all those kids
Q.
Did you meet Susan Snell upon entering town?
A.
Yes, sir. She flagged me down.
Q.
What time was this?
A.
Just as I entered town . . .11:12, no later.
Q.. What did she say?
A.
She was distraught. She’d been in a minor car accident-skidding-and she was barely making sense. She asked me if Tommy was dead. I asked her who Tommy was, but she didn’t answer. She asked me if we had caught Carrie yet.
Q.
The Commission is extremely interested in this part of your testimony, Sheriff Doyle.
A.
Yes, sir, I know that.
Q.
How did you respond to her question?
A.
Well, there’s only one Carrie in town as far as I know, and that’s Margaret White’s daughter. I asked her if Carrie had something to do with the fires. Miss Snell told me Carrie had done it. Those were her words. “Carrie did it. Carrie did it.” She said it twice.
Q.
Did she say anything else?
A.
Yes, s~. She said: “They’ve hurt Carrie for the last time.”
Q.
Sheriff, are you sure she didn’t say: “We’ve hurt Carrie for the last time”?
A.
I am quite sure.
Q.
Are you positive? One hundred per cent?
A.
Sir, the town was burning around our heads. I-
Q.
Had she been drinking?
A.
I beg pardon?
Q.
Had she been drinking? You said she had been involved in a car smash.
A.
I believe I said a minor skidding accident: Q.
And you can’t be sure she didn’t say we instead of they?
A.
I guess she might have, but-
Q.
What did Miss Snell do then?
A.
She burst into tears. I slapped her.
Q.
Why did you do that?
A.
She seemed hysterical.
Q.
Did she quiet eventually?
A.
Yes, sir. She quieted down and got control of herself pretty well, in light of the fact that her boy friend was probably dead.
Q.
Did you interrogate her?
A.
Well, not the way you’d interrogate a criminal, if that’s what you mean. I asked her if she knew anything about what had happened. She repeated what she had already said, but in a calmer way.
I asked her where she had been when the trouble began, and she told me that she had been at home.
Q.
Did you interrogate her further?
A.
No, sir.
Q.
Did she say anything else to you?
A.
Yes, sir. She asked me-begged me-to find Carrie White.
Q.
What was your reaction to that?
A.
I told her to go home.
Q.
Thank you, Sheriff Doyle.
Vic Mooney lurched out of the shadows near the Bankers Trust drive-in office with a grin on his face. It was a huge and awful grin, a Cheshire cat grin, floating dreamily in the fire shot darkness like a trace memory
of lunacy. His hair, carefully slicked down for his emcee duties, was now sticking up in a crow’s nest. Tiny drops of blood were branded across his forehead from some unremembered fall in his mad flight from the Spring Ball. One eye was swelled purple and screwed shut. He walked into Sheriff Doyle’s squad car, bounced back like a pool ball, and grinned in at the drunk driver dozing in the back. Then he turned to Doyle, who had just finished with Sue Snell. The fire cast wavering shadows of light across everything, turning the world into the maroon tones of dried blood.
As Doyle turned, Vic Mooney clutched him. He clutched Doyle as an amorous swain might clutch his lady in a hug dance. He clutched Doyle with both arms and squeezed him, all the while goggling upward into Doyle’s face with his great crazed grin.
“Vic-” Doyle began.
“She pulled all the plugs,” Vic said lightly, grinning. “Pulled all the plugs and turned on the water and buzz, buzz, buzz.”
“We can’t let ’em. Oh no. NoNoNo. We can’t. Carrie pulled all the plugs. Rhonda Simard burnt up. OhJeee’eeeeeeesuuuuuuuu~”
Doyle slapped him twice, callused palm cracking flatly on the boy’s face. The scream died with shocking suddenness, but the grin remained, like an echo of evil. It was loose and terrible.
“What happened?” Doyle said roughly. “What happened at the school?”
“Carrie,” Vic muttered. “Carrie happened at the school. She …” He trailed off and grinned at the ground.
Doyle gave him three brisk shakes. Vic’s teeth clicked together like castanets.
“What about Carrie?”
“Queen of the Prom,” Vic muttered. “They dumped blood on her and Tommy.”
“What-”
It was 11:15. Tony’s Citgo on Summer Street suddenly exploded with a great, coughing roar. The street went daylight that made them both stagger back against the police car and shield their eyes. A huge, oily cloud of fire climbed over the elms in Courthouse Park, lighting the duck pond and the Little League diamond in scarlet. Amid the
hungry crackling roar that followed, Doyle could hear glass and wood and hunks of gas-station cinderblock rattling back to earth. A secondary explosion followed, making them wince again. He still couldn’t get it straight
(my town this is happening in my town)
that this was happening in Chamberlain, in Chamberlain, for God’s sake, where he drank iced tea on his mother’s sun porch and refereed PAL basketball and made one last cruise out Route 6 past The Cavalier before turning in at 2:30 every morning. His town was burning up.
Tom Quillan came out of the police station and ran down the sidewalk to Doyle’s cruiser. His hair was standing up every which way, he was dressed in dirty green work fatigues and an undershirt and he had his loafers on the wrong feet, but Doyle thought he had never been so glad to see anyone in his life. Tom Quillan was as much Chamberlain as anything, and he was here-intact.
“Holy God,” he panted. “Did you see that?”
“What’s been happening?” Doyle asked curtly.
“1 been monitorin’ the radio,” Quillan said. “Motton and Westover wanted to know if they should send ambulances and I said hell yes, send everything. Hearses too. Did I do right?”
“Yes.” Doyle ran his hands through his hair. “Have you seen Harry Block?” Block was the town’s Commissioner of Public Utilities, and that included water.
“Nope. But Chief Deighan says they got water in the old Rennett Block across town. They’re laying hose now. I collared some kids, and they’re settin’ up a hospital in the police station. They’re good boys, but they’re gonna get blood on your floor, Otis.”
Otis Doyle felt unreality surge over him. Surely this conversation couldn’t be happening in Chamberlain. Couldn’t.
“That’s all right, Tommy. You did right. You go back there and start calling every doctor in the phone book. I’m going over to Summer Street.”
“Okay, Otis. If you see that crazy broad, be careful.”
“Who?” Doyle was not a barking man, but now he did. Tom Quillan flinched back. “Carrie. Carrie White.”
“Who? How do you know?”
Quillan blinked slowly. “I dunno. It just sort of . . . came to me.”
From the national AP ticker, 11:46 P.M.:
CHAMBERLAIN, MAINE (AP)
A DISASTER OF MAJOR PROPORTIONS HAS STRUCK THE
TOWN OF CHAMBERLAIN, MAINE, TONIGHT. A FIRE, BELIEVED TO HAVE BEGUN AT EWEN (U-WIN) HIGH
SCHOOL DURING A SCHOOL DANCE, HAS SPREAD TO THE
DOWNTOWN AREA, RESULTING IN MULTIPLE
EXPLOSIONS THAT HAVE LEVELED MUCH OF THE
DOWNTOWN AREA. A RESIDENTIAL AREA TO THE WEST
OF THE DOWNTOWN AREA IS ALSO REPORTED TO BE
BURNING. HOWEVER, MOST CONCERN AT THIS TIME IS
OVER THE HIGH SCHOOL WHERE A JUNIOR-SENIOR PROM
WAS BEING HELD. IT IS BELIEVED THAT MANY OF THE
PROM-GOERS WERE TRAPPED INSIDE. A WESTOVER FIRE
OFFICIAL SUMMONED TO THE SCENE SAID THE KNOWN
TOTAL OF DEAD
STOOD AT SIXTY-SEVEN, MOST OF THEM HIGH SCHOOL
STUDENTS. ASKED HOW HIGH THE TOTAL MIGHT GO HE
SAID: “WE DON’T KNOW. WE’RE AFRAID TO GUESS. THIS
IS GOING
TO BE WORSE THAN THE COCONUT GROVE.” AT LAST
REPORT THREE FIRES WERE RAGING OUT OF CONTROL
IN THE TOWN. REPORTS OF POSSIBLE ARSON ARE
UNCONFIRMED. ENDS.
l1:46 PM MAY 27 894~F AP
There were no more AP reports from Chamberlain. At 12:06 AM., a Jackson Avenue gas main was opened. At 12:17, an ambulance attendant from Motton tossed out a cigarette butt as the rescue vehicle sped toward Summer Street.
The explosion destroyed nearly half a block at a stroke, including the offices of the Chamberlain Clarion, By 12:18 A.M., Chamberlain was cut off from the country that slept in reason beyond.
At 12:10, still seven minutes before the gas-main explosion, the telephone exchange experienced a softer explosion: a complete jam of every town phone line still in operation. The three harried girls on duty stayed at their posts but were utterly unable to cope. They worked with expressions of wooden horror on their faces, trying to place implacable calls.
And so Chamberlain drifted into the streets.
They came like an invasion from the graveyard that lay in the elbow crook formed by the intersection of the Bellsqueeze Road and Route 6; they came in white nightgowns and in robes, as if in winding shrouds.