“I think you are a mean, nasty, ugly girl to torment Carrie!” said Lacy.
Sissy raised her fist in the manner of a professional boxer, dancing around to take quick jabs at Lacy. “You wanna fight? C’mon, put up your dukes! Just see if you can get me before I blacken your eyes!” And before Lacy could raise her hands for protection, Sissy shot out a right that caught Lacy squarely on the left eye. Then Sissy’s left hook smashed Lacy’s fine straight nose! Blood spurted everywhere!
This was when Carrie lifted her head, saw the only girl who’d shown her the least bit of kindness being beaten to a pulp, and that was cause enough for Carrie to use her most formidable weapon—her voice. She began to scream. Full blast, using every bit of vocal power she had, Carrie threw back her head and let go!
Down in her study on the first floor, Miss Emily Dean Dewhurst bolted upright and smeared the ink in her ledger. She ran to sound an alarm in the hall to bring each and every female teacher on the run.
It was eight o’clock in the evening. Most of the faculty had retired to their rooms. Clad in bathrobes, negligees, and one in a scarlet evening gown, apparently ready to slip out on the sly, the teachers raced toward the clamor. They burst into the room Carrie shared with Sissy and found a frightful scene. Twelve girls all doing battle, while others stood back and watched. One girl, like Carrie, only screamed, but the others were yelling, kicking, wrestling on the floor, pulling hair, biting and tearing off clothes—and above all the racket of the fray resounded the blaring trumpet of one small human in terror.
“Where is the man—the man?” cried out Miss Longhurst, the one in the scarlet evening gown with her bosom about to fall out of the lowcut bodice.
“Miss Longhurst, control yourself!” ordered Miss Dewhurst, who promptly assessed the situation and planned her strategy. “There is no man here. Girls!” she boomed, “stop this fracas this very second, or every one of you will be denied liberty this weekend!” Then she said in a low voice to the sexy Longhurst, “You report to my office when this is under control.”
Every girl in that room about to have her hair pulled or her face scratched jerked abruptly still and quiet. With horrified eyes they looked around and saw the room full of teachers—and worst of all Miss Dewhurst, who was not known for showing mercy once bedlam broke loose, as it often did. All hushed. All but Carrie who kept right on screaming, her eyes squeezed shut, her small, pale hands in tight fists.
“Why is that child screaming?” asked Miss Dewhurst as a guilty-looking Miss Longhurst sneaked away to take off her incriminating evidence—that somewhere a man was hiding and waiting.
Naturally, it was Sissy Towers who recovered first. “She’s the one who started it all, Miss Dewhurst. It’s all Carrie’s fault. She’s like a baby. You’ve just got to give me a new roomy or I’ll die living so close to a baby.”
“Repeat what you just said, Miss Towers. Tell me again what I must do.”
Intimidated, Sissy smiled uneasily. “I mean, I would like to have a new roomy; I don’t feel good living so close to someone so unnaturally small.”
Coldly Miss Dewhurst eyed Sissy. “Miss Towers, you are unnaturally cruel. From now on you will room on the first floor in the room next to mine where I can keep an eye on you.” She flashed her sharp gaze around the room. “As for the rest of you, I’m going to notify your parents that your weekend leaves are canceled! Now, each of you report to Miss Littleton so she may mark your records with demerits.” The girls groaned and one by one they drifted out to have their names recorded with minus marks. Only then did Miss Dewhurst advance to where Carrie was on her hands and knees, her voice faded to a whimper, but her head kept moving from side to side in a hysterical way. “Miss Dollanganger, are you calm enough now to tell me what happened?”
Carrie was beyond speech. Terror and the sight of blood had taken her back to the locked room, to a hungry day when she had been forced to drink blood or starve to death. Miss Dewhurst was touched and bewildered. Forty years she’d seen girls come and go, and she knew girls could be just as devastatingly ugly and cruel as boys. “Miss Dollanganger, unless you respond to me, you will not visit your family this weekend. I know you’ve had a hard time of it and I want to be kind to you. Can’t you please explain what happened?”
Fallen flat on the floor now, Carrie looked up. She saw the older woman towering above her, and the blue skirt she wore was almost gray. Gray was the color the grandmother always wore. And the grandmother did terrible things; somehow the grandmother had caused Cory to die—and now she had come to get Carrie too!
“I hate you! I hate you!” screamed Carrie over and over, until finally Miss Dewhurst was driven from the room and the school nurse was sent in to give Carrie a sedative.
That Friday, I answered the telephone when Miss Dewhurst called to say twelve of her girls had broken her rules and disobeyed her orders, and Carrie was one of them. “I’m sorry, really I am. But I can’t give your sister privileges and still punish the others. She was in the room and she refused to quiet when I ordered her to.”
* * *
I waited until evening at the dinner table to discuss it with Paul. “It’s a terrible mistake to leave Carrie over the weekend, Paul. You know we promised her, she could come home every weekend. She’s too little to be the cause of anything, so it’s not fair she should be punished too!”
“Really, Cathy,” he said, putting down his fork, “Miss Dewhurst called me right after she talked to you. She does have rules, and if Carrie misbehaved then she has to suffer along with the rest of the girls. And I respect Miss Dewhurst even if you don’t.”
Chris, home for the weekend, spoke up and agreed with Paul. “Sure, Cathy, you know as well as I do that Carrie can cut up when she wants to. If she did nothing but scream she could drive you batty—and deaf.”
That weekend was a flop without Carrie. I couldn’t get her off my mind. I stewed, fretted, worried over Carrie. I seemed to hear her calling to me. I closed my eyes and I saw her small, white face with her eyes huge and haunted by fear. She was all right! She had to be, didn’t she? What could happen to a little girl in an expensive school controlled by such a responsible, respectable woman as Miss Emily Dean Dewhurst?
* * *
When Carrie was hurting and at odds with herself and all the world, and there was no one near who loved her, she retreated to yesterdays and the safe comfort of the tiny porcelain dolls she’d carefully hidden away beneath all of her clothes. Now she was the only girl in the school with a room all to herself. She’d never been alone before. Not once in all her nine years had Carrie I spent a night in a room alone. She was alone now and she knew it. Every girl in the school had turned against her, even pretty Lacy St. John.
From her very secret place Carrie would take her dolls, Mr. and Mrs. Parkins and dear little baby Clara, and she’d talk to them as she used to do when she was locked away in the attic. “And Cathy,” she told me later, “I thought maybe Momma was up in God’s heaven, in the garden with Cory and Daddy, and I felt so mean at you and Chris because you let Dr. Paul put me in that place, and you know how much I liked to be with all of you. And I hated you, Cathy! I hated everybody! I hated God for making me so small so people laugh at my big head and little body!”
In the short halls and long corridors of green carpeting Carrie heard the girls whispering. Furtively they shifted their eyes when she looked their way. “I told myself I didn’t care,” whispered Carrie hoarsely to me, “but I did care. I told myself I could be brave like you wanted and Chris wanted and Dr. Paul wanted. I kept on making myself feel brave but I wasn’t really brave. I don’t like dark. And I told myself God was gonna hear my prayers and make me grow taller, ’cause everybody grows taller when they grow older, and so would I.
“It was so dark, Cathy, and the room felt so big and scary. You know I don’t like night and darkness with no lamp burning, with nobody there but me. I even wanted Sissy back, she seemed better than nobody. Something in the shadows moved and I
was terrified, and though we’re not supposed to I turned on a lamp. I wanted to take all my little dolls to bed with me so I’d have company. I was gonna be so careful not to toss and turn and break off their heads.
“I always put Mr. and Mrs. Parkins left and right with baby Clara in the middle in the bottom drawer of my dresser. I picked up the cotton wadding that was in the middle first and felt something hard. But when I looked, Cathy, when I looked there was no baby, only a little stick! I unwrapped Mr. and Mrs. Parkins, and they were only sticks too—bigger ones! It hurt so bad not to find them I began to cry. All my little dolls gone all turned to wood, so I knew God was never gonna let me grow tall when he would make my pretty dolls into only sticks.
“Something funny happened to me then, like I turned into wood too. I felt stiff and couldn’t see too good. I went and crouched in a corner and waited for something bad to happen. The grandmother said something terrible would happen if I broke a doll, didn’t she?” Not another word would she say, but I learned from others what happened after that.
In the dark, long after midnight, the twelve little rich girls Miss Dewhurst had denied liberty all stole furtively into Carrie’s room. It was Lacy St. John who had the integrity to tell me, but only when Miss Dewhurst was out of hearing.
Twelve girls, all wearing long white cotton nightgowns, the official sleeping garments of the school, filed into Carrie’s room, each bearing a single candle held so her face was lit up under her chin. Such lighting made their eyes appear sunken, dark hollows and lent their youthful faces an eerie, ghoulish appearance—enough to terrify a little girl still crouched in the corner, already in a trance of haunted fear.
They came to form a semicircle around Carrie, to stare down at her as each put over her head a pillowcase with holes for eyes. Then came the ritual of weaving the candles intricately in formalized patterns as they chanted in the way of real witches. They sought to drive the smallness out of Carrie. They sought to set her “free” and themselves “free” from whatever evil they were driven to do for self-protection from someone so “unnaturally small and strange.”
One voice shrilled above all the others and Carrie knew it was Sissy Towers. To Carrie, all those shrouded girls in their long nightgowns with white hoods over their heads and the black holes for eyes were devils straight from hell! She began to whimper, to tremble, and oh, she was so scared, as if once more the grandmother were in the room, only this time she had multiplied until there were twelve of her!
“Don’t you cry, don’t you fear,” soothed the nightmarish voice from a mouthless hood. “If you live through this night, through this initiation, you, Carrie Dollanganger, will become a member of our most private and very exclusive society. If you succeed from this night forward, you will share in our secret rituals, our secret parties, our secret hoards of goodies.”
“Ohhh,” moaned Carrie, “go away, leave me alone, go away, leave me alone.”
“Quiet!” ordered the shrill voice of the hidden speaker, “you have no chance to become one of us unless you sacrifice your most beloved and precious possessions. It is either that or suffer our trial.”
Crouched in the corner, Carrie could only stare at the moving shadows behind the white witches who threatened her. The glows from the candles grew larger, larger, turning her world into one of yellow and scarlet fire.
“Give to us what you dearly cherish or you must suffer, suffer, suffer.”
“I have nothing,” whispered Carrie honestly.
“The dolls, the pretty little china dolls, give us those,” intoned the austere voice of the speaker. “Your little clothes won’t fit us; we don’t want those; give us your dolls, your pretty man, woman and child dolls.”
They’re gone,” cried Carrie, fearful they would set fire to her. “They turned to wooden sticks.”
“Ho-ho! A likely story! You lie! So now you must suffer, little owl, to become one of us—or die. Take your choice.”
It was an easy decision. Carrie nodded and tried not to sniffle.
“All right, from this night forward you, Carrie Dollanganger, funny name, funny face, will be one of us.”
It hurts to write of how they took Carrie and blindfolded her, then tied her small hands behind her back, then pushed her out into the hall, then up a flight of steep stairs, and suddenly they were outside. Carrie felt the cool night air, the slant of the support beneath her bare feet, and guessed correctly the girls had taken her onto the roof! There was only one thing she feared more than the grandmother and that was the roof—any roof! Anticipating her bellowing screams the girls had gagged Carrie. “Now lie or sit still as a proper owl should,” said the same harsh voice. “Perch here on the roof, near the chimney under the moon, and in the morning you will be one of us.”
Struggling and frantic now, Carrie tried to resist the pull of so many who forced her to sit. Then, even worse, they suddenly took away their hands and left her there in the darkness on the roof—all alone. Far away she heard the whispering titters of their retreat and the slight click of a door latching down.
Cathy, Cathy, she screamed to herself, Chris, come save me! Dr. Paul, why did you put me here? Don’t nobody want me? Sobbing, making small mewing sounds while blindfolded, gagged and bound, Carrie braved the steep incline of the huge, strange roof and began to move toward where the latching sound had come from. Inch by inch, sitting up and sliding along on her bottom, Carrie moved forward, praying every time she moved an inch not to fall. It seemed from her faltering report that she gave me much, much later that she was not only guided by instinct, but she could hear, above and from behind the oncoming spring thunderstorm, the sweet and distant voice of Cory singing as he strummed his melancholy song of finding his home and the sun again.
“Oh, Cathy, it was so strange way up there high, and the wind started to blow, and the rain began to fall, and the thunder rumbled and the lightning struck so I could see the brightness through the blindfold—and all the time Cory was singing and leading me to the trapdoor that opened when I used my feet to force it upward, and somehow I wiggled through. Then I fell down the stairs! I fell into blackness and I heard a bone break. And the pain, it came like teeth and bit me so I couldn’t see or feel anything or even hear the rain anymore. And Cory, he went away.”
* * *
Sunday morning came and Paul, Chris and I were at the breakfast table eating brunch.
Chris had a hot, homemade buttery roll in his hand, his lips parted wide to put at least half inside with one bite, when the telephone in the hall rang. Paul groaned as he put down his fork. I groaned too, for I had made my first cheese soufflé and it had to be eaten right away. “Would you mind getting that, Cathy?” he asked. “I really want to dig into your soufflé. It looks delicious and it smells heavenly.”
“You sit right there and eat,” I said, jumping up and hurrying to answer, “and I’ll do what I can to protect you from the pesky Mrs. Williamson. . . .”
He softly laughed and flashed me an amused look as he picked his fork up again. “It may not be my lonely widow lady with another of her minor afflictions.” Chris went right on eating.
I picked up the phone and in my most adult and gracious way I said, “Dr. Paul Sheffield’s residence.”
“This is Emily Dean Dewhurst calling,” said the stern voice on the other end. “Please put Dr. Sheffield on the phone immediately!”
“Miss Dewhurst!” I said, already alarmed. “This is Cathy, Carrie’s sister. Is Carrie all right?”
“You and Dr. Sheffield are needed here immediately!”
“Miss Dewhurst—”
But she didn’t let me finish. “It seems that your younger sister has disappeared rather mysteriously. On Sundays those girls who are being punished by weekend liberty denial are required to attend chapel services. I myself called the roll and Carrie did not respond to her name.” My heart beat faster, apprehensive of what I was to hear next, but my finger moved to push a button that would put Miss Dewhurst’s message onto the
attached microphone so Chris and Paul would hear even as they ate.
“Where was she?” I asked in a small voice, already terrified.
She spoke calmly. “A strange hush came in the air this morning when your sister’s name was called and when I asked where she was. I sent a teacher to check your sister’s room and she wasn’t there. I then ordered a thorough search of the grounds and the entire school building from basement to attic, and still your sister wasn’t found. I would, if your sister was of a different character, presume she’d run off and was on her way home. But something in the atmosphere warns that at least twelve of the girls here know what has happened to Carrie and they refuse to talk and incriminate themselves.”
My eyes widened. “You mean you still don’t know where Carrie is?”
Paul and Chris had stopped eating. Now both stared at me with mounting concern. “I’m sorry to say I don’t. Carrie hasn’t been seen since nine o’clock last night. Even if she walked all the way home she should have reached there by now. It’s almost noon. If she is not there and she is not here, then she is either injured, lost or some other accident has befallen her. . . .”
I could have screamed. How could she speak so dispassionately! Why, why every time something terrible came into our lives was it a flat, uncaring voice that told us the bad news?
Paul’s white car sped down Overland Highway toward Carrie’s school. I was sandwiched in the front seat between Paul and Chris. My brother had his bag so he could catch a bus and go on to his school after he found out what had happened to Carrie. He had my hand squeezed tight in his to reassure me that this child of ours was going to live! “Stop looking so worried, Cathy,” said Chris as he put an arm about my shoulder and drew my head to his shoulder. “You know how Carrie is. She’s probably hiding and just won’t answer. Remember how she was in the attic? She wouldn’t stay even when Cory wanted to. Carrie’d take off to do her own thing. She hasn’t run away. She’d be too afraid of the dark. She’s hiding somewhere. Somebody did something to hurt her feelings and she’s punishing them by letting them worry. She couldn’t face the world in the dead of night.”
The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! Page 52