The Exorcist (16 page)

Agony. Bedlam.

Chris looking up and then leaping for the light switch.

Klein running forward.

Regan with her head back, cackling demonically, then howling like a wolf.

Chris slapped at the light switch. Turned. Saw grainy, flickering film of a slow-motion nightmare: Regan and the doctors writhing on the bed in a tangle of shifting arms and legs, in a melee of grimaces, gasps and curses, and the howling and the yelping and the hideous laughter, with Regan oinking, Regan neighing, then the film racing faster and the bedstead shaking, violently quivering from side to side as Chris watched helplessly while her daughter's eyes rolled upward into their sockets and she wrenched up a keening shriek of terror torn raw and bloody from the base of her spine.

Regan crumpled and fell unconscious. Something unspeakable left the room.

For a breathless moment, no one moved. Then slowly and carefully, the doctors untangled themselves; stood up. They stared at Regan. After a time, the expressionless Klein took Regan's pulse. Satisfied, he slowly pulled up her blanket and nodded to the others. They left the room and went down to the study.

For a time, no one spoke. Chris was on the sofa. Klein and the psychiatrist sat near her in facing chairs. The psychiatrist was pensive, pinching at his lip as he stared at the coffee table; then he sighed and looked up at Chris. She turned her burned-out gaze to his. "What the hell's going on?" she asked in a mournful, haggard whisper.

"Did you recognize the language she was speaking?'' he asked her.

Chris shook her head.

"Have you any religion?"

"No."

"Your daughter?"

"No."

And now the psychiatrist asked her a lengthy series of questions relating to Regan's psychological history. When at last he had finished, he seemed disturbed.

"What is it?" Chris asked him, white-knuckled fingers clenching and unclenching on a balled-up handkerchief. "What has she got?"

"Well, it's somewhat confusing," the psychiatrist evaded. "And frankly, it would be quite irresponsible of me to attempt a diagnosis after so brief an examination."

"Well, you must have some idea," she insisted.

The psychiatrist sighed, fingering his brow. "Well, I know you're quite anxious; so I will mention one or two tentative impressions."

Chris leaned forward, nodding tensely, Fingers in her lap started fumbling with the handkerchief, telling the stitches in the hem as if they were wrinkled linen rosary beads.

"To begin with," he told her, "it's highly improbable that she's faking."

Klein was nodding in agreement. "We think so for a number of reasons," the psychiatrist continued. "For example, the abnormal and painful contortions, and most dramatically, I suppose, from the change in her features when we were talking to the so-called person she thinks is inside her. You see, a psychic effect like that is unlikely unless she believed in this person. Do you follow?"

"I think I do," Chris answered, squirming her eyes in puzzlement. "But one thing I don't understand is where this person comes from. I mean, you keep hearing about 'split personality' but I've never really known any explanation."

"Well, neither does anyone else, Mrs. MacNeil. We use concepts like 'consciousness'--- 'mind'--- 'personality,' but we don't really know yet what these things are." He was shaking his head. "Not really. Not at all. So when I start talking about something like multiple or split personality, all we have are some theories that raise more questions than they give answers. Freud thought that certain ideas and feelings are somehow repressed by the conscious mind, but remain alive in a person's subconscious; remain quite strong, in fact, and continue to seek expression through various psychiatric symptoms. Now when this repressed, or let's call it dissociated material--- the word 'dissociation' implying a splitting off from the mainstream of consciousness--- well, when this type of material is sufficiently strong, or where the subject's personality is disorganized and weak, the result can be schizophrenic psychosis. Now that isn't the same, he cautioned, "as dual personality. Schizophrenia means a shattering of personality. But where the dissociated material is strong enough to somehow come glued together, to somehow organize in the individual's subconscious--- why, then it's bees known, at times, to function independently as a separate personality; to take over the bodily functions."

He took a breath. Chris listened intently and he went on. "That's one theory. There are several others, some of them involving the notion of escape into unawareness; escape from some conflict or emotional problem. Getting back to Regan, she hasn't any history of schizophrenia and the EEG didn't show up the brain-wave pattern that normally accompanies it. So I tend to reject schizophrenia. Which leaves us the general field of hysteria."

"I gave last week," Chris murmured bleakly.

The worried psychiatrist smiled thinly. "Hysteria," he continued, "is a form of neurosis in which emotional disturbances are converted into bodily disorders. Now, in certain of its forms, there's dissociation. In psychasthenia, for example, the individual loses consciousness of his actions, but he sees himself act and attributes his actions to someone else. His idea of the second personality is vague, however, and Regan's seems specific. So we come to what Freud used to call the 'conversion' form of hysteria. It grows from unconscious feelings of guilt and the need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, evert multiple personality. And the syndrome might also include epileptoid-like convulsions; hallucinations; abnormal motor excitement."

"Gee, that does sound a lot like Regan," Chris ventured moodily. "Don't you think? I mean, except for the guilt part. What would she have to feel guilty about?"

"Well, a cliché answer," the psychiatrist responded, "might be the divorce. Children often feel they are the ones rejected and assume the full responsibility for the departure of one of their parents. In the case of your daughter, there's reason to believe that that could be the case. Here I'm thinking of the brooding and the deep depression over the notion of people dying: thanatophobia. In children, you'll find it accompanied by guilt formation that's related to family stress, very often fear of the loss of a parent. It produces rage and intense frustration. In addition, the guilt in this type of hysteria needn't be known to the conscious mind. It could even be the guilt that we call "free-floating,' a general guilt that relates to nothing in particular," he concluded.

Chris gave her head a shape. "I'm confused," she murmured. "I mean, where does this new personality come in?"

"Well, again, it's a guess," he replied, "just a guess--- but assuming that it is conversion hysteria stemming from guilt, then the second personality is simply the agent who handles the punishing. If Regan herself were to do it, you see, that would mean she would recognize her guilt. But she wants to escape that recognition. Therefore; a second personality."

"And that's what you think she's got?"

"As I said, I don't know," replied the psychiatrist, still evasive. He seemed to be choosing his words as he would moss-covered stones to cross a stream. "It's extremely unusual for a child of Regan's age, to be able to pull together and organize the components of a new personality. And certain--- well, other things are puzzling. Her performance with the Ouija board, for example, would indicate extreme suggestibility; and yet apparently I never really hypnotized her." He shrugged. "Well, perhaps she resisted. But the really striking thing," he noted, "is the new personality's apparent precocity. It isn't a twelve-year-old at all. It's much, much older. And then there's the language she was speaking...." He stated at the rug in front of the fireplace, thoughtfully tugging at his lower lip. "There's a similar state, of course, but we don't know much about it: a form of somnambulism where the subject suddenly manifests knowledge or skills that he's never learned--- and where the intention of the second personality is the destruction of the first. However..."

The word trailed away. Abruptly the psychiatrist looked up at Chris. "Well, it's terribly complicated," he told her, "and I've oversimplified outrageously."

"So what's the bottom line?" Chris aspect.

"At the moment," he told her, "a blank. She need an intensive examination by a team of experts; two or three weeks of really concentrated study in a clinical atmosphere; say, the Barringer Clinic in Dayton."

Chris looked away.

"It's a problem?"

"No. No problem." She sighed. "I just lost Hope, that's all."

"Didn't get you."

"It's an inside tragedy."

The psychiatrist telephoned the Barringer Clinic from Chris's study. They agreed to take Regan the following day.

The doctors left.

Chris swallowed pain with remembrance of Dennings, with remembrance of death and the worm and the void and unspeakable loneliness and stillness, darkness, underneath the sod, with nothing moving, no, no motion.... Briefly, she wept. Too much... too much... Then she put it away and began to pack.

**********

She was standing in her bedroom selecting a camouflaging wig to wear in Dayton when Karl appeared. There was someone to see her, he told her.

"Who?"

"Detective."

"And he wants to see me?"

He nodded. Then he handed her a business card. She looked it over blankly. WILLIAM F. KINDERMAN, it announced, LIEUTENANT OF DETECTIVES; and tucked in the lower-left-hand corner like a poor relation: Homicide Division. It was printed in an ornate, raised Tudor typeface that might have been selected by a dealer in antiques.

She looked up from the card with a sniffing suspicion. "Has he got something with him that might be a script? Like a big manila envelope or something?"

There was no one in the world, Chris had come to discover, who didn't have a novel or a script or a notion for one or both tucked away in a drawer or a mental sock. She seemed to attract them as priests did drunks.

But Karl shook his head. Chris immediately grew curious and walked down the stairs. Burke? Was it something to do with Burke?

He was sagging in the entry hall, the brim of his limp and crumpled hat clutched tight with short fat fingers freshly manicured. Plump. In his middle fifties. Jowly cheeks that gleamed of soap. Yet rumpled trousers, cuffed and baggy, mocked the sedulous care that he gave his body. A gray tweed coat hung loose and old-fashioned, and his moist brown eyes, which dropped at the corners, seemed to be staring at times gone by. He wheezed asthmatically as he waited.

Chris approached. The detective extended his hand with a weary and somewhat fatherly manner, and spoke in a hoarse, emphysematous whisper. "I'd know that face in any lineup, Miss MacNeil."

"Am I in one?" Chris asked him earnestly as she took his hand.

"Oh, my goodness, oh, no," he said, brushing at the notion with his hand as if swatting at a fly. He'd closed his eyes and inclined his head; the other hood rested lightly on his paunch. Chris was expecting a God forbid! "No, it's strictly routine," he assured her, "routine. Look, you're busy? Tomorrow. I'll come again tomorrow."

He was turning away as if to leave, but Chris said anxiously, "What is it? Burke? Burke Dennings?"

The detective's drooping, careless ease had somehow tightened the springs of her tension.

"A shame. What a shame," the detective breathed, with lowered eyes and a shake of the head.

"Was he killed?" Chris asked with a look of shock. "I mean, is that why you're here? He was killed? Is that it?"

"No, no, no, it's routine." he repeated, "routine. You know, a man so important, we just couldn't pass it. We couldn't," he pleaded with a helpless look. "At least one or two questions. Did he fall? Was he pushed?" As he asked, he was listing from side to side with his head and his hand. Then he shrugged and huskily whispered, "Who knows?"

"Was he robbed?"

"No, not robbed, Miss MacNeil, never robbed, but then who needs a motive in times like these?" His hands were constantly in motion, like a flabby glove informed by the fingers of a yawning puppeteer. "Why, today, for a murderer, Miss MacNeil, a motive is only an encumbrance; in fact, a deterrent." He shook his head. "These drugs, these drugs," he bemoaned. "These drugs. This LSD."

He load at Chris as he tapped his chest with the tips of his fingers. "Believe me, I'm a father, and when I see what's going on, it breaks my heart. You've got children?"

"Yes, one."

"A son?"

"A daughter."

"Well..."

"Listen, come on in the study," Chris interrupted anxiously, turning about to lead the way. She was losing all patience.

"Miss MacNeil, could I trouble you for something?"

She turned with the dim and weary expectation that he wanted her autograph for his children. It was never for themselves. It was always for their children. "Yeah, sure," she said.

"My stomach." He gestured with a trace of a grimace. "Do you keep any Calso water, maybe? If it's trouble, never mind; I don't want to be trouble."

"No, no trouble at all," she sighed. "Grab a chair in the study." She pointed, then turned and headed for the kitchen. "I think there's a bottle in the fridge."