The Exorcist

    Who is there, then? Nobody.

    Does Clelia exist at all? No.

    Then with whom was I speaking yesterday? With nobody.

    Karras stopped reading. Shook his head. Here was no paranormal performance: only the limitless abilities of the mind.

    He reached for a cigarette, sat down and lit it. "I am no one. Many." Eerie. Where did it come from, he wondered, this content of her speech?

    "With nobody."

    From the same place Clelia had come from? Emergent personalities?

    "Marin... Marin..."

    "Ah, the blood..."

    "He is ill...."

    Haunted, he glanced at his copy of Satan and moodily leafed to the opening inscription: "Let not the dragon be my leader...."

    He exhaled smoke and closed his eyes. He coughed. His throat felt raw and inflamed. He crushed out the cigarette, eyes watering from smoke. exhausted. His bones felt like iron pipe. He got up and put out a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door, then he flicked out the room light, shuttered his window blinds, kicked off his shoes and collapsed on the bed. Fragments. Regan. De

    Try the Bishop with what little he had? He did not think so. He could never convincingly argue the case.

    He thought of undressing, getting under the covers. Too tired. This burden. He wanted to be free.

    "... Let us be!"

    Let me be, he responded to the fragment. He drifted into motionless, dark granite sleep.

The ringing of a telephone awakened him. Groggy, he fumbled toward the light switch. What time was it? A few minutes after three. He reached blindly for the telephone. Answered. Sharon. Would he come to the house right away? He would come. He hung up the telephone, feeling trapped again, smothered and enmeshed.

    He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, dried off and then started from the room, but at the door, he turned around and came back for his sweater. He pulled it over his head and then went out into the street.

    The air was thin and still in the darkness. Some cats at a garbage can scurried in fright as he crossed toward the house.

    Sharon met him at the door. She was wearing a sweater and was draped in a blanket. She looked frightened. Bewildered. "Sorry, Father," she whispered as he entered the house, "but I thought you ought to see this."

    "What?"

    "You'll see. Let's be quiet, now. I don't want to wake up Chris. She shouldn't see this." She beckoned.

    He followed her, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs to Regan's bedroom. Entering, the Jesuit felt chilled to the bone. The room was icy. He frowned in bewilderment at Sharon, and she nodded at him solemnly. "Yes. Yes, the heat's on," she whispered. Then she turned and stared at Regan, at the whites of her eyes glowing eerily in lamplight. She seemed to be in coma. Heavy breathing. Motionless. The nasogastric tube was in place, the Sustagen seeping slowly into her body.

    Sharon moved quietly toward the bedside and Karras followed, still staggered by the cold. When they stood by the bed, he saw beads of perspiration on Regan's forehead; glanced down and saw her hands gripped firmly in the restraining straps.

    Sharon. She was bending, gently pulling the top of Regan's pajamas 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 eyes upon him. "I don't know if it's stopped," she whispered. "But watch: just keep looking at her chest."

    She turned and looked down, and the Jesuit, puzzled, followed her gaze. Silence. The breathing. Watching. The cold. Then the Jesuit's brows knitted tightly as he saw something happening to the skin: a faint redness, but in sharp definition; like handwriting. He peered down closer.

    "There, it's coming," whispered Sharon.

    Abruptly the gooseflesh on Karras' arms was not from the icy cold in the room; was from what he was seeing on Regan's chest; was from bas-relief script rising up in clear letters of blood-red skin. Two words: help me "That's her handwriting," whispered Sharon.

    At 9: 00 that morning, Damien Karras came to the president of Georgetown University and asks 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.

    "I've made a prudent judgment that it meets the conditions set forth in the Ritual," answered Karras evasively. He still did not dare 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?" asked the Bishop.

    He felt a moment of 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. "Yes, of course," answered Karras.

    "How's your health?"

    "All right."

    "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, of course, 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 him 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. There should be a psychiatrist present, anyway."

    "And what about the exorcist? Any ideas? I'm blank."

    "Well, now, Lankester Merrin's around."

    "Merrin? I had a notion he was over is Iraq. I think I read he was working on a dig around Nineveh."