The Exorcist (24 page)

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

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

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

Regan screaming in anguish; in terror; imploring!

Kark! Karl bellowing angrily at Regan!

Chris bolted from the kitchen.

God almighty, what's happening?

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

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

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

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

The threatening bellow, the words, came from Regan, her voice coarse and guttural, bristling with venom, while in an instantaneous flash her expression and features were hideously transmuted into those of the feral, demonic personality that had appeared in the course of hypnosis. And now faces and voices, as Chris watched stunned, interchanged with rapidity:

"No!"

"You'll do it!"

"Please!"

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

"Please!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She screamed until she fainted.

(End of part two * Scanned and fully proofed by nihua)

III: The Abyss

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

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

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

CHAPTER ONE

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

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

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

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

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

"Miss MacNeil? I'm Father Karras."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Human?" he interjected with a smile.

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

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

"Right now I'd smoke rope."

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

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

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

"Like what?"

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

"Thanks, Father."

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

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

"New York."

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

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

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

"That's right."

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

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

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

"Who?"

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

"Oh, I see."

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

"Where?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I am."

"Pretty close?"

"Pretty close."

"Did he talk about the party?"

"At your house?"

"At my house."

"Yes, he said you seemed human."

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

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

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

"No."

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

"He never mentioned her."

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

"That depends," answered Karras.

"On what?"

"On the priest."

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

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

"Yes, that's right."

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

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

"You wouldn't."

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

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

"Beg pardon?"

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

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

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

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

"Since when?"

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

'You kidding?"

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

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

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