On Wednesday, May 11, they were back in the house. They put Regan to bed, installed a lock on the shutters and stripped all the mirrors from her bedroom and bathroom.
“… fewer and fewer lucid moments, and now there’s a total blacking out of her consciousness during the fits, I’m afraid. That’s new and would seem to eliminate genuine hysteria. In the meantime, a symptom or two in the area of what we call parapsychic phenomena have…”
Dr. Klein came by, and Chris attended with Sharon as he drilled them in proper procedures for administering Sustagen feedings to Regan during her periods of coma. He inserted the nasogastric tubing. “First…”
Chris forced herself to watch and yet still not see her daughter’s face; to grip at the words that the doctor was saying and push away others that she’d heard at the clinic.
“Now you stated ‘No religion’ here, Mrs. MacNeil. Is that right? No religious education at all?”
“Oh, well, maybe just ‘God.’ You know, general. Why?”
“Well, for one thing, the content of much of her raving—when it isn’t that gibberish she’s been spouting—is religiously oriented. Now where do you think she might have gotten that?”
“Well, first give me a for instance.”
“Okay, then: ‘Jesus and Mary, sixty-nine,’ for example.”
Klein had guided the tubing into Regan’s stomach. “First you check to see if fluid’s gotten into her lungs,” he instructed, pinching on the tube in order to clamp off the flow of Sustagen. “If it…”
“… syndrome of a type of disorder that you rarely ever see anymore, except among primitive cultures. We call it somnambuliform possession. Quite frankly, we don’t know much about it except that it starts with some conflict or guilt that eventually leads to the patient’s delusion that his body’s been invaded by an alien intelligence; a spirit, if you will. In times gone by, when belief in the devil was fairly strong, the possessing entity was usually a demon. In relatively modern cases, however, it’s mostly the spirit of someone dead, often someone the patient has known or seen and is able unconsciously to mimic as to the voice and the mannerisms, even the features of the face at rare times.”
After a gloomy Dr. Klein had left the house, Chris telephoned her agent in Beverly Hills and announced to him lifelessly that she definitely wouldn’t be directing “Hope.” Then she called Mrs. Perrin. She was out. Chris hung up the phone with a mounting dread. Who was it who could help her, she desperately wondered. Was there anyone? Anything? What?
“… Cases where it’s spirits of the dead are easier to deal with; you don’t find the rages in most of those cases, or the hyperactivity and motor excitement. However, in the other main type of somnambuliform possession, the new personality’s always malevolent, always hostile toward the first. Its primary aim, in fact, is to damage and sometimes even kill it.”
A set of restraining straps had been delivered to the Prospect Street house and Chris stood watching, wan and spent, while Karl affixed them, first to Regan’s bed and then to her wrists. As Chris moved a pillow in an effort to center it under Regan’s head, the Swiss straightened up and looked pityingly at the child’s ravaged face. “She is going to be well?” he asked.
Chris didn’t answer. As Karl was speaking, she had slipped out an object from under Regan’s pillow and was holding it up to her mystified gaze. Then her glance flicked to Karl as she snapped at him sternly, “Karl, who put this crucifix here?”
“The syndrome is only the manifestation of some conflict, of some guilt, so we try to get at it, find out what it is. Well, the best procedure in a case like this is hypnotherapy; however, we can’t seem to put her under. So then we took a shot at narcosynthesis, but it looks like another dead end.”
“So what’s next?”
“Mostly time. We’ll just have to keep trying and hoping there’s a change. In the meantime, she’s going to have to be hospitalized.”
Chris found Sharon in the kitchen setting up her typewriter on the table. She had just brought it up from the basement playroom. Willie sliced carrots at the sink for a stew.
With a current of tension and strain in her voice, Chris asked, “Was it you who put the crucifix under her pillow, Shar?”
Sharon looked befuddled. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t?”
“Chris, I don’t even know what you’re talking about! Look, I told you before, Chris, I told you on the plane, all I’ve ever said about religion to Rags is stuff like ‘God made the world’ and maybe things about—”
“Fine, Sharon, fine. I believe you, but—”
“Me, I don’t put it!” growled Willie defensively.
“Dammit, somebody put it there!” Chris suddenly erupted. Then she wheeled on Karl, who had entered the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. “Karl!” she called out to him sharply.
“Yes, Madam,” Karl answered her calmly without turning around. He was folding ice cubes into a face towel.
“Well, I’m asking you one more time,” Chris said grittily, her voice cracking and at the edge of shrillness: “Did you put that freaking crucifix under Regan’s pillow?”
“No, Madam. Not me. I don’t do it,” Karl answered as he plopped another ice cube into the towel.
“That fucking cross didn’t just walk up there, goddammit!” Chris shrieked as she spun around to Willie and Sharon. “Now which one of you is lying? Tell me!”
Karl stopped what he was doing and turned to study Chris. Her sudden rage had stunned the room, and now abruptly she slumped down into a chair, convulsively sobbing into trembling hands. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing!” she said tremulously as she wept. “Oh, my God, I don’t know!”
While Willie and Karl stood silently watching, Sharon came up behind Chris and started kneading her neck and shoulders with comforting hands. “Hey, okay. It’s okay.”
Chris wiped at her face with the back of a sleeve. “Yeah, I guess whoever did it”—she found a handkerchief in a pocket and blew her nose, then continued—“Whoever did it was only trying to help.”
“Look, I’m telling you again and you’d better believe it, I’m not about to put her into an asylum!”
“Ma’am, it isn’t an—”
“I don’t care what you call it! No way! I’m not letting her out of my sight!”
“I’m so sorry. We all are.”
“Yeah, sure. Jesus, eighty-eight doctors and all you can tell me with all of your bullshit is…!”
Chris tore the cellophane off a blue packet of Gauloises Blondes, an imported French cigarette, took a few deep puffs and then tamped it out rapidly in an ashtray and went upstairs to look in on Regan. When she opened the door, in the gloom of the bedroom, she made out a male figure by Regan’s bedside sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair, his arm outstretched and his hand over Regan’s brow. Chris moved closer. It was Karl. When Chris reached the bedside, he neither looked up at her, nor did he speak, but kept his gaze intently on the child’s face. There was something in the hand on Regan’s brow. What was it? Then she saw it was an improvised ice pack.
Surprised and touched, Chris appraised the stolid Swiss with a look of fondness that she had long ago misplaced; but when he neither moved nor acknowledged her presence, she turned away and quietly left the room. She went down to the kitchen, sat in the breakfast nook, drank coffee and stared off distantly in thought until, on a sudden impulse, she stood up and walked briskly toward the cherrywood paneled study.
“Possession is loosely related to hysteria insofar as the origin of the syndrome is almost always autosuggestive. Your daughter might have known about possession, believed in it, and possibly known about some of its symptoms, so that now her unconscious is producing the syndrome. Follow? Now if that can be firmly established, and you still won’t agree to hospitalization, you might want to take a stab at something that I’m going to suggest. It has only an outside chance of a cure, I would think, but still it’s a chance.”
“Oh, well, name it, for God’s sake! What is it?!”
“Have you ever heard of exorcism, Mrs. MacNeil?”
Chris was unfamiliar with the books in the study—they were part of the furnishings that came with the house—and now she was carefully scanning the titles.
“It’s a stylized ritual pretty much out of date in which rabbis and priests tried to drive out an evil spirit. It’s only the Catholics who haven’t discarded it yet, but they keep it pretty much in the closet as sort of an embarrassment, I think. But to someone who really thinks he’s possessed, I’d have to say that the ritual’s pretty impressive, and it used to work, in fact, although not for the reason they thought; it was purely the force of suggestion. The victim’s belief in possession helped cause it, and in just the same way his belief in the power of the exorcism can make it disappear. It’s—I see that you’re frowning. Well, of course; I know it sounds far-fetched. So let me tell you something similar that we know to be a fact. It has to do with Australian aborigines. They’re convinced that if some wizard thinks a ‘death ray’ at them from a distance, why, they’re definitely going to die. And the fact is that they do! They just lie down and slowly die! And the only thing that saves them, most times, is a similar form of suggestion: a counteracting ‘ray’ by another wizard.”
“Are you telling me to take my daughter to a witch doctor?”
“As a last-ditch, desperate measure—well, yes. I suppose that I’m saying exactly that. Take her to a Catholic priest. That’s a rather bizarre little piece of advice, I know, and maybe even a little bit dangerous, unless we can definitely ascertain whether or not your daughter knew anything at all about possession, and particularly exorcism, before any of her symptoms came on. Do you think she might have read it somewhere?”
“No.”
“Seen a movie about it? Something on the radio? TV?”
“No.”
“Read the gospels, maybe? The New Testament?”
“No, she hasn’t. Why are you asking?”
“There are quite a few accounts of possession in them and of exorcisms by Christ. The descriptions of the symptoms, in fact, are the same as in possession today, so—”
“Look, it’s just no good. Okay? Just forget it! That’s all I need is to have her father hear I called in a…!”
Chris’s fingertips moved from book to book, searching but so far finding nothing until—Hold it! Her eyes darted quickly back to a title on the bottom shelf. It was the book about witchcraft that Mary Jo Perrin had sent to her. Chris plucked it out and turned quickly to the table of contents, running her thumbnail slowly down the list until abruptly she stopped and thought, There! There it is! Soft thrills of surmise rippled through her. Were the doctors at Barringer right after all? Was this it? Had Regan plucked her disorder and her symptoms through autosuggestion from the pages of this book?
The title of a chapter was “States of Possession.”
Chris walked to the kitchen where Sharon was seated reading her shorthand from a propped-up notepad while typing a letter. Chris held up the book. “Have you ever read this, Shar?”
Still typing, Sharon asked, “Read what?”
“This book about witchcraft.”
Sharon stopped typing, turned her glance to Chris and the book, said, “No, I haven’t,” and turned back to her work.
“Never seen it? Never put it on a bookshelf in the study?”
“No.”
“Where’s Willie?”
“At the market.”
Chris nodded and stood silently pondering, then went back upstairs to Regan’s bedroom, where Karl still kept vigil at her daughter’s bedside.
“Karl!”
“Yes, Madam.”
Chris held up the book. “By any chance did you find this lying around and then put it with the rest of the books in the study?”
The houseman turned to Chris, expressionless, shifted his gaze to the book and then back to her. “No, Madam,” he said; “not me.” Then he turned his gaze back to Regan.
Okay then, maybe Willie.
Chris returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and, opening the book to the chapter on possession, she began to search for anything relevant, anything the doctors at Barringer Clinic thought might have given rise to Regan’s symptoms.
And found it.
Immediately derivative of the prevalent belief in demons was the phenomenon known as possession, a state in which many individuals believed that their physical and mental functions had been invaded and were being controlled by either a demon (most common in the period under discussion) or the spirit of someone dead. There is no period of history or quarter of the globe where this phenomenon has not been reported, and in fairly constant terms, and yet it is still to be adequately explained. Since Traugott Oesterreich’s definitive study, first published in 1921, very little has been added to the body of knowledge, the advances of psychiatry notwithstanding.
Chris frowned. Not fully explained? She’d had a different impression from the doctors at Barringer.
What is known is the following: that various people, at various times, have undergone massive transformations so complete that those around them feel they are dealing with another person. Not only the voice, the mannerisms, facial expressions and characteristic movements are sometimes altered, but the subject himself now thinks of himself as totally distinct from the original person and as having a name—whether human or demonic—and a separate history of its own. In the Malay Archipelago, where possession even now is an everyday, common occurrence, the possessing spirit of someone dead often causes the possessed to mimic its gestures, voice and mannerisms so strikingly, that relatives of the deceased will burst into tears. But aside from so-called quasi-possession—those cases that are ultimately reducible to fraud, paranoia and hysteria—the problem has always lain with interpreting the phenomena, the oldest interpretation being the spiritist, an impression that is likely to be strengthened by the fact that the intruding personality may have accomplishments quite foreign to the first. In the demoniacal form of possession, for example, the “demon” may speak in languages unknown to the first personality.
There! Regan’s gibberish! An attempt at a language? Chris read on quickly:
… or manifest various parapsychic phenomena, such as telekinesis for example: the movement of objects without application of material force.
The rappings? The flinging up and down on the bed?
… In cases of possession by the dead, there are manifestations such as Oesterreich’s account of a monk who, abruptly, while possessed, became a gifted and brilliant dancer although he had never, before his possession, had occasion to dance so much as a step. So impressive, at times, are these manifestations that Jung, the psychiatrist, after studying a case at first hand, could offer only partial explanation for what he was certain could “not have been fraud”…
Chris frowned. The tone of this was worrisome.
… and William James, the greatest psychologist that America has ever produced, resorted to positing “the plausibility of the spiritualist interpretation of the phenomenon” after closely studying the so-called “Watseka Wonder,” a teen-aged girl in Watseka, Illinois, who became indistinguishable in personality from a girl named Mary Roff who had died in a state insane asylum twelve years prior to the possession…
Riveted, Chris did not hear the doorbell chime; did not hear Sharon stop typing and go to the door.
The demoniacal form of possession is usually thought to have had its origin in early Christianity; yet in fact both possession and exorcism pre-date the time of Christ. The ancient Egyptians as well as the earliest civilizations of the Tigris and the Euphrates believed that physical and spiritual disorders were caused by invasion of the body by demons. The following, for example, is the formula for exorcism against maladies of children in ancient Egypt: “Go hence, thou who comest in darkness, whose nose is turned backwards, whose face is upside down. Hast thou come to kiss this child? I will not let thee…”
“Chris?”
“Shar, I’m busy.”
“There’s a homicide detective wants to see you.”
“Oh, Christ, Sharon, tell him to—” Abruptly Chris stopped, then looked up and said, “Oh. Yeah, sure, Sharon. Tell him to come in. Let him in.” Sharon left and Chris stared at the pages of the book, unseeing, gripped by some formless yet gathering premonition of dread. Sound of a door being closed. Sound of walking this way. A sense of waiting. Waiting? For what? Like the vivid dream one can never remember, Chris felt an expectancy that seemed known and yet undefined.
His hat brim crumpled in his hands, he came in with Sharon, wheezing and listing and deferential. “I am really so sorry,” Kinderman said as he approached. “Yes, you’re busy. I can see that. I’m a bother.”
“How’s the world?” Chris asked him.
“Very bad. And how’s your daughter?”
“No change.”
“I’m so sorry.” Breathing adenoidally, Kinderman was standing by the table now, his drooping beagle eyes moist with concern. “Look, I wouldn’t even bother; I mean, your daughter; it’s a worry. God knows, when my little girl Julie was down with the—What, now? What was it? Can’t remember. It—”
“Why don’t you sit down,” Chris cut in.
“Oh, yes, thank you very much,” the detective exhaled gratefully while settling his bulk in a chair across from Sharon, who, seemingly oblivious, continued to type.
“Sorry. You were saying?” Chris asked.
“Well, my daughter, she—oh, well, no. Never mind. I get started, I’ll be telling you my whole life story, you could maybe make a film of it. No, really! It’s incredible! If you only knew half the crazy things that used to happen in my family, you would—No. No, never mind. All right, one! I’ll tell one! Like my mother, every Friday she would make for us gefilte fish, all right? Only all week long—the whole week—no one gets to take a bath on account of my mother has the carp in the bathtub, it’s swimming back and forth, back and forth, because my mother said this cleaned out the poison in its system. I mean, really, who knew! Who knew that carp the whole time are all thinking all these horrible and evil, vindictive thoughts! Oh, well, enough now. Really. Only now and then a laugh just to keep us from crying.”
Chris studied him. Waiting.
“Ah, you’re reading!” The detective was looking down at the book on witchcraft. “For a film?”
“No, just passing the time.”
“Is it good?”
“I just started it.”
“Witchcraft,” Kinderman murmured, his head angled to the side as he read the book’s title at the top of a page.
“So okay now, what’s doin’?” Chris asked.
“Yes, I’m sorry. You’re busy. I’ll finish. As I said, I wouldn’t bother you, except…”
“Except what?”
Looking suddenly grave, the detective clasped his hands together on the polished pine tabletop. “Well, it seems that Burke—”
“Damn it!” snapped Sharon irritably as she ripped out a letter from the platen of the typewriter, crumpled it up in her hands and then errantly tossed it at a wastepaper basket close to Kinderman’s feet. He and Chris had turned their heads to stare at her, and when the secretary saw them, she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even know you were there!”
“You’re Miss Fenster?” asked Kinderman.
“Spencer,” Sharon corrected him as she slid her chair back and got up to retrieve the balled-up letter from the floor with a murmured “I never said I was Julius Erving.”
“Never mind, never mind,” the detective told her as, reaching to the floor near his foot, he picked up the crumpled page.
“Oh, thanks.” Sharon stopped and went back to her chair.
“Excuse me—you’re the secretary?” Kinderman asked her.
“Sharon, this is—” Chris turned to Kinderman. “Sorry,” she said to him. “Your name again?”
“Kinderman. William F. Kinderman.”
“This is Sharon; Sharon Spencer.”
With a courtly tilt and nod of the head, the detective told Sharon, “It’s a pleasure.” Sharon was now bent forward, eyeing him curiously, her chin resting on folded arms atop the typewriter. “And perhaps you can help me,” the detective added.
Her arms still folded, Sharon sat up and said, “Me?”
“Yes, perhaps. On the night of Mr. Dennings’s demise, you went out to a drugstore and left him alone in the house, am I correct?”
“Well, not exactly. Regan was here.”
“That’s my daughter,” Chris clarified.
“Spelling?”
“R-e-g-a-n,” Chris told him.
“Lovely name,” said Kinderman.
“Thank you.”
The detective turned back to Sharon. “Now Dennings had come here that night to see Mrs. MacNeil?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“He expected her shortly?”
“Yes, I told him I expected her back pretty soon.”
“Very good. And you left at what time? You remember?”
“Let’s see. I was watching the news, so I guess—oh, no, wait—yes, that’s right. I remember being bothered because the pharmacist said the delivery boy had gone home and I said, ‘Oh, come on now,’ or something about it only being about six-thirty. Then Burke came along just ten, maybe twenty minutes after that.”
“So a median,” concluded the detective, “would have put him here at six-forty-five. Not so?”
“And so what’s this all about?” Chris asked him.
The nebulous tension she’d been feeling had mounted.
“Well, it raises a question, Mrs. MacNeil. To arrive at the house at, say, quarter to seven and leave only twenty minutes later…”
Chris shrugged. “Oh, well, that was Burke,” she said. “Just like him.”
“Was it also like him,” Kinderman asked, “to frequent the bars down on M Street?”
“No. Not at all. Not that I know of.”
“No, I thought not. I made a little check. And so he wouldn’t have had a reason to be at the top of those steps beside your house after leaving here that night. And was it also not his custom to travel by taxi? He wouldn’t call a cab from your house when he left?”
“Yes, he would. At least, he always did.”
“Then one wonders—not so?—why or how he came to be there that night. And one wonders why taxicab companies do not show a record of calls from this house on that night, except for the one that picked up your Miss Spencer here at precisely six-forty-seven.”
Her voice drained of color, Chris said softly, “I don’t know.”
“No, I doubted that you would,” the detective told her.