The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty Read Free Book Online

entirely natural. I want you to cast out his demons. You’re a colonel and a Catholic and an unfrocked priest.”
    Suddenly Reno was in the room, floating three feet off the floor. He was wearing a high-altitude flight suit. He looked at Kane and opened his mouth and out came the yappings of a dog.
    Kane put a finger to his neck and felt a round Roman collar. He experienced a surging exhilaration.
    It was then that the dream again changed in texture, and seemed to be not a dream at all. Cutshaw was staring at him intently, his cigarette glowing in the dimness. “You awake?” said the apparition.
    Kane moved his lips and tried to say “Yes,” but no sound would issue forth. He spoke with his mind, thinking-saying?—”Yes.”
    “Do you really believe in an afterlife?”
    “Yes.”
    “I mean, really.”
    “Yes, I believe.”
    “Why?”
    “I just know.”
    “Blind faith?”
    “No, not that; not that, exactly.”
    “How do you know?” insisted Cutshaw.
    Kane paused, dredging for arguments. Then at last he said (thought?):
    “Because every man who has ever lived has been filled with desire for perfect happiness. But unless there is an afterlife, fulfillment of this desire is impossible. Perfect happiness, in order to be perfect, must carry with it the assurance that the happiness won’t cease; that it will not be snatched away. But no one has ever had such assurance; the mere fact of death serves to contradict it. Yet why should Nature implant in everyone a desire for something unattainable? I can think of no more than two answers: either Nature is consistently mad and perverse; or after this life there’s another, a life where this universal desire for perfect happiness can be fulfilled. But nowhere else in creation does Nature exhibit this kind of perversity; not when it comes to a basic drive.
    An eye is always for seeing and an ear is always for hearing. And any universal craving-I mean a craving without exceptions-has to be capable of fulfillment. It can’t be fulfilled here, so it’s fulfilled, I think, somewhere else; sometime else. Does that make any sense? It’s difficult. I think I’m dreaming. Am I dreaming?”
    Cutshaw’s cigarette briefly glowed bright. “If you dream, don’t drive,” he rasped. And then Kane was on the island of Molokai, where he had come to cure the lepers, but it somehow was also an orphanage where a Franciscan monk was lecturing to children in military uniform, their faces blank and eroded. Suddenly the roof fell in upon them as bombs struck Molokai. “Get out! There’s still time! Get out!” cried the monk. “No, I’m staying with you!” cried out the Kane in the dream. The Franciscan’s head came loose from his body and Kane picked it up and kissed it fervently. Then he hurled it away in revulsion. The head said, “Feed my sheep.”
    Kane awakened with an inchoate shout. He wasn’t in his office. He was fully dressed and sitting on the floor in a corner of his bedroom. He could not remember how he had gotten there.
     

 

     
     

    7
     
     
    Reno awakened at dawn and looked at Cutshaw’s cot. It was empty. He slipped on fatigues and walked down the aisle past the cots and footlockers and out of the dormitory. All the other inmates were sleeping.
    Reno searched the mansion, looking for Cutshaw, then went outside and padded through the fog. He stopped and looked around the desolate courtyard once and bitterly muttered, “Fardels!” At last he saw him. The astronaut was lurking in the lower branches of a spruce where Groper customarily stood before Assembly. He was stirring a gallon of paint balanced between his knees. Reno scuttled up the tree trunk and parted a branch. “Captain Billy!” he exclaimed.
    “For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down!” Cutshaw said guardedly. “What in the hell are you doing up here?”
    “It’s Kane!” whispered Reno excitedly. His eyes were shining and wild.
    He was hyperventilating.
    “What about him?” Cutshaw