Karras was exhausted. After his visit to the Chancery Office that morning, he returned to the house to tell Chris what had happened Then he set up an intravenous feeding for Regan, went back to his room and fell on his bed. After only an hour and a half of sleep, however, the telephone had wrenched him awake. Sharon. Regan was still unconscious and her pulse had been gradually slipping lower. Karras had then rushed to the house with his medical bag and pinched Regan's Achilles tendon, looking for reaction to pain. There was none. He pressed down hard on one of her fingernails. Again no reaction. He was worried. Though he knew that in hysteria and in states of trance there was sometimes an insensitivity to pain, he now feared coma, a state from which Regan might slip easily into death. He checked her blood pressure: ninety over sixty; then pulse rate: sixty. He had waited in the room then, and checked her again every fifteen minutes for an hour and a half before he was satisfied that blood pressure and pulse rate had stabilized, meaning Regan was not in shock but in a state of stupor. Sharon was instructed to continue to check the pulse each hour. Then he'd returned to his room and his sleep. But again the telephone woke him up. The exorcist, the Chancery Office told him, would be Lankester Merrin. Karras would assist.
The news had stunned him. Merrin! the philosopher-paleontologist! the soaring, staggering intellect! His books had stirred ferment in the Church; for they interpreted his faith in the terms of science, in terms of a matter that was still evolving, destined to be spirit and joined to God.
Karras telephoned Chris at once to convey the news, but found that she'd heard from the Bishop directly. He had told her that Merrin would arrive the next day. 'I told the Bishop he could stay at the house,' Chris said. 'It'll just be a day or so, won't it?' Before answering, Karras paused. 'I don't know.' And then, pausing again, said, 'You mustn't expect too much.'
'If it works, I mean,' Chris had answered. Her tone had been subdued. 'I didn't mean to imply that it wouldn't,' he reassured her. 'I just meant that it might take time.'
'How long?'
'It varies.' He knew that an exorcism often took weeks, even months; knew that frequently it failed altogether. He expected the latter; expected that the burden, barring cure through suggestion, would fall once again, and at the last, upon him. 'It can take a few days or weeks,' he'd then told her. 'How long has she got, Father Karras?...'
When he hung up the phone, he'd felt heavy, tormented. Stretched out on the bed, he thought of Merrin. Merrin! An excitement and a hope seeped through him. A sinking disquiet followed. He himself had been the natural choice for exorcist, yet the Bishop had passed him over. Why? Because Merrin had done this before?
As he closed his eyes, he recalled that exorcists were selected on the basis of 'piety' and 'high moral qualities'; that a passage in the gospel of Matthew related that Christ, when asked by his disciples the cause of their failure in an effort at exorcism, had answered them: '... because of your little faith.'
The Provincial had known about his problem; so had the president, Karras reflected. Had either told the Bishop?
He had turned on his bed then, damply despondent; felt somehow unworthy; incompetent; rejected. It stung. Unreasonably, it stung. Then, finally, sleep came pouring into emptiness, filling in the niches and cracks in his heart.
But again the ring of the phone woke him, Chris calling to inform him of Regan's new frenzy. Back at the house, he checked Regan's pulse. It was strong. He gave Librium, then again. And again. Finally, he made his way to the kitchen, briefly joining Chris at the table for coffee. She was reading a book, one of Merrin's that she'd ordered delivered to the house. 'Way over my head,' she told him softly, yet she looked touched and deeply moved. 'But there's some of it so beautiful---so great.' She flipped back through pages to a passage she had marked, and handed the book across the table to Karras. He read: ... We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure; how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops---which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.
'Yes, it's beautiful,' Karras said softly. His eyes were still on the page. The raging of the demon from upstairs grew louder.
'... bastard... scum... pious hypocrite!'
'She used to put a rose on my plate... in the morning... before I'd go to work.'
Karras looked up with a question in his eyes. 'Regan,' Chris told him.
She looked down. 'Yeah, that's right. I forget... you've never met her.' She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes. 'Want some brandy in that coffee, Father Karras?' she asked.
'Thanks, I don't think so.'
'Coffee's flat,' she whispered tremulously. 'I think I'll get some brandy. Excuse me.' She quickly left the kitchen.
Karras sat alone and sipped bleakly at his coffee. He felt warm in the sweater that he wore beneath his cassock; felt weak in his failure to have given Chris comfort. Then a memory of childhood shimmered up sadly, a memory of Ginger, his mongrel dog, growing skeletal and dazed in a box in the apartment; Ginger shivering with fever and vomiting while Karras covered her with towels, tried to make her drink warm milk, until a neighbor came by and saw it was distemper, shook his head and said, 'Your dog needed shots right away.' Then dismissed from school one after-noon... to the street... in columns of twos to the corner... his mother there to meet him... unexpected... looking sad... and then taking his hand to press a shiny half-dollar piece into it... elation... so much money!... then her voice, soft and tender, 'Gingie die....'
He looked down at the steaming, bitter blackness in his cup and felt his hands empty of comfort or of cure.
'... pious bastard!'
The demon. Still raging.
