"Father Karras; it's my daughter," she told him huskily, "my daughter!"

    "Then all the more reason," he at last said gently, "to forget about exorcism and---"

    "Why? God, I don't understand!" she burst out in a voice that was cracking and distraught.

    He took her wrist in a comforting hand. "In the first place," he told her in soothing tones, "it could make things worse."

    "But how?"

    "The ritual of exorcism is dangerously suggestive. It could plant the notion of possession, you see, where it didn't exist before, or if it did, it could tend to fortify it. And secondly, Miss MacNeil, before the Church approves an exorcism, it conducts an investigation to see if it's warranted. That takes time. In the meantime, your---"

    "Couldn't you do the exorcism yourself?" she pleaded, her lower lip starting to tremble. Her eyes were filling up with tears.

    "Look, every priest has the power to exorcise, but he has to have Church approval, and frankly, it's rarely ever given, so---"

    "Can't you even look at her?"

    "Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could, but---"

    "She needs a priest!" Chris suddenly cried out, her features contorted with anger and fear. "I've taken her to every goddamn, fucking doctor, psychiatrist in the world and they sent me to you; now you send me to them!"

    "But your---"

    "Jesus Christ won't somebody help me?" The heart-stopping shriek bolted raw above the river. Startled birds shot up screeching from its banks. "Oh, my God, someone help me!" Chris moaned as she crumpled to Karras' chest with convulsive sobs. "Please help me! Help me! Please! Please, help!..."

    The Jesuit looked down at her, lifted up comforting hands to her head as the riders in traffic-locked automobiles glanced out windows to watch them wig passing disinterest.

    "It's all right," Karras whispered as he patted her shoulder. He wanted only to calm her; to humor; Stem hysteria. "... my daughter'

    '? It was she who needed psychiatric help. "It's all right. I'll go see her," he told her. "I'll see her."

He approached the house with her in silence, with a lingering sense of unreality, with thoughts of the next day's lecture at the Georgetown Medical School. He had yet to prepare his notes.

    They climbed the front stoop. Karras glanced down the street at the Jesuit residence hall and realized he would now miss dinner. It was ten before six. He looked at Chris as she slipped the key in the lock. She hesitated, turned to him. "Father... do you think you should wear your priest clothes?"

    The voice: how childlike it was; how naïve."Too dangerous," he told her.

    She nodded and started opening the door, and it was then that Karras felt it: a chill, tugging warning. It scraped through his bloodstream like particles of ice.

    "Father Karras?"

    He looked up. Chris had entered. She was holding the door.

    For a hesitant moment he stood unmoving; then abruptly he went forward, stepping into the house with an odd sense of ending.

    Karras heard commotion. Upstairs. A deep, booming voice was thundering obscenities, threatening in anger, in hate, in frustration.

    Karras glanced at Chris. She was staring at him mutely. Then she moved on ahead. He followed her upstairs and along the hall to Regan's bedroom, where Karl leaned against the wall just opposite her door, his head sagging low over folded arms. As the servant looked slowly up at Chris, Karras saw bafflement and fright in his eyes. The voice from the bedroom, this close, was so loud that it almost seemed amplified electronically. "It wants no straps, still," Karl told Chris in an awed, cracking voice.

    "I'll be back in a second, Father," Chris told the priest dully.

    Karras watched her walk down the hall and into her own bedroom; then he glanced at Karl. The Swiss was looking at him fixedly.

    "You are priest?" Karl asked. Karras nodded, then looked quickly back to the door of Regan's room. The raging voice had been displaced by the long, strident lowing of some animal that might have been a steer.

    Something prodding at his hand. He looked down. "That's her," Chris was saying "that's Regan." She was giving him a photograph. He took it. Young girl. Very pretty. Sweet smile.

    "That was taken four months ago," Chris said numbly. She took back the photo and motioned with her head at the bedroom door. "Now you go and take a look at her now." She leaned against the wall beside Karl. "I'll wait here."

    "Who's in there with her?" Karras asked her.

    "No one."

    He held her steady gaze and then turned with a frown to the bedroom door. As he grasped the doorknob, the sounds from within ceased abruptly. In the ticking silence, Karras hesitated, then entered the room slowly, almost flinching backward at the pungent stench of moldering excrement that hit him in the face like a palpable blast.

    Quickly reining back his revulsion, he closed the door. Then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back in the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite as they fixed upon his, as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal, hideous mask of mind-bending malevolence. Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled, thickly matted hair; to the wasted arms and legs; the distended stomach jutting up so grotesquely; then back to the eyes: they were watching him... pinning him... shifting now to follow as he moved to a desk and chair near the window.

    "Hello, Regan, " said the priest in a warm, friendly tone. He picked up the chair and took it over by the bed.

    "I'm a friend of your mother's. She tells me that you haven't been feeling too well." He sat down. "Do you think you'd like to tell me what's wrong? I'd like to help you."

    The eyes gleamed fiercely, unblinking and a yellowish saliva dribbled down from a corner of her mouth to her chin. Then her lips stretched taut into a feral grin, into bow-mouthed mockery.