A gout of flame had ripped skyward, trailing a nimbus of fluttering steel roof panels, wood, and paper. The smell was thick and oily. Main Street was lit as if by a flashgun. In that terrible hallway between seconds, she saw that the entire gymnasium wing of Ewen High was a gutted, flaming ruin.
Concussion struck a moment later, knocking her backward. Road litter blew past her in a sudden and tremendous rush, along with a blast of warm air that reminded her fleetingly of (the smell of subways)
a trip she had taken to Boston the year before. The windows of Bill’s Home Drugstore and the Kelly Fruit Company jingled and fell inward.
She had fallen on her side, and the fire lit the street with hellish noonday. What happened next happened in slow motion as her mind ran steadily onward
(dead are they all dead carrie why think carrie) at its own clip. Cars were rushing toward the scene, and some people were running in robes, nightshirts, pajamas. She saw a man come out of the front door of Chamberlain’s combined police station and courthouse. He was moving slowly. The cars were moving slowly.
Even the people running were moving slowly.
She saw the man on the police-station steps cup his hand around his mouth and scream something; unclear over the shrieking town whistle, the fire sirens, the monster-mouth of the fire. Sounded like:
“Heyret! Don’t hey that ass!”
The street was all wet down there. The light danced on the water.
Down by Teddy’s Amoco station.
“-hey, that’s-”
And then the world exploded.
From the sworn testimony of Thomas K. Quillan, taken before The State Investigatory Board of Maine in connection with the events of May 27-28 in Chamberlain, Maine (abridged version which follows is from Black Prom: The White Commission Report, Signet Books: New York, 1980):
Q. Mr. Quillan. are you a resident of Chamberlain?
A. Yes.
Q. What is your address?
A. I got a room over the pool hall. That’s where I work. I mop the floors, vacuum the tables, work on the machines-pinball machines, you know.
Q. Where were you on the night of May twenty-seventh at 10:30
P.M., Mr. Quillan?
A. Well . . . actually, I was in a detention cell at the police station. I get paid on Thursdays, see. And I always go out and get bombed. I go out to The Cavalier, drink some Schlitz, play a little poker out back.
But I get mean when I drink. Feels like the Roller Derby’s going on in my head. Bummer, huh? Once I conked a guy over the head with a chair and-
Q. Was it your habit to go to the police station when you felt these fits of temper coming on?
A. Yeah. Big Otis, he’s a friend of mine.
Q. Are you referring to Sheriff Otis Doyle of this county?
A. Yeah. He told me to pop in any time I started feeling mean. The night before the prom, a bunch of us guys were in the back room down at The Cavalier playing stud poker and I got to thinking Fast Marcel Dubay was cheating. I would have known better sober-a Frenchman’s idea of pullin’ a fast one is to look at his own cards-but that got me going. I’d had a couple of beers, you know, so I folded my hand and went on down to the station. Plessy was catching, and he locked me
right up in Holding Cell Number 1. Plessy’s a good boy. I knew his mom, but that was many years ago.
Q. Mr. Quillan, do you suppose we could discuss the night of the twenty-seventh? 10:30 P.M.?
A. Ain’t we?
Q. I devoutly hope so. Continue.
A. Well, Plessy locked me up around quarter of two on Friday morning, and I popped right off to sleep. Passed out, you might say.
Woke up around four o’clock the next afternoon, took three Alka-Seltzers, and went back to sleep. I got a knack that way. I can sleep until my hangover’s all gone. Big Otis says I should find out how I do it and take out a patent. He says I could save the world a lot of pain.
Q. I’m sure you could, Mr. Quillan. Now when did you wake up again?
A. Around ten o’clock on Friday night. I was pretty hungry, so I decided to go get some chow down at the diner.
Q. They left you all alone in an open cell?
A. Sure. I’m a fantastic guy when I’m sober. In fact, one time-
Q. Just tell the Committee what happened when you left the cell.
A. The fire whistle went off, that’s what happened. Scared the bejesus out of me. I ain’t heard that whistle at night since the Viet Nam war ended. So I ran upstairs and sonofabitch, there’s no one in the office. I say to myself, hot damn, Plessy’s gonna get it for this. There’s always supposed to be somebody catching, in case there’s a call-in. So I went over to the window and looked out.
Q. Could the school be seen from that window?
A. Sure. It’s on the other side of the street, a block and a half down.
People were running around and yelling. And that’s when I saw Carrie White.
Q. Had you ever seen Carrie White before?
A. Nope.
Q. Then how did you know it was she?
A. That’s hard to explain.
Q. Could you see her clearly?
A. She was standing under a street light, by the fire hydrant on the corner of Main and Spring.
Q. Did something happen?
A. I guess to Christ. The whole top of the hydrant exploded off three different ways. Left, right, and straight up to heaven.
Q. What time did this… …. . malfunction occur?
A. Around twenty to eleven. Couldn’t have been no later.
Q. What happened then?
A. She started downtown. Mister, she looked awful. She was wearing some kind of party dress, what was left of it, and she was all wet from that hydrant and covered with blood. She looked like she just crawled out of a car accident. But she was grinning. I never saw such a grin. It was like a death’s head. And she kept looking at her hands and rubbing them on her dress, trying to get the blood off and thinking she’d never get it off and how she was going to pour blood on the whole town and make them pay. It was awful stuff.
Q. How would you have any idea what she was thinking?
A. I don’t know. I can’t explain.
Q. For the remainder of your testimony, I wish you would stick to what you saw, Mr. Quillan.
A. Okay. There was a hydrant on the corner of Grass Plaza, and that one went, too. I could see that one better. The big lug nuts on the sides were unscrewing themselves. I saw that happening. It blew, just like the other one. And she was happy. She was saying to herself, that’ll give
’em a shower, that’ll . . . whoops, sorry. The fire trucks started to go by then, and I lost track of her. The new pumper pulled up to the school and they started on those hydrants and saw they wasn’t going to get no water. Chief Burton was hollering at them, and that’s when the school exploded. Je- sus.
Q. Did you leave the police station?
A. Yeah. I wanted to find Plessy and tell him about that crazy broad and the fire hydrants. I glanced over at Teddy’s Amoco, and I seen something that made my blood run cold. All six gas pumps was off their hooks. Teddy Duchamp’s been dead since 1968, God love him, but his boy locked those pumps up every night just like Teddy himself used to do. Every one of them Yale padlocks was hanging busted by their hasps. The nozzles were laying on the tarmac, and the automatic feeds was set on every one. Gas was pouring out onto the sidewalk and into the street. Holy mother of God, when I seen that, my balls drew right up. Then I saw this guy running along with a lighted cigarette.
Q. What did you do?
A. Hollered at him. Something like Hey! Watch that cigarette! Hey don’t, that’s gas! He never heard me. Fire sirens and the town whistle and cars rip-assing up and down the street, I don’t wonder. I saw he was going to pitch it, so I started to duck back inside.
Q. What happened next?
A. Next? Why, next thing, the Devil came to Chamberlain…
When the buckets fell, she was at first only aware of a loud, metallic clang cutting through the music, and then she was deluged in warmth and wetness. She closed her eyes instinctively. There was a grunt from beside her, and in the part of her mind that had come so recently awake, she sensed brief pain.