The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty

had no head.
    “You got a Charlie,” Gilman said tonelessly.
    “Just a boy.” Kane’s voice was dreamy. He lifted unseeing eyes to Gilman’s. “He spoke to me, Gilman.”
    Gilman stared uneasily. Kane was partially turned away from him. “Are you all right, sir?”
    “I cut off his head and he kept on talking, Gilman. He spoke to me after I killed him.”
    Gilman was alarmed. “Come on, sir, let’s go,” he urged. “It’s getting light.”
    “He told me I loved him,” Kane said dully.
    “Christ, forget about it, Colonel!” Gilman’s face was close to Kane’s.
    He squeezed his arm with heavy fingers.
    “He was only a boy,” said Kane. Then Gilman stared in horror as Kane raised his hands. Cradled in them was the severed head of a fourteen-year-old boy. “See?” Gilman stifled a scream. Savagely he knocked the head out of Kane’s hands. It rolled down an incline and finally thumped against a tree.
    “Oh, my Christ,” moaned Gilman.
    Eventually he got Kane back to the base. But when Kane was put to bed he was still in a trancelike state. A medical orderly recorded the incident, noting that Kane would bear further observation.
    The following morning Kane behaved normally and continued with his duties. He seemed to have no recollection of the head. In the days to come he was to wonder why Lieutenant Gilman eyed him oddly whenever he saw him. Kane made sure that Gilman never again accompanied him on a mission. He could not pin down his reason for this; somehow it just seemed more efficient.
    Some two weeks after the incident, Kane was standing by a window of his adjutant’s sandbagged shack. He was staring at the drumming torrential rain that had not ceased for the last four days. The adjutant, a dark-eyed captain named Robinson, was hovering by a TWX machine that spewed out messages a chattering inch per thrust. It mingled in ominous syncopation with the pounding of the rain.
    Kane suddenly started; then relaxed. He thought he’d heard a voice from the jungle: a single cry that sounded like “Kane!” Then he saw the bird taking off from the treetops and remembered the screech of its species.
    There was an unaccountable trembling in his fingers; a twitching in his bones: they had been his companions ever since first he had come to Vietnam; they and the sleeplessness. And when he slept he was haunted by dreams, chilling nightmares always forgotten. He tried to remember them but couldn’t. There were even times when he would tell himself in a dream that surely this time he would remember. But he never did. Each humid morning’s only legacy was sweat and the drone of mosquitoes. Yet the dreams, he knew, never left him: they still ran darkly through his bloodstream. Behind him he could sense vague tracks, feel menacing eyes that were fixed on some easy prey within him. He was nagged by a prescience of disaster.
    The TWX machine clicked its teeth without pause.
    “Can’t you turn that damned thing off!” snapped Kane.
    “Special orders coming in, sir,” Robinson told him. The machine fell silent. Robinson ripped away the message. When he looked up, the colonel was gone and rain splattered in through an open door. Robinson carried the message to the doorway and saw Kane walking toward the jungle; he was coatless, hatless, instantly drenched in the violent downpour. Robinson shook his head. “Colonel Kane, sir!” he called.
    Kane stopped dead, then turned around. His hands were cupped before him like a child’s catching the rain, and he was looking at them.
    The adjutant flourished the message. “It’s for you, sir!”
    Kane walked slowly back to the shack and stood staring silently at Robinson. Trickles of water plopped down from the bottoms of his trousers and sleeves and puddled on the floor.
    The TWX machine had received a set of special orders assigning Kane to the state of Washington. Robinson looked rueful as he handed them to Kane. “Oh, well, Christ, it’s an obvious mistake, sir. Some