heard.' (Regan gliding like a snake when she was following Sharon. The gibberish. An attempt at an 'unknown language.')
... The case of Joseph and Thiebaut Burner, aged eight and ten; description of them 'lying on their backs and suddenly whirling like tops with the utmost rapidity.' (Sounds pretty close to her whirling like a dervish.)
There were other similarities; still other reasons for suspecting suggestion: mention of abnormal strength; of obscenity of speech; and accounts of possession from the gospels, which perhaps were the basis, thought Karras, of the curiously religious content of Regan's ravings at Barringer Clinic. Moreover, in the chapter there was mention of the onset of possession in stages: '... The first, infestation, consists of an -attack through the victim's surroundings; noises---odors---the displacement of objects; and the second, obsession, consists in a personal attack on the subject designed to instill terror through the kind of injury that one man might inflict on another through blows and kicks.' The rappings. The flingings. The attacks by Captain Howdy.
Maybe... maybe she read it. But Karras wasn't convinced. Not at all... not at all. And Chris. She had seemed so uncertain about it.
He walked to the window again. What's the answer, then? Genuine possession? A demon? He looked down and shook his head. No way. No way. Paranormal happenings? Sure. Why not? Too many competent observers had reported them. Doctors. Psychiatrists. Men like Junod. But the problem is how do you interpret the phenomena? He thought back to Oesterreich. Reference to a shaman of the Altai. Siberia. Voluntarily possessed and examined in a clinic while performing an apparently paranormal action: levitation. Just prior, his pulse rate had spurted to one hundred, then, afterward, leaped to an amazing two hundred. Marked changes in temperature as well. Its respiration. So his paranormal action was tied to physiology. It was caused by some bodily energy or force. But as proof of possession the Church wanted clear and exterior phenomena that suggested....
He'd forgotten the wording. Looked it up. Traced a finger down the page of a book on his desk. Found it: '... verifiable exterior phenomena which suggest the idea that they are due to the extraordinary intervention of an intelligent cause other than man.' Was that the case with the shaman? Karras asked himself. No. And is that the case with Regan?
He turned to a passage he had underlined in percil: 'The exorcist will simply be careful that none of the patient's manifestations are left unaccounted for...'
He nodded. Okay, then. Let's see. Pacing, he ran through the manifestations of Regan's disorder along with their possible explanations. He ticked them off mentally, one by one: The startling change in Regan's features.
Partly her illness. Partly undernourishment. Mostly, he concluded, it was due to physiognomy being an expression of psychic constitution. Whatever the hell that means! he added wryly.
The startling change in Regan's voice.
He had yet to hear the original voice. And even if that had been light, as reported by her mother, constant shrieking would thicken the vocal cords, with a consequent deepening of the voice. The only problem here, he reflected, was the massive volume of that voice, for even with a thickening of the cords this would seem to be physiologically impossible. And yet, he considered, in states of anxiety or pathology, displays of paranormal strength in excess of muscular potential were known to be a commonplace. Might not vocal cords and voice box be subject to the same mysterious effect?
Regan's suddenly extended vocabulary and knowledge.
Cryptomnesia: buried recollections of words and data she had once been exposed to, even in infancy, perhaps. In somnambulists---and frequently in people at the point of death---the buried data often came to the surface with almost photographic fidelity.
Regan's recognition of him as a priest.
Good guess. If she had read the chapter on possession, she might have expected a visit by a priest. And according to Jung, the unconscious awareness and sensitivity of hysterical patients could at moments be fifty times greater than normal, which accounted for seemingly authentic 'thought reading' via table-tapping by mediums, for what the medium's unconscious was actually 'reading' were the tremors and vibrations created in the table by the hands of the person whose thoughts were supposedly being read. The tremors formed a pattern of letters or numbers. Thus, Regan might conceivably have 'read' his identity merely from his manner; from the look of his hands; from the scent of sacramental wine.
Regan's knowledge of the death of his mother.
Good guess. He was forty-six.
'Couldjya help an old altar boy, Faddah?'
Textbooks in use in Catholic seminaries accepted telepathy as both a reality and a natural phenomenon.
Regan's precocity of intellect.
In the course of personally observing a case of multiple personality involving alleged occult phenomena, the psychiatrist Jung had concluded that in states of hysterical somnambulism not only were unconscious perceptions of the senses heightened, but also the functioning of the intellect, for the new personalities in the case in question seemed clearly more intelligent than the first. And yet, puzzled Karras, did merely reporting the phenomenon explain it?
Abruptly he stopped pacing and hovered by his desk, for it suddenly dawned upon him that Regan's pun on Herod was even more complicated than at first it had appeared: when the Pharisees told Christ of Herod's threats, he remembered, Christ had answered them: 'Go and tell that fox that I cast out devils...'
He glanced at the tape of Regan's voice for a moment, then sat wearily at the desk. He lit another cigarette... exhaled... thought again of the Burner boys; of the case of the eight-year-old girl who had manifested symptoms of full-blown possession. What book had this girl read that had enabled her unconscious mind to simulate the symptoms to such perfection? And how did the unconscious of victims in China communicate the symptoms to the various un-conscious minds of people possessed in Siberia, in Germany, in Africa, so that the symptoms were always the same?
'Incidentally, your mother is here with us, Karras...'
He stared unseeing as smoke from his cigarette rose like whispered curls of memory. The priest leaned back, looking down at the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk. For a time, he kept staring. Then slowly he leaned down, pulled open the drawer and extracted a faded language exercise book. Adult education. His mother's. He set
