Dimiter by William Peter Blatty Read Free Book Online

start. He sat up and looked around. “So they’re gone, the other lunatics,” he exhaled into the dimness, “hauled off to asylums, no doubt. Just a joke. Without a doubt they’re all dead.” He looked over at the Prisoner, who was sitting on the ground close beside him with his head bent low and his forearms braced upon propped-up knees so that his hands hung loosely with spatulate grace. He had yet to utter a word. “You there, hello,” said the priest.”What’s your name? What’s your crime, your unspeakable offence? I mean, besides going mad, which is definitely criminal, especially if caused by recollections of Eden. Tell me, what have you done?”
    The Prisoner made no reply. He did not move.
    The priest appraised him dismally.
    “Please don’t pay me any mind,” he said dryly. “After all, I’m just a poor old reactionary cleric, adjunct and running dog of the Vatican and all-around enemy of the people. Please don’t work yourself up over anything I say.” The priest waited for an answer, then looked away. “It’s the babies,” he murmured cryptically. “I am sorry. I am not Stephen Kurti. Stephen Kurti fought the soldiers with his hands, with his fists, when they came to destroy his church in Drin. They sent him to prison and then to a labor camp where he secretly baptized a child, and for this he was executed by firing squad. Did any saint fear God as much as these villains?” He lowered his head to his chest. “No, I am not Kurti,” he continued softly: “My body is a house of pain, I am in torment, I am hopelessly insane and a river of grief; and yet I cannot extinguish my yearning to live. I live for the cold, slimy noodles that they give us.” The priest jerked his head up and looked to the door as in the hall steely footsteps crunched, implacable, approaching the cell with deadly intent. Then they passed and their echoes lost their way into death. The priest lowered his head again.
    “Father Lazar Shantoja, the famous man of letters, he was another,” he mournfully recalled. “After years at hard labor, they released him. Do you know what his mother did when she saw him, her only son, her beloved boy, when he first came walking up to her door after all those years of unbroken separation?” He turned and looked at the Prisoner again. “She danced. Yes, she found she couldn’t speak so she danced; she danced uncontrollably, on and on. Months later Shantoja was rearrested. His hands were sawn off and his forearms and his leg bones were broken, and only then was his mother allowed to comevisit him. When he entered the room where she was waiting he was walking in the only way that he could, by supporting his weight on his elbows and knees, and she screamed at the jailers to be merciful and kill him. They obliged. I saw him dragged by his feet down flights of stairs, and by the time they had reached the second floor, his skull was ripped open. When they saw that I had witnessed this, I was put in isolation for a month. They let me out early so I could play in a volleyball game.” He lifted his head, looking off.
    “Oh, once I was brave, I suppose. When I was first captured they started to question me: Wasn’t it true I was a Vatican spy? Would I recant? Pledge allegiance to the new Albania, the first official atheist state in all the world? I said no. And then the torture came, the electrodes. Blue-white lightning filled my skull; I thought the top of my head was about to come off. I was screaming and my teeth would slam shut on my tongue. Then I felt a warm liquid pouring down on my face. I thought it was water to spread the current, but I heard the men laughing and opened my eyes and saw that one of them was pissing on my face. Soon after, when maddened by thirst one day, I suddenly plunged my burning head into the fouled and stinking bowl of a toilet, my parched tongue lapping like a maddened dog’s, and then in vain were the shouts and the threats and the kicks, the rifle butt