Crazy by William Peter Blatty Read Free Book Online

”
    “So he says. He said he yelled at her to stop but she gave him ‘the arm’ and some guff about a bell.” Heinz shrugged. “I dunno.”
    I pointed to an usher coming out of the theater.
    “Is that him?”
    “No, that’s Louis. The guy you want to talk to is Eddie.”
    “Eddie who?”
    “Eddie Arrigo. He comes in at six o’clock. You want to wait?”
    “Oh, I’d like to, Mr. Heinz, sir. I’d like to. But I’ve got an appointment with this grouchy detective who’s in charge of the search for my sister. When I’m late he gets mad and makes threats.”
    “He shouldn’t do that.”
    “No.”
    I left and could hardly stand to wait until Monday when I could get the straight skinny from Jane herself, though I was scared she might think me half a jerk for even bothering to check out Arrigo’s story, although, speaking of which, it might be time to put my cards on the table and confess that I was always into “out of this world” kinds of stuff and maybe more than a little too willing to believe, which of course will make a lot more sense to you after you consider that for maybe four months of second grade I believed that Doc Savage was an actual person, although, unlike Arrigo, and not wanting to be piling on or anything like that, I never claimed to be related to Doc Savage “by marriage.” So okay, that’s neither here nor wherever you want to put it, my only point being that when it came to reports of such things as levitation, my famed cynical smirk was nothing more than a cover as I tended toward wanting weird things to be true. As it happened my mask of superior snide was ripped off by Tommy Foley on one of those days where, always just before Christmas and Easter, my whole class would get marched into church two by two to sit in pews and wait in dread for our turn for confession because we never knew who’d wind up being our confessor, the wildly popular ninety-two-year-old Father Causey who had so heard it all and so endlessly often that if you told him that you’d murdered someone, he’d keep his head down and sigh, then say, “How many times?” and for your penance tell you, “Think about saying a Hail Mary,” whereas the other priest was the previously mentioned Father Huerta, and we all would sweat bullets that he’d be our confessor after Paulie Farragher told us how when he’d confessed to him that in the past four months he’d had impure thoughts about girls “for sure once, maybe twice,” Huerta growled, “Is that all you ever think about?” and gave him three decades of the rosary for a penance, which made me think Huerta was probably lucky to be in a state of grace and that the penitent’s box was so small as I had this sudden vision of Farragher swinging his arms around in his patented windmill defense and maybe breaking Huerta’s nose while he was giving absolution. So okay, it’s now a Friday just before Easter when Foley, who is sitting beside me in a pew, leans over and whispers in my ear that he’s heard from a source he refused to identify that if you stare at the back of someone’s head pretty soon they’ll feel the vibes and turn around to see who’s watching them, and he asks me now to help him try it out, to which, of course, I immediately agreed. I mean, it was Foley who’d reported to me accurately that if two or more people keep staring at somebody’s shoes, like on a bus or the subway, at first they turn their glances here and there, trying hard to look oblivious and cool like Noël Coward on opening night in London with the V-2 rockets whistling close overhead and then exploding and shaking the theater, when in fact they’re really feeling like the lead in some weirdo play by Franz Kafka until finally they break and look down at their shoes to find out what could possibly be wrong with them. I admit that we almost got beaten to a pulp one time on the bus to the Central Park Zoo. We had to pick on some guy wearing jackboots? Never mind. Oh, well,