"Does he, Merrin? Does he?"
Now the demon returned and Merrin continued the adjurations, the applications of the stole and the constant tracings of the sign of the cross while it lashed him again obscenely. Too long, worried Karras: the fit was continuing far too long.
"Now the saw comes! The mother of the piglet!" mocked the demon.
Karras turned and saw Chris coming toward him with a swab and disposable syringe. She kept her head down as the demon hurled abuse, and Karras went to her, frowning. "Sharon's changing her clothes," Chris explained, "and Karl's---"
Karras cut her short with "All right," and they approached the bed.
"Ah, yes, come see your handiwork, sow-mother! Come!"
Chris tried desperately not to listen, not to look, while Karras pinned Regan's unresisting arms.
"See the puke! see the murderous bitch!" the demon raged. "Are you pleased? It is you who have done it! Yes, you with your career before anything; your career before your husband, before her, before..."
Karras glanced around. Chris stood paralyzed, "Go ahead!" he ordered. "Don't listen! Go ahead!"
"...your divorce! Go to priests, will you? Priest will not help!" Chris's hand began to shake,
"She mad! She is mad! The piglet is mad! You have driven her to madness and to murder and..."
"I can't!" Face contorted, Chris was staring at the quivering syringe. Shook her head. "I can't do it!"
Karras plucked it from her fingers. "All right, swab it! Swab the arm! Over here!" he told her firmly.
"...in her coffin, you bitch, by..."
"Don't listen!" cautioned Karras again, and now the demon jerked its head around, its eyes bulging fury, "And you, Karras!"
Chris swabbed Regan's arm. "Now, get out!" Karras ordered her, flicking the needle into wasted flesh.
She fled.
"Yes, we know of your kindness to mothers, dear Karras!" croaked the demon. The Jesuit blenched and for a moment did not move. Then slowly he drew the needle out and looked into eyes that rolled upward into their sockets. Out of Regan's mouth came a slow, lilting singing, almost chanting, in a sweet clear voice like a choirboy's. " 'Tantum ergo sacramentum veneremur cerniu...' "
It was a hymn sung at Catholic benediction. Karras stood bloodlessly as it continued. Weird and chilling, the singing was a vacuum into which Karras felt the horror of the evening rushing with a horrible clarity. He looked up and saw Merrin with a towel in his hands. With weary, tender movements he wiped away the vomit from Regan's face and neck.
" '...et antiquum documentum...' "
The singing. Whose voice? wondered Karras. And then fragments: Dennings... The window...
Haunted, he saw Sharon come back in and take the towel from Merrin. "I'll finish that, Father,"
she told him. "I'm all right now. I'd like to change her and get her cleaned up before I give her the Compazine; all right? Could you both wait outside for awhile?"
The two priests stepped into the warmth and the dimness of the hall and leaned wearily against the wall.
Karras listened to the eerie, muffled singing from within. After some moments, he spoke softly to Merrin. "You said--- you said earlier there was only... one entity."
"Yes."
The hushed tones, the lowered heads, were confessional.
"All the others are but forms of attack," continued Merrin. "There is one... only one. It is a demon." There was a silence. Then Merrin stated simply, "I know you doubt this. But you see, this demon... I have met once before. And he is powerful... powerful...."
A silence. Karras spoke again. "We say the demon... cannot touch the victim's will."
"Yes, that is so... that is so... There is no sin."
"Then what would be the purpose of possession?" Karras said, frowning. "What's the point?"
"Who can know?" answered Merrin. "Who can really hope to know?" He thought for a moment.
And then probingly continued: "Yet I think the demon's target is not the possessed; it is us...
the observers... every person in this house. And I think--- I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us..."
Again Merrin paused. He continued more slowly and with a hush of introspection: 'He knows...
the demon knows where to strike...." He was nodding. "Long ago I despaired of ever loving my neighbor. Certain people... repelled me. How could I love them? I thought. It tormented me, Damien; it led me to despair of myself... and from that, very soon, to despair of my God.
My faith was shattered...."
Karras looked up at Merrin with interest. "And what happened?" he asked.
"Ah, well... at last I realized that God would never ask of me that which I know to be psychologically impossible; that the love which He asked was in my will and not meant to be felt as emotion at all. Not at all. He was asking that I act with love; that I do unto others; and that I should do it unto those who repelled me, I believe, was a greater act of love than any
other." He shook his head. "I know that all of this must seem very obvious, Damien. I know.
