William Blatty - The Exorcist

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."