The Masque of the Red Death Table of Contents The Masque of the Red Death The Masque of the Red Death Edgar Allan Poe Copyright  2014 epubBooks All Rights Reserved. This publication is protected by copyright. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen or via personal texttospeech computer systems. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of epubBooks. www.epubbooks.com The Masque of the Red Death The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its sealthe redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellowmen. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and lighthearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were balletdancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death". It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. These were sevenan imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example in blueand vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orangethe fifth with whitethe sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the colour of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarleta deep blood colour. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the bloodtinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minutehand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to harken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before. But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colours and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not. He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fte; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasmmuch of what has been since seen in "Hernani". There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And thesethe dreamswrithed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stifffrozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die awaythey have endured but an instantand a light, halfsubdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the bloodcoloured panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments. But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprisethen, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust. In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had outHeroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in bloodand his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror. When the eyes of the Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage. "Who dares,"he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him"who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask himthat we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!" It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand. It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince's person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purplethrough the purple to the greenthrough the green to the orangethrough this again to the whiteand even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cryand the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpselike mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the bloodbedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.


The Raven Table of Contents Introduction The Poem. The Poem  Illustrated The Raven Edgar Allan Poe Contributor  Edmund C. Stedman Illustrator  Gustave Dor Copyright  2014 epubBooks All Rights Reserved. This publication is protected by copyright. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen or via personal texttospeech computer systems. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of epubBooks. www.epubbooks.com First published in 1884 Introduction Comment on the Poem. The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. Yield to its spell, accept the poet's mood this, after all, is what the sages answer when you ask them of its value. Even though the poet himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleight of hand, his food enchanter's food, and offer to show you the trick of it,believe him not. Wait for his prophetic hour; then give yourself to his passion, his joy or pain. "We are in Love's hand today!" sings Gautier, in Swinburne's buoyant paraphrase,and from morn to sunset we are wafted on the violent sea there is but one love, one May, one flowery strand. Love is eternal, all else unreal and put aside. The vision has an end, the scene changes; but we have gained something, the memory of a charm. As many poets, so many charms. There is the charm of Evanescence, that which lends to supreme beauty and grace an aureole of Pathos. Share with Landor his one "night of memories and of sighs" for Rose Aylmer, and you have this to the full. And now take the hand of a newworld minstrel, strayed from some proper habitat to that rude and dissonant America which, as Baudelaire saw, "was for Poe only a vast prison through which he ran, hither and thither, with the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in a purer world," and where "his interior life, spiritual as a poet, spiritual even as a drunkard, was but one perpetual effort to escape the influence of this antipathetical atmosphere." Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubled singer dreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which he found,never throughout the day, always in the night,if not the Atlantis whence he had wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in which by day he was immured. To one land only he has power to lead you, and for one night only can you share his dream. A tract of neither Earth nor Heaven "Noman'sland," out of Space, out of Time. Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes, like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed; here spirits, groping for the path which leads to Eternity, are halted and delayed. It is the limbo of "planetary souls," wherein are all moonlight uncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance, the only respite attainable; others "move fantastically To a discordant melody" while everywhere are "Sheeted Memories of the Past Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pass the wanderer by." Such is the land, and for one night we enter it,a night of astral phases and recurrent chimes. Its monodies are twelve poems, whose music strives to change yet ever is the same. One by one they sound, like the chiming of the brazen and ebony clock, in "The Masque of the Red Death," which made the waltzers pause with "disconcert and tremulousness and meditation," as often as the hour came round. Of all these mystical cadences, the plaint of The Raven, vibrating through the portal, chiefly has impressed the outer world. What things go to the making of a poem,and how true in this, as in most else, that race which named its bards "the makers"? A work is called out of the void. Where there was nothing, it remains,a new creation, part of the treasure of mankind. And a few exceptional lyrics, more than others that are equally creative, compel us to think anew how bravely the poet's pen turns things unknown "to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name." Each seems without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy that peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of Goethe, "Manfred," or even those ethereal masterpieces, "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." More than one, while otherwise unique, has some burden or refrain which haunts the memory,once heard, never forgotten, like the tone of a rarely used but distinctive organstop. Notable among them is Buerger's "Lenore," that ghostly and resonant ballad, the lure and foil of the translators. Few will deny that Coleridge's wondrous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" stands at their very head. "Le JuifErrant" would have claims, had Beranger been a greater poet; and, but for their remoteness from popular sympathy, "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Blessed Damozel" might be added to the list. It was given to Edgar Allan Poe to produce two lyrics, "The Bells" and The Raven, each of which, although perhaps of less beauty than those of Tennyson and Rossetti, is a unique. "Ulalume," while equally strange and imaginative, has not the universal quality that is a portion of our test. The Raven in sheer poetical constituents falls below such pieces as "The Haunted Palace," "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and "Israfel." The whole of it would be exchanged, I suspect, by readers of a fastidious cast, for such passages as these "Around, by lifting winds forgot, Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie. No rays from the holy heaven come down On the long nighttime of that town; But light from out the lurid sea Streams up the turrets silently    Up many and many a marvellous shrine Whose wreathed friezes intertwine The viol, the violet, and the vine.    No swellings tell that winds may be Upon some faroff happier sea No heavings hint that winds have been On seas less hideously serene." It lacks the aerial melody of the poet whose heartstrings are a lute "And they say (the starry choir And the other listening things) That Israfeli's fire Is owing to that lyre By which he sits and sings The trembling living wire Of those unusual strings." But The Raven, like "The Bells" and "Annabel Lee," commends itself to the many and the few. I have said elsewhere that Poe's rarer productions seemed to me "those in which there is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity,in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him unawares." This is still my belief; and yet, upon a fresh study of this poem, it impresses me more than at any time since my boyhood. Close acquaintance tells in favor of every true work of art. Induce the man, who neither knows art nor cares for it, to examine some poem or painting, and how soon its force takes hold of him! In fact, he will overrate the relative value of the first good work by which his attention has been fairly caught. The Raven, also, has consistent qualities which even an expert must admire. In no other of its author's poems is the motive more palpably defined. "The Haunted Palace" is just as definite to the select reader, but Poe scarcely would have taken that subtle allegory for bald analysis. The Raven is wholly occupied with the author's typical themethe irretrievable loss of an idolized and beautiful woman; but on other grounds, also, the public instinct is correct in thinking it his representative poem. A man of genius usually gains a footing with the success of some one effort, and this is not always his greatest. Recognition is the more instant for having been postponed. He does not acquire it, like a miser's fortune, coin after coin, but "not at all or all in all." And thus with other ambitions the courtier, soldier, actor,whatever their parts,each counts his triumph from some lucky stroke. Poe's Raven, despite augury, was for him "the bird that made the breeze to blow." The poet settled in NewYork, in the winter of 1844'45, finding work upon Willis's paper, "The Evening Mirror," and eking out his income by contributions elsewhere. For six years he had been an active writer, and enjoyed a professional reputation; was held in both respect and misdoubt, and was at no loss for his share of the illpaid journalism of that day. He also had done much of his very best work,such tales as "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," (the latter containing that mystical counterpart, in verse, of Elihu Vedder's "A Lost Mind,") such analytic feats as "The Gold Bug" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget." He had made proselytes abroad, and gained a lasting hold upon the French mind. He had learned his own power and weakness, and was at his prime, and not without a certain reputation. But he had written nothing that was on the tongue of everybody. To rare and delicate work some popular touch must be added to capture the general audience of one's own time. Through the industry of Poe's successive biographers, the hit made by The Raven has become an ofttold tale. The poet's young wife, Virginia, was fading before his eyes, but lingered for another year within death's shadow. The long, low chamber in the house near the Bloomingdale Road is as famous as the room where Rouget de l'Isle composed the Marseillaise. All have heard that the poem, signed "Quarles," appeared in the "American Review," with a pseudoeditorial comment on its form; that Poe received ten dollars for it; that Willis, the kindest and least envious of fashionable arbiters, reprinted it with a eulogy that instantly made it towntalk. All doubt of its authorship was dispelled when Poe recited it himself at a literary gathering, and for a time he was the most marked of American authors. The hit stimulated and encouraged him. Like another and prouder satirist, he too found "something of summer" even "in the hum of insects." Sorrowfully enough, but three years elapsed,a period of influence, pride, anguish, yet always of imaginative or critical labor,before the final defeat, before the curtain dropped on a life that for him was in truth a tragedy, and he yielded to "the Conqueror Worm." "The American Review A Whig Journal" was a creditable magazine for the time, doublecolumned, printed on good paper with clear type, and illustrated by mezzotint portraits. Amid much matter below the present standard, it contained some that any editor would be glad to receive. The initial volume, for 1845, has articles by Horace Greeley, Donald Mitchell, Walter Whitman, Marsh, Tuckerman, and Whipple. Ralph Hoyt's quaint poem, "Old," appeared in this volume. And here are three lyrics by Poe "The City in the Sea," "The Valley of Unrest," and The Raven. Two of these were built up,such was his way,from earlier studies, but the lastnamed came out as if freshly composed, and almost as we have it now. The statement that it was not afterward revised is erroneous. Eleven trifling changes from the magazinetext appear in The Raven and Other Poems, 1845, a book which the poet shortly felt encouraged to offer the public. These are mostly changes of punctuation, or of single words, the latter kind made to heighten the effect of alliteration. In Mr. Lang's pretty edition of Poe's verse, brought out in the "Parchment Library," he has shown the instinct of a scholar, and has done wisely, in going back to the text in the volume just mentioned, as given in the London issue of 1846. The "standard" Griswold collection of the poet's works abounds with errors. These have been repeated by later editors, who also have made errors of their own. But the text of The Raven, owing to the requests made to the author for manuscript copies, was still farther revised by him; in fact, he printed it in Richmond, just before his death, with the poetic substitution of "seraphim whose footfalls" for "angels whose faint footfalls," in the fourteenth stanza. Our present text, therefore, while substantially that of 1845, is somewhat modified by the poet's later reading, and is, I think, the most correct and effective version of this single poem. The most radical change from the earliest version appeared, however, in the volume in 1845; the eleventh stanza originally having contained these lines, faulty in rhyme and otherwise a blemish on the poem "Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed fasterso, when Hope he would adjure, Stern Despair returned, instead of the sweet Hope he dared adjure That sad answer, 'Nevermore!'" It would be well if other, and famous, poets could be as sure of making their changes always improvements. Poe constantly rehandled his scanty show of verse, and usually bettered it. The Raven was the first of the few poems which he nearly brought to completion before printing. It may be that those who care for poetry lost little by his death. Fluent in prose, he never wrote verse for the sake of making a poem. When a refrain of image haunted him, the lyric that resulted was the inspiration, as he himself said, of a passion, not of a purpose. This was at intervals so rare as almost to justify the Fairfield theory that each was the product of a nervous crisis. What, then, gave the poet his clue to The Raven? From what misty foundation did it rise slowly to a music slowly breathed? As usual, more than one thing went to the building of so notable a poem. Considering the longer sermons often preached on brief and less suggestive texts, I hope not to be blamed for this discussion of a single lyric,especially one which an artist like Dore has made the subject of prodigal illustration. Until recently I had supposed that this piece, and a few which its author composed after its appearance, were exceptional in not having grown from germs in his boyish verse. But Mr. Fearing Gill has shown me some unpublished stanzas by Poe, written in his eighteenth year, and entitled, "The Demon of the Fire." The manuscript appears to be in the poet's early handwriting, and its genuineness is vouched for by the family in whose possession it has remained for half a century. Besides the plainest germs of "The Bells" and "The Haunted Palace" it contains a few lines somewhat suggestive of the opening and close of The Raven. As to the rhythm of our poem, a comparison of dates indicates that this was influenced by the rhythm of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Poe was one of the first to honor Miss Barrett's genius; he inscribed his collected poems to her as "the noblest of her sex," and was in sympathy with her lyrical method. The lines from her lovepoem, "With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows," found an echo in these "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled mefilled me with fantastic terrors never felt before." Here Poe assumed a privilege for which he roughly censured Longfellow, and which no one ever sought on his own premises without swift detection and chastisement. In melody and stanzaic form, we shall see that the two poems are not unlike, but in motive they are totally distinct. The generous poetess felt nothing but the true originality of the poet. "This vivid writing!" she exclaimed,"this power which is felt!Our great poet, Mr. Browning, author of 'Paracelsus,' etc., is enthusiastic in his admiration of the rhythm." Mr. Ingram, after referring to "Lady Geraldine," cleverly points out another source from which Poe may have caught an impulse. In 1843, Albert Pike, the halfGreek, halffrontiersman, poet of Arkansas, had printed in "The New Mirror," for which Poe then was writing, some verses entitled "Isadore," but since revised by the author and called "The Widowed Heart." I select from Mr. Pike's revision the following stanza, of which the main features correspond with the original version "Restless I pace our lonely rooms, I play our songs no more, The garish sun shines flauntingly upon the unswept floor; The mockingbird still sits and sings, O melancholy strain! For my heart is like an autumncloud that overflows with rain; Thou art lost to me forever, Isadore!" Here we have a prolonged measure, a similarity of refrain, and the introduction of a bird whose song enhances sorrow. There are other trails which may be followed by the curious; notably, a passage which Mr. Ingram selects from Poe's final review of "Barnaby Rudge" "The raven, too,    might have been made, more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby.    Its character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air." Nevertheless, after pointing out these germs and resemblances, the value of this poem still is found in its originality. The progressive music, the scenic detail and contrasted light and shade,above all, the spiritual passion of the nocturn, make it the work of an informing genius. As for the gruesome bird, he is unlike all the other ravens of his clan, from the "twa corbies" and "three ravens" of the balladists to Barnaby's rumpled "Grip." Here is no semblance of the cawing rook that haunts ancestral turrets and treads the field of heraldry; no boding phantom of which Tickell sang that, when, "shrieking at her window thrice, The raven flap'd his wing, Too well the lovelorn maiden knew The solemn boding sound." Poe's raven is a distinct conception; the incarnation of a mourner's agony and hopelessness; a sable embodied Memory, the abiding chronicler of doom, a type of the Irreparable. Escaped across the Styx, from "the Night's Plutonian shore," he seems the imaged soul of the questioner himself,of him who can not, will not, quaff the kind nepenthe, because the memory of Lenore is all that is left him, and with the surcease of his sorrow even that would be put aside. The Raven also may be taken as a representative poem of its author, for its exemplification of all his notions of what a poem should be. These are found in his essays on "The Poetic Principle," "The Rationale of Verse," and "The Philosophy of Composition." Poe declared that "in Music, perhaps, the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it strugglesthe creation of supernal Beauty. Verse cannot be better designated than as an inferior or less capable music"; but again, verse which is really the "Poetry of Words" is "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty,"this and nothing more. The tone of the highest Beauty is one of Sadness. The most melancholy of topics is Death. This must be allied to Beauty. "The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover." These last expressions are quoted from Poe's whimsical analysis of this very poem, but they indicate precisely the general range of his verse. The climax of "The Bells" is the muffled monotone of ghouls, who glory in weighing down the human heart. "Lenore," The Raven, "The Sleeper," "To One in Paradise," and "Ulalume" form a tenebrose symphony,and "Annabel Lee," written last of all, shows that one theme possessed him to the end. Again, these are all nothing if not musical, and some are touched with that quality of the Fantastic which awakes the sense of awe, and adds a new fear to agony itself. Through all is dimly outlined, beneath a shadowy pall, the poet's ideal love,so often halfportrayed elsewhere,the entombed wife of Usher, the Lady Ligeia, in truth the counterpart of his own nature. I suppose that an artist's love for one "in the form" never can wholly rival his devotion to some ideal. The woman near him must exercise her spells, be all by turns and nothing long, charm him with infinite variety, or be content to forego a share of his allegiance. He must be lured by the Unattainable, and this is ever just beyond him in his passion for creative art. Poe, like Hawthorne, came in with the decline of the Romantic school, and none delighted more than he to laugh at its calamity. Yet his heart was with the romancers and their Oriental or Gothic effects. His invention, so rich in the prose tales, seemed to desert him when he wrote verse; and his judgment told him that long romantic poems depend more upon incident than inspiration,and that, to utter the poetry of romance, lyrics would suffice. Hence his theory, clearly fitted to his own limitations, that "a 'long poem' is a flat contradiction in terms." The components of The Raven are few and simple a man, a bird, and the phantasmal memory at a woman. But the piece affords a fine display of romantic material. What have we? The midnight; the shadowy chamber with its tomes of forgotten lore; the student,a modern Hieronymus; the raven's tap on the casement; the wintry night and dying fire; the silken windswept hangings; the dreams and vague mistrust of the echoing darkness; the black, uncanny bird upon the pallid bust; the accessories of violet velvet and the gloating lamp. All this stage effect of situation, light, color, sound, is purely romantic, and even melodramatic, but of a poetic quality that melodrama rarely exhibits, and thoroughly reflective of the poet's "eternal passion, eternal pain." The rhythmical structure of The Raven was sure to make an impression. Rhyme, alliteration, the burden, the stanzaic form, were devised with singular adroitness. Doubtless the poet was struck with the aptness of Miss Barrett's musical trochaics, in "eights," and especially by the arrangement adopted near the close of "Lady Geraldine" "'Eyes,' he said, 'now throbbing through me! Are ye eyes that did undo me? Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in Parian statuestone! Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid O'er the desolate sanddesert of my heart and life undone?'" His artistic introduction of a third rhyme in both the second and fourth lines, and the addition of a fifth line and a final refrain, made the stanza of The Raven. The persistent alliteration seems to come without effort, and often the rhymes within lines are seductive; while the refrain or burden dominates the whole work. Here also he had profited by Miss Barrett's study of ballads and romaunts in her own and other tongues. A "refrain" is the lure wherewith a poet or a musician holds the wandering ear,the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. I have always admired the beautiful refrains of the English songstress,"The Nightingales, the Nightingales," "Margret, Margret," "My Heart and I," "Toll slowly," "The River floweth on," "Pan, Pan is dead," etc. She also employed what I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has excelled all poets since Coleridge thus revived it "O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware." Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,"Lenore," "Annabel Lee," "Ulalume," and "For Annie." It gained a wild and melancholy music, I have thought, from the "sweet influences," of the Afric burdens and repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native melody the voice of our Southern poet. "The Philosophy of Composition," his analysis of The Raven, is a technical dissection of its method and structure. Neither his avowal of coldblooded artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an exposure of this artifice was only another of his intellectual hoaxes, need be wholly credited. If he had designed the complete work in advance, he scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of rattlepan rhymes to the delicious melody of the second stanza,not even upon his theory of the fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a work, sees, like the first Artist, that it is good, and sees why it is good. A subsequent analysis, coupled with a disavowal of any sacred fire, readily enough may be made. My belief is that the first conception and rough draft of this poem came as inspiration always comes; that its author then saw how it might be perfected, giving it the final touches described in his chapter on Composition, and that the latter, therefore, is neither wholly false nor wholly true. The harm of such analysis is that it tempts a novice to fancy that artificial processes can supersede imagination. The impulse of genius is to guard the secrets of its creative hour. Glimpses obtained of the toil, the baffled experiments, which precede a triumph, as in the sketchwork of Hawthorne recently brought to light, afford priceless instruction and encouragement to the sincere artist. But one who voluntarily exposes his Muse to the gaze of all comers should recall the fate of King Candaules. The world still thinks of Poe as a "luckless man of genius." I recently heard him mentioned as "one whom everybody seems chartered to misrepresent, decry or slander." But it seems to me that his illluck ended with his pitiable death, and that since then his defence has been persistent, and his fame of as steadfast growth as a suffering and gifted author could pray for in his hopeful hour. Griswold's decrial and slander turned the current in his favor. Critics and biographers have come forward with successive refutations, with tributes to his character, with new editions of his works. His own letters and the minute incidents of his career are before us; the record, good and bad, is widely known. No appellor has received more tender and forgiving judgement. His mishaps in life belonged to his region and period, perchance still more to his own infirmity of will. Doubtless his environment was not one to guard a finegrained, illbalanced nature from perils without and within. His strongest will, to be lord of himself, gained for him "that heritage of woe." He confessed himself the bird's unhappy master, the stricken sufferer of this poem. But his was a full share of that dramatic temper which exults in the presage of its own doom. There is a delight in playing one's high part we are all gladiators, crying Ave Imperator! To quote Burke's matter of fact "In grief the pleasure is still uppermost, and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we endeavor to shake off as soon as possible." Poe went farther, and was an artist even in the tragedy of his career. If, according to his own belief, sadness and the vanishing of beauty are the highest poetic themes, and poetic feeling the keenest earthly pleasure, then the sorrow and darkness of his broken life were not without their frequent compensation. In the following pages, we have a fresh example of an artist's genius characterizing his interpretation of a famous poem. Gustave Dore, the last work of whose pencil is before us, was not the painter, or even the draughtsman, for realists demanding truth of tone, figure, and perfection. Such matters concerned him less than to make shape and distance, light and shade, assist his purpose,which was to excite the soul, the imagination, of the looker on. This he did by arousing our sense of awe, through marvellous and often sublime conceptions of things unutterable and full of gloom or glory. It is well said that if his works were not great paintings, as pictures they are great indeed. As a "literary artist," and such he was, his force was in direct ratio with the dramatic invention of his author, with the brave audacities of the spirit that kindled his own. Hence his success with Rabelais, with "Le JuifErrant," "Les Contes Drolatiques," and "Don Quixote," and hence, conversely, his failure to express the beauty of Tennyson's Idyls, of "Il Paradiso," of the Hebrew pastorals, and other texts requiring exaltation, or sweetness and repose. He was a born master of the grotesque, and by a special insight could portray the spectres of a haunted brain. We see objects as his personages saw them, and with the very eyes of the Wandering Jew, the bewildered Don, or the goldsmith's daughter whose fancy so magnifies the King in the shop on the PontauChange. It was in the nature of things that he should be attracted to each masterpiece of verse or prose that I have termed unique. The lower kingdoms were called into his service; his rocks, trees and mountains, the sky itself, are animate with motive and diablerie. Had he lived to illustrate Shakespeare, we should have seen a remarkable treatment of Caliban, the Witches, the storm in "Lear"; but doubtless should have questioned his ideals of Imogen or Miranda. Beauty pure and simple, and the perfect excellence thereof, he rarely seemed to comprehend. Yet there is beauty in his designs for the "Ancient Mariner," unreal as they are, and a consecutiveness rare in a series by Dore. The Rime afforded him a prolonged story, with many shiftings of the scene. In The Raven sound and color preserve their monotone and we have no change of place or occasion. What is the result? Dore proffers a series of variations upon the theme as he conceived it, "the enigma of death and the hallucination of an inconsolable soul." In some of these drawings his faults are evident; others reveal his powerful originality, and the best qualities in which, as a draughtsman, he stood alone. Plainly there was something in common between the working moods of Poe and Dore. This would appear more clearly had the latter tried his hand upon the "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." Both resorted often to the elfland of fantasy and romance. In melodramatic feats they both, through their command of the supernatural, avoided the dangerline between the ideal and the absurd. Poe was the truer worshipper of the Beautiful; his love for it was a consecrating passion, and herein he parts company with his illustrator. Poet or artist, Death at last transfigures all within the shadow of his sable harbinger, Vedder's symbolic crayon aptly sets them face to face, but enfolds them with the mantle of immortal wisdom and power. An American woman has wrought the image of a stareyed Genius with the final torch, the exquisite semblance of one whose vision beholds, but whose lips may not utter, the mysteries of a land beyond "the door of a legended tomb." EDMUND C. STEDMAN. The Poem. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'T is some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door Only this, and nothing more." Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrowvainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrowsorrow for the lost Lenore For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore Nameless here for evermore. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled mefilled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating "'T is some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; This it is, and nothing more.


" Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, "Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you"here I opened wide the door; Darkness there, and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!" This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping, somewhat louder than before. "Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; 'T is the wind and nothing more!" Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore, Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaninglittle relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as "Nevermore." But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing further then he utterednot a feather then he fluttered Till I scarcely more than muttered, "Other friends have flown before On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before." Then the bird said, "Nevermore." Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, "Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of 'Nevernevermore.'" But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking "Nevermore." This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er, But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er She shall press, ah, nevermore! Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent theeby these angels he hath sent thee Respiterespite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!prophet still, if bird or devil! Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted On this home by Horror hauntedtell me truly, I implore Is thereis there balm in Gilead?tell metell me, I implore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evilprophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above, usby that God we both adore Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." "Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be liftednevermore! The Poem  Illustrated "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." "Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor." "Eagerly I wished the morrow;vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrowsorrow for the lost Lenore." "Sorrow for the lost Lenore." "For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore Nameless here for evermore." "'T is some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door." "Here I opened wide the door; Darkness there, and nothing more." "Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before." "'Surely,' said I, 'surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.'" "Open here I flung the shutter."  "A stately Raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he." "Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door Perched, and sat, and nothing more." "Wandering from the Nightly shore." "Till I scarcely more than muttered, 'Other friends have flown before On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'" "Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy." "But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er She shall press, ah, nevermore!" "'Wretch,' I cried, 'thy God hath lent theeby these angels he hath sent thee Respiterespite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!'" "On this home by Horror haunted."  "Tell me truly, I implore Is thereis there balm in Gilead?tell metell me, I implore!" "Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore." "'Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked, upstarting." "'Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!'" "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be liftednevermore!"


The TellTale Heart Table of Contents The Telltale Heart The TellTale Heart Edgar Allan Poe Copyright  2014 epubBooks All Rights Reserved. This publication is protected by copyright. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen or via personal texttospeech computer systems. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of epubBooks. www.epubbooks.com The Telltale Heart TRUE!nervousvery, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my sensesnot destroyednot dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthilyhow calmly I can tell you the whole story. It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulturea pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degreesvery graduallyI made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever. Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceededwith what cautionwith what foresightwith what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened itoh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowlyvery, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiouslyoh, so cautiouslycautiously (for the hinges creaked)I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nightsevery night just at midnightbut I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he has passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept. Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powersof my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew backbut no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers,) and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily. I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in bed, crying out"Who's there?" I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening;just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall. Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of griefoh, no!it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself"It is nothing but the wind in the chimneyit is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feelalthough he neither saw nor heardto feel the presence of my head within the room. When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a littlea very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened ityou cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthilyuntil, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye. It was openwide, wide openand I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctnessall a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot. And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but overacuteness of the sense?now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eve. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!do you mark me well I have told you that I am nervous so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized methe sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked onceonce only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more. If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs. I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eyenot even hiscould have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash outno stain of any kindno bloodspot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught allha! ha! When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clockstill dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart,for what had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises. I smiled,for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them searchsearch well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim. The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinctIt continued and became more distinct I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling but it continued and gained definitenessuntil, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears. No doubt I now grew very pale;but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increasedand what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick soundmuch such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breathand yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quicklymore vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the menbut the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamedI ravedI swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louderlouderlouder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!no, no! They heard!they suspected!they knew!they were making a mockery of my horror!this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and nowagain!hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! "Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed!tear up the planks! here, here!It is the beating of his hideous heart!"


BY STEPHEN KING NOVELS AS RICHARD BACHMAN Carrie Rage 'Salem's Lot The Long Walk The Shining Roadwork The Stand The Running Man The Dead Zone Thinner Firestarter Cujo COLLECTIONS The Dark Tower Night Shift The Gunslinger Different Seasons Christine Skeleton Crew Pet Sematary The Talisman NONFICTION (with Peter Straub) Danse Macabre It The Eyes of the Dragon SCREENPLAYS Misery Creepshow The Tommyknockers Cat's Eye The Dark Tower II Silver Bullet Drawing of the Three The Dark Half The Stand The Complete  Uncut Edition 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 threeyearold 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 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 lefthanded monkey wrenches, perpetual foulup, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewen High had individualand thus privateshowers, 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 Revisitedthat 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 Mondaymorning 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 PERiod! 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. PERiod, PERiod, PERiod! 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 dimesized 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. She thinks they're for lipstick! Ruth Gogan 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 up, plug it Sue was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doinga 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 harmIt 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 shortsheet 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 truckface, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratchass, 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, falling on her face in Modern Dance 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 CARRIE Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shiton, grossout, putdown, 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 gynecologist 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 Gogan, 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 Gogan said What the hell are you up to? Miss White replied Isn't this right? Miss Gogan then replied Sure. Sure it is. Ruth Gogan 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 firstyear teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good. Carrie looked up at her dumbly, face still contorted and working. MMMiss DDDesD 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 sanitarynapkin 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 selfshame 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 ascendent 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 housingproject job in Portland. Mrs. White continued to live alone in their suburban Chamberlain bungalow. Due to the Whites' nearfanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs, Mrs. White had no friends to see her through her period of bereavement. And when her labor began seven months later, she was alone. At approximately 130 P.M. on September 21, the neighbors on Carlin Street began to hear screams from the White bungalow. The police, however, were not summoned to the scene until after 600 P.M. We are left with two unappetizing alternatives to explain this time lag Either Mrs. White's neighbors 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 waitandsee attitude. Mrs. Georgia McLaughlin, the only one of 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 622 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 Fielding 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 onward 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 palegreen 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 assjabber 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 throatclearing 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 handprint 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 onto 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. Um. He funneled 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 hereonce 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 Snerds, Morton murmured. Yes. Tina Blake, Rachel Spies, Helen Shyres, Donna Thibodeau and her sister Mary 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 aa 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, classcutters extraordinaire, slunk in, he glowered at them happily and prepared to talk tough. As he often told Hank Grayle, he ate classcutters for lunch. Graffiti scratched on a desk in Chamberlain Junior High School Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, but Carrie White eats shit. She walked down Ewen Avenue and crossed over to Carlin at the stoplight on the corner. Her head was down and she was trying to think of nothing. Cramps came and went in great, gripping waves, making her slow down and speed up like a car with carburetor trouble. She stared at the sidewalk. Quartz glittering in the cement. Hopscotch grids scratched in ghostly, rainfaded chalk. Wads of gum stamped flat. Pieces of tinfoil and pennycandy wrappers. They all hate and they never stop. They never get tired of it. A penny lodged in a crack. She kicked it. Imagine Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy. With rats crawling all over her face. Good. Good. That would be good. A dog turd with a foottrack in the middle of it. A roll of blackened caps that some kid had banged with a stone. Cigarette butts. Crash in her head with a rock, with a boulder. Crash in all their heads. Good. Good. (saviour jesus meek and mild) That was good for Momma, all right for her. She didn't have to go among the wolves every day of every year, out into a carnival of laughers, joketellers, pointers, snickerers. And didn't Momma say there would be a Day of Judgment (the name of that star shall be wormwood and they shall be scourged with scorpions) and an angel with a sword? If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and a shepherd's crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickerers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaminga terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness. And if only she could be His sword and His arm. She had tried to fit. She had defied Momma in a hundred little ways, had tried to erase the redplague circle that had been drawn around her from the first day she had left the controlled environment of the small house on Carlin Street and had walked up to the Barker Street Grammar School with her Bible under her arm. She could still remember that day, the stares, and the sudden, awful silence when she had gotten down on her knees before lunch in the school cafeteriathe laughter had begun on that day and had echoed up through the years. The redplague circle was like blood itselfyou could scrub and scrub and scrub and still it would be there, not erased, not clean. She had never gotten on her knees in a public place again, although she had not told Momma that. Still, the original memory remained, with her and with them. She had fought Momma tooth and nail over the Christian Youth Camp, and had earned the money to go herself by taking in sewing. Momma told her darkly that it was Sin, that it was Methodists and Baptists and Congregationalists and that it was Sin and Backsliding. She forbade Carrie to swim at the camp. Yet although she had swum and had laughed when they ducked her (until she couldn't get her breath any more and they kept doing it and she got panicky and began to scream) and had tried to take part in the camp's activities, a thousand practical jokes had been played on ol' prayin' Carrie and she had come home on the bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Momma at the station, and Momma had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Momma knew, that Momma was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. For strait is the gate, Momma said grimly in the taxi, and at home she had sent Carrie to the closet for six hours. Momma had, of course, forbade her to shower with the other girls; Carrie had hidden her shower things in her school locker and had showered anyway, taking part in a naked ritual that was shameful and embarrassing to her in hopes that the circle around her might fade a little, just a little (but today o today) Tommy Erbter, age five, was biking up the other side of the street. He was a small, intenselooking boy on a twentyinch Schwinn with brightred training wheels. He was humming Scoobie Doo, where are you? under his breath. He saw Carrie, brightened, and stuck out his tongue. Hey, ol' fartface! Of prayin' Carrie! Carrie glared at him with sudden smoking rage. The bike wobbled on its training wheels and suddenly fell over. Tommy screamed. The bike was on top of him. Carrie smiled and walked on. The sound of Tommy's wails was sweet, jangling music in her ears. If only she could make something like that happen whenever she liked. (just did) She stopped dead seven houses up from her own, staring blankly at nothing. Behind her, Tommy was climbing tearfully back onto his bike, nursing a scraped knee. He yelled something at her, but she ignored it. She had been yelled at by experts. She had been thinking (fall off that bike kid push you off that bike and split your rotten head) and something had happened. Her mind had . . . had . . . she groped for a word. Had flexed. That was not just right, but it was very close. There had been a curious mental bending, almost like an elbow curling a dumbbell. That wasn't exactly right either, but it was all she could think of. An elbow with no strength. A weak baby muscle. Flex.