The Exorcist

by William Peter Blatty

She was pleased but not really surprised. They courted her company: cabdrivers; poets; professors; kings. What was it they liked about her? Life?

‘a cunting embarrassment somewhere near the level of Sumo wrestling’?”

“My dear, it’s all very well for me to say ‘cunting,’ but not for America’s sweetheart.

in some unknowable and harmful form. Chris pursed her lips. A fantasy playmate. It didn’t sound healthy. And why the name “Howdy”? For Howard? Her father? Pretty close.

“Oh, well, Burke,” Sharon sighed. In a guarded tone, she described an encounter between the senator and Dennings, who had remarked to him, in passing, that there appeared to be “an alien pubic hair floating round in my gin.” Then he’d turned to the senator’s wife and added in a vaguely accusatory tone, “Never seen it before in my life! Have you?”

They brought her to an ending in a crowded cemetery where the gravestones cried for breath.

He’d been drunk. He had stumbled. He had fallen down the steep flight of steps beside the house to the bottom, where a passing pedestrian on M Street watched as he tumbled into night without end. A broken neck. This bloody, crumpled scene, his last.

“Who are you?” “Nowonmai,” she answered gutturally. “That’s your name?” Another nod. “You’re a man?” She said, “Say.” “Did you answer?” “Say.” “If that’s ‘yes,’ nod your head.” Regan nodded. “Are you speaking in a foreign language?” “Say.” “Where do you come from?” “Dog.” “You say that you come from a dog?” “Dogmorfmocion,” Regan replied.

The psychiatrist seemed to be choosing his words as carefully as flat, round stones to skim over a pond.

to me a myth is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: it’s glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn’t otherwise swallow,

Kinderman trailed him, hat in hand, following the faint scent of caraway seed and mustard to rows of refrigerated lockers, to the dreamless cabinet used for the filing of sightless eyes.

“It’s really true, you know, you do look like a boxer! Excuse me, but that scar there right over your eye?” He was pointing. “Just like Marlon Brando, it looks, in On the Waterfront, Father; yes, almost exactly Marlon Brando! They gave him a scar”—he was illustrating, pulling at the corner of his eye—“that made his eye look a little bit closed, a little dreamy all the time, a little sad. Well, that’s you,” he concluded; “Marlon Brando. People tell you that, Father?” “Do people tell you that you look like Paul Newman?” “Always. And believe me, inside this body, Mr. Newman is struggling to get out. Too crowded. Inside here is also Clark Gable.” Half smiling, Karras slightly shook his head and looked away.

He looked back at the detective. “But I know it was a trademark of demonic assassins.”

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. And so I think—” “You mean ‘suspect.’ ” “Yes, I suspect that Black Mass was just used as the justification.”

“Well, I really don’t know about ritual murder,” Karras said; “about that I have no clue. But I do know that a midwife in Switzerland once confessed to the murder of thirty or forty babies for use at Black Mass. Oh, well, maybe she was tortured into saying that,” he amended with a shrug. “But she sure as heck told a convincing story. She described how she’d hide a long, thin needle up her sleeve, so that when she was delivering the baby, she’d slip out the needle and stick it through the crown of the baby’s head, and then hide the needle again. No marks,” Karras said as he turned a glance to Kinderman. “The baby looked stillborn. You’ve heard of the prejudice European Catholics used to have against midwives? Well, that’s how it started.”

“Yes, I hate to go alone. You know, afterward I love to talk film; to discuss; to critique.” Silent, Karras nodded, then looked down at his large and powerful hands that he was holding clasped between his legs. Moments passed. And then Kinderman asked in a wistful tone of voice, “Would you like to see a film with me sometime? It’s free.” “Yes, I know. You get passes.” “Would you like to?” “As Elwood P. Dowd says in Harvey, ‘When?’ ” “Oh, I’ll call you!” The detective was beaming. “Okay, do that. I’d like that.”

At 7:23, Lieutenant Kinderman was pondering a spectrographic analysis showing that the paint from Regan’s sculpture matched a scraping of paint from the desecrated statue of the Virgin Mary,

Something was horribly wrong. Like light leaking under a door into a darkened hallway somewhere out of time, the glow of coming dread had seeped further and further into her consciousness. What lay behind the door? She feared to open it and look.

“In the piglet? No such luck. We’re just a poor little family of wandering souls. By the way, you don’t blame us for being here, do you? After all, we have no place to go. No home.”

“And how long are you planning to stay?” Face contorted in sudden rage, Regan jerked up from the pillow as she shouted in fury, “Until the piglet dies!” and then as suddenly, she settled back onto her pillows with a thick-lipped, drooling grin, saying, “Incidentally, what an excellent day for an exorcism.”

“Yes, you’ll join our little family,” Regan continued. “You see, the trouble with signs in the sky is that, once having seen them, one has no excuse. Have you noticed how few miracles one hears about lately? Not our fault, dear Karras. We try!”

Karras felt a rage sweeping through him, and then realized with a start that his anger was directed not at Regan, but at the demon! The demon! He tightly gripped calm by its shoulders, breathed deeply and then, standing up, he slipped a slender glass vial from a pocket and uncorked it.

We’ll see. After that there’s clairvoyance, although nowadays it might be ruled out as just telepathy or ESP.” “You believe in that stuff?” Karras studied her, the grimace of disbelief, the frown. She was serious, he decided. “It’s undeniable these days,” he told her, “although, as I said, it isn’t at all supernatural.” “Good grief, Charlie Brown!” “Oh, so you do have a skeptical side.”

Karl met the eyes that were shifting hardness, that were haggard wells of pain and blame; glimpsed briefly the dissolute bending of the lips and the ravaged face of a youth and a beauty buried alive in a thousand motel rooms, in a thousand awakenings from restless sleep with a stifled cry at remembered grace.

he ran back through Regan’s symptoms, touching each like a schoolboy making sure that he taps every slat as he walks along a white picket fence. Karras wondered which one he had missed.

Holding Karras’s gaze with dead eyes, Chris said quietly, “No. Burke told me that she did it. She pushed him out the window and she killed him.”

“Oh, that one.” The detective made a gesture of dismissal. “Don’t ask! Listen, what are you doing tonight? Are you busy? I’ve got passes for the Biograph. It’s Othello.” “That depends on who’s in it.” “Who’s in it? John Wayne, Othello, and Desdemona, Doris Day. You’re happy? This is freebies, Father Marlon Annoyingly Particular! This is William F. Shakespeare! Doesn’t matter who’s starring, who’s not! Now, you’re coming?” “I’m afraid I’ll have to pass. I’m snowed under.”

And how much longer before Kinderman demanded to see Regan? Had a chance to see the Dennings personality? To hear it? How much longer before Regan would be institutionalized? Or die?

Karras took the book and began to read: We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

As the stranger reached up to remove his hat, Chris was nodding her head, and then suddenly she was looking into eyes that overwhelmed her: that shone with intelligence and kindly understanding, with serenity that poured from them into her being like the waters of a warm and healing river whose source was both in him and yet somehow beyond him; whose flow was contained and yet headlong and endless.

The old priest saw her anxious gaze flicking upward toward the raging of the demon. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she was asking in a voice that was insistent and faintly pleading. “It’s hot and fresh-made. Wouldn’t you like some?” Merrin saw the hands lightly clasping and unclasping; the deep caverns of her eyes. “Yes, I would,” he said warmly. “Thank you.” Something heavy had been gently brushed aside; told to wait. “If you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

Repelled, Karras focused his attention on the text as Merrin read a passage from Saint Luke: … “My name is Legion,” answered the man, for many demons had entered into him. And they begged Jesus not to command them to depart into the abyss. Now a herd of swine was there, feeding on the mountain-side. And the demons kept entreating Jesus to let them enter into them. And he gave them leave. And the demons came out from the man and entered into the swine, and the herd rushed down the cliff and into the lake and were drowned. And…

I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us … the observers … every person in this house. And I think—I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial, vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love: of accepting the possibility that God could ever love us.”

“Ah, well … at last I realized that God would never ask of me that which I know to be psychologically impossible; that the love which He asked was in my will and not meant to be felt as emotion. No. Not at all. He was asking that I act with love; that I do unto others; and that I should do it unto those who repelled me, I believe, was a greater act of love than any other.”

How many husbands and wives,” Merrin uttered sadly, “must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds. Ah, dear God!” He shook his head. And then he nodded. “There it lies, I think, Damien … possession; not in wars, as some tend to believe; not so much; and very rarely in extraordinary interventions such as here … this girl … this poor child. No, I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves … for ourselves.”

“And yet even from this—from evil—there will finally come good in some way; in some way that we may never understand or even see.” Merrin paused. “Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness,” he brooded. “And perhaps even Satan—Satan, in spite of himself—somehow serves to work out the will of God.”

“Once the demon’s driven out,” he asked, “what’s to keep it from coming back in?” “I don’t know,” Merrin answered. “And yet it never seems to happen. No, never.”

“In just a minute. For now we’ll just walk. We’ll take air. We’ll enjoy.” He hooked his arm through the Jesuit’s and guided him diagonally to the other side of the street.

Glory be to God for dappled things, For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-fire-coal chestnut falls; finches’ wings… He fathers forth whose beauty is past change. Praise Him.

“Let me through, please! Coming through!” As he pushed his way through the bystanders, Dyer heard murmurs of the litany of indifference. “What happened?” “Some guy fell down the steps.”

The wail of the ambulance siren lifted shrill into night above the river. Then abruptly it ceased. The driver had remembered that time no longer mattered.

Dyer stared at her with fondness for a moment, then said quietly, “But if all of the evil in the world makes you think that there might be a devil, Chris, how do you account for all of the good?”

“It’s been peachy. Oh, no, wait! I almost forgot!” The priest reached into a pocket of his coat and extracted something. “This was his,” he said. Chris looked down at the holy medal and chain that was cupped in Dyer’s open and upraised hand. “Saint Christopher. I thought you might like to have it.” For long, silent moments Chris stared down at the medal thoughtfully, her brow lightly furrowed as if debating some decision; then, slowly, she reached out a hand, took the medal, slipped it into a pocket of her coat and said to Dyer, “Thanks, Father. Yeah. Yeah, I would.”