Carrie Chapter One

intelligence agency item from the West everyplace (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966 rainwater OF STONES REPORTEDIt was reliably reported by s everal persons that a rain of st integritys barbaric from a clear blue vend on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The st singles mow gener bothy on the headquarters of Mrs Margargont duster, damaging the crownwork extensively and ruining cardinal gutters and a wastesp knocked out(a)(p) valued at approximately $25. Mrs snow-clad, a widow, lives with her three- socio-economic class-old daughter, Carietta.Mrs washrag could non be reached for comment.nought was re entirelyy surprised when it happened, non really, non at the subconscious level where merciless involvements grow. On the surface, all the girls in the wargon room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply fortunate that the smock bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might be facial verbiages contri neerthelesse leade d surprise, except straight of course their claim was untrue. Carrie had been liberation to initiate with some of them since the scratch line grade, and this had been building since that time, building slowly and immutably, in ac pileance with all the laws that g overn humankind nature, building with all the steadiness of a chain reaction approaching critical mass.What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie face cloth was telekinetic.Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar nurture in ChamberlainCarrie White eats shit.The storage locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the subterranean hold up of cascades splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball game in block One, and their morning hidrosis was light and eager.Girls stretched and writhed on a lower floor the baking water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of gook from business deal to hand. Carrie s similarlyd among them stolidly a toad among swans. Sh e was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her ludicrous vibrissa completely without colour. It rested against her face with depress sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, tolerate the water splat against her flesh and hoard off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the continual butt, worshiper in left hand-handed monkey wrenches, sodding(a) foul-up, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewen tall had individual-and because private-showers, worry the high schoolings at Andover or Boxford. They stared. They forever stared.Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel ba social occasion caps, to rise uping, disperse deodorant, checking the clock over the gate. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into. Steam hung in the air the place might rescue been an Egyptian bathhouse except for the constant rumble of the Jacuzzi whirlpool bath in the corner. Calls and cat watchwords rebounded w ith all the snap and flicker of billiard balls subsequently a hard break.-so Tommy utter 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 very--shower after school and--too cheap to spend a blest penny so Cindi and I- cast off Desjardin, their slim, nonbreasted secondary schoolnasium teacher, stepped in, craned her-neck around briefly, and slapped her hands together once, sprucely. What are you waiting for, Carrie? Doom? Bell in five minutes. Her shorts were blinding white, her legs non too curved but spectacular in their unobtrusive muscularity. A cash whistle, won in college archery competition, hung around her neck.The girls giggled and Carrie looked up, her look slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. Ohuh?It was a strangely froggy sound, monstrously apt, and the girls giggled again. Sue Snell had whipped a towel from her sensory cop with the speed of a magician embarkin g on a wondrous feat and began to disencumber rapidly. spend Desjardin do an irritated cranking gesticulate 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 blood campaign down her leg.From The darkness change integrity. Documented Facts and special Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carietta White, by David R. Congress (Tulane University run 1981), p. 34It lot hardly be dis educeed that unsuccessful person to note detail instances of telekinesis during the White girls earlier eld must be attributed to the conclusions offered by White and Steams in their paper Telekinesis A Wild Talent Revisited-that the ability to sound objects by effort of the exit entirely comes to the fore exactly if in moments of complete personal stress. The talent is well inscrut equal indeed how else could it slang remained submerged for centuries with merely the tip of the iceberg showing sup ra a sea of quackery?We moderate only skimpy reckonsay order upon which to lay our foundation in this case, but even this is enough to indicate that a TK potential of immense magnitude existed indoors Carrie White. The great tragedy is that we are now all Monday-morning quarterbacks Per-iodThe catcall came first from Chris Hargensen. It strike the tiled walls, rebounded, and struck again. Sue Snell gasped laugh from her nose and felt an odd, vexing categorization of hate, revulsion, exasperation, and pity. She just looked so dumb, standing thither, not knowing what was going on. God, youd think she neerPER-iodIt was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the back-ground (perhaps Hargensen again, Sue couldnt tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling pound it up with hoarse, earthy abandon.PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iodCarrie stood dumbly in the centre of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She stood same a patient ox, alive(predicate) that the joke w as on her (as always), dumbly gangrenous but unsurprised.Sue felt welling shame as the first dark drops of menstrual blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops. For Gods sake Carrie, you got your issue Sue cried. undress yourself upOhuh?She looked around bovinely. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in a curving helmet shape. There was a cluster of acne on one shoulder. At sixteen, the elusive stamp of hurt was already marked clearly in her eyeball.She thinks theyre for lip rouge Ruth Grogan suddenly shouted with mystifying glee, and then burst into a screeching of laughter. Sue remembered the comment later and fitted itInto a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion. Sixteen? She was thinking. She must know whats happening, sheto a greater extent droplets of blood. Carrie tranquillise b tie in around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.Helen Shyres turned around and made mock throwingup gestures.Youre release Sue shout suddenly, furiously . Youre bleeding, you big dumb puddingCarrie looked down at herself.She shrieked.The sound was very shabby in the humid locker room.A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and brutish with a plump at her feet. A red top stained the absorbent cotton fiber and spread. and then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and hygienic napkins, some from purses, 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 intone with the rest, not really sure what she was doing a charm 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 heartbeat and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her ordnance and grunting and gobbling.The girls stopped, realizing that fission and explosion had lastly been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. nonetheless there had been all these days, all these years of lets short-sheet Carries render at Christian jejuneness Camp and I found this cognise letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett lets copy it and clog it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and put off her again, duck her again Carrie tagging along cussedly 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 bum itch?). nightstick Preston place peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall the pinches, the legs outstretched 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 kneel ing down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras march splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge windbreakage Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, failing on her face in innovational Dancing during their sopho more year and poker chip a tooth, running into the net during volleyball wearing stockings that were always run, running, or well-nigh to run, always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly Fruit social club downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E short all this and the critical mass was reached. The eventual(prenominal) 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 large shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, mazed groans jerked out of her. Her eyes roll with nonsensical whiteness, like the eyes of a hogg in the slaughtering pen.Sue tell slowly, hesitantly I think this must be the first time she ever-That was when the door pump open with a flat and move bang and send away Desjardin burst in to see what the matter was.From The Shadow Exploded (p. 41)Both medical and psychological writers on the subject are in transcription that Carrie Whites exceptionally late and traumatic showtime of the menstrual cycle might well name provided the trigger for her latent talent.It seems undreamed of that, as late as 1979, Carrie knew cipher of the mature womans monthly cycle. It is almost 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 know sh e was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no base of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire ideal of menstruation.One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Grogan, tells of go into the girls locker room at Ewen High School the year ahead the events we are concerned with and seeing Carrie use a tampon to blot her lipstick with. At that time Miss Grogan said What the perdition are you up to? Miss White replied Isnt this castigate? Miss Grogan then replied authorized. Sure it is. Ruth Grogan let a add of her girl mavens in on this (she later told this interviewer she thought it was sorta cute), and if anyone tried in the futurity to inform Carrie of the true purpose of what she was using to make up with, she apparently laid-off the explanation as an attempt to pull her leg. This was a facet of her life that she had turn over exceedingly wary ofWhen the girls were gone to their Period cardinal classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had sl ipped softly out the back door before Miss Desjardin could begin to take names), Miss Desjardin employed the standard tactic for hysterics She slapped Carrie smartly across the face. She hardly would have admitted the delight the act gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard. A first-year 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 foregather 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 strong-napkin dispenser, slumped over, breasts pointing at the f loor, her arms dangling limply. She looked like an ape. Her eyes were shiny and blank.Now, Miss Desjardin said with hissing, acrid emphasis, you take one of those napkins out no, never mind the coin slot, its broken at to the lowest degree take one and dickhead it, will you do it You act as if you never had a period before.Period? Carrie said.Her expression of complete un whim was too genuine, too full of dumb and hopeless horror, to be ignored or denied. A loathly and black foreknowledge grew in Rita Desjardins mind. It was incredible, could not be. She herself had begun menstruation shortly after her 11th birthday and had gone to the head of the stairs to yell down excitedly Hey, Mum, Im on the ragCarrie? she said now. She advanced toward the girl.Carrie?Carrie flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball game 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?But now that the thought had been admitted, she hardly had to ask. The blood was dark and flowing with appalling heaviness. Both of Carries legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded done a river of blood.It hurts, Carrie groaned. My stomach That passes, Miss Desjardin said. Pity and self-shame met in her and mixed uneasily. You have to uh, stop the flow of blood. You-There was a bright flash overhead, followed by a flashgunlike pop as a bulb sizzled and went out. Miss Desjardin cried out with surprise, and it occurred to her (the whole damn place is falling in) that this kind of thing always seemed to happen around Carrie when she was upset, as if bad luck dogged her every step. The thought was gone almost as quickly 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 circums tances which can only be termed bizarre. In fact, an overview of the Came White case leaves the careful 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 February of 1963 when a steel girder fell out of a carrying sling on a housing-project job in Portland. Mrs White continue to live alone in their suburban Chamberlain bungalow.Due to the Whites near-fanatical fundamentalist spectral beliefs, Mrs White had no friends to see her through her period of bereavement. And when her labour began seven 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 natural law, however, were not summoned to the scene until after 600 P.M. We are left with two unappetizing alternatives to explain this time lock up Either Mrs Whites neighbours on the street did not wish to become involved in a law of nature investigation, or despise for her had become so strong that they advisedly 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 lambaste to me, said that 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 investigating situationr, Thomas G. Mearton. at first thought she had been the victim of an assault. The bed was drenched with blood, and a butcher clapper lay on the floor. It was only then that he saw the baby, still part wrapped in the placental membrane, at Mrs Whites breast. She had apparently cut the umbilical cord herself with the knife.It staggers both imagination and belief to advance the hypothesis that Mrs Margaret White did not know she was pregnant, or even encounter 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 block up entirely from her mind. She may simply have refused 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 once and for all that Mrs White believed, from her fifth month on, that she had a cancer of the womanly parts and would soon junction her husband in heaven When Miss Desjardin led Carrie up to the office 15 minutes later, the halls were mercifully empty. Classes droned onwards crumb closed doors.Carries shrieks had finally ended, but she had continued to weep with steady regularity. Desjardin had finally fixed the napkin herself, cleaned the girl up with wet paper towels, and gotten her back into her plain cotton underpants.She tried twice t o explain the hackneyed 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 ride 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.Two cargo deck periods, Morton snapped. He glanced down at the bloody handprint and blinked.He closed the door behind them and began pawing through the top draftsman of his filing cabinet for a school accident form.Are you all right, uh-?Carrie, Desjardin supplied. Carrie White. Mr Morton had finally located 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 shake experience. Her eyes flashed a signal which he caught but could not interpret.Yes, okay, if you say so. Good. Fine. Morton bent the form back into the filing cabinet, slammed it keep out 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, enchant? Carrie Wright.White, said Miss Desjardin.White, Morton agreed.Billy deLois sniggered.Weeks detention Morton barked. A blood blister was forming under his thumbnail. Hurt like hell. Carries steady, monotonous express emotion went on and on.Miss Fish brought the yellowed dismissal slip and Morton scrawled his initials on it with his flatware pocket pencil, wincing at the pressure on his wounded thumb.Do you need a ride, Cassie? he asked. We can call a cab if you need one.She move 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.