"Would you get your ass out of here, Joe?" prodded Karras, tamping out his cigarette butt in an ashtray.
"Is this boring?"
"I've got work to do."
"Who the hell's stopping you?"
"Come on, now, I mean it." Karras had started to unbutton his shirt. "I'm going to jump in the shower and then I've got to work."
"Didn't see you at dinner, by the way," said Dyer, rising reluctantly from the bed. "Where'd you eat?"
"I didn't"
"That's foolish. Why diet when you only wear frocks?" He had come to the desk add was smiling at a cigarette. "Stale."
"Is there a tape recorder here in the hall?"
'There isn't even a lemon drop here in the hall. Use the language lab."
"Who's got a key? Father President?"
"No. Father Janitor. You need it tonight?"
"Yes, I do," said Karras, as he draped his shirt on the back of the desk chair. "Where do I find him?"
"Want me to get it for you?"
"Could you do that? I'm really in a bind."
"No sweat, Great Beatific Jesuit Witch Doctor. Coming." Dyer opened the door and walked out.
**********
Karras showered and then dressed in a T-shirt and trousers. Sitting down to his desk, he discovered a carton of Camel nonfilters, and beside it a key that was labeled LANGUAGE
LAB and another tagged REFECTORY REFRIGERATOR. Appended to the latter was a note: Better you than the rats. Karras smiled at the signature: The Lemon Drop Kid. He put the note aside, then unfastened is wristwatch and plated it in front of him on the desk. The time was 10:58 P.M. He began to read. Freud. McCasland. Satan. Oesterreich's exhaustive study. And at a little after 4 A.M., he had finished. Was rubbing at his face. At his eyes. They were smarting. He glanced at the ashtray. Ashes and the twisted butts of cigarettes. Smoke hanging thick in the air. He stood up and walked wearily to a window. Slid it open. He gulped at the coolness of the moist morning air and stood there thinking. Regan had the physical syndrome of possession. That much he knew. About that he had no doubt. For in case after case, irrespective of geography or period of history, the symptoms of possession were substantially constant. Some Regan had not evidenced as yet: stigmata; the desire for repugnant foods; the insensitivity to pain; the frequent loud and irrepressible hiccuping. But the others she had manifested clearly: the involuntary motor excitement; foul breath; furred tongue; the wasting away of the frame; the distended stomach; the irritations of the skin and mucous-membrane.
And most significantly present were the basic symptoms of the hard core of cases which Oesterreich had characterized as "genuine" possession: the striking change in the voice and in the features, plus the manifestation of a new personality.
Karras looked up and stared darkly down the street. Through the branches of trees he could see the house and the large bay window of Regan's bedroom. When possession was voluntary, as with mediums, the new personality was often benign. Like Tia, brooded Karras. Spirit of a woman who'd possessed a man. A sculptor. Briefly. An hour at a time. Until a friend of the sculptor fell desperately in love. With Tia. Pleaded with the sculptor to permit her to permanently remain in possession of his body. But in Regan, there's no Tia, Karras reflected grimly. The invading personality was vicious. Malevolent. Typical of cases of demonic possession where the new personality sought the destruction of the body of its host. And frequently achieved it.
Moodily the Jesuit walked back to his desk, where he picked up a package of cigarettes; lit one.
So okay. She's got the syndrome of demonic possession. Now how do you cure it?
He fanned out the match. That depends on what caused it. He sat on the edge of his desk.
Considered. The nuns at the convent of Lille. Possessed. In early-seventeenth-century France.
They'd confessed to their exorcists that while helpless in the state of possession, they had regularly attended Satanic orgies; had regularly varied their erotic fare: Mondays and Tuesdays, heterosexual copulation; Thursdays, sodomy, fellatio and cunnilingus, with homosexual partners; Saturday, bestiality with domestic animals and dragons. And dragons!...
The Jesuit shook his head. As with Lille, he thought the causes of many possessions were a mixture of fraud and mythomania. Still others, however, seemed caused by mental illness: paranoia; schizophrenia,; neurasthenia; psychasthenia; and this was the reason, he knew, that the Church had for years recommended that the exorcist work with a psychiatrist or a neurologist present. Yet not all possessions had causes so clear. Many had led Oesterreich to characterize possession as a separate disorder all its own; to dismiss the explanatory "split personality" label of psychiatry as no more than an equally occult substitution for the concepts of "demon" and "spirit of the dead."
Karras rubbed a finger in the crease beside his nose. The indications from Barringer, Chris had told him, were that Reagan's disorder might be caused by suggestion; by something that was somehow related to hysteria. And Karras thought it likely. He believed the majority of the cases he had studied had been caused by precisely these two factors. Sure. For one thing, it mostly hits women. For another, all those outbreaks of possession epidemics. And then those exorcists... Karras frowned. They often themselves became the victims of possession. He thought of Loudun. France. The Ursuline Convent of nuns. Of four of the exorcists sent there to deal with an epidemic of possession, three--- Fathers Lucas, Lactance and Tranquille-- not only became possessed, but died soon after, apparently of shock. And the fourth, Père Surin, who was thirty-three years old at the time of his possession, became insane for the subsequent twenty-five years of his life.
He nodded to himself. If Regan's disorder was hysterical; if the onset of possession was the product of suggestion, then the source of the suggestion could only be the chapter in the book on witchcraft. The chapter on possession. Did she read it?
He pored over its pages. Were there striking similarities between any of its details and Regan's behavior? That might prove it. It might.
He found some correlations:
...The case of an eight-year-old girl who was described in the chapter as "bellowing like a bull in thunderous, deep bass voice." (Regan's lowing like a steer.)
...The case of Helen Smith, who'd been treated by the great psychologist Flournoy; his description of her changing her voice and her features with "lightning" rapdity" into those of a variety of personalities. (She did that with me. The personality who spoke with a British accent.
Quick change. Instanttaneous.)
...A case in South Africa, reported by the noted ethnologist Junod; his description of a woman who'd vanished from her dwelling one night being found on the following morning "tied to the top" of a very tall tree by "fine lianas," and then afterward "gliding down the tree, head down, while hissing and rapidly flicking her tongue in and out like a snake. She then hung suspended, for a time, and proceeded to speak in a language that no one had ever heard."
(Regan gliding like a snake when she was following Sharon. The gibberish. An attempt at an
"unknown language.")
...The case of Joseph and Thiebaut Burner, aged eight and ten; description of them "lying on their backs and suddenly whirling like tops with the utmost rapidity." (Sounds pretty close to her whirling like a dervish.)
There were other similarities; still other reasons for suspecting suggestion: mention of abnormal strength; of obscenity of speech; and accounts of possession from the gospels, which perhaps were the basis, thought Karras, of the curiously religious content of Regan's ravings at Barringer Clinic. Moreover, in the chapter there was mention of the onset of possession in stages: "...The first, infestation, consists of an attack through the victim's surroundings; noises-
-- odors--- the displacement of objects; and the second, obsession, consists in a personal attack on the subject designed to instill terror through the kind of injury that one man might inflict on another through blows and kicks." The rappings. The flingings. The attacks by Captain Howdy.
Maybe... maybe she read it. But Karras wasn't convinced. Not at all... not at all. And Chris. She had seemed so uncertain about it.
He walked to the window again. What's the answer, then? Genuine possession? A demon? He looked down and shook his head. No way. No way. Paranormal happenings? Sure. Why not?
Too many competent observers had reported them. Doctors. Psychiatrists. Men like Junod. But the problem is how do you interpret the phenomena? He thought back to Oesterreich.
Reference to a shaman of the Altai. Siberia. Voluntarily possessed and examined in a clinic while performing an apparently paranormal action: levitation. Just prior, his pulse rate had spurted to one hundred, then, afterward, leaped to an amazing two hundred. Marked changes in temperature as well. Its respiration. So his paranormal action was tied to physiology. It was caused by some bodily energy or force. But as proof of possession the Church wanted clear and exterior phenomena that suggested....
He'd forgotten the wording. Looked it up. Traced a finger down the page of a book on his desk.
Found it: "...verifiable exterior phenomena which suggest the idea that they are due to the extraordinary intervention of an intelligent cause other than man." Was that the case with the shaman? Karras asked himself. No. And is that the case with Regan?
He turned to a passage he had underlined in percil: "The exorcist will simply be careful that none of the patient's manifestations are left unaccounted for..."
He nodded. Okay, then. Let's see. Pacing, he ran through the manifestations of Regan's disorder along with their possible explanations. He ticked them off mentally, one by one: The startling change in Regan's features.
Partly her illness. Partly undernourishment. Mostly, he concluded, it was due to physiognomy being an expression of psychic constitution. Whatever the hell that means! he added wryly.
The startling change in Regan's voice.
