Carrie Chapter One

News item from the West everywhere (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966RAIN OF STONES describeIt was reliably reported by s foreveral persons that a rain of st wizs go away from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell princip either last(predicate)y on the home of Mrs Marg art White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs White, a widow, lives with her three- stratum-old female child, Carietta.Mrs White could non be reached for comment. null was really surprised when it goed, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the sur salute, all the female childs in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White bitch had declaren it in the backtalk again. Some of them might also have produceed surprise, unless of course their claim was untrue. Carrie had been going to prepare with just about of the m since the first grade, and this had been building since that time, building late and immutably, in accordance with all the laws that govern human nature, building with all the steadiness of a chain reaction approaching searing mass.What none of them k in the buff, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar school in ChamberlainCarrie White eats shit.The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the later(a) blend of showers splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball in gunpoint One, and their morning sweat was light and eager.Girls stretched and writhed below the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squeeze out white bars of soap from hand to hand. Carrie sas welld among them stolidly a catch among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and scarcetocks, her laughable h line completely without colour. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she sim ply stood, go slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the government agency of the sacrificial goat, the unalterable plainlyt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, pure(a) foul-up, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewen High had individual-and thus private-showers, interchangeable the high schools at Andover or Boxford. They stared. They always stared.Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing delicate bathing caps, towelling, s demanding deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into. Steam hung in the air the place might have been an Egyptian bathhouse except for the constant rumble of the Jacuzzi whirlpool bath in the corner. Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flip of billiard balls after a hard break.-so Tommy verbalise he hated it on me and I--Im going with my sister and her husband. He picks his nose but so does she, so theyre ve ry--shower after school and--too cheap to spend a goddamn penny so Cindi and I- ignore Desjardin, their slim, nonbreasted gym teacher, stepped in, craned her-neck around briefly, and slapped her hands in concert once, smartly. What are you waiting for, Carrie? Doom? Bell in five proceedings. Her boxershorts were blinding white, her legs not too curved but striking in their unobtrusive muscularity. A silver whistle, won in college archery competition, hung around her neck.The girls giggled and Carrie looked up, her eyeball slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. Ohuh?It was a fishily froggy sound, grotesquely apt, and the girls giggled again. challenge Snell had whipped a towel from her bull with the speed of a magician embarking on a wondrous feat and began to comb rapidly. leave off Desjardin made an irritated cranking gesture at Carrie and stepped out.Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle.It wasnt until she stepped out that they all saw the strain running down her leg.From The vestige Exploded. Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carietta White, by David R. Congress (Tulane University Press 1981), p. 34It can simply be contest that visitation to note specific instances of telekinesis during the White girls earlier age must be attributed to the conclusions offered by White and Steams in their paper telekinesis A Wild Talent Revisited-that the ability to move objects by labor of the will alone comes to the fore altogether in moments of extreme own(prenominal) stress. The talent is well hidden indeed how else could it have remained submerged for centuries with totally the tip of the iceberg showing above a sea of charlatanism?We have only skimpy hearsay evidence upon which to lay our footing in this case, but even this is enough to indicate that a TK authorisation of immense magnitude existed within Carrie White. The great tragedy is that we are at once al l Monday-morning quarterbacks Per-iodThe catcall came first from Chris Hargensen. It struck the tiled walls, rebounded, and struck again. work Snell gasped laughter from her nose and felt an odd, vexing mixture of hate, revulsion, exasperation, and pity. She just looked so dumb, standing in that respect, not fill ining what was going on. God, youd think she neerPER-iodIt was bonny a chant, an incantation. Someone in the back-ground (perhaps Hargensen again, work couldnt tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling jade it up with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iodCarrie stood dumbly in the gist of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She stood analogous a patient ox, aware that the joke was on her (as always), dumbly embarrassed but unsurprised.Sue felt welling disgust as the first dark drops of menstrual blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops. For Gods sake Carrie, you got your period Sue cried. Clean yourself upOhuh?She looked aroun d bovinely. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in a turn helmet shape. There was a cluster of acne on one shoulder. At sixteen, the convoluted stamp of hurt was already marked clearly in her look.She thinks theyre for limn Ruth Grogan suddenly shouted with cryptic glee, and indeed burst into a shriek of laughter. Sue remembered the comment later and fitted itInto a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion. xvi? She was thinking. She must know whats happening, sheMore droplets of blood. Carrie restrained blinked around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.Helen Shyres turned around and made mock throwingup gestures.Youre bleeding Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. Youre bleeding, you big dumb puddingCarrie looked down at herself.She shrieked.The sound was very loud in the humid locker room.A stop up suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plunk at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread.Then the laughter, disgust ed, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from rumples, some from the broken dispenser on the wall. They flew like snow and the chant became Plug it up. Plug it up. Plug it-Sue was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing a c detriment had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon Theres no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm-It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and grunting and gobbling.The girls stopped, realizing that nuclear fission and explosion had finally been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. however there had been all these years, all these years of lets short-sheet Carries bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to scare a way Bobby Pickett lets copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in the grass in her shoe and duck her again, duck her again Carrie tagging along mulishly on biking trips, known one year as puddn and the next year as truck-face, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratch-ass, your lav itch?). baton Preston putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall the pinches, the legs ex black marketed in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene postcard tucked into her purse Carrie on the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge windbreakage Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, failing on her face in Modern Dancing during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during vo lleyball wear stockings that were always run, running, or about to run, always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly harvest-feast Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, grossout, put-down, long searched for, was found. Fission.She backed away, howling in the new silence, fat forearms crossing her face, a tampon stuck in the middle of her pubic hair.The girls watched her, their eyes shining solemnly.Carrie backed into the side of one of the four tumid shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes rolled with wet whiteness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen.Sue said slowly, hesitantly I think this must be the first time she ever-That was when the door pumped open with a planar and hurried bang and drop off Desjardin burst in to see what the topic was.From The Shadow Exploded (p. 41)Both medical and psychological writers on the flying field are in agreement that Carrie Whites exceptionally late and traumatic number 1 of the menstrual cycle might well have provided the trigger for her possible talent.It seems incredible that, as late as 1979, Carrie knew nothing of the mature womans periodical cycle. It is nearly as incredible to believe that the girls mother would permit her daughter to reach the age of nearly seventeen without consulting a gynaecologist concerning the daughters failure to menstruate.Yet the facts are incontrovertible. When Carrie White realized she was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no idea of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire concept of stop.One of her go classmates, Ruth Grogan, tells of entering the girls locker room at Ewen High aim the year in the beginning the events we are concerned with and seeing Carrie using a tamp on to blot her lipstick with. At that time look across Grogan said What the hell are you up to? send packing White replied Isnt this right? miss Grogan then replied Sure. Sure it is. Ruth Grogan let a number of her girl champions in on this (she later told this interviewer she thought it was sorta cute), and if anyone tried in the prox to inform Carrie of the true purpose of what she was using to make up with, she obviously dismissed the explanation as an attempt to pull her leg. This was a prospect of her life that she had become exceedingly wary ofWhen the girls were gone to their Period ii classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had slipped quietly out the back door before Miss Desjardin could begin to take names), Miss Desjardin employed the standard simulated military operation for hysterics She slapped Carrie smartly across the face. She hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act gave her, and she sure enough would have denied that she regarded C arrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard. A freshman teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.Carrie looked up at her dumbly, face still contorted and working. M-M-Miss D-D-Des-D-Get up, Miss Desjardin said dispassionately. Get up and tend to yourself.Im bleeding to death Carrie screamed, and one blind, searching hand came up and clutched Miss Desjardins white shorts. It left a bloody handprint.I you . . . The gym teachers face contorted into a pucker of disgust, and she suddenly hurled Came, stumbling, to her feet Get over thereCarrie stood swaying between the showers and the wall with its dime sanitary-napkin dispenser, slumped over, breasts pointing at the floor, her arms dangling limply. She looked like an ape. Her eyes were shiny and blank.Now, Miss Desjardin said with hissing, deadly emphasis, you take one of those napkins out no, never mind the coin slot, its broken anyway take one and damn it, will you do it You act as if you never had a period before. Period? Carrie said.Her expression of complete unbelief was too genuine, too full of dumb and hopeless horror, to be ignored or denied. A terrible and black foreknowledge grew in Rita Desjardins mind. It was incredible, could not be. She herself had begun menstruation shortly after her eleventh birthday and had gone to the head of the steps to yell down excitedly Hey, Mum, Im on the ragCarrie? she said now. She mature toward the girl.Carrie?Carrie flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball bats in the corner fell over with a large, echoing bang. They rolled every which way, making Desjardin jump.Carrie, is this your first period? and now that the thought had been admitted, she hardly had to ask. The blood was dark and flowing with terrible heaviness. Both of Carries legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded finished a river of blood.It hurts, Carrie groaned. My stomach That passes, Miss Desjardin said. Pity and self-shame met in her and mixed u neasily. You have to uh, stop the flow of blood. You-There was a brightly flash overhead, followed by a flashgunlike pop as a lightbulb sizzled and went out. Miss Desjardin cried out with surprise, and it occurred to her (the whole damn place is falling in) that this tolerant of thing always seemed to happen around Carrie when she was upset, as if bad constituent dogged her every step. The thought was gone almost as pronto as it had come. She took one of the sanitary napkins from the broken dispenser and unwrapped it.Look, she said, Like this-From The Shadow Exploded (p. 54)Carrie Whites mother, Margaret White, gave birth to her daughter on September 21, 1963, under circumstances which can only be termed bizarre. In fact, an overview of the Came White case leaves the paying attention student with one feeling ascendant over all others that Carrie was the only issue of a family as odd as any that has ever been brought to popular attention.As noted earlier, Ralph White died in F ebruary of 1963 when a stain girder fell out of a carrying sling on a housing-project prank in Portland. Mrs White act to live alone in their suburban Chamberlain bungalow.Due to the Whites near-fanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs, Mrs White had no friends to see her through her period of bereavement. And when her labour began seven calendar months later, she was alone.At approximately 130 P.M. on September 21, the neighbours on Carlin Street began to hear screams from the White bungalow. The jurisprudence, however, were not summoned to the scene until after 600 P.M. We are left with two unappetising alternatives to explain this time lag Either Mrs Whites neighbours on the street did not wish to become involved in a police investigation, or dislike for her had become so strong that they deliberately adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Mrs Georgia McLaughlin, the only one of the three remaining residents who were on the street at that time and who would talk to me, said tha t she did not call the police because she thought the screams had something to do with holy rollin.When the police did arrive at 622 P.M. the screams had become irregular. Mrs White was found in her bed upstairs, and the study officer, Thomas G. Mearton. at first thought she had been the victim of an assault. The bed was swamp with blood, and a butcher knife lay on the floor. It was only then that he saw the baby, still partially wrapped in the placental mammal membrane, at Mrs Whites breast. She had apparently cut the umbilical cord herself with the knife.It staggers both(prenominal) imagination and belief to advance the theory that Mrs Margaret White did not know she was pregnant, or even understand what the word entails, and recent scholars such as J. W. Bankson and George Felding have made a more reasonable case for the hypothesis that the concept, linked irrevocably in her mind with the sin of intercourse, had been blocked entirely from her mind. She may simply have refuse d to believe that such a thing could happen to her.We have records of at least three letters to a friend in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that seem to prove conclusively that Mrs White believed, from her fifth month on, that she had a cancer of the womanly parts and would soon join her husband in heaven When Miss Desjardin led Carrie up to the office fifteen minutes later, the halls were mercifully empty. Classes droned onwards behind unopen doors.Carries shrieks had finally ended, but she had act to weep with steady regularity. Desjardin had finally placed the napkin herself, cleaned the girl up with wet paper towels, and gotten her back into her plain cotton underpants.She tried double to explain the commonplace reality of menstruation, but Carrie clapped her hands over her ears and continued to cry.Mr Morton, the assistant principal, was out of his office in a flash when they entered. Billy deLois and Henry Trennant, two boys waiting for the lecture due them for cutting French I, goggled around from their chairs.Come in, Mr Morton said briskly. Come right in. He glared over Desjardins shoulder at the boys, who were staring at the bloody handprint on her shorts. What are YOU looking at?Blood, Henry said, and smiled with a kind of vacuous surprise. twain detention periods, Morton snapped. He glanced down at the bloody handprint and blinked.He closed the door behind them and began pawing through the top drawer of his filing footlocker for a school accident form.Are you all right, uh-?Carrie, Desjardin supplied. Carrie White. Mr Morton had finally find an accident form. There was a large coffee stain on it. You wont need that, Mr Morton.I suppose it was the trampoline. We just I wont?No. But I think Carrie should be allowed to go home for the rest of the day. Shes had a rather frightening experience. Her eyes flashed a signal which he caught but could not interpret.Yes, okay, if you say so. Good. Fine. Morton crumpled the form back into the filing cabinet, slammed i t conclude with his thumb in the drawer, and grunted. He whirled gracefully to the door, yanked it open, glared at Billy and Henry, and called Miss Fish, could we have a dismissal slip here, please? Carrie Wright.White, said Miss Desjardin.White, Morton agreed.Billy deLois sniggered.Weeks detention Morton barked. A blood blister was forming under his thumbnail. yearn like hell. Carries steady, monotonous weeping went on and on.Miss Fish brought the colour dismissal slip and Morton scrawled his initials on it with his silver pocket pencil, wincing at the thrust on his wounded thumb.Do you need a ride, Cassie? he asked. We can call a cab if you need one.She shook her head. He noticed with distaste that a large bubble of green mucus had formed at one nostril. Morton looked over her head and at Miss Desjardin.