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 color. It restedagainst 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 Westover or Lewiston. They stared. They
always stared.
Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel
bathing caps, toweling, 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 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
conclusion offered by White and Stearns 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 . . .
• • •
“Period!”
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 background
(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 center 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!”
she 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.
