‘Oh, thank you,’ Mrs Whatsit said. ‘You’re so clever!’
‘Un asno viejo sabe 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.’
4. The Black Thing
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.
‘Meg!’ Charles Wallace’s voice came. ‘Meg! Calvin, where’s Meg?’
‘I’m right here,’ she tried to say, but her voice seemed to be caught at its source.
‘Meg!’ Calvin cried, and he turned round, looking about wildly.
‘Mrs Which, you haven’t left Meg behind, have you?’ Charles Wallace shouted.
‘If you’ve hurt Meg, any of you –’ Calvin started, but suddenly Meg felt a violent push and a shattering as though she had been thrust through a wall of glass.
‘Oh, there you are!’ Charles Wallace said, and rushed over to her and hugged her.
‘But where am I?’ Meg asked breathlessly, relieved to hear that her voice was now coming out of her in more or less a normal way.
She looked round rather wildly. They were standing in a sunlit field, and the air about them was moving with the delicious fragrance that comes only on the rarest of spring days when the sun’s touch is gentle and the apple blossoms are just beginning to unfold. She pushed her glasses up her nose to reassure herself that what she was seeing was real.
They had left the silver glint of a biting autumn evening; and now around them everything was golden with light. The grasses of the field were a tender new green, and scattered about were tiny, multicoloured flowers. Meg turned slowly to face a mountain reaching so high into the sky that its peak was lost in a crown of puffy white clouds. From the trees at the base of the mountain came a sudden singing of birds. There was an air of such peace and joy all around her that her heart’s wild thumping slowed.
‘When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’
came Mrs Who’s voice. Suddenly the three of them were there, Mrs Whatsit with her pink stole askew; Mrs Who with her spectacles gleaming; and Mrs Which still little more than a shimmer. Delicate, multicoloured butterflies were fluttering about them, as though in greeting.
Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who began to giggle, and they giggled until it seemed that, whatever their private joke was, they would fall down with the wild fun of it. The shimmer seemed to be laughing, too. It became vaguely darker and more solid; and then there appeared a figure in a black robe and a black peaked hat, beady eyes, a beaked nose and long grey hair; one bony claw clutched a broomstick.
‘Wwell, jusstt ttoo kkeepp yyou girrlls happpy,’ the strange voice said, and Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who fell into each other’s arms in gales of laughter.
‘If you ladies have had your fun I think you should tell Calvin and Meg a little more about all this,’ Charles Wallace said coldly. ‘You scared Meg half out of her wits, whisking her off this way without any warning.’
‘Finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis,’ Mrs Who intoned. ‘Horace. To action little, less to words inclined.’
‘Mrs Who, I wish you’d stop quoting!’ Charles Wallace sounded very annoyed.