Authors: Madeleine L'Engle

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Classics, #Time Travel, #Retail, #Personal

A Wind in the Door (5 page)

BOOK: A Wind in the Door

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He said, “I wanted to come find you myself, Margaret, because I feel that I owe you an apology for my sharpness with you last week when you came to see me.” He held out a hand, pale in the moonlight wavering behind the clouds.

In utter confusion she reached out to take his hand, and as she did so, Louise rose up on the wall behind her, hissing and making a strange, warning clacking. Meg turned to see the snake, looking as large and hooded as a cobra, hissing angrily at Mr. Jenkins, raising her large dark coils to strike.

Mr. Jenkins screamed, in a way that she had never known a man could scream, a high, piercing screech.

Then he rose up into the night like a great, flapping bird, flew, screaming across the sky, became a rent, an emptiness, a slash of nothingness—

Meg found that she, too, was screaming.

It could not have happened.

There was no one, no thing there.

She thought she saw Louise slithering back through a dark recess in the stone wall, disappearing—

It was impossible.

Her mind had snapped. It was some kind of hallucination caused by the weather, by her anxiety, by the state of the world—

A thick, ugly smell, like spoiled cabbage, like flower
stalks left too long in water, rose like a miasma from the place where Mr. Jenkins had been—

But he could not have been there—

She screamed again, in uncontrollable panic, as a tall shape hurtled towards her.

Calvin. Calvin O’Keefe.

She burst into hysterical tears of relief.

He vaulted over the wall to her, his strong, thin arms tight around her, holding her. “Meg. Meg, what is it?”

She could not control her terrified sobbing.

“Meg, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” He shook her, urgently.

Gasping, she tried to tell him. “I know it sounds incredible—” she finished. She was still trembling violently, her heart racing. When he did not speak, but continued soothingly to pat her back, she said, through a few final, hiccuping sobs, “Oh, Calvin, I wish I
had
imagined it. Do you think—do you think maybe I did?”

“I don’t know,” Calvin said flatly. He continued to hold her strongly, comfortingly.

Now that Calvin was here, would take over, she was able to manage a slightly hysterical giggle. “Mr. Jenkins always said I have too much imagination—but it’s never been
that
kind of imagination. I’ve never hallucinated or anything, have I?”

“No,” he replied firmly. “You have not. What’s that awful stench?”

“I don’t know. It’s not nearly as bad now as it was just before you came.”

“It makes silage smell like roses. Yukh.”

“Calvin—Louise the Larger—it’s not the first time today Louise has done something peculiar.”

“What?”

She told him about Louise that afternoon. “But she wasn’t attacking or anything then, she was still friendly. She’s always been a friendly snake.” She let her breath out in a long, quavering sigh. “Cal, let me have your handkerchief, please. My glasses are filthy and I can’t see a thing, and right now I’d like to be able to see what’s going on.”

“My handkerchief is filthy.” But Calvin fished in his pockets.

“It’s better than a kilt.” Meg spat on her glasses and wiped them. Without their aid she could see no more of the older boy than a vague blur, so she made bold to say, “Oh, Cal, I was hoping you might come over tonight anyhow.”

“I’m surprised you’re even willing to speak to me. I came over to apologize for what my brother did to Charles Wallace.”

Meg adjusted her spectacles with her usual rough shove up the nose, just as a shaft of moonlight broke
through the clouds and illuminated Calvin’s troubled expression. She returned his handkerchief. “It wasn’t your fault.” Then—“I must have had a mental aberration or something, about Louise and Mr. Jenkins, mustn’t I?”

“I don’t know, Meg. You’ve never had a mental aberration before, have you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Fewmets to Mr. Jenkins, anyhow.”

She almost shouted, “What did you say!”

“Fewmets to Mr. Jenkins. Fewmets is my new swear word. I’m tired of all the old ones. Fewmets are dragon droppings, and—”

“I know fewmets are dragon droppings! What I want to know is why you picked on fewmets, of all things?”

“It seemed quite a reasonable choice to me.”

Suddenly she was shaking again. “Calvin—please—don’t—it’s too serious.”

He dropped his bantering tone. “Okay, Meg, what’s up about fewmets?”

“Oh, Cal, I was so sort of shook about the Mr. Jenkins thing I almost forgot about the dragons.”

“The what?”

She told him, all about Charles Wallace and his dragons, “and he’s never hallucinated before, either.” She told him again about Louise greeting the shadow of something they had not quite seen, “but it certainly
wasn’t Mr. Jenkins. Louise wasn’t in the least friendly about Mr. Jenkins.”

“It’s wild,” Calvin said, “absolutely wild.”

“But we did see fewmets, Calvin—or something, more like feathers, really, but not like real feathers. Charles Wallace took one home—there was a whole pile of them—these sort of feathers, and dragon scales, by the biggest rock in the north pasture.”

Calvin sprang to his feet. “Let’s go, then! Bring your flashlight.”

It was possible now for her to cross the orchard and go into the pasture with Calvin to take the lead. Uppermost in Meg’s mind, superseding fear, was the need to prove that she and Charles Wallace weren’t just making something up, that the wild tales she had told Calvin were real—not Mr. Jenkins turning into a flying emptiness in the sky, she did not want that to be real, but the dragons. For if nothing that had happened touched on reality, then she was going out of her mind.

When they reached the pasture, Calvin took the light from her. “I’ll go ahead a bit.”

But Meg followed close on his heels. She thought she could sense disbelief as he swept the arc of light around the base of the rock. The beam came to rest in a small circle, and in the center of the circle shone something gold and glittering.

“Phew—” Calvin said.

Meg giggled with relief and tension. “Don’t you mean fewmets? Has anybody ever seen a fewmet?”

Calvin was down on hands and knees, running his fingers through the little pile of feathers and scales. “Okay, okay, this is most peculiar. But what left it? After all, a gang of dragons just doesn’t disappear.”

“A drive of dragons,” Meg corrected, automatically. “Do you really think it’s dragons?”

Calvin did not answer. He asked, “Did you tell your mother?”

“Charles Wallace showed the feather to the twins during dinner, and Mother saw it, too. The twins said it wasn’t a bird’s feather because the rachis isn’t right, and then the conversation got shifted. I think Charles shifted it on purpose.”

“How is he?” Calvin asked. “How badly did Whippy hurt him?”

“He’s been hurt worse. Mother put compresses on his eye, and it’s turning black and blue. But that’s about all.” She was not ready, yet, to mention his pallor, or shortness of wind. “You’d think we lived in the roughest section of an inner city or something, instead of way out in the peaceful country. There isn’t a day he doesn’t get shoved around by one of the bigger kids—it’s not only Whippy. Cal, why is it that my parents know all about physics and biology and stuff, and nothing about keeping their son from being mugged?”

Calvin pulled himself up onto the smaller of the two stones. “If it’s any consolation to you, Meg, I doubt if my parents know the difference between physics and biology. Maybe Charles would be better off in a city school, where there’re lots of different kinds of kids, white, black, yellow, Spanish-speaking, rich, poor. Maybe he wouldn’t stand out as being so different if there were other different people, too. Here—well, everybody’s sort of alike. People’re kind of proud of having your parents live here, and pally with the president and all, but you Murrys certainly aren’t like anybody else.”

“You’ve managed.”

“Same way the twins have. Playing by the laws of the jungle. You know that. Anyhow, my parents and grandparents were born right here in the village, and so were my great-grandparents. The O’Keefes may be shiftless, but at least they’re not newcomers.” His voice deepened with an old sadness.

“Oh, Cal—”

He shrugged his dark mood aside. “I think maybe we’d better go talk to your mother.”

“Not yet.” Charles Wallace’s voice came from behind them. “She’s got enough worries. Let’s wait till the dragons come back.”

Meg jumped. “Charles! Why aren’t you in bed? Does Mother know you’re out?”

“I was in bed. Mother doesn’t know I’m out. Obviously.”

Meg was near tears of exhaustion. “Nothing is obvious any more.” Then, in her big-sister tone of voice: “You shouldn’t be out this late.”

“What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Meg, I came out because something frightened you.” He sighed, a strangely tired and ancient sigh from so small a boy. “I was almost asleep and I felt you screaming.”

“I don’t want to tell you about it. I don’t want it to have happened. Where’s Fortinbras?”

“I left him at home and told him not to let on that I wasn’t sound asleep in bed. I didn’t want him tangling with dragons. Meg, what happened? You’ve got to tell me.”

Meg said, “Okay, Charles, I don’t doubt your dragons any more. No dragons could be more incredible than Mr. Jenkins coming to look for me in the garden, and then turning into a—a great shrieking bird of nothingness.” She spoke quickly, because what she was saying sounded so absurd.

Charles Wallace did not laugh. He opened his mouth to speak, then swung around. “Who’s here?”

“Nobody,” Calvin said. “Meg and me. You.” But he jumped down from the rock.

“There’s somebody else. Near.”

Meg moved closer to Calvin. Her heart, it seemed, stopped beating.

“Hush,” Charles Wallace said, though they had not spoken. He listened with lifted head, like Fortinbras catching a scent.

To the right of the pasture was a woods, a small forest of oak, maple, beech, stripped of all but a few brittle leaves, backed by the dark winter richness of assorted spruce and pine. The ground, which the moonlight did not reach, was covered with fallen damp leaves and pine needles which would silence footsteps. Then they heard the sharp crack of a breaking twig.

Meg and Calvin, straining to peer through the trees, saw nothing.

Then Charles Wallace cried, “My dragons!”

They turned around, and they saw, there by the great rock—

wings, it seemed like hundreds of wings, spreading, folding, stretching—

and eyes

how many eyes can a drive of dragons have?

and small jets of flame

Suddenly a voice called to them from the direction of the woods, “Do not be afraid!”

THREE

The Man in the Night

A
huge dark form strode swiftly through the woods and into the pasture; it reached them in a few strides, and then stood very still, so that the folds of the long robe seemed chiseled out of granite.

“Do not be afraid,” he repeated. “He won’t hurt you.”

He?

Yes. Charles Wallace’s drive of dragons was a single creature, although Meg was not at all surprised that Charles Wallace had confused this fierce, wild being with dragons. She had the feeling that she never saw all of it at once, and which of all the eyes could she meet? merry eyes, wise eyes, ferocious eyes, kitten eyes, dragon eyes, opening and closing, looking at her, looking at Charles Wallace and Calvin and the strange tall man. And wings, wings in constant motion, covering and uncovering the eyes. When the wings were spread out they had a span of at least ten feet, and when they
were all folded in, the creature resembled a misty, feathery sphere. Little spurts of flame and smoke spouted up between the wings; it could certainly start a grass fire if it weren’t careful. Meg did not wonder that Charles Wallace had not approached it.

Again the tall stranger reassured them. “He won’t hurt you.” The stranger was dark, dark as night and tall as a tree, and there was something in the repose of his body, the quiet of his voice, which drove away fear.

Charles Wallace stepped towards him. “Who are you?”

“A Teacher.”

Charles Wallace’s sigh was longing. “I wish you were
my
teacher.”

“I am.” The cello-like voice was calm, slightly amused.

Charles Wallace advanced another step. “And my dragons?”

The tall man—the Teacher—held out his hand in the direction of the wild creature, which seemed to gather itself together, to rise up, to give a great, courteous bow to all of them.

The Teacher said, “His name is Proginoskes.”

Charles Wallace said, “He?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not dragons?”

“He is a cherubim.”

“What!?”

“A cherubim.”

Flame spurted skywards in indignation at the doubt in the atmosphere. Great wings raised and spread and the children were looked at by a great many eyes. When the wild thing spoke, it was not in vocal words, but directly into their minds.

“I suppose you think I ought to be a golden-haired baby-face with no body and two useless little wings?”

Charles Wallace stared at the great creature. “It might be simpler if you were.”

Meg pulled her poncho closer about her, for protection in case the cherubim spouted fire in her direction.

“It is a constant amazement to me,” the cherubim thought at them, “that so many earthling artists paint cherubim to resemble baby pigs.”

Calvin made a sound which, if he had been less astonished, would have been a laugh. “But cherubim is plural.”

The fire-spouting beast returned, “I am practically plural. The little boy thought I was a drive of dragons, didn’t he? I am certainly not a cherub. I am a singular cherubim.”

“What are you doing here?” Charles Wallace asked.

“I was sent.”

“Sent?”

“To be in your class. I don’t know what I’ve done to be assigned to a class with such immature earthlings. I
have a hard enough job as it is. I really don’t fancy coming back to school at all at my age.”

“How old are you?” Meg held her poncho out wide, ready to use it as a shield.

“Age, for cherubim, is immaterial. It’s only for timebound creatures that age even exists. I am, in cherubic terms, still a child, and that is all you need to know. It’s very rude to ask questions about age.” Two of the wings crossed and uncrossed. The message had been rueful, rather than annoyed.

Charles Wallace spoke to the tall man. “You are my teacher, and his teacher, too?”

“I am.”

Charles Wallace looked up at the strange dark face which was stern and gentle at the same time. “It’s too good to be true. I think I must be having a dream. I wish I’d just go on dreaming and not wake up.”

“What is real?” The Teacher stretched out an arm, and gently touched the bruise on Charles Wallace’s cheek, the puffed and discolored flesh under his eye. “You are awake.”

“Or if you’re asleep,” Meg said, “we’re all having the same dream. Aren’t we, Calvin?”

“The thing that makes me think we’re awake is that if I were to dream about a cherubim, it wouldn’t look like that—that—”

Several very blue, long-lashed eyes looked directly at
Calvin. “Proginoskes, as the Teacher told you. Proginoskes. And don’t get any ideas about calling me Cherry, or Cheery, or Bimmy.”

“It would be easier,” Charles Wallace said.

But the creature repeated firmly, “Proginoskes.”

Out of the dark form of the Teacher came a deep, gentle rumbling of amusement, a rumbling which expanded and rose and bubbled into a great laugh. “All right, then, my children. Are you ready to start—we will call it, for want of a better word in your language, school—are you ready to start school?”

Charles Wallace, a small and rather ludicrous figure in the yellow slicker he had pulled on over his pajamas, looked up at the oak-tree height and strength of the Teacher. “The sooner the better. Time’s running out.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Calvin objected. “What are you going to do with Charles? You and the—the cherubim can’t take him off without consulting his parents.”

“What makes you think I’m planning to?” The Teacher gave an easy little jump, and there he was, comfortably sitting on the tallest of the glacial rocks as though it were a stool, his arms loosely about his knees, the folds of his robe blending with the moonlit stone. “And I came not only to call Charles Wallace. I came to call all three of you.”

Meg looked startled. “All of us? But—”

“You may address me as Blajeny,” the Teacher said.

Charles Wallace asked, “Mr. Blajeny? Dr. Blajeny? Sir Blajeny?”

“Blajeny is enough. That is all of my name you need to know. Are you ready?”

Meg still looked astonished. “Calvin and me, too?”

“Yes.”

“But—” As always when she felt unsure, Meg was argumentative. “Calvin doesn’t need—he’s the best student in school, and the best athlete, he’s important and everything. And I’m getting along, now. It’s Charles who’s the trouble—you can see for yourself. School, ordinary school, is just not going to work out for him.”

Blajeny’s voice was cool. “That is hardly my problem.”

“Then why are you here?” That Blajeny might have been sent solely to help her brother did not seem at all astonishing to Meg.

Again came the rumble that bubbled up into a laugh. “My dears, you must not take yourselves so seriously. Why should school be easy for Charles Wallace?”

“It shouldn’t be
this
bad. This is the United States of America. They’ll hurt him if somebody doesn’t do something.”

“He will have to learn to defend himself.”

Charles Wallace, looking very small and defenseless, spoke quietly. “The Teacher is right. It’s a question of learning to adapt, and nobody can do that for me. If everybody will leave me alone, and stop trying to help
me, I’ll learn, eventually, how not to be conspicuous. I can assure you I haven’t mentioned mitochondria and farandolae lately.”

The Teacher nodded grave approval.

Charles Wallace moved closer to him. “I’m very glad you haven’t come because I’m making such a mess of school. But—Blajeny—if you haven’t come because of that, then why are you here?”

“I have come not so much to offer you my help as to ask for yours.”

“Ours?” Meg asked.

Charles Wallace looked up at the Teacher. “I’m not much of a help to anybody right now. It isn’t just that I’m not getting along at school—”

“Yes,” Blajeny said. “I know of the other problem. Nevertheless you are called, and anybody who is invited to study with one of the Teachers is called because he is needed. You have talents we cannot afford to lose.”

“Then—”

“We must find out what is making you ill and, if possible, make you well again.”

“If possible?” Meg asked anxiously.

Calvin asked sharply, “Charles? Ill? What’s wrong? What’s the matter with Charles?”

“Look at him,” Meg said in a low voice. “Look how pale he is. And he has trouble breathing. He got out of
breath just walking across the orchard.” She turned to the Teacher. “Oh, please, please, Blajeny, can you help?”

Blajeny looked down at her, darkly, quietly. “I think, my child, that it is you who must help.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“You know I’d do anything in the world to help Charles.”

Calvin looked questioningly at the Teacher.

“Yes, Calvin, you, too.”

“How? How can we help?”

“You will learn as the lessons progress.”

Calvin asked, “Where are we going to have these lessons, then? Where’s your school?”

Blajeny jumped lightly down from the rock. Despite his height and girth he moved, Meg thought, as though he were used to a heavier gravity than earth’s. He strode lightly halfway across the pasture to where there was a large, flat rock where the children often went with their parents to watch the stars. He dropped down onto the rock and lay stretched out on his back, gesturing to the others to join him. Meg lay beside him, with Calvin on her other side, so that she felt protected, not only from the cold night wind but from the cherubim, who had reached the rock with the beat of a wing and assorted himself into an assemblage of wings and eyes and puffs
of smoke at a discreet distance from Charles Wallace, who was on Blajeny’s other side.

“It’s all right, dragons,” Charles Wallace said. “I’m not afraid of you.”

The cherubim rearranged his wings. “Proginoskes, please.”

Blajeny looked up at the sky, raised his arm, and made a wide, embracing gesture. The clouds had almost dispersed; only a few rapidly flying streamers veiled the stars, which blazed with the fierce brilliance of the rapidly plummeting mercury. The Teacher’s sweeping motion indicated the entire sparkling stretch of sky. Then he sat up and folded his arms across his chest, and his strange luminous eyes turned inwards, so that he was looking not at the stars nor at the children, but into some deep, dark place far within himself, and then further. He sat there, moving in, in, deeper and deeper, for time out of time. Then the focus of his eyes returned to the children, and he gave his radiant smile and answered Calvin’s question as though not a moment had passed.

“Where is my school? Here, there, everywhere. In the schoolyard during first-grade recess. With the cherubim and seraphim. Among the farandolae.”

Charles Wallace exclaimed, “My mother’s isolated the farandolae!”

“So she has.”

“Blajeny, do you know if something’s wrong with my farandolae and mitochondria?”

Blajeny replied quietly, “Your mother and Dr. Colubra are trying to find that out.”

“Well, then, what do we do now?”

“Go home to bed.”

“But school—”

“You will all go to school as usual in the morning.”

It was total anticlimax. “But
your
school—” Meg cried in disappointment. She had hoped that Charles Wallace would never have to enter the old red school building again, that Blajeny would take over, make everything all right …

“My children,” Blajeny said gravely, “my school building is the entire cosmos. Before your time with me is over, I may have to take you great distances, and to very strange places.”

“Are we your whole class?” Calvin asked. “Meg and Charles Wallace and me?”

Proginoskes let out a puff of huffy smoke.

“Sorry—and the cherubim.”

Blajeny said, “Wait. You will know when the time comes.”

“And why on earth is one of our classmates a cherubim?” Meg said. “Sorry, Proginoskes, but it does seem very insulting to
you
to have to be with mortals like us.”

Proginoskes batted several eyes in apology. “I didn’t mean what I said about immature earthlings. If we have been sent to the same Teacher, then we have things to learn from each other. A cherubim is not a
higher
order than earthlings, you know, just different.”

Blajeny nodded. “Yes. You have much to learn from each other. Meanwhile, I will give each of you assignments. Charles Wallace, can you guess what yours is?”

“To learn to adapt.”

“I don’t want you to change!” Meg cried.

“Neither do I,” Blajeny replied. “Charles Wallace’s problem is to learn to adapt while remaining wholly himself.”

BOOK: A Wind in the Door

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