty much in the closet as sort of an embarrassment, I think. But to someone who thinks that he's really possessed, I would say that the ritual's rather impressive. It used to work, in fact, although not the reason they thought, of course; it was purely the -force of suggestion. The victim's belief in possession helped cause it, or at least the appearance of the a syndrome, and in just the same way his belief in the power of the exorcism can make it disappear. It's---ah, you're frowning. Well, perhaps I should tell you about the Australian aborigines. They're convinced that if some wizard thinks a 'death ray' at them from a distance, why, they're definitely going to die, you see. And the fact is that they do! They just lie down and slowly die! And the only thing that saves them, at times, is a similar form of suggestion: a counteracting 'ray' by another wizard!"


"Are you telling me to take her to a witch doctor?"


"Yes, I suppose that I'm saying just that: as a desperate measure, perhaps to a priest. That's a rather bizarre little piece of advice, I know, even dangerous, in fact, unless we can definitely ascertain whether Regan knew anything at all about possession, and particularly exorcism, before this all came on. Do you think she might have read it?"


"No, l don't."


"Seen a movie about it sometime? Something on television?"


"No."


"Read the gospels, perhaps? The New Testament?"


"Why?"


"There are quite a few accounts of possession in them; of exorcisms by Christ. The descriptions of the symptoms, in fact, are the same as in possession today. If you---"


"Look, it's no good. Never mind, just forget it! That's all I need is to have her father hear that I called in a bunch of..."


Chris's index fingernail clicked slowly from binding to binding. Nothing. No Bible. No New Testament. Not a--- Hold it!


Her eyes darted quickly back to a title on the bottom shelf. The volume on witchcraft that Mary Jo Perrin had sent her. Chris plucked it out from the shelf and turned to the table of contents, running her thumbnail down the...


There!


The title of a chapter pulsed like a heartthrob: "States of Possession."


Chris closed the book and her eyes at the same time, wondering, wondering....


Maybe... just maybe...


She opened her eyes and walked slowly to the kitchen. Sharon was typing. Chris held up the book. "Did you read this, Shar?"


Sharon kept typing, never glancing up. "Read what?" she answered.


"This book on witchcraft"


"No."


"Did you put it in the study?"


"No. Never touched it."


"Where's Willie?-"


"At the market."


Chris nodded, considering. Then went back upstairs to Regan's bedroom. She showed Karl the book. Did you put this in the study, Karl? On the bookshelf?"


"No, madam."


"Maybe Willie," Chris murmured as she stared at the book. Soft thrills of surmise rippled through her. Were the doctors at Barringer Clinic right? Was this it? Had Regan plucked her disorder through autosuggestion from the pages of this book? Would she find her symptoms listed here? Something specific that Regan was doing?


Chris sat at the table, opened to the chapter on possession and began to search, to search, to read: Immediately derivative of the prevalent belief in demons was the phenomenon known as possession, a state in which many individuals believed that their physical and mental functions had been invaded and were being controlled by either a demon (most common in the period under discussion) or the spirit of someone dead. There is no period of history or quarter of the globe where this phenomenon has not been reported, and in fairly constant terms, and yet it is still to be adequately explained. Since Traugott Oesterreich's definitive study, first published in 1921, very little has been added to the body of knowledge, the advances of psychiatry notwithstanding.


Not fully explained? Chris frowned. She'd had a different impression from the doctors.


What is known is the following: that various people, at various times, have undergone massive transformations so complete that those around them feel they are dealing with another person. Not only the voice, the mannerisms, facial expressions and characteristic movements are altered, but the subject himself now thinks of himself as totally distinct from the original person and as having a name---whether human or demonic---and separate history of its own....


The symptoms. Where were the symptoms? Chris wondered impatiently.


... In the Malay Archipelago, where possession is even today an everyday, common occurrence, the possessing spirit of someone dead often causes the possessed to mimic its gestures, voice and mannerisms so strikingly, that relatives of the deceased will burst into tears. But aside from so-called quasi-possession---those cases that are ultimately reducible to fraud, paranoia and hysteria---the problem has always lain with interpreting the phenomena, the oldest interpretation being the spiritist, an impression that is likely to be strengthened by the fact that the intruding personality may have accomplishments quite foreign to the first. In the demoniacal form of possession, for example, the "demon" may sneak in languages unknown to the first personality, or...


There! Something! Regan's gibberish! An attempt at a language? She read on quickly.


... or manifest various parapsychic phenomena, telekinesis for example: the movement of objects without application of material force.


The rappings? The flinging up and down on the bed?


... In cases of possession by the dead, there are manifestations such as Oesterreich's account of a monk who, abruptly, while possessed, became a gifted and brilliant dancer although he had never, before his possession, had occasion to dance so much as a step. So impressive, at times, are these manifestations that Jung, the psychiatrist, after studying a case at first hand, could offer only partial explanation far what he was certain could "not have been fraud"...


Worrisome. The tone of this was worrisome.


... and William James, the greatest psychologist that America has ever produced, resorted to positing "the plausibility of the spiritualist interpretation of the phenomenon" after closely studying the so-called "Watseka Wonder," a teenaged girl in Watseka, Illinois, who became indistinguishable in personality from a girl named Mary Roff who had died in a state insane asylum twelve years prior to the possession...


Frowning, Chris did not hear the doorbell chime; did not hear Sharon stop typing to rise and go answer it.


The demoniacal form of possession is usually thought to have had its origin in early Christianity; yet in fact both possession and exorcism pre-date the time of Christ. The ancient Egyptians as well as the earliest civilizations of the Tigris and the Euphrates believed that physical and spiritual disorders were caused by invasion of the body by demons. The following, for example, is the formula for exorcism against maladies of children in ancient Egypt: "Go hence, thou who comest in darkness, whose nose is turned backwards, whose face is upside down. Hast thou come to kiss this child? I will not let the..."


"Chris?"


She kept reading, absorbed. "Shar, I'm busy."


"There's a homicide detective wants to see you."


"Oh, Christ, Sharon, tell him to---"


She stopped.


"No, no, hold it." Chris frowned, still staring at the book. "No. Tell him to come in. Let him in."


Sound of walking.


Sound of waiting.


What am I waiting for? Chris wondered. She sat on expectancy that was known yet undefined, like the vivid dream one can never remember.


He came in with Sharon, his hat brim crumpled in his hand, wheezing and listing and deferential. "So sorry.


You're busy, you're busy, I'm a bother."


"How's the world?"


"Very bad, very bad. How's your daughter?"


"No change."


"Ah, I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry." He was hulking by the table now, his eyelids dripping concern. "Look, I wouldn't even bother; your daughter; it's a worry. God knows, when my Ruthie was down with the---no no no no, it was Sheila, my little---"


"Please sit down," Chris cut in.


"Oh, yes, thank you," he exhaled, gratefully settling his bulk in a chair across the table from Sharon, who had now returned to her typing of letters.


"I'm sorry; you were saying?" Chris asked the detective.


"Well, my daughter, she---ah, never mind." He dismissed it. "You're busy. I get started, I'll tell my life story, you could maybe make a film of it. Really! it's incredible! If you only knew half of the things used to happen in my crazy family, you know, like my---ah, well, you're---One! I'll tell one! Like my mother, every Friday she made us gefilte fish, right? Only all week long, the whole week, no one gets to take a bath on account of my mother has the carp in the bathtub, it's swimming back and forth, back and forth, the whole week, because my mother said this cleaned out the poison in its system! You're prepared? Because it... Ah, that's enough now; enough." He sighed, wearily, motioning his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "But now and then a laugh just to keep us from crying."


Chris watched him expressionlessly, waiting....


"Ah, you're reading." He was glancing at the book on witchcraft. "For a film?" he inquired.


"Just reading."


"It's good?"


"I just started."


"Witchcraft," he murmured, his head angled, reading the title at the top of the pages.


"What's doin'?" Chris asked him.


"Yes, I'm sorry. You're busy. You're busy. I'll finish. As I said, I wouldn't bother you, except..."


"Except what?"


He looked suddenly grave and clasped his hands on the table. "Well, Mr. Dennings, Mrs. MacNeil..."


"Well..."


"Darn it," snapped Sharon with irritation as she ripped out a letter from the platen of the typewriter. She balled it up and tossed it at a wastepaper basket near Kinderman. "Oh, I'm sorry," she apologized as she saw that her outburst had interrupted them.


Chris and Kinderman were staring.


"You're Miss Fenster?" Kinderman asked her.


"Spencer," said Sharon, pulling back her chair in order to rise and retrieve the letter.


"Never mind, never mind," said Kinderman as he reached to the floor near his foot and picked up the crumpled page.


"Thanks," said Sharon.


"Nothing. Excuse me---you're the secretary?"


"Sharon, this is..."


"Kinderman," the detective reminded her. "William Kinderman."


"Right. This is Sharon Spencer."


"A pleasure," Kinderman told the blonde, who now folded her arms on the typewriter,, eyeing him curiously. "Perhaps you can help," he added. "On the night of Mr. Dennings' demise, you went out to a drugstore and left him alone in the house, correct?"


"Well, no; Regan was here."


"That's my daughter," Chris clarified.


Kinderman continued to question Sharon. "He came to see Mrs. MacNeil?"


"Yes, that's right"


"He expected her shortly?"


"Well, I told him I expected her back pretty soon."


"Very good. And you left at what time? You remember?"


"Let's see. I was watching the news, so I guess---oh, no, wait---yes, that's right. I remember being bothered because the pharmacist said the delivery boy had gone home. I remember I said, 'Oh, come on, now,' or something about its only being six-thirty. Then Burke came along just ten, maybe twenty minutes after that."


"So a median," concluded the detective, "would have put him here at six-forty-five."


"And so what's this all about?" asked Chris, the nebulous tension in her mounting.


"Well, it raises a question, Mrs. MacNeil," wheezed -Kinderman, turning his head to gaze at her. "To arrive in the house at say quarter to seven and leave only twenty minutes later..."


"Oh, well, that was Burke," said Chris "Just like him."


"Was it also like Mr. Dennings," asked Kinderman; "to frequent the bars on M. Street?"


"No."


"No, No, I thought not. I made a little check. And was it also not his custom to travel by taxi? He wouldn't call a cab from the house when he left?"


"Yes, he would."


"Then one wonders---not so?---how he came to be walking on the platform at the top of the steps. And one wonders why taxicab companies do not show a record of calls from this house on that night," added Kinderman, "except for the one that picked up your Miss Spencer here at precisely six-forty-seven."


"I don't know," answered Chris, her voice drained of color... and waiting...


"You knew all along!" gasped Sharon at Kinderman, perplexed.


"Yes, forgive me," the detective told her. "However, the matter has now grown serious."


Chris breathed shallowly, fixing the detective with a steady gaze. "In what way?" she asked. Her voice came thin from her throat.


He leaned over hands still clasped on the table, the page of typescript balled between them. "The report of the pathologist, Mrs. MacNeil, seems to show that the chance that he died accidentally is still very possible. However..."


"Are you saying he was murdered?" Chris tensed.


"The position---now I know this is painful---"


"Go ahead."


"The position of Dennings' head and a certain shearing of the muscles of the neck would---"


"Oh, God!" Chris winced.


"Yes, it's painful. I'm sorry; I'm terribly sorry. But you see, this condition---we can skip the details---but it never could happen, you see, unless Mr. Dennings had fallen some distance before he hit the steps; for example, some twenty or thirty feet before he went rolling down to the bottom. So a clear possibility, plainly speaking, is maybe... Well, first let me ask you..."


He'd turned now to a frowning Sharon. "When you left, he was where, Mr. Dennings? With the child?"


"No, down here in the study. He was fixing a drink."


"Might your daughter remember"---he turned to Chris---"if perhaps Mr. Dennings was in her room that night?"


Has she ever been alone with him?


"Why do you ask?"


"Might your daughter remember?"


"No, I told you before, she was heavily sedated and---"


"Yes, yes, you told me; that's true; I recall it; but perhaps she awakened---not so?---and..."


"No chance. And---"


"She was also sedated," he interrupted, "when last we spoke?"


"Oh, well, yes; as a matter of fact she was," Chris recalled. "So what?"


"I thought I saw her at her window that day."


"You're mistaken."


He shrugged. "It could be, it could be; I'm not sure."


"Listen, why are you asking all this?" Chris demanded.


"Well, a clear possibility, as I was saying, is maybe the deceased was so drunk that he stumbled and fell from the window in your daughter's bedroom."


Chris shook her head. "No way. No chance. In the first place, the window was always closed, and in the second place, Burke was always drunk, but he never got sloppy, never sloppy at all. That right, Shar?"


"Right."


"Burke used to direct when he was smashed. Now how could he stumble and fall out a window?"


"Were you maybe expecting someone else here that night?" he asked her.


"No."


"Have you friends who drop by without calling?"


"Just Burke," Chris answered. Why?"


The detective lowered his head and shook it, frowning at the crumpled paper in his hands. "Strange... so baffling." He exhaled wearily. "Baffling." Then he lifted his glance to Chris. "The deceased comes to visit, stays only twenty minutes without even seeing you, and leaves all alone here a very sick girl. And speaking plainly, Mrs. MacNeil, as you say, it's not likely he would fall from a window. Besides that, a fall wouldn't do to his neck what we found except maybe a chance in a thousand." He nodded with his head of the book on witchcraft. "You've read in that book about ritual murder?"


Some prescience chilling her, Chris shook her head. "Maybe not in that book," he said. "However---forgive me; I mention this only so maybe you'll think just a little bit harder---poor Mr. Dennings was discovered with his neck wrenched around in the style of ritual murder by so-called demons, Mrs. MacNeil."


Chris went white.


"Some lunatic killed Mr. Dennings," the detective continued, eyeing Chris fixedly. "At first, I never told you to spare you the hurt. And besides, it could technically still be an accident. But me, I don't think so. My hunch. My opinion. I believe he was killed by a powerful man: point one. And the fracturing of his skull---point two---plus the various things I have mentioned, would make it very probable---probable, not certain---the deceased was killed and then afterward pushed from your daughter's window. But no one was here except your daughter. So how could this be? It could be one way: if someone came calling between the time Miss Spencer left and the time you returned. Not so? Maybe so. Now I ask you again, please: who might have come?"


"Judas priest, just a second!" Chris whispered hoarsely, still in shock.


"Yes, I'm sorry. It's painful. And perhaps I'm wrong--- I'll admit. But you'll think now? Who? Tell me who might have come?"


Chris had her head down, frowning in thought. Then she looked up at Kinderman. "No. No, there's no one."


"Maybe you then, Miss Spencer?" he asked hems "Someone comes here to see you?"


"Oh, no, no one," said Sharon, her eyes very wide.


Chris turned to her. "Does the horseman know where you work?"


"The horseman?" asked Kinderman.


"Her boyfriend," Chris explained.


The blonde shook her head. "He's never come here. Besides, he was in Boston that night. Some convention."


"He's a salesman?"


"A lawyer."


The detective turned again to Chris. "The servants? They have visitors?"


"Never. Not at all."


"You expected a package that day? Some delivery?"


"Not that I know of. Why?"


"Mr. Dennings was---not to speak ill of the dead, may he rest in peace---but as you said, in his cups he was somewhat---well, call it irascible: capable, doubtless, of provoking an argument; an anger; in this case a rage from perhaps a delivery man who came by to drop a package. So were you expecting something? Like dry cleaning, maybe? Groceries? Liquor? A package?"


"I really wouldn't know," Chris told him. "Karl handles all of that."


"Oh, I see."


"Want to ask him?"


The detective sighed and leaned back from the table, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his coat. He stared glumly at the witchcraft book. "Never mind, never mind; it's remote. You've got a daughter very sick, and---well, never mind." He made a gesture of dismissal and rose from the chair. "Very nice to have met you, Miss Spencer."


"Same here." Sharon nodded remotely.


"Baffling," said Kinderman with a headshake. "Strange." He was focused on some inner thought. Then he looked at Chris as she rose from her chair. "Well, I'm sorry. I've bothered you for nothing. Forgive me."


"Here, I'll walk you to the door," Chris told him,, thoughtful.


"Don't bother."


"No bother."


"If you insist. Incidentally," he said as they moved from the kitchen, "just a chance in a million, I know, but your daughter---you could possibly ask her if she saw Mr. Dennings in her room that night?"


Chris walked with folded arms. "Look, he wouldn't have had a reason to be up there is the first place."


"I know that; I realize; that's true; but if certain British doctors never asked, 'What's this fungus?' we wouldn't today have penicillin. Right? Please ask. You'll ask?"


'When she's well enough, yes; I'll ask."


"Couldn't hurt. In the meantime..." They'd come to the front door and Kinderman faltered, embarrassed. He put fingertips to mouth in a hesitant gesture. "Look, I really hate to ask you; however...'


Chris tensed for some new shock, the prescience tingling again in her bloodstream "What?"


"For my daughter... you could maybe give an autograph?" He'd reddened, and Chris almost laughed with relief; at herself; at despair and the human condition.


"Oh, of course. Where's a pencil?" she said.


"Right her!" he responded instantly, whipping out the stub of a chewed-up pencil from the pocket of his coat while he dipped his other hand in a pocket of his jacket and slipped out a calling card. "She would love it," he said as he handed them both to Chris.


"What's her name?" Chris asked, pressing the card against the door and poising the pencil stub to write. There followed a weighty hesitation. She heard only wheezing. She glanced around. In Kinderman's eyes she saw some massive, terrible struggle.


"I lied," he said finally, his eyes at once desperate and defiant. "It's for me."


He fixed his gaze on the card and blushed. "Write 'To William---William Kinderman'---it's spelled on the back."


Chris eyed him with a wan and unexpected affection, checked the spelling of his name and wrote, William F. Kinderman, I love you! And signed her name. Then she gave him the card, which he tucked in his pocket without reading the inscription.


"You're a very nice lady," he told her sheepishly, gaze averted.


"You're a very nice man."


He seemed to blush harder. "No, I'm not. I'm a bother." He was opening the door. "Never mind what I said here today. It's upsetting. Forget it. Keep your mind on your daughter. Your daughter."


Chris nodded, her despondency surging up again as Kinderman stepped outside onto the stoop and donned his hat.


"But you'll ask her?" he reminded as he turned.


"I will," Chris whispered. "I promise. I will."


"Well, good-bye. And take care."


Once more Chris nodded; then added, "Yon too."


She closed the door softly. Then instantly opened it again as he knocked.


"What a nuisance. I'm a nuisance. I forgot my pencil." He grimaced in apology.


Chris eyed the stub in her hand, smiled faintly and gave it to Kinderman.


"And another thing..." He hesitated. "It's pointless, I know---it's a bother, it's dumb---but I know I won't sleep thinking maybe there's a lunatic loose or a doper if every little point I don't cover, whatever. Do you think I could---no, no, it's dumb, it's a ---yes; I should. Could I maybe have a word with Mr. Engstrom, do yon think? The deliveries... the question of deliveries. I really should...."


"Sure, came on in," Chris said wearily.


"No, you're busy. Enough. I can talk to him here. This is fine. Here is fine."


He had leaned against a railing.


"If you insist." Chris smiled thinly. "He's with Regan. I'll send him right down."


"I'm obliged."


Quickly Chris closed the door. A minute later, Karl opened it. He stepped down to the stoop with his hand on the doorknob, holding the door slightly ajar. Standing tall and erect, he looked at Kinderman with eyes that were clear and cool. "Yes?" he asked without expression.


"You have the right to remain silent," Kinderman greeted him, steely gaze locked tight on Karl's. "If you give up the right to remain silent," he intoned rapidly in a flat, deadly cadence, "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak with an attorney and to have the attorney present during questioning. If you so desire, and cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed for you without charge prior to questioning. Do you understand each of these rights I've explained to you?"


Birds twittered softly in the branches of the elder tree, and the traffic sounds of M Street came up to them muted like the humming of bees from a distant meadow. Karl's gaze never wavered as he answered, "Yes."


"Do you wish to give up the right to remain silent?"


"Yes."


"Do you wish to give up the right to speak to an attorney and have him present during questioning?"


"Yes."


"Did you previously state that on April twenty-eighth, the night of the death of Mr. Dennings, you attended a film that was showing at the Crest?"


"Yes."


"And what time did you enter the theater?"


"I do not remember."


"You stated previously you attended the six-o'clock showing. Does that help you to remember?"


"Yes. Yes, six-o'clock show. I remember."


"And you saw the picture---the film---from the beginning?"


"I did."


"And you left at the film's conclusion?"


"I did."


"Not before?"


"No, I see entire film."


"And leaving the theater, you boarded the D. C. Transit bus is front of the theater, debarking at M Street and Wisconsin Avenue at approximately nine-twenty P. M.?"


"Yes."


"And walked home?"


"I walk home."


"And were back in this residence at approximately nine-thirty P. M.?"


"I am back here exactly nine-thirty," Karl answered.


"You're sure."


"Yes, I look at my watch. I am positive."


"And you saw the whole film to the very end?"


"Yes, I said that."


"Your answers are being electronically recorded, Mr. Engstrom. I want you to be absolutely positive."


"I am positive."


"You're aware of the altercation between an usher and a drunken patron that happened in the last minutes of the film?"


"Yes."


"Can you tell me the cause of it?"


"The man, he was drunk and was making disturbance."


"And what did they do with him finally?"


"Out. They throw him out."


"There was no such disturbance. Are you also aware that during the course of the six o'clock showing a technical breakdown lasting approximately fifteen minutes caused an interruption in the showing of the film?"


"I am not."


"You recall that the audience booed?"


"No, nothing. No breakdown."


"'You're sure?"


"There was nothing."


"There was, as reflected in the log of the projectionist-, showing that the film ended not at eighty-forty that night, but at approximately eight-fifty-five, which would mean that the earliest bus from the theater would put you at M Street and Wisconsin not at nine-twenty, but nine-forty-five, and that therefore the earliest you could be at the house was approximately five before ten, not nine-thirty, as testified by Mrs. MacNeil. Would you care now to comment on this puzzling discrepancy?"


Not for a moment had Karl lost his poise and he held it now as he answered, "No."


The detective stared at him mutely for a moment, then sighed and looked down as he turned off the monitor control that was tucked in the lining of his coat. He held his gaze down for a moment, then looked up at Karl. "Mr. Engstrom..." he began in a tone that was weary with understanding. "A serious crime may have been committed. You are under suspicion. Mr. Dennings abused you, I have learned from other sources. And apparently you've lied about your whereabouts at the time of his demise. Now it sometimes happens---we're human; why not?---that a man who is married is sometimes someplace where he says that he is not. You will notice I arranged we are talking in private? Away from the others? Away from your wife? I'm not now recording. It's off. You can trust me. If it happens you were out with a woman not your wife on that night, you can tell me, I'll have it checked out, you'll be out of this trouble and your wife, she won't know. Now then tell me; where were you at the time Dennings died?"


For a moment something flickered in the depths of Karl's eyes; and then was smothered.


"At movies!" he insisted through narrowed lips.


The detective eyed him steadily, silent and unmoving, no sound but his wheezing as the seconds ticked heavily, heavily....


"You are going to arrest me?" Karl asked the silence at last in a voice that subtly wavered.


The detective made no answer but continued to eye him, unblinking, and when Karl seemed again about to speak, the detective abruptly pushed away from the railing, moving toward the squad car with hands in his pocket. He walked unhurriedly, viewing his surroundings to the left and the right like an interested visitor to the city.


From the stoop, Karl watched, his features stolid and impassive as Kinderman open the door of the squad car, reached inside to a box of Klennex fixed to the dashboard, extracted a tissue and blew his nose while staring idly across the river as if considering where to have lunch. Then he entered the car without glancing back.


As the car pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-fifth, Karl looked at the hand that was not on the doorknob and saw it was trembling.


When she heard the front door being closed, Chris was brooding at the bar in the study, pouring out a Vodka over ice. Footsteps. Karl going up the stairs. She picked up her vodka and moved slowly back toward the kitchen, stirring her drink with an index finger; picking her way with absent eyes. Something... something was horribly wrong. Like light from a room leaking under the door, a glow of dread seeped into the darkened hall of her mind. What lay behind the door? What was it?


Don't look!


She entered the kitchen, sat at the table and sipped at her drink.


"I believe he was killed by a powerful man..."


She dropped her glance to the book on witchcraft.


Something...


Footsteps. Sharon returning from Regan's bedroom. Entering. Sitting at the table by the typewriter. Cranking fresh stationery into the roller.


Something...


"Pretty creepy," Sharon murmured, fingertips resting on the keyboard and eyes on her steno notes to the side.


No answer. Uneasiness hung in the room. Chris sipped absently at her drink.


Sharon probed at the silence in a strained, low voice. "They've got an awful lot of hippie joints down around M Street and Wisconsin. Pot-heads. Occultists. The police call them 'hellhounds.' " She paused as if waiting for comment, her eyes still fixed upon the notes; then continued: "I wonder if Burke might have---"


"Oh, Christ, Shar! Forget about it, will you!" Chris erupted. "I've got all I can think about with Rags! Do you mind?" She had her eyes shut. She clenched the book.


Sharon returned instantly to the keys of the typewriter, clicking off words at a furious tempo for a minute, then abruptly bolted up from her chair and out of the kitchen. "I'm going for a walk!" she said icily.


"Stay the hell away from M Street!" Chris rumbled at her moodily, her gaze on the book over folded arms.


"I Will!"


"And N!"


Chris heard the front door being opened, then closed. She sighed. Felt a pang of regret. But the flurry had siphoned off tension. Not all. Still the glow in the hall. Very faint.


Shut it out!


Chris took a deep breath and tried to focus on the book. She found her place; grew impatient; started hastily flipping through pages, skimming, searching for descriptions of Regan's symptoms. "... demonic possession... syndrome... case of an eight-year-old girl... abnormal... four strong men to restrain him from..."


Turning a page, Chris stared---and froze.


Sounds. Willie coming in with groceries.


"Willie?... Willie?" Chris asked tonelessly.


"Yes, madam," Willie answered, setting down her bags. Without looking up, Chris held up the book. -"Was it you put this book in the study, Willie?"


Willie glanced at the book and nodded, then turned around and began to slip items from the bags.


"Willie, where did you find it?"


"Up in bedroom," Willie answered, putting bacon in the meat compartment of the refrigerator.


"Which bedroom, Willie?"


"Miss Regan. I find it under bed when I am cleaning."


"When did you find it?"' Club asked, her gaze still locked to the pages of the book.


"After all go to hospital, madam; when I vacuum in Regan bedroom."


"You're sure?"


"I am sure, madam. Yes. I am sure."


Chris did not move, did not blink, did not breathe as the headlong image of an open window in Regan's bedroom the night of Dennings' accident rushed at -her memory, talons extended, like a bird of prey who knew her name; as she recognized a sight that was numbingly fair; as she stared at the facing page of the book.


A narrow strip had been surgically shaved from the length of its edge.


Chris jerked her head up at the sounds of commotion in Regan's bedroom.


Rappings, rapid, with a nightmarish resonance; massive, like a sledgehammer pounding in a tomb!


Regan screaming in anguish; in terror; imploring!


Karl! Karl bellowing angrily at Regan!


Chris bolted from the kitchen.


God almighty, what's happening?


Frenzied, Chris raced for the stairs, toward the bedroom, heard a blow, someone reeling, someone crashing like a boulder to the floor with her daughter crying, "No! Oh, no, don’t! Oh, no, please!" and Karl bellowing---No! No, not Karl! Someone else! A thundering bass that was threatening, raging!


Chris plunged down the hall and burst into the bedroom, gasped, stood rooted in paralyzing shock as the rappings boomed massively, shivering through walls; as Karl lay unconscious on the floor near the bureau; as Regan, her legs propped up and spread wide on a bed that was violently bouncing and shaking, clutched the bone-white crucifix in raw knuckled hands; the bone-white crucifix poised at her vagina, the bone-white crucifix she stared at with terror, eyes bulging in a face that was bloodied from the nose, the naso-gastric tubing ripped out.


"Oh, Please! Oh, no, please!" she was shrieking as her hands brought the crucifix closer; as she seemed to be straining to push it away.


"You'll do as I tell you, fifth! You'll do it!"


The threatening bellow, the words, came from Regan, her voice coarse and guttural, bristling with venom, while in an instantaneous flash her expression and features were hideously transmuted into those of the feral, demonic personality that had appeared in the course of hypnosis. And now faces and voices, as Chris watched stunned, interchanged with rapidity: "No!"


"You'll do it!"


"Please!"


"You will, you bitch, or I'll kill you!"


"Please!"


"Yes, you're going to let Jesus fuck you, fuck you, f---"


Regan now, eyes wide and staring, flinching from the rush of some hideous finality, mouth agape shrieking at the dread of some ending. Then abruptly the demonic face once more possessed her, now filled her, the room choking suddenly with a stench in the nostrils, with an icy cold that seeped from the walls as the rappings ended and Regan's piercing cry of terror turned to a guttural, yelping laugh of malevolent spite and rage triumphant while she thrust down the crucifix into her vagina and began to masturbate ferociously, roaring in that deep, coarse, deafening voice, "Now you're mine, now you're mine, you stinking cow! You bitch! Let Jesus fuck you, fuck you!"


Chris stood rooted to the ground in horror, frozen, her hands pressing tight against her cheeks as again the demonic, loud laugh cackled joyously, as Regan's vagina gushed blood onto sheets with her hymen, the tissues ripped. Abruptly, with a shriek clawing raw from her throat, Chris rushed at the bed, grasped blindly at the crucifix, was still screaming as Regan flared up at her in fury, features contorted infernally, reached out a hand, clutching Chris's hair, and yanked her head down, pressing her face hard against her vagina, smearing it with blood while she frantically undulated her pelvis.


"Aahhh, little pig mother!" Regan crooned with a guttural, rasping, throaty eroticism. "Lick me, lick me, lick me! Aahhhhh!" Then the hand that was holding Chris's head down jerked it upward while the other arm smashed her a blow across the chest that sent Chris reeling across the room and crashing to a wall with stunning force while Regan laughed with bellowing spite.


Chris crumpled to the floor in a daze of horror, in a swirling of images, sounds in the room, as her vision spun madly, blurring, unfocused, her ears ringing loud with chaotic distortions as she tried to raise herself, was too weak, faltered, then looked toward the still-blurred bed, toward Regan with her back to her, thrusting the crucifix gently and sensually into her vagina, then out, then in, with that deep, bass voice crooning, "Ah, there's my sow, yes, my sweet honey piglet, my Piglet, my---"


The words were cut off as Chris started crawling painfully toward the bed with her face smeared with blood, with her eyes still unfocused, limbs aching, past Karl. Then she cringed; shrinking bade in incredulous terror as she thought she saw hazily, in a swimming fog, her daughter's head turning slowly around on a motionless torso, rotating monstrously, inexorably, until at last it seemed facing backward.


"Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?" giggled an elfin familiar voice.


Chris blinked at the mad-staring, grinning face, at the cracked, parched lips and foxlike eyes.


She screamed until she fainted.


III: The Abyss


They said, "What sign can you give us to see, so that we may believe you?" ---John 6: 30-31


... A [Vietnam] brigade commander once ran a contest to rack up his unit's 10,000th kill; the prize was a week of luxury in the colonel's own quarters... ---Newsweek, 1969


You do not believe although you have seen... ---John 6: 36-37


CHAPTER ONE


She was standing on the Key Bridge walkway, arms atop the parapet, fidgeting, waiting, while homeward-bound traffic stuttered thickly behind her, while drivers with everyday cares honked horns and bumpers nudged bumpers with scraping indifference. She had reached Mary Jo; told her lies.


"Regan's fine. By the way, I've been thinking of another little dinner party. What was the name of that Jesuit psychiatrist again? I thought maybe I'd include him in the..."


Laughter floating up from below her: a blue-jeaned young couple in a rented canoe. With a quick, nervous gesture, she flicked ash from her cigarette and glanced up the walkway of the bridge toward the District. Someone hurrying toward her: khaki pants and blue sweater; not a priest; not him. She looked down at the river again, at her helplessness swirling in the wake of the bright-red canoe. She could make out the name on its side: Caprice.


Footsteps. The man in the sweater coming closer, slowing down as he reached her. Peripherally, she saw him rest a forearm on the top of the parapet and quickly she averted her head toward Virginia.


"Keep movin', creep," she rumbled at him huskily, flipping her cigarette into the river, "or, I swear to Christ, I'll yell for a cop!"


"Miss MacNeil? I'm Father Karras."


She started, reddened, jerked swiftly around The chipped, rugged face. "Oh, my God! Oh, I'm---Jesus!"


She was tugging at her sunglasses, flustered, and immediately pushing them back as the sad, dark eyes probed hers.


"I should have told you that I wouldn't be in uniform. Sorry."


His voice was cradling, stripping her of burden, as his powerful hands clasped gently together. They were large and yet sensitive: veined Michelangelos. Chris felt her gaze somehow drawn to them instantly.


"I thought it would be much less conspicuous," he continued. "You seemed so concerned about keeping this quiet."


"Guess I should have been concerned about not making such an ass of myself," she retorted, quickly fumbling through her purse. "I just thought you were---"


"Human?" he interjected with a smile.


"I knew that when I saw you one day on the campus," she said, as she searched now in the pockets of her suit. "That's why I called. You seemed human." She looked up and saw him staring at her hands. "Got a cigarette, Father?"


He reached into the pocket of his shirt. "Can yon go a nonfilter?"


"Right now I'd smoke rope."


He tapped out a Camel from the packet. "On my allowance, I frequently do."


"Vow of poverty," she murmured as she slipped out the cigarette, smiling tightly.


"A vow of poverty has uses," he commented, reaching in his pocket for matches.


"Like what?"


"Makes rope taste better." Again, a half smile as he watched her hand holding the cigarette. It trembled. He saw the cigarette wavering in quick, erratic jumps, and without pausing, he took it from her fingers and put it up to his mouth. He lit it, his hands cupped around the match. He puffed. Gave the cigarette back to Chris, his eyes on the cars passing over the bridge.. "Lots easier. Breeze from the traffic," he told her.


"Thanks, Father."


Chris looked at him appraisingly, with gratitude, even with hope. She knew what he'd done. She watched as he lit up a Camel for himself. He forgot to cup his hands. As he exhaled, they each leaned an elbow on the parapet.


"Where are you from, Father Karras? Originally."


"New York."


"Me too. Wouldn't ever go back, though. Would you?"


Karras fought down the rise in his throat. "No, I wouldn't." He forced a smile. "But I don't have to make those decisions."


"God, I'm dumb. You're a priest. You have to go where they send you."


"That's right."


"How'd a shrink ever get to be a priest?" she asked.


He was anxious to know what the urgent problem was that she'd mentioned when she telephoned. She was feeling her way, he sensed---toward what? He must not prod. It would come... it would come.


"It's the other way around," he corrected her gently. "The Society---"


"Who?"


"The Society of Jesus. Jesuit is short for that."


"Oh, I see."


"The Society sent me through medical school and through psychiatric training."


"Where?"


"Oh, well, Harvard; Johns Hopkins; Bellevue."


He was suddenly aware that he wanted to impress her. Why? he wondered; and immediately saw the answer in the slums of his boyhood; in the balconies of theaters on the Lower East Side. Little Dimmy with a movie star.


"Not bad," she said appraisingly, nodding her head.


"We don't take vows of mental poverty."


She sensed an irritation; shrugged; turned front, facing out to the river. "Look, it's just that I don't know you, and..." She dragged on the cigarette, long and deep, and then exhaled, crushing out the butt on the parapet. "You're a friend of Father Dyer's, that right?"


"Yes, I am."


"Pretty close?"


"Pretty close."


"Did he talk about the party?"


"At your house?"


"At my house."


"Yes, he said you seemed human."


She missed it; or ignored it. "Did he talk about my daughter?"


"No, I didn't know you had one."


"She's twelve. He didn't mention her?"


"No."


"He didn't tell you what she did?"


"He never mentioned her."


"Priests keep a pretty tight mouth, then; that right?"


"That depends," answered Karras.


"On what?"


"On the priest."


At the fringe of his awareness drifted a warning about women with neurotic attractions to priest who desired, unconsciously and under the guise of some other problem, to seduce the unattainable.


"Look, I mean like confession. You're not allowed to talk about it, right?"


"Yes, that's right."


"And outside of confession?" she asked him. "I mean, what if some..." Her hands were now agitated; fluttering. "I'm curious. I... No, No, I'd really like to know. I mean, what if a person, let's say, was a criminal, like maybe a murderer or something, you know? If he came to you for help, would you have to turn him in?"


Was she seeking instruction? Was she clearing off doubts in the way of conversion? There were people, Karras knew, who approached salvation as if it were an unreliable bridge overhanging an abyss. "If he came to me for spiritual help, I'd say, no;" he replied.


"You wouldn't."


"No. No, I wouldn't. But I'd try to persuade him to turn himself in."


"And how do you go about getting an exorcism?"


"Beg pardon?"


"If a person's possessed by some kind of demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?"


"Well, first you'd have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century."


She was puzzled. "What do you mean by that? Didn't get you."


"Well, it just doesn't happen anymore, Miss MacNeil."


"Since when?"


"Since we learned about mental illness; about paranoia; split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard."


'You kidding?"


Her voice wavered helpless, confused, and Karras regretted his flipness. Where had it come from? he wondered. It had leaped to his tongue unbidden.


"Many educated Catholics, Miss MacNeil," he told her in a gentler tone, "don't believe in the devil anymore, and as far as possession is concerned, since the day I joined the Jesuits I've never met a priest who's ever in his life performed an exorcism. Not one."


"Are you really a priest, she demanded with a bitter, disappointed sharpness, "or from Central Casting? I mean, what about all those stories in the Bible about Christ driving out all those demons?"


Again, he was answering crisply, unthinking: "Look, if Christ had said those people who were supposedly possessed had schizophrenia, which I imagine they did, they would probably have crucified him three years earlier."


"Oh, really?" Chris put a shaking hand to her sunglasses, deepening her voice in an effort at control. "Well, it happens, Father Karras, that someone very close to me is probably possessed. She needs an exorcism. Will you do it?"


To Karras, it suddenly seemed unreal: Key Bridge; across the river, the Hot Shoppe; traffic; Chris MacNeil, the movie star. As he stared at her, groping for an answer, she slipped off the glasses and Karras felt momentary, wincing shock at the redness, at the desperate pleading in those haggard eyes. The woman was serious, he realized.


"Father Karras; it's my daughter," she told him huskily, "my daughter!"


"Then all the more reason," he at last said gently, "to forget about exorcism and---"


"Why? God, I don't understand!" she burst out in a voice that was cracking and distraught.


He took her wrist in a comforting hand. "In the first place," he told her in soothing tones, "it could make things worse."


"But how?"


"The ritual of exorcism is dangerously suggestive. It could plant the notion of possession, you see, where it didn't exist before, or if it did, it could tend to fortify it. And secondly, Miss MacNeil, before the Church approves an exorcism, it conducts an investigation to see if it's warranted. That takes time. In the meantime, your---"


"Couldn't you do the exorcism yourself?" she pleaded, her lower lip starting to tremble. Her eyes were filling up with tears.


"Look, every priest has the power to exorcise, but he has to have Church approval, and frankly, it's rarely ever given, so---"


"Can't you even look at her?"


"Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could, but---"


"She needs a priest!" Chris suddenly cried out, her features contorted with anger and fear. "I've taken her to every goddamn, fucking doctor, psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you; now you send me to them!"


"But your---"


"Jesus Christ won't somebody help me?" The heart-stopping shriek bolted raw above the river. Startled birds shot up screeching from its banks. "Oh, my God, someone help me!" Chris moaned as she crumpled to Karras' chest with convulsive sobs. "Please help me! Help me! Please! Please, help!..."


The Jesuit looked down at her, lifted up comforting hands to her head as the riders in traffic-locked automobiles glanced out windows to watch them wig passing disinterest.


"It's all right," Karras whispered as he patted her shoulder. He wanted only to calm her; to humor; Stem hysteria. "... my daughter'


'? It was she who needed psychiatric help. "It's all right. I'll go see her," he told her. "I'll see her."


He approached the house with her in silence, with a lingering sense of unreality, with thoughts of the next day's lecture at the Georgetown Medical School. He had yet to prepare his notes.


They climbed the front stoop. Karras glanced down the street at the Jesuit residence hall and realized he would now miss dinner. It was ten before six. He looked at Chris as she slipped the key in the lock. She hesitated, turned to him. "Father... do you think you should wear your priest clothes?"


The voice: how childlike it was; how naïve."Too dangerous," he told her.


She nodded and started opening the door, and it was then that Karras felt it: a chill, tugging warning. It scraped through his bloodstream like particles of ice.


"Father Karras?"


He looked up. Chris had entered. She was holding the door.


For a hesitant moment he stood unmoving; then abruptly he went forward, stepping into the house with an odd sense of ending.


Karras heard commotion. Upstairs. A deep, booming voice was thundering obscenities, threatening in anger, in hate, in frustration.


Karras glanced at Chris. She was staring at him mutely. Then she moved on ahead. He followed her upstairs and along the hall to Regan's bedroom, where Karl leaned against the wall just opposite her door, his head sagging low over folded arms. As the servant looked slowly up at Chris, Karras saw bafflement and fright in his eyes. The voice from the bedroom, this close, was so loud that it almost seemed amplified electronically. "It wants no straps, still," Karl told Chris in an awed, cracking voice.


"I'll be back in a second, Father," Chris told the priest dully.


Karras watched her walk down the hall and into her own bedroom; then he glanced at Karl. The Swiss was looking at him fixedly.


"You are priest?" Karl asked. Karras nodded, then looked quickly back to the door of Regan's room. The raging voice had been displaced by the long, strident lowing of some animal that might have been a steer.


Something prodding at his hand. He looked down. "That's her," Chris was saying "that's Regan." She was giving him a photograph. He took it. Young girl. Very pretty. Sweet smile.


"That was taken four months ago," Chris said numbly. She took back the photo and motioned with her head at the bedroom door. "Now you go and take a look at her now." She leaned against the wall beside Karl. "I'll wait here."


"Who's in there with her?" Karras asked her.


"No one."


He held her steady gaze and then turned with a frown to the bedroom door. As he grasped the doorknob, the sounds from within ceased abruptly. In the ticking silence, Karras hesitated, then entered the room slowly, almost flinching backward at the pungent stench of moldering excrement that hit him in the face like a palpable blast.


Quickly reining back his revulsion, he closed the door. Then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back in the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite as they fixed upon his, as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal, hideous mask of mind-bending malevolence. Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled, thickly matted hair; to the wasted arms and legs; the distended stomach jutting up so grotesquely; then back to the eyes: they were watching him... pinning him... shifting now to follow as he moved to a desk and chair near the window.


"Hello, Regan, " said the priest in a warm, friendly tone. He picked up the chair and took it over by the bed.


"I'm a friend of your mother's. She tells me that you haven't been feeling too well." He sat down. "Do you think you'd like to tell me what's wrong? I'd like to help you."


The eyes gleamed fiercely, unblinking and a yellowish saliva dribbled down from a corner of her mouth to her chin. Then her lips stretched taut into a feral grin, into bow-mouthed mockery.


"Well, well, well," gloated Regan sardonically, and hairs prickled on the back of Karras' neck, for the voice was an impossibly deep bass thick with menace and power. "So it's you... they sent you! Well, we've nothing to fear from you at all."


"Yes, that's right. I'm your friend. I'd like to help," said Karras.


"You might looses these straps, then," Regan croaked. She had tugged up her wrists so that now Karras noticed that they were bound with a double set of restraining straps.


"Are they uncomfortable for you?" he asked her.


"Extremely. They're a nuisance. An infernal nuisance." The eyes glinted slyly with secret amusement.


Karras saw the scratch marks on her face; the cuts on her lips where apparently she'd bitten them. "I'm afraid you might hurt yourself, Regan."


"I'm not Regan," she rumbled, still with the hideous grin that now seemed to Karras to be her permanent expression. How incongruous, the braces on her teeth looked, he reflected.


"Oh, I see. Well, then, maybe we should introduce ourselves. I'm Damien Karras," said the priest. "Who are you?"


"I'm the devil."


"Ah, good, very good." Karras nodded approvingly.


"Now we can talk."


"A little chat?"


"If you like."


"Very good for the soul. However, you will find that I cannot talk freely while bound with these straps. I'm accustomed to gesturing." Regan drooled. "As you know, I've client much of my time in Rome, dear Karras. Now kindly undo the straps!"


What precocity of language and thought, mused Karras. He leaned forward in his chair with professional interest "You say you're the devil?" he asked.


"I assure you."


"Then why don't you just make the straps disappear?"


"That's much too vulgar a display of power, Karras. Too crude. After all, I'm a prince!" A chuckle. "I much prefer persuasion, Karras; togetherness; community involvement. Moreover, if I loosen the straps myself, my friend, I deny you the opportunity of performing a charitable act."


"But a charitable act," said Karras, "is a virtue and that's what the devil would want to prevent; so in fact I'd be helping you now if I didn't undo the straps. Unless, of course"---he shrugged---"you're really not really the devil. And in that case, perhaps I would undo the straps."


"How very foxy of you, Karras. If only dear Herod were here to enjoy this."


"Which Herod?" asked Karras with narrowed eyes. Was she punning on Christ's calling Herod "that fox"? "There were two. Are you talking about the King of Judea?"


"The tetrarch of Galilee!" she blasted him with anger and scorching contempt; then abruptly she was grinning again, cajoling in that sinister voice: "There, you see how these damnable straps have upset me? Undo then. Undo them and I'll tell you the future."


"Very tempting."


"My forte."


"But then how do I know that you can read the future?"


"I'm the devil."


"Yes, you say so, but you won't give me proof."


"You have no faith."


Karras stiffened. "In what?"


"In me, dear Karras; in me!" Something mocking and malicious danced hidden in those eyes. "All these proofs, all these signs in the sky!"


"Well, now, something very simple might do," offered Karras. "For example: the devil knows everything, correct?"


"No, almost everything, Karras---almost. You see? They keep saying that I'm proud. I am not. Now, then, what are you up to, fox?" The yellowed, bloodshot eyes gleamed craftily.


"I thought we might test the extent of your knowledge."


"Ah, yes! The largest lake in South America," japed Regan, eyes bulging with glee, "is Lake Titicaca in Peru! Will that do it?"'


"No, I'll have to ask something only the devil would know. For example, where is Regan? Do you know?"


"She is here."


"Where is 'here'?"


"In the pig."


"Let me see her."


"Why?"


"Why, to prove that you're telling me the truth."


"Do you want to fuck her? Loose the straps and I will let you go at it!"


"Let me see her."


"Very succulent cunt," leered Regan, her furred and lolling tongue licking spittle across cracked lips. "But a poor conversationalist, my friend. I strongly advise you to stay with me."


"Well, it's obvious you don't know where she is"---Karras shrugged---"so apparently you aren't the devil."


"I am!" Regan bellowed with a sudden jerk forward, her face contorting with rage. Karras shivered as the massive, terrifying voice boomed crackling off the walls of the room. "I am!"


"Well, then, let me see Regan," said Karras. "That would prove it."


"I will show you! I will read your mind!" it seethed furiously. "Think of a number between one and ten!"


"No, that wouldn't prove a thing. I would have to see Regan."


Abruptly it chuckled, leaning back against the headboard. "No, nothing would prove anything at all to you, Karras. How splendid. How splendid indeed! In the meantime, we shall try to keep you properly beguiled. After all, now, we would not wish to lose you."


"Who is 'we'?" Karras probed with alert, quick interest.


"We are quite a little group in the piglet," it said, nodding. "Ah, yes, quite a stunning little multitude. Later I may see about discreet introductions. In the meantime, I am suffering from a maddening itch that I cannot reach. Would you loosen one strap for a moment, Karras?"


"No; just tell me where it itches and I'll scratch it."


"Ah, sly, very sly!"


"Show me Regan and perhaps I'll undo one strap," offered Karras. "If---"


Abruptly he flinched in shock as he found himself staring into eyes filled with terror, at a mouth gaping wide in a soundless shriek for help.


But then quickly the Regan identity vanished in a blurringly rapid remolding of features. "Won't you take off these straps?" asked a wheedling voice in a clipped British accent.


In a flash, the demonic personality returned. "Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?" it croaked, and then threw back its head in laughter.


Karras sat stunned, felt the glacial hands at the back of his neck again, more palpable now, more firm. The Regan-thing broke off its laughter and fixed him with taunting eyes.


"Incidentally, your mother is here with us, Karras. Do you wish to leave a message? I will see that she gets it." Then Karras was suddenly dodging a projectile stream of vomit, leaping out of his chair. It caught a portion of his sweater and one of his hands.


His face now colorless, the priest looked down at the bed. Regan cackled with glee. His hand dripped vomit onto the rug. "If that's true," the priest said numbly, "then you must know my mothers first name. What is it?"


The Regan-thing hissed at him, mad eyes gleaming, head gently undulating like a cobra's.


"What is it?"


Regan lowed like a steer in an angry bellow that pierced the shutters and shivered through the glass of the large bay window. The eyes rolled upward into their sockets.


For a time Karras watched as the bellowing continued; then he looked at his hand and walked out of the room.


Chris pushed herself quickly away from the wall, glancing, with distress at the Jesuit's sweater. "What happened? Did she vomit?"


"Got a towel?" he asked her.


"There's a bathroom right there!" she said hurriedly, pointing at a hallway door. "Karl, take a look at her!" she instructed, and followed the priest to the bathroom.


"I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed in agitation, whipping a towel off the bar. The Jesuit moved to the washbasin.


"Have you got her on tranquilizers?' he asked.


Chris turned on the water taps. "Yes, Librium. Here, take off that sweater and then you can wash."


"What dosage?" he asked her, tugging at the sweater -with his clean left hand.


"Here, I'll help you." She pulled at the sweater from the bottom. "Well, today she's had four hundred milligrams, Father."


"Four hundred?"


She had the sweater pulled up to his chest "Yeah, that's how we got her into those straps. It took all of us together to---"


"You gave your daughter four hundred milligrams at once?"


"C'mon, get your arms up, Father." He raised them and she tugged delicately. "She's so strong you can't believe it."


She pulled back the shower curtain, tossing the sweater into the tub. "I'll have Willie get it cleaned for you, Father. I'm sorry."


"Never mind. It doesn't matter." He unbuttoned the right sleeve of his starched white shirt and rolled it up, exposing a matting of fine brown hairs on a bulging, thickly muscled forearm.


"I'm sorry," Chris repeated quietly, slowly sitting down on the edge of the tub.


"Is she taking any nourishment at all?" asked Karras. He held his hand beneath the hot-water tap to rinse away the vomit.


She clutched and unclutched the towel. It was pink, the name Regan embroidered in blue. "No, Father. Just Sustagen when she's been sleeping. Bu she ripped out the tubing."


"Ripped it out?"


"Today."


Disturbed, Karras soaped and rinsed his hands, and after a pause said gravely, "She ought to be in a hospital."


"I just can't do that," answered Chris in a toneless voice.


"Why not?"


"I just can't!" she repeated with quavering anxiety. "I can't have anyone else involved! She's..." Chris-dropped her head. Inhaled. Exhaled. "She s done something, Father. I can't take the risk of someone else finding out. Not a doctor... not a nurse..." She looked up. "Not anyone."


Frowning, he turned off the taps. "... What if a person, let's say, was a criminal..." He lowered his head, staring down at the basin. "Who's giving her the Sustagen? the Librium? her medicines?"


"We are. Her doctor showed us how."


"You need prescriptions."


"Well, you can do some of that, can't you, Father?"


Karras turned to her, hands upraised above the basin like a surgeon after washup. For a moment he met her haunted gaze, felt some terrible secret in them, some dread. He nodded at the towel in her hands. She stared blankly. "Towel, please," he said softly.


"Oh, I'm sorry!" Very quickly, she fumbled it out to him, still watching him with a tight expectancy. The Jesuit dried his hands. "Well, Father, what's it look like?" Chris finally asked him. "Do you think she's possessed?"


"Do you?"


"I don't know. I thought you were the expert."


"How much do you know about possession?"


"Just a little that I've read. Some things that the doctors told me."


"What doctors?"


"At Barringer Clinic."


He folded the towel and carefully draped it over the bar. "Are you Catholic?"


"No."


"Your daughter?"


"No."


"'What religion?"


"None; but I---"


"Why did you come to me, then? Who, advised it?"


"I came because I'm desperate!" she blurted excitedly. "No one advised me!"


He stood with his back to her, fringes of the towel still lightly in his grip. "You said earlier psychiatrists advised you to come to me."


"Oh, I don't know what I was saying! I've been practically out of my head!"


"Look, I couldn't care less about your motive," he answered with a carefully tempered intensity. "All I care about is doing what's best for your daughter. I'll tell you right now that if you're looking for an exorcism as an autosuggestive shock cure; you're much -better off calling Central Casting, Miss MacNeil, because the Church won't buy it and you'll have wasted precious time." Karras clutched at the towel rack to -steady his trembling hands. What's wrong? What's happened?


Incidentally, it's Mrs. MacNeil," he heart Chris telling him drily.


He lowered his head and gentled his tone. "Look, whether it's a demon or a mental disorder, I'll do everything I possibly can to help. But I've got to have -the truth. It's important for Regan. At the moment, I'm groping in a state of ignorance, which is nothing supernatural for me or abnormal, it's just my usual condition. Now why don't we both get out of this bathroom and go downstairs where we can talk." He had turned back to her with a faint, warm smile of reassurance and reached out his hand to help her up. "I could use a cup of coffee."


"I could use a drink."


While Karl and Sharon looked after Regan, they sat in the study, Chris on the sofa, Karras in a chair beside the fireplace, and Chris related the history of Regan's illness, though she carefully withheld any mention of phenomena related to Dennings.


The priest listened, saying very little: an occasional question; a nod; a frown.


Chris admitted that at first she'd considered exorcism as shock treatment. "Now I don't know," she said, shaking her head. Freckled, clasped fingers twitched in her lap. "I just don't know." She lifted a look to the pensive priest. "What do you think, Father?'


'


"Compulsive behavior produced by guilt, perhaps, put together with split personality."


"Father, I've had all that garbage! Now how can you say that after all you've just seen!"


"If you've seen as many patients in psychiatric wards as I have, you can say it very easily," he assured her.


"Come on, now. Possession by demons, all right: let's assume it's a fact of life,, that it happens. But your daughter doesn't say she's a demon; she insists she's the devil himself, and that's the same thing as saying you're Napoleon Bonaparte! You see?"


"Then explain all those rappings and things."


"I haven't heard them."


"Well, they heard then at Barringer, Father, so it wasn't just here in the house."


"Well, perhaps, but we'd hardly need a devil to explain them."


"So explain them," she demanded.


"Psychokinesis."


"What?"


"Well, you have heard of poltergeist phenomena, haven't you?"


"Ghosts throwing dishes and things?"


Karras nodded. "It's not that uncommon, and usually happens around an emotionally disturbed adolescent.


Apparently, extreme inner tension of the mind can sometimes trigger some unknown energy that seems to move objects around at a distance. There's nothing supernatural about it. Like Regan's strength. Again, in pathology it's common. Call it mind over matter, if you will."


"I call it weird."


"Well, in any case, it happens outside of possession."


"Boy, isn't this beautiful," she said wearily. "Here I am an atheist and here you are a priest and---"


"The best explanation for any phenomenon," Karras overrode her, "is always the simplest one available that accommodates all the facts."


"Well, maybe I'm dumb," she retorted, "but telling me an unknown gizmo in somebody's head throws dishes at a ceiling tells me nothing at all! So what is it? Can you tell me for pete's sake what it is?"


"No, we don't under---"


"What the hell's split personality, Father? You say it; I hear it. What is it? Am I really that stupid? Will you tell me what it is in a way I can finally get it through my head?" In the red-veined eyes was a plea of despairing confusion.


"Look, there's no one in the world who pretends to understand it," the priest told her gently. "All we know is that it happens, and anything beyond the phenomenon itself is only the purest speculation. But think of it this way, if you like: the human brain contains, say, seventeen billion cells."


Chris leaned forward, frowning intently.


"Now looking at these brain cells," continued Karras, "we see that they handle approximately a hundred million messages per second; that's the number of sensations bombarding your body. They not only integrate all of these messages, but they do it efficiently, they do it without ever stumbling or getting in each other's way. Now how could they do that, without some form of communication? Well, it seems as if they couldn't. So apparently each of these cells has a consciousness, maybe, of its own. Now imagine that the human body is a massive ocean liner, all right? and that all of your brain cells are the crew. Now one of these cells is up on the bridge. He's the captain. But he never knows precisely what the rest of the crew below decks is doing. All he knows is that the ship keeps running smoothly, that the job's getting done. Now the captain is you, it's your waking consciousness. And what hap-pens in dual personality---maybe---is that one of those crew cells down below decks comes up on the bridge and takes over command. In other words, mutiny. Now---does that help you understand it?"


She was staring in unblinking incredulity. "Father, that's so far out of sight that I think its almost easier to believe in the devil!"


"Well---"


"Look, I don't know about all these theories and stuff," she interrupted in a low, intense voice. "But I'll tell you something, Father; you show me Regan's identical twin: same face, same voice, same smell, same everything down to the way she dots her i's, and still I'd know in a second that it wasn't really her! I'd know it! I'd know it in my gut and I'm telling you I know that thing upstairs is not my daughter! I know it! I know!"


She leaned back, drained. "Now you tell me what to do," she challenged. "Go ahead: you tell me that you know for a fact there's nothing wrong with my daughter except in her head; that you know for a fact that she doesn't need an exorcism; that you know it wouldn't do her any good. Go ahead! You tell me! You tell me what to do!"


For long, troubled seconds, the priest was still. Then he answered softly, "Well, there's little in this world that I know for a fact."


He brooded, sunk back in his chair. Then he spoke again. "Does Regan have a low-pitched, voice?" he asked. "Normally?"


"No. In fact, I'd say it's very light."


'Would you consider her precocious?"


"Not at all."


"Do you know her IQ?"


"About average."


"And her reading habits?"


"Nancy Drew and comic books, mostly."


"And her style of speech, right now: how much different would you say it is from normal?"


"Completely. She's never used half of those words."


"No, I don't mean the content of her speech; I mean the style."


"Style?"


"The way she puts words together."


"Gee, I'm really not sure I know what you mean."


'Would you have any letters she's written? Compositions? A recording of her voice would be---"


"Yes, there's a tape of her talking to her father," she interrupted. "She was making it to send to him as a letter but she never got it finished. You want it?"


"Yes, I do, and I'll also need her medical records, especially the file from Barringer."


"Look, Father, I've been that route and I---"


"Yes, yes, I know, but I'll have to see the records for myself."


"So you're still against an exorcism."


"I'm only against the chance of doing your daughter more harm than good."


"But you're talking now strictly as a psychiatrist, right?"


"No, Im talking now also as a priest. If I go to the Chancery Office, or wherever it is I have to go, to get their permission to perform an exorcism, the first thing I'd have to have is a pretty substantial indication that your daughter's condition isn't a purely psychiatric problem. After that, I'd need evidence that the Church would accept as signs of possession."


"like what?"


"I don't know. I'll have to go and look it up."


"Are you kidding? I thought you were supposed to be an expert."


"You probably know more about demonic possession right now than most priests. In the meantime, when can you get me the Barringer records?"


"I'll charter a plane if I have to!"


"And that tape?"


She stood up. "I'll go see if I can find it."


"And just one other thing," he added. She paused beside his chair. "That book you mentioned with the section on possession: do you think you can remember now if Regan ever read it prior to the onset of the illness?"


She concentrated, fingernails scraping at teeth. "Gee, I seem to remember her reading something the day before the shi---before the trouble really started," she amended, "but I really just can't be sure. But she did it sometime, I think. I mean, I'm sure. Pretty sure."


"I'd like to see it. May I have it?'


'


"It's yours. It's overdue at your library. I'll get it." She was moving from the study. "That tape's in basement, I think. I'll look. Be right back in a second."


Karras nodded absently, staring at a pattern in the rug, and then after many minutes he got up, walked slowly to the entry hall and stood motionless in the darkness, stood without expression, in another dimension, staring into nothing with his hands in his pockets as he listened to the grunting of a pig from upstairs, to the yelping of a jackal, to hiccups, to hissing.


"Oh, you're there! I went looking in the study."


Karras turned to see Chris flicking on the light.


"Are you leaving?" She came forward with the book and the tape.


"I'm afraid I've got a lecture to prepare for tomorrow."


"Oh? Where?"


"At the med school." He accepted the book and the tape from her hands. "I'll try to get by here sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening. In the meantime, if anything urgent develops, you be sure that you call me, no matter what time. I'll leave word at the switchboard to let your ring through." She nodded. The Jesuit opened the door. "Now how are you fixed for medication?" he asked.


"Okay," she said. "It's all on refillable prescription."


"You won't call your doctor in again?"


The actress closed her eyes and very slightly shook her head.


"You know, I'm not a GP," he cautioned.


"I can't," she whispered. "I can't."


He could feel her anxiety pounding like waves on an unknown beach. "Well, now, sooner or later, I'm going to have to tell one of my superiors what I'm up to, especially if I'm going to be coming by here at various unusual hours of the night."


"Do you have to?" She frowned at him worriedly.


"Well, otherwise, it might look a little bit odd, don't you think?"


She looked down. "Yeah, I see what you mean," she murmured.


"Do you mind? I'll tell him only what I have to. Don't worry," he assured her. "It won't get around."


She lifted a helpless; tormented face to the strong, sad eyes; saw strength; saw pain.


"Okay," she said weakly.


She trusted the pain.


He nodded. "We'll be talking."


He started outside, but then hung in the doorway for a moment, thinking, a hand to his lips. "Did your daughter know a priest was coming over?"


"No. No, nobody knew but me."


"Did you know that my mother had died just recently?- 'Yes. I'm very sorry."


"Is Regan aware of it?"


"Why?"


"Is she aware of it?"


"No, not at all."


He nodded.


"Why'd you asks" Chris repeated, her brows slightly puckered with curiosity.


"Not important." He shrugged. "I just wondered." He examined her features with a faint look of worry. "Are you getting any sleep?"


"Oh, a little."


"Get pills, then. Are you taking any Librium?"


"Yes."


"How much?" he asked.


"Ten milligrams, twice a day."


Try twenty, twice a day. In the meantime, try to keep away from your daughter. The more you're exposed to her present behavior, the greater the chance of some permanent damage being done to your feelings about her. Stay clear. And slow down. You'll be no help to Regan, you know, with a nervous breakdown.


She nodded despondently, eyes lowered.


"Now please go to bed," he said gently. "Will you please go to bed right now?"


"Yeah, okay," she said softly. "Okay. I promise." She looked at him with the trace of a smile. "Goodnight, Father. Thanks. Thanks a lot."


He studied her for a moment without expression; then quickly moved away.


Chris watched from the doorway. As he crossed the street, it occurred to her that he'd probably missed his dinner. Then briefly she worried that he might be cold. He was rolling his shirt sleeve down.


At the corner of Prospect and P, he dropped the book and stooped quickly to retrieve it, then rounded the corner and vanished from sight. As she watched him disappear, Chris abruptly was aware of a feeling of lightness. She didn't see Kinderman sitting alone in the unmarked car.


She closed the door.


Half an hour later, Damien Karras hurried back to his room in the Jesuit residence hall with a number of books and periodicals taken from the shelves of the Georgetown library. Hastily he dumped them on top of his desk and then rummaged through drawers for a package of cigarettes. Finding a half-empty pack of stale Camels, he lit one, puffed deep and held the smoke in his lungs while he thought about Regan.


Hysteria. He knew that it had to be hysteria. He exhaled the smoke, hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked down at the books. He had Oesterreich's Possession; Huxley's The Devils of Loudun; Parapraxis in the Haizman Case of Freud; McCasland's Demon Possession and Exorcism in Early Christianity in the Light of Modern Views of Mental Illness; and extracts from psychiatric journals of Freud's "A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the 17th Century," and "The Demonology of Modern Psychiatry."


"Couldya help an old altar boy, Faddah?"


The Jesuit felt at his brow, and then looked at his fingers, rubbing a sticky sweat between them. Then he noticed that his door was open. He crossed the room and closed it, and then event to a shelf for his redbound copy of The Roman Ritual, a compendium of rites and prayers. Clamping the cigarette between his lips, he squinted through smoke as he turned to the "General Rules" for exorcists, looking for the signs of demonic possession. He scanned and then started to read more slowly: ... The exorcist should not believe too rapidly that a person is possessed by an evil spirit; but he ought to ascertain the signs by which a person possessed can be distinguished from one who is suffering from some illness, especially one of a psychological nature. Signs of possession may be the following: ability to speak with some facility in a strange language or, to understand it when spoken by another; the faculty of divulging future and hidden events; display of powers which are beyond the subject's age and natural condition; and various other conditions which, when taken together as a whole, build up the evidence.


For a time Karras pondered, then he leaned against the bookshelf and read the remainder of the instructions. When he had finished, he found himself glancing back up at instruction number 8: Some reveal a crime which has been committed and the perpetrators thereof--- He looked up at the door as he heard a knock. "Damien?"


"Come in."


It was Dyer. "Hey, Chris MacNeil was trying to reach you. She ever get hold of you?"


"When? You mean, tonight?"


"No, this afternoon."


"Oh, yes, I spoke to her."


"Good," said Dyer. "Just wanted to be sure you got the message."


The diminutive priest was prowling the room now, picking at objects like an elf in a thrift shop.


"What do you need, Joe?" Karras asked him.


"Got any lemon drops?"


"What?"


"I've looked all through the hall for some lemon drops. Nobody's got any. Boy, I really crave one," Dyer brooded, still prowling. "I once spent a year hearing children's confessions, and I wound up a lemon-drop junkie. I got hooked. The little bastards keep breathing it on you along with all that pot. Between the two, it's addictive, I think." He lifted the lid of a pipe-tobacco humidor where Karras had stored some pistachio nuts. "What are these---dead Mexican jumping beans?"


Karras turned to his bookshelves, looking for a title. "Listen, Joe, I've got a---"


"Isn't that Chris really nice?"' interrupted Dyer, flopping on the bed. He stretched full length with his hands clasped comfortably behind his head. "Nice lady. Have you met her?"


"We've talked," answered Karras, plucking out a green-bound volume called Satan, a collection of articles and Catholic position papers by various French theologians. He carried it back with him toward the desk, "Look I've really got to---"


"Plain. Down-to-earth. Unaffected," continued Dyer. "She can help us with my plan for when we both quit the priesthood."


"Who's quitting the priesthood?"


"Faggots. In droves. Basic black has gone out. Now, I--- "Joe, I've got a lecture to prepare for tomorrow," said Karras as he set down the books on his desk.


"Yeah, okay. Now my plan is we go to Chris MacNeil---got the picture?---with this notion that I've got for a screenplay based on the life of Saint Ignatius Loyola. The title is Brave Jesuits Marching, and---"


"Would you get your ass out of here, Joe?" prodded Karras, tamping out his cigarette butt in an ashtray.


"Is this boring?"


"I've got work to do."


"Who the hell's stopping you?"


"Come on, now, I mean it." Karras had started to unbutton his shirt. "I'm going to jump in the shower and then I've got to work."


"Didn't see you at dinner, by the way," said Dyer, rising reluctantly from the bed. "Where'd you eat?"


"I didn't"


"That's foolish. Why diet when you only wear frocks?" He had come to the desk add was smiling at a cigarette. "Stale."


"Is there a tape recorder here in the hall?"


'There isn't even a lemon drop here in the hall. Use the language lab."


"Who's got a key? Father President?"


"No. Father Janitor. You need it tonight?"


"Yes, I do," said Karras, as he draped his shirt on the back of the desk chair. "Where do I find him?"


"Want me to get it for you?"


"Could you do that? I'm really in a bind."


"No sweat, Great Beatific Jesuit Witch Doctor. Coming." Dyer opened the door and walked out.


Karras showered and then dressed in a T-shirt and trousers. Sitting down to his desk, he discovered a carton of Camel nonfilters, and beside it a key that was labeled LANGUAGE LAB and another tagged REFECTORY REFRIGERATOR. Appended to the latter was a note: Better you than the rats. Karras smiled at the signature: The Lemon Drop Kid. He put the note aside, then unfastened is wristwatch and plated it in front of him on the desk. The time was 10: 58 P. M. He began to read. Freud. McCasland. Satan. Oesterreich's exhaustive study. And at a little after 4 A. M., he had finished. Was rubbing at his face. At his eyes. They were smarting. He glanced at the ashtray. Ashes and the twisted butts of cigarettes. Smoke hanging thick in the air. He stood up and walked wearily to a window. Slid it open. He gulped at the coolness of the moist morning air and stood there thinking. Regan had the physical syndrome of possession. That much he knew. About that he had no doubt. For in case after case, irrespective of geography or period of history, the symptoms of possession were substantially constant. Some Regan had not evidenced as yet: stigmata; the desire for repugnant foods; the insensitivity to pain; the frequent loud and irrepressible hiccupping. But the others she had manifested clearly: the involuntary motor excitement; foul breath; furred tongue; the wasting away of the frame; the distended stomach; the irritations of the skin and mucous-membrane. And most significantly present were the basic symptoms of the hard core of cases which Oesterreich had characterized as "genuine" possession: the striking change in the voice and in the features, plus the manifestation of a new personality.


Karras looked up and stared darkly down the street. Through the branches of trees he could see the house and the large bay window of Regan's bedroom. When possession was voluntary, as with mediums, the new personality was often benign. Like Tia, brooded Karras. Spirit of a woman who'd possessed a man. A sculptor. Briefly. An hour at a time. Until a friend of the sculptor fell desperately in love. With Tia. Pleaded with the sculptor to permit her to permanently remain in possession of his body. But in Regan, there's no Tia, Karras reflected grimly. The invading personality was vicious. Malevolent. Typical of cases of demonic possession where the new personality sought the destruction of the body of its host. And frequently achieved it.


Moodily the Jesuit walked back to his desk, where he picked up a package of cigarettes; lit one. So okay. She's got the syndrome of demonic possession. Now how do you cure it?


He fanned out the match. That depends on what caused it. He sat on the edge of his desk. Considered. The nuns at the convent of Lille. Possessed. In early-seventeenth-century France. They'd confessed to their exorcists that while helpless in the state of possession, they had regularly attended Satanic orgies; had regularly varied their erotic fare: Mondays and Tuesdays, heterosexual copulation; Thursdays, sodomy, fellatio and cunnilingus, with homosexual partners; Saturday, bestiality with domestic animals and dragons. And dragons!... The Jesuit shook his head. As with Lille, he thought the causes of many possessions were a mixture of fraud and mythomania. Still others, however, seemed caused by mental illness: paranoia; schizophrenia,; neurasthenia; psychasthenia; and this was the reason, he knew, that the Church had for years recommended that the exorcist work with a psychiatrist or a neurologist present. Yet not all possessions had causes so clear. Many had led Oesterreich to characterize possession as a separate disorder all its own; to dismiss the explanatory "split personality" label of psychiatry as no more than an equally occult substitution for the concepts of "demon" and "spirit of the dead."


Karras rubbed a finger in the crease beside his nose. The indications from Barringer, Chris had told him, were that Reagan's disorder might be caused by suggestion; by something that was somehow related to hysteria. And Karras thought it likely. He believed the majority of the cases he had studied had been caused by precisely these two factors. Sure. For one thing, it mostly hits women. For another, all those outbreaks of possession epidemics. And then those exorcists... Karras frowned. They often themselves became the victims of possession. He thought of Loudun. France. The Ursuline Convent of nuns. Of four of the exorcists sent there to deal with an epidemic of possession, three---Fathers Lucas, Lactance and Tranquille---not only became possessed, but died soon after, apparently of shock. And the fourth, Père Surin, who was thirty-three years old at the time of his possession, became insane for the subsequent twenty-five years of his life.


He nodded to himself. If Regan's disorder was hysterical; if the onset of possession was the product of suggestion, then the source of the suggestion could only be the chapter in the book on witchcraft. The chapter on possession. Did she read it?


He pored over its pages. Were there striking similarities between any of its details and Regan's behavior? That might prove it. It might.


He found some correlations: ... The case of an eight-year-old girl who was described in the chapter as "bellowing like a bull in thunderous, deep bass voice." (Regan's lowing like a steer.)


... The case of Helen Smith, who'd been treated by the great psychologist Flournoy; his description of her changing her voice and her features with "lightning" rapdity" into those of a variety of personalities. (She did that with me. The personality who spoke with a British accent. Quick change. Instanttaneous.)

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