The Exorcist

by William Peter Blatty

“You been playin’ with the Ouija board, Rags, honey?” “Oh, yeah.” “You know how?” “Oh, well, sure. Here, I’ll show you.” Regan was moving to sit before the board. “Well, I think you need two people, honey.” “No ya don’t, Mom; I do it all the time.”

You don’t want me to play?” “No, I do! Captain Howdy said ‘no.’ ” “Captain who?” “Captain Howdy.”

What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night.

There’s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by a devil.”

The next morning the devil worship book had mysteriously vanished from the table. No one noticed.

Chris looked up. Then to the side. And froze. Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she sibilantly hissed and moved her head very slightly back and forth like a cobra.

With his eyes still closed, the detective softly recited the beginning of the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky”: “ ‘ ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…’

he pulled back the sheet to expose what he’d seen and yet could not accept: Dennings’s head was turned completely around and facing backward.

“Have you ever heard of exorcism, Mrs. MacNeil?”

Chris turned back and started opening the door, and it was then that Karras felt it: a chill, tugging warning. It scraped through his bloodstream like particles of ice.

he went forward, stepping into the house with an odd sense of ending.

“But it, too, could be a natural phenomenon.” “Where? In Transylvania?”

Lmao