The Exorcist (31 page)

"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 preoccopied, 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 Kinderman.

"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-phehomena 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."