My Old Haunt

By the time we were looking for a new house, I was six years old and convinced that the Devil lived in my stomach. I’d been bewitched by an excerpt from The Exorcist when I stayed home sick from school one winter day, and that was all it took. Regan MacNeil had a mottled, scarred face. Her skin looked greenish, even on our black and white television. Her irises were cloudy, with dark slits for pupils. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but her voice was scratchy, as low as a man’s, and she was cussing out a priest as well as her own mother. The preview ended with a flood of vomit bursting from the little girl’s mouth.

I’d observed other events on A.M. Chicago that moved me, other things that were hard to explain. One was James Brown, caught up in a spirit he seemed to welcome, sweating and singing, screaming himself hoarse. Please, please, please, please, James Brown was on his knees. He was on the studio stage and he was somewhere else entirely. I was with my mother when I first saw James Brown do his thing. Here was the kind of conduct that would make Momma shake her head and bunch her lips. “Now he knows he doesn’t need to act up like that.” But I was alone when I saw that forty-five-second clip of Linda Blair pretending to be a devil-ridden child named Regan; by the next day, I was convinced that I was possessed. I didn’t tell anyone.

Up until I saw The Exorcist, I believed that the Devil was eternal. I also figured that the Devil, like God, was a he. But unlike God, who was everywhere all the time, I thought that the Devil was tangible, cunning and mobile—that if you were looking with all of your might, you could see him coming, recognize him, do something to save yourself in response. He was crimson and scaly, with hooves, claws, and dazzling white teeth. The Devil might confront you and scare you. He might hurt you with fire. But if you were good enough and strong enough, you could stand your ground against him. Up until The Exorcist, I’d never imagined the Devil as a spirit who could slip inside your skin at will and transform you into his evil puppet.

I was a sneaky girl. I wasn’t sick the day I’d been home in bed, drinking ginger ale, eating saltines served by my mother, and watching A.M. Chicago on the sly. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t have described myself as a bad girl. Until I glimpsed Regan’s affliction, my own damnation had hardly crossed my mind. Now I understood that the Devil could take me over anytime he wanted.

So when my sisters and I waited in the old Volvo station wagon, parked in front of a big, grey stucco house that might soon be ours, and an orange tabby came slinking our way, finally planting its haunches on the sidewalk nearby, I lost control. I wasn’t used to cats. I’d heard rumors at school about how a cat could crouch over a crib and suck all the breath from the parted mouth of a sleeping infant. This tabby meant harm, hardly blinking, with those eyeballs that could go red if you caught them at the wrong angle. They kept going red. This was the signal: the cat knew what I knew—that I was possessed—and he was waiting for me to begin showing signs.

My sisters were distressed for their own unspoken reasons. I whimpered and moaned while Jill, then eight years old, and Miriam, then three, trembled on either side of me. The cat crept closer, from the sidewalk to the square of green lawn right in front of the car. Suddenly it was only inches from us, on the hood of the Volvo. It perched and watched us howl. When my parents returned after who knows how long, the cat leapt off the station wagon and fled down...