The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
The internist nodded and prepared an injection of fifty milligrams of Thorazine. However, when the doctors approached the bed, Regan seemed to sense their presence and quickly turned over, and as the neuropsychiatrist attempted to hold her, she shrieked in malevolent fury. Bit him. Fought him. Held him off. It was only when Karl was called in to assist that they managed to keep Regan sufficiently still for Klein to be able to administer the injection.
The dosage proved inadequate and another fifty milligrams was injected. They waited. And soon Regan grew tractable. Then dreamy. Then stared at the doctors in sudden bewilderment. “Where’s Mom? I want Mom!” she said, tearful and frightened.
At a nod from the neuropsychiatrist, Klein left the room.
“Your mother will be here in just a second, dear,” the psychiatrist said to Regan soothingly. He sat on the bed and stroked her head. “There, there, it’s all right, dear. I’m a doctor.”
“I want my mom!”
“Your mom is coming. She’s coming. Do you hurt, dear?”
As the tears streamed down her face, Regan nodded.
“Tell me where, dear. Where does it hurt?”
“It hurts every place!” Regan said, sobbing.
“Oh, my baby!”
“Mom!”
Chris ran to the bed and hugged her. Kissed her. Comforted and soothed. Then Chris herself became tearful with happiness. “Oh, you’re back, Rags! You’re back! It’s really you!”
“Oh, Mom, he hurt me!” Regan told her, sniffling. “Please make him stop hurting me! Okay, Mom? Please?”
Chris stared at her, puzzled, then turned to the doctors with a plea and a question in her eyes as she asked them, “What? What is it?”
“She’s heavily sedated,” the psychiatrist said gently.
“You mean that—”
He quickly cut her off with “We’ll see.”
He turned to Regan. “Can you tell me what’s wrong, dear?”
“I don’t know!” Regan tearfully answered him. “I don’t know! I don’t know why he does it! He was always my friend before!”
“Who’s that?”
“Captain Howdy! And then after it’s like somebody else is inside me! Making me do things!”
“Captain Howdy?”
“I don’t know!”
“A person?”
Regan nodded.
“Tell me who?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, all right, then; let’s try something, Regan. How about if we play a little game?” He was reaching into a jacket pocket and drew out a shining round bauble attached to a silvery length of chain. “Have you ever seen movies where someone gets hypnotized?” he asked.
Wide-eyed, Regan solemnly nodded.
“Well, I’m a hypnotist, Regan. Oh, yes, really! I hypnotize people all the time. I really do! That’s, of course, if they let me. Now I think if I hypnotize you, Regan, it will help you get well. Yes, that person inside you will come right out. Would you like to be hypnotized? See, your mother’s right here, right beside you.”
Regan looked to Chris questioningly.
“Go ahead, honey, do it,” Chris urged her. “Try it.”
Regan turned to the psychiatrist and nodded. “Okay,” she said softly. “But only a little.”
The psychiatrist smiled, then quickly glanced to the sound of pottery breaking behind him. A delicate vase had fallen to the floor from the top of a bureau where Klein was now resting his forearm. He looked at his arm and then down at the shards with an air of puzzlement, then stooped to pick them up.
“Never mind, Doc, Willie’ll get it,” Chris told him.
“Would you please close those shutters for me, Sam?” the psychiatrist asked. “And pull the drapes?”
When the room was dark, the psychiatrist gripped the chain in his fingertips and began to swing the bauble back and forth with an easy movement. He shone a penlight on it. It glowed.
He began to intone the hypnotic ritual: “Now watch this, Regan, keep watching, and soon you’ll feel your eyelids growing heavier and heavier…”
Within a very short time, Regan seemed to be in a trance.
“Extremely suggestible,” the psychiatrist murmured. Then he asked, “Are you comfortable, Regan?”
“Yes,” Regan answered in a voice that was soft and whispery.
“How old are you, Regan?”
“Twelve.”
“Is there someone inside you?”
“Sometimes.”
“When?”
“Different times.”
“It’s a person?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Captain Howdy?”
“I don’t know.”
“A man?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he’s there.”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“Now?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I ask him to tell me, will you let him answer?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid!”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know!”
“If he talks to me, Regan, I think he will leave you. Do you want him to leave you?”
“Yes.”
“Let him speak, then. Will you let him speak?”
A long silence. And then finally, “Yes.”
“I am speaking to the person inside of Regan now,” the psychiatrist said firmly. “If you are there, you too are hypnotized and must answer all my questions.” For a moment, he paused to allow the suggestion to enter Regan’s bloodstream. Then he repeated it: “If you are there, then you are hypnotized and must answer all my questions. Come forward and answer me now. Are you there?”
Silence. Then something curious happened: Regan’s breath turned suddenly foul. It was thick, like a current. The psychiatrist smelled it from two feet away. He shone the penlight on Regan’s face and, wide-eyed and shocked, Chris lifted a hand to stifle a gasp as she watched Regan’s features contort into a malevolent mask, her lips pulling tautly in opposite directions, and a tumefied tongue lolling wolfishly from her mouth.
“Are you the person in Regan?” asked the psychiatrist.
Regan nodded.
“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 paused, and after thinking it over he decided to attempt another approach. “When I ask you questions now, you will answer by moving your head: a nod for ‘yes,’ and a shake for ‘no.’ Do you understand that?”
Regan nodded.
“Did your answers have meaning?” he asked her. Yes.
“Are you someone whom Regan has known?” No.
“That she knows of?” No.
“Are you someone she’s invented?” No.
“You’re real?” Yes.
“Part of Regan?” No.
“Were you ever a part of Regan?” No.
“Do you like her?” No.
“Dislike her?” Yes.
“Do you hate her?” Yes.
“Over something she’s done?” Yes.
“Do you blame her for her parents’ divorce?” No.
“Has it something to do with her parents?” No.
“With a friend?” No.
“But you hate her.” Yes.
“Are you punishing Regan?” Yes.
“You wi
“To kill her?” Yes.
“If she died, wouldn’t you die too?” No.
The answer seemed to disquiet him and he lowered his eyes in thought. The bedsprings squeaked as he shifted his weight. In the smothering stillness, Regan’s breathing came raspy as if from a rotted, putrid bellows. Here. Yet far. And sinister.
As he lifted his glance again to that hideous, twisted face, the psychiatrist’s eyes gleamed sharply with speculation as he asked, “Is there something she can do that would make you leave her?” Yes.
“Can you tell me what it is?” Yes.
“Will you tell me?” No.
“But—”
Abruptly the psychiatrist gasped in pain as he realized with horrified incredulity that Regan was squeezing his scrotum with a hand that had gripped him like an iron talon. Eyes wide and staring, he struggled to free himself, but he couldn’t. “Sam! Sam, help me!” he croaked in agony.
Bedlam.
Chris leaping for the light switch.
Dr. Klein running forward.
Regan with her head back, cackling demonically, then howling like a wolf.
Chris slapped at the light switch, then she turned and saw flickering, grainy black-and-white film of a slow-motion nightmare: Regan and the doctors writhing on the bed in a tangle of shifting arms and legs, in a melee of grimaces, gasps and curses, and the howling and the yelping and that hideous laughter; Regan oinking and grunting like a pig, Regan neighing like a horse, and then the film racing faster with the bedstead shaking and violently quivering from side to side as Regan’s eyes rolled upward into their sockets and she wrenched up a keening shriek of terror torn raw and bloody from the base of her spine.
Regan crumpled and fell unconscious.
Something unspeakable left the room.
For a haunted space of time, no one moved. Then slowly and carefully, the doctors untangled themselves. They stood up and stared at Regan, speechless, and then Klein, expressionless, moved to the bed, took Regan’s pulse and, satisfied, slowly and gently pulled her blanket up over her, and then nodded to Chris and the psychiatrist. They left the room and went down to the study, where, for a time, no one spoke. Chris was on the sofa, with Klein and the psychiatrist near her in the facing chairs that bracketed the space. The psychiatrist was pensive, pinching at his lip as he stared at the coffee table dully, then finally sighed and looked up at Chris as she turned her burned-out gaze to his. “What the hell is going on?” she asked, in a haggard, vanquished whisper.
“Did you recognize the language she was speaking?”
Chris shook her head.
“Have you any religious beliefs?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And your daughter?”
“No.”
From there the psychiatrist asked a lengthy series of questions relating to Regan’s psychological history, and when at last he had finished, he seemed disturbed.
“What is it?” Chris asked him, her white-knuckled fingers clenching and unclenching on the balled-up handkerchief in her fist. “Doc, what has she got?”
The psychiatrist looked evasive. “Well, it’s somewhat confusing,” he said. “And quite frankly, it would be quite irresponsible for me to attempt a diagnosis after so brief an examination.”
“Well, you must have some idea,” Chris insisted.
Fingering his brow and looking down, the psychiatrist emitted a sigh, then, relenting, looked up and said, “All right. I know you’re quite anxious, so I’ll mention a couple of impressions. But they’re tentative, okay?”
Chris leaned forward, nodding tensely. “Yeah, okay. So what are they?” Fingers in her lap started fumbling with the handkerchief, telling stitches in the hem like linen rosary beads.
“To begin with,” the psychiatrist told her, “it’s highly improbable that she’s faking. Right, Sam?” Klein was nodding in agreement. “We think so for a number of reasons,” the psychiatrist continued. “For example, the abnormal and painful contortions; and most dramatically, I suppose, from the change in her features when we were talking to the so-called person she thinks is inside her. A psychic effect like that is unlikely unless she believed in this person. Do you follow?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Chris answered; “except one thing I don’t understand is where this other person comes from. I mean, you keep hearing about ‘split personality’ but I’ve never really known any explanation.”
“Well, neither does anyone else. We use concepts like ‘consciousness’—‘mind’—‘personality,’ but we don’t really know yet what they are. So when I start talking about something like multiple or split personality, all we have are some theories that raise more questions than they give answers. Freud thought that certain ideas and feelings are somehow repressed by the conscious mind, but remain alive in a person’s subconscious; remain quite strong, in fact, and continue to seek expression through various psychiatric symptoms. Now when this repressed—or let’s call it dissociated material, the word dissociation implying a splitting off from the mainstream of consciousness. Are you with me?”
“Yeah, go on.”
“All right. Well, when this type of material is sufficiently strong, or where the subject’s personality is disorganized and weak, the result can be schizophrenic psychosis. Now that isn’t the same,” he cautioned, “as dual personality. Schizophrenia means a shattering of the personality. But where the dissociated material is strong enough to somehow come glued together, to somehow organize in the individual’s subconscious—why, then it’s been known, at times, to function independently as a separate personality; in other words, to take over the bodily functions.”
“And that’s what you think is happening to Regan?”
“Well, that’s just one theory. There are several others, some of them involving the notion of escape into unawareness; escape from some conflict or emotional problem. Your daughter hasn’t any history of schizophrenia and the EEG didn’t show the brain-wave pattern that normally accompanies it. So that leaves us with the general field of hysteria.”
“I gave last week,” Chris murmured.
The worried psychiatrist smiled thinly. “Hysteria,” he continued, “is a form of neurosis in which emotional disturbances are converted into bodily disorders. Now, in certain of its forms, there’s dissociation. In psychasthenia, for example, the individual loses consciousness of his actions, but he sees himself act and attributes his actions to someone else. His idea of the second personality is vague, however, and Regan’s seems specific. So we come to what Freud used to call the ‘conversion’ form of hysteria, which grows from unconscious feelings of guilt and the need to be punished. Dissociation is the paramount feature here, even multiple personality. And the syndrome might also include epileptoid-like convulsions, hallucinations and abnormal motor excitement.”
Chris had listened intently, her eyes and face scrunched up with the strain of trying to understand. “Well, that does sound a lot like Regan,” she said. “Don’t you think? Well, except for the guilt part. I mean, what would she have to feel guilty about?”
“Well, a cliché answer might be the divorce. Children often feel that they are the ones rejected and sometimes assume the full responsibility for the departure of one of their parents, so in the case of your daughter, that might apply. Here I’m thinking of the symptoms of thanatophobia—a brooding and neurotic depression over the notion of people dying.” Chris’s stare grew intense. “In children,” the psychiatrist continued, “you’ll find it accompanied by guilt formation that’s related to family stress, very often the fear of the loss of a parent. It produces rage and intense frustration. In addition, the guilt in this type of hysteria needn’t be known to the conscious mind. It could even be the guilt that we call ‘free-floating,’ which means it relates to nothing in particular.”
“So this fear of death thing…”
“The thanatophobia.”
“Yeah, right, what you said. Is it something that’s inherit
Looking slightly aside to avoid betraying his curiosity about the question, the psychiatrist said, “No. No, I don’t think so.”
Chris lowered her head and shook it. “I just don’t get it,” she said; “I’m confused.” She looked up, gentle furrows lightly lining her brow. “I mean, where does this new personality come in?”
The psychiatrist turned back to her. “Well, again, it’s just a guess,” he said, “but assuming that it is conversion hysteria stemming from guilt, then the second personality is simply the agent who handles the punishing. If Regan herself were to do it, that would mean she would recognize her guilt. But she wants to escape that recognition. Therefore, a second personality.”
“And that’s it? That’s what you think she’s got?”
“As I said, I don’t know.” The psychiatrist seemed to be choosing his words as carefully as flat, round stones to skim over a pond. “It’s fairly extraordinary for a child of her age to be able to pull together and organize the components of a new personality. And certain—well, there are some other things that are puzzling. Her performance with the Ouija board, for example, would indicate extreme suggestibility; and yet apparently I never really hypnotized her.” He shrugged. “Maybe she resisted. But the really striking thing,” he noted, “is the new personality’s apparent precocity. It isn’t a twelve-year-old at all. It’s much older. And then there’s the language she was speaking…” His voice trailed off, as he stared into the fireplace pensively. “There’s a similar state, of course,” he said, “but we don’t know very much about it.”
“What is it?”
The psychiatrist turned to her. “Well, it’s a form of somnambulism where the subject suddenly manifests knowledge or skills that he’s never learned, and where the intention of the second personality is to—” He broke off. “Well, it’s terribly complicated,” he resumed, “and I’ve oversimplified outrageously.” He had also not completed his statement, for fear of unduly upsetting Chris: the intention of the second personality, he would have said, was the destruction of the first.
“And so what’s the bottom line?”
“A bit squiggly. She needs an intensive examination by a team of specialists: two or three weeks of really concentrated study in a clinical atmosphere; someplace like the Barringer Clinic in Dayton.”