17

   Eddie saw one of the lobstrosities loom over his face, its rugose eyes dead yet hideously sparkling with hideous life. Its claws descended toward his face.
   Dod-a—, it began, and then it was smashed backward in chunks and splatters.
   Roland saw one skitter toward his flailing left hand and thought There goes the other hand … and then the lobstrosity was a splatter of shell and green guts flying into the dark air.
   He twisted around and saw a woman whose beauty was heart stopping, whose fury was heart-freezing. "COME ON, MAHFAHS!" she screamed. "YOU JUST COME ON! YOU JUST COME FOR EM! I'M GONNA BLOW YO EYES RIGHT BACK THROUGH YO FUCKIN ASSHOLES!"
   She blasted a third one that was crawling rapidly between Eddie's spraddled legs, meaning to eat on him and neuter him at the same time. It flew like a tiddly-wink.
   Roland had suspected they had some rudimentary intelligence; now he saw the proof.
   The others were retreating.
   The hammer of one revolver fell on a dud, and then she blew one of the retreating monsters into gobbets.
   The others ran back toward the water even faster. It seemed they had lost their appetite.
   Meanwhile, Eddie was strangling.
   Roland fumbled at the rope digging a deep furrow into his neck. He could see Eddie's face melting slowly from purple to black. Eddie's strugglings were weakening.
   Then his hands were pushed away by stronger ones.
   "I'll take care of it. "There was a knife in her hand … his knife.
   Take care of what? he thought as his consciousness faded. What is it you'll take care of, now that we're both at your mercy?
   "Who are you?" he husked, as darkness deeper than night began to take him down.
   ''I am three women,'' he heard her say, and it was as if she were speaking to him from the top of a deep well into which he was falling. "I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved.
   "I thank you, gunslinger."
   She kissed him, he knew that, but for a long time after, Roland knew only darkness.

FINAL SHUFFLE

1

   For the first time in what seemed like a thousand years, the gunslinger was not thinking about the Dark Tower . He thought only about the deer which had come down to the pool in the woodland clearing.
   He sighted over the fallen log with his left hand.
   Meat, he thought, and fired as saliva squirted warmly into his mouth.
   Missed, he thought in the millisecond following the shot. It's gone. All my skill …gone.
   The deer fell dead at the edge of the pool.
   Soon the Tower would fill him again, but now he only blessed what gods there were that his aim was still true, and thought of meat, and meat, and meat. He reholstered the gun—the only one he wore now—and climbed over the log behind which he had patiently lain as late afternoon drew down to dusk, waiting for something big enough to eat to come to the pool.
   Iam getting well, he thought with some amazement as he drew his knife. Iam really getting well.
   He didn't see the woman standing behind him, watching with assessing brown eyes.

2

   They had eaten nothing but lobster-meat and had drunk nothing but brackish stream water for six days following the confrontation at the end of the beach. Roland remembered very little of that time; he had been raving, delirious. He sometimes called Eddie Alain, sometimes Cuthbert, and always he called the woman Susan.
   His fever had abated little by little, and they began the laborious trek into the hills. Eddie pushed the woman in the chair some of the time, and sometimes Roland rode in it while Eddie carried her piggyback, her arms locked loosely around his neck. Most of the time the way made it impossible for either to ride, and that made the going slow. Roland knew how exhausted Eddie was. The woman knew, too, but Eddie never complained.
   They had food; during the days when Roland lay between life and death, smoking with fever, reeling and railing of times long past and people long dead, Eddie and the woman killed again and again and again. Bye and bye the lobstrosities began staying away from their part of the beach, but by then they had plenty of meat, and when they at last got into an area where weeds and slutgrass grew, all three of them ate compulsively of it. They were starved for greens, any greens. And, little by little, the sores on their skins began to fade. Some of the grass was bitter, some sweet, but they ate no matter what the taste … except once.
   The gunslinger had wakened from a tired doze and seen the woman yanking at a handful of grass he recognized all too well.
   "No! Not that!" he croaked. "Never that! Mark it, and remember it! Never that!"
   She looked at him for a long moment and put it aside without asking for an explanation.
   The gunslinger lay back, cold with the closeness of it. Some of the other grasses might kill them, but what the woman had pulled would damn her. It had been devil-weed.
   The Keflex had brought on explosions in his bowels, and he knew Eddie had been worried about that, but eating the grasses had controlled it.
   Eventually they had reached real woods, and the sound of the Western Sea diminished to a dull drone they heard only when the wind was right.
   And now … meat.

3

   The gunslinger reached the deer and tried to gut it with the knife held between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. No good. His fingers weren't strong enough. He switched the knife to his stupid hand, and managed a clumsy cut from the deer's groin to its chest. The knife let out the steaming blood before it could congeal in the meat and spoil it … but it was still a bad cut. A puking child could have done better.
   You are going to learn to be smart, he told his left hand, and prepared to cut again, deeper.
   Two brown hands closed over his one and took the knife.
   Roland looked around.
   "I'll do it," Susannah said.
   "Have you ever?"
   "No, but you'll tell me how."
   "All right."
   "Meat," she said, and smiled at him.
   "Yes," he said, and smiled back. "Meat."
   "What's happening?" Eddie called. "I heard a shot."
   "Thanksgiving in the making!" she called back. "Come help!"
   Later they ate like two kings and a queen, and as the gunslinger drowsed toward sleep, looking up at the stars, feeling the clean coolness in this upland air, he thought that this was the closest he had come to contentment in too many years to count.
   He slept. And dreamed.

4

   It was the Tower. The Dark Tower .
   It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn't see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the windows which spiraled up along that staircase's way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.
   Roland…come…Roland…come…come… come…
   "I come," he whispered, and awoke sitting bolt upright, sweating and shivering as if the fever still held his flesh.
   "Roland?"
   Eddie.
   "Yes."
   "Bad dream?"
   "Bad. Good. Dark."
   "The Tower?"
   "Yes."
   They looked toward Susannah, but she slept on, undisturbed. Once there had been a woman named Odetta Susannah Holmes; later, there had been another named Detta Susannah Walker. Now there was a third: Susannah Dean.
   Roland loved her because she would fight and never give in; he feared for her because he knew he would sacrifice her—Eddie as well—without a question or a look back.
   For the Tower.
   The God-Damned Tower .
   "Time for a pill," Eddie said.
   "I don't want them anymore."
   "Take it and shut up."
   Roland swallowed it with cold stream-water from one of the skins, then burped. He didn't mind. It was a meaty burp.
   Eddie asked, "Do you know where we're going?"
   "To the Tower."
   "Well, yeah," Eddie said, "but that's like me being some ignoramus from Texas without a road-map saying he's going to Achin' Asshole, Alaska . Where is it? Which direction?"
   "Bring me my purse."
   Eddie did. Susannah stirred and Eddie paused, his face red planes and black shadows in the dying embers of the campfire. When she rested easy again, he came back to Roland.
   Roland rummaged in the purse, heavy now with shells from that other world. It was short enough work to find what he wanted in what remained of his life.
   The jawbone.
   The jawbone of the man in black.
   "We'll stay here awhile," he said, "and I'll get well."
   "You'll know when you are?"
   Roland smiled a little. The shakes were abating, the sweat drying in the cool night breeze. But still, in his mind, he saw those figures, those knights and friends and lovers and enemies of old, circling up and up, seen briefly in those windows and then gone; he saw the shadow of the Tower in which they were pent struck black and long across a plain of blood and death and merciless trial.
   "I won't," he said, and nodded at Susannah. "But she will."
   "And then?"
   Roland held up the jawbone of Walter. "This once spoke."
   He looked at Eddie.
   "It will speak again."
   "It's dangerous." Eddie's voice was flat.
   "Yes."
   "Not just to you."
   "No."
   "I love her, man."
   "Yes."
   "If you hurt her—"
   "I'll do what I need to," the gunslinger said.
   "And we don't matter? Is that it?"
   "I love you both." The gunslinger looked at Eddie, and Eddie saw that Roland's cheeks glistened red in what remained of the campfire's embered dying glow. He was weeping.
   "That doesn't answer the question. You'll go on, won't you?"
   "Yes."
   "To the very end."
   "Yes. To the very end."
   "No matter what." Eddie looked at him with love and hate and all the aching dearness of one man's dying hopeless helpless reach for another man's mind and will and need.
   The wind made the trees moan.
   "You sound like Henry, man." Eddie had begun to cry himself. He didn't want to. He hated to cry. "He had a tower, too, only it wasn't dark. Remember me telling you about Henry's tower? We were brothers, and I guess we were gunslingers. We had this White Tower, and he asked me to go after it with him the only way he could ask, so I saddled up, because he was my brother, you dig it? We got there, too. Found the White Tower . But it was poison. It killed him. It would have killed me. You saw me. You saved more than my life. You saved my fuckin soul."
   Eddie held Roland and kissed his cheek. Tasted his tears.
   "So what? Saddle up again? Go on and meet the man again?"
   The gunslinger said not a word.
   "I mean, we haven't seen many people, but I know they're up ahead, and whenever there's a Tower involved, there's a man. You wait for the man because you gotta meet the man, and in the end money talks and bullshit walks, or maybe here it's bullets instead of bucks that do the talking. So is that it? Saddle up? Go to meet the man? Because if it's just a replay of the same old shitstorm, you two should have left me for the lobsters." Eddie looked at him with dark-ringed eyes. "I been dirty, man. If I found out anything, it's that I don't want to die dirty."
   "It's not the same."
   "No? You gonna tell me you're not hooked?"
   Roland said nothing.
   "Who's gonna come through some magic door and save you, man? Do you know? I do. No one. You drew all you could draw. Only thing you can draw from now on is a fucking gun, because that's all you got left. Just like Balazar."
   Roland said nothing.
   "You want to know the only thing my brother ever had to teach me?" His voice was hitching and thick with tears.
   "Yes," the gunslinger said. He leaned forward, his eyes intent upon Eddie's eyes.
   "He taught me if you kill what you love, you're damned."
   "I am damned already," Roland said calmly. "But perhaps even the damned may be saved."
   "Are you going to get all of us killed?"
   Roland said nothing.
   Eddie seized the rags of Roland's shirt. "Are you going to get her killed?"
   "We all die in time," the gunslinger said. "It's not just the world that moves on." He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. "But we will be magnificent." He paused. "There's more than a world to win, Eddie. I would not risk you and her—I would not have allowed the boy to die—if that was all there was."
   "What are you talking about?"
   "Everything there is," the gunslinger said calmly. "We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand."
   Now it was Eddie who said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.
   Roland gently grasped Eddie's arm. "Even the damned love," he said.

5

   Eddie eventually slept beside Susannah, the third Roland had drawn to make a new three, but Roland sat awake and listened to voices in the night while the wind dried the tears on his cheeks.
   Damnation?
   Salvation?
   The Tower.
   He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names.
   The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread:
   There I will sing all their names!

-AFTERWORD

   This completes the second of six or seven books which make up a long tale called TheDarkTower. The third, The Waste Lands, details half of the quest of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah to reach the Tower; the fourth, Wizard and Glass, tells of an enchantment and a seduction but mostly of those things which befell Roland before his readers first met him upon the trail of the man in black.
   My surprise at the acceptance of the first volume of this work, which is not at all like the stories for which I am best known, is exceeded only by my gratitude to those who have read it and liked it. This work seems to be my own Tower, you know; these people haunt me, Roland most of all. Do I really know what that Tower is, and what awaits Roland there (should he reach it, and you must prepare yourself for the very real possibility that he will not be the one to do so)? Yes … and no. All I know is that the tale has called to me again and again over a period of seventeen years. This longer second volume, still leaves many questions unanswered and the story's climax far in the future, but I feel that it is a much more complete volume than the first.
   And the Tower is closer.
   Stephen King
   December 1st, 1986

Carrie

Stephen King

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Part One
Blood Sport

   News item from the Westover ( Me. ) weekly Enterprise , August 19, 1966 :
   RAIN OF STONES REPORTED
   It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta.
   Mrs White could not be reached for comment.


   Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim was untrue. Carrie had been going to school with some of them since the first grade, and this had been building since that time, building slowly and immutably, in accordance with all the laws that govern human nature, building with all the steadiness of a chain reaction approaching critical mass.
   What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.
   Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar school in Chamberlain:
   Carrie White eats shit.
   The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the subterranean sound of showers splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball in Period One, and their morning sweat was light and eager.
   Girls stretched and writhed under the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of soap from hand to hand. Carrie stood among them stolidly a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without colour. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewen High had individual-and thus private-showers, like the high schools at Andover or Boxford. They stared. They always stared.
   Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel bathing caps, towelling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into. Steam hung in the air; the place might have been an Egyptian bathhouse except for the constant rumble of the Jacuzzi whirlpool bath in the corner. Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break.
   '-so Tommy said he hated it on me and I-'
   '-I'm going with my sister and her husband. He picks his nose but so does she, so they're very-'
   '-shower after school and-'
   '-too cheap to spend a goddam penny so Cindi and I-'
   Miss Desjardin, their slim, nonbreasted gym teacher, stepped in, craned her-neck around briefly, and slapped her hands together once, smartly. 'What are you waiting for, Carrie? Doom? Bell in five minutes.' Her shorts were blinding white, her legs not too curved but striking in their unobtrusive muscularity. A silver whistle, won in college archery competition, hung around her neck.
   The girls giggled and Carrie looked up, her eyes slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. 'Ohuh?'
   It was a strangely froggy sound, grotesquely apt, and the girls giggled again. Sue Snell had whipped a towel from her hair with the speed of a magician embarking on a wondrous feat and began to comb rapidly. Miss Desjardin made an irritated cranking gesture at Carrie and stepped out.
   Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle.
   It wasn't until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.


   From The Shadow Exploded. Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carietta White, by David R. Congress (Tulane University Press: 1981), p. 34:
   It can hardly be disputed that failure to note specific instances of telekinesis during the White girl's earlier years must be attributed to the conclusions offered by White and Steams in their paper Telekinesis: A Wild Talent Revisited-that the ability to move objects by effort of the will alone comes to the fore only in moments of extreme personal stress. The talent is well hidden indeed; how else could it have remained submerged for centuries with only the tip of the iceberg showing above a sea of quackery?
   We have only skimpy hearsay evidence upon which to lay our foundation in this case, but even this is enough to indicate that a 'TK' potential of immense magnitude existed within Carrie White. The great tragedy is that we are now all Monday-morning quarterbacks …


   'Per-iod!'
   The catcall came first from Chris Hargensen. It struck the tiled walls, rebounded, and struck again. Sue Snell gasped laughter from her nose and felt an odd, vexing mixture of hate, revulsion, exasperation, and pity. She just looked so dumb, standing there, not knowing what was going on. God, you'd think she never
   'PER-iod!'
   It was becoming a chant, an incantation. Someone in the back-ground (perhaps Hargensen again, Sue couldn't tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling 'Plug it up!' with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.
   'PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!'
   Carrie stood dumbly in the centre of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She stood like a patient ox, aware that the joke was on her (as always), dumbly embarrassed but unsurprised.
   Sue felt welling disgust as the first dark drops of menstrual blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops. 'For God's sake Carrie, you got your period!' Sue cried. 'Clean yourself up!'
   'Ohuh?'
   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 eyes.
   'She thinks they're for lipstick!' Ruth Grogan suddenly shouted with cryptic glee, and then burst into a shriek of laughter. Sue remembered the comment later and fitted it
   Into a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion. Sixteen? She was thinking. She must know what's happening, she…
   More droplets of blood. Carrie still blinked around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.
   Helen Shyres turned around and made mock throwingup gestures.
   'You're bleeding!' Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. 'You're bleeding, you big dumb pudding!'
   Carrie looked down at herself.
   She shrieked.
   The sound was very loud in the humid locker room.
   A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plop at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread.
   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 sanitary 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 chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing – a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There's no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm-It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and grunting and gobbling.
   The girls stopped, realizing that fission and explosion had finally been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let's short-sheet Carrie's bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett let's copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and duck her again, duck her again: Carrie tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as pudd'n 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?). Billy Preston putting 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 kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge windbreakage; Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, failing on her face in Modern Dancing during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volleyball; wearing stockings that were always run, running, or about 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 Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E: Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate 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, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes rolled with wet whiteness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen.
   Sue said slowly, hesitantly: 'I think this must be the first time she ever-'
   That was when the door pumped open with a flat and hurried bang and Miss 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 agreement that Carrie White's exceptionally late and traumatic commencement of the menstrual cycle might well have provided the trigger for her latent talent.
   It seems incredible that, as late as 1979, Carrie knew nothing of the mature woman's monthly cycle. It is nearly as incredible to believe that the girl's mother would permit her daughter to reach the age of nearly seventeen without consulting a gynaecologist concerning the daughter's failure to menstruate.
   Yet the facts are incontrovertible. When Carrie White realized she was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no idea of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire concept of menstruation.
   One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Grogan, tells of entering the girls' locker room at Ewen High School the year before the events we are concerned with and seeing Carrie using a tampon to blot her lipstick with. At that time Miss Grogan said: 'What the hell are you up to?' Miss White replied: 'Isn't this right?' Miss Grogan then replied: 'Sure. Sure it is.' Ruth Grogan let a number of her girl friends in on this (she later told this interviewer she thought it was 'sorta cute'), and if anyone tried in the future to inform Carrie of the true purpose of what she was using to make up with, she apparently dismissed the explanation as an attempt to pull her leg. This was a facet of her life that she had become exceedingly wary of…


   When the girls were gone to their Period Two classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had slipped quietly 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 pleasure 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.'
   'I'm bleeding to death!' Carrie screamed, and one blind, searching hand came up and clutched Miss Desjardin's white shorts. It left a bloody handprint.
   'I … you . . .' The gym teacher's face contorted into a pucker of disgust, and she suddenly hurled Carrie, stumbling, to her feet 'Get over there!'
   Carrie stood swaying between the showers and the wall with its dime sanitary-napkin dispenser, slumped over, breasts pointing at the floor, her arms dangling limply. She looked like an ape. Her eyes were shiny and blank.
   'Now,' Miss Desjardin said with hissing, deadly emphasis, 'you take one of those napkins out … no, never mind the coin slot, it's broken anyway… take one and… damn it, will you do it! You act as if you never had a period before.'
   'Period?' Carrie said.
   Her expression of complete unbelief was too genuine, too full of dumb and hopeless horror, to be ignored or denied. A terrible and black foreknowledge grew in Rita Desjardin's mind. It was incredible, could not be. She herself had begun menstruation shortly after her eleventh birthday and had gone to the head of the stairs to yell down excitedly: 'Hey, Mum, I'm on the rag!'
   'Carrie?' she said now. She advanced toward the girl.
   'Carrie?'
   Carrie flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball 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 terrible heaviness. Both of Carrie's legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded through 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 lightbulb 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 White's mother, Margaret White, gave birth to her daughter on September 21, 1963, under circumstances which can only be termed bizarre. In fact, an overview of the Carrie 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 continued to live alone in their suburban Chamberlain bungalow.
   Due to the White's near-fanatical fundamentalist religious 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 1:30 P.M. on September 21, the neighbours on Carlin Street began to hear screams from the White bungalow. The police, however, were not summoned to the scene until after 6:00 P.M. We are left with two unappetizing alternatives to explain this time lag: Either Mrs White's neighbours on the street did not wish to become involved in a police investigation, or dislike for her had become so strong that they deliberately 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 talk 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 6:22 P.M. the screams had become irregular. Mrs White was found in her bed upstairs, and the investigating officer, Thomas G. Mearton. at first thought she had been the victim of an assault. The bed was drenched with blood, and a butcher knife lay on the floor. It was only then that he saw the baby, still partially wrapped in the placental membrane, at Mrs White's 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 understand 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 blocked 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 conclusively that Mrs White believed, from her fifth month on, that she had 'a cancer of the womanly parts' and would soon join her husband in heaven …


   When Miss Desjardin led Carrie up to the office fifteen minutes later, the halls were mercifully empty. Classes droned onwards behind closed doors.
   Carrie's shrieks had finally ended, but she had continued to weep with steady regularity. Desjardin had finally placed the napkin herself, cleaned the girl up with wet paper towels, and gotten her back into her plain cotton underpants.
   She tried twice to explain the commonplace 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 lecture due them for cutting French I, goggled around from their chairs.
   'Come in,' Mr Morton said briskly. 'Come right in.' He glared over Desjardin's 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 detention periods,' Morton snapped. He glanced down at the bloody handprint and blinked.
   He closed the door behind them and began pawing through the top drawer 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 won't need that, Mr Morton.'
   'I suppose it was the trampoline. We just … I won't?'
   'No. But I think Carrie should be allowed to go home for the rest of the day. She's had a rather frightening experience.' Her eyes flashed a signal which he caught but could not interpret.
   'Yes, okay, if you say so. Good. Fine.' Morton crumpled the form back into the filing cabinet, slammed it shut 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, please? Carrie Wright.'
   'White,' said Miss Desjardin.
   'White,' Morton agreed.
   Billy deLois sniggered.
   'Week's detention!' Morton barked. A blood blister was forming under his thumbnail. Hurt like hell. Carrie's steady, monotonous weeping went on and on.
   Miss Fish brought the yellow dismissal slip and Morton scrawled his initials on it with his silver 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 shook 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.
   'I'm sure she'll be all right,' she said. 'Carrie only has to go over to Carlin Street. The fresh air will do her good.'
   Morton gave the girl the yellow slip. 'You can go now, Cassie,' he said magnanimously.
   'That's not my name!' she screamed suddenly.
   Morton recoiled, and Miss Desjardin jumped as if struck from behind. The heavy ceramic ashtray on Morton's desk (it was Rodin's Thinker with his head turned into a receptacle for cigarette butts) suddenly toppled to the rug, as if to take cover from the force of her scream. Butts and flakes of Morton's pipe tobacco scattered on the pale-green nylon rug.
   'Now, listen,' Morton said, trying to muster sternness, 'I know you're upset, but that doesn't mean I'll stand for-'
   'Please,' Miss Desjardin said quietly.
   Morton blinked at her and then nodded curtly. He tried to project the image of a lovable John Wayne figure while performing the disciplinary functions that were his main job as Assistant Principal, but did not succeed very well. The administration (usually represented at Jay Cee suppers, P.T.A. functions, and American Legion award ceremonies by Principal Henry Grayle) usually termed him 'lovable Mort.' The student body was more apt to term him 'that crazy ass-jabber from the office.' But, as few students such as Billy deLois and Henry Trennant spoke at P.T.A. functions or town meetings, the administration's view tended to carry the day.
   Now lovable Mort, still secretly nursing his jammed thumb, smiled at Carrie and said, 'Go along then if you like, Miss Wright. Or would you like to sit a spell and just collect yourself?'
   'I'll go,' she muttered, and swiped at her hair. She got up, then looked around at Miss Desjardin. Her eyes were wide open and dark with knowledge. 'They laughed at me. Threw things. They've always laughed,'
   Desjardin could only look at her helplessly.
   Carrie left.
   For a moment there was silence; Morton and Desjardin watched her go. Then, with an awkward throat-clearing sound, Mr Morton hunkered down carefully and began to sweep together the debris from the fallen ashtray.
   'What was that all about?'
   She sighed and looked at the drying maroon hand-print on her shorts with distaste. 'She got her period. Her first period. In the shower.'
   Morton cleared his throat again and his cheeks went pink. The sheet of paper he was sweeping with moved even faster. 'Isn't she a bit, uh-'
   'Old for her first? Yes. That's what made it so traumatic for her. Although I can't understand why her mother…' The thought trailed off, forgotten for the moment. 'I don't think I handled it very well, Morty, but I didn't understand what was going on. She thought she was bleeding to death.'
   He stared up sharply.
   'I don't believe she knew there was such a thing as menstruation until half an hour ago.'
   'Hand me that little brush there, Miss Desjardin. Yes, that's it.' She handed him a little brush with the legend Chamberlain Hardware and Lumber Company NEVER Brushes You Off written up the handle. He began to brush his pile of ashes on to the paper. 'There's still going to be some for the vacuum cleaner, I guess. This deep pile is miserable. I thought I set that ashtray back on the desk further. Funny how things fall over.' He bumped his head on the desk and sat up abruptly. 'It's hard for me to believe that a girl in this or any other high school could get through three years and still be alien to the fact of menstruation, Miss Desjardin.'
   'It's even more difficult for me,' she said. 'But it's all I can think of to explain her reaction. And she's always been a group scapegoat.'
   'Urn.' He funnelled the ashes and butts into the wastebasket and dusted his hands. 'I've placed her, I think. White. Margaret White's daughter. Must be. That makes it a little easier to believe.' He sat down behind his desk and smiled apologetically. 'There's so many of them. After five years or so, they all start to merge into one group face. You call boys by their brother's names, that type of thing. It's hard.'
   'Of course it is.'
   'Wait 'til you've been in the game twenty years, like me,' he said morosely, looking down at his blood blister. 'You get kids that look familiar and find out you had their daddy the year you started teaching. Margaret White was before my time, for which I am profoundly grateful. She told Mrs Bicente, God rest her, that the Lord was reserving a special burning seat in hell for her because she gave the kids an outline of Mr Darwin's beliefs on evolution. She was suspended twice while she was here – once for beating a classmate with her purse. Legend has it that Margaret saw the classmate smoking a cigarette. Peculiar religious views. Very peculiar.' His John Wayne expression suddenly snapped down. 'The other girls. Did they really laugh at her?'
   'Worse. They were yelling and throwing sanitary napkins at her when I walked in. Throwing them like.. like peanuts.'
   'Oh. Oh, dear.' John Wayne disappeared. Mr Morton went scarlet. 'You have names?'
   'Yes. Not all of them, although some of them may rat on the rest. Christine Hargensen appeared to be the ringleader … as usual.'
   'Chris and her Mortimer Snurds,' Morton murmured.
   'Yes. Tina Blake, Rachel Spies, Helen Shyres, Donna Thibodeau and her sister Fern, Lila Grace, Jessica Upshaw. And Sue Snell.' She frowned. 'You wouldn't expect a trick like that from Sue. She's never seemed the type for this kind of a – stunt.'
   'Did you talk to the girls involved?'
   Miss Desjardin chuckled unhappily. 'I got them the hell out of there. I was too flustered. And Carrie was having hysterics.'
   'Um.' He steepled his fingers. 'Do you plan to talk to them?'
   'Yes.' But she sounded reluctant.
   'Do I detect a note of-'
   'You probably do,' she said glumly. 'I'm living in a glass house, see. I understand how those girls felt. The whole thing just made me want to take the girl and shake her. Maybe-there's some kind of instinct about menstruation that makes women want to snarl. I don't know. I keep seeing Sue Snell and the way she looked.'
   'Um,' Mr Morton repeated wisely. He did not understand women and had no urge at all to discuss menstruation.
   'I'll talk to them tomorrow,' she promised, rising. 'Rip them down one side and up the other.'
   'Good. Make the punishment suit the crime. And if you feel you have to send any of them to, ah, to me, feel free-'
   'I will,' she said kindly. 'By the way, a light blew out while I was trying to calm her down. It added the final touch.'
   'I'll send a janitor right down,' he promised. 'And thanks for doing your best, Miss Desjardin. Will you have Miss Fish send in Billy and Henry?'
   'Certainly.' She left.
   He leaned back and let the whole business slide out of his mind. When Billy deLois and Henry Trennant, class-cutters extraordinaire, slunk in, he glared at them happily and prepared to talk tough.
   As he often told Hank Grayle, he ate class-cutters for lunch.