A Wrinkle in Time Quintet (60 page)

“I thought you were talking the way you used to. I
thought you were all right!” Her voice rose in frustration and outrage. “Not Gedder! Mortmain!”

He tried to come back to her, but
he could not. “Same difference. Same smell. The baby has to come from Madoc. Bran and Zillah have to have the baby because of the prayer.”

“What prayer?” she shouted.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“The letters.”

“What letters?”

He became impatient. “Bran’s letters, of course.”

“But we’ve read them all. There wasn’t anything like that in them.”

“Found some more.”

“When? Where?”

“In the attic. Grandma helps me read them.”

“Where are they?” she demanded.

He fumbled under his pillow. “Here.”

* * *

Chuck walked through a spring evening, smelling of growing grass, and blossoms drifting from the trees. He walked over
the fields, over the brook, drinking the water rushing with melting snow, lifting his head, clambering to his feet, going on to the flat rock. Pain walked with him, and there was a dark veil of cloud between his eyes and the world. If a chair was pulled out of place he walked into it. Trees and rocks did not move; he felt safer at the rock than anywhere else.

He did not tell anybody about the
veil.

He began to make mistakes in stamping the prices on the stock, but Duthbert Mortmain assumed it was because the fall had made him half-witted.

The baby came, a boy, and the mother no longer worked in the store. Paddy O’Keefe had dropped out of school and came in to help. Chuck followed Paddy’s instructions, marking the cans with the stamp which Paddy set for him. He heard Paddy say, “He’s
more trouble than he’s worth. Whyn’t you send him to the nuthouse?”

Mortmain muttered something about his wife.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll hurt the baby?” Paddy asked.

After that, Chuck stayed out of the way as much as possible, spending the warm days at the flat rock, the cold ones curled up in the attic. He saw Beezie to talk to only in the evenings, and Sunday afternoons.

“Chuck, what’s wrong
with your eyes?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not seeing properly.”

“It’s all right.”

“Ma—”

“Don’t tell Ma!”

“But you ought to see a doctor.”

“No! All they want is any excuse to put me away. You must have heard them, Paddy and Duthbert. They want to put me in an institution. For my own good, Mortmain said to Ma. He said I’m an idiot and I might hurt the baby.”

Beezie burst into tears and flung her
arms around her brother. “You wouldn’t!”

“I know I wouldn’t. But it’s the one thing Ma might listen to.”

“And you’re not an idiot!”

His cheeks were wet with Beezie’s tears. “If you tell them about my eyes they’ll put me in an insane asylum for my own good and the baby’s. I’m trying to keep out of the way.”

“I’ll help you, oh, Chuck, I’ll help you,” Beezie promised.

“I have to stay long enough
to make sure Matthew sends Zillah to Vespugia. He’s saving the money.”

“Oh, Chuck,” Beezie groaned. “Don’t let them hear you talk like this.”

* * *

As the veil deepened and darkened, his inner vision lightened. When the weather was fine he lay out on the flat rock all day, looking up toward the sky and seeing pictures, pictures more vivid than anything he had seen with unveiled eyes. His concentration
was so intense that he became part of all that was happening in the pictures. Sometimes in the evenings he told Beezie about them, pretending they were dreams, in order not to upset her.

“I dreamed about riding a unicorn. He was like moonlight, and so tall I had to climb a tree to get on his back, and we flew among the fireflies, and the unicorn and I sang together.”

“That’s a lovely dream.
Tell me more.”

“I dreamed that the valley was a lake, and I rode a beautiful fish sort of like a porpoise.”

“Pa said the valley was a lake, way back in prehistory. Archaeologists have found fish fossils in the glacial rocks. Maybe that’s why you dreamed it.”

“Grandma told us about the lake, the day we blew dandelion clocks.”

“Oh, Chuck, you’re so strange, the way you remember some things …”

“And I dreamed about a fire of roses, and—” He reached gropingly for her hand. “I can move in and out of time.”

“Oh, Chuck!”

“I can, Beezie.”

“Please—please stop.”

“It’s only dreams,” he comforted. “Well, then. But don’t tell Ma.”

“Only you and Grandma.”

“Oh, Chuck.”

He knew the route to the rock so well that it was easier for him to go in the dark, when he could see nothing, than in sunlight
when shafts of brilliance penetrated the veil like spears and hurt his eyes and confused his sense of direction.

Time. Time. There wasn’t much time.

Time. Time was as fluid as water.

He stood by Matthew’s couch. “You can’t wait any longer. You have to get Zillah to Vespugia now, or it will be too late.”

Matthew is writing, writing against time. It’s all in the book Pa talked about. They don’t
want me to see the book.

Ritchie is cutting a window in Brandon’s room, before leaving for Wales …

But Zillah isn’t there … Why is there an Indian girl instead?

Because it isn’t Zillah’s time. She comes later, in Matthew’s time

Unicorns can move in time

and idiots

space is more difficult

Paddy wants me out of the way. Paddy and Mortmain. Not much time

Did you not learn in Gwynedd that there is room for one king only?

You will be great, little Madog, and call the world your own, to keep or destroy as you will. It is an evil world, little Madog.

You will do good for your people, El Zarco, little Blue Eyes. The prayer
has been answered in you, blue for birth, blue for mirth

Which blue will it be

They are fighting

up on the cliff

on the steep rock

the world

it’s tilting

it’s going too fast

I’m going to fall

ELEVEN

All these I place

The light came back slowly. There had been shadows, nothing but deepening shadows, and pain, and slowly the pain began to leave and healing light touched his closed lids. He opened them. He was on the star-watching rock with Gaudior.

“The wind brought you out of Chuck.”

“What happened to him?”

“Mortmain had him institutionalized. Are you ready? It’s time—” A ripple
of tension moved along the unicorn’s flanks.

Charles Wallace felt the wind all about them, cold, and yet strengthening. “What Chuck saw—two men fighting—was it real?”

“What is real?” Gaudior replied infuriatingly.

“It’s important!”

“We do not always know what is important and what
is not. The wind sends a warning to hurry, hurry. Climb up, and hold very tight.”

“Should I bind myself to you
again?”

“The wind says there’s no time. We’ll fly out of time and through galaxies the Echthroi do not know. But the wind says it may be difficult to send you Within, even so. Hold on, and try not to be afraid.”

Charles Wallace felt the wind beneath them as Gaudior spread his wings. The flight at first was serene. Then he began to feel cold, a deep, penetrating cold far worse than the cold of
the Ice Age sea. This was a cold of the spirit as well as the body. He did not fall off the unicorn because he was frozen to him; his hands were congealed in their clenched grasp on the frozen mane.

Gaudior’s hoofs touched something solid, and the cold lifted just enough so that the boy was able to unclench his hands and open his frozen lids. They were in an open square in a frozen city of tall,
windowless buildings. There was no sign of tree, of grass. The blind cement was cracked, and there were great chunks of fallen masonry on the street.

“Where—” Charles Wallace started, and stopped.

The unicorn turned his head slowly. “A Projection—”

Charles Wallace followed his gaze and saw two men in gas masks patrolling the square with machine guns. “Do they see us?”

The question was answered
by the two men pausing,
turning, looking through the round black eyes of their gas masks directly at unicorn and boy, and raising their guns.

With a tremendous leap Gaudior launched upward, wings straining. Charles Wallace pressed close to the neck, hands twined in the mane. But for the moment they had escaped the Echthroi, and when Gaudior’s hoofs touched the ground, the Projection was gone.

“Those men with guns—” Charles Wallace started. “In a Projection, could they have killed us?”

“I don’t know,” Gaudior said, “and I didn’t want to wait to find out.”

Charles Wallace looked around in relief. When he had left Chuck, it was autumn, the cold wind stripping the trees. Now it was high spring, the old apple and pear trees in full blossom, and the smell of lilac on the breeze. All about
them, the birds were in full song.

“What should we do now?” Charles Wallace asked.

“At least you’re asking, not telling.” Gaudior sounded unusually cross, so the boy knew he was unusually anxious.

Meg shivered. Within the kythe she saw the star-watching rock and a golden summer’s day. There were two people on the rock, a young woman, and a young man—or a boy? She was not sure, because there
was something wrong with the boy. But from their dress she was positive that it was the time of the Civil War—around 1865.

* * *

The Within-ing was long and agonizing, instead of immediate, as it had always been before. Charles Wallace felt intolerable pain in his back, and a crushing of his legs. He could hear himself screaming. His body was being forced into another body, and at the same time
something was struggling to pull him out. He was being torn apart in a battle between two opposing forces. Sun blazed, followed by a blizzard of snow, snow melted by raging fire, and violent flashings of lightning, driven by a mighty wind, which whipped across sea and land …

His body was gone and he was Within, Within a crippled body, the body of a young man with useless legs like a shriveled
child’s … Matthew Maddox.

From the waist up he looked not unlike Madoc, and about the same age, with a proud head and a lion’s mane of fair hair. But the body was nothing like Madoc’s strong and virile one. And the eyes were grey, grey as the ocean before rain.

Matthew was looking somberly at the girl, who appeared to be about his age, though her eyes were far younger than his. “Croeso f’annwyl,
Zillah.” He spoke the Welsh words of endearment lovingly. “Thank you for coming.”

“You knew I would. As soon as Jack O’Keefe brought your note, I set off. How did you get here?”

He indicated a low wagon which stood a little way from the rock.

She looked at the powerful torso, and deeply muscled shoulders and arms. “By yourself, all the way?”

“No. I can do it, but it takes me a long time, and
I had to go over the store ledgers this morning. When I went to the stables to find Jack to deliver the note, I swallowed my pride and asked him to bring me.”

Zillah spread her billowing white skirts about her on the rock. She wore a wide-brimmed leghorn hat with blue ribbons, which brought out the highlights in her straight, shining black hair, and a locket on a blue ribbon at her throat. To
Matthew Maddox she was the most beautiful, and desirable, and—to him—the most unattainable woman in the world.

“Matt, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“Something’s happened to Bran.”

She paled. “How do you know? Are you sure?”

“Last night I woke out of a sound sleep with an incredibly sharp pain in my leg. Not my own familiar pain, Bran’s pain. And he was calling out to me to help him.”

“O dear
Lord. Is he going to be all right?”

“He’s alive. He’s been reaching out to me all day.”

She buried her face in her hands, so that her words were muffled. “Thank you for telling me. You and Bran—you’ve always been so close, even closer than most twins.”

He acknowledged this with a nod. “We were always close, but it was after my accident that—it was Bran who brought me back into life, Zillah,
you know that.”

She dropped her hand lightly on his shoulder. “If Bran is badly wounded, we’re going to need you. As once you needed Bran.”

After the accident, five years earlier, when his horse had crashed into a fence and rolled over on him, crushing his pelvis and legs and fracturing his spine, Bran had shown him no pity; instead, had fiercely tried to push his twin brother into as much independence
as possible, and refused to allow him to feel sorry for himself.

“But Rollo jumps fences twice as high with ease.”

“He didn’t jump that one.”

“Bran, just before he crashed, there was a horrible, putrid stink—”

“Stop going back over things. Get on with it.”

They continued to go everywhere together—until the war. Unlike Bran, Matthew could not lie about his age and join the cavalry.

“I lived
my life through Bran, vicariously,” Matthew told Zillah. “When he went to war, it was the first time he ever left me out.” Then: “When you and Bran fell in love, I knew that I had to start letting him go, to try to find some kind of life of my own, so that he’d be free. And it was easier to let go with you than with anyone
else in the world, because you’ve always treated me like a complete human
being, and I knew that the two of you would not exclude me from your lives.”

“Dear Matt. Never. And you are making your own life. You’re selling your stories and poems, and I think they’re as good as anything by Mark Twain.”

Matthew laughed, a warm laugh that lightened the pain lines in his face. “They’re only a beginner’s work.”