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Nothing exceptional. An Assyrian ivory toilet box. And man. The bones of man.
“Allah ma’ak, chawaga.”
Oh nourrrr
He knew. It was coming.
That,s what she said
she murmured softly, “Yeah, maybe cat better … much better.” When she grinned, her entire face crinkled up.
Bermingham didn’t press him on the reasons for his doubt. For which Karras was grateful. He knew that his answers would have sounded insane. The need to rend food with the teeth and then defecate. My mother’s nine First Fridays. Stinking socks. Thalidomide babies. An item in the paper about a young altar boy waiting at a bus stop; set on by strangers; sprayed with kerosene; ignited. No. No, too emotional. Vague. Existential. More rooted in logic was the silence of God. In the world there was evil and much of it resulted from doubt, from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a
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‘Et clamor meus ad te veniat,’ ” he prayed with murmured anguish: “ ‘And let my cry come unto Thee…’
“She appears to have a hyperkinetic behavior disorder,”
Ritalin.”
Alv ritalin
And if I’m right, perhaps the bridge between the two worlds is what you yourself just mentioned, the subconscious mind. All I know is that things seem to happen. And, my dear, there are lunatic asylums all over the world filled with people who dabbled in the occult.”
She flicked on the lights. Good Christ almighty!
In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. —Aeschylus
When she’d first arrived, he’d reported his suspicion that the shaking of the bed had been caused by a seizure of clonic contractions, an alternating tensing and relaxing of the muscles. The chronic form of such a condition, he’d told her, was clonus, which often indicated a lesion in the brain.
Librium
The next morning the devil worship book had mysteriously vanished from the table. No one noticed.
Shrieking hysterically and flailing her arms, her body seemed to fling itself up horizontally into the air above her bed and then be slammed down savagely onto the mattress. It was happening rapidly, again and again.
The neurologist remained beside the bed and saw Regan fall backward as if from a shove while her eyes rolled upward into their sockets again, and with her body rolling from side to side, she began to mutter rapidly in guttural tones. The neurologist leaned closer and tried to make it out.
“Neurasthenia?”
“Well, I think we discussed that before,” said Klein. “Pathological states can induce abnormal strength and accelerated motor performance.” “But you said you don’t know why.” “Well, it seems to have something to do with motivation,” Coleman answered. “But that’s about all we know.”
“Oh, shit, where’s a cigarette?” she sighed tremulously, wiping at her eyes with the knuckle of a finger. Klein gave her the water and a small green pill. “Try this instead,” he advised. “That a tranquilizer?” “Yes.” “I’ll have a double.” “One’s enough.”
That WAS funny
Thorazine
Research
Your daughter hasn’t any history of schizophrenia and the EEG didn’t show the brain-wave pattern that normally accompanies it. So that leaves us with the general field of hysteria.”
“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, which grows from unconscious feelings of guilt and the need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, even
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Research
the pathologist’s report on Dennings: … tearing of the spinal cord with fractured skull and neck, plus numerous contusions, lacerations and abrasions; stretching of the neck skin; ecchymosis of the neck skin; shearing of platysma, sternomastoid, splenius, trapezius and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae and shearing of both the anterior and posterior spinous ligaments…
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…’
Love that for us <3
boyish interest.
Huh?!
That’s defensive. You’re afraid you’ll look gullible, maybe: a superstitious priest in front of Kinderman the rationalist, the Age of Reason made flesh and now walking beside you! All right, look at me in the eye now and tell me that I’m wrong! Come on, look already! Look! You can’t do it!”
Sure, okay. Black Mass. It happens. But anyone doing those things is a very disturbed human being, and disturbed in a very special way. There’s a clinical name for that kind of disturbance, in fact; it’s called satanism—meaning people who can’t have any sexual pleasure unless it’s connected to a blasphemous action.
“Look, one thing that we sometimes tend to forget is that people psychotic enough to confess to such things might also be psychotic enough to have done them. For example, the myths about werewolves, let’s say. So, okay, they’re preposterous: no one can turn himself into a wolf. But what if a person were so disturbed that he not only thought that he was a werewolf, but he also acted like one?”
The detective was beaming.
Fa-
fewer and fewer lucid moments, and now there’s a total blacking out of her consciousness during the fits, I’m afraid. That’s new and would seem to eliminate genuine hysteria. In the meantime, a symptom or two in the area of what we call parapsychic phenomena have…”
“Possession is loosely related to hysteria insofar as the origin of the syndrome is almost always autosuggestive.
Immediately derivative of the prevalent belief in demons was the phenomenon known as possession, a state in which many individuals believed that their physical and mental functions had been invaded and were being controlled by either a demon (most common in the period under discussion) or the spirit of someone dead. There is no period of history or quarter of the globe where this phenomenon has not been reported, and in fairly constant terms, and yet it is still to be adequately explained. Since Traugott Oesterreich’s definitive study, first published in 1921, very little has been added to the
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What is known is the following: that various people, at various times, have undergone massive transformations so complete that those around them feel they are dealing with another person. Not only the voice, the mannerisms, facial expressions and characteristic movements are sometimes altered, but the subject himself now thinks of himself as totally distinct from the original person and as having a name—whether human or demonic—and a separate history of its own. In the Malay Archipelago, where possession even now is an everyday, common occurrence, the possessing spirit of someone dead often
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or manifest various parapsychic phenomena, such as telekinesis for example: the movement of objects without application of material force.
In cases of possession by the dead, there are manifestations such as Oesterreich’s account of a monk who, abruptly, while possessed, became a gifted and brilliant dancer although he had never, before his possession, had occasion to dance so much as a step. So impressive, at times, are these manifestations that Jung, the psychiatrist, after studying a case at first hand, could offer only partial explanation for what he was certain could “not have been fraud”…
The demoniacal form of possession is usually thought to have had its origin in early Christianity;
“Come, that’s much too vulgar a display of power. After all, I’m a prince! ‘The Prince of This World,’ as some very strange person said of me once. Can’t quite remember who.”
“We are quite a little group in the piglet,”
The exorcist should not believe too readily that a person is possessed 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,
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Some reveal a crime which has been committed.
was malevolent and typical of cases of demonic possession where the new personality sought the destruction of the body of its host.
possession was the product of suggestion, then the only likely source of the suggestion was the chapter on possession in the witchcraft book.
The first, infestation, consists of an attack through the victim’s surroundings: noises, odors, the displacement of objects without visible cause; and the second, obsession, is a personal attack on the subject designed to instill terror through the kind of injury that a person might inflict on another through blows and kicks.” The rappings. The flingings. The attacks by Captain Howdy.
Cryptomnesia: buried recollections of words and data she had once been exposed to, even in infancy, perhaps. In somnambulists—and frequently in people at the point of death—the buried data often came to the surface with almost photographic fidelity.
‘Domine, non sum dignus.’
The thing that I saw in that room wasn’t Regan!
Possession? Impossible! The holy water! But still…
A coarse male voice from within the apartment. Slurred. The boyfriend.
“And let my cry come unto thee…”
He who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him…
