"You need prescriptions."
"Well, you can do some of that, can't you, Father?"
Karras turned to her, hands upraised above the basin like a surgeon after washup. For a moment he met her haunted gaze, felt some terrible secret in them, some dread. He nodded at the towel in her hands. She stared blankly. "Towel, please," he said softly.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Very quickly, she fumbled it out to him, still watching him with a tight expectancy. The Jesuit dried his hands. "Well, Father, what's it look like?" Chris finally asked him. "Do you think she's possessed?"
"Do you?"
"I don't know. I thought you were the expert."
"How much do you know about possession?"
"Just a little that I've read. Some things that the doctors told me."
"What doctors?"
"At Barringer Clinic."
He folded the towel and carefully draped it over the bar. "Are you Catholic?"
"No."
"Your daughter?"
"No."
"'What religion?"
"None; but I---"
"Why did you come to me, then? Who, advised it?"
"I came because I'm desperate!" she blurted excitedly. "No one advised me!"
He stood with his back to her, fringes of the towel still lightly in his grip. "You said earlier psychiatrists advised you to come to me."
"Oh, I don't know what I was saying! I've been practically out of my head!"
"Look, I couldn't care less about your motive," he answered with a carefully tempered intensity.
"All I care about is doing what's best for your daughter. I'll tell you right now that if you're looking for an exorcism as an autosuggestive shock cure; you're much better off calling Central Casting, Miss MacNeil, because the Church won't buy it and you'll have wasted precious time."
Karras clutched at the towel rack to steady his trembling hands. What's wrong? What's happened?
Incidentally, it's Mrs. MacNeil," he heart Chris telling him drily.
He lowered his head and gentled his tone. "Look, whether it's a demon or a mental disorder, I'll do everything I possibly can to help. But I've got to have the truth. It's important for Regan.
At the moment, I'm groping in a state of ignorance, which is nothing supernatural for me or abnormal, it's just my usual condition. Now why don't we both get out of this bathroom and go downstairs where we can talk." He had turned back to her with a faint, warm smile of reassurance and reached out his hand to help her up. "I could use a cup of coffee." "I could use a drink."
**********
While Karl and Sharon looked after Regan, they sat in the study, Chris on the sofa, Karras in a chair beside the fireplace, and Chris related the history of Regan's illness, though she carefully withheld any mention of phenomena related to Dennings.
The priest listened, saying very little: an occasional question; a nod; a frown.
Chris admitted that at first she'd considered exorcism as shock treatment. "Now I don't know,"
she said, shaking her head. Freckled, clasped fingers twitched in her lap. "I just don't know."
She lifted a look to the pensive priest. "What do you think, Father?''
"Compulsive behavior produced by guilt, perhaps, put together with split personality."
"Father, I've had all that garbage! Now how can you say that after all you've just seen!"
"If you've seen as many patients in psychiatric wards as I have, you can say it very easily," he assured her. "Come on, now. Possession by demons, all right: let's assume it's a fact of life,, that it happens. But your daughter doesn't say she's a demon; she insists she's the devil himself, and that's the same thing as saying you're Napoleon Bonaparte! You see?"
"Then explain all those rappings and things."
"I haven't heard them."
"Well, they heard then at Barringer, Father, so it wasn't just here in the house."
"Well, perhaps, but we'd hardly need a devil to explain them." "So explain them," she demanded.
"Psychokinesis."
