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The Nightmare Catcher ch 1

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The Nightmare Catcher.

Ch 1.

"Excuse me, but this is our table."
The young girl gazed up and saw three girls, two with very blonde hair and one brunette, all wearing the stereotypical and "every girl biggest dream" cheerleader dresses. Blonde girl number one, (obviously the leader), who had told her to move away, spoke as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. They were the queens and she was a lower peasant. But the girl just starred expressionless at her, then continued to draw in her sketchbook.

"I don't think you own this table. Is your name on it?"
Blonde girl number one looked down at the dark clothed emo-girl who had just ignored her command and then physically pulled her black skinny legs up and dropped them back on the bench.
"Well, I can't see your name on it either!" Blonde girl number two smirked.
Without taking her eyes off her sketching, the emo-girl grabbed one of her dark colored pencils and scribbled her name (with her left hand) on the desk, upside down from her side of the table.
"It is now," she said before she switched pencils and started to draw with a red tone on her paper. "Now go away…"
Looking down, the girls could see the name "Carrie"' written in loopy, black, cursive style. The girl, named Carrie, continued to draw in her sketchbook.
This was her new style. Pretend that these girls didn't exist in this cafeteria nor on the planet. It was better than throwing her lunch and the milk packet on them.
"Mmmm… If I remember, you often sit there," Blonde girl number one said, pointing to one part of cafeteria which was the most unclean one. "Or in the basement," she continued. "So my recommendation to you, "Miss weirdo freak number one" is to sit as far from us as impossible or sit with your friends…" Then the blonde girl pretended to realize something important, with mock surprise, that her words would have been humiliating for Carrie.
"Oh heavens, I forgot, you don't have any!" She finished cruelly and All three of them laughed.
"Or you could just go and take another seat or go back to where you came from… the operating table perhaps?" Carrie muttered and ignored again the six eyes gazing irritably at her skinny person.
In their own little world, the idea of perfection, beauty and grace were crucial. In their own little world, they knew they were beautiful, but would never admit it to each other. It was "vanity". According to them, when you had a nice body, you needed to pretend to whine over it. Saying that you've got fat legs, a chubby stomach or pimples, just to get the attention of your friends and admirers, and to hear them praising "Oh you`re not fat! Your body is so slim, just look at me, I`m fat!" Then you could pretend to be modest, when secretly feeling good. The latest fashions and makeup are therefore in their eyes a crucial fact to being popular and worshipped by others 'below' them. But this girl, sitting on "their" bench, had a style that was total opposite from their own clothes and fashion.
Carrie wore a tight fitting black leather jacket, with a black/red punk shirt under it, with detachable mesh sleeves underneath and together with black skinny jeans with holes in them, together with black heavy boots to match with her gothic outfit. She had really pale, flawless skin, high cheekbones and light, almost invisible eyebrows, but wore thick black eyeliner, with red and black eye shadows around her eyes which made it look almost like two deep holes. She also wore several earrings in her ears, then a ring in her lip and a small star on her left nose. The only necklace she had was a long silver chain with a pendant. The chain was simple but the pendant was oval shaped stone with silver texture around it.
She barely had any breasts, which the cheerleaders probably thought should be pitied, but to compensate she had long slim legs. The only thing Carrie and the two blonde cheerleaders might had in common was their light hair color. Well…the cheerleaders' hair was fake and more golden and shinny. Carrie's was pale, long, and messy with dusty grey touch and few long black strands under it.
In different clothes, her body and face could have been more appealing but Carrie had ignored all the rules of fashion. Through the cheerleaders' eyes, she looked like an insect, a small black grouse spider from another world.  
"Miss Reilly, what in heaven's name have you done to the desk?" A sharp and bright voice roared behind the three girls and a second later, the source of the voice was standing in front of Carrie's black boots. Carrie moved slowly her eyes up to Mrs. Schwartz demonic eyes, but didn't move an inch from her spot, nor said a word in reply to the history teacher's question.
Deborah Hackbarth (blonde girl number one) took the chance, considered herself to be Mrs. Schwartz's favorite student and special pet.
"Carrie refuses to move her dirty boots from her bench so we can eat our lunch and she even splotched her name on the desk to prove she owns it."
"Miss Reilly, perhaps you have forgotten our head principals rules, that bad behavior and disrespectful attitudes towards your classmates and teachers, are strictly forbidden and if someone breaks these rules, that student will be excluded from the school in X amount of time!"
"I know it so well Mrs. Schwartz, but I can't remember when I insulted you?" Carrie said calmly but still kept her boots on the bench and even started to rub her black heels on the top of it, creating small marks. Reaching what must have been Mrs. Schwartz limits of patience; the old teacher grabbed Carrie's feet and forced them down from the bench. Carrie tensed when Mrs. Schwartz touched her legs.
"Don't be such an idiot Miss Reilly, just because you just moved here and have obvious "mental" problems, that is no reason for me or the principal to save you from being kicked out of school, and sending you back where you belong."
"Oh Mrs Schwartz, I really like it here! I'd never of imaged such a place I never had the joy of moving here. A place where people care if the chickens in the factory are sleeping well during the nights or whether they've given them enough food to get fat and chubby enough for butchering the next day," Carrie said sweetly and then glanced at Deborah's, Ruth's and Melanie's white, red and orange cheerleader's outfits, before adding: "Not to mention that even the cheerleaders are dressing like chickens."
"How dare you!" Mrs Schwartz hissed. "These girls are representing our baseball team and working very hard to support and encourage them to be the best team in this town. Not to mention the whole of Minnesota too. They are hard working girls with great grades and personality and you should be seeing them as great role models!"
"Role models, riiight!" Carrie thought disbelieving. "In appearances they would represent perfect Miss America, but their souls, they would be perfect assistants the devil`s bitch!"
"And give me that!" Mrs. Schwartz grabbed Carrie's sketchbook forcefully and took a quick glance at it. She frowned. "Dear god! Where in your deepest part of your brain have you come up with this picture? It is hideous!"
Carrie was an excellent artist and loved to draw. However, Carrie would never show her talent to the world, as the pictures she preferred to draw were not kind child-friendly pictures. When Mrs. Schwartz grabbed her book, it was the last straw of Carries small patience. A murderous rage overtook Carrie's features as she glared at Mrs. Schwartz before snatched her sketchbook back from her hands.
A savaged thought of inserting her red pen right in the middle Mrs. Schwartz's eyes, crossed her mind, and afterwards she'd use her hands and give each one of the "chicken-girls" a nice swollen lip.
But she controlled herself.
Instead Carrie hissed slowly "Don't touch my things!"
Perhaps her intuition, but Mrs. Schwartz could feel the hidden lines between Carries hissing, her skinny body tensing, her long fingers clutching hard in her book like claws and her other hand holding her red pen with a very hard grip, like she was ready to attack her prey. Mrs. Schwartz's found she was swimming in deep dangerous water now but it didn't affect her decision to punish Carrie.
The "Chicken-girls" has also noticed Carrie's hard clutch on her pen and looked like they wanted to get the hell away from this strange girl. Half the cafeteria had dropped their food and was now watching the drama, curious what`s going to happen next.
"Go to the principal's office, NOW!" Mrs. Schwartz said coolly and loud enough for everyone to hear. "You're just begging to get excluded from this school and I won't be surprised if the Principal is fed up of giving chances and does it. I can't understand why he has tolerated you so long!"
Carries ice grey eyes pierced through her blonde hair that fell in her face. Seeking Mrs. Schwartz's brown eyes out like a target. It sent shivers up Mrs. Schwartz's spine and she felt a cool breeze whip through her grey hair.
Then Carrie just grinned, clicked her red pen shut and put the sketch-book away in her backpack before taking her dishes to the sink. Taking very slow lazy steps to make Mrs. Schwartz more pissed off.
"That girl is retarded," Melanie whispered to the others.
"Yeah! She reminds me of that half-dead zombie girl from that horror movie we saw last weekend…"
"I heard seen she's visiting a head-shrink," Deborah whispered back. "And that she's been in and out of psychiatric units since she was five and…"
"That girl is not normal," Mrs. Schwartz muttered as she moved back from Carrie to check the other students in the cafeteria.
Carrie was irritated and tired. The bell signaling the beginning fifth period had just rang and she was, at this point, sick of school. Not that she was never NOT sick of school. She trudged through the hallways like she was walking through prison, angry with herself for being stupid enough to get provoked again and let her sarcastic tongue slip.
"The last thing I needed was to get in trouble with the school authorities…again," she thought bitterly.
She had no friends. She ate lunch alone, studied alone, and never raised her hand in class. The most she did do was drawing or reading big heavy books. Her 'mother', or rather, the lady who took care of her, worked at the chicken factory, and even when the teachers asked what to do about Caroline (Carrie's birth name), her guardian's advice was to "just leave her be."
It's not like her grades are suffering. Quite remarkably the opposite, but everyone felt something was a little…off, with Carrie. No one could really explain it, but she just sent out bad vibes.
Her nickname 'Carrie' was not unusual; especially when you had a name like Caroline, most people would rather be called something a little less old fashioned. It's easy to pronounce, it sounds pretty and a very famous TV-character is also called Carrie.
But when people think about her and that name, they didn't think designer clothes, they thought of the horror novel.
Except that this Carrie and Carrie from the novel are two totally different personalities, not to mention looks. If there was another universe and if these two girls existed in the same time, and maybe in this universe they even went in same school. Carrie White would be terrified of Carrie Reilly. The difference was, Carrie White's biggest wish was to fit in and be popular. Carrie Reilly didn't give a damn about it.
As she walked though the corridor, the microphone turned on and the dear Head Principal's dark and low voice screamed though the speakers.
"Attention students, I have important information that you need to listen to. From an unknown but very important source, I must inform you that all lessons for today and tomorrow are canceled and all students must immediately go home to their families and stay there until further notice. I don't have more information at this time but the school is closed from now on."
"Someone up there must love me."
Strangely, Carrie was not surprised. For the past few days, the people in the town had been acting kind of funny. She notice that people sometimes turned around and glanced behind their shoulders, or cut off in the middle of their conversations or pause from doing something, as if an invisible person was irrupting them and telling them bad stuff. Some people on her street had even packed their belongings and suddenly moved away, without telling anyone why.
Carrie asked her guardian Nancy about it, but she just gave a worried look and said uncertainly that she didn't know.
"There is something in their heads that keeps repeating that they need to move from the town, or at least to move to "Higher ground." And it's not only them, I got that feeling too. You remember what happened in the hotel "Comfort Tree" right, in the strange room?" Nancy had said.
Thinking about these strange events, Carrie notice an old poster half hanging on of the school billboards, showing a young plain looking girl, wearing a white shirt, blue jacket and dark shoulder length hair. What caught her attention were the girl's mismatched eyes, brown and blue, and the big text over her head.
"Missing" and then her name "Candy Quakenbush".
Carrie found it odd that Candy's last school paper and the haunting rumors and whisperings came from the same source. It been months since Candy had disappeared and Carrie seemed the only one interested in the fact that Candy had written about the haunting at the Comfort Tree Hotel, and that now odd things were happening there. No one seemed to make the connection but Carrie got the feeling it was something important!
"Define "normal" for me please." Carrie thought bitterly as she walked out of the school building.
She wasn't deaf to what people said about her and she had heard Mrs. Schwartz's last word. Mrs. Schwartz seemed obsessed with the idea of being normal.
The last time Mrs Schwartz had asked a pupil why she couldn't be like other "normal" people, had been the day they when they got their papers back. The project had been to describe ten important things about Chickentown and Carrie remembered that she had written a very detailed and interesting description about "Final Scream," Chickentown's one and only fashion-shop which contained a few collections of her favorite clothes. She also liked it because it didn't contain posters, T-shirts, cups, postcards or any other sorts' commercial rubbish picturing their "precious" chicken factory, in which she placed as number nine on her assignment.
She had got a C+ and a long note from Mrs. Schwartz that contained that "a small store, nearing it's bankruptcy, is not a suitable, intresting or important choice of project, and has nothing to with Chickentown at all. Except selling horrible and trashy clothes that nobody wears."
Mrs. Schwartz had a reputation for being very strict. There was even a rumor that she kept a cane in her cupboard. Unfortunately on that particular day she was at her worst, but rather than Carrie, the class was surprised when Mrs. Schwartz's choice had been Candy Quakenbush for "Victim of the week."
"Why can't you be like everyone else?" Mrs. Schwartz had yelled at her. "How can you be so stupid and naïve, just look at Ruth's paper. Look at the diagrams and the budgets." (Which Carrie knew was copied from her father's booklets, since Ruths father was the head-chief of chicken.)
Carrie wondered if it was illegal to say such a thing to a student. That you're an idiot, naïve and annoying? Probably! Her former teachers had said the same things and they never got arrested. Carrie had been watching the events from the corner of the classroom. She had slouched on her desk, resting her chin on her hand and listening to the conversation between Candy and Mrs. Schwarz. She remembered that Candy had defended herself and even fought back when the dragon lady told her to pick up her stuff from the floor (which had been Mrs. Schwartz's fault.)
"Smart girl" Carrie had thought at the time.
She was the only girl Carrie could think of, who had at something more in her brain than rubbish like the rest of students, and even had guts enough to run away from this lousy town. Carrie couldn't help but smile as the thought about it.
"To bad that I didn't have the chance to know you. If I knew that you would leave this town in the middle of the day, pissing of Mrs. Schwartz and perhaps never coming back, I might have joined you. I honestly hope for the day when people's lives don't revolve around chickens, chicken food and the other crap that comes with chickens. But that seems a long, far way off. Unfortunately."
She was one year older than Candy, why she studied with the first grades and not the seniors, was because two years of her life got wasted in "prison". She avoids speaking to anyone about it, neither her guardian nor the teachers. But somehow Mrs. Schwartz's had heard about it from the principal. Not good! She preferred to be alone and endure high school sufferings alone. But if Mrs. Schwartz's was going to use her past as a blackmail, then she would be very very sorry!
Reviews please!
This is my first Abarat story ever written and I hope you guys will be gentle with me. I`m a writer to "Creature and the Maiden story, based on Mary Shelley Frankenstein and I`m soon be reaching 20 chapters. Became a Abarat fan when I got the books as a birthday present and I just fell in love in the story and the amazing paintings!

I want to say Thank you to Red Stockings, for her kindness to correct the tenses and spellings for me! Thank you and watch out for chapter two! :)

P.S The Abarat world belongs to Clive Barker, I`m writing only for fun, not for money! But the main character Caroline "Carrie" Reilly is mine.

Enjoy!
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