“Stand up!”
Momma’s voice failed her but she did stand up, with her hands still on her head, like a prisoner of war. Her lips moved. To Carrie she seemed to be reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“I don’t want to fight with you, Momma,” Carrie said, and her voice almost broke from her and dissolved. She struggled to control it. “I only want to be let to live my own life. I . . . I don’t like yours.” She stopped, horrified in spite of herself. The ultimate blasphemy had been spoken, and it was a thousand times worse than the Eff Word.
“Witch,” Momma whispered. “It says in the Lord’s Book:
‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ Your father did the Lord’s work-”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Carrie said. It always disturbed her to hear Momma talk about her father. “I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma.” Her eyes gleamed. “They better understand it, too.”
But Momma was whispering to herself again.
Unsatisfied, with a feeling of anticlimax in her throat and the dismal roiling of emotional upset in her belly, she went to the cellar to get her dress material.
It was better than the closet. There was that. Anything was better than the closet with its blue light and the overpowering stench of sweat and her own sin. Anything. Everything.
She stood with the wrapped package hugged against her breast and closed her eyes, shutting out the weak glow of the cellar’s bare, cobweb-festooned bulb. Tommy Ross didn’t love her; she knew that.
This was some strange kind of atonement, and she could understand that and respond to it. She had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since she had been old enough to reason.
He had said it would be good-that they would see to it. Well, she would see to it. They better not start anything. They just better not. She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.
Upstairs, Momma continued to whisper. It was not the Lord’s Prayer. It was the Prayer of Exorcism from Deuteronomy.
From My Name Is Susan Snell (p.23): They finally even made a movie about it. I saw it last April. When I came out, I was sick. Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it. And forgetting Carrie White may be a bigger mistake than anyone realizes.
Monday morning; Principal Grayle and his understudy, Pete Morton, were having coffee in Grayle’s office.
“No word from Hargensen yet?” Morty asked. His lips curled into a John Wayne leer that was a little frightened around the edges.
“Not a peep. And Christine has stopped upping off about how her father is going to send us down the road.” Grayle blew on his coffee with a long face.
“You don’t exactly seem to be turning cartwheels.”
“I’m not. Did you know Carrie White is going to the prom?”
Morty blinked. “With who? The Beak?” The Beak was Freddy Holt, another of Ewen’s misfits. He weighed perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, and the casual observer might be tempted to believe that sixty of it was nose.
“No,” Gravle said. “With Tommy Ross.”
Morty swallowed his coffee the wrong way and went into a coughing fit.
“That’s the way I felt,” Grayle said.
“What about his girl friend? The little Snell girl?”
“I think she put him up to it,” Grayle said. “She certainly seemed guilty enough about what happened to Carrie when I talked to her. Now she’s on the Decoration Committee, happy as a clam, just as if not going to her Senior prom was nothing at all.”
“Oh,” Morty said wisely.
“And Hargensen-I think he must have talked to some people and discovered we really could sue him on behalf of Carrie White if we wanted to. I think he’s cut his losses. It’s the daughter that’s worrying me.”
“Do you think there’s going to be an incident Friday night?”
“I don’t know. I do know Chris has got a lot of friends who are going to he there. And she’s going around with that Billy Nolan mess; he’s got a zoo full of friends, too. The kind that make a career out of scaring pregnant ladies. Chris Hargensen has him tied around her finger, from what I’ve heard.”
“Are you afraid of anything specific?”
Grayle made a restless gesture. “Specific? No. But I’ve been in the game long enough to know it’s a bad situation. Do you remember the Stadler game in seventy-six?”
Morty nodded. It would take more than the passage of three years to obscure the memory of the Ewen-Stadler game. Bruce Trevor had been a marginal student but a fantastic basketball player. Coach Gaines didn’t like him, but Trevor was going to put Ewen in the area tournament for the first time in ten years. He was cut from the team a week before Ewen’s last must-win game against the Stadler Boheats. A regular announced locker inspection had uncovered a kilo of marijuana behind Trevor’s civics book. Ewen lost the game-and their shot at the tourney-10~48. But no one remembered that; what they remembered
was the riot that had interrupted the game in the fourth period. Led by Bruce Trevor, who righteously claimed he had been bum rapped, it resulted in four hospital admissions. One of them had been the Stadler coach, who had been hit over the head with a first-aid kit.
“I’ve got that kind of feeling,” Grayle said. “A hunch. Someone’s going to come with rotten apples or something.”
“Maybe you’re psychic,” Morty said.
From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 92-93): It is now generally agreed that the TK phenomenon is a genetic-recessive occurrence-but the opposite of a disease like hemophilia, which becomes overt only in males. In that disease, once called “King’s Evil,” the gene is recessive in the female and is carried harmlessly.
Male offspring, however, are “bleeders.” This disease is generated only if an afflicted male marries a woman carrying the recessive gene. If the offspring of such union is male, the result will be a hemophiliac son. If the offspring is female, the result will he a daughter who is a carrier. It should be emphasized that the hemophilia gene may be carried recessively in the male as a part of his genetic make-up. But if he marries a woman with the same outlaw gene, the result will be hemophilia if the offspring is male.
In the case of royal families, where intermarriage was common, the chance of the gene reproducing once it entered the family tree were high-thus the name King’s Evil. Hemophilia also showed up in significant quantities in Appalachia during the earlier part of this century, and is commonly noticed in those cultures where incest and the marriage of first cousins is common.
With the TK phenomenon, the male appears to be the carrier; the TK gene may be recessive in the female, but dominates only in the female. It appears that Ralph White carried the gene. Margaret Brigham, by purest chance, also carried the outlaw gene sign, but we may be fairly confident that it was recessive, as no information has ever been found to indicate that she had telekinetic powers resembling her daughter’s. Investigations are now being conducted into the life of Margaret Brigham’s grandmother, Sadie Cochran-for, if the
dominant/recessive pattern obtains with TK as it does with hemophilia, Mrs. Cochran may have been TK dominant.
If the issue of the White marriage had been male, the result would have been another carrier. Chances that the mutation would have died with him would have been excellent, as neither side of the Ralph White-Margaret Brigham alliance had cousins of a comparable age for the theoretical male ottspring to marry. And the chances of meeting and marrying another woman with the TK gene at random would be small.
None of the teams working on the problem have yet isolated the gene.
Surely no one can doubt, in light of the Maine holocaust, that isolating this gene must become one of medicine’s number-one priorities. The hemophiliac, or H gene, produces male issue with a lack of blood platelets. The telekinetic, or TK gene, produces female Typhoid Marys capable of destroying almost at will….
Wednesday afternoon.
Susan and fourteen other students-The Spring Ball Decoration Committee, no less-were working on the huge mural that would hang behind the twin bandstands on Friday night. The theme was Springtime in Venice (who picked these hokey themes, Sue wondered. She had been a student at Ewen for four years, had attended two Balls, and she still didn’t know. Why did the goddam thing need a theme, anyway?