Carrie (21 page)

(A short recess)

Q. You are personally sure that Carrie White did this? A. Yes.

Q. Thank you, Mrs. Simard. A. I'd like to ask a question, if you please. Q. Of course.

A. What happens if there are others like her? What happens to the world?

From
The Shadow Exploded
(p. 151):

By 12:45 on the morning of May 28, the situation in Chamberlain was critical. The school had burned itself out on a fairly isolated piece of ground, but the entire downtown area was ablaze. Almost all the city water in that area had been tapped, but enough was available (at low pressure) from Deighan Street water mains to save the business buildings below the intersection of Main and Oak streets.

The explosion of Tony's Citgo on upper Summer Street had resulted in a ferocious fire that was not to be controlled until nearly ten o'clock that morning. There was water on Summer Street; there simply were no firemen or fire-fighting equipment to utilize it. Equipment was then on its way from Lewiston, Auburn, Lisbon, and Brunswick, but nothing arrived until one o'clock.

On Carlin Street, an electrical fire, caused by downed power lines, had begun. It was to eventually gut the entire north side of the street, including the bungalow where Margaret White gave birth to her daughter.

On the West End of town, just below what is commonly called Brickyard Hill, the worst disaster had taken place: the explosion of a gas main and a resulting fire that raged out of control through most of the next day.

And if we look at these flash points on a municipal map (see page facing), we can pick out Carrie's route—a wandering, looping path of destruction through the town, but one with an almost certain destination: home. . . .

Something toppled over in the living room, and Margaret White straightened up, cocking her head to one side. The butcher knife glittered dully in the light of the flames. The electric power had gone off sometime before, and the only light in the house came from the fire up the street.

One of the pictures fell from the wall with a thump. A moment later the Black Forest cuckoo clock fell. The mechanical bird gave a small, strangled squawk and was still.

From the town the sirens whooped endlessly, but she could still hear the footsteps when they turned up the walk.

The door blew open. Steps in the hall.

She heard the plaster plaques in the living room (
CHRIST, THE UNSEEN GUEST; WHAT WOULD JESUS DO; THE HOUR DRAWETH NIGH: IF TONIGHT BECAME JUDGMENT, WOULD YOU BE READY
) explode one after the other, like plaster birds in a shooting gallery.

(o i've been there and seen the harlots shimmy on wooden stages)

She sat up on her stool like a very bright scholar who has gone to the head of the class. But her eyes were deranged.

The living-room windows blew outward.

The kitchen door slammed and Carrie walked in.

Her body seemed to have become twisted, shrunken, crone-like. The prom dress was in tatters and flaps, and the pig blood had began to clot and streak. There was a smudge of grease on her forehead, and both knees were scraped and raw-looking.

“Momma,” she whispered. Her eyes were preternaturally bright, hawklike, but her mouth was trembling. If someone had been there to watch, he would have been struck by the resemblance between them.

Margaret White sat on her kitchen stool, the carving knife hidden among the folds of her dress in her lap.

“I should have killed myself when he put it in me,” she said clearly. “After the first time, before we were married, he promised. Never again. He said we just . . . slipped. I believed him. I fell down and I lost the baby and that was God's judgment. I felt that the sin had been expiated. By blood. But sin never dies.
Sin
. . .
never
. . .
dies.”
Her eyes glittered.

“Momma, I—”

“At first it was all right. We lived sinlessly. We slept in the same bed, belly to belly sometimes, and o, I could feel the presence of the Serpent, but we. never. did. until.” She began to grin, and it was a hard, terrible grin. “And that night I could see him looking at me That Way. We got down on our knees to pray for strength and he . . . touched me. In that place. That woman place. And I sent him out of the house. He was gone for hours, and I prayed for him. I could see him in my mind's eye, walking the midnight streets, wrestling with the devil as Jacob wrestled with the Angel of the Lord. And when he came back, my heart was filled with thanksgiving.”

She paused, grinning her dry, spitless grin into the shifting shadows of the room.

“Momma, I don't want to hear it!”

Plates began to explode in the cupboards like clay pigeons.

“It wasn't until he came in that I smelled the whiskey on his breath. And he took me.
Took me!
With the stink of filthy roadhouse whiskey still on him he took me . . .
and I liked it!”
She screamed out the last words at the ceiling. “
I liked it o all that dirty fucking and his hands on me
ALL OVER ME!
”

“MOMMA!”

(!! MOMMA !!)

She broke off as if slapped and blinked at her daughter. “I almost killed myself,” she said in a more normal tone of voice. “And Ralph wept and talked about atonement and I didn't and then he was dead and then I thought God had visited me with cancer; that He was turning my female parts into something as black and rotten as my sinning soul. But that would have been too easy. The Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. I see that now. When the pains began I went and got a knife—this knife—” she held it up “—and waited for you to come so I could make my sacrifice. But I was weak and backsliding. I took this knife in hand again when you were three, and I backslid again. So now the devil has come home.”

She held the knife up, and her eyes fastened hypnotically on the glittering hook of its blade.

Carrie took a slow, blundering step forward.

“I came to kill you, Momma. And you were waiting here to kill me. Momma, I . . . it's not right, Momma. It's not . . .”

“Let's pray,” Momma said softly. Her eyes fixed on Carrie's and there was a crazed, awful compasssion in them. The firelight was brighter now, dancing on the walls like dervishes. “For the last time, let us pray.”

“Oh Momma help me!”
Carrie cried out.

She fell forward on her knees, head down, hands raised in supplication.

Momma leaned forward, and the knife came down in a shining arc.

Carrie, perhaps seeing out of the tail of her eye, jerked back, and instead of penetrating her back, the knife went into her shoulder to the hilt. Momma's feet tangled in the legs of her chair, and she collapsed in a sitting sprawl.

They stared at each other in silent tableau.

Blood began to ooze from around the handle of the knife and to splash onto the floor.

Then Carrie said softly: “I'm going to give you a present, Momma.”

Margaret tried to get up, staggered, and fell back on her hands and knees. “What are you doing?” she croaked hoarsely.

“I'm picturing your heart, Momma,” Carrie said. “It's easier when you see things in your mind. Your heart is a big red muscle. Mine goes faster when I use my power. But yours is going a little slower now. A little slower.”

Margaret tried to get up again, failed, and forked the sign of the evil eye at her daughter.

“A little slower, Momma. Do you know what the present is, Momma? What you always wanted. Darkness. And whatever God lives there.”

Margaret White whispered: “Our Father, Who art in heaven—”

“Slower, Momma. Slower.”

“—hallowed be Thy name—”

“I can see the blood draining back into you. Slower.”

“—Thy kingdom come—”

“Your feet and hands like marble, like alabaster. White.”

“—Thy will be done—”

“My
will, Momma. Slower.”

“—on earth—”

“Slower.”

“—as . . . as . . . as it . . .”

She collapsed forward, hands twitching.

“—as it is in heaven.”

Carrie whispered: “Full stop.”

She looked down at herself, and put her hands weakly around the haft of the knife.

(no o no that hurts that's too much hurt)

She tried to get up, failed, then pulled herself up by Momma's stool. Dizziness and nausea washed over her. She could taste blood, bright and slick, in the back of her throat. Smoke, acrid and choking, was drifting in through the windows now. The flames had reached next door; even now sparks would be lighting softly on the roof that rocks had punched brutally through a thousand years before.

Carrie went out the back door, staggered across the lawn, and rested

(where's my momma)

against a tree. There was something she was supposed to do. Something about

(roadhouses parking lots)

the Angel with the Sword. The Fiery Sword.

Never mind. It would come to her.

She crossed by back yards to Willow Street and then crawled up the embankment to Route 6.

It was 1:15
A.M
.

It was 11:20
P.M
. when Christine Hargensen and Billy Nolan got back to The Cavalier. They went up the back stairs, down the hall, and before she could do more than turn on the lights, he was yanking at her blouse.

“For God's sake let me unbutton it—”

“To hell with that.”

He ripped it suddenly down the back. The cloth tore with a sudden hard sound. One button popped free and winked on the bare wood floor. Honky-tonkin' music came faintly up to them, and the building vibrated subtly with the clumsy-enthusiastic dancing of farmers and truckers and millworkers and waitresses and hairdressers, of the greasers and their townie girl friends from Westover and Lewiston.

“Hey—”

“Be quiet.”

He slapped her, rocking her head back. Her eyes took on a flat and deadly shine.

“This is the end, Billy.” She backed away from him, breasts swelling into her bra, flat stomach pumping, legs long and tapering in her jeans; but she backed toward the bed. “It's over.”

“Sure,” he said. He lunged for her and she punched him, a surprisingly hard punch that landed on his cheek.

He straightened and twitched his head a little. “You gave me a shiner, you bitch.”

“I'll give you more.”

“You're goddam right you will.”

They stared at each other, panting, glaring. Then he began to unbutton his shirt, a little grin beginning on his face.

“We got it on, Charlie. We really got it on.” He called her Charlie whenever he was pleased with her. It seemed to be, she thought with a cold blink of humor, a generic term for good cunt.

She felt a little smile come to her own face, relaxed a little, and that was when he whipped his shirt across her face and came in low, butting her in the stomach like a goat, tipping her onto the bed. The springs screamed. She pounded her fists helplessly on his back.

“Get off me! Get off me! Get off me! You fucking grease-ball,
get off me!”

He was grinning at her, and with one quick, hard yank her zipper was broken, her hips free.

“Call your daddy?” he was grunting. “That what you gonna do? Huh? Huh? That it, ole Chuckie? Call big ole legal beagle daddy? Huh? I woulda done it to you, you know that? I woulda dumped it all over your fuckin squash. You know it? Huh? Know it? Pig blood for pigs, right? Right on your motherfuckin squash. You—”

She had suddenly ceased to resist. He paused, staring down at her, and she had an odd smile on her face. “You wanted it this way all along, didn't you? You miserable little scumbag. That's right, isn't it? You creepy little one-nut low-cock dinkless wonder.”

His grin was slow, crazed. “It doesn't matter.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn't.” Her smile suddenly vanished, the cords on her neck stood out as she hawked back—and spit in his face.

They descended into a red, thrashing unconsciousness.

Downstairs the music thumped and wheezed
(“I'm poppin little white pills an my eyes are open wide/Six days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home tonight”),
c/w, full throttle, very loud, very bad, five-man band wearing sequined cowboy shirts and new pegged jeans with bright rivets, occasionally wiping mixed sweat and Vitalis from their brows, lead guitar, rhythm, steel, dobro guitar, drums: no one heard the town whistle, or the first explosion, or the second; and when the gas main blew and the music stopped and someone drove into the parking lot and began to yell the news, Chris and Billy were asleep.

Chris woke suddenly and the clock on the night table said five minutes of one. Someone was pounding on the door.

“Billy!” the voice was yelling. “Get up! Hey! Hey!”

Billy stirred, rolled over, and knocked the cheap alarm clock onto the floor. “What the Christ?” he said thickly, and sat up. His back stung. The bitch had covered it with long scratches. He'd barely noticed it at the time, but now he decided he was going to have to send her home bowlegged. Just to show her who was b—

Silence struck him. Silence. The Cavalier did not close until two; as a matter of fact, he could still see the neon twinkling and flicking through the dusty garret window. Except for the steady pounding

(something happened)

the place was a graveyard.

“Billy, you in there? Hey!”

“Who is it?” Chris whispered. Her eyes were glittering and watchful in the intermittent neon.

“Jackie Talbot,” he said absently, then raised his voice. “What?”

“Lemme in, Billy. I got to talk to you!”

Billy got up and padded to the door, naked. He unlocked the old-fashioned hook-and-eye and opened it.

Jackie Talbot burst in. His eyes were wild and his face was smeared with soot. He had been drinking it up with Steve and Henry when the news came at ten minutes of twelve. They had gone back to town in Henry's elderly Dodge convertible, and had seen the Jackson Avenue gas main explode from the vantage point of Brickyard Hill. When Jackie had borrowed the Dodge and started to drive back at 12:30, the town was a panicky shambles.