She was standing on the Key Bridge walkway, arms atop the parapet, fidgeting, waiting, while homeward-bound traffic stuttered thickly behind her as 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 floated up from below her: a blue-jeaned young couple in a rented canoe. With a quick, nervous gesture, she flicked ash from her cigarette, the last in her pack, 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 chinos and sweater coming closer, slowing down as he reached her. Peripherally, she saw him rest a forearm on the top of the parapet and quickly averted her gaze toward Virginia. Another autograph seeker? Or worse?
“Chris MacNeil?”
Flipping her cigarette butt into the river, Chris said coldly, “Keep moving, or, I swear, I’ll yell for a cop!”
“Miss MacNeil? I’m Father Karras.”
Chris started, then reddened, jerking swiftly around to the chipped, rugged face. “Oh my God! Oh, I’m so sorry!” She was tugging at her sunglasses, flustered, then immediately pushing them back as the sad, dark eyes probed hers.
“I should have told you that I wouldn’t be in uniform.”
The voice was cradling, stripping her of burden. The priest had clasped his hands together on the parapet, veined Michelangelos, sensitive and large. “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,” Chris retorted. “I just thought you were—”
“Human?” Karras finished with a faint, wry smile.
Chris appraised him, and then, nodding and returning the smile, she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I knew that the first time I saw you.”
“When was that?”
“On the campus one day while we were filming. Got a cigarette, Father?”
Karras reached into the pocket of his shirt.
“Can you go a nonfilter?”
“Right now I’d smoke rope.”
“On my allowance, I frequently do.”
Smiling tightly, Chris nodded. “Yeah, right. Vow of poverty,” she murmured as she slipped out a cigarette from the packet the priest was holding out to her. Karras reached into a trouser pocket for matches.
“A vow of poverty has its uses,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Makes rope taste better.” Again, a half smile as he watched Chris’s hand that was holding the cigarette. It was trembling, the cigarette wavering in quick, erratic jumps, and without pausing, he took it from her fingers, put it up to his mouth and, cupping his hands around the match, he lit the cigarette, puffed, and then gave it back to Chris, saying, “Awful lot of breeze from all these cars going by.”
Chris looked at him appraisingly, with gratitude, and even with hope. She knew what he’d done. “Thanks, Father” she said, and then 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? I mean, originally.”
“New York,” he said.
“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 little smile. “But I don’t have to make those decisions.”
Chris shook her head and looked aside. “God, I’m dumb,” she said. “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?”
He was anxious to know what the urgent problem was that she’d mentioned when she called him at the residence. She was feeling her way, he sensed—but toward what? He must not prod. 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. Places like that.”
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.
Chris nodded her head in approval. “Not bad,” she said.
“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 and then flipping it out to the river “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 the Jesuit’s awareness drifted a warning about women with neurotic attractions to priests, women 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 at the end of a flimsy bridge overhanging an abyss. “If he came to me for spiritual help, I’d say, no,” he answered.
“You wouldn’t turn him in?”
“No, I wouldn’t. But I’d try to persuade him to turn himself in.”
“And how do you go about getting an exorcism?”
There was a pause while Karras stared.
“Beg pardon?” he said at last.
“If a person’s possessed by some kind of a demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?”
Karras looked off, took a breath, then looked back to her. “Oh, well, first you’d have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century.”
Puzzled, Chris frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it just doesn’t happen anymore.”
“Oh, really? Since when?”
“Since when? Since we learned about mental illness and schizophrenia and split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard.”
“Are you kidding?”
Chris’s voice had wavered, sounding helpless, confused, and Karras instantly regretted his flipness. Where had it come from? he wondered. It had leaped to his tongue unbidden.
“Many educated Catholics,” he said 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.”
“Oh, are you really a priest or from Central Casting?” Chris blurted with a suddenly bitter, disappointed sharpness. “I mean, what about all of those stories in the Bible about Christ driving out all those demons?”
Karras answered spontaneously with heat, “Look, if Christ had said those people who were supposedly possessed had schizophrenia, which I imagine they did, they would probably have crucified him three years earlier.”
“Oh, really?” Chris put a shaking hand to her sunglasses, deepening her voice in an effort at control. “Well, it happens, Father Karras, that someone very close to me is probably possessed and needs an exorcism. Will you do it?”
To Karras, it suddenly seemed unreal: Key Bridge; motor traffic; across the river, the Hot Shoppe with frozen milk shakes and beside him a movie star asking for an exorcism. As he stared at her, groping for an answer, she slipped off her oversized dark sunglasses and Karras felt a wincing shock at the redness, at the desperate pleading in those haggard eyes. And suddenly realized that the woman was serious. “Father Karras, it’s my daughter,” she pleaded. “My daughter!”
“Then all the more reason,” he said to her soothingly, “to forget about getting an exorcism and—”
“Why?” Chris suddenly burst out in a voice that was cracking and strident and distraught. “Tell me why! God, I don’t understand!”
Karras took hold of her wrist in an effort to calm her. “In the first place,” he told her, “it could make things worse.”
Incredulous, Chris scrunched up her face and said, “Worse?”
“Yes, worse. That’s right. Because the ritual of exorcism is dangerously suggestive. It could implant the notion of possession where it didn’t exist before, or if it did, it could tend to fortify it.”
“But—”
“And secondly,” Karras overrode her, “before the Catholic Church approves an exorcism, it conducts an investigation to see if it’s warranted, and that takes time. In the meantime, your—”
“Couldn’t you do it yourself?” Chris’s lower lip was slightly trembling now, her eyes filling up with tears.
“Look, every priest has the power to exorcise, but he has to have Church approval, and frankly, it’s rarely ever given, so—”
“Can’t you even look at her?”
“Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could, but—”
“She needs a priest!” Chris cried out suddenly, her features contorted with anger and fear. “I’ve taken her to every god-damn, fucking doctor, psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you; now you send me to them?”
“But your—”
“Jesus Christ, won’t somebody help me?”
The heart-stopping shriek bolted raw above the river, sending startled flocks of birds shooting up into the air from its grassy banks with a sound of cawing and a thousand flapping wings. “Oh my God, someone help me!” Chris moaned as, sobbing convulsively, she crumpled to Karras’s chest. “Oh, please help me! Please! Please, help!”
The Jesuit looked down at her, and then lifted up comforting hands to her head as the riders in traffic-locked automobiles glanced out windows to watch them with passing disinterest.
“It’s all right,” Karras told her. He wanted only to calm her; to stem her hysteria. “My daughter?” No, it was Chris who needed psychiatric help, he believed. “It’s all right. I’ll go see her,” he told her. “I’ll see her right now. Come on, let’s go.”
With that sense of unreality still lingering, Karras let her lead him to the house in silence and with thoughts of his next day’s lecture at the Georgetown Medical School. He had yet to prepare his notes.
As they climbed the front stoop, Karras glanced at his watch. It was ten before six. He looked down the street at the Jesuit residence hall as he realized he would now miss dinner. “Father Karras?” The priest turned to look at Chris. About to turn her key in the front door lock, she had hesitated and turned to him. “Do you think you should be wearing your priest clothes?” she said.
Karras eyed her with a pity that he tried to conceal. Her face and her voice: how helplessly childlike they were. “Too dangerous,” he told her.
“Okay.”
Chris turned back and started opening the door, and it was then that Karras felt it: a chill, tugging warning. It scraped through his bloodstream like particles of ice.
“Father Karras?”
He looked up. Chris had entered.
For a hesitant moment the priest stood unmoving; then slowly and deliberately, as if he had made a decision to do so, he went forward, stepping into the house with an odd sense of ending.
Karras heard commotion. Upstairs. A deep, booming voice was thundering obscenities, threatening in anger and in hate and frustration. Taken aback, he turned to Chris with a look of wonderment. She was staring at him mutely. Then she moved on ahead. He followed her upstairs and along a hall to where Karl was standing with his head bent low over folded arms just opposite the door to Regan’s bedroom. At this close range, the voice from the bedroom was so loud that it almost seemed amplified electronically. As Karl looked up at their approach, the priest saw bafflement and fright in his eyes as in an awed and cracking voice he said to Chris, “It wants no straps.”
Chris turned to Karras. “I’ll be back in a second,” she told him, the words coming dully from a worn-out soul. Karras watched her as she turned and walked away down the hall and then into her bedroom. She left the door open behind her.
Karras turned his glance to Karl. The houseman was staring at him intently. “You are priest?” he asked.
Karras nodded, then looked quickly back to Regan’s bedroom door. The raging voice had been abruptly displaced by the long, strident lowing of some animal that might have been a steer. Something prodding at Karras’s hand. He looked down. “That’s her,” Chris was saying; “that’s Regan.” She was handing him a photograph and he took it. Young girl. Very pretty. Sweet smile.
“That was taken four months ago,” Chris said dreamily. She took back the photo and motioned with her head at the bedroom door. “Now you go and take a look at her now.” Chris leaned back against the wall beside Karl, and with her eyes cast down, her arms folded across her chest, she said hopelessly and quietly, “I’ll wait here.”
“Who’s in there with her?” Karras asked.
Chris looked up at him, expressionless. “No one.”
The priest held her haunted gaze and then turned with a frown to the bedroom door, and as he grasped the doorknob, the sounds from within abruptly ceased. In the ticking silence, Karras hesitated, then slowly entered the room, almost flinching backward at the pungent stench of moldering excrement that hit his face and his nostrils like a palpable blast. Reining in his revulsion, he closed the door and then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back on the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite, as they fixed upon his; as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal mask of unthinkable malevolence. Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled and thickly matted hair; to the wasted arms and legs and distended stomach jutting up so grotesquely; then back to the eyes: they were watching him … pinning him … shifting now to follow as he moved to a desk and chair near the large bay window. Karras fought to sound calm, even warm and friendly. “Hello, Regan,” he said. He picked up the chair and took it over by the bed. “I’m a friend of your mother’s,” he said, “and she tells me that you’re very, very sick.” Karras sat down. “Do you think you’d like to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked. “I’d like to help you.”
Regan’s eyes gleamed fiercely, unblinking, as a yellowish saliva dribbled down from a corner of her mouth to her chin, to her lips stretched taut into a feral grin of bow-mouthed mockery.
“Well, well, well,” she gloated sardonically and hairs prickled up on the back of Karras’s neck at a voice that was deep and thick with menace and power. “So it’s you … they sent you!” she continued as if pleased. “Well, we’ve nothing to fear from you at all.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Karras answered; “I’m your friend and I’d like to help you.”
“You might loosen these straps, then,” Regan croaked. She had tugged up her wrists so that now Karras noticed they were bound with a double set of leather restraining straps.
“Are the straps uncomfortable for you?”
“Extremely. They’re a nuisance. An infernal nuisance.”
The eyes glinted slyly with secret amusement.
Karras saw the scratch marks on Regan’s face; the cuts on her lips where apparently she’d bitten them. “I’m afraid you might hurt yourself, Regan,” he told her.
“I’m not Regan,” she rumbled, still with that taut and hideous grin that Karras now guessed was her permanent expression. How incongruous the braces on her teeth looked, he thought. “Oh, I see,” he said, nodding. “Well, then, maybe we should introduce ourselves. I’m Damien Karras. Who are you?”
“I’m the Devil!”
“Ah, good.” Karras nodded approvingly. “Now we can talk.”
“A little chat?”
“If you wish.”
“Yes, I would like that,” Regan said, drooling a little from a corner of her mouth. “However, you will find that I cannot talk freely while bound with these straps. As you know, I’ve spent much of my time in Rome and I’m accustomed to gesturing, Karras. Now then, kindly undo the straps.”
What precocity of language and thought, reflected Karras. He leaned forward in his chair with a mixture of amazement and professional interest. “You say you’re the Devil?” he asked.
“I assure you.”
“Then why don’t you just make the straps disappear?”
“Come, that’s much too vulgar a display of power. After all, I’m a prince! ‘The Prince of This World,’ as some very strange person said of me once. Can’t quite remember who.” A low chuckle. Then, “I much prefer persuasion, Karras; togetherness; community involvement. Moreover, if I loosen the straps myself, I deny you the opportunity of performing a charitable act.”
Incredible! thought Karras. “But a charitable act,” he parried, “is a virtue and that’s what the Devil would want to prevent; so in fact I’d be helping you now if I didn’t undo the straps. Unless, of course”—Karras shrugged—“unless of course you really aren’t the devil, and in that case I probably would undo them.”
“How very foxy of you, Karras. If only dear Herod were here to enjoy this.”
Karras stared with narrowed eyes and an even deeper interest. Was she punning on Christ’s calling Herod “that fox”? “Which Herod?” he asked. “There were two. Are you talking about the King of Judea?”
“No, I am talking about the tetrarch of Galilee!” Regan shot back at Karras in a voice raised to blast him with scorching contempt; then abruptly she was grinning again as she quietly cajoled in that soft and sinister voice, “There, you see how these damnable straps have upset me? Undo them. Undo them and I’ll tell you the future.”
“Very tempting.”
“My forte.”
“But then how do I know you really can read the future?”
“Because I’m the Devil, you ass!”
“Yes, you say so, but you won’t give me proof.”
“You have no faith.”
Karras stiffened. Paused. “No faith in what?”
“Why in me, my dear Karras; in me!” Something mocking and malicious danced hidden in those eyes. “All these proofs, all these signs in the sky!”
Karras barely had a grip on his composure as he answered, “Well, now, something very simple might do. For example, the Devil knows everything, correct?”
“No, in fact I know almost everything, Karras. There, you see? They keep saying that I’m proud. I am not. Now then, what are you up to, sly fox? Spit it out!”
“Well, I thought we might test the extent of your knowledge.”
“Very well, then. How’s this? The largest lake in South America,” the Regan-thing japed, her eyes bulging with mocking glee, “is Lake Titicaca in Peru! Will that do it?”
“No, I’ll have to ask something only the Devil would know.”
“Ah, I see. Such as what?”
“Where is Regan?”
“She is here.”
“Where is ‘here’?”
“In the piglet.”
“Let me see her.”
“Why, Karras? Do you want to fuck her? Loose these straps and I will let you go at it!”
“I want to see if you’re telling me the truth. Let me see her.”
“Very succulent cunt,” Regan leered, her furred and lolling tongue licking spittle across dry, cracked lips. “But a poor conversationalist, my friend. I strongly advise you to stay with me.”
“Well, it’s obvious you don’t know where she is”—Karras shrugged—“so apparently you aren’t the Devil.”
“I am!” Regan bellowed with a sudden jerk forward, her face contorting with rage. Karras shivered as the terrifying voice boomed and crackled off the walls of the room. “I am!”
“Well, then, let me see Regan. That would prove it.”
“There are much better ways! I will show you! I will read your mind!” the Regan creature seethed furiously. “Think of a number between one and one hundred!”
“No, that wouldn’t prove a thing. I would have to see Regan.”
Abruptly it chuckled, leaning back against the headboard.
“No, nothing would prove anything at all to you, Karras. That is why I love all reasonable men. How splendid! How splendid indeed! In the meantime, we shall try to keep you properly beguiled. After all, now, we would not wish to lose you.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Karras probed with a quick, alert interest.
“We are quite a little group in the piglet,” came the answer.
“Ah, yes, quite a little multitude. Later I may see about discreet introductions. In the meantime, I am suffering from a maddening itch that I cannot reach. Would you loosen one strap for a moment? Just one?”
“No, just tell me where it itches and I’ll scratch it.”
“Ah, sly, very sly!”
“Show me Regan and perhaps I’ll undo one strap,” offered Karras. “That’s providing she’s—”
Abruptly the priest flinched in shock as he found himself staring into eyes filled with terror and a mouth gaping wide in a soundless shriek for help; but then quickly the Regan identity vanished in a blurringly rapid remolding of features as, “For pity’s sakes, won’t you kindly remove these cunting straps?” asked a wheedling voice in a clipped British accent just before, in a flash, the demonic personality returned. “Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?” it croaked, and then it threw back its head in wild and high-pitched laughter.
Stunned, Karras leaned back, as he felt the glacial hands at the back of his neck again, more palpable now, and more clearly something more than suggestion.
The Regan-thing broke off its laughter and fixed him with taunting eyes. “Feeling icy hands? Oh, incidentally, your mother is in here with us, Karras. Would you like to leave a message? I will see that she gets it.” Mocking laughter. And then suddenly Karras was leaping out of his chair as he dodged a projectile stream of vomit. It caught a portion of his sweater and one of his hands.
His face drained of color, the priest looked down at the bed; at Regan cackling with glee as his hand dripped vomit onto the rug. “If that’s true,” he said numbly, “then you must know my mother’s first name.”
“Oh, I do.”
“Well, what is it?”
The Regan-thing hissed at him, mad eyes gleaming, and the head gently undulating from side to side like a cobra’s.
“What is it?” Karras repeated.
With her eyes rolling upward into their sockets, Regan lowed like a steer in an angry bellow that pierced the shutters and shivered through the glass of the large bay window. For a time Karras watched as the bellowing continued; then he looked at his hand and walked out of the room.
Chris pushed herself quickly away from the wall as she glanced with distress at the Jesuit’s sweater. “What happened? Did she vomit?”
“Got a towel?” Karras asked her.
“There’s a bathroom right there!” Chris said hurriedly, pointing at a hallway door. “Karl, go in and take a look at her!” she instructed over her shoulder as she followed the priest to the bathroom. “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed.
The Jesuit moved to the washbasin.
“Have you got her on tranquilizers?” he asked.
Chris turned on the water taps and answered, “Yes, Librium. Here, take off that sweater and then you can wash.”
“What dosage?” Karras asked as he tugged at the sweater with his clean left hand.
“Here, I’ll help you.” Chris pulled at the sweater from the bottom. “Well, today she’s had four hundred milligrams, Father.”
“Four hundred?”
Chris had the sweater pulled up to his chest. “Yeah, that’s how we got her into those straps. It took all of us together to—”
“You gave your daughter four hundred milligrams at once?”
“She’s so strong you can’t believe it. Get your arms up, Father.”
“Okay.”
He raised them and Chris pulled the sweater up and off, pulled back the shower curtain and tossed the sweater into the bathtub. “I’ll have Willie get it cleaned for you, Father.” She dejectedly sat down on the edge of the bathtub and slipped a pink towel off a towel bar, her hand inadvertently covering the word Regan embroidered in navy blue script. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” Karras unbuttoned the right sleeve of his starched white shirt and rolled it up, exposing a matting of fine brown hairs on a thickly muscled forearm as he asked, “Is she taking any nourishment at all?” He held his hand underneath the hot-water tap to rinse away the vomit.
“No, Father. Just Sustagen when she’s been sleeping. But she ripped out the tubing.”
“Ripped it out? When?”
“Today.”
Disturbed, Karras soaped and rinsed his hands, and after a thoughtful pause he said gravely, “Your daughter really needs to be in a hospital.”
Chris lowered her head. “I just can’t do that, Father,” she said in a soft, flat, toneless voice.
“Why can’t you”
“I just can’t,” Chris repeated in a husky, dead whisper. “She … she’s done something, Father, and I can’t take the risk of someone else finding out. Not a doctor … not a nurse … not anyone.”
Frowning, Karras turned off the water taps. “What if a person, let’s say, was a criminal.” Troubled, he looked down at the wash-basin, gripping its sides. “Who’s been giving her the Sustagen? the Librium? her medicines?”
“We are. Her doctor showed us how.”
“You need prescriptions.”
“Well, you could do some of that, couldn’t you, Father?”
His thoughts now spinning, Karras turned to her, his hands upraised, as he met Chris’s haunted, vanquished gaze. He nodded toward the towel in her hands, and said, “Please.”
Chris stared at him blankly and said, “What?”
“The towel, please,” Karras said softly.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Very quickly, Chris fumbled it out to him, and as the Jesuit dried his hands, she asked him with a tightly searching expectancy, “So now, Father, what’s it look like? Do you think she’s possessed?”