... A case in South Africa, reported by the noted ethnologist Junod; his description of a woman who'd vanished from her dwelling one night being found on the following morning "tied to the top" of a very tall tree by "fine lianas," and then afterward "gliding down the tree, head down, while hissing and rapidly flicking her tongue in and out like a snake. She then hung suspended, for a time, and proceeded to speak in a language that no one had ever heard." (Regan gliding like a snake when she was following Sharon. The gibberish. An attempt at an "unknown language.")


... The case of Joseph and Thiebaut Burner, aged eight and ten; description of them "lying on their backs and suddenly whirling like tops with the utmost rapidity." (Sounds pretty close to her whirling like a dervish.)


There were other similarities; still other reasons for suspecting suggestion: mention of abnormal strength; of obscenity of speech; and accounts of possession from the gospels, which perhaps were the basis, thought Karras, of the curiously religious content of Regan's ravings at Barringer Clinic. Moreover, in the chapter there was mention of the onset of possession in stages: "... The first, infestation, consists of an -attack through the victim's surroundings; noises---odors---the displacement of objects; and the second, obsession, consists in a personal attack on the subject designed to instill terror through the kind of injury that one man might inflict on another through blows and kicks." The rappings. The flingings. The attacks by Captain Howdy.


Maybe... maybe she read it. But Karras wasn't convinced. Not at all... not at all. And Chris. She had seemed so uncertain about it.


He walked to the window again. What's the answer, then? Genuine possession? A demon? He looked down and shook his head. No way. No way. Paranormal happenings? Sure. Why not? Too many competent observers had reported them. Doctors. Psychiatrists. Men like Junod. But the problem is how do you interpret the phenomena? He thought back to Oesterreich. Reference to a shaman of the Altai. Siberia. Voluntarily possessed and examined in a clinic while performing an apparently paranormal action: levitation. Just prior, his pulse rate had spurted to one hundred, then, afterward, leaped to an amazing two hundred. Marked changes in temperature as well. Its respiration. So his paranormal action was tied to physiology. It was caused by some bodily energy or force. But as proof of possession the Church wanted clear and exterior phenomena that suggested....


He'd forgotten the wording. Looked it up. Traced a finger down the page of a book on his desk. Found it: "... verifiable exterior phenomena which suggest the idea that they are due to the extraordinary intervention of an intelligent cause other than man." Was that the case with the shaman? Karras asked himself. No. And is that the case with Regan?


He turned to a passage he had underlined in percil: "The exorcist will simply be careful that none of the patient's manifestations are left unaccounted for..."


He nodded. Okay, then. Let's see. Pacing, he ran through the manifestations of Regan's disorder along with their possible explanations. He ticked them off mentally, one by one: The startling change in Regan's features.


Partly her illness. Partly undernourishment. Mostly, he concluded, it was due to physiognomy being an expression of psychic constitution. Whatever the hell that means! he added wryly.


The startling change in Regan's voice.


He had yet to hear the original voice. And even if that had been light, as reported by her mother, constant shrieking would thicken the vocal cords, with a consequent deepening of the voice. The only problem here, he reflected, was the massive volume of that voice, for even with a thickening of the cords this would seem to be physiologically impossible. And yet, he considered, in states of anxiety or pathology, displays of paranormal strength in excess of muscular potential were known to be a commonplace. Might not vocal cords and voice box be subject to the same mysterious effect?


Regan's suddenly extended vocabulary and knowledge.


Cryptomnesia: buried recollections of words and data she had once been exposed to, even in infancy, perhaps. In somnambulists---and frequently in people at the point of death---the buried data often came to the surface with almost photographic fidelity.


Regan's recognition of him as a priest.


Good guess. If she had read the chapter on possession, she might have expected a visit by a priest. And according to Jung, the unconscious awareness and sensitivity of hysterical patients could at moments be fifty times greater than normal, which accounted for seemingly authentic "thought reading" via table-tapping by mediums, for what the medium's unconscious was actually "reading" were the tremors and vibrations created in the table by the hands of the person whose thoughts were supposedly being read. The tremors formed a pattern of letters or numbers. Thus, Regan might conceivably have "read" his identity merely from his manner; from the look of his hands; from the scent of sacramental wine.


Regan's knowledge of the death of his mother.


Good guess. He was forty-six.


"Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?"


Textbooks in use in Catholic seminaries accepted telepathy as both a reality and a natural phenomenon.


Regan's precocity of intellect.


In the course of personally observing a case of multiple personality involving alleged occult phenomena, the psychiatrist Jung had concluded that in states of hysterical somnambulism not only were unconscious perceptions of the senses heightened, but also the functioning of the intellect, for the new personalities in the case in question seemed clearly more intelligent than the first. And yet, puzzled Karras, did merely reporting the phenomenon explain it?


Abruptly he stopped pacing and hovered by his desk, for it suddenly dawned upon him that Regan's pun on Herod was even more complicated than at first it had appeared: when the Pharisees told Christ of Herod's threats, he remembered, Christ had answered them: "Go and tell that fox that I cast out devils..."


He glanced at the tape of Regan's voice for a moment, then sat wearily at the desk. He lit another cigarette... exhaled... thought again of the Burner boys; of the case of the eight-year-old girl who had manifested symptoms of full-blown possession. What book had this girl read that had enabled her unconscious mind to simulate the symptoms to such perfection? And how did the unconscious of victims in China communicate the symptoms to the various un-conscious minds of people possessed in Siberia, in Germany, in Africa, so that the symptoms were always the same?


"Incidentally, your mother is here with us, Karras..."


He stared unseeing as smoke from his cigarette rose like whispered curls of memory. The priest leaned back, looking down at the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk. For a time, he kept staring. Then slowly he leaned down, pulled open the drawer and extracted a faded language exercise book. Adult education. His mother's. He set it on the desk and thumbed the pages with a tender care. Letters of the alphabet, over and over. Then simple exercises: LESSON VI MY COMPLETE ADDRESS Between the pages, an attempt at a letter.


Then another beginning. Incomplete. He looked away. Saw her eyes at the window... waiting....


" 'Domine, non sum dignus....' "


The eyes became Regan's... eyes shrieking... eyes waiting....


" 'Speak but the word...' "


He glanced at the tape of Regan's voice.


He left the room. Took the tape to the language lab. Found a tape recorder. Sat down. He threaded the tape to an empty reel. Clamped on earphones. Turned on the switch. Then leaned forward and listened. Exhausted. Intense.


For a time, only tape hiss. Squeaking of the mechanism. Suddenly, a thumping sound of activation. Noises. "Hello..." Then a whining feedback. Chris MacNeil, tone hushed, in the background: "Not so close to the microphone, honey. Hold it back."


"Like this?"


"No, more."


"Like this?"


"Yeah, okay. Go ahead now, just talk." Giggling. The microphone bumping a table. Then the sweet, clear voice of Regan MacNeil: "Hello, Daddy? This is me. Ummm..." Giggling; then a whispered aside: "I can't tell what to say!"


"Oh, just tell him how you are, honey. Tell about all of the things you've been doing." More giggling, then: "Umm, Daddy... Well, ya see... I mean, I hope you can hear me okay, and, umm---well, now, let's see. Umm, well, first we're---No, wait, now.... See, first we're in Washington, Daddy, ya know? I mean, that's where the President lives; and this house---ya know. Daddy?---it's---No, wait, now; I better start over. See, Daddy, there's..."


Karras heard the rest only dimly, from afar, through the roaring of blood in his ears, like the ocean, as up through his chest and his fate swelled an overwhelming intuition: The thing that I saw in that room wasn't Regan!


He returned to the Jesuit residence hall. Found a cubicle. Said Mass before the rush. As he lifted the Host in consecration, it trembled in his fingers with a hope he dared not hope, that he fought with every particled fiber of his will. " 'For this is My Body...' " he whispered tremulously.


No, bread! This is nothing but bread!


He dared not love again and lose. That loss was too great, that pain too keen. He bowed his head and swallowed the Host like lost illusion. For a moment it stuck in the dryness of his throat.


After Mass, he skipped breakfast. Made notes for his lecture. Met his class at the Georgetown University Medical School. Threaded hoarsely through the ill-prepared talk: "... and in considering the symptoms of manic mood disorders, you will..."


"Daddy, this is me... this is me..."


But who was "me"?


Karras dismissed the class early and returned to his room, where immediately he hunched over his desk, palms of his hands pressed flat, and intently reexamined the Church's position on the paranormal signs of demonic possession. Was I being too hard-nosed? he wondered. He scrutinized the high points in Satan: "telepathy... natural phenomenon... movement of objects from a distance now suspect... from the body there may emanate some fluid... our forefathers... science... nowadays we must be more cautious. The paranormal evidence notwithstanding, however... " He slowed the pace of his reading. "... all conversations held with the patient must be carefully analyzed, for if they present the same system of association of ideas and of logicogrammatical habits that he exhibits in his normal state, the possession must then be held suspect."


Karras breathed deeply, exhausted. Then exhaled. Dropped his head. No way. Doesn't cut it. He glanced to the plate on the facing page. A demon. His gaze flicked down idly to the caption: "Pazuzu." Karras shut his eyes. Something wrong. Tranquille... He envisioned the exorcist's death: the final agonies... the bellowing... the hissing... the vomiting... the hurlings to the ground from his bed by his "demons," who were furious because soon he would be dead and beyond their torment. And Lucas! Lucas. Kneeling by the bedside. Praying. But the moment Tranquille was dead, Lucas instantly assumed the identity of his demons, began viciously lucking at the still-warm corpse, at the shattered, clawed body reeking of excrement and vomit, while six strong men were attempting to restrain him, would not stop until the corpse had been carried from the room. Karras saw it. Saw it clearly.


Could it be? Could it possibly, conceivably be? Could the only hope for Regan be the ritual of exorcism? Must he open up that locker of aches?


He could not shake it. Could not leave it untested. He must know. How to know? He opened his eyes. "... conversations with the patient must be carefully..." Yes. Yes, why not? If discovery that speech patterns of Regan and the "demon" were the same ruled out possession even with paranormal occurrences, then certainly... Sure... strong difference in the patterns should mean that there probably is possession!


He paced. What else? What else? Something quick. She---Wait a minute. He paused, staring down, hands clasped behind his back. That chapter... that chapter in the book on witchcraft. Had it mentioned...? Yes, it had: that demons invariably reacted with fury when confronted with the consecrated Host... with relics... with---Holy water! Right! That's it! I'll go up there and sprinkle her with tap water! But tell her it's holy water! Sure! If she reacts the way demons are supposed to react, then I'll know she's not possessed... that the symptoms are suggestive... that she got them from the book! But if she doesn't react it would mean...


Genuine possession?


Maybe...


Feverish, he rummaged for a holy-water vial.


Willie admitted him to the house. In the entry, he glanced toward Regan's bedroom. Shouts. Obscenities. And yet not in the deep, coarse voice of the demon. Raspy. Lighter. A broad British... Yes!... The manifestation that had fleetingly appeared when he'd last sees Regan.


Karras glanced down at the waiting Willie. She was staring puzzled at the Roman collar. At the priestly robes. "Where's Mrs. MacNeil, please?" Karras asked her.


Willie motioned upstairs.


'Thank you."


He moved to the staircase. Climbed. Saw Chris in the hall. She was sitting in a chair near Regan's bedroom, head lowered, her arms folded on her chest. As the Jesuit approached her, Chris heard the swishing of his robes. She glanced up and quickly stood. "Hello, Father."


There were bluish sacs beneath her eyes. Karras frowned. "Did you sleep?"


"Oh, a little."


He was shaking his head in admonishment.


"Well, I couldn't," she sighed at him, motioning her head at Regan's door. "She's been doing that all night."


"Any vomiting?"


"No." She took hold of his sleeve as if to lead him away. "C'mon, let's go downstairs where we can---"


"No, I'd like to see her," he gently interrupted. He resisted the tugging insistence of her lead.


"Right now?"


Something wrong, reflected Karras. She looked tense. Afraid. "Why not now?" he inquired.


She glanced furtively at the door of Regan's bedroom. From within shrieked the hoarse mad voice: "Damned Naa-zi! Naa-zi cunt!"


Chris looked away; then reluctantly nodded. "Go ahead. Go on in."


"You've got a tape recorder?"


Her eyes searched his with quick movements. Little flicks.


"Could you have it bought up to the room with a blank reel of tape, please?"


She frowned with suspicion. "What for?" Then alarm.


"You mean, you want to tape...?"


"Yes, it's im---"


"Father, I can't have you...!"


"I need to make comparisons of patterns of speech," he cut in firmly. "Now please! You're just going to have to trust me!"


They turned to the door as an excoriating, stream of obscenities apparently drove Karl out of Regan's bedroom. His face ashen and grim, he was carrying soiled diapers and bedding.


"Get 'em on, Karl?" Chris asked him as the servant closed the bedroom door behind him.


Karl glanced quickly at Karras, then at Chris. "They are on," he said tersely, and went quickly down the hallway toward the staircase.


Chris watched him. She turned back to Karras.


"Okay," she said weakly. "Okay. I'll have it sent up." And abruptly she was walking down the hall.


For a moment Karras watched her. Puzzled. What was wrong? Then he noticed the sudden silence in the bedroom. It was brief. Now the yelping of diabolic laughter. He moved forward. Felt the water vial in his pocket. He opened the door and stepped into the bedroom.


The stench was more powerful than the evening before. He closed the door. Stared. That horror. That thing on the bed.


As he approached, it was watching with mocking eyes. Full of cunning. Full of hate. Full of power.


"Hello, Karras."


The priest heard the sound of diarrhetic voiding into plastic pants.


He spoke calmly from the foot of the bed. "Hello, devil. And how are you feeling?"


"At the moment, very happy to see you. Glad." The tongue lolled out of the mouth while the eyes appraised Karras with insolence. "Flying your colors, I see. Very good." Another rumbling. "You don't mind a bit of stink, do you, Karras?"


"Not at all."


"You're a liar!"


"Does that bother you?"


"Mildly."


"But the devil likes liars."


"Only good ones, dear Karras, only good ones," it chuckled. "Moreover, who said I'm the devil?"


"Didn't you?"


"Oh, I might have. I might. I'm not well. You believed me?"


"Of course."


"My apologies."


"Are you saying that you aren't the devil?"


"Just a poor struggling demon. A devil. A subtle distinction, but one not entirely lost upon Our Father who is in Hell. Incidentally, you won't retention my slip of the tongue to him, Karras, now will you? Eh? When you see him?"


"See him? Is he here?" asked the priest.


"In the pig? Not at all. Just a poor little family of wandering souls, my friend. Yon don't blame us for being here, do you? After all, we have no place to go. No home."


"And how long are you planning to stay?"


The head jerked up from the pillow, contorted is rage as it roared, "Until the piglet dies!" And then as suddenly, Regan settled back into a thick-lipped, drooling grin. "Incidentally, what an excellent day for an exorcism, Karras."


The books! She must have read that in the book!


The sardonic eyes were staring piercingly. "Do begin it soon. Very soon."


Inconsistent. Something off here. "You would like that?"


"Intensely."


"But wouldn't that drive you out of Regan?"


The demon put its head back, cackling maniacally, then broke off. "It would bring us together."


'You and Regan?"


"You and us, my good friend," croaked the demon. "You and us." And from deep in that throat, muffled laughter.


Karras stared. At the back of his neck, he felt hands. Icy cold. Lightly touching. And then gone. Caused by fear, he concluded. Fear.


Fear of what?


"Yes, you'll join our little family, Karras. You see, the trouble with signs in the sky, my dear morsel, is that once having seen them, one has no excuse. Have you noticed how few miracles one hears about lately? Not our fault, Karras. Don't blame us. We try!"


Karras jerked around his head at a loud, sudden banging. A bureau drawer had popped open, sliding out its entire length. He felt a quick-rising thrill as he watched it abruptly bang shut. There it is! And then as suddenly, the emotion dropped away like a rotted chunk of bark from a tree: Psychokinesis. Karras heard chuckling. He glanced back to Regan.


"How pleasant to chat with you, Karras," said the demon, grinning. "I feel free. Like a wanton. I spread my great wings. In fact, even my telling you this will serve only to increase your damnation, my doctor, my dear and inglorious physician."


"You did that? You made the dresser drawer move just now?"


The demon wasn't listening. It had glanced toward the door, toward the sound of someone rapidly approaching down the hall, and now its features turned to those of the other personality. "Damned butchering bastard!" it shrieked in the hoarse, British-accented voice. "Cunting Hun!"


Through the door came Karl, moving swiftly with the tape recorder, setting it down by the bed, eyes averted, and then quickly retreating from the room.


"Out, Himmler! Out of my sight! Go and visit your club-footed daughter! Bring her sauerkraut! Sauerkraut and heroin, Thorndike! She will love it! She will---"


Gone. Karl was gone. And now abruptly the thing within Regan was cordial, watching Karras as the priest quickly set up the tape recorder; looked for an outlet; plugged it in; threaded tape.


"Oh, yes, hullo hullo hullo. What's up?" it said happily. "Are we going to record something, Padre? How fun! Oh, I do love to playact, you know! Oh, immensely!"


"I'm Damien Karras," said the priest as he worked. "And who are you?"


"Are you asking for my credits now, ducks? Damned cheeky of you, wouldn't you say?" It giggled. "I was Puck in the junior class play." It glanced around. "Where's a drink, incidentally? I'm parched."


The priest placed the microphone gently on the nightstand.


"If you'll tell me your name, I'll try to find one."


"Yes, of course," it responded with a cackle of amusement. "And then drink it yourself, I suppose."


As he pushed the RECORD button, Karras answered, "Tell me your name."


"Fucking plunderer!" it rasped.


And then promptly disappeared and was replaced by the demon. "And what are we doing now, Karras? Recording our little discussion?"


Karras straightened. Stared. Then he pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat dawn. "Do you mind?" he responded.


"Not at all," croaked the demon. "I have always rather liked infernal engines."


Abruptly a strong, new stench assailed Karras. It was an odor like...


"Sauerkraut, Karras. Have you noticed?"


It does smell like sauerkraut, the Jesuit marveled. It seemed to be emanating from the bed. From Regan's body. Then it was gone, replaced by the putrid stench of before. Karras frowned. Did I imagine it? Autosuggestion? He thought of the holy water. Now? No, save it. Get more of the speech pattern. "To whom was I speaking before?" he asked.


"Merely one of the family, Karras."


"A demon?"


"You give too much credit."


"How so?"


"The word 'demon' means 'wise one.' He is stupid."


The Jesuit grew taut. "In what language does 'demon' mean 'wise one'?"


"In Greek."


"You speak Greek?"


"Very fluently."


One of the signs! Karras thought with excitement. Speaking in an unknown tongue! It was more than he'd hoped for. "Pos egnokas hoti presbyteros eimi?" he quickly inquired in classical Greek.


"I am not in the mood, Karras."


"Oh. Then you cannot---"


"I am not in the mood!"


Disappointment. Karras brooded., "You made the dresser drawer come sliding out?" He inquired.


"Most assuredly."


"Very impressive." Karras nodded. "You're certainly a very, very power demon."


"I am."


"I was wondering if you'd do it again."


"Yes, in time."


"Do it now, please---I would really like to see it."


"In time."


"Why not now?"


"We must give you some reason for doubt," it croaked. "Some. Just enough to assure the final outcome." It put back its head in a chuckle of malice. "How novel to attack through the truth! Ah, what joy!"


Icy hands lightly touching at his neck. Karras stared. Why the fear again? Fear? Was it fear?


"No, not fear," said the demon. It was grinning. "That was me."


Hands gone now. Karras frowned. Felt new wonder. Chipped it down. Telepathic. Or is she? Find out. Find out now. "Can you tell me what I'm thinking right now?"


"Your thoughts are too dull to entertain."


"Then you can't read my mind."


"You may have it as you wish... as you wish."


Try the holy water? Now? He heard the squeaking of the tape-recorder mechanism. No. Just keep digging. Get more of a sampling of the speech. "You're a fascinating person," said Karras.


Regan sneered.


"Oh, no, really," said Karras. "I'd like to know more about your background. You've never told me who you are, for example."


"A devil," rumbled the demon.


"Yes, I know, but which devil? What's your name?"


"Ah, now what is in a name, Karras? Never mind my name. Call me Howdy, if you find it more comfortable."


"Oh, yes. Captain Howdy." Karras nodded. "Regan's friend."


"Her very close friend."


"Oh, really?"


"Indeed."


"But then why do you torment her?"


"Because I am her friend. The piglet likes it!"


"She likes it?"


"She adores it!"


"But why?"


"Ask her!"


"Would you allow her to answer?"


"No."


"Well, then what would be the point in my asking?"


"None!" The demon's eyes glinted spite.


"Who's the person I was speaking to earlier?" asked Karras.


"You've asked that."


"I know, but you never gave an answer."


"Just another good friend of the sweet, honey piglet, dear Karras."


"May I speak to him?"


"No. He is busy with your mother. She is sucking his cock to the bristles, Karras! to the root!" it chuckled softly, and then added, "Marvelous tongue, your mother. Good mouth."


It was gleaming at him mockingly, and Karras felt a rage sweeping through him, a tremor of hatred that the priest quickly realized with a start was directed not at Regan, but at the demon. The demon! What the hell is the matter with you, Karras? The Jesuit gripped calm by its edges, breathed deep and then stood up and slipped the vial of water from the pocket of his shirt. He uncorked it.


The demon looked wary. "What is that?"


"Don't you know?" asked Karras, his thumb half covering the mouth of the vial as he started to sprinkle its contents on Regan. "It's holy water, devil."


Immediately the demon was cringing, writhing, bellowing in terror and in pain: "It burns! It burns! Ahh, stop it! Cease, priest bastard! Cease!"


Expressionless, Karras stopped sprinkling. Hysteria. Suggestion. She did read the book. He glanced at the tape recorder. Why bother?


He noticed the silence. Looked at Regan. Knit his bows. What's this? What's going on? The demonic personality had vanished and in its place were other features, which were similar. Yet different. And the eyes had rolled upward into their sockets, exposing the whites. Now murmuring. Slowly. A feverish gibberish. Karras came around to the side of the bed. Leaned over to listen. What is it? Nothing. And yet... It's got cadence. Like a language. Could it be? He felt the fluttering of wings in his stomach; gripped them hard; held them still. Come on, don't be an idiot! And yet...


He glanced to the volume monitor on the tape recorder. Not flashing. He turned up the amplification knob and then listened, intent, ear low to Regan's lips. The gibberish ceased and was replaced by breathing, raspy and deep.


Karras straightened. "Who are you?" he asked.


"Nowonmai," the entity answered. Groaning whisper. In pain. Whites of eyes. Lids fluttering. "Nowonmai." The cracked, breathy voice, like the soul of its owner, seemed cloistered in a dark, curtained space beyond time.


"Is that your name?" Karras frowned.


The lips moved. Fevered syllables. Slow. Unintelligible. Then shortly it ceased.


"Are you able to understand me?"


Silence. Only breathing. Deep. Oddly muffled. The eerie sound of sleep in an oxygen tent.


The Jesuit waited. Hoped for more.


Nothing came.


He rewound the tape, packed the tape recorder into its case, picked it up and took the reel of tape. He gave Regan a last look. Louse ends. Irresolute, he left the room and went downstairs.


He found Chris in the kitchen. She was sitting somberly over coffee at the table with Sharon. As they saw him approach, they looked up at him with a questioning, anxious expectancy. Chris said quietly to Sharon, "Better go check on Regan. Okay?"


Sharon took a final sip of coffee, nodded wanly at Karras and left. He sat down wearily at the table.


"So what's doin'?" Chris asked him, searching his eyes.


About to answer, Karras waited as Karl entered quietly from the pantry and west over to the sink to scrub pots.


Chris followed has gaze. "It's okay," she said softly. "Go ahead. What's the drill?"


"There were two personalities I hadn't seen before. Well, no, one I guess I'd seen for just a moment, the one that sounds British. Is that anyone you know?"


"Is that important?" Chris asked.


He saw again the special tension in her face. "It's important."


She looked down and nodded. "Yeah, it's someone I knew."


"Who?"


She looked up. "Burke Dennings."


"The director?"


"Yes."


"The director who---"


"Yes," she cut in.


The Jesuit considered her answer for a moment in silence. He saw her index finger twitching.


"Would you like some coffee or something, Father?"


He shook his head. "Thanks, no." He lead forward, elbows on the table. "Was Regan acquainted with him?"


"Yes."


"And---"


A clattering. Startled, Chas flinched, turned and saw that Karl had dropped a roasting pan to the floor and was stooping to retrieve it. As he lifted it, he dropped it again.


"God almighty, Karl!"


"Sorry, madam."


"Go on, Karl, get out of here! Go see a movie or something! We can't all stay cooped in this house!" She turned back to Karras, picking up a cigarette packet and slamming it down on the table when Karl protested, "No, I look---"


"Karl, now, I mean it!" Chris snapped at him nervously, raising her voice but not turning her head. "Get out! Just get out of this house for a while! We've all got to start getting out! Now just go!"


"Yes, you go!" echoed Willie as she entered and snatched away the pan from Karl's grasp. She pushed him irritably toward the pantry.


Karl eyed Karras and Chris briefly and then left.


"Sorry, Father," Chris murmured in apology. She reached for a cigarette. "He's had to take an awful lot lately."


"You were right," said Karras gently. He picked up the matches. "You should all make an effort to get out of the house." He lit her cigarette. "You too."


"So what did Burke Say?" Chris asked.


"Just obscenities," Karras said, shrugging.


"That's all?"


He caught the faint pulse of fear in her tone "Pretty much," he responded. Then he lowered his voice. "Incidentally, does Karl have a daughter?"


"A daughter? No, not that I know of. Or if he does, he's never mentioned it."


"You're sure?"


Willie was scouring at the sink. Chris turned to her. "You don't have a daughter, do you, Willie?"


"She die, madam, long, long before."


"Oh, I'm sorry."


Chris turned back to Karras. "That's the first I ever heard of her," she whispered. "Why'd you ask? How'd you know?"


"Regan. She mentioned it," said Karras.


Chris stared.


"Has she ever shown signs of having ESP?" he asked. "I mean, prior to this time."


"Well..." Chris hesitated. "Well, I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, there have been lots of times when she seems to be thinking the same things that I'm thinking, but doesn't that happen with people -who are close?"


Karras nodded. Thought. "Now this other personality that I mentioned," he began. "That's the one that emerged in hypnosis once?"


"Talks gibberish?"


"Yes. Who is it?"


"I don't know."


"It's not familiar at all?"


"Not at all."


"Have you sent for the medical records?"


"They'll be here this afternoon. They're being flown down. They'll be coming straight to you." She sipped coffee. "That's the only way I could get them loose, and even at that I had to raise hell."


"Yes, I thought there might be trouble."


"There was. But they're coming." She took another sip. "Now what about the exorcism, Father?"


He looked down, then sighed. "Well, I'm not very hopeful I can sell it to the Bishop."


"What do you mean, 'not very hopeful'?" She set down the coffee cup, frowning anxiously.


He dipped into his pocket and extracted the vial, holding it out to show Chris. "See this?"


She nodded.


"I told her it was holy water," Karras explained. "And when I started to sprinkle her with it, she reacted very violently."


"So?"


"It's not holy water. It's ordinary tap water."


"So maybe some demons just don't know the difference."


"You really believe there's a demon inside her?"


"I believe that there's something inside of Regan that's trying to kill her, Father Karras, and whether it knows piss from water doesn't seem to have very much to do with it all, don't you think? I mean, sorry, but you asked my opinion!" She tamped out her cigarette. "What's the difference between holy water and tap water anyway?"


"Holy water's blessed."


"Mazel tov, Father; I'm happy for it! So what are you telling me, meantime---no exorcism?"


"Look, I've only just begun to dig into this," Karras said heatedly. "But the Church has criteria that have to be met, and they have to be met for a very good reason: keeping clear of the superstitious garbage that people keep pinning on her year after year! I give you 'levitating priests,' for example, and statues of the Blessed Mother that supposedly cry on Good Fridays and feast days. Now I think I can live without contributing to that!"


"Would you like a little Librium, Father?"


"I'm sorry, but you asked my opinion."


"I got it."


He was reaching for the cigarettes.


"Me too," Chris said huskily.


He extended the pack. She took one. He popped one in his mouth and lit both. They exhaled with audible sighs and slumped around the table.


"I'm sorry," he told her softly.


"Those nonfilter cigarettes'll kill ya."


He toyed with the cigarette packet, crinkling cellophane. "Here are the signs that the Church might accept. One is speaking in a language that the subject has never known before. Never studied. I'm working on that one. With the tapes. We'll see. Then there's clairvoyance, although nowadays telepathy or ESP might nullify that one."


"You believe in that stuff?" She frowned skeptically.


He looked at her. She was serious, he decided. He continued. "And the last one is powers beyond her ability and age. That's a catchall. Anything occult."


"Well, now, what about those poundings in the wall?"


"By itself, it meals nothing."


"And the way she was flying up and down off the bed?"


"Not enough."


"Well, then, what about these things on her skin?"


"What things?"


"I didn't tell you?"


"Tell me what?"


"Oh, it happened at the clinic," Chris explained. "There were---well..." She traced a finger on her chest. "You know, like writing? Just letters. They'd show up on her chest, then disappear. Just like that."


Karras frowned. "You said 'Letters.' Not words?"


"No, no words. Just an M once or twice. Then an L."


"And you saw this?" he asked her.


"Well, no. But they told me."


"Who told you?"


"The doctors at the clinic. Look, you'll see it in the records. It's for real."


"Yes, I'm sure. But again, that's a natural phenomenon."


"Where? Transylvania?" Chris said, incredulous.


Karras shook his head. "No, I've come across cases of that in the journals. There was one, I remember, where a prison psychiatrist reported that a patient of his---an inmate---could go into a self-induced state of trance and make the signs of the zodiac appear on his skin." He made a gesture at his chest. "Made the skin raise up."


"Boy, miracles sure don't come easy with you, do they?"


"There was once an experiment," he explained to her gently, "in which the subject was hypnotized, put into trance; and then surgical incisions were made is each arm. He was told that his left arm was going to bleed, but that the right arm would not. Well, the left arm bled and the right arm didn't. The power of the mind controlled the blood flow. We don't know how, of course; but it happens. So in cases of stigmata---like the one with that prisoner I mentioned, or with Regan the unconscious mind is controlling the differential of blood flow to the skin, sending more to the parts that it wants raised up. And so then you have drawings, or letters, or whatever. Mysterious, but hardly supernatural."


"You're a real tough case, Father Karras, do you know that?"


Karras touched a thumbnail to his teeth. "Look, maybe this will help you to understand," he said finally. "The Church---not me---the Church---once published a statement, a warning to exorcists. I read it last night. And what it said was that most of the people who are thought to be possessed or whom others believe to be possessed---and now I'm quoting---'are far more in need of a doctor than of an exorcist.' " He looked up into Chris's eyes. "Can you guess when that warning was issued?"


"No, when?"


"The year fifteen eighty-three."


Chris stared in surprise; thought. "Yeah, that sure was one hell of a year," she muttered. She heard the priest rising from his chair. "Let me wait and check the records from the clinic," he was saying.


Chris nodded.


"In the meantime," he continued, "I'll edit the tapes and then take them to the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. It could be this gibberish is some kind of a language. I doubt it. But maybe. And comparing the patterns of speech... Well, then you'll know. If they're the same, you'll know for sure she s not possessed."


"And what then?" she asked anxiously.


The priest probed her eyes. They were turbulent. Worried that her daughter is not possessed! He thought of Dennings. Something wrong. Very wrong. "I hate to ask, but could I borrow your car for a while?"


She looked bleakly at the floor. "You could borrow my life for a while," she murmured. "Just get it back by Thursday. You never know; I might need it."


With an ache, Karras stared at the bowed, defenseless head. He yearned to take her hand and say that all would be well. But how?


"Wait, I'll get you the keys," she said.


He watched her drift away like a hopeless prayer.


When she'd given him the keys, Karras walked back to his room at the residence hall. He left the tape recorder there and collected the tape of Regan's voice. Then he went back across the street to Chris's parked car.


Climbing in, he heard Karl calling out from the doorway of the house: "Father Karras!" Karras looked. Karl was rushing down the stoop, quickly throwing on a jacket. He was waving. "Father Karras! One moment!"


Karras leaned over and cranked down the window on the passenger side. Karl leaned his head in. "You are going which way, Father Karras?"


"Du Pont Circle."


"Ah, yes, good! You could drop me, please, Father? You would mind?"


"Glad to do it. Jump in."


Karl nodded. "I appreciate it, Father!"


Karras started up the engine. "Do you good to get out"


"Yes, I go to see a film. A good film."


Karras put the car in gear and pulled away.


For a time they drove in silence. Karras was preoccupied, searching for answers. Possession. Impossible. The holy water. Still...


"Karl, you knew Mr. Dennings pretty well, wouldn't you say?"


Karl stared through the windshield; then nodded stiffly. "Yes. I know him."


"When Regan... when she appears to be Dennings, do you get the impression that she really is?"


Long pause. And then a flat and expressionless "Yes."


Karras nodded, feeling haunted.


There was no more conversation until they reached Du Pont Circle, where they came to a traffic signal, and stopped. "I get off here, Father Karras," Karl said, opening the door. "I can catch here the bus." He climbed out, then leaned his head in the window. "Father, thank you very much. I appreciate. Thank you."


He stood back on the safety island and waited for the light to change. He smiled and waved as the priest drove. away. He watched the car until at last it disappeared around the bend at the mouth of Massachusetts Avenue. Then he ran for a bus. Boarded. Took a transfer. Changed buses. Rode in silence until finally he debarked at a northeast tenement section of the city, where he walked to a crumbling apartment building and entered.


Karl paused at the bottom of the gloomy staircase, smelling acrid aromas from efficiency kitchens. From somewhere the sound of a baby crying. He lowered his head. A roach scuttled quickly from a baseboard and across a stair in jagging darts. He clutched at the banister and seemed on the verge of turning back, but then shook his head and began to climb. Each groaning footfall creaked like a rebuke.


On the second floor, he walked to a door in a murky wing, and for a moment he stood there, a hand on the door frame. He glanced at the wall: peeling paint; Nicky and Ellen in penciled scrawl and below it, a date and a heart whose core was cracking plaster. Karl pushed the buzzer and waited, head down. From within the apartment, a squeaking of bedsprings. Irritable muttering. Then someone approaching: a sound that was irregular: the dragging clump of an orthopedic shoe. Abruptly the door jerked partly open, the chain of a safety latch rattling to its limit as a woman in a slip scowled out through the aperture, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.


"Oh, it's you," she said huskily. She took off the chain.


Karl met the eyes that were shifting hardness, that were haggard wells of pain and blame; glimpsed briefly the dissolute bending of the lips and the ravaged face of a youth and a beauty buried alive in a thousand motel rooms, in a thousand awakenings from restless sleep with a stifled cry at remembered grace.


"C'mon, tell 'im to fuck off!" A coarse male voice from within the apartment. Slurred. The boyfriend.


The girl turned her head and snapped quickly, "Oh, shut up, jerk, it's Pop!"


The girl turned to Karl. "He's drunk, Pop. Ya better not come in."


Karl nodded.


The girl's hollow eyes shifted down to his hand as it reached to a back trouser pocket for a wallet. "How's Mama?" she asked him, dragging on her cigarette, eyes on the hands that were dipping in the wallet, hands counting out tens.


"She is fine. " He nodded. tersely. "Your mother is fine."


As he handed her the money, she began to cough rackingly. She threw up a hand to her mouth. "Fuckin' cigarettes!" she choked out.


Karl stared at the puncture scabs on her arm.


"Thanks, Pop."


He felt the money being slipped from his fingers.


"Jesus, hurry it up!" growled the boyfriend from within.


"Listen, Pop, we better cut this kinds short. Okay? Ya know how he gets."


"Elvira...!" Karl had suddenly reached through the door and grasped her wrist. "There is clinic in New York now!" he whispered at her pleadingly.


She was grimacing, trying to break free from his grip.


"Oh, come on!"


"I will send you! They help you! You don't go to jail! It is- "Jesus, come on, Pop!" she screeched, breaking free from his clutch.


"No, no, please! It is---"


She slammed the door in his face.


In the shadowy hall, in the carpeted tomb of his expectations, Karl stared mutely for a moment at the door, and then lowered his head into quiet grief. From within the apartment came muffed conversation. Then a cynical, ringing woman's laugh. It was followed by coughing.


Karl turned away, and felt a sudden stab of shock as he found the way blocked by Lieutenant Kinder-man.


"Perhaps we could talk now, Mr. Engstrom," he wheezed. Hands in the pockets of his coat. Eyes sad. "Perhaps we could now have a talk..."


CHAPTER TWO


Karras threaded tape to an empty reel in the office of the rotund, silver-hair director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. Having carefully edited sections of his tapes onto separate reels, he was about to play the first. He started the tape recorder and stepped back from the table. They listened to the fever voice croaking its gibberish. Then he turned to the director. "What is that, Frank? Is it a language?"


The director was sitting on the edge of his desk. By the time the tape ended, he was frowning in puzzlement. "Pretty weird. Where'd you get that?"


Karras stopped the tape. "Oh, it's something that I've had for a number of years from when I worked on a case of dual personality. I'm doing a paper on it."


"I see."


"Well, what about it?"


The director pulled off his glasses and chewed at the tortoise frame. "No, it isn't any language that I've ever heard. However..." He frowned. And then looked up at Karras. "Want to play it again?"


Karras quickly rewound the tape and played it over. "Now what do you think?" he asked.


"Well, it does have the cadence of speech."


Karras felt a quickening of hope. Fought it down. "Yes, that's what I thought," he agreed.


"But I certainly don't recognize it, Father. Is it ancient or modern? Or do you know?"


"No, I don't."


"Well, why not leave it with me, Father? I'll check it with some of the boys."


"Could you make up a copy of it, Frank? I'd like to keep the original myself."


"Oh, yes, surely."


"In the meantime, I've got something else. Got the time?"


"Yes, of course. Go ahead. What's the problem?"


"Well, what if I gave you fragments of ordinary speech by what are apparently two different people. Could you tell by semantic analysis whether just one person might have been capable of both modes of speech?"


"Oh, I think so."


"How?"


"Well, a 'type-token' ratio, I suppose, is as good a way as any. In samples of a thousand words or more, you could just check the frequency of occurrence of the various parts of speech."


"And would you call that conclusive?"


"Oh, yes. Well, pretty much. You see, that sort of test would discount any change in the basis vocabulary. It's not words but expression of the words: the style. We call it 'index of diversity.' Very baffling to the layman, which, of course, is what we want." The director smiled wryly. Then he nodded at the tapes in Karras' hands. "You've got two different people on those, is that it?"


"No. The voice and the words came out of the mouth of just one person, Frank. As I said, it was a case of dual personality. The words and the voices seem totally different to me but both are from the mouth of just one person. Look, I need a big favor from you..."


"You'd like me to test them out? I'd be glad to. I'll give it to one of the instructors."


"No, Frank, that's the really big part of the favor: I'd like you to do it yourself and as fast as you can do it. It's terribly important."


The director read the urgency in his eyes. He nodded. "Okay. Okay. I'll get on it."


The director made copies of both the tapes, and Karras returned to the Jesuit residence hall with the originals. He found a message slip in his room. The records from the clinic had arrived.


He hurried to Reception and signed for the package. Back in his room, he began to read immediately; and was soon convinced that his trip to the Institute had been wasted.


"... indications of guilt obsession with ensuing hysterical-somnambulistic..."


Room for doubt. Always room. Interpretation. But Regan's stigmata... Karras buried his weary face in his hands. The skin stigmata that Chris had described had indeed been reported in Regan's fife. But it also had been noted that Regan had hyperreactive skin and could herself have produced the mysterious letters merely by tracing them on her flesh with a finger a short time prior to their appearance. Dermatographia.


She did it herself, brooded Karras. He was certain. For as soon as Regan's hands had been immobilized by restraining straps, the records noted, the mysterious phenomena had ceased and were never repeated.


Fraud. Conscious or unconscious. Still fraud.


He lifted his head and eyed the phone. Frank. Call him off? He picked up the receiver. There was no answer and he left word for him to call. Then, exhausted, he stood up and walked slowly to the bathroom. He splashed cold water an his face. "The exorcist will simply be careful that none of the patent's manifestations are left...." He looked up at himself in the mirror. Had he missed something? What? The sauerkraut odor. He turned and slipped a towel off the rack and wiped his face. Autosuggestion, he remembered. And the mentally ill, in certain instances, seemed able unconsciously to direct their bodies to emit a variety of odors.


Karras wiped his hands. The poundings... the opening and closing of the drawer. Psychokinesis? Really? "You believe in that stuff?" He paused as he set back the towel; grew aware that he wasn't thinking clearly. Too tired. Yet he dared not give Regan up to guess; to opinion; to the savage betrayals of the mind.


He left the hall and went to the campus library. He searched through the Guide to Periodical Literature: Po... Pol... Polte... He found what he was looking for and sat down with a scientific journal to read an article on poltergeist-phenomena investigations by the German psychiatrist Dr. Hans Bender.


No doubt about it, he concluded when he finished: psychokinetic phenomena existed; had been thoroughly documented; filmed; observed in psychiatric clinics. And in none of the cases reported in the article was there any connection to demonic possession. Rather, the hypothesis was mind-directed energy unconsciously produced and usually---and significantly, Karras saw---by adolescents in stages of "extremely high inner tension, frustration and rage."


Karras rubbed his tired eyes. He still felt remiss. He ran back through the symptoms, touching each like a boy going back to touch slats on a white picket fence. Which one had ha missed? he wondered. Which?


The answer, he concluded wearily, was None.


He returned the journal to the desk.


He walked back to the MacNeil house. Willie admitted him and led him to the study. The door was closed.


Willie knocked. "Father Karras," she announced.


"Come in."


Karras entered and closed the door behind him. Chris was standing with her back to him, brow in her hand, an elbow on the bar. "Hello, Father."


Her voice was a husky and despairing whisper. Concerned, he went over to her. "You okay?" he asked softly.


"Yeah, I'm fine."


Her voice held tension. He frowned. Her hand was obscuring her face. The hand trembled. "What's doin'?" she asked him.


"Well, I've looked at the records from the clinic." He waited. She made no response. He continued. "I believe..." He paused. "Well, my honest opinion right now is that Regan can best be helped by intensive psychiatric care."


She shook her head very slowly back and forth.


"Where's her father?" he asked her.


"In Europe," she whispered.


"Have you told him what's happening?"


She had thought about telling him so many times. Had been tempted. The crisis could bring them back together. But Howard and priests... For Regan's sake, she'd decided he mustn't be told.


"No," she answered softy.


"Well, I think it would help if he were here."


"Listen, nothing's going to help except something out of sight!" Chris suddenly erupted, lifting a tear-stained face to the priest. "Something way out of sight."


"I believe you should send for him."


"It would---"


"I've asked you to drive a demon out, goddammit, not ask another one in!" she cried at Karras in sudden hysteria. Her features were contorted in anguish. "What happened to the exorcism all of a sudden?"


"Now---"


"What in the hell do I want with Howard?"


"We can talk about it---"


"Talk about it now, goddammit! What the hell good is Howard right now? What's the good?"


"There's a strong probability that Regan's disorder is rooted in a guilt over---"


"Guilt over what?" she cried, eyes wild.


"It could---"


"Over the divorce? All that psychiatric bullshit?"


"Now---"


"She's guilty because she killed Burke Dennings!" Chris shrieked at him, hands crushing hard against her temples. "She killed him! She killed him and they'll put her away; they're going to put her away! Oh, my God, oh, my..."


Karras caught her up as she crumpled, sobbing, and guided her toward the sofa. "It's all right," he kept telling her softly, "it's all right..."


"No, they'll put... her away," she was sobbing. '"They'll put... put... ohhhhhhh! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"


"It's all right..."


He eased her down and stretched her out on the sofa. He sat down on the edge and took her hand in both of his. Thoughts of Kinderman. Dennings. Her sobbing. Unreality. "All right... its all right... take it easy... it's all right..."


Soon the crying subsided and he helped her sit up. He brought her water and a box of tissues he'd found -on a shelf behind the bar. Then he sat down beside her.


"Oh, I'm glad," she said, sniffling and blowing her nose. "God, I'm glad I got it out."


Karras was in turmoil, his own shock of realization increasing, the calmer she grew. Quiet sniffles now. Intermittent catches in the throat. And now the weight was on his back again, heavy and oppressive. He inwardly stiffened. No more! Say no more! "Do you want to tell me more?" he asked her gently.


Chris nodded. Exhaled. She wiped at an eye and spoke haltingly, in spasms, of Kinderman; of the book; of her certainty that Dennings had been up in Regan's bedroom; of Regan's great strength; of the Dennings personality that Chris thought she had seen with the head turned around and facing backward.


She finished. Now she waited for Karras' reaction. For a time he did not speak as he thought it all over. Then at last he said softly, "You don't know that she did it."


"But the head turned around," said Chris.


"You'd hit your own head pretty hard against the wall," Karras answered. "You were also in shock. You imagined it."


"She told me that she did it," Chris intoned without expression.


A pause. "And did she tell you how?" Karras asked.


Chris shook her head. He turned and looked at her. "No," she said. "No."


"Then it doesn't mean a thing," Karras told her. "No, it wouldn't mean a thing unless she gave you details that no one else could conceivably know but the killer."


She was shaking her head in doubt. "I don't know," she answered. "I don't know if I'm doing what's right. I think she did it and she could kill someone else. I don't know...." She paused. "Father, what should I do?" she asked him hopelessly.


The weight was now set in concrete; in drying, it had shaped itself to his back.


He rested an elbow on his knee and closed his eyes. "Well, you've told someone now," he said quietly. "You've done what you should. Now forget it. Just put it away and leave it all up to me."


He felt her gaze on him and looked at her. "Are you feeling any better now?"


She nodded.


"Will you do me a favor?" he asked her.


"What?"


"Go out and see a movie."


She wiped at an eye with the back of her hand and smiled. "I hate 'em."


"Then go visit a friend."


She put her hands in her lap and looked at him warmly. "Got a friend right here," she said at last.


He smiled. "Get some rest," he advised her.


"I will."


He had another thought. "You think Dennings brought the book upstairs? Or was it there?"


"I think it was already there," Chris answered.


He considered this. Then he stood up. "Well, okay. You need the car?"


"No, you keep it."


"All right, then. I'll be back to you later."


"Ciao, Father."


"Ciao."


He walked out in the street brimming turmoil. Churning. Regan. Dennings. Impossible! No! Yet there was Chris's near conviction, her reaction, her hysteria. And that's just what it: hysterical imagining. And yet... He chased certainties like leaves in a knifing wind.


As he passed by the long flight of steps near the house, he heard a sound from below, by the river. He stopped and looked down toward the C&O Canal. A harmonica. Someone playing "Red River Valley," since boyhood Karras' favorite song. He listened until traffic noise drowned it out, until his drifting reminiscence was shattered by a world that was now and in torment, that was shrieking for help, dripping blood on exhaust fumes. He thrust his hands into his pockets. Thought feverishly. Of Chris. Of Regan. Of Lucas aiming kicks at Tranquille. He must do something. What? Could he hope to outguess the clinicians at Barringer? "... go to Central Casting!" Yes; yes, he knew that was the answer; the hope. He remembered the case of Achille. Possessed. Like Regan, he had called himself a devil; like Regan, his disorder had been rooted in guilt; remorse over marital infidelity. The psychologist Janet had effected a cure by hypnotically suggesting the presence of the wife; who appeared to Achille's hallucinated eyes and solemnly forgave him. Karras nodded. Suggestion could work for Regan. But not through hypnosis. They had tried that at Barringer. No. The counteracting suggestion for Regan, he believed, was the ritual of exorcism. She knew what it was; knew its effect. Her reaction to the holy water. Got that from the book. And in the book, there were descriptions of successful exorcisms. It could work! It could! It could work! But how to get permission from the Chancery Office? How to build up a case without mention of Dennings? Karras could not lie to the Bishop. Would not falsify the facts. But you can let the facts speak for themselves!


What facts?


He ran a hand across his brow. Needed sleep. Could not sleep. He felt his temples pound in headache. "Hello, Daddy?"


What facts?


The tapes at the Institute. What would Frank find? Was there anything he could find? No. But who knew? Regan hadn't known holy water from tap water. Sure. But if supposedly she's able to read my mind, why is it she didn't know the difference between them? He put a hand to his forehead. The headache. Confusion. Jesus, Karras, wake up! Someone's dying! Wake up!


Back in his room, he celled the institute. No Frank. He put down the telephone. Holy Water. Tap water. Something. He opened up the Ritual to "Instructions to Exorcists": "... evil spirits... deceptive answers... so it might appear that the afflicted one is in no way possessed..." Karras pondered. Was that it? What the hell are you talking about? What "evil spirit"?


He slammed shut the book and saw the medical records. He reread them, scanning quickly for anything that might help with the Bishop.


Hold it. No history of hysteria. That's something. But weak. Something else. Some discrepancy. What was it? He dredged desperately through memories of his studies. And then he recalled it. Not much. But something.


He picked up the phone and called Chris. She sounded groggy.


"Hi, Father."


"Were you sleeping? I'm sorry."


"It's okay."


"Chris, where's this Doctor...." Karras ran a finger down the records. "Doctor Klein?"


"In Rosslyn."


"In the medical building?"


"Yes."


"Please call him and tell him Doctor Karras will be by and that I'd like to take a look at Regan's EEG. Tell him Doctor Karras, Chris. Have you got that?"


"Got It."


"I'll talk to you later."


When he'd hung up the phone, Karras snapped off his collar and got out of his clerical robe and black trousers, changing quickly into khaki pants and a sweatshirt. Over these he wore his priest's black raincoat, buttoning it up to the collar. He looked in a mirror and frowned. Priests and policemen, he thought, as he quickly unbuttoned the raincoat: their clothing had identifying smells one couldn't hide. Karras slipped off his shoes and got into the only pair he owned that were not black, his scuffed white tennis shoes.


In Chris's car, he drove quickly toward Rosslyn. As he waited on M Street for the light to cross the bridge, he glanced right through the window and saw something disturbing: Karl getting out of a black sedan on Thirty-fifth Street in front of the Dixie Liquor Store. The driver of the car was Lieutenant Kinderman.


The light changed. Karras gunned the car and shot forward, turning onto the bridge, then looked back through the mirror. Had they seen him? He didn't think so. But what were they doing together? Pure chance? Had it something to do with Regan? with Regan and...?


Forget it! One thing at a time!


He parked at the medical building and went upstairs to Dr. Klein's suite of offices. The doctor was busy, but a nurse handed Karras the EEG and very soon he was standing in a cubicle, studying it, the long narrow band of paper slipping slowly through his fingers.


Klein hurried in, his glance brushing in puzzlement over Karras' dress. "Doctor Karras?"


"Yes. How do you do?"


They shook hands.


"I'm Klein. How's the girl?"


"Progressing."


"Glad to hear it." Karras looked back to the graph and Klein scanned it with him, tracing his finger over patterns of waves. "There, you see? It's very regular. No fluctuations whatsoever."


"Yes, I see." Karras. frowned. "Very curious."


"Curious?"


"Presuming that we're dealing with hysteria."


"Don't get it."


"I suppose it isn't very well known," murmured Karras, pulling paper through his hands in a steady flow, "but a Belgian---Iteka---discovered that hysterics seemed to cause some rather odd fluctuations in the graph, a very minuscule but always identical pattern. I've been looking for it here and I don't find it."


Klein grunted noncommittally. "How about that."


Karras glanced at him. "She was certainly disordered when you ran this graph; is that right?"


"Yes, she was. Yes, I'd say so. She was."


"Well, then, isn't it curious that she tested so perfectly? Even subjects in a normal state of mind can influence their brain waves at least within the normal range, and Regan was disturbed at the time. It would seem there would be some fluctuations. If---"


"Doctor, Mrs. Simmons is getting impatient," a nurse interrupted, cracking open the door.


"Yes, I'm coming," sighed Klein. As the nurse hurried off, he took a step toward the hallway then turned with his hand on the door edge. "Speaking of hysteria," he commented dryly. "Sorry. Got to run."


He closed the door behind him. Karras heard his footsteps heading down the hall; heard the opening of a door; heard, "Well, now, how are we feeling today, Mrs...."


Closing of the door. Karras went back to his study of the graph, finished, then folded it up and banded it. He returned it to the nurse in Reception. Something. It was something he could use with the Bishop as an argument that Regan was not a hysteric and therefore conceivably was possessed. And yet the EEG had posed still another mystery: why no fluctuations? why none at all?


He drove back toward Chris's house, but at a stop sign at the corner of Prospect and Thirty-fifth he froze behind the wheel: parked between Karras and the Jesuit residence hall was Kinderman. He was sitting alone behind the wheel with his elbow out the window, looking straight ahead.


Karras took a right before Kinderman could see him in Chris's Jaguar. Quickly he found a space, parked and locked the car. Then he walked around the corner as if heading for the residence hall. Is he watching the house? he worried. The specter of Dennings rose up again to haunt him. Was it possible that Kinderman thought Regan had...?


Easy. Slow down. Take it easy.


He walked up beside the car and leaned his head through the window on the passenger side. "Hello, Lieutenant."


The detective turned quickly and looked surprised. Then beamed. "Father Karras."


Off key, thought Karras. He noticed that his hands were feeling dampish and cold. Play it light! Don't let him know that you're worried! Play it light! "Don't you know you'll get a ticket? Weekdays, no parking between four and six."


"Never mind that,'" wheezed Kinderman. "Im talking to a priest. Every cop in this neighborhood is Catholic or passing."


"How've you been?"


"Speaking plainly, Father Karras, only so-so. Yourself?"


"Can't complain. Did you ever solve that case?"


"Which case?"


"The director."


"Oh, that one." He made a gesture of dismissal. "Don't ask. Listen, what are you doing tonight? Are you busy? I've got passes for the Crest. It's Othello."


"Who's starring?"


"Molly Picon, Desdemona, and Othello, Leo Fuchs. You're happy? This is freebies, Father Marlon Particular! This is William F. Shakespeare! Doesn't matter who's starring, who's not! Now, you're coming?"


"I'm afraid I'll have to pass. I'm pretty snowed under."


"I can see. You look terrible, you'll pardon my noticing. You're keeping late hours?"


"I always look terrible."


"Only now more than usual. Come on! Get away for one night! We'll enjoy!"


Karras decided to test; to touch a nerve. "Are you sure that's what's playing?" he asked. His eyes were probing steadily into Kinderman's. "I could have sworn there was a Chris MacNeil film at the Crest."


The detective missed a beat, and then said quickly, "No, I'm certain. Othello. It's Othello."


"What brings you to the neighborhood, incidentally?"


"You! I came only to invite you to the film!"


"Yes, it's easier to drive than to pick up a phone," said Karras softly.


The detective's eyebrows lifted in unconvincing innocence. "Your telephone was busy!" he whispered hoarsely, poising an upraised palm in midair.


The Jesuit stared at him, expressionless.


"What's wrong?" asked Kinderman after a moment.


Gravely Karras reached a hand inside the car and lifted Kinderman's eyelid. He examined the eye. "I don't know. You look terrible. You could be coming down with a case of mythomania."


"I don't know what that means," answers Kinderman as Karras withdrew his hand. "Is it serious?"


"Not fatal."


"What is it? The suspense is now driving me crazy!"


"Look it up," said Karras.


"Listen, don't be so snotty. You should render unto Caesar just a little, now and then. I'm the law. I could have you deported, you know that?"


"What for?"


"A psychiatrist shouldn't make people worry. Plus also the goyim, plainly speaking, would love it. You're a nuisance to them altogether anyway, Father. No, frankly, you embarrass them. They would love to get rid of you. Who needs it? a priest who wears sweatshirts and sneakers!"


Smiling faintly, Karras nodded. "Got to go. Take care." He tapped a hand on the window frame, twice, in farewell, and then turned and walked slowly toward the entry of the residence.


"See an analyst!" the detective called after him hoarsely. Then his warm look gave way to worry. He glanced through his windshield up at the house, then started the engine and drove up the street. Passing Karras, he honked his horn and waved.


Karras waved back; watching Kinderman round the corner of Thirty-sixth. Then he stood motionless for a while on the sidewalk, rubbing gently at his brow with a trembling hand. Could she really have done it? Could Regan have murdered Burke Dennings so horribly? With feverish eyes, he looked up at Regan's window. What in God's name is in that house? And how much longer before Kinderman demanded to see Regan? had a chance to see the Dennings personality? to hear it? How much longer before Regan would be institutionalized?


Or die?


He had to build the case for the Chancery.


He walked quickly across the street at an angle to Chris's house. He rang the doorbell.


Willie let him in.


"Missiz taking little nap now," she said.


Karras nodded. "Good. Very good." He walked by her and upstairs to Regan's bedroom. He was seeking a knowledge he must clutch by the heart.


He entered and saw Karl in a chair by the window, his arms folded, watching Regan. He was silent and present as a dense, dark wood.


Karras walked up beside the bed and looked down. The whites of the eyes like milky fog. The murmurings. Spells from some other world. Karras glanced at Karl. Then slowly he leaned over and began to unfasten one of Regan's restraining straps.


"Father, no!"


Karl rushed to the bedside and vigorously yanked back the priest's arm. "Very bad, Father! Strong! It is strong! Leave on straps!"


In the eyes there was a fear that Karras recognized as genuine, and now he knew that Regan's strength was not theory; it was a fact. She could have done it. Could have twisted Dennings' neck around. My God, Karras! Hurry! Find some evidence! Think! Hurry before...!


"Ich möchte Sie etwas fragen, Engstrom!"


With a stab of discovery and hot-surging hope, Karras jerked around his head and looked down at the bed. The demon grinned mockingly at Karl. "Tanzt Ihre Tochter gern?"


German! It had asked if Karl's daughter liked to dance! His heart pounding, Karras turned and saw that the servant's cheeks had flushed crimson; that he trembled, that his eyes glared with fury. "Karl, you'd better step outside," Karras advised him.


The Swiss shook his head, his hands squeezed into white-knuckled fists. "No, I stay!"


"You will go, please," the Jesuit said firmly. His gaze held Karl's implacably.


After a moment of dogged resistance, Karl gave way and hurried from the room.


The laughter had stopped. Karras turned back. The demon was watching him. It looked pleased. "So you're back," it croaked. "I'm surprised. I would think that embarrassment over the holy water might have discouraged you from ever returning. But then I forget that a priest has no shame."


Karras breathes shallowly and forced himself to rein his expectations, to think clearly. He knew that the language test in possession required intelligent conversation as proof that whatever was said was not traceable to buried linguistic recollections. Easy! Slow down! Remember that girl? A teen-age servant. Possessed. In delirium, she'd babbled a language that finally was recognized to be Syriac. Karras forces himself to think of the excitement it had caused, of how finally it was learned that the girl had at one time been employed in a boardinghouse where one of the lodgers was a student of theology. On the eve of examinations, he would pace in his room and walk up and down stairs while reciting his Syriac lessons aloud. And the girl had overheard them. Take it easy. Don't get burned.


"Sprechen Sie deutsch?" asked Karras warily.


"More games?"


"Sprechen Sie deutsch?" he repeated, his pulse still throbbing with that distant hope.


"Natürlich," the demon leered at him. "Mirabile dictu, wouldn't you agree?"


The Jesuit's heart leaped up. Not only German, but Latin! And in context!


"Quad nomen mihi est?" he asked quickly. What is my name?


"Karras."


And now the priest rushed on with excitement.


"Ubi sum?" Where am I?


"In cubiculo." In a room.


"Et ubi est cubiculum?" And where is the room?


"In domo." In a house.


"Ubi est Burke Dennings?" Where is Burke Den-nings?


"Mortuus." He is dead.


"Quomodo mortuus est?" How did he die?


"Inventus est capite reverso." He was found with his head turned around.


"Quis occidit eum?" Who killed him?


"Regan."


"Quomodo ea occidit illum? Dic mihi exacte!" How did she kill him? Tell me in detail!


"Ah, well, that's sufficient excitement for the moment," the demon said, grinning. "Sufficient. Sufficient altogether. Though of course it will occur to you, I suppose, that while you were asking your questions in Latin, you were mentally formulating answers in Latin." It laughed. "All unconscious, of course. Yes, whatever would we do without unconsciousness? Do you see what I'm driving at, Karras? I cannot speak Latin at all. I read your mind. I merely plucked the responses from your head!"


Karras felt an instant dismay as his certainty crumbled, felt tantalized and frustrated by the nagging doubt now planted in his brain.


The demon chuckled. "Yes, I knew that would occur to you, Karras," it croaked at him. "That is why I'm fond of you. That is why I cherish all reasonable men." Its head tilted back in a spate of laughter.


The Jesuit's mind raced rapidly, desperately; formulating questions to which there was no single answer, but rather many. But maybe I'd think of them all! he realized. Okay! Then ask a question that you don't know the answer to! He could check the answer later to see if it was correct.


He waited for the laughter to ebb before hd spoke: "Quam profundus est imus Oceanus Indicus?" What is the depth of the Indian Ocean at its deepest point?


The demon's eyes glittered: "La plume de ma tante," it rasped.


"Responde Latine."


"Bon jour! Bonne nuit!"


"Quam---"


Karras broke off as the eyes rolled upward into their sockets and the gibberish entity appeared.


Impatient and frustrated, Karras demanded, "Let me speak to the demon again!"


No answer. Only the breathing from another shore.


"Quis es tu?'" he snapped hoarsely. Voice frayed.


Still the breathing.


"Let me speak to Burke Dennings!"


A hiccup. Breathing. A hiccup. Breathing.


"Let me speak to Burke Dennings!"


The hiccupping, regular and wrenching, continued. Karras shook his head. Then he walked to a chair and sat on its edge. Hunched over. Tense. Tormented. And waiting...


Time passed. Karras drowsed. Then jerked his head up. Stay awake! With blinking, heavy lids, he looked over at Regan. No hiccupping. Silent.


Sleeping?


He walked over to the bed and looked down. Eyes closed. Heavy breathing. He reached down and felt her pulse, then stooped and carefully examined her lips. They were parched. He straightened up and waited. Then at last he left the room.


He went down to the kitchen in search of Sharon; and found her at the table eating soup and a sandwich. "Can I fix you something to eat, Father Karras?" she asked him. "You must be hungry."


"


"Thanks, no, I'm not," he answered. Sitting down, he reached over and picked up a pencil and pad by Sharon's typewriter. "She's been hiccupping," he told her. "Have you had any Compazine prescribed?"


"Yes, we've got some."


He was writing on the pad. "Then tonight give her half of a twenty-five-milligram suppository."


"Right."


"She's beginning to dehydrate," he continued, "so I'm switching her to intravenous feedings. First thing in the morning, call a medical-supply house and have them deliver these right away." He slid the pad across the table to Sharon. "In the Meantime, she's sleeping, so you could start her on a Sustagen feeding."


"Okay." Sharon nodded. "I will." Spooning soup, she turned the pad around and looked at the list."


Karras watched her. Then he frowned in concentration.


"You're her tutor."


"Yes, that's right."


"Have you taught her any Latin?"


She was puzzled. "No, I haven't.-"


"Any German?"


"Only French."


"What level? La plume de ma tante?"


"Pretty much."


"But no German or Latin."


"Huh-nh, no."


"But the Engstroms, don't they sometimes speak German?"


"Oh, sure."


"Around Regan?"


She shrugged. "I suppose." She stood up and took her plates to the sink. "As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure."


"Have you ever studied Latin?" Karras asked her.


"No, I haven't."


"But you'd recognize the general sound."


"Oh, I'm sure." She rinsed the soup bowl and put it in the rack.


"Has she ever spoken Latin in your presence?"


"Regan?"


"Since her illness."


"No, never."


"Any language at all?" probed Karras.


She tuned off the faucet, thoughtful. "Well, I might have imagined it, I guess, but..."


"What?"


"Well, I think..." She frowned. "Well, I could have sworn I heard her talking in Russian."


Karras stared. "Do you speak it?" he asked her, throat dry.


She shrugged. "Oh, well, so-so." She began to fold the dishcloth: "I just studied it in college, that's all. "


Karras sagged. She did pick the Latin from my brain. Staring bleakly; he lowered his brow to his hand, into doubt, into torments of knowledge and reason: Telepathy more common in states of great tension: speaking always in a language known to someone in the room: "... thinks the same things I'm thinking...": "Bon jour...": "La plume de ma tante...": "Bonne nuit..." With thoughts such as these, he slowly watched blood turning back into wine.


What to do? Get some sleep. Then come back es»d try again... try again... try again.


He stood up and looked blearily at Sharon. She was leaning with her back against the sink, arms folded, watching him thoughtfully. "I'm going over to the residence," he told her. "As soon as Regan's awake, I'd like a call."


"Yes, I'll call you."


"And the Compazine," he reminded her. "You won't forget?"


She shook her head. "No, I'll take care of it right away," she said.


He nodded. With hands in hip pockets, he looked down, trying to think of what he might have forgotten to tell Sharon. Always something to be done. Always something overlooked when even everything was done.


"Father, what's going on?" he heard her ask gravely. "What is it? What's really going on with Rags?"


He lifted up eyes that were haunted and seared. "I really don't know," he said emptily.


He turned and walked out of the kitchen.


As he passed through the entry hall, Karras heard footsteps coming up rapidly behind him.


"Father Karras!"


He turned. Saw Karl with his sweater.


"Very sorry," said the servant as he handed it over. "I was thinking to finish much before. But I forget."


The vomit stains were gone and it had a sweet smell. "That was thoughtful of you, Karl," the priest said gently. "Thank you."


"Thank you, Father Karras."


There was a tremor in his voice and his eyes were full.


"Thank you for your helping Miss Regan," Karl finished. Then he averted his head, self-conscious, and swiftly left the entry.


Karras watched, remembering him in Kinderman's car. More mystery. Confusion. Wearily he opened the door. It was night. Despairing, he stepped out of darkness into darkness.


He crossed to the residence, groping toward sleep, but as he entered his room he looked down and saw a message slip pink on the floor. He picked it up. From Frank. The tapes. Home number. "Please call...."


He picked up the telephone and requested the number. Waited. His hands shook with desperate hope.


"Hello?" A young boy. Piping voice.


"May I speak to your father, please."


"Yes. just a minute." Phone clattering. Then quickly picked up. Still the boy. "Who is this?"


"Father Karras."


"Father Karits?"


His heart thumping, Karras spoke evenly, "Karras. Father Karras..."


Down went the phone again.


Karras pressed digging fingers against his brow.


Phone noise.


"Father Karras?"


'Yes, hello, Frank. I've been trying to reach you."


"Oh, I'm sorry. I've been working on your tapes at the house."


"Are you finished?"


"Yes, I am. By the way, this is pretty weird stuff."


"I know." Karras tried to flatten the tension in his voice. "What's the story, Frank? What have you found?"


"Well, this 'type-token' ratio, first..."


"Yes?"


"Well, I didn't have enough of a sampling to be absolutely accurate, you understand, but I'd say it's pretty close, or at least as close as you can get with these things. Well, at any rate, the two different voices on the tapes, I would say, are probably separate personalities."


"Probably?"


"Well, I wouldn't want to swear to it in court. In fact, I'd have to say the variance is really pretty minimal."


"Minimal..." Karras repeated dully. Well, that's the ball game. "And what about the gibberish?" he asked without hope. "Is it any kind of language?"


Frank chuckled.


"What's funny?" asked the Jesuit moodily.


"Was this really some sneaky psychological testing, Father?"


"I don't know what you mean, Frank."


"Well, I guess you got your tapes mixed around or something. It's---"


"Frank, is it a language or not?" cut in Karras.


"Oh, I'd say it was a language, all right."


Karras stiffened. "Are you kidding?"


'No, I'm not."


"What's the language?" he asked, unbelieving.


"English."


For a moment, Karras was mute, and when he spoke there was an edge to his voice. "Frank, we seem to have a very poor connection; or would you like to let me in on the joke?"


"Got your tape recorder there?" asked Frank.


It was sitting on his desk. "Yes, I do."


"Has it got a reverse-play position?"


"Why?"


"Has it got one?"


"Just a second." Irritable, Karras set down the phone and took the top off the tape recorder to check it. "Yes, it's got one. Frank, what's this all about?"


"Put your tape on the machine and play it backward."


"What?"


"You've got gremlins." Frank laughed, "Look, play it and I'll talk to you tomorrow. Good night, Father."


"Night, Frank."


"Have fun."


Karras hung up. He looked baffled. He hunted up the gibberish tape and threaded it onto the recorder. First he ran it forward, listening. Shook his head. No mistake. It was gibberish.


He let it run through to the end and then played it in reverse. He heard his voice speaking backward. Then Regan---or someone---in English!


... Marin marin karras be us let us...


English. Senseless; but English! How on earth could she do that? he marveled.


He listened to it all, then rewound and played the tape through again. And again. And then realized that the order of speech was inverted.


He stopped the tape and rewound it. With a pencil and paper, he sat down at the desk and began to play the tape from the beginning while transcribing the words, working laboriously and long with almost constant stops and starts of the tape recorder. When finally it was done, he made another transcription on a second sheet of paper, reversing the order of the words. Then he leaned back and read it: ... danger. Not yet. [indecipherable] will die. Little time. Now the [indecipherable]. Let her die. No, no, sweet! it is sweet in the body! I feel! There is [indecipherable]. Better [indecipherable] than the void. I fear the priest. Give us time. Fear the priest! He is [indecipherable]. No, not this one: the [indecipherable], the one who [indecipherable]. He is ill. Ah, the blood, feel the blood, how it [sings?].


Here, Karras asked, "Who are you?" with the answer: I am no me. I am no one.


Then Karras: "Is that your name?" and then: I have no name. I am no one. Many. Let us be. Let us warm in the body. Do not [indecipherable] from the body into void, into [indecipherable]. Leave us. Leave us. Let us be. Karras. [Marin?


Marin?]...


Again and again he read it over, haunted by its tone, by the feeling that more than one person was speaking, until finally repetition itself dulled the words into commonness. He set down the tablet on which he'd transcribed them and rubbed at his face, at his eyes, at his thoughts. Not an unknown language. And writing backward with facility was hardly paranormal or even unusual. But speaking backward: adjusting and altering the phonetics so that playing them backward would make them intelligible;. wasn't such performance beyond the reach of even a hyperstimulated intellect? The accelerated unconscious referred to by Jung? No. Something...


He remembered. He went to his shelves for a book: Jung's Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena. Something similar here, he thought. What?


He found it: an account of an experiment with automatic writing in which the unconscious of the subject seemed able to answer his questions and anagrams.


Anagrams!


He propped the book open on the desk, leaned over and read an account of a portion of the experiment: 3rd DAY What is man? Tefi hasl esble lies.


Is that an anagram? Yes.


How many words does it contain? Five.


What is the first word? See.


What is the second word? Eeeee.


See? Shall I interpret it myself? Try to!


The subject found this solution: "The life is less able." He was astonished at this intellectual pronouncement, which seemed to him to prove the existence of an intelligence independent of his own. He therefore went on to ask: Who are you? Clelia.


Are you a woman? Yes.


Have you lived on earth? No.


Will you come to life? Yes.


When? In six years.


Why are you conversing with me? E if Cledia el.


The subject interpreted this answer as an anagram for "I Clelia feel."


4TH DAY


Am I the one who answers the questions? Yes.


Is Clelia there? No.


Who is there, then? Nobody.


Does Clelia exist at all? No.


Then with whom was I speaking yesterday? With nobody.


Karras stopped reading. Shook his head. Here was no paranormal performance: only the limitless abilities of the mind.


He reached for a cigarette, sat down and lit it. "I am no one. Many." Eerie. Where did it come from, he wondered, this content of her speech?


"With nobody."


From the same place Clelia had come from? Emergent personalities?


"Marin... Marin..."


"Ah, the blood..."


"He is ill...."


Haunted, he glanced at his copy of Satan and moodily leafed to the opening inscription: "Let not the dragon be my leader...."


He exhaled smoke and closed his eyes. He coughed. His throat felt raw and inflamed. He crushed out the cigarette, eyes watering from smoke. exhausted. His bones felt like iron pipe. He got up and put out a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door, then he flicked out the room light, shuttered his window blinds, kicked off his shoes and collapsed on the bed. Fragments. Regan. Dennings. Kinderman. What to do? He must help. How?


Try the Bishop with what little he had? He did not think so. He could never convincingly argue the case.


He thought of undressing, getting under the covers. Too tired. This burden. He wanted to be free.


"... Let us be!"


Let me be, he responded to the fragment. He drifted into motionless, dark granite sleep.


The ringing of a telephone awakened him. Groggy, he fumbled toward the light switch. What time was it? A few minutes after three. He reached blindly for the telephone. Answered. Sharon. Would he come to the house right away? He would come. He hung up the telephone, feeling trapped again, smothered and enmeshed.


He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, dried off and then started from the room, but at the door, he turned around and came back for his sweater. He pulled it over his head and then went out into the street.


The air was thin and still in the darkness. Some cats at a garbage can scurried in fright as he crossed toward the house.


Sharon met him at the door. She was wearing a sweater and was draped in a blanket. She looked frightened. Bewildered. "Sorry, Father," she whispered as he entered the house, "but I thought you ought to see this."


"What?"


"You'll see. Let's be quiet, now. I don't want to wake up Chris. She shouldn't see this." She beckoned.


He followed her, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs to Regan's bedroom. Entering, the Jesuit felt chilled to the bone. The room was icy. He frowned in bewilderment at Sharon, and she nodded at him solemnly. "Yes. Yes, the heat's on," she whispered. Then she turned and stared at Regan, at the whites of her eyes glowing eerily in lamplight. She seemed to be in coma. Heavy breathing. Motionless. The nasogastric tube was in place, the Sustagen seeping slowly into her body.


Sharon moved quietly toward the bedside and Karras followed, still staggered by the cold. When they stood by the bed, he saw beads of perspiration on Regan's forehead; glanced down and saw her hands gripped firmly in the restraining straps.


Sharon. She was bending, gently pulling the top of Regan's pajamas wide apart, and an overwhelming pity hit Karras at the sight of the wasted chest, the protruding ribs where one might count the remaining weeks or days of her life.


He felt Sharon's haunted eyes upon him. "I don't know if it's stopped," she whispered. "But watch: just keep looking at her chest."


She turned and looked down, and the Jesuit, puzzled, followed her gaze. Silence. The breathing. Watching. The cold. Then the Jesuit's brows knitted tightly as he saw something happening to the skin: a faint redness, but in sharp definition; like handwriting. He peered down closer.


"There, it's coming," whispered Sharon.


Abruptly the gooseflesh on Karras' arms was not from the icy cold in the room; was from what he was seeing on Regan's chest; was from bas-relief script rising up in clear letters of blood-red skin. Two words: help me "That's her handwriting," whispered Sharon.


At 9: 00 that morning, Damien Karras came to the president of Georgetown University and asks for permission to seek an exorcism. He received it, and immediately afterward went to the Bishop of the diocese, who listened with grave attention to all that Karras had to say.


"You're convinced that it's genuine?" the Bishop asked finally.


"I've made a prudent judgment that it meets the conditions set forth in the Ritual," answered Karras evasively. He still did not dare believe. Not his mind but his heart had tugged him to this moment; pity and the hope for a cure through suggestion.


"You would want to do the exorcism yourself?" asked the Bishop.


He felt a moment of elation; saw the door swinging open to fields, to escape from the crushing weight of caring and that meeting each twilight with the ghost of his faith. "Yes, of course," answered Karras.


"How's your health?"


"All right."


"Have you ever been involved with this sort of thing before?"


"No, I haven't."


"Well, we'll see. It might be best to have a man with experience. There aren't too many, of course, but perhaps someone back from the foreign missions. Let me see who's around. In the meantime, I'll call you as soon as we know."


When Karras had left him, the Bishop called the president of Georgetown University, and they talked about him for the second time that day.


"Well, he does know the background," said the president at a point in their conversation. "I doubt there's any danger in just having him assist. There should be a psychiatrist present, anyway."


"And what about the exorcist? Any ideas? I'm blank."


"Well, now, Lankester Merrin's around."


"Merrin? I had a notion he was over is Iraq. I think I read he was working on a dig around Nineveh."


"Yes, down below Mosul. That's right. But he finished and came back around three or four months ago, Mike.


He's at Woodstock."


"Teaching?"


"No, working on another book."


"God help us! Don't you think he's too old, though? "How's his health?"


"Well, it must be all right or he wouldn't still be running around digging up tombs, don't you think?"


"Yes, I suppose so."


"And besides, he's had experience, Mike."


"I didn't know that."


"Well, at least that's the word."


"When was that?"


"Oh, maybe ten or twelve years ago, I think, in Africa. Supposedly the exorcism lasted for months. I heard it damn near killed him."


"Well, in that case, I doubt that he'd want to do another one."


"We do what we're told here, Mike. All the rebels are over with you seculars."


"Thanks for reminding me."


"Well, what do you think?"


"Look, I'll leave it up to you and the Provincial."


Early that silently waiting evening, a young scholastic preparing for the priesthood wandered the grounds of Woodstock Seminary in Maryland. He was searching for a slender, gray-haired old Jesuit. He found him on a pathway, strolling through a grove. He handed him a telegram. The old man thanked him, serene, eyes kindly, then turned and renewed his contemplation; continued his walk through a nature that he loved. Now and then he would pause to hear the song of a robin, to watch a bright butterfly hover on a branch. He did not open and read the telegram. He knew what it said. He had known. He had read it in the dust of the temples of Nineveh. He was ready.


He continued his farewells.


IV: "And let my cry come unto Thee..."


"He who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him..." ---Saint Paul.


CHAPTER ONE


In the breathing dark of his quiet office, Kinderman brooded above his desk.


He adjusted the desk-lamp beams a fraction. Below him were records, transcripts, exhibits; police files; crime-lab reports; scribbled notes. In a pensive mood, he had carefully fashioned them into a collage in the shape of a rose, as if to belie the ugly conclusion to which they had led him; that he could not accept.


Engstrom was innocent. At the time of Dennings' death, he had been visiting his daughter, supplying her with money for the purchase of drugs. He had lied about his whereabouts that night in order to protect her and to shield her mother, who believed Elvira to be dead and past all harm and degradation.


It was not from Karl that Kinderman had learned this. On the night of their encounter in Elvira's hallway, the servant remained obdurately silent. It was only when Kinderman apprised the daughter of her father's involvement in the Dennings case that Elvira volunteered the truth. There were witnesses to confirm it. Engstrom was innocent. Innocent and silent concerning events in Chris MacNeil's house.


Kinderman frowned at the rose collage. Something was wrong with the composition. He shifted a petal point---the corner of a deposition---a trifle lower and to the right.


Roses. Elvira. He had warned her grimly that failure to check herself into a clinic within two weeks would result in his dogging her trail with warrants until he had evidence to effect her arrest. Yet he did not really believe she would go. There were times when he stared at the law unblinkingly as he would the noonday sun in the hope it would temporarily blind him while some quarry made its escape.


Engstrom was innocent. What remained?


Kinderman, wheezing, shifted his weight. Then he closed his eyes and imagined he was soaking in a lapping hot bath. Mental Closeout Sale! he bannered at himself: Moving to New Conclusions! Positively Everything Must Go! For a moment he waited, unconvinced. Then, Positively! he added sternly.


He opened his eyes and examined afresh the bewildering data.


Item: The death of director Burke Dennings seemed somehow linked to the desecrations at Holy Trinity. Both involved witchcraft and the unknown desecrator could easily be Dennings' murderer.


Item: An expert on witchcraft, a Jesuit priest, had been seen making visits to the home of the MacNeils.


Item: The typewritten sheet of paper containing the text of the blasphemous altar card discovered at Holy Trinity had been checked for latent fingerprints. Impressions had been found on both sides. Some had been made by Damien Karras. But still another set had been found that, from their size, were adjudged to be those of a person with very small hands, quite possibly a child.


Item: The typing on the altar card had been analyzed and compared with the typed impressions on the unfinished letter that Sharon Spencer had pulled from her typewriter, crumpled up, and tossed at a wastepaper basket, missing it, while Kinderman had been questioning Chris. He had picked it up and smuggled it out of the house. The typing on this letter and the typing on the altar-card sheet had been done on the same machine. According to the reports however, the touch of the typists differed. The person who had typed the blasphemous text had a touch far heavier than Sharon Spencer's. Since the typing of the former, moreover, had not been "hunt and peck" but, rather, skillfully accomplished, it suggested that the unknown typist of the altar-card text was a person of extraordinary strength.


Item: Burke Dennings---if his death was not an accident---had been killed by a person of extraordinary strength.


Item: Engstrom was no longer a suspect.


Item: A check of domestic airline reservations disclosed that Chris MacNeil had taken her daughter to Dayton, Ohio. Kinderman had known that the daughter was ill and was being taken to a clinic. But the clinic in Dayton would have to be Barringer. Kinderman had checked and the clinic confirmed that the daughter had been in for observation. Though the clinic refused to state the nature of the illness, it was obviously a serious mental disorder.


Item: Serious mental disorders at times caused extraordinary strength.


Kinderman sighed and closed his eyes. The same. He was back to the same conclusion. He shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and stared at the center of the paper rose: a faded old copy of a national news magazine. On the cover were Chris and Regan. He studied the daughter: the sweet, freckled face and the ribboned ponytails, the missing front tooth in the grin. He looked out a window into darkness. A drizzling rain had begun to fall.


He went down to the garage, got into the unmarked black sedan and then drove through rain-slick, shining streets to the Georgetown area, where he parked on the eastern side of Prospect Street. And sat. For a quarter of an hour. Sat. Staring at Regan's window. Should he knock at the door and demand to see her? He lowered his head. Rubbed at his brow. William F. Kinderman, you are sick! You are ill! Go home! Take medicine! Sleep!


He looked up at the window again and ruefully shook his head. Here his haunted logic had led him.


He shifted his gaze as a cab pulled up to the house. He started the engine and turned on the windshield wipers.


From the cab stepped a tall old man. Black raincoat and hat and a battered valise. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless, staring at the house. The cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-sixth Street. Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. As he turned the corner, he noticed that the tall old man hadn't moved, but was standing under street-light glow, in mist, like a melancholy traveler frozen in time. The detective blinked his lights at the taxi.


Inside, at that moment, Karras and Karl pinned Regan's arms while Sharon injected her with Librium, bringing the total amount injected in the last two hours to four hundred milligrams. The dosage, Karras knew, was staggering. But after a lull of many hours, the demonic personality had suddenly awaked in a fit of fury so frenzied that Regan's debilitated system could not for very long endure it.


Karras was exhausted. After his visit to the Chancery Office that morning, he returned to the house to tell Chris what had happened Then he set up an intravenous feeding for Regan, went back to his room and fell on his bed. After only an hour and a half of sleep, however, the telephone had wrenched him awake. Sharon. Regan was still unconscious and her pulse had been gradually slipping lower. Karras had then rushed to the house with his medical bag and pinched Regan's Achilles tendon, looking for reaction to pain. There was none. He pressed down hard on one of her fingernails. Again no reaction. He was worried. Though he knew that in hysteria and in states of trance there was sometimes an insensitivity to pain, he now feared coma, a state from which Regan might slip easily into death. He checked her blood pressure: ninety over sixty; then pulse rate: sixty. He had waited in the room then, and checked her again every fifteen minutes for an hour and a half before he was satisfied that blood pressure and pulse rate had stabilized, meaning Regan was not in shock but in a state of stupor. Sharon was instructed to continue to check the pulse each hour. Then he'd returned to his room and his sleep. But again the telephone woke him up. The exorcist, the Chancery Office told him, would be Lankester Merrin. Karras would assist.


The news had stunned him. Merrin! the philosopher-paleontologist! the soaring, staggering intellect! His books had stirred ferment in the Church; for they interpreted his faith in the terms of science, in terms of a matter that was still evolving, destined to be spirit and joined to God.


Karras telephoned Chris at once to convey the news, but found that she'd heard from the Bishop directly. He had told her that Merrin would arrive the next day. "I told the Bishop he could stay at the house," Chris said. "It'll just be a day or so, won't it?" Before answering, Karras paused. "I don't know." And then, pausing again, said, "You mustn't expect too much."


"If it works, I mean," Chris had answered. Her tone had been subdued. "I didn't mean to imply that it wouldn't," he reassured her. "I just meant that it might take time."


"How long?"


"It varies." He knew that an exorcism often took weeks, even months; knew that frequently it failed altogether. He expected the latter; expected that the burden, barring cure through suggestion, would fall once again, and at the last, upon him. "It can take a few days or weeks," he'd then told her. "How long has she got, Father Karras?..."


When he hung up the phone, he'd felt heavy, tormented. Stretched out on the bed, he thought of Merrin. Merrin! An excitement and a hope seeped through him. A sinking disquiet followed. He himself had been the natural choice for exorcist, yet the Bishop had passed him over. Why? Because Merrin had done this before?


As he closed his eyes, he recalled that exorcists were selected on the basis of "piety" and "high moral qualities"; that a passage in the gospel of Matthew related that Christ, when asked by his disciples the cause of their failure in an effort at exorcism, had answered them: "... because of your little faith."


The Provincial had known about his problem; so had the president, Karras reflected. Had either told the Bishop?


He had turned on his bed then, damply despondent; felt somehow unworthy; incompetent; rejected. It stung. Unreasonably, it stung. Then, finally, sleep came pouring into emptiness, filling in the niches and cracks in his heart.


But again the ring of the phone woke him, Chris calling to inform him of Regan's new frenzy. Back at the house, he checked Regan's pulse. It was strong. He gave Librium, then again. And again. Finally, he made his way to the kitchen, briefly joining Chris at the table for coffee. She was reading a book, one of Merrin's that she'd ordered delivered to the house. "Way over my head," she told him softly, yet she looked touched and deeply moved. "But there's some of it so beautiful---so great." She flipped back through pages to a passage she had marked, and handed the book across the table to Karras. He read: ... We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure; how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops---which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.


"Yes, it's beautiful," Karras said softly. His eyes were still on the page. The raging of the demon from upstairs grew louder.


"... bastard... scum... pious hypocrite!"


"She used to put a rose on my plate... in the morning... before I'd go to work."


Karras looked up with a question in his eyes. "Regan," Chris told him.


She looked down. "Yeah, that's right. I forget... you've never met her." She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. "Want some brandy in that coffee, Father Karras?" she asked.


"Thanks, I don't think so."


"Coffee's flat," she whispered tremulously. "I think I'll get some brandy. Excuse me." She quickly left the kitchen.


Karras sat alone and sipped bleakly at his coffee. He felt warm in the sweater that he wore beneath his cassock; felt weak in his failure to have given Chris comfort. Then a memory of childhood shimmered up sadly, a memory of Ginger, his mongrel dog, growing skeletal and dazed in a box in the apartment; Ginger shivering with fever and vomiting while Karras covered her with towels, tried to make her drink warm milk, until a neighbor came by and saw it was distemper, shook his head and said, "Your dog needed shots right away." Then dismissed from school one after-noon... to the street... in columns of twos to the corner... his mother there to meet him... unexpected... looking sad... and then taking his hand to press a shiny half-dollar piece into it... elation... so much money!... then her voice, soft and tender, "Gingie die...."


He looked down at the steaming, bitter blackness in his cup and felt his hands empty of comfort or of cure.


"... pious bastard!"


The demon. Still raging.


"Your dog needed shots right away...."


Quickly he returned to Regan's bedroom, where he held her while Sharon administered the Librium injection that now brought the total dosage up to five hundred milligrams.


Sharon was swabbing the needle puncture while Karras watched Regan, puzzled. The frenzied obscenities seemed to be directed at no one in the room, but rather at someone unseen---or not present.


He dismissed the thought. "I'll be back," he told Sharon.


Concerned about Chris, he went down to the kitchen, where again he found her sitting alone at the table. She was pouring brandy into her coffee. "Are you sure you wouldn't like some, Father?" she asked.


Shaking his head, he came over to the table and sat down wearily. He stared at the floor. Heard porcelain clicks of a spoon stirring coffee. "Have you talked to her father?" he asked.


"Yes. Yes, he called." A pause. "He wanted to talk to Rags."


"And what did you tell him?"


A pause. Then, "I told him she was out at a party."


Silence. Karras heard no more clicks. He looked up and saw her staring at the ceiling. And then he noticed it too: the shouts above had finally ceased.


"I guess the Librium took hold," he said gratefully.


Chiming of the doorbell. He glanced toward the sound; then at Chris, who met his look of surmise with a questioning, apprehensive lifting of an eyebrow.


Kinderman?


Seconds. Ticking. They waited. Willie was resting. Sharon and Karl were still upstairs. No one coming to answer. Tense, Chris got up abruptly from the table and went to the living room. Kneeling on a sofa, she parted a curtain and peered furtively through the window at her caller. Thank God! Not Kinderman. She was looking, instead, at a tall old man in a threadbare raincoat, his head bowed patiently in the rain. He carried a worn, old- fashioned valise. For an instant, a buckle gleamed in street-lamp glow as the bag shifted slightly in his grip.


The doorbell chimed again.


Who is that?


Puzzled, Chris got down off the sofa and walked to the entry hall. She opened the door only slightly, squinting out into darkness as a fine mist of rain brushed her eyes. The man's hat brim obscured his face. "Yes, hello; can I help you?"


"Mrs. MacNeil?" came a voice from the shadows. It was gentle, refined, yet as full as a harvest.


As he reached for his hat, Chris was nodding her head, and then suddenly she was looking into eyes that overwhelmed her, that shone with intelligence and kindly understanding, with serenity that poured from them into her being like the waters of a warm and healing river whose source was both in him yet somehow beyond him; whose flow was contained and yet headlong and endless.


"I'm Father Merrin."


For a moment she looked blank as she stared at the lean and ascetic face; at the sculptured cheekbones, polished like soapstone; then quickly she flung wide the door. "Oh, my gosh, please come in! Oh; come in! Gee, I'm... Honestly! I don't know where my..."


He entered and she closed the door.


"I mean, I didn't expect you until tomorrow!"


"Yes, I know," she heard him saying.


As she turned around to face him, she saw him standing with his head angled sideways, glancing upward, as if he were listening---no, more like feeling; she thought---for some presence out of sight... some distant vibration that was known and familiar. Puzzled, she watched him. His skin seemed weathered by alien winds, by a sun that shone elsewhere, somewhere remote from her time and her place.


What's he doing?


"Can I take that bag for you, Father? It must weigh a ton by now."


"It's all right," he said softly. Still feeling. Still probing. "It's like part of my arm: very old... very battered." He looked down with a warm, tired smile in his eyes. "I'm accustomed to the weight.... Is Father Karras here?" he asked.


"Yes, he is. He's in the kitchen. Have you had any dinner, incidentally, Father?"


He kicked his glance upward at the sound of a door being opened. "Yes, I had some on the train."


"Are you sure you wouldn't like something else?"


A moment. Then sound of the door being closed. He glanced down. "No, thank you."


"Gee, all of this rain," she protested, still flustered. "If I'd known you were coming, I could have met you at the station."


"It's all right."


"Did you have to wait long for a cab?"


"A few minutes."


"I take that, Father!"


Karl. He'd descended the stairs very quickly and now slipped the bag from the priest's easy grip and took it off down the hall.


"We've put a bed in the study for you, Father:" Chris was fidgeting. "It's really very comfortable and I thought you'd like the privacy. I'll show you where it is." She'd started moving, then stopped. "Or would you like to say hello to Father Karras?"


"I should like to see your daughter first," said Merrin.


She looked puzzled "Right now, you mean, Father?"


He glanced upward again with that distant attentiveness. "Yes, now---I think now."


"Gee, I'm sure she's asleep."


"I think not."


"Well, if---"


Suddenly, Chris flinched at a sound from above, at the voice of the demon, booming and yet muffled, croaking, like amplified premature burial.


"Merriiiiinnnnnn!"


Then the massive and shiveringly hollow jolt of a single blow against the bedroom wall.


"God almighty!" Chris breathed as she clutched a pale hand against her chest. Stunned, she looked at Merrin.


The priest hadn't moved. He was still staring upward, intense and yet serene, and in his eyes there was not even a hint of surprise. It was more, Chris thought, like recognition.


Another blow shook the walls.


"Merriiiiinnnnnnnnnn!"


The Jesuit moved slowly forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went calmly up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.


Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring -after him, an odd expression on her face.


The Jesuit descended the staircase rapidly and put out his hand to the waiting Karras.


"Father Karras..."


"Hello, Father."


Merrin had clasped the other priest's hand in both of his; he was squeezing it, searching Karras' face with a look of gravity and concern, while upstairs the laughter turned to vicious, obscenities directed at Merrin. "You look terribly tired," he said "Are you tired?"


"Not at all. Why do you ask?"


"Do you have your raincoat with you?"


Karras shook his head and said, "No."


"Then here, take mine," said the gray-haired Jesuit, unbuttoning the coat. "I should like you to go to the residence, Damien, and gather up a cassock for my-self, two surplices, a purple stole, some holy water and two copies of The Roman Ritual." He handed the raincoat to the puzzled Karras. "I believe we should begin."


Karras frowned. "You mean now? Right away?"


"Yes, I think so."


"Don't you want to hear the background of the case first, Father?"


"Why?"


Merrin's brows were knitted in earnestness.


Karras realized that he had no answer. He averted his gaze from those disconcerting eyes. "Right," he said. He was slipping on the raincoat and turning away. "I'll go and get the things."


Karl made a dash across the room, got ahead of Karras and pulled the front door open for him. They exchanged brief glances, and then Karras stepped out into the rainy night. Merrin glanced back to Chris. "You don't mind if we begin right away?" he asked softly.


She'd been watching him, glowing with relief at the feeling of decision and direction and command rushing in like a shout in sunlit day. "No, I'm glad," she said gratefully. "You must be tired, though, Father."


He saw her anxious gaze flick upward toward the raging of the demon.


"Would you like a cup of coffee?" she was asking. "It's fresh." Insistent. Faintly pleading. "It's hot. Wouldn't you like some; Father?"


He saw the hands lightly clasping, unclasping; the deep caverns of her eyes. "Yes, I would," he said warmly. "Thank you." Something heavy had been gently brushed aside; told to wait. "If you're sure it's no trouble..."


She led him to the kitchen and soon he was leaning against the stove with a mug of black coffee in his hand.


"Want some brandy in it Father?" Chris held up the bottle.


He bent his head and looked down into the mug without expression. "Well, the doctors say I shouldn't," he said. And then he held out the mug. "But thank God, my will is weak."


Chris paused for a moment, unsure, then saw the smile in his eyes as he lifted his head.


She poured.


"What a lovely name you have," he told her. "Chris MacNeil. It's not a stage name?"


Chris trickled brandy into her coffee and shook hey head. "No, I'm really not Esmerelda Glutz."


"Thank God for that," murmured Merrin.


Chris smiled and sat down. "And what's Lankester,


Father? So unusual. Were you named after someone?"


"A cargo ship." he murmured as he stared absently and put the mug to his lips. He sipped. "Or a bridge. Yes, I suppose it was a bridge." He looked rueful. "Now, Damien," he went on, "how I wish I had a name like Damien. So lovely."


"Where does that come from, Father? That name?"


"Damien?" He looked down at his cup. "It was the name of a priest who devoted his life to taking can of the lepers on the island of Molokai. He finally caught the disease himself." He paused. "Lovely name," he said again. "I believe that with a first name like Damien, I might even be content with the last name Glutz."


Chris chuckled. She unwound. Felt easier. And for minutes, she and Merrin spoke of homely things, little things. Finally, Sharon appeared the kitchen, and only then did Merrin move to leave. It was as if he had been waiting for her arrival, for immediately he carried his mug to the sink, rinsed it out and placed it carefully in the dish rack. "That was good; that was just what I wanted," he said.


Chris got up and said, "I'll take you to your room."


He thanked her and followed her to the door of the study. "If there's anything you need; Father," she said, "let me know."


He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly. Chris felt a power and warmth flowing into her. Peace. She felt peace. And an odd sense of... safety? she wondered.


"You're very kind." His eyes smiled. "Thank you."


He removed his hand and watched her walk away. As soon as she was gone, a tightening pain seemed to clutch at his face. He entered the study and closed the door. From a pocket of his trousers, he slipped out a tin marked Bayer Aspirin, opened it, extracted a nitroglycerin pill and placed it carefully under his tongue.


Chris entered the kitchen. Pausing by the door, she looked at Sharon, who was standing by the stove, the palm of her hand against the percolator as she waited for the coffee to reheat.


Chris went over to her, concerned. "Hey, honey," she said softly. "Why don't you get a little rest?"


No response. Sharon seemed lost in thought. Then she turned and stared blankly at Chris. "I'm sorry. Did you say something?"


Chris studied the tightness in her face, the distant look. "What happened up there, Sharon?" she asked.


"Happened where?"


"When Father Merrin walked in upstairs."


"Oh, Yes..." Sharon frowned. She shifted her faraway gaze to a point in space between doubt and remembrance. "Yes. It was funny."


"Funny?"


"Strange. They only..." She pause. "Well, they only just stared at each other for a while, and then Regan---that thing---it said..."


"Said what?"


"It said, 'This time, you're going to lose.' "


Chris stared at her, waiting. "And then?"


"That was it," Sharon answered. "Father Merrin turned around and walked out of the room."


"And how did he look?" Chris asked her.


"Funny."


"Oh, Christ, Sharon, think of some other word!" snapped Chris, and was about to say something else when she noticed that Sharon had angled her head up, to the side, abstracted, as if she were listening.


Chris glanced upward and heard it too: the silence; the sudden cessation of the raging of the demon; yet something more... something... and growing.


The women flicked sidelong stares at each other.


"You feel it too?" asked Sharon quietly.


Chris nodded. The house. Something in the house. A tension. A gradual thickening of the air. A pulsing, like energies slowly building up.


The lilting of the door chimes sounded unreal.


Sharon turned away. "I'll get it."


She walked to the entry hall and opened the door. It was Karras. He was carrying a cardboard laundry box. "Thank you, Sharon."


"Father Merrin's in the study," she told him.


Karras moved quickly to the study, tapped lightly and cursorily at the door and then entered with the box. "Sorry, Father," he was saying, "I had a little---"


Karras stopped short. Merrin, in trousers and T-shirt, kneeled in prayer beside the rented bed, his forehead bent low to his tight-clasped hands. Karras stood rooted for a moment, as if he had casually rounded a corner and suddenly encountered his boyhood self with an altar boy's cassock draped over an arm, hurrying by without a glance of recognition.


Karras shifted his eyes to the open laundry box, to speckles of rain on starch. Then slowly, with his gaze still averted, he moved to the sofa and soundlessly laid out the contents of the box. When he finished, he took off the raincoat and draped it carefully over a chair. As he glanced back toward Merrin, he saw the priest blessing himself and he hastily looked away, reaching down for the larger of the white cotton surplices. He began to put it on over his cassock. He heard Merrin rising, and then, "Thank you, Damien." Karras turned to face him, tugging down the surplice while Merrin came over in front of the sofa, his eyes brushing tenderly over its contents.


Karras reached for a sweater. "I thought you might wear this under your cassock, Father," he told Merrin as he handed it over. "The room gets cold at times"


Merrin touched the sweater lightly with his hands. "'That was thoughtful of you, Damien."


Karras picket up Merrin's cassock from the sofa, and watched him pull the sweater down over his head, and only now, and very suddenly, while watching this homely, prosaic action, did Karras feel the staggering impact of the man; of the moment; of a stillness in the house, crushing down on him, choking off breath.


He came back to awareness with the feeling of the cassock being tugged from his hands. Merrin. He was slipping it on. "You're familiar with the rules concerning exorcism, Damien?"


"Yes, I am," answered Karras.


Merrin began buttoning up the cassock. "Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon...."


"The demon." He'd said it so matter-of-factly, thought Karras. It jarred him.


"We may ask what is relevant," said Merrin as he buttoned the collar of the cassock. "But anything beyond that is dangerous. Extremely." He lifted the surplice from Karras' hands and began to slip it over the cassock. "Especially, do not listen to anything he says. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us; but he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien. And powerful. Do not listen. Remember that. Do not listen."


As Karras handed him the stole, the exorcist added, "Is there anything at all you would like to ask now, Damien?"


Karras shook his head. "No. But I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities that Regan has manifested. So far, there seem to be three."


"There is only one," said Merrin softly, slipping the stole around his shoulders. For a moment, he gripped it and stood unmoving as a haunted expression came into his eyes. Then he reached for the copies of the Roman Ritual and gave one to Karras. "We will skip the Litany of the Saints. You have the holy water?"


Karras slipped the slender, cork-tipped vial from his pocket. Merrin took it, then nodded serenely toward the door. "If you will lead, please, Damien."


Upstairs, by the door to Regan's bedroom, Sharon and Chris stood tense and waiting. They were bundled in heavy sweaters and jackets. At the sound of a door coming open, they turned and looked below and saw Karras and Merrin come down the hall to the stairs in solemn procession. Tall: how tall they were, thought Chris; and Karras: the dark of that rock-chipped face above the innocent, altar-boy white of the surplice. Watching them steadily ascending the staircase, Chris felt deeply and strangely moved. Here comes my big brother to beat your brains in, creeps! It was a feeling, she thought, much like that. She could feel her heart begin to beat faster.


At the door of the room, the Jesuits stopped. Karras frowned at the sweater and jacket Chris wore. "You're coming in?"


"Well, I really thought I should."


"Please don't," he urged her. "Don't. You'd be making a great mistake."


Chris turned questioningly to Merrin.


"Father Karras knows best," said the exorcist quietly.


Chris looked to Karras again. Dropped her head. "Okay," she said, despondently. She leaned against the wall. "I'll 'wait out here."


"What is your daughter's middle name?" asked Merrin.


"Teresa."


"What a lovely name," said Merrin warmly. He held her gaze for a moment, reassuring. Then he looked at the door, and again Chris felt it: that tension; that thickening of coiled darkness. Inside. In the bedroom. Beyond that door. Karras felt it too, she noticed, and Sharon.


Merrin nodded. "All right," he said softly.


Karras opened the door, and almost reeled back from the blast of stench and icy cold. In a corner of the room, Karl sat huddled in a chair. He was dressed in a faded olive green hunting jacket and turned expectantly to Karras. The Jesuit quickly flicked his glance to the demon in the bed. Its gleaming eyes stared beyond him to the hall. They were fixed on Merrin.


Karras moved forward to the foot of the bed while Merrin walked slowly, tall and erect, to the side. There he stopped and looked down into hate.


A smothering stillness hung over the room. Then Regan licked a wolfish, blackened tongue across her cracked and swollen lips. It sounded like a hand smoothing crumpled parchment. "Well, proud scum!" croaked the demon. "At last! At last you've come!"


The old priest lifted his hand and traced the sign of the cross above the bed, and then repeated the gesture toward all in the room. Turning back, he plucked the cap from the vial of holy water.


"Ah, yes! The holy urine now!" rasped the demon. "The semen of the saints!"


Merrin lifted up the vial and the face of the demon grew livid, contorted. "Ah, will you, bastard?" it seethed at him. "Will you?"


Merrin started sprinkling.


The demon jerked its head up, the mouth and the neck muscles trembling with rage. "Yes, sprinkle! sprinkle, Merrin! Drench us! Drown us in your sweat! Your sweat is sanctified, Saint Merrin! Bend and fart out clouds of incense! Bend and show the holy rump that we may worship and adore it! kiss it! lick it, blessed---"


"Be silent!"


The words flung forth like bolts. Karras flinched and jerked his head around in wonder at Merrin, who stared commandingly at Regan. And the demon was silent. Was returning his stare. But the eyes were now hesitant. Blinking. Wary.


Merrin capped the holy-water vial routinely and re-turned it to Karras. The psychiatrist slipped it into his pocket and watched as Merrin kneeled down beside the bed and closed his eyes in murmured prayer. " 'Our Father...' " he began.


Regan spat and hit Merrin in the face with a yellowish glob of mucus. It oozed slowly down the exorcist's cheek.


" 'Thy kingdom come... ' " His head still bowed, Merrin continued the prayer without a pause while his hand plucked a handkerchief out of his pocket and unhurriedly wiped away the spittle. " '... and lead us not into temptation,' " he ended mildly.


" 'But deliver us from evil,' " responded Karras.


He looked up briefly. Regan's eyes were rolling upward into their sockets until only the white of the sclera was exposed. Karras felt uneasy. Felt something in the room congealing. He returned to his text to follow Merrin's prayer: " 'God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; I appeal to your holy name, humbly begging your kindness, that you may graciously grant me help against this unclean spirit now tormenting this creature of yours; through Christ our Lord.' "


"Amen," responded Karras.


Now Merrin stood up and prayed reverently: " 'God, Creator and defender of the human race, look down in pity on this your servant, Regan Teresa MacNeil, now trapped in the coils of man's ancient enemy, sworn foe of our race, who...' "


Karras glanced up as he heard Regan hissing, saw her sitting erect with the whites of her eyes exposed, while her tongue flicked in and out rapidly, head weaving slowly back and forth like a cobra's.


Once again Karras had a fling of disquiet. He looked back at his text.


" 'Save your servant,' " prayed Merrin, standing and reading from the Ritual.


" 'Who trusts in you, my God,' " answered Karras.


" 'Let her find in you, Lord, a fortified tower.' "


" 'In the face of the enemy.' "


As Merrin continued with the next line, Karras heard a gasp from Sharon behind him, and turning quickly around, he saw her looking stupefied at the bed. Puzzled, he looked back. And was instantly electrified. The front of the bed was rising up off the floor!


He stared at it incredulously. Four inches. Half a foot. A foot. Then the back legs began to come up.


"Gott in Himmel!" Karl whispered in fear. But Karras did not hear him or see him make the sign of the cross on himself as the back of the bed lifted level with the front.


It's not happening! he thought, as he watched, transfixed.


The bed drifted upward another foot and then hovered there, bobbing and listing gently as if it were floating on a stagnant lake.


"Father Karras?"


Regan undulating. Hissing.


"Father Karras?"


Karras turned. The exorcist was eyeing him serenely, and now motioned his head toward the copy of the Ritual in Karras' hands. "The response, please, Damien."


Karras looked blank and uncomprehending. Sharon ran from the room.


" 'Let the enemy have no power over her,' " Merrin repeated gently.


Hastily, Karras glanced back at the text and with a pounding heart breathed out the response: " 'And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her.' "


" 'Lord, hear my prayer,' " continued Merrin.


" 'And let my cry come unto Thee.' "


" 'The Lord be with you.' "


" 'And with your spirit.' "


Merrin embarked upon a lengthy prayer and Karras again returned his gaze to the bed, to his hopes of his God and the supernatural hovering low in the empty air. An elation thrilled up through his being. It's there! There it is! Right in front of me! There! He looked suddenly around at the sound of the door opening. Sharon rushed in with Chris, who stopped, unbelieving, and gasped, "Jesus Christ!"


" 'Almighty Father, everlasting God...' "


The exorcist reached up his hand in a workaday manner and traced the sign of the cross, unhurriedly, three times on Regan's brow while continuing to read from the text of the Ritual: " '... who sent your only begotten Son into the world to crush that roaring Lion....' "


The hissing ceased and from the taut-stretched O of Regan's mouth came the nerve-shredding lowing of a steer.


" '... snatch from ruination and from the clutches of the noonday devil this human being made in your image, and...' "


The lowing grew louder, tearing at flesh and shivering through bone.


" 'God and Lord of all creation... ' " Merrin routinely reached up his hand and pressed a portion of the stole to Regan's neck while continuing to pray: " '... by whose might Satan was made to fall from heaven like lightning, strike terror into the beast now laying waste your vineyard...' "


The bellowing ceased. A ringing silence. Then a thick and putrid greenish vomit began to pump from Regan's mouth in slow and regular spurts that oozed like lava over her lip and flowed in waves onto Merrin's hand. But he did not move it. 'Let your mighty hand cast out this cruel demon from Regan Teresa MacNeil, who...' "


Karras was dimly aware of a door being opened, of Chris bolting from the room.


" 'Drive out this persecutor of the innocent....' "


The bed began to rock lazily, then to pitch, and then suddenly it was violently dipping and yawing, and with the vomit still pumping from Regan s mouth, Merrin calmly made adjustments and kept the stole firmly to her neck.


" 'Fill your servants with courage to manfully oppose that reprobate dragon lest he despise those who put their trust in you, and...' "


Abruptly, the movements subsided and as Karras watched, mesmerized, the bed drifted featherlike, slowly, to the floor and settled on the rug with a cushioned thud.


" 'Lord, grant that this...' "


Numb, Karras shifted his gaze. Merrin's hand. He could not see it. It was buried under mounded, steaming vomit.


"Damien?"


Karras glanced up.


" 'Lord, hear my prayer,' " said the exorcist gently.


Slowly, Karras turned to the bed. " 'And let my cry come unto Thee.' "


Merrin lifted off the stole, took a slight step backward, and then jolted the room with the lash of his voice as he commanded, " 'I cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every satanic power of the enemy! every specter from hell! every savage companion!' " Merrin's hand, at his side, dripped vomit to the rug. " 'It is Christ who commands you, who once stilled the wind and the sea and the storm! Who...' "


Regan stopped vomiting. Sat silent. Unmoving, The whites of her eyes gleamed balefully at Merrin. From the foot of the bed, Karras watched her intently as his shock and excitement began to fade, as his mind began feverishly to thresh, to poke its fingers, unbidden, compulsively, deep into corners of logical doubt: poltergeists; psychokinetic action; adolescent tensions and mind-directed force. He frowned as he remembered something. He moved to the side of the bed, leaned over, reached down to grasp Regan's wrist. And found what he'd feared. Like the shaman in Siberia, the pulse was racing at an unbelievable speed. It drained him suddenly of sun, and glancing at his watch, he counted the heartbeats, now, like arguments against his life.


" 'It is He who commands you, He who flung you headlong from the heights of heaven!' "


Merrin's powerful adjuration pounded off the rim of Karras' consciousness in resonant, inexorable blows as the pulse came faster now. And faster. Karras looked at Regan. Still silent. Unmoving. Into icy air, thin mists of vapor wafted from the vomit like a reeking offering. Karras felt uneasy. Then the hair on his arms began prickling up. With nightmare slowness, a fraction at a time, Regan's head was turning, swiveling like a manikin, creaking with the sound of some rusted mechanism, until the dread and glaring whites of those ghastly eyes were fixed on his.


" 'And therefore, tremble in fear, now, Satan...' "


The head turned slowly back toward Merrin.


" '... you corrupter of justice! you begetter of death! you betrayer of the nations! you robber of life! you...' "


Karras glanced warily around as the lights in the room began flickering, dimming, and then faded to an eerie, pulsing amber. He shivered. It was colder. The room was getting colder.


" '... you prince of murderers! you inventor of every obscenity! you enemy of the human ace! you...' "


A muffled pounding jolted the room. Then another. Then steadily, shuddering through walls, through the floor, through the ceiling, splintering, throbbing at a ponderous rate like the beating of a heart that was massive and diseased.


" 'Depart, you monster! Your place is in solitude! Your abode is in a nest of vipers! Get down and crawl with them! It is God himself who commands you! The blood of...' "


The poundings grew louder, began to come ominously faster and faster.


" 'I adjure you, ancient serpent...' "


And faster...


" '... by the judge of the living and the dead, by your Creator, by the creator of all the universe, to...' "


Sharon cried out, pressing fists against her ears as the poundings grew deafening and now suddenly accelerated and leaped to a terrifying tempo.


Regan's pulse was astonishing. It hammered at a speed too rapid to gauge. Across the bed, Merrin reached out calmly and with the end of his thumb traced the sign of the cross on Regan's vomit-covered chest. The words of his prayer were swallowed in the poundings.


Karras felt the pulse rate suddenly drop, and as Merrin prayed and traced the sign of the cross on Regan's blow, the nightmarish poundings abruptly ceased.


" 'O God of heaven and earth, God of the angels and archangels...' " Karras could now hear Merrin praying as the pulse kept dropping, dropping...


" 'Prideful bastard, Merrin! Scum! You win lose! She will die! The pig will die!"


The flickering haze grew gradually brighter. The demonic entity had returned and raged hatefully at Merrin. "Profligate peacock! Ancient heretic! I adjure you, turn and look on me! Now look on me, you scum!" The demon jerked forward and spat in Merrin's face, and then croaked at him, "Thus does your master cure the blind!"


" 'God and Lord of all creation...' " prayed Merrin, reaching placidly for his handkerchief and wiping away the spittle.


"Now follow his teaching, Merrin! Do it! Put your sanctified cock in the piglet's mouth and cleanse it, swab it with the wrinkled relic and she will be cured, Saint Merrin! A miracle! A---"


" '... deliver this servant of...' "


"Hypocrite! You care nothing at all for the pig. You care nothing! You have made her a contest between us!"


" '... I humbly...' "


"Liar! Lying bastard! Tell us, where is your humility, Merrin? In the desert? in the ruins? in the tombs where you fled to escape your fellowman? to escape from your inferiors, from the halt and the lame of mind? Do you speak to men, you pious vomit?..."


" '... deliver...' "


"Your abode is in a nest of peacocks, Merrin! your place is within yourself! Go back to the mountaintop and speak to your only equal!"


Merrin continued with the prayers, unheeding, as the torrent of abuse raged on. "Do you hunger, Saint Merrin? Here, I give to you nectar and ambrosia, I give to you the food of your God!" croaked the demon. It excreted diarrhetically, mocking, "For this is my body! Now consecrate that, Saint Merrin!"


Repelled, Karras focused his attention on the text as Merrin read a passage from Saint Luke: " '..."My name is Legion," answered the man, for many demons had entered into him. And they begged Jesus not to command them to depart into the abyss. Now a herd of swine was there, feeding on the mountain-side. And the demons kept entreating Jesus to let them enter into them. And he gave them leave. And the demons came out from the man and entered into the swine, and the herd rushed down the cliff and into the lake and were drowned. And...' "


"Willie, I bring you good news!" croaked the demon. Karras glanced up and saw Willie near the door, stopping short with an armload of towels and sheets. I bring you tidings of redemption!" it gloated. "Elvira is alive! She lives! She is..."


Willie stared in shock and now Karl turned and shouted at her, "No, Willie! No!"


"... a drug addict, Willie, a hopeless---"


"Willie, do not listen!" cried Karl.


"Shall I tell you where she lives?"


"Do not listen! Do not listen!" Karl was rushing Willie out of the room.


"Go and visit her on Mother's Day, Willie! Surprise her! Go and---"


Abruptly the demon broke off and fixed its eyes on Karras. He had again checked the pulse and found it strong, which meant it was safe to give Regan more Librium. Now he moved to Sharon to instruct her to prepare another injection. "Do you want her?" leered the demon. "She is yours! Yes, the stable whore is yours! You may ride her as you wish! Why, she fantasizes nightly concerning you, Karras! She masturbates, dreaming of your great priestly..."


Sharon crimsoned and kept her eyes averted as Karras gave instructions for the Librium.


"And a Compazine suppository is use there's more vomiting," he added.


Sharon nodded at the floor and started stiffly away. As she walked by the bed with her head still lowered, Regan croaked at her, "Slut!" then jerked up and hit her face with a flung bolt of vomit, and while Sharon stood paralyzed and dripping, the Dennings personality appeared, rasping, "Stable whore! Cunt!"


Sharon bolted from the room.


The Dennings personality now grimaced with distaste, glance around and asked, "Would someone crack a window open, please? It bloody stinks in this room! Its simply---!


"No no no, don't!" it then amended. "No for heaven's sake, don't, or someone else might be bloody well dead!" And then it cackled, winked monstrously at Karras and vanished.


" 'It is He who expels you...' "


"Does he, Merrin? Does he?"


Now the demon returned and Merrin continued the adjurations, the applications of the stole and the constant tracings of the sign of the cross while it lashed him again obscenely. Too long, worried Karras: the fit was continuing far too long.


"Now the saw comes! The mother of the piglet!" mocked the demon.


Karras turned and saw Chris coming toward him with a swab and disposable syringe. She kept her head down as the demon hurled abuse, and Karras went to her, frowning.


"Sharon's changing her clothes," Chris explained, "and Karl's---"


Karras cut her short with "All right," and they approached the bed.


"Ah, yes, come see your handiwork, sow-mother! Come!"


Chris tried desperately not to listen, not to look, while Karras pinned Regan's unresisting arms.


"See the puke! see the murderous bitch!" the demon raged. "Are you pleased? It is you who have done it! Yes, you with your career before anything; your career before your husband, before her, before..."


Karras glanced around. Chris stood paralyzed, "Go ahead!" he ordered. "Don't listen! Go ahead!"


"... your divorce! Go to priests, will you? Priest will not help!" Chris's hand began to shake, "She mad! She is mad! The piglet is mad! You have driven her to madness and to murder and..."


"I can't!" Face contorted, Chris was staring at the quivering syringe. Shook her head. "I can't do it!"


Karras plucked it from her fingers. "All right, swab it! Swab the arm! Over here!" he told her firmly.


"... in her coffin, you bitch, by..."


"Don't listen!" cautioned Karras again, and now the -demon jerked its head around, its eyes bulging fury, "And you, Karras!"


Chris swabbed Regan's arm. "Now, get out!" Karras ordered her, flicking the needle into wasted flesh.


She fled.


"Yes, we know of your kindness to mothers, dear Karras!" croaked the demon. The Jesuit blenched and for a moment did not move. Then slowly he drew the needle out and looked into eyes that rolled upward into their sockets. Out of Regan's mouth came a slow, lilting singing, almost chanting, in a sweet clear voice like a choirboy's. " 'Tantum ergo sacramentum veneremur cerniu...' "


It was a hymn sung at Catholic benediction. Karras stood bloodlessly as it continued. Weird and chilling, the singing was a vacuum into which Karras felt the horror of the evening rushing with a horrible clarity. He looked up and saw Merrin with a towel in his hands. With weary, tender movements he wiped away the vomit from Regan's face and neck.


" '... et antiquum documentum...' "


The singing. Whose voice? wondered Karras. And then fragments: Dennings... The window... Haunted, he saw Sharon come back in and take the towel from Merrin. "I'll finish that, Father," she told him. "I'm all right now. I'd like to change her and get her cleaned up before I give her the Compazine; all right? Could you both wait outside for awhile?"


The two priests stepped into the warmth and the dimness of the hall and leaned wearily against the wall.


Karras listened to the eerie, muffled singing from within. After some moments, he spoke softly to Merrin. "You said---you said earlier there was only... one entity."


"Yes."


The hushed tones, the lowered heads, were confessional.


"All the others are but forms of attack," continued Merrin. "There is one... only one. It is a demon." There was a silence. Then Merrin stated simply, "I know you doubt this. But you see, this demon... I have met once before. And he is powerful... powerful...."


A silence. Karras spoke again. "We say the demon... cannot touch the victim's will."


"Yes, that is so... that is so... There is no sin."


"Then what would be the purpose of possession?" Karras said, frowning. "What's the point?"


"Who can know?" answered Merrin. "Who can really hope to know?" He thought for a moment. And then probingly continued: "Yet I think the demon's target is not the possessed; it is us... the observers... every person in this house. And I think---I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us..."


Again Merrin paused. He continued more slowly and with a hush of introspection: 'He knows... the demon knows where to strike...." He was nodding. "Long ago I despaired of ever loving my neighbor. Certain people... repelled me. How could I love them? I thought. It tormented me, Damien; it led me to despair of myself... and from that, very soon, to despair of my God. My faith was shattered...."


Karras looked up at Merrin with interest. "And what happened?" he asked.


"Ah, well... at last I realized that God would never ask of me that which I know to be psychologically impossible; that the love which He asked was in my will and not meant to be felt as emotion at all. Not at all. He was asking that I act with love; that I do unto others; and that I should do it unto those who repelled me, I believe, was a greater act of love than any other." He shook his head. "I know that all of this must seem very obvious, Damien. I know. But at the time I could not see It. Strange blindness. How many husbands and wives," he uttered sadly, "must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds! Ah, dear God!" He shook his head; and then nodded. "There it lies, I think, Damien... possession; not in wars, as some tend to believe; not so much; and very seldom in extraordinary interventions such as here... this girl... this poor child. No, I see it most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites; the misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Enough of these," Merrin whispered, "and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves... for ourselves...."


The lilting singing could still be heard in the bedroom. Merrin looked up at the door and listened for a moment. "And yet even from this---from evil---will come good. In some way. In some way that we may never understand or ever see." Merrin paused. "Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness," he brooded. "And perhaps even Satan---Satan, in spite of himself---somehow serves to work out the will of God."


He said no more, and for a time they stood in silence while Karras reflected. Another objection came to mind. "Once the demon's driven out," he probed, "what's to keep it from coming back in?"


"I don't know," Merrin answered. "I don't know. And yet it never seems to happen. Never. Never." Merrin put a hand to his face, tightly pinching at the corners of his eyes. "Damien... what a wonderful name," he murmured. Karras heard exhaustion in the voice. And something else. Some anxiety. Something like repression of pain.


Abruptly, Merrin pushed himself away from the wall, and with his face still hidden in his hand; he excused himself and hurried down the hall to the bathroom. What was wrong? wondered Karras. He felt a sudden envy and admiration for the exorcist's strong and simple faith. He turned toward the door. The singing. It had stopped. Had the night at last ended?


Some minutes later, Sharon came out of the bedroom with a foul-smelling bundle of bedding and clothing. "She's sleeping now," she said. She looked away quickly and moved off down the hall.


Karras took a deep breath and returned to the bedroom. Felt the cold. Smelled the stench. He walked slowly to the bedside. Regan. Asleep. At last. And at last, thought Karras, he could rest.


He reached down and gripped Regan's thin wrist, looking at the sweep-second hand of his watch.


"Why you do this to me, Dimmy?"


His heart froze.


"Why you do this?"


The priest could not move, did not breathe, did not dare to glance over to that sorrowful voice, did not dare see those eyes really there: eyes accusing, eyes lonely. His mother. His mother!


"You leave me to be priest, Dimmy; and send me institution...."


Don't look!


"Now you chase me away?..."


It's not her!


"Why you do this?..."


His head throbbing, heart in his throat, Karras shut his eyes tightly as the voice grew imploring, grew frightened, grew, tearful. "You always good boy, Dimmy. Please! I am 'fraid! Please no chase me outside, Dimmy! Please!"


... not my mother!


"Outside nothing! Only dark, Dimmy! Lonely!" Now tearful.


"You're not my mother!" Karras vehemently whispered.


"Dimmy. please!..."


"You're not my---"


"Oh, for heaven's sake, Karras!"


Dennings.


"Look, it simply isn't fair to drive us out of here! Really!


I mean, speaking for myself it's only justice I should be here! Little bitch! She took my body and I think it only right that I ought to be allowed to stay in hers, don't you think? Oh, for Christ's sake, Karras, look at me, now would you? Come along! It isn't very often I get out to speak my piece. Just turn around -now."


Karras opened up his eyes and saw the Dennings personality.


"There, that's better. Look, she killed me. Not our innkeeper, Karras---she! Oh, yes, indeed!" It was nodding affirmation. "She! I was minding my business at the bar, you see, when I thought I heard her moaning. Upstairs. Well, now, I had to see what ailed her, after all, so up I went and don't you know, she bloody took me by the throat, the little cunt!" The voice was whiny now; pathetic. "Christ, I've never in my life seen such strength! Began to scream that I was diddling her mother or something, or that I caused the divorce. Some such thing. It wasn't dear. But I tell you, love, she pushed me out the bloody fucking window!" Voice cracking. High-pitched now. "She killed me! Fucking killed me! Now you think it's bloody fair to throw me out? Come along, now, Karras, answer me! You think it really fair? I mean, do you?"


Karras swallowed.


"Yes, or no," it prodded "Is it fair?"


"How was... the head turned around?" asked Karras hoarsely.


Dennings shifted his gaze around evasively. "Oh, well, that was an accident... a freak... I hit the steps, you know.... It was freaky."


Karras pondered, a dryness in his throat. Then he picked up Regan's wrist again; And glanced at his watch in a move of dismissal.


"Dimmy, Please! Don' make me be alone!"


His mother.


"If instead of be priest, you was doctor, I Live in nice house, Dimmy, not wit' da cockroach, not all by myself in da apartment! Then..."


He was straining to block it all out, but the voice began to weep again.


"Dimmy, please!"


"You're not my---"


"Won't you face the truth, stinking scum?" It was the demon. "You believe what Merrin tells you?" It seethed. "You believe him to be holy and good? Well, he is not! He is proud and unworthy! I will prove it to you, Karras I will prove it by killing the piglet!"


Karras opened up his eyes. But still dared not look.


"Yes, she will die and Merrin's God will not save her, Karras! You will not save her! She will die from Merrin's pride and your incompetence! Bungler! You should not have given her the Librium!"


Karras turned now and looked at the eyes. They were shining with triumph and piercing spite.


"Feel her pulse!" The demon grinned "Go ahead, Karras! Feel it!"


Regan's wrist was still gripped in his hand, and now he frowned worriedly. The pulse beat was rapid and...


"Feeble?" croaked the demon. "Ah, yes. A trifle. For the moment, just a bit."


Karras fetched his medical bag and took out his stethoscope. The demon rasped, "Listen, Karras! Listen well!"


Karras listened. The heart tones sounded distant and inefficient.


"I will not let her sleep!"


Karras flicked up his glance to the demon. Felt chilled.


"Yes, Karras!" it croaked. "She will not sleep! Do you hear? I will not let the piglet sleep!"


As Karras stared numbly, the demon put its head back in gloating laughter. He did not hear Merrin come back into the room.


The exorcist stood by him at the side of the bed and studied his face. "What is it?" he asked.


Karras answered dully, "The demon... said he wouldn't let her sleep." He turned haunted eyes on Merrin. "Her heart's begun to work inefficiently, Father. If she doesn't get rest pretty soon, she'll die of cardiac exhaustion."


Merrin looked grave. "Can you give her drugs? Some medicine to make her sleep?"


Karras shook his head. "No, that's dangerous. She might go into coma." He turned as Regan clucked like a hen. "If her blood pressure drops any more..." He trailed off.


"What can be done?" Merrin asked.


"Nothing... nothing..." Karras answered. "But I don't know---maybe new advances---" He said abruptly to Merrin, "I'm going to call in a cardiac specialist, Father."


Merrin nodded.


Karras went downstairs. He found Chris keeping vigil in the kitchen and from the room off the Pantry he heard Willie sobbing, heard the sound of Karras consoling voice. He explained the need for consultation, carefully not divulging the full extent of Regan's danger. Chris gave him permission, and Karras telephoned a friend, a noted specialist at the Georgetown University Medical School, awakening him and briefing him tersely.


"Be right there," said the specialist.


He was at the house in less than half an hour. In the bedroom he reacted with bewilderment to the cold and the stench and with horror and compassion to Regan's condition. She was now croaking gibberish. While the specialist examined her, she alternately sang and made animal noises. Then Dennings appeared.


"Oh, it's terrible,"' it whined at the specialist. "Just awful! Oh, I do hope there's something you can do! Is there something? We'll have no place to go, you see, otherwise, and all because... Oh, damn the stubborn devil!" As the specialist stared oddly while taking Regan's blood pressure, Dennings looked to Karras and complained, "What the hell are you doing! Can't you see the little bitch should be in hospital? She belongs in a madhouse, Karras! Now you know that! Really! Now let's stop all this cunting mumbo-jumbo! If she dies, you know, it's your fault! All yours! I mean, just because he's stubborn doesn't mean you should behave like a snot! You're a doctor! You should know better, Karras! Now come along; there's just a terrible shortage of housing these days. If we're---"


Back came the demon now, howling like a wolf. The specialist, expressionless, undid the sphygmomanometer wrapping. Then he nodded at Karras. He was finished.


They went out into the hall, where the specialist looked back at the bedroom door for a moment, and then turned to Karras. "What the hell's going on in there, Father?"


The Jesuit averted his face. "I can't say," he said softly.


"Okay."


"What's the story?"


The specialist's manner was somber. "She's got to stop that activity... sleep... go to sleep before the blood pressure drops...."


"Is there anything I can do, Bill?"


The specialist looked directly at Karras and said, "Pray."


He said good night and walked away. Karras watched him, every artery and nerve begging rest, begging hope, begging miracles though he knew none could be. "... You should not have given her the Librium!"


He turned back to the room and pushed open the door with a hand that was heavy as his soul.


Merrin stood by the bedside, watching while Regan neighed shrilly like a horse. He heard Karras enter -and looked at him inquiringly. Karras shook his head. Merrin nodded. There was sadness in his face; then acceptance; and as he turned back to Regan, there was grim resolve.


Merrin knelt by the bed. "Our Father..." he began.


Regan splattered him with dark and stinking bile, and then croaked, "You will lose! She will die! She will die!"


Karras picked up his copy of the Ritual. Opened it. Looked up and stared at Regan.


" 'Save your servant,' " prayed Merrin.


" 'In the face of the enemy.' "


In Karras' heart there was a desperate torment. Go to sleep! Go to sleep! roared his will in a frenzy.


But Regan did not sleep.


Not by dawn.


Not by noon.


Not by nightfall.


Not by Sunday, when the pulse rate was one hundred and forty, and ever threadier, while the fits continued unremittingly, while Karras and Merrin kept repeating the ritual, never sleeping, Karras feverishly groping for remedies: a restraining sheet to hold Regan's movements to a minimum; keeping everyone out of the bedroom for a time to see if lack of provocation might terminate the fits. It did not. And Regan's shouting was as draining as her movements. Yet the blood pressure held. But how much longer? Karras agonized. Ah, God, don't let her die! he cried repeatedly to himself. Don't let her die! Let her sleep! Let her sleep! Never was he conscious that his thoughts were prayers; only that the prayers were never answered.


At seven o'clock that Sunday evening, Karras sat mutely next to Merrin in the bedroom, exhausted and racked by the demonic attacks: his lack of faith; his incompetence; his flight from his mother in search of status. And Regan. His fault. "You should not have given her the Librium..."


The priests had just finished a cycle of the ritual. They were resting, listening to Regan singing "Panis Angelicus." They rarely left the room, Karras once to change clothes and to shower. But in the cold it was easier to stay wakeful; in the stench that since morning had altered in character to the gorge-raising odor of decayed, rotted flesh.


Staring feverishly at Regan with red-veined eyes, Karras thought he heard a sound. Something creaked. Again: As he blinked. And then he realized it was coming from his own crusted eyelids. He turned toward Merrin. Through the hours, the exorcist had said very little: now and then a homely story of his boyhood; reminiscences; little things; a story about a duck he owned named Clancy. Karras worried about him. The lack of sleep. The demon's attacks. At his age. Merrin closed his eyes and let his chin rest on his chest. Karras glanced around at Regan, and then wearily stood up and moved over to the bed. He checked her pulse and then began to take a blood pressure reading. As he wrapped the black sphygmomanometer cloth around the arm, he blinked repeatedly to clear the blurring of his vision.


"Today Muddir Day, Dimmy."


For a moment; he could not move; felt his heart wrenched from his chest. Then he looked into those eyes that seemed not Regan's anymore, but eyes sadly rebuking. His mother's.


"I not good to you? Why you leave me to die all alone, Dimmy? Why? Why you..."


"Damien!"


Merrin clutching tightly at his arm. "Please go and rest for a little now, Damien."


"Dimmy, please! Why you..."


Sharon came in to change the bedding.


"Go, rest for a little, Damien!" urged Merrin.


With a lump rising dry to his throat, Karras turned and left the bedroom. Stood weak in the hall. Then he walked down the stairs, and stood indecisively. Coffee? He craved it. But a shower even more, a change of clothing, a shave.


He left the house and crossed the street to the Jesuit residence hall. Entered. Groped to his room. And when he looked at his bed... Forget the shower. Sleep. Half an hour. As he reached for the telephone to tell Reception to awaken him, it rang.


"Yes, hello," he answer hoarsely.


"Someone waiting here to see you, Father Karras: a Mr. Kinderman."


For a moment, Karras held his breath and then, weakly, he answered, "Please tell him I'll be out in just a minute."


As he hung up the telephone, Karras saw the carton of Camels on his desk A note from Dyer was attached. He read blearily.


A key to the Playboy Club has been found on the chapel kneeler in front of the votive lights. Is it yours? You can claim it at Reception.


Without expression, Karras set down the note, dressed in fresh clothing and walked out of the room. He forgot to take the cigarettes.


In Reception, he saw Kinderman at the telephone switchboard counter, delicately rearranging the composition of a vase full of flowers. As he turned and saw Karras, he was holding the stem of a pink camellia.


"Ah, Father! Father Karras!" glowed Kinderman, his expression changing to concern at the exhaustion in the Jesuit's face. He quickly replaced the camellia and came forward to meet Karras. "You look awful! What's the matter? That's what comes of all this schlepping around the track? Give it up! Listen, come!" He gripped Karras by the elbow and propelled him toward the street. "You've got a minute?" he asked as they passed through the entry doors.


"Barely," murmured Karras. "What is it?"


"A little talk. I need advice, nothing more, just advice."


"What about?"


"In just a minute," waved Kinderman in dismissal.


"Now we'll walk. We'll take air. We'll enjoy." He linked his arm through the Jesuit's and guided him diagonally across Prospect Street. " Ah, now, look at that! Beautiful! Gorgeous!" He was pointing to the sun sinking low on the Potomac, and in the stillness rang the laughter and the talking-all-together of Georgetown undergraduates in front of a drinking hall near the corner of Thirty-sixth Street. One punched another one hard on the arm, and the two began wrestling amicably. "Ah, college, college..." breathed Kinderman ruefully, nodding as he stared. "I never went... but I wish... I wish..." He saw that Karras was watching the sunset. "I mean, seriously, you really look bad," he repeated. "What's the matter? You've been sick?"


When would Kinderman come to the point? Karras wondered. "No, just busy," he answered.


"Slow it down, then," wheezed Kinderman. "Slow. You know better. You saw the Bolshoi Ballet, incidentally, at the Watergate?"


"No."


"No, me neither. But I wish. They're so graceful... so cute!"


They had come to the Car Barn wall. Resting a forearm, Karras faced Kinderman, who had clasped his hands atop the wall and was staring pensively across the river. "Well, what's on your mind, Lieutenant?" asked Karras.


"Ah, well, Father," sighed Kinderman, "I'm afraid I've got a problem."


Karras flicked a brief glance up at Regan's shuttered window. "Professional?"


"Well, partly... only partly."


"What is it?"


"Well, mostly it's..." Hesitant, Kinderman squinted. "Well, mostly it's ethical, you could say, Father Karras... a question...." The detective turned around and leaned his back against the wall. He frowned at the sidewalk. Then he shrugged. "There's just no one I could talk to about it; not my captain in particular, you see. I just couldn't. I couldn't tell him. So I thought..." His face lit with sudden animation. "I had an aunt... you should hear this; it's funny. She was terrified---terrified---for years of my uncle. Never dared to say a word to him. Wouldn't dare to raise her voice. Never! So whenever she got mad at him for something---for whatever---right away, she'd run quick to the closet in her bedroom, and then there in the dark---you won't believe this!---in the dark, by herself, and the moths and the clothes hanging up, she mould curse---she would curse!---at my uncle for maybe twenty minutes! Tell exactly what she thought of him! Really! I mean, yelling! She'd come out, she'd feel better, she'd go kiss him on the cheek. Now what is that, Father Karras? That's good therapy or not!"


"It's very good," said Karras, smiling bleakly. "And I'm your closet now? Is that what you're saying?"


"In a way," said Kinderman. Again he looked down. "In a way. But more serious, Father Karras." He paused. "And the closet must speak," he added heavily.


"Got a cigarette?" asked Karras with shaking hands.


The detective looked up at him, blankly incredulous. "A condition like mine and I would smoke?"


"No, you wouldn't," murmured Karras, clasping hands atop the wall and staring at them. Stop shaking!


"Some doctor! God forbid I should be sick in some jungle and instead of Albert Schweitzer, there is with me only you! You cure warts still with frogs, Doctor Karras?"


"It's toads," Karras answered, subdued.


"You're not laughing today," worried Kinderman. "Something's wrong?"


Mutely Karras shook his head. Then, "Go ahead," he said softly.


The detective sighed and faced out to the river. "I was saying..." he wheezed. He scratched his brow with his thumbnail. "I was saying---well, lets say I'm working on a case, Father Karras. A homicide."


"Dennings?"


"No, no, purely hypothetical. You wouldn't be familiar with it. Nothing. Not at all."


Karras nodded.


"Like a ritual witchcraft murder, this looks," the detective continued broodingly. He was frowning, picking words slowly. "And let us say in this house----this hypothetical house---there are living five, and that one must be the killer." with his hand, he made flat, chopping motions of emphasis, "Now, I know this---I know this---I know this for a fact." Then he paused, slowly exhaling breath. "But then the problem.... All the evidence---well, It points to a child, Father Karras; a little girl maybe ten, twelve years old... just a baby; she could maybe be my daughter." He kept his eyes fixed on the embankment beyond them. "Yes, I know: sounds fantastic... ridiculous... but true. Now there comes to this house, Father, a priest---very famous---and this case being purely hypothetical, Father, I learn through my also hypothetical genius that this priest has once cured a very special type illness. An illness which is mental, by the way, a fact I mention just in passing for your interest."


Karras felt himself turning grayer by the moment.


"Now also there is... satanism involved in this illness, it happens, plus... strength... yes, incredible strength. And this... hypothetical girl, let us say, then, could... twist a man's head around, you see. Yes, she could." He was nodding now. "Yes... yes, she could. Now the question.." He grimaced thoughtfully. "You see... you see, the girl is not responsible, Father. She's demented." He shrugged. "And just a child! A child!" He shook his head. "And yet the illness that she has... it could be dangerous. She could kill someone else. Who's to know?" He again squinted out across the river. "It's a problem. What to do? Hypothetically, I mean. Forget it? Forget it and hope she gets"---Kinderman paused---"gets well?" He reached for a handkerchief. "Father, I don't know... I don't know." He blew his nose. "It's a terrible decision; just awful." He was searching for a clean, unused section of handkerchief. "Awful. And I hate to be the one who has to make it." He again blew his nose and lightly dabbed at a nostril. "Father, what would be right in such a case? Hypothetically? What do you believe would be the right thing to do?"


For an instant, the Jesuit throbbed with rebellion, with a dull, weary anger at the piling on of weight. He let it ebb. He met Kinderman's eyes and answered softly, "I would put it in the hands of a higher authority."


"I believe it is there at this moment," breathed Kinderman.


"Yes... and I would leave it there."


Their gazes locked. Then Kinderman pocketed the handkerchief. "Yes... yes, I thought you would say that." He nodded, then glanced at the sunset. "So beautiful. A sight" He tugged back his sleeve for a look at his wrist watch. "Ah, well, I have to go. Mrs. K will be shrieking now: 'The dinner, it's cold!' " He turned back to Karras. "Thank you, Father. I feel better... much better. Oh, incidentally, you could maybe do a favor? Give a message? If you meet a man named Engstrom, tell him---well, say, 'Elvira is in a clinic, she's all right.' He'll understand. Would you do that? I mean, if you should meet him."


Karras was puzzled. Then, "Sure," he said. "Sure."


"Look, we couldn't make a film some night, Father?"


The Jesuit looked down and murmured, "Soon."


" 'Soon.' You're like a rabbi when he mentions the Messiah: always 'Soon.' Listen, do me another favor, please, Father." The detective looked gravely concerned. "Stop this running round the track for a little. Just walk. Walk. Slow down. You'll do that?"


"I'll do that."


Hands in his pocket, the detective looked down at the sidewalk in resignation. "I know." He sighed wearily. "Soon. Always soon." As he started away, his head still lowered, he reached up a hand to the Jusuit's shoulder. Squeezed. "Elia Kazan sends regards:"


For a time, Karras watched him as he listed down the street. Watched with wonder. With fondness. And surprise at the heart's labyrinthine turnings. He. looked up at the clouds washed in pink above the river, then beyond to the west, where they drifted at the edge of the world, glowing faintly, like a promise remembered. He put the side of his fist against his lips and looked down against the sadness as it welled from his throat toward the corners of his eyes. He waited. Dared not risk another glance at the sunset. He looked up at Regan's window, then went back to the house.


Sharon let him in and said nothing had changed. She had a bundle of foul-smelling laundry in her hands. She excused herself. "I've got to get this downstairs to the washer."


He watched her. Thought of coffee. But now he heard the demon croaking viciously at Merrin. He started toward the staircase. Then remembered the message. Karl Where was he? He turned to ask Sharon and glimpsed her disappearing down the basement steps. In a fog, he went to the kitchen.


No Karl. Only Chris. She was sitting at the table looking down at... an album? Pasted photographs. Scraps of paper. Cupped hands at her forehead obscured her from his view.


"Excuse me," said Karras very softly. "Is Karl in his room?"


She shook her head. "He's on an errand," she whispered huskily. Karras heard her sniffle. Then, "There's coffee there, Father," Chris murmured. "It ought to perc in just a minute."


As Karras glanced over at the percolator light, he heard Chris getting up from the table, and when he turned he saw her moving quickly past him with her face averted. He heard a quavery "Excuse me." She left the kitchen.


His gaze shifted to the album. He walked over and looked down. Candid photos. A young girl. With a pang, Karras realized he was looking at Regan: here, blowing out candles on a whipped-creamy birthday cake; here, sitting on a lakefront dock in shorts and a T-shirt, waving gaily at the camera. Something was stenciled on the front of the T-shirt. CAMP... He could not make it out.


On the opposite page a ruled sheet of paper bore the script of a child: If instead of just clay I could take all the prettiest things Like a rainbow, Or clouds or the way a bird sings, Maybe then, Mother dearest, If I put them all together, I could really make a sculpture of you.


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


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


"If instead of just clay..."


The rage drained to sorrow and helpless frustration.


"... all the prettiest things..."


He could not wait for coffee. He must go... he must do something... help someone... try....


He left the kitchen. As he passed by the living room, he looked in. Chris was on the sofa, sobbing convulsively, and Sharon was comforting her. He looked away and walked up the stairs, heard the demon roaring frenziedly at Merrin. "... would have lost! You would have lost and you knew it! You scum, Merrin! Bastard! Come back! Come and..." Karras blocked it out.


"... or the way a bird sings..."


He realized as he entered the bedroom that he had forgotten to wear a sweater. He looked at Regan. The head was turned away from him, sideways, as the demon continued to rage.


"... All the prettiest..."


He went slowly to his chair and picked up a blanket, and only then, in his exhaustion, did he notice Merrin's absence. On the way back to Regan to take a blood-pressure reading, he nearly stumbled over him. Limp and disjointed, he lay sprawled face down on the floor beside the bed. Shocked, Karras knelt. Turned him over. Saw the bluish coloration of his face. Felt for pulse. And in a wrenching, stabbing instant of anguish, Karras realized that Merrin was dead.


"... saintly flatulence! Die, will you? Die? Karras, heal him!" raged the demon. "Bring him back and let us finish, let us..."


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


"... pious..."


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


"Even worms will not eat your corruption, you..."


Karras heard the words of the demon and began to tremble with a murderous fury.


Don't listen!


"... homosexual..."


Don't listen! Don't listen!


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


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


It was barely a minute later where Chris and Sharon heard the sounds from above. They were in the study and, dry-eyed, Chris sat in front of the bar while Sharon, behind it, was mixing them a drink. As she set the vodka and tonic on the bar, both the women glanced up at the ceiling. Stumblings. Sharp bumps against furniture. Walls. Then the voice of... the demon? The demon. Obscenities. But another voice. Alternating. Karras? Yes, Karras. Yet stronger. Deeper.


"No! I won't let you hurt them! You're not going to hurt them! You're coming with..."


Chris knocked her drink over as she flinched at a violent splintering, at the breaking of glass, and in an instant she and Sharon were racing from the study, up the stairs, to the door of Regan's bedroom, bursting in. They saw the shutters of the window on the floor, ripped off their hinges! And the window! The glass had been totally shattered!


Alarmed, they rushed forward toward the window, and as they did, Chris saw Merrin on the floor by the bed. She stood rooted in shock. Then she ran to him. Knelt. She gasped. "Oh, my God!" she whimpered "Sharon! Shar, come here! Quick, come---"


Sharon screamed from the window, and as Chris looked up bloodlessly, gaping, she ran again toward the door.


"Shar, what is it?"


"Father Karras! Father Karras!"


She bolted from the room in hysteria, and Chris got up and ran trembling to the window. She looked below and felt her heart dropping out of her body. At the bottom of the steps on busy M Street, Karras lay crumpled amid a gathering crowd.


She stared horrified. Paralyzed. Tried to move.


"Mother?"


A small, wan voice calling tearfully behind her. Chris gulped. Did not dare to believe or---"What's happening, Mother? Oh, please! Please come here! Mother, please! I'm afraid! I'm a---"


Chris turned quickly and saw the tears of confusion, the pleading; and suddenly she was racing to the bed, weeping, "Rags! Oh, my baby, my baby! Oh, Rags!"


Downstairs, Sharon lunged from the house and ran frantically to the Jesuit residence hall. She asked urgently for Dyer. He came quickly to Reception. She told him. He turned pale.


"Called an ambulance?"


"Oh, my God, I didn't think!"


Swiftly Dyer gave instructions to the switchboard operator, then he raced from the hall, followed closely by Sharon. Crossed the street. Down the steps.


"Let me through, please! Coming through!" As he pushed through the bystanders, Dyer heard murmurs of the litany of indifference. "What happened?"


"Some guy fell down the steps."


"Did you...?"


"Musta been drunk: See the vomit?"


"Come on, we'll be late for the..."


Dyer at last broke through, and for a heart-stop-ping instant felt frozen in a timeless dimension of grief, in a space where the air was too painful to breathe. Karras lay crumpled and twisted, on his back; with his head in the center of a growing pool of blood. He was staring vacantly, jaw slack. And now his eyes shifted numbly to Dyer. Leaped alive. Seemed to glow with an elation.


Some plea. Something urgent.


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

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