The Exorcist

by William Peter Blatty

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

The Mass had been lonely as her life.

Karras swallowed Scotch, but not the story.

He sat on the cot and drank in darkness. Wet came the tears. They would not cease. This was like childhood, this grief.

And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that so frequently rendered him helpless in the face of someone’s plea; that he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself out to rescue at the call of

“I think she convulsed. Don’t you?”

Nope, just a little twitch, that's all. Nothing to worry docs.

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

an impassive Karl Engstrom emerged from a rat-infested tenement building, walked three blocks south to a bus stop where he waited alone for a minute, expressionless, then clutched at a lamppost with both his hands as he crumpled against it, racked with tears.