Текст книги "The Exorcist"

Автор книги: William Peter Blatty

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    "Regan's fine. By the way, I've been thinking of another little dinner party. What was the name of that Jesuit psychiatrist again? I thought maybe I'd include him in the..."

    Laughter floating up from below her: a blue-jeaned young couple in a rented canoe. With a quick, nervous gesture, she flicked ash from her cigarette and glanced up the walkway of the bridge toward the District. Someone hurrying toward her: khaki pants and blue sweater; not a priest; not him. She looked down at the river again, at her helplessness swirling in the wake of the bright-red canoe. She could make out the name on its side: Caprice.

    Footsteps. The man in the sweater coming closer, slowing down as he reached her. Peripherally, she saw him rest a forearm on the top of the parapet and quickly she averted her head toward Virginia.

    "Keep movin', creep," she rumbled at him huskily, flipping her cigarette into the river, "or, I swear to Christ, I'll yell for a cop!"

    "Miss MacNeil? I'm Father Karras."

    She started, reddened, jerked swiftly around The chipped, rugged face. "Oh, my God! Oh, I'm–Jesus!"

    She was tugging at her sunglasses, flustered, and immediately pushing them back as the sad, dark eyes probed hers.

    "I should have told you that I wouldn't be in uniform. Sorry."

    His voice was cradling, stripping her of burden, as his powerful hands clasped gently together. They were large and yet sensitive: veined Michelangelos. Chris felt her gaze somehow drawn to them instantly.

    "I thought it would be much less conspicuous," he continued. "You seemed so concerned about keeping this quiet."

    "Guess I should have been concerned about not making such an ass of myself," she retorted, quickly fumbling through her purse. "I just thought you were–"

    "Human?" he interjected with a smile.

    "I knew that when I saw you one day on the campus," she said, as she searched now in the pockets of her suit. "That's why I called. You seemed human." She looked up and saw him staring at her hands. "Got a cigarette, Father?"

    He reached into the pocket of his shirt. "Can yon go a nonfilter?"

    "Right now I'd smoke rope."

    He tapped out a Camel from the packet. "On my allowance, I frequently do."

    "Vow of poverty," she murmured as she slipped out the cigarette, smiling tightly.

    "A vow of poverty has uses," he commented, reaching in his pocket for matches.

    "Like what?"

    "Makes rope taste better." Again, a half smile as he watched her hand holding the cigarette. It trembled. He saw the cigarette wavering in quick, erratic jumps, and without pausing, he took it from her fingers and put it up to his mouth. He lit it, his hands cupped around the match. He puffed. Gave the cigarette back to Chris, his eyes on the cars passing over the bridge.. "Lots easier. Breeze from the traffic," he told her.

    "Thanks, Father."

    Chris looked at him appraisingly, with gratitude, even with hope. She knew what he'd done. She watched as he lit up a Camel for himself. He forgot to cup his hands. As he exhaled, they each leaned an elbow on the parapet.

    "Where are you from, Father Karras? Originally."

    "New York."

    "Me too. Wouldn't ever go back, though. Would you?"

    Karras fought down the rise in his throat. "No, I wouldn't." He forced a smile. "But I don't have to make those decisions."

    "God, I'm dumb. You're a priest. You have to go where they send you."

    "That's right."

    "How'd a shrink ever get to be a priest?" she asked.

    He was anxious to know what the urgent problem was that she'd mentioned when she telephoned. She was feeling her way, he sensed–toward what? He must not prod. It would come... it would come.

    "It's the other way around," he corrected her gently. "The Society–"

    "Who?"

    "The Society of Jesus. Jesuit is short for that."

    "Oh, I see."

    "The Society sent me through medical school and through psychiatric training."

    "Where?"

    "Oh, well, Harvard; Johns Hopkins; Bellevue."

    He was suddenly aware that he wanted to impress her. Why? he wondered; and immediately saw the answer in the slums of his boyhood; in the balconies of theaters on the Lower East Side. Little Dimmy with a movie star.

    "Not bad," she said appraisingly, nodding her head.

    "We don't take vows of mental poverty."

    She sensed an irritation; shrugged; turned front, facing out to the river. "Look, it's just that I don't know you, and..." She dragged on the cigarette, long and deep, and then exhaled, crushing out the butt on the parapet. "You're a friend of Father Dyer's, that right?"

    "Yes, I am."

    "Pretty close?"

    "Pretty close."

    "Did he talk about the party?"

    "At your house?"

    "At my house."

    "Yes, he said you seemed human."

    She missed it; or ignored it. "Did he talk about my daughter?"

    "No, I didn't know you had one."

    "She's twelve. He didn't mention her?"

    "No."

    "He didn't tell you what she did?"

    "He never mentioned her."

    "Priests keep a pretty tight mouth, then; that right?"

    "That depends," answered Karras.

    "On what?"

    "On the priest."

    At the fringe of his awareness drifted a warning about women with neurotic attractions to priest who desired, unconsciously and under the guise of some other problem, to seduce the unattainable.

    "Look, I mean like confession. You're not allowed to talk about it, right?"

    "Yes, that's right."

    "And outside of confession?" she asked him. "I mean, what if some..." Her hands were now agitated; fluttering. "I'm curious. I... No, No, I'd really like to know. I mean, what if a person, let's say, was a criminal, like maybe a murderer or something, you know? If he came to you for help, would you have to turn him in?"

    Was she seeking instruction? Was she clearing off doubts in the way of conversion? There were people, Karras knew, who approached salvation as if it were an unreliable bridge overhanging an abyss. "If he came to me for spiritual help, I'd say, no;" he replied.

    "You wouldn't."

    "No. No, I wouldn't. But I'd try to persuade him to turn himself in."

    "And how do you go about getting an exorcism?"

    "Beg pardon?"

    "If a person's possessed by some kind of demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?"

    "Well, first you'd have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century."

    She was puzzled. "What do you mean by that? Didn't get you."

    "Well, it just doesn't happen anymore, Miss MacNeil."

    "Since when?"

    "Since we learned about mental illness; about paranoia; split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard."

    'You kidding?"

    Her voice wavered helpless, confused, and Karras regretted his flipness. Where had it come from? he wondered. It had leaped to his tongue unbidden.

    "Many educated Catholics, Miss MacNeil," he told her in a gentler tone, "don't believe in the devil anymore, and as far as possession is concerned, since the day I joined the Jesuits I've never met a priest who's ever in his life performed an exorcism. Not one."

    "Are you really a priest, she demanded with a bitter, disappointed sharpness, "or from Central Casting? I mean, what about all those stories in the Bible about Christ driving out all those demons?"

    Again, he was answering crisply, unthinking: "Look, if Christ had said those people who were supposedly possessed had schizophrenia, which I imagine they did, they would probably have crucified him three years earlier."

    "Oh, really?" Chris put a shaking hand to her sunglasses, deepening her voice in an effort at control. "Well, it happens, Father Karras, that someone very close to me is probably possessed. She needs an exorcism. Will you do it?"

    To Karras, it suddenly seemed unreal: Key Bridge; across the river, the Hot Shoppe; traffic; Chris MacNeil, the movie star. As he stared at her, groping for an answer, she slipped off the glasses and Karras felt momentary, wincing shock at the redness, at the desperate pleading in those haggard eyes. The woman was serious, he realized.

    "Father Karras; it's my daughter," she told him huskily, "my daughter!"

    "Then all the more reason," he at last said gently, "to forget about exorcism and–"

    "Why? God, I don't understand!" she burst out in a voice that was cracking and distraught.

    He took her wrist in a comforting hand. "In the first place," he told her in soothing tones, "it could make things worse."

    "But how?"

    "The ritual of exorcism is dangerously suggestive. It could plant the notion of possession, you see, where it didn't exist before, or if it did, it could tend to fortify it. And secondly, Miss MacNeil, before the Church approves an exorcism, it conducts an investigation to see if it's warranted. That takes time. In the meantime, your–"

    "Couldn't you do the exorcism yourself?" she pleaded, her lower lip starting to tremble. Her eyes were filling up with tears.

    "Look, every priest has the power to exorcise, but he has to have Church approval, and frankly, it's rarely ever given, so–"

    "Can't you even look at her?"

    "Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could, but–"

    "She needs a priest!" Chris suddenly cried out, her features contorted with anger and fear. "I've taken her to every goddamn, fucking doctor, psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you; now you send me to them!"

    "But your–"

    "Jesus Christ won't somebody help me?" The heart-stopping shriek bolted raw above the river. Startled birds shot up screeching from its banks. "Oh, my God, someone help me!" Chris moaned as she crumpled to Karras' chest with convulsive sobs. "Please help me! Help me! Please! Please, help!..."

    The Jesuit looked down at her, lifted up comforting hands to her head as the riders in traffic-locked automobiles glanced out windows to watch them wig passing disinterest.

    "It's all right," Karras whispered as he patted her shoulder. He wanted only to calm her; to humor; Stem hysteria. "... my daughter'

    '? It was she who needed psychiatric help. "It's all right. I'll go see her," he told her. "I'll see her."

He approached the house with her in silence, with a lingering sense of unreality, with thoughts of the next day's lecture at the Georgetown Medical School. He had yet to prepare his notes.

    They climbed the front stoop. Karras glanced down the street at the Jesuit residence hall and realized he would now miss dinner. It was ten before six. He looked at Chris as she slipped the key in the lock. She hesitated, turned to him. "Father... do you think you should wear your priest clothes?"

    The voice: how childlike it was; how naïve."Too dangerous," he told her.

    She nodded 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.

    "Father Karras?"

    He looked up. Chris had entered. She was holding the door.

    For a hesitant moment he stood unmoving; then abruptly he went forward, stepping into the house with an odd sense of ending.

    Karras heard commotion. Upstairs. A deep, booming voice was thundering obscenities, threatening in anger, in hate, in frustration.

    Karras glanced at Chris. She was staring at him mutely. Then she moved on ahead. He followed her upstairs and along the hall to Regan's bedroom, where Karl leaned against the wall just opposite her door, his head sagging low over folded arms. As the servant looked slowly up at Chris, Karras saw bafflement and fright in his eyes. The voice from the bedroom, this close, was so loud that it almost seemed amplified electronically. "It wants no straps, still," Karl told Chris in an awed, cracking voice.

    "I'll be back in a second, Father," Chris told the priest dully.

    Karras watched her walk down the hall and into her own bedroom; then he glanced at Karl. The Swiss was looking at him fixedly.

    "You are priest?" Karl asked. Karras nodded, then looked quickly back to the door of Regan's room. The raging voice had been displaced by the long, strident lowing of some animal that might have been a steer.

    Something prodding at his hand. He looked down. "That's her," Chris was saying "that's Regan." She was giving him a photograph. He took it. Young girl. Very pretty. Sweet smile.

    "That was taken four months ago," Chris said numbly. She took back the photo and motioned with her head at the bedroom door. "Now you go and take a look at her now." She leaned against the wall beside Karl. "I'll wait here."

    "Who's in there with her?" Karras asked her.

    "No one."

    He held her steady gaze and then turned with a frown to the bedroom door. As he grasped the doorknob, the sounds from within ceased abruptly. In the ticking silence, Karras hesitated, then entered the room slowly, almost flinching backward at the pungent stench of moldering excrement that hit him in the face like a palpable blast.

    Quickly reining back his revulsion, he closed the door. Then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back in the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite as they fixed upon his, as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal, hideous mask of mind-bending malevolence. Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled, thickly matted hair; to the wasted arms and legs; the distended stomach jutting up so grotesquely; then back to the eyes: they were watching him... pinning him... shifting now to follow as he moved to a desk and chair near the window.

    "Hello, Regan, " said the priest in a warm, friendly tone. He picked up the chair and took it over by the bed.

    "I'm a friend of your mother's. She tells me that you haven't been feeling too well." He sat down. "Do you think you'd like to tell me what's wrong? I'd like to help you."

    The eyes gleamed fiercely, unblinking and a yellowish saliva dribbled down from a corner of her mouth to her chin. Then her lips stretched taut into a feral grin, into bow-mouthed mockery.

    "Well, well, well," gloated Regan sardonically, and hairs prickled on the back of Karras' neck, for the voice was an impossibly deep bass thick with menace and power. "So it's you... they sent you! Well, we've nothing to fear from you at all."

    "Yes, that's right. I'm your friend. I'd like to help," said Karras.

    "You might looses these straps, then," Regan croaked. She had tugged up her wrists so that now Karras noticed that they were bound with a double set of restraining straps.

    "Are they uncomfortable for you?" he asked her.

    "Extremely. They're a nuisance. An infernal nuisance." The eyes glinted slyly with secret amusement.

    Karras saw the scratch marks on her face; the cuts on her lips where apparently she'd bitten them. "I'm afraid you might hurt yourself, Regan."

    "I'm not Regan," she rumbled, still with the hideous grin that now seemed to Karras to be her permanent expression. How incongruous, the braces on her teeth looked, he reflected.

    "Oh, I see. Well, then, maybe we should introduce ourselves. I'm Damien Karras," said the priest. "Who are you?"

    "I'm the devil."

    "Ah, good, very good." Karras nodded approvingly.

    "Now we can talk."

    "A little chat?"

    "If you like."

    "Very good for the soul. However, you will find that I cannot talk freely while bound with these straps. I'm accustomed to gesturing." Regan drooled. "As you know, I've client much of my time in Rome, dear Karras. Now kindly undo the straps!"

    What precocity of language and thought, mused Karras. He leaned forward in his chair with professional interest "You say you're the devil?" he asked.

    "I assure you."

    "Then why don't you just make the straps disappear?"

    "That's much too vulgar a display of power, Karras. Too crude. After all, I'm a prince!" A chuckle. "I much prefer persuasion, Karras; togetherness; community involvement. Moreover, if I loosen the straps myself, my friend, I deny you the opportunity of performing a charitable act."

    "But a charitable act," said Karras, "is a virtue and that's what the devil would want to prevent; so in fact I'd be helping you now if I didn't undo the straps. Unless, of course"–he shrugged–"you're really not really the devil. And in that case, perhaps I would undo the straps."

    "How very foxy of you, Karras. If only dear Herod were here to enjoy this."

    "Which Herod?" asked Karras with narrowed eyes. Was she punning on Christ's calling Herod "that fox"? "There were two. Are you talking about the King of Judea?"

    "The tetrarch of Galilee!" she blasted him with anger and scorching contempt; then abruptly she was grinning again, cajoling in that sinister voice: "There, you see how these damnable straps have upset me? Undo then. Undo them and I'll tell you the future."

    "Very tempting."

    "My forte."

    "But then how do I know that you can read the future?"

    "I'm the devil."

    "Yes, you say so, but you won't give me proof."

    "You have no faith."

    Karras stiffened. "In what?"

    "In me, dear Karras; in me!" Something mocking and malicious danced hidden in those eyes. "All these proofs, all these signs in the sky!"

    "Well, now, something very simple might do," offered Karras. "For example: the devil knows everything, correct?"

    "No, almost everything, Karras–almost. You see? They keep saying that I'm proud. I am not. Now, then, what are you up to, fox?" The yellowed, bloodshot eyes gleamed craftily.

    "I thought we might test the extent of your knowledge."

    "Ah, yes! The largest lake in South America," japed Regan, eyes bulging with glee, "is Lake Titicaca in Peru! Will that do it?"'

    "No, I'll have to ask something only the devil would know. For example, where is Regan? Do you know?"

    "She is here."

    "Where is 'here'?"

    "In the pig."

    "Let me see her."

    "Why?"

    "Why, to prove that you're telling me the truth."

    "Do you want to fuck her? Loose the straps and I will let you go at it!"

    "Let me see her."

    "Very succulent cunt," leered Regan, her furred and lolling tongue licking spittle across cracked lips. "But a poor conversationalist, my friend. I strongly advise you to stay with me."

    "Well, it's obvious you don't know where she is"–Karras shrugged–"so apparently you aren't the devil."

    "I am!" Regan bellowed with a sudden jerk forward, her face contorting with rage. Karras shivered as the massive, terrifying voice boomed crackling off the walls of the room. "I am!"

    "Well, then, let me see Regan," said Karras. "That would prove it."

    "I will show you! I will read your mind!" it seethed furiously. "Think of a number between one and ten!"

    "No, that wouldn't prove a thing. I would have to see Regan."

    Abruptly it chuckled, leaning back against the headboard. "No, nothing would prove anything at all to you, Karras. How splendid. How splendid indeed! In the meantime, we shall try to keep you properly beguiled. After all, now, we would not wish to lose you."

    "Who is 'we'?" Karras probed with alert, quick interest.

    "We are quite a little group in the piglet," it said, nodding. "Ah, yes, quite a stunning little multitude. Later I may see about discreet introductions. In the meantime, I am suffering from a maddening itch that I cannot reach. Would you loosen one strap for a moment, Karras?"

    "No; just tell me where it itches and I'll scratch it."

    "Ah, sly, very sly!"

    "Show me Regan and perhaps I'll undo one strap," offered Karras. "If–"

    Abruptly he flinched in shock as he found himself staring into eyes filled with terror, at a mouth gaping wide in a soundless shriek for help.

    But then quickly the Regan identity vanished in a blurringly rapid remolding of features. "Won't you take off these straps?" asked a wheedling voice in a clipped British accent.

    In a flash, the demonic personality returned. "Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?" it croaked, and then threw back its head in laughter.

    Karras sat stunned, felt the glacial hands at the back of his neck again, more palpable now, more firm. The Regan-thing broke off its laughter and fixed him with taunting eyes.

    "Incidentally, your mother is here with us, Karras. Do you wish to leave a message? I will see that she gets it." Then Karras was suddenly dodging a projectile stream of vomit, leaping out of his chair. It caught a portion of his sweater and one of his hands.

    His face now colorless, the priest looked down at the bed. Regan cackled with glee. His hand dripped vomit onto the rug. "If that's true," the priest said numbly, "then you must know my mothers first name. What is it?"

    The Regan-thing hissed at him, mad eyes gleaming, head gently undulating like a cobra's.

    "What is it?"

    Regan lowed like a steer in an angry bellow that pierced the shutters and shivered through the glass of the large bay window. The eyes rolled upward into their sockets.

    For a time Karras watched as the bellowing continued; then he looked at his hand and walked out of the room.

    Chris pushed herself quickly away from the wall, glancing, with distress at the Jesuit's sweater. "What happened? Did she vomit?"

    "Got a towel?" he asked her.

    "There's a bathroom right there!" she said hurriedly, pointing at a hallway door. "Karl, take a look at her!" she instructed, and followed the priest to the bathroom.

    "I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed in agitation, whipping a towel off the bar. The Jesuit moved to the washbasin.

    "Have you got her on tranquilizers?' he asked.

    Chris turned on the water taps. "Yes, Librium. Here, take off that sweater and then you can wash."

    "What dosage?" he asked her, tugging at the sweater -with his clean left hand.

    "Here, I'll help you." She pulled at the sweater from the bottom. "Well, today she's had four hundred milligrams, Father."

    "Four hundred?"

    She had the sweater pulled up to his chest "Yeah, that's how we got her into those straps. It took all of us together to–"

    "You gave your daughter four hundred milligrams at once?"

    "C'mon, get your arms up, Father." He raised them and she tugged delicately. "She's so strong you can't believe it."

    She pulled back the shower curtain, tossing the sweater into the tub. "I'll have Willie get it cleaned for you, Father. I'm sorry."

    "Never mind. It doesn't matter." He unbuttoned the right sleeve of his starched white shirt and rolled it up, exposing a matting of fine brown hairs on a bulging, thickly muscled forearm.

    "I'm sorry," Chris repeated quietly, slowly sitting down on the edge of the tub.

    "Is she taking any nourishment at all?" asked Karras. He held his hand beneath the hot-water tap to rinse away the vomit.

    She clutched and unclutched the towel. It was pink, the name Regan embroidered in blue. "No, Father. Just Sustagen when she's been sleeping. Bu she ripped out the tubing."

    "Ripped it out?"

    "Today."

    Disturbed, Karras soaped and rinsed his hands, and after a pause said gravely, "She ought to be in a hospital."

    "I just can't do that," answered Chris in a toneless voice.

    "Why not?"

    "I just can't!" she repeated with quavering anxiety. "I can't have anyone else involved! She's..." Chris-dropped her head. Inhaled. Exhaled. "She s done something, Father. I can't take the risk of someone else finding out. Not a doctor... not a nurse..." She looked up. "Not anyone."

    Frowning, he turned off the taps. "... What if a person, let's say, was a criminal..." He lowered his head, staring down at the basin. "Who's giving her the Sustagen? the Librium? her medicines?"

    "We are. Her doctor showed us how."

    "You need prescriptions."

    "Well, you can do some of that, can't you, Father?"

    Karras turned to her, hands upraised above the basin like a surgeon after washup. For a moment he met her haunted gaze, felt some terrible secret in them, some dread. He nodded at the towel in her hands. She stared blankly. "Towel, please," he said softly.

    "Oh, I'm sorry!" Very quickly, she fumbled it out to him, still watching him with a tight expectancy. The Jesuit dried his hands. "Well, Father, what's it look like?" Chris finally asked him. "Do you think she's possessed?"

    "Do you?"

    "I don't know. I thought you were the expert."

    "How much do you know about possession?"

    "Just a little that I've read. Some things that the doctors told me."

    "What doctors?"

    "At Barringer Clinic."

    He folded the towel and carefully draped it over the bar. "Are you Catholic?"

    "No."

    "Your daughter?"

    "No."

    "'What religion?"

    "None; but I–"

    "Why did you come to me, then? Who, advised it?"

    "I came because I'm desperate!" she blurted excitedly. "No one advised me!"

    He stood with his back to her, fringes of the towel still lightly in his grip. "You said earlier psychiatrists advised you to come to me."

    "Oh, I don't know what I was saying! I've been practically out of my head!"

    "Look, I couldn't care less about your motive," he answered with a carefully tempered intensity. "All I care about is doing what's best for your daughter. I'll tell you right now that if you're looking for an exorcism as an autosuggestive shock cure; you're much -better off calling Central Casting, Miss MacNeil, because the Church won't buy it and you'll have wasted precious time." Karras clutched at the towel rack to -steady his trembling hands. What's wrong? What's happened?

    Incidentally, it's Mrs. MacNeil," he heart Chris telling him drily.

    He lowered his head and gentled his tone. "Look, whether it's a demon or a mental disorder, I'll do everything I possibly can to help. But I've got to have -the truth. It's important for Regan. At the moment, I'm groping in a state of ignorance, which is nothing supernatural for me or abnormal, it's just my usual condition. Now why don't we both get out of this bathroom and go downstairs where we can talk." He had turned back to her with a faint, warm smile of reassurance and reached out his hand to help her up. "I could use a cup of coffee."

    "I could use a drink."

While Karl and Sharon looked after Regan, they sat in the study, Chris on the sofa, Karras in a chair beside the fireplace, and Chris related the history of Regan's illness, though she carefully withheld any mention of phenomena related to Dennings.

    The priest listened, saying very little: an occasional question; a nod; a frown.

    Chris admitted that at first she'd considered exorcism as shock treatment. "Now I don't know," she said, shaking her head. Freckled, clasped fingers twitched in her lap. "I just don't know." She lifted a look to the pensive priest. "What do you think, Father?'

    '

    "Compulsive behavior produced by guilt, perhaps, put together with split personality."

    "Father, I've had all that garbage! Now how can you say that after all you've just seen!"

    "If you've seen as many patients in psychiatric wards as I have, you can say it very easily," he assured her.

    "Come on, now. Possession by demons, all right: let's assume it's a fact of life,, that it happens. But your daughter doesn't say she's a demon; she insists she's the devil himself, and that's the same thing as saying you're Napoleon Bonaparte! You see?"

    "Then explain all those rappings and things."

    "I haven't heard them."

    "Well, they heard then at Barringer, Father, so it wasn't just here in the house."

    "Well, perhaps, but we'd hardly need a devil to explain them."

    "So explain them," she demanded.

    "Psychokinesis."

    "What?"

    "Well, you have heard of poltergeist phenomena, haven't you?"

    "Ghosts throwing dishes and things?"

    Karras nodded. "It's not that uncommon, and usually happens around an emotionally disturbed adolescent.

    Apparently, extreme inner tension of the mind can sometimes trigger some unknown energy that seems to move objects around at a distance. There's nothing supernatural about it. Like Regan's strength. Again, in pathology it's common. Call it mind over matter, if you will."

    "I call it weird."

    "Well, in any case, it happens outside of possession."

    "Boy, isn't this beautiful," she said wearily. "Here I am an atheist and here you are a priest and–"

    "The best explanation for any phenomenon," Karras overrode her, "is always the simplest one available that accommodates all the facts."

    "Well, maybe I'm dumb," she retorted, "but telling me an unknown gizmo in somebody's head throws dishes at a ceiling tells me nothing at all! So what is it? Can you tell me for pete's sake what it is?"

    "No, we don't under–"

    "What the hell's split personality, Father? You say it; I hear it. What is it? Am I really that stupid? Will you tell me what it is in a way I can finally get it through my head?" In the red-veined eyes was a plea of despairing confusion.

    "Look, there's no one in the world who pretends to understand it," the priest told her gently. "All we know is that it happens, and anything beyond the phenomenon itself is only the purest speculation. But think of it this way, if you like: the human brain contains, say, seventeen billion cells."

    Chris leaned forward, frowning intently.

    "Now looking at these brain cells," continued Karras, "we see that they handle approximately a hundred million messages per second; that's the number of sensations bombarding your body. They not only integrate all of these messages, but they do it efficiently, they do it without ever stumbling or getting in each other's way. Now how could they do that, without some form of communication? Well, it seems as if they couldn't. So apparently each of these cells has a consciousness, maybe, of its own. Now imagine that the human body is a massive ocean liner, all right? and that all of your brain cells are the crew. Now one of these cells is up on the bridge. He's the captain. But he never knows precisely what the rest of the crew below decks is doing. All he knows is that the ship keeps running smoothly, that the job's getting done. Now the captain is you, it's your waking consciousness. And what hap-pens in dual personality–maybe–is that one of those crew cells down below decks comes up on the bridge and takes over command. In other words, mutiny. Now–does that help you understand it?"