Marin marin karras let us be let us…

English! Senseless! But still English!

How on earth could she do that? Karras marveled.

He listened to it all, rewound the tape and played it through again. And again. And then realized that the order of speech was inverted. He stopped the tape, rewound it, and with a pencil and a writing tablet at hand, 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. [unintelligible] will die. Little time. Now the [unintelligible]. Let her die. No, no, sweet! It is sweet in the body! I feel! There is [unintelligible]. Better [unintelligible] than the void. I fear the priest. Give us time. Fear the priest! He is [unintelligible]. No, not this one: the [unintelligible], the one who [unintelligible]. He is ill. Ah, the blood, feel the blood, how it [sings?].

Karras asked on the tape, “Who are you?” with the answer:

I am no one. I am no one.

Then Karras: “Is that your name?” And the answer:

I have no name. I am no one. Many. Let us be. Let us warm in the body. Do not [unintelligible] from the body into void, into [unintelligible]. Leave us. Leave us. Let us be. Karras. Merrin. Merrin.

Again and again Karras read his transcription over, haunted by its tone, by the feeling that more than one person was speaking, until finally repetition itself dulled the words into commonness and he set down the transcription 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 … something at the rim of memory. Then he remembered. He went to his shelves for a book: Jung’s Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena. Something similar here, he was thinking as he rapidly searched through the pages of the book. What was it?

He found it: an account of an experiment with automatic writing in which the unconscious of the subject seemed able to answer his questions with 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 Clelia 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 who was I talking to yesterday? With nobody.

Karras stopped reading and shook his head. There was nothing paranormal here, he thought, only proof of the limitless abilities of the mind. He reached for a cigarette, sat down and lit it. “I am no one. Many.” Where did it come from, Karras wondered, this eerie content of Regan’s speech? From the same place Clelia had come from? Emergent personalities?

“Merrin … Merrin…” “Ah, the blood…” “He is ill…”

His eyes haunted, Karras glanced at his copy of Satan and moodily leafed to the opening inscription: “Let not the dragon be my leader…” Closing his eyes as he exhaled smoke, Karras lifted a fist to his mouth as he coughed, and, aware of his throat feeling raw and inflamed, he crushed out the cigarette in an ashtray. Exhausted, he slowly and awkwardly got up, flicked out the room light, shuttered his window blinds, kicked off his shoes and collapsed facedown on his narrow cot. Fevered fragments spun and tumbled through his mind: Regan. Kinderman. Dennings. What to do? He must help! He had to help! But 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, of getting under the covers.

Too tired. This burden. He wanted to be free.

“… Let us be!”

As he began the slow drift into granite sleep, Karras’s lips moved almost imperceptibly, forming the soundless words “Let me be.” And then suddenly he was lifting his head, awakened by adenoidal breathing and the soft sound of cellophane being crinkled, and opening his eyes he saw a stranger in his room, a slightly overweight, middle-aged, freckle-faced priest with thin strands of red hair that were combed straight back on a balding head. Sitting in an overstuffed corner chair, he was watching Karras and tearing off the seal from a packet of Gauloises cigarettes. The priest smiled. “Oh, well, hello.”

Karras swung his legs around and sat up.

“Yeah, hello and good-bye,” Karras growled. “Who are you and what the fuck are you doing in my room?”

“Look, I’m sorry, but when I knocked and you didn’t answer, I saw the door was unlocked so I just thought I’d come in and wait. And then there you were!” The priest gestured to a pair of crutches tilted and leaned against the wall near the chair. “I couldn’t wait for very long in the hall, you see; I can stand for so long but then at some point I just have to sit. I do hope you’ll forgive me. I’m Ed Lucas, by the way. Your Father President suggested that I see you.”

Slightly frowning, Karras tilted his head to the side.

“You said ‘Lucas’?”

“Yes, it’s Lucas all the time,” said the priest, his grin displaying long and nicotine-stained teeth. He’d extracted a cigarette from the packet and was slipping a hand into his pocket for a lighter. “Mind if I smoke?”

“No, go ahead. I’m a smoker.”

“Oh, well, yes,” Lucas said as he glanced at a crush of cigarette butts in an ashtray on the end table next to his chair. The priest held out the cigarette packet to Karras. “Try a Gauloise?”

“Thanks, no. Look, you said that Tom Bermingham sent you?”

“Good old Tom. Yeah, we’re ‘buds.’ We were in the same high school class at Regis, and after that we did our Tertianship together at St. Andrews on Hudson. Yes, Tom recommended that I see you, so I took a Greyhound from New York. I’m at Fordham.”

Karras’s mood abruptly lifted. He said, “Oh, New York! Is this about my request for reassignment?”

“Reassignment? No, I know nothing at all about that. It’s a personal matter,” said the priest.

Karras’s shoulders slumped with his hopes. “Well, okay then,” he said in a tone more subdued. He stood up and walked over to the straight-backed wooden chair behind his desk, turned it around, sat down and began to measure Lucas with a clinically appraising eye. To Karras, from this closer vantage, the priest’s black suit looked rumpled and baggy, even seedy. There was dandruff on the shoulders. The priest had pulled a cigarette out of its package and now he lit it with the leaping, tall flame of a Zippo lighter that he seemed to have produced unnoticed from a pocket, like a magician’s sleight-of-hand, and then blew out a stream of moody bluish gray smoke, which he watched with what looked like a deep satisfaction as he drawled, “Ah, there’s just nothing like a Gauloise for the nerves!”

“Are you nervous, Ed?”

“A little.”

“Well, okay, then let’s get to it. Go ahead and lay it out for me, Ed. How can I help you?”

Lucas studied Karras with a look of concern. “You look exhausted,” he said. “Perhaps it’s best if we meet up tomorrow. What do you say?” Then he quickly added, “Yes! Yes, most definitely tomorrow! Could you hand those to me, please?”

He had reached out a hand to the crutches.

“No, no, no!” Karras told him. “I’m fine, Ed! Just fine!”

Leaning forward with his hands clasped together between his knees, Karras scanned the priest’s face as he told him, “Procrastination is what we often call ‘resistance.’ ”

Lucas lifted an eyebrow, in his eyes a faint hint of what might have been bemusement. “Oh, is that so?”

“Yes, it’s so.”

Karras lowered his gaze to Lucas’s legs.

“Does that depress you?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Oh, my legs! Oh, well sometimes, I suppose.”

“Congenital?”

“No. No, it happened in a fall.”

For a moment Karras studied his visitor’s face. That faint, secret smile. Had he seen it yet again? “That’s too bad,” Karras murmured sympathetically.

“Oh, well, that’s the world we’ve inherited, not so?” reacted Lucas, the Gauloise cigarette still dangling from a corner of his mouth. He took it from his lips between two fingers and lamented amid an exhale of smoke, “Ah, well.”

“So okay, Ed, let’s get to it. Okay? You didn’t come here all the way from New York to play dodgeball with me, that’s for sure, so let’s open up now. Tell me everything. Okay? Open up.”

Lucas gently shook his head and looked aside. “Oh, well, it’s such a long story,” he began, but then he had to put a fist to his mouth as a new spell of coughing racked him.

“Want a drink?” Karras asked.

His eyes watering, the priest shook his head. “No, no, I’m fine,” he said chokingly, “Really!” as the spasm seemed to pass. He looked down and brushed cigarette ash from the front of his jacket. “Filthy habit!” he grumbled as Karras noticed now what looked to be a soft-boiled egg stain on the black clergy shirt the priest wore beneath his jacket.

“Okay, what’s the problem?” Karras asked.

Lucas lifted his gaze to him and said, “You.”

Karras blinked. He said, “Me?”

“Yes, Damien, you. Tom’s terribly worried about you.”

Karras stared at Lucas steadily now with the beginning of realization, for in his eyes and in his voice there was a deep compassion. “Ed, what do you do up at Fordham?” Karras asked.

“I counsel,” said the priest.

“You counsel.”

“Yes, Damien. I’m a psychiatrist.”

Karras stared. “A psychiatrist,” he echoed blankly.

Lucas looked aside. “Oh, well, now where do I begin?” he breathed out reluctantly. “I’m not sure. It’s so tricky. Very tricky. Ah, well then, let’s see what we can do,” he said softly, leaning over and tamping out his Gauloise in the ashtray. “But then again you’re a pro,” he said, looking up, “and at times it’s best to put things on the table straightaway.” The priest began coughing into his fist again. “Damn! I’m so sorry! Really!” The coughing ended, Lucas eyed Karras somberly. “Look, it’s all this crazy business with you and the MacNeils.”

Karras reacted with surprise. “The MacNeils?” he marveled. “Listen, how could you possibly know about that? There’s no way that Tom would ever let that out. No, no way. It would be harmful to the family.”

“There are sources.”

“What sources? Such as who? Such as what?”

“Does it matter?” said the priest. “No, not at all. All that matters is your health and your emotional stability, both of which are clearly already in danger, and this thing with the MacNeils will only stress it all the more, so the Provincial is ordering you to break it off. Break it off for your own sake, Karras, as well as for the good of the Order!” The priest’s bushy eyebrows had gathered inward, almost touching, and he’d lowered his head so that his stare and his visage seemed threatening. “Break it off!” he warned, “before it leads to some greater catastrophe; before things get even worse, much worse! We don’t want any more desecrations now, Damien, do we?”

Karras stared at his visitor in bafflement, and then shock.

“The desecrations? Ed, what are you talking about? What does my mental health have to do with them?”

Lucas leaned back in his chair. “Oh, come on!” he scoffed cynically. “You join the Jesuits and leave your poor mother to die all alone and in abject poverty? And so who would someone hate for all of that unconsciously if not the Catholic Church!” Here, the priest leaned forward again, hunching over as he hissed, “Don’t be obtuse! Stay away from the MacNeils!”

His eyes tight, his head angled in surmise, Karras rose and stared down at the priest, demanding huskily, “Who in the hell are you, pal? Who are you?”

The soft ringing of the telephone on Karras’s desk drew a swift, alarmed glance from Father Lucas. “Watch out for Sharon!” he warned Karras sharply, and then abruptly the phone was ringing loudly so that Karras awakened and realized he’d been dreaming. Groggy, he got up from his cot, stumbled over to a light switch, flicked it on, and then moved to the desk and picked up the phone. It was Sharon. What time was it? he asked her. A little after three. Could he come to the house right away? Ah, God! Karras inwardly groaned, and yet, “Yes,” he said. Yes. He would come. And once again he felt trapped; smothered; enmeshed.

He lurched into his white-tiled bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face and, drying off, he suddenly remembered Father Lucas and the dream. What did it mean? Perhaps nothing. He would think about it later. When about to leave his room, at the door Karras stopped, turned around and came back for a black woolen sweater, pulling it over his head, and as he tugged it down, he abruptly stopped, numbly staring at the end table by the corner chair. Taking a breath and then a slow step forward, he reached down to the ashtray, picked up a cigarette butt and then stood motionless for a time as he held it up to his stunned surmise. It was a Gauloise. Racing thoughts. Suppositions. A coldness. Then an urgency: “Watch out for Sharon!” Karras placed the Gauloise butt back into the ashtray, hurried from his room and down the hall and then out onto Prospect Street, where the air was thin and still and damp. He passed the steps, crossed over to the opposite side diagonally and found Sharon watching and waiting for him at the MacNeil house’s open front door. Looking frightened and bewildered, one hand held a flashlight while a hand at her neck held together the edges of a blanket that was draped around her shoulders. “Sorry, Father,” she huskily whispered as the Jesuit entered the house, “but I thought you ought to see this.”

“See what?”

Sharon soundlessly closed the door. “I’ll have to show you,” she whispered. “Let’s be quiet, now. I don’t want to wake up Chris. She shouldn’t see this.” She beckoned and Karras followed her, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs to Regan’s bedroom. Entering, the Jesuit felt chilled. The room was icy. Frowning, he turned a questioning look to Sharon, and she nodded her head and whispered, “Yes, Father. Yes. The heat’s on.” They turned and stared at Regan, at the whites of her eyes glowing eerily in dim lamplight. She seemed to be in a coma. Heavy breathing. Motionless. The nasogastric tubing was in place and the Sustagen was slowly seeping into her body.

Sharon moved quietly toward the bedside. Karras followed, still staggered by the cold. When they were standing by the bed, he saw beads of perspiration on Regan’s forehead; glanced down and saw her wrists gripped firmly in the leather restraining straps. Sharon bent over the bed, gently pulling the top of Regan’s pink and white pajama top 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 stare upon him. “I don’t know if it’s stopped,” she whispered. “But watch: just keep looking at her chest.”

Sharon turned on the flashlight and shone it on Regan’s bare chest, and the Jesuit, puzzled, followed her gaze. Then silence. Regan’s slightly whistling breathing. Watching. The cold. Then the Jesuit’s brows knitted tightly together as he saw something happening to the skin of Regan’s chest: a faint redness, but in sharp definition. He peered down closer.

“There, it’s coming!” Sharon whispered sharply.

Abruptly the gooseflesh on Karras’s arms was not from the icy cold in the room, but from what he was seeing on Regan’s chest; from the bas-relief script rising up in clear letters of raised and blood-red skin. Two words:

            help me

Her wide stare riveted to the words, Sharon’s breath came frosty as she whispered, “That’s her handwriting, Father.”

At 9:00 that morning, Karras went to the president of Georgetown University and asked 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.

“Well, I’ve made a prudent judgment that it meets the conditions set forth in the Ritual,” Karras answered evasively. He still did not dare to 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?”

Karras felt 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. And yet, “Yes, Your Grace,” he answered.

“How’s your health?”

“My health is fine, Your Grace.”

“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 these days 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 Karras 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. In any case, there should be a psychiatrist present.”

“And what about the exorcist? Any ideas? I’m a blank.”

“Well, now, Lankester Merrin’s around.”

“Merrin? I had a notion he was over in 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, he’s 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.”

“And when was that? This experience, I mean.”

“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 there 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 quietly 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. His manner serene, the old priest thanked him and then turned to renew his contemplation, to continue 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 read it in the dust of the temples of Nineveh. He was ready.

He continued his farewells.