"Okay," she said weakly.
She trusted the pain.
He nodded. "We'll be talking."
He started outside, but then hung in the doorway for a moment, thinking, a hand to his lips.
"Did your daughter know a priest was coming over?"
"No. No, nobody knew but me."
"Did you know that my mother had died just recently?
'Yes. I'm very sorry."
"Is Regan aware of it?"
"Why?"
"Is she aware of it?"
"No, not at all." He
nodded.
"Why'd you asks" Chris repeated, her brows slightly puckered with curiosity.
"Not important." He shrugged. "I just wondered." He examined her features with a faint look of worry. "Are you getting any sleep?"
"Oh, a little."
"Get pills, then. Are you taking any Librium?"
"Yes."
"How much?" he asked.
"Ten milligrams, twice a day."
Try twenty, twice a day. In the meantime, try to keep away from your daughter. The more you're exposed to her present behavior, the greater the chance of some permanent damage being done to your feelings about her. Stay clear. And slow down. You'll be no help to Regan, you know, with a nervous breakdown.
She nodded despondently, eyes lowered.
"Now please go to bed," he said gently. "Will you please go to bed right now?"
"Yeah, okay," she said softly. "Okay. I promise." She looked at him with the trace of a smile.
"Goodnight, Father. Thanks. Thanks a lot."
He studied her for a moment without expression; then quickly moved away.
Chris watched from the doorway. As he crossed the street, it occurred to her that he'd probably missed his dinner. Then briefly she worried that he might be cold. He was rolling his shirt sleeve down.
At the corner of Prospect and P, he dropped the book and stooped quickly to retrieve it, then rounded the corner and vanished from sight. As she watched him disappear, Chris abruptly was aware of a feeling of lightness. She didn't see Kinderman sitting alone in the unmarked car.
She closed the door.
**********
Half an hour later, Damien Karras hurried back to his room in the Jesuit residence hall with a number of books and periodicals taken from the shelves of the Georgetown library. Hastily he dumped them on top of his desk and then rummaged through drawers for a package of cigarettes. Finding a half-empty pack of stale Camels, he lit one, puffed deep and held the smoke in his lungs while he thought about Regan.
Hysteria. He knew that it had to be hysteria. He exhaled the smoke, hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked down at the books. He had Oesterreich's Possession; Huxley's The Devils of Loudun; Parapraxis in the Haizman Case of Freud; McCasland's Demon Possession and Exorcism in Early Christianity in the Light of Modern Views of Mental Illness; and extracts from psychiatric journals of Freud's "A Neurosis of Demoniacal Possession in the 17th Century," and "The Demonology of Modern Psychiatry."
"Couldya help an old altar boy, Faddah?"
The Jesuit felt at his brow, and then looked at his fingers, rubbing a sticky sweat between them.
Then he noticed that his door was open. He crossed the room and closed it, and then event to a shelf for his redbound copy of The Roman Ritual, a compendium of rites and prayers.
Clamping the cigarette between his lips, he squinted through smoke as he turned to the "General Rules" for exorcists, looking for the signs of demonic possession. He scanned and then started to read more slowly:
...The exorcist should not believe too rapidly that a person is possesesd by an evil spirit; but he ought to ascertain the signs by which a person possessed can be distinguished from one who is suffering from some illness, especially one of a psychological nature. Signs of possession may be the following: ability to speak with some facility in a strange language or, to understand it when spoken by another; the faculty of divulging future and hidden events; display of powers which are beyond the subject's age and natural condition; and various other conditions which, when taken together as a whole, build up the evidence.
For a time Karras pondered, then he leaned against the bookshelf and read the remainder of the instructions. When he had finished, he found himself glancing back up at instruction number 8:
Some reveal a crime which has been committed and the perpetrators thereof---
He looked up at the door as he heard a knock. "Damien?"
