Madeleine L'Engle - Wrinkle in Time

A slow tear trickled down Meg’s cheek. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

‘Why don’t you cry?’ Calvin asked gently. ‘You’re just crazy about your father, aren’t you? Go ahead and cry. It’ll do you good.’

Meg’s voice came out trembling over tears. ‘I cry much too much. I should be like mother. I should be able to control myself.’

‘Your mother’s a completely different person and she’s a lot older than you are.’

‘I wish I were a different person,’ Meg said shakily. ‘I hate myself.’

Calvin reached over and took off her glasses. Then he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her tears. This gesture of tenderness undid her completely, and she put her head down on her knees and sobbed. Calvin sat quietly beside her, every once in a while patting her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed finally. ‘I’m terribly sorry. Now you’ll hate me.’

‘Oh, Meg, you are a moron,’ Calvin said. ‘Don’t you know you’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me in a long time?’

Meg raised her head, and moonlight shone on her tear-stained face; without the glasses her eyes were unexpectedly beautiful. ‘If Charles Wallace is a sport, I think I’m a biological mistake.’

Now she was waiting to be contradicted. But Calvin said, ‘Do you know that this is the first time I’ve seen you without your glasses?’

‘I’m blind as a bat without them. I’m near-sighted, like father.’

‘Well, you know what, you’ve got dream-boat eyes,’ Calvin said. ‘Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don’t think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.’

Meg smiled with pleasure. She could feel herself blushing and she wondered if the blush would be visible in the moonlight.

‘Okay, hold it, you two,’ came a voice out of the shadows. Charles Wallace stepped into the moonlight. ‘I wasn’t spying on you,’ he said quickly, ‘and I hate to break things up, but this is it, kids, this is it!’ His voice quivered with excitement.

‘This is what?’ Calvin asked.

‘We’re going.’

‘Going? Where?’ Meg reached out and instinctively grabbed for Calvin’s hand.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Charles Wallace said. ‘But I think it’s to find father.’

Suddenly two eyes seemed to spring at them out of the darkness; it was the moonlight striking on Mrs Who’s glasses. She was standing next to Charles Wallace, and how she had managed to appear where a moment ago there had been nothing but flickering shadows in the moonlight Meg had no idea. She heard a sound behind her and turned round. There was Mrs Whatsit scrambling over the wall.

‘My, but I wish there were no wind,’ Mrs Whatsit said plaintively. ‘It’s so difficult with all these clothes.’ She wore her outfit of the night before, rubber boots and all, with the addition of one of Mrs Buncombe’s sheets which she had draped over her. As she slid off the wall the sheet caught in a low branch and came off. The felt hat slipped over both eyes, and another branch plucked at the pink stole. ‘Oh, dear ,’ she sighed. ‘I shall never learn to manage.’

Mrs Who wafted over to her, tiny feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, the lenses of her glasses glittering. ‘ Come t’è picciol fallo amaro morso ! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee !’With a clawlike hand she pushed the hat up on Mrs Whatsit’s forehead, untangled the stole from the tree and with a deft gesture took the sheet and folded it.

‘Oh, thank you,’ Mrs Whatsit said. ‘You’re so clever!’

‘ Un asno viejo sake más que un potro. A. Perez. An old ass knows more than a young colt .’

‘Just because you’re a paltry few billion years —’ Mrs Whatsit was starting indignantly, when a sharp, strange voice cut in.

‘Alll rrightt, girrllss. Thiss iss nno ttime forr bbickkerring.’

‘It’s Mrs Which,’ Charles Wallace said.

There was a faint gust of wind, the leaves shivered in it, the patterns of moonlight shifted, and in a circle of silver something shimmered, quivered, and the voice said, ‘I ddo nott thinkk I willl matterrialize commpletely. I ffindd itt verry ttirinngg, andd wee hhave mmuch ttoo ddoo.’

The trees were lashed into a violent frenzy. Meg screamed and clutched at Calvin, and Mrs Which’s authoritative voice called out, ‘Qquiett, chilldd!’

Did the shadow fall across the moon or did the moon simply go out, extinguished as abruptly and completely as a candle? There was still the sound of leaves, a terrified, terrifying rushing. All light was gone. Darkness was complete. Suddenly the wind was gone, and all sound. Meg felt that Calvin was being torn from her. When she reached for him her fingers touched nothing.

She screamed out, ‘Charles!’ and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know. The word was flung back down her throat and she choked on it.

She was completely alone.

She had lost the protection of Calvin’s hand. Charles was nowhere, either to save or to turn to. She was alone in a fragment of nothingness. No light, no sound, no feeling. Where was her body? She tried to move in her panic, but there was nothing to move. Just as light and sound had vanished, she was gone, too. The corporeal Meg simply was not.

Then she felt her limbs again. Her legs and arms were tingling faintly, as though they had been asleep. She blinked her eyes rapidly, but though she herself was somehow back, nothing else was. It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void.

It was the same way with the silence.This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, travelling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond the rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.

— I am asleep; I am dreaming, she thought. — I’m having a nightmare. I want to wake up. Let me wake up.

‘Well!’ Charles Wallace’s voice said. ‘That was quite a trip! I do think you might have warned us.’

Light began to pulse and quiver. Meg blinked and shoved shakily at her glasses and there was Charles Wallace standing indignantly in front of her, his hands on his hips. ‘Meg!’ he shouted. ‘Calvin! Where are you?’

She saw Charles, she heard him, but she could not go to him. She could not shove through the strange, trembling light to meet him.

Calvin’s voice came as though it were pushing through a cloud. ‘Well, just give me time, will you? I’m older than you are.’

Meg gasped. It wasn’t that Calvin wasn’t there and then that he was. It wasn’t that part of him came first and then the rest of him followed, like a hand and then an arm, an eye and then a nose. It was a sort of shimmering, a looking at Calvin through water, through smoke, through fire, and then there he was, solid and reassuring.