Carrie

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 lipping 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,’ Grayle 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 be there. And she’s going around with that Billy Nolan mess; he’s got a zooful 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 but must-win game against the Stadler Bobcats. A regular announced locker inspection had uncovered a kilo of marijuana behind Trevor’s civic book. Ewen lost the game – and their shot at the tourney – 104-48. 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 geneticrecessive occurrence – but the opposite of a disease like haemophilia, 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 haemophiliac son. If the offspring is female, the result will be a daughter who is a carrier. It should be emphasized that the haemophilia 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 haemophilia if the offspring is male.

In the case of royal families, where intermarriage was common, the chances of the gene reproducing once it entered the family tree were high – thus the name King’s Evil. Haemophilia 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 name, 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 haemophilia, Mrs Cochran must 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 offspring to marry. And the chances of meeting and marrying another woman with 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 haemophiliac, or H-gene, produces male issue with a lack of blood platelets. The telekineticn or TK-gene, produces female Typhoid Marys capable of destroying almost at will …