Текст книги "The Exorcist"

Автор книги: William Peter Blatty

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    "God almighty, I'm relieved! For a second, there, I thought you were going to tell me it's haunted!"

    Mrs. Perrin glanced down to her. "Why would I tell you a thing like that?"

    Chris was thinking of a friend, a noted actress in Beverly Hills who had sold her home because of her insistence that it was inhabited by a poltergeist. "I -don't' know." She grinned wanly. "On account of who you are, I guess. I was kidding."

    "It's a very fine house," Mrs. Perrin reassured her in an even tone. "I've been here before, you know; many times."

    "Have yogi really?"

    "Yes, an admiral had it; a friend of mine. I get a letter from him now and then. They've shipped him to sea again, poor dear. I don't know if it's really him that I miss or this house." She smiled. "But then maybe you'll invite me back."

    "Mary Jo, I'd love to have you back. I mean it. You're a fascinating person."

    "Well, at least I'm the nerviest person you know."

    "Oh, come on. Listen, call me. Please. Will you call me next week?"

    "Yes, I would like to hear how your daughter's coming on."

    "Got the number?"

    "Yes, at home in my book."

    What was off? wondered Chris. There was something in her tone that was slightly off-center.

    "Well, good night," said Mrs. Perrin, "and thanks again for a marvelous evening." And before Chris could answer her, she was walking rapidly down the street.

    For a moment, Chris watched her; and then closed the front door. A heavy lassitude overcame her. Quite a night, she thought; some night... some night...

    She went to the living room and stood over Willie, who was kneeling by the urine stain. She was brushing up the nap of the rug.

    "White vinegar I put on," muttered Willie. "Twice."

    "Comin' out?"

    "Maybe now," answered Willie. "I do not know. We will see."

    "No, you can't really tell until the damned thing dries."

    Yeah, that's brilliant there, punchy. That's really a brilliant observation. Judas priest, kid, go to bed!

    "C'mon, leave it alone for now, Willie. Get to sleep."

    "No, I finish."

    "Okay, then. And thanks. Good night."

    -"Good night, madam."

    Chris started up the stairs with weary steps. "Great curry, there, Willie. Everybody loved it."

    "Yes, thank you, madam."

    Chris looked in on Regan and found her still asleep. Then she remembered the Ouija board. Should she hide it? Throw it away? Boy, Perrin's really dingy when it comes to that stuff. Yet Chris was aware that the fantasy playmate was morbid and unhealthy. Yeah, maybe I should chuck it.

    Still, Chris was hesitant. Standing by the bedside and looking at Regan, she remembered an incident when her daughter was only three: the night that Howard had decided she was much too old to continue to sleep with her baby bottle, on which she had grown dependent. He'd taken it away from her that night, and Regan had screamed until four in the morning, then acted hysterical for days. And now Chris feared a similar reaction. Better wait until I talk it all out with a shrink. Moreover, the Ritalin, she reflected, hadn't had a chance to take effect.

    At the last, she decided to wait and see.

    Chris retired to her room, settled wearily into bed, and almost instantly fell asleep. Then awakened to fearful, hysterical screaming at the rim of her consciousness.

    "Mother, come here, come here, I'm afraid!"

    "Yes, I'm coming, all right, hon, I'm coming!"

    Chris raced down the hall to Regan's bedroom. Whimpering. Crying. Sounds like bedsprings.

    "Oh, my baby, what's wrong?" Chris exclaimed as she reached out and flicked on the lights.

    Good Christ almighty!

    Regan lay taut on her back, face stained with tears and contorted with terror as she gripped at the sides of her narrow bed.

    "Mother, why is it shaking?" she cried. "Make it stop! Oh, I'm scared! Make it stop! Mother, Please make it stop!"

    The mattress of the bed was quivering violently back and forth.

II: The Edge

.... 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

CHAPTER ONE

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

    The Mass had been lonely as her life. Her brothers from Brooklyn. The grocer on the corner who'd extended her credit. Watching them lower her into the dark of a world without windows, Damien Karras sobbed with a grief he had long misplaced.

    "Ah, Dimmy, Dimmy..."

    An uncle with an arm around his shoulder.

    "Never mind, she's in heaven now, Dimmy, she's happy."

    Oh, God, let it be! Ah, God! Ah, please! Oh, God please be!

    They waited in the car while he lingered by the grave. He could not bear the thought of her being alone.

    Driving to Pennsylvania Station, he listened to his uncles speak of their illnesses in broken, immigrant accents.

    "... emphysema... gotta quit smokin'... I ohmos' died las' year, you know that?"

    Spasms of rage fought to break from his lips, but he pressed them back and felt ashamed. He looked out the window: they were passing by the Home Relief Station where on Saturday mornings in the dead of winter she would pick up the milk and the sacks of potatoes while he lay in his bed; the Central Park Zoo, where she left him in summer while she begged by the fountain in front of the Plaza. Passing the hotel, Karras burst into sobs, and then choked back the memories, wiped at the wetness of stinging regrets. He wondered why love had waited for this distance, waited for the moment when he need not touch, when the limits of contact and human surrender had dwindled to the size of a printed Mass card tucked in his wallet: In Memoriam...

    He knew. This grief was old.

    He arrived at Georgetown in time for dinner, but had no appetite. He paced inside his cottage. Jesuit friends came by with condolences. Stayed briefly. Promised prayers.

    Shortly after ten, Joe Dyer appeared with a bottle of Scotch. He displayed it proudly: "Chivas Regal!"

    "Where'd you get the money for it–out of the poorbox?"

    "Don't be an asshole, that would be breaking my vow of poverty."

    "Where did you get it, then?"

    "I stole it"

    Karras smiled and shook his head as he fetched a glass and a pewter coffee mug. He rinsed them out in his tiny bathroom sink and said, "I believe you."

    "Greater faith I have never seen."

    Karras felt a stab of familiar pain. He shook it off and returned to Dyer, who was sitting on his cot breaking open the seal. He sat beside him.

    "Would you like to absolve me now or later?"

    "Just pour," said Karras, "and we'll absolve each other."

    Dyer poured deep into glass and cup. "College presidents shouldn't drink," he murmured. "It sets a bad example. I figure I relieved him of a terrible temptation."

    Karras swallowed Scotch, but not the story. He knew the president's ways too well. A man of tact and sensitivity, he always gave through indirection. Dyer had come, he knew, as a friend, but also as the president's personal emissary. So when Dyer made a passing comment about Karras possibly needing a rest," the Jesuit psychiatrist took it as hopeful omen of the future and felt a momentary flood of relief.

    Dyer was good for him; made him laugh; talked about the party and Chris MacNeil; purveyed new anecdotes about the Jesuit Prefect of Discipline. He drank very little, but continually replenished Karras' glass, and when he thought he was numb enough for sleep, he got up from the cot and made Karras stretch out, while he sat at the desk and continued to talk until Karras' eyes were closed and his comments were mumbled grunts.

    Dyer stood up and undid the laces of Karras' shoes. He slipped them off.

    "Gonna steal my shoes now?" Karras muttered thickly.

    "No, I tell fortunes by reading the creases. Now shut up and go to sleep."

    "You're a Jesuit cat burglar."

    Dyer laughed lightly and covered him with a coat that he took from a closet. "Listen, someone's got to worry about the bills around this place. All you other guys do is rattle beads and pray for the hippies down on M Street."

    Karras made no answer. His breathing was regular and deep. Dyer moved quietly to the door and flicked out the light.

    "Stealing is a sin," muttered Karras in the darkness.

    "Mea culpa," Dyer said softly.

    For a time he waited, then at last decided that Karras was asleep. He left the cottage.

    In the middle of the night, Karras awakened in tears. He had dreamed of his mother. Standing at a window high in Manhattan, he'd seen her emerging from a subway kiosk across the street. She stood at the curb with a brown paper shopping bag, searching for him. He waved. She didn't see him. She wandered the street. Buses. Trucks. Unfriendly crowds. She was growing frightened. She returned to the subway and began to descend. Karras grew frantic; ran to the street and began to weep as he called her name; as he could not find her; as he pictured her helpless and bewildered in the maze of tunnels beneath the ground.

    He waited for his sobbing to subside, and then fumbled for the Scotch. He sat on the cot and drank in darkness. Wet came the tears. They would not cease. This was like childhood, this grief.

    He remembered a telephone call from his uncle: "Dimmy, da edema's affected her brain. She won't let a doctor come anywhere near her. Jus' keeps screamin' things. Even talks ta da goddam radio. I figure she's got ta go to Bellevue, Dimmy. A regular hospital won't put up wit' dat. I jus' figure a coupla months an' she's good as new; den we take her out again. Okay? Lissen, Dimmy, I tell you: we awready done it. Dey give her a shot an' den take her in da ambulance dis mornin'. We didn' wanna bodda you, excep' dere is a hearin' and you gotta sign da papers. Now... What?... Private hospital? Who's got da money, Dimmy? You?"

    He didn't remember falling asleep.

    He awakened in torpor, with memory of loss draining blood from his stomach. He reeled to the bathroom; showered; shaved; dressed in a cassock. It was five-thirty-five. He unlocked the door to Holy Trinity, put on his vestments, and offered up Mass at the left side altar.

    "Memento etiam..." he prayed with bleak despair. "Remember thy servant, Mary Karras...."

    In the tabernacle door he saw the face of the nurse at Bellevue Receiving; heard again the screams from the isolation room.

    "You her son?"

    "Yes, I'm Damien Karras"

    "Well, I wouldn't go in there. She's pitchin' a fit."

    He'd looked through the port at the windowless room with the naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling; padded walls; stark; no furniture save for the cot on which she raved.

    "... grant her, we pray Thee, a place of refreshment, light and peace...."

    As she met his gaze, she'd grown suddenly silent; moved to the port with a baffled look.

    "Why you do this, Dimmy? Why?"

    The eyes had been meeker than a lamb's.

    "Agnus Dei..." he murmured as he bowed and struck his breast. "Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant her rest...."

    As he closed his eyes and held the Host, he saw his mother in the hearing room, her hands clasped gentle in her lap, her expression docile and confused as the judge explained to her the Bellevue psychiatrist's report.

    "Do you understand that, Mary?"

    She'd nodded; wouldn't open her mouth; they had taken her dentures.

    "Well, what do you say about that, Mary?'

    '

    She'd proudly answered him: "My boy, he speak for me."

    An anguished moan escaped from Karras as he bowed his head above the Host. He struck his breast as if it were time and murmured, "Domine, no sum dignus.... I am not worthy... say but the word and my soul shall be healed."

    Against all reason, against all knowledge, he prayed there was Someone to hear his prayer.

    He did not think so.

    After the Mass, he returned to the cottage and tried to sleep. Without success.

    Later in the morning, a youngish priest that he'd never seen came by unexpectedly. He knocked and looked in the door.

    "You busy? Can I see you for a while?"

    In the eyes, the restless burden; in the voice, the tugging plea.

    For a moment, Karras hated him.

    "Come in," he said gently. And inwardly raged at this portion of his being that rendered him helpless; that he could not control; that lay coiled within him like a length of rope, always ready to fling itself unbidden at the cry of someone else's need. It gave him -no peace. Not even in sleep. At the edge of his dreams, there was often a sound like a faint, brief cry of someone in distress. It was almost inaudible in the distance. Always the same. And for minutes after waking, he would feel the anxiety of some duty unfulfilled.

    The young priest fumbled; faltered; seemed shy. Karras led him patiently. Offered cigarettes. Instant coffee. Then forced a look of interest as the moody young visitor gradually unfolded a familiar problem: the terrible loneliness of priests.

    Of all the anxieties that Karras encountered among the community, this one had lately become the must prevalent. Cut off from their families as well as from women, many of the Jesuits were also fearful of expressing affection for fellow priests; of forming deep and loving friendships.

    "Like I'd like to put my arm around another guy's shoulder, but right away I'm scared he's going to think I'm queer. I mean, you hear all these theories about so many latents attracted to the priesthood. So I just don't do it. I won't even go to somebody's room just to listen to records; or talk; or smoke. It's not that I'm afraid of him; I'm just worried about him getting worried about me."

    Karras felt the weight easing slowly from the other and onto him. He let it come; let the young priest talk. his knew he would return again and again; find relief from aloneness; make Karras his friend; and when he'd realized he had done so without fear and suspicion, perhaps he would go on to make friends among the others.

    The psychiatrist grew weary; found himself drifting into private sorrow. He glanced at a plaque that someone had given him the previous Christmas. MY BROTHER HURTS. I SHARE HIS PAIN. I MEET GOD IN HIM, he read.

    A failed encounter. He blamed himself. He had mapped the streets of his brother's torment, yet never had walked them; or so he believed. He thought that the pain which he felt was his own.

    At last the visitor looked at his watch. It was time for lunch in the campus refectory. He rose and started to leave. Then paused to glance at a current novel on Karras' desk.

    "Have you read it?" asked Karras.

    The other shook his head. "No, I haven't. Should I?"

    "I don't know. I just finished it and I'm not at all sure that I really understand it," Karras lied. He picked up the book and handed it over. "Want to take along? You know, I'd really like to hear someone else's opinion."

    "Well, sure," said the Jesuit, examining the copy on the flap of the dust jacket. "I'll try to get it back to you in a couple of days."

    His mood seemed brighter.

    As the screen door creaked with his departure, Karras felt momentary peace. He picked up his breviary and stepped out to the courtyard, where he slowly paced and said his Office.

    In the afternoon, he had still another visitor, the elderly pastor of Holy Trinity, who took a chair by the desk and offered condolences on the passing of Karras' mother.

    "Said a couple of Masses for her, Damien. And one for you," he wheezed with the barest trace of a brogue.

    "That was thoughtful of you, Father. Thank you very much."

    "How old was she?"

    "Seventy."

    "A good old age."

    Karras fixed his gaze on an altar card that the pastor had carried in with him. One of three employed in the Mass, it was covered in plastic and inscribed with a portion of the prayers that were said by the priest. The psychiatrist wondered what he was doing with it.

    "Well, Damien, we've had another one of those things here today. In the church, y'know. Another desecration."

    A statue of the Virgin at the back of the church had been painted like a harlot, the pastor told him. Then he handed the altar card to Karras. "And this one the morning after you'd gone, y'know, to New York. Was it Saturday? Saturday. Yes. Well, take a look at that. I just had a talk with a sergeant of police, and–well... well, look at this card, would you, Damien?"

    As Karras examined it, the pastor explained that someone had slipped in a typewritten sheet between the original card and its cover. The ersatz text, though containing some strikeovers and various typographical errors, was in basically fluent and intelligible Latin and described in vivid, erotic detail an imagined homosexual encounter involving the Blesses Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.

    "That's enough, now, you don't have to read it all," said the pastor, snapping back the card as if fearing that it might be an occasion of sin. "Now that's excellent Latin; I mean, it's got style, a church Latin style. Well, the sergeant says he talked to some fellow, a psychologist, and he says that the person's been doin' this all–well, he could be a priest, y'know, a very sick priest. Do you think?"

    The psychiatrist considered for a while. Then nodded. "Yes. Yes, it could. Acting out a rebellion, perhaps, in a state of complete somnambulism. I don't know. It could be. Maybe so."

    "Can you think of any candidates, Damien?"

    "I don't get you."

    "Well, now, sooner or later they come and see you, wouldn't you say? I mean, the sick ones, if there are any, from the campus. Do y'know any like that? I mean with that kind of illness, y'know."

    "No, I don't."

    "No, I didn't think you'd tell me."

    "Well, I wouldn't know anyway, Father. Somnambulism is a way of resolving any number of possible conflict situations, and the usual form of resolution is symbolic. So I really wouldn't know. And if it is a somnambulist, he's probably got a complete posterior amnesia about what he's done, so that even he wouldn't have a clue."

    "What if you were to tell him?" the pastor asked cagily. He plucked at an earlobe, a habitual gesture, Karras had noticed, whenever he thought he was being wily.

    "I really don't know," repeated the psychiatrist.

    "No. No, I really didn't think that you'd tell me." He rose and moved for the door. "Y'know what you're like, you people? Like priests!" he complained.

    As Karras laughed gently, the pastor returned and dropped the altar card on his desk. "I suppose yon should study this thing." he mumbled. "Something might come to you."

    The pastor moved for the door.

    "Did they check it for fingerprints?" asked Karras.

    The pastor stopped and turned slightly. "Oh, I doubt it. After all, it's not a criminal we're after, now, is it? More likely it's only a demented parishioner. What do you think of that, Damien? Do you think that it could be someone in the parish? You know, I think so. It wasn't a priest at all, it was someone among the parishioners." He was pulling at his earlobe again. '"Don't you think?"

    "I really wouldn't know," he said again.

    "No, I didn't think you'd tell me."

    Later that day, Father Karras was relieved of his duties as counselor and assigned to the Georgetown University Medical School as lecturer in psychiatry. His orders were to "rest."

CHAPTER TWO

Regan lay on her back on Klein's examining table, arms and legs bowed outward. Taking her foot in both his hands; the doctor flexed it toward her ankle. For moments he held it there in tension, then suddenly released it. The foot relaxed into normal position.

    He repeated the procedure several times but without any variance in the result. He seemed dissatisfied. When Regan abruptly sat up and spat in his face; he instructed a nurse to remain in the room and returned to his office to talk to Chris.

    It was April 26. He'd been out of the city both Sunday and Monday and Chris hadn't reached him until this morning to relate the happening at the party and the subsequent shaking of the bed.

    "It was actually moving?"

    "It was moving."

    "How long?"

    "I don't know. Maybe ten, maybe fifteen seconds. I-mean, that's all l saw. Then she sort of went stiff and wet the bed. Or maybe she'd wet it before. I don't know. But then all of a sudden she was dead asleep and never woke up till the next afternoon."

    Dr. Klein entered thoughtfully.

    "Well, what is it?" Chris asked in an anxious tone.

    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, and usually indicated a lesion in the brain.

    "Well, the test was negative," he told her, and described the procedure, explaining that in clonus the alternate flexing and releasing of the foot would have triggered a run of clonic contractions. As he sat at his desk, he still seemed worried, however, "Has she ever had a fall?"

    "Like on the head?" Chris asked.

    "Well, yes."

    "No, not that I know of."

    "Childhood diseases?"

    "Just the usual. Measles and mumps and chicken pox."

    "Sleepwalking history?"

    "Not until now."

    "What do you mean? She was walking in her sleep at the party?"

    "Well, yes. She still doesn't know what she did that night. And there's stuff, too, that she doesn't remember."

    "Lately?"

    Sunday. Regan still sleeping. An overseas telephone call from Howard.

    "How's Rags?"

    "Thanks a lot for the call on her birthday."

    "I was stuck on a yacht. Now for chrissakes lay off me. I called her the minute I was back in the hotel."

    "Oh, sure."

    "She didn't tell you?"

    "You talked to her?"

    "Yes. That's why I thought I'd better call you. What the hell's going on with her?"

    "What am you getting at?"

    "She just called me a 'cocksucker' and hung up the phone."

    Recounting the incident to Dr. Klein, Chris explained -that when Regan had finally awakened, she had no memory whatever of either the telephone call or what had happened on the night of the dinner.

    "Then perhaps she wasn't lying about the moving of the furniture," Klein hypothesized.

    "I don't get you."

    "Well, she moved it herself, no doubt, but perhaps while in one of those states where she didn't really know what she was doing. It's known as automatism. Like a trance state. The patient doesn't know or remember what he's doing."

    "But something just occurred to me, doc, you know that? There's a great big heavy bureau in her room made out of teakwood. It must weigh half a ton. I mean, how could she have moved that?"

    "Extraordinary strength is pretty common in pathology."

    "Oh, really? How come?"

    The doctor shrugged "No one knows.

    "Now, besides what you've told me," he continued, "have you noticed any other bizarre behavior?"

    "Well, she's gotten zeal sloppy."

    "Bizarre," he repeated.

    "For her, that's bizarre. Oh, now wait! There's this! You remember that Ouija board she's been playing with? Captain Howdy?"

    "The fantasy playmate."The internist nodded.

    "Well, now she can hear him," Chris revealed.

    The doctor leaned forward, folding his arms atop the desk. As Chris, continued, his eyes were alert and had narrowed to dart points of speculation.

    "Yesterday morning," said Chris, "I could hear her talking to Howdy in her bedroom. I mean, she'd talk, and then seem to wait, as if she were playing with the Ouija board. When I peeked inside the room, though, there wasn't any Ouija board there; just Rags; and she was nodding her head, doc, just like she was agreeing with what he was saying."

    "Did she see him?"

    "I don't think so. She sort of had her head to the side, the way she does when she listens to records."

    The doctor nodded thoughtfully, "Yes. Yes, I see. Any other phenomena like that? Does she see things? Smell things?"

    "Smell," Chris remembered. "She keeps smelling something bad in her bedroom."

    "Something burning?"

    "Hey, that's right!" Chris exclaimed. "How'd you know that?"

    "It's sometimes the symptom of a type of disturbance in the chemicoelectrical activity of the brain. In the case of your daughter, in the temporal lobe, you see." He put a hand to the front of his skull. "Up here, in the forward part of the brain. Now it's rare but it does cause bizarre hallucinations and usually just before a convulsion. I suppose that's why it's taken for schizophrenia so often; but it isn't schizophrenia. It's produced by a lesion in the temporal lobe. Now the test for clonus isn't conclusive, Mrs. MacNeil, so I think I'd like to give her an EEG."

    "What's that?"

    "Electroencephalograph. It will show us the pattern of her brain waves. That's usually a pretty good indication of abnormal functioning."

    "But you think that's it, huh? Temporal lobe?"'

    "Well, she does have the syndrome, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, the untidiness; the pugnacity; behavior that's socially embarrassing; the automatism, as well. And of course, the seizures that made the bed shake. Usually, that's followed by either wetting the bed or vomiting, or both, and then sleeping very deeply."

    "You want to test her right now?" asked Chris.

    "Yes, I think we should do it immediately, but she's going to need sedation. If she moves or jerks it will void the results, so may I give her, say, twenty-five milligrams of Librium?"

    "Jesus, do what you have to," she told him, shaken.

    She accompanied him to the examining room, and when Regan saw him readying the hypodermic, she screamed and filled the air with a torrent of obscenities.

    "Oh, honey, it's to help you!" Chris pleaded in distress. She held Regan still while Dr. Klein gave the injection.

    "I'll be back," the doctor said, nodding, and while a nurse wheeled the EEG apparatus into the room, he left to attend another patient. When he returned a short time later, the Librium still had not taken effect.

    Klein seemed surprised. "That was quite a strong dose," he remarked to Chris.

    He injected another twenty-five milligrams; left; came back; found Regan tractable and docile.

    "What are you doing?" Chris asked him as Klein applied the saline-tipped electrodes to Regan's scalp.

    "We put four on each side," he explained. "That enables us to take a brain-wave reading from the left and right side of the brain and then compare them."

    "Why compare them?"

    "Well, deviations could be significant. For example, I had a patient who used to hallucinate," said Klein. "He'd see things, he'd hear things, things that weren't actually there, of course. Well, I found a discrepancy in comparing the left and right readings of his brain waves and discovered that actually the man was hallucinating on just one side of his head."

    "That's wild."

    "The left eye and ear functioned normally; only the right side had visions and heard things.

    "Well, all right, now, let's see." He had turned the machine on. He pointed to the waves on the fluorescent screen. "Now that's both sides together," he explained."What I'm looking for now are spiky waves"–he patterned in the air with his index finger–"especially waves of very high amplitude coming at four to eight per second. That's temporal lobe," he told her.

    He studied the pattern of the brain wave carefully, but discovered no dysrhythmia. No spikes. No flattened domes. And when he switched to comparison readings, the results were also negative.

    Klein frowned. He couldn't understand it. He repeated the procedure. And found no change.

    He brought in a nurse to attend to Regan and returned to his office with her mother.

    "So what's the story?" Chris inquired.

    The doctor sat pensively on the edge of his desk. "Well, the EEG would have proved that she had it, but the lack of dysrhythmia doesn't prove to me conclusively that she doesn't. It might be hysteria, but the pattern before and after her convulsion was much too striking."

    Chris furrowed her brow. "You know, you keep on saying that, doc–'convulsion.' What exactly is the name of this disease?"

    "Well, it isn't a disease," he said quietly.

    "Well, what do you call it? I mean, specifically."

    "You know it as epilepsy, Mrs. MacNeil."

    "Oh, my God!"

    Chris sank to a chair.

    "Now, let's hold it," soothed Klein. "I can see that like most of the general public your impression of epilepsy is exaggerated and probably largely mythical."

    "Isn't it hereditary?" Chris said, wincing.

    "That's one of the myths," Klein told her calmly "At least, most doctors seem to think so. Look, practically anyone can be made to convulse. You see, most of us are born with a pretty high threshold of resistance to convulsions; some with a low one; so the difference between you and an epileptic is a matter of degree. That's all. Just degree. It is not a disease."

    "Then what is it–a freaking hallucination?"

    "A disorder: a controllable disorder. And there are many, many types of it, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, you're sitting here now and for a second you seem to go blank, let's say, and you miss a little bit of what I'm saying. Well, now that's a kind of epilepsy, Mrs. MacNeil. That's right. It's a true epileptic attack."

    "Yeah, well, that isn't Regan," Chris rebutted. "And how come it's happening just all of a sudden?"

    "Look, we still aren't sure that's what she's got, and I grant you that maybe you were right in the first place; very possibly it's psychosomatic. However, I doubt it. And to answer your question, any number of changes in the function of the brain can trigger a convulsion in the epileptic: worry; fatigue; emotional stress; a particular note on a musical instrument. I once had a patient, for instance, who never used to have a seizure except on a bus when he was a block away from home. Well, we finally discovered what was causing it: flickering light from a white slat fence reflected in the window of the bus. Now at another time of day, or if the bus had been going at a different speed, he wouldn't have convulsed, you see. He had a lesion, a scar in the brain that was caused by some childhood disease. In the case of your daughter, the scar would be forward–up front in the temporal lobe–and when it's hit by a particular electrical impulse of a certain wavelength and periodicity, it triggers a sudden burst of abnormal reactions from deep within a focus in the lobe. Do you see?"