Free Dimiter by William Peter Blatty

at HadassahHospital’s medical school, the neurologist awakened in the tunnels of night with a quietly pulsing sense of dread. Wide awake, he lay still, staring up into darkness while he listened to the whirring and the flurry of his thoughts. He had dreamed. Something strange. But what? He sat up, turned on a bedside tensor lamp, and squinted down at the tiny brass moonfaced clock ticking loudly in the hush of a circle of light. Mayo groaned. It was minutes after 2 A.M. The neurologist sighed, swung his feet to the floor, and was cradling his lowered head in his hands when an overwhelming sadness, a depression, fell upon him. What was it? he wondered. The dream? Dully staring at his curled-up bony white toes, Mayo moodily wriggled them up and down. One of his patients had died the night before. Despondency and guilt always followed, he knew. Was that it? Or was it still the mad horror in the Psychiatric Ward, the shocking murder that no one could comprehend? Mayo scratched at his scrawny chest through the flannel of a red and white striped pajama top. No, he decided: neither one. He stood up and his feet made fleshy padding sounds as he entered a white tiled bathroom where he turned on the light, gripped and twisted a spigot, and splashed cold water onto his face. In the pipes, wakened air clanged and rattled, then abated.
Yes, shut up
, Mayo thought,
there are sick people here who are sleeping
. “Not me, though,” he murmured aloud. “Not me.”
    Drying off with a threadbare, faded blue towel, Mayo paused in his tentative dabbing and rubbing to meet his own gaze in the cabinet mirror, where grieving green eyes in an angular face beneath a bristling of iron gray hair stared back with the sting of recrimination. “Incompetent!” Mayo murmured bitterly. “Fraud!” He was brooding about the patient who had died. Flopping the towel back onto a hook, he stared into themirror at a quiet birthmark, a milk white oval indentation palely nestled near the corner of his drooping right eye. “Come on, what did I dream?” once again he asked himself. Nothing came and he turned away.
    And then suddenly the dream opened up its heart to him, beginning with a Christ Child aged about five. Wearing only a dhoti and brown leather sandals in addition to a stethoscope dangling from his neck, he was solemnly conducting grand rounds through the Neurology Ward as he led a procession of note-taking medical students to the bed of the blind man he had famously cured at the Pool of Bethesda. The Child’s expression was mild and sweet and his body was shrouded in a faint white glow as he nodded at the blind man reassuringly. “We meet again,” he told him with a smile. His head propped on pillows, the miracle’s recipient did not respond but lay rigidly still, his eyes wide with suspicion and apprehension. The Child unhooked his chart from the bedstead, scanned it, replaced it, and then turned to the students who lifted their clipboards and pens to take notes.
    “What we have here is a genuine miracle,” announced the Child. He pointed to the patient with an index finger at the top of which an inch-high Band-Aid was wrapped, “This man was blind from birth,” he recounted, “so I applied a bit of spittle to his eyes with my fingers and then asked him if he saw anything. He said, ‘Yes. I can see. I see people. But they look like trees that are walking around.’ ” At this the formerly blind man appeared to relax, as if at last understanding that the group had not come to accuse him of some crime or perhaps a lack of adequate appreciation, and the miracle of sight was not about to be reversed. He shut his eyes peacefully and nodded as if in confirmation of what he was hearing. “So I gave him a secondapplication,” said the Child; “but no spittle this time, just my fingertips touching his eyes. And right away he saw everything without distortion. And
that
, please observe, was the actual miracle: it was that
second
laying on of my