Carrie Read online

Chapter Twenty

 

  Q. You deny you had prior knowledge of Carrie White's whereabouts?

  A. Of course I do. It's an absurd idea.

  Q. Oh? And why is it absurd?

  A. Well, if you're suggesting some kind of conspiracy, it's absurd because Carrie was dying when I found her. It could not have been an easy way to die.

  Q. If you had no prior knowledge of her whereabouts, how could you go directly to her location?

  A. Oh, you stupid man! Have you listened to anything that's been said here? Everybody knew it was Carrie! Anyone could have found her if they had put their minds to it.

  Q. But not just anyone found her. You did. Can you tell us why people did not show up from all over, like iron filings drawn to a magnet?

  A. She was weakening rapidly. I think that perhaps the . . . the zone of her influence was shrinking.

  Q. I think you will agree that that is a relatively uninformed supposition.

  A. Of course it is. On the subject of Carrie White, we're all relatively uninformed.

  Q. Have it your way, Miss Snell. Now if we could turn to . . .

  At first, when she climbed up the enbankment between Henry Drain's meadow and the parking lot of The Cavalier, she thought Carrie was dead. Her figure was halfway across the parking lot, and she looked oddly shrunken and crumpled. Sue was reminded of dead animals she had seen on 495 - woodchucks, groundhogs, skunks - that had been crushed by speeding trucks and station wagons.

  But the presence was still in her mind, vibrating stubbornly, repeating the call letters of Carrie White's personality over and over. An essence of Carrie, a gestalt. Muted now, not strident, not announcing itself with a clarion, but waxing and waning in steady oscillations.

  Unconscious.

  Sue climbed over the guard rail that bordered the parking lot, feeling the heat of the fire against her face.

  The Cavalier was a wooden frame building, and it was burning briskly. The charred remains of a car were limned in flame to the right of the back door. Carrie had done that. She did not go to look and see if anyone had been in it. It didn't matter, not now.

  She walked over to where Carrie lay on her side, unable to hear her own footsteps under the hungry crackle of the fire. She looked down at the curled-up figure with a bemused and bitter pity. The knife hilt protruded cruelly from her shoulder, and she was lying in a small pool of blood - some of it was trickling from her mouth. She looked as if she had been trying to turn herself over when unconsciousness had taken her. Able to start fires, pull down electric cables, able to kill almost by thought alone; lying here unable to turn herself over.

  Sue knelt, took her by one arm and the unhurt shoulder, and gently turned her on to her back.

  Carrie moaned thickly, and her eyes fluttered. The perception of her in Sue's mind sharpened, as if a mental picture was coming into focus.

  (who's there)

  And Sue, without thought, spoke in the same fashion:

  (me sue snell)

  Only there was no need to think of her name. The thought of herself as herself was neither words nor pictures. The realization suddenly brought everything up close, made it real, and compassion for Carrie broke through the dullness of her shock.

  And Carrie with faraway, dumb reproach:

  (you tricked me you all tricked me)

  (carrie i don't even know what happened is tommy)

  (you tricked me that happened trick trick trick o dirty trick)

  The mixture of image and emotion was staggering, indescribable. Blood. Sadness. Fear. The latest dirty trick in a long series of dirty tricks: they flashed by in a dizzying shuffle that made Sue's mind reel helplessly, hopelessly. They shared the awful totality of perfect knowledge.

  (carrie don't don't don't hurts me)

  Now girls throwing sanitary napkins, chanting, laughing, Sue's face mirrored in her own mind: ugly, caricatured all mouth, cruelly beautiful.

  (see the dirty tricks see my whole life one long dirty trick)

  (look carrie look inside me)

  And Carrie looked.

  The sensation was terrifying. Her mind and nervous system had become a library. Someone in desperate need ran through her, fingers trailing lightly over shelves of books, lifting some out, scanning them, putting them back, letting some fall, leaving the pages to flutter wildly

  (glimpses that's me as a kid hate him daddy o mommy wide lips o teeth bobby pushed me o my knee car want to ride in the car we're going to see aunt cecily mommy come quick i made pee)

  in the wind of memory; and still on and on, finally reaching a shelf marked TOMMY, subheaded PROM. Books thrown open, flashes of experience, marginal notations in all the hiergglyphs of emotion, more complex than the Rosetta Stone.

  Looking. Finding more than Sue herself had suspected-love for Tommy, jealousy, selfishness, a need to subjugate him to her will on the matter of taking Carrie, disgust for Carrie herself,

  (she could take better care of herself she does look just like a GODDAM TOAD)

  hate for Miss Desjardin, hate for herself.

  But no ill will for Carrie personally, no plan to get her in front of everyone and undo her.

  The feverish feeling of being raped in her most secret corridors began to fade. She felt Carrie puffing back, weak and exhausted.

  (why didn't you just leave me alone)

  (carrie i)

  (momma would be alive i killed my momma i want her o it hurts my chest my shoulder o o o i want my momma)

  (carrie i)

  And there was no way to finish that thought, nothing there to complete it with. Sue was suddenly overwhelmed with terror, the worse because she could put no name to it: The bleeding freak on this oil-stained asphalt suddenly seemed meaningless and awful in its pain and dying.

  (o momma i'm scared momma MOMMA)

  Sue tried to pull away, to disengage her mind, to allow Carrie at least the privacy of her dying, and was unable to. She felt that she was dying herself and did not want to see this preview of her own eventual end.

  (carrie let me GO)

  (Momma Momma Momma oooooooooooo 0000000)

  The mental scream reached a flaring, unbelievable crescendo and then suddenly faded. For a moment Sue felt as if she were watching a candle flame disappear down a long, black tunnel at a tremendous speed.

  (she's dying o my god i'm feeling her die)

  And then the fight was gone, and the last conscious thought had been

  (momma i'm sorry where)

  and it broke up and Sue was tuned in only on the blank, idiot frequency of the physical nerve endings that would take hours to die.

  She stumbled away from it, holding her arms out in front of her like a blind woman, toward the edge of the parking lot. She tripped over the knee-high guard rail and tumbled down the embankment. She got to her feet and stumbled into the field, which was filling with mystic white pockets of ground mist. Crickets chirruped mindlessly and a whippoorwill

  (whippoorwill somebody's dying)

  called in the great stillness of morning.

  She began to run, breathing deep in her chest, running from Tommy, from the fires and explosions, from Carrie, but mostly from the final horror-that last lighted thought carried swiftly down into the black tunnel of eternity, followed by the blank, idiot hum of prosaic electricity.

  The after-image began to fade reluctantly, leaving a blessed, cooling darkness in her mind that knew nothing. She slowed, halted, and became aware that something had begun to happen. She stood in the middle of the great and misty field. waiting for realization.

  Her rapid breathing slowed, slowed, caught suddenly as if on a thorn

  And suddenly vented itself in one howling, cheated scream.

  As she felt the slow course of dark menstrual blood down her thighs.