Free Legion by William Peter Blatty

Neurology’s box and walked out of the hospital. It was almost half past five, and he quickened his steps toward Holy Trinity. He could make the evening Mass. The church was crowded and he stood in the back and followed the Mass with an agonizing hope. The broken bodies he had treated through the years had imbued him with a sense of man’s frailty and aloneness. Men were tiny candle flames, apart and adrift in a void that was endless and terrifying and black. This perception brought humanity into his embrace. Yet God eluded him. He’d found His cryptic traces in the brain, but the God of the brain only beckoned him toward Him, and when he came close He held him out at arm’s length; and at the last, there was nothing to embrace but his faith. It hugged the candle flames together in a oneness that soared and illumined the night.
    “O Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house….”
    Here was all that could matter, for nothing else did.
    Amfortas glanced over at the lines for confession. They were long. He decided to go the next day. He would make it a general, he thought: a confession of the sins of all his life. There would be time at the morning Mass, he thought. There was rarely a line at that hour.
    “And may it become for us an everlasting heal–ing.
    “Amen,” prayed Amfortas firmly.
    He had made up his mind.
    He unlocked the front door and walked into the house. In the foyer he picked up the bag and the Post and then carried them into the little living room, where he turned on all the lamps. The house was a rental, fully furnished in a cheap, drab, mock–colonial style. The living room railroaded into a kitchen and a tiny breakfast nook. Upstairs were a bedroom and a den. It was all that Amfortas needed or wanted.
    He eased himself down into an overstuffed chair. He looked around him. The room was, as usual, untidy. Disarray had never bothered him before. But now he felt an odd impulse to straighten it up, to organize and clean the entire house. It was something like the feeling before a long trip.
    He put it off until tomorrow. He felt weary.
    He stared at a tape recorder on a shelf. It was connected to an amplifier. There were earphones. Too tired for that as well, he decided. He didn’t have the energy for it now. He looked down at the Washington Post on his lap, and in an instant the headache was tearing at his brain. He gasped and his hands flew up to his temples. He stood up and the newspaper scattered to the floor.
    He lurched upstairs and into his bedroom. He fumbled for the lamp and turned it on. By the bed he kept a medical bag, and he opened it, removing a swab, a disposable syringe and an amber–colored vial filled with a fluid. He sat down on his bed, unbuckled his pants and pushed them down, exposing his thighs. And in moments, he’d injected six milligrams of Decadron, a steroid, into the muscle of his leg; the Dilaudid wasn’t enough anymore.
    Amfortas fell back on the bed and waited. The amber–colored vial was clutched in his hand. His heart and his head pounded out different rhythms, but then after a while they melted into one. He lost track of the time.
    When at last he sat up he saw that his trousers were still at his knees. He pulled them up, and as he did, his eye caught the green and white ceramic on his bed - stand, a fluffy duck in little girl’s clothing. A legend read HONK IF YOU THINK I’M ADORABLE. For a moment he stared at it sadly. He buckled his belt and went downstairs.
    He went into the living room and gathered up the Sunday Washington Post. He thought to read it while he heated a frozen dinner. When he turned on the overhead kitchen light, he stopped in his tracks. On the breakfast nook table were the remains of a morning meal and a copy of the Sunday Washington Post. The paper was disarrayed and in sections.
    Someone had been reading it.

 
     
     
     
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    DIVISION OF CONSOLIDATED LABORATORY SERVICES BUREAU OF FORENSIC SCIENCE
    Laboratory Report March 13,