‘We can’t leave Charles,’ Calvin told her, ‘and we can’t go before we’ve found your father. You know that. But you’re right, Meg, and Mrs Which is right. This is Evil.’
Charles Wallace shook his head, and scorn and disapproval seemed to emanate from him. ‘Come. We’re wasting time.’ He moved rapidly down the corridor, but continued to speak. ‘How dreadful it is to be low, individual organisms. Tch-tch-tch.’ His pace quickened from step to step, his short legs flashing, so that Meg and Calvin almost had to run to keep up with him. ‘Now see this,’ he said. He raised his hand and suddenly they could see through one of the walls into a small room. In the room a little boy was bouncing a ball. He was bouncing it in rhythm, and the walls of his little cell seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the ball. And each time the ball bounced he screamed as though he were in pain.
‘That’s the little boy we saw this afternoon,’ Calvin said sharply, ‘the little boy who wasn’t bouncing the ball like the others.’
Charles Wallace giggled again. ‘Yes. Every once in a while there’s a little trouble with cooperation, but it’s easily taken care of. After today he’ll never desire to deviate again. Ah, here we are.’
He moved rapidly down the corridor and again held up his hand to make the wall transparent. They looked into another small room or cell. In the centre of it was a large, round, transparent column, and inside this column was a man.
‘FATHER!’ Meg screamed.
9. IT
MEG RUSHED at the man imprisoned in the column, but as she reached what seemed to be the open door she was hurled back as though she had crashed into a brick wall.
Calvin caught her. ‘It’s just transparent like glass this time,’ he told her. ‘We can’t go through it.’
Meg was so sick and dizzy from the impact that she could not answer. For a moment she was afraid that she would be sick or faint. Charles Wallace laughed again, the laugh that was not his own, and it was this that saved her, for once more anger overcame her pain and fear. Charles Wallace, her own real, dear Charles Wallace, never laughed at her when she hurt herself. Instead, his arms would go quickly around her neck and he would press his cheek against hers. But the demon Charles Wallace sniggered. She turned away from him and looked again at the man in the column.
‘Oh, Father –’ she whispered longingly, but the man in the column did not move to look at her. The horn-rimmed glasses, which always seemed so much a part of him, were gone, and the expression of his eyes was turned inwards, as though he were deep in thought. He had grown a beard, and the silky brown was shot with grey. His hair, too, had not been cut. It wasn’t just the overlong hair of the man in the snapshot at Cape Canaveral; it was pushed back from his high forehead and fell softly almost to his shoulders, so that he looked like someone in another century, or a shipwrecked sailor. But there was no question, despite the change in him, that he was her father, her own beloved father.
‘My, he looks a mess, doesn’t he?’ Charles Wallace said, and sniggered.
Meg swung on him with sick rage, ‘Charles, that’s father! Father!’
‘So what?’
Meg turned away from him and held out her arms to the man in the column.
‘He doesn’t see us, Meg,’ Calvin said gently.
‘Why? Why?’
‘I think it’s sort of like those little peepholes they have in apartments, in the front doors,’ Calvin explained. ‘You know. From inside you can look through and see everything. And from outside you can’t see anything at all. We can see him, but he can’t see us.’
‘Charles!’ Meg pleaded. ‘Let me in to father!’
‘Why?’ Charles asked placidly.
Meg remembered that when they were in the room with the man with red eyes she had knocked Charles Wallace back into himself when she tackled him and his head cracked on the floor; so she hurled herself at him. But before she could reach him his fist shot out and punched her hard in the stomach. She gasped for breath. Sickly, she turned away from her brother, back to the transparent wall. There was the cell, there was the column with her father inside. Although she could see him, although she was almost close enough to touch him, he seemed farther away than he had been when she had pointed him out to Calvin in the picture on the piano. He stood there quietly as though frozen in a column of ice, an expression of suffering and endurance on his face that pierced into her heart like an arrow.
‘You say you want to help father?’ Charles Wallace’s voice came from behind her, with no emotion whatsoever.
‘Yes. Don’t you?’ Meg demanded, swinging round and glaring at him.
‘But of course. That is why we are here.’
‘Then what do we do?’ Meg tried to keep the desperation out of her voice, trying to sound as drained of feeling as Charles, but nevertheless ending on a squeak.
‘You must do as I have done, and go in to IT,’ Charles said.
‘No.’
‘I can see you don’t really want to save father.’
‘How will my being a zombie save father?’
‘You will just have to take my word for it, Margaret,’ came the cold, flat voice from Charles Wallace, ‘IT wants you and IT will get you. Don’t forget that I, too, am part of IT, now. You know I wouldn’t have done IT if IT weren’t the right thing to do.’
‘Calvin,’ Meg asked in agony, ‘will it really save father?’
But Calvin was paying no attention to her. He seemed to be concentrating with all his power on Charles Wallace. He stared into the pale blue that was all that was left of Charles Wallace’s eyes. ‘And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands … / she did confine thee … into a cloven pine –’ he whispered, and Meg recognized Mrs Who’s words to him.
For a moment Charles Wallace seemed to listen. Then he shrugged and turned away. Calvin followed him, trying to keep his eyes focused on Charles’s. ‘If you want a witch, Charles,’ he said, ‘IT is the witch. Not our ladies. Good thing I had The Tempest at school this year, isn’t it, Charles? It was the witch who put Ariel in the cloven pine, wasn’t it?’
Charles Wallace’s voice seemed to come from a great distance. ‘Stop staring at me.’
Breathing quickly with excitement, Calvin continued to pin Charles Wallace with his stare. ‘You’re like Ariel in the cloven pine, Charles. And I can let you out. Look at me, Charles. Come back to us.’
Again the shudder went through Charles Wallace.
Calvin’s intense voice hit at him. ‘Come back, Charles. Come back to us.’
Again Charles shuddered. And then it was as though an invisible hand had smacked against his chest and knocked him to the ground, and the stare with which Calvin had held him was broken. Charles sat there on the floor of the corridor whimpering, not a small boy’s sound, but a fearful, animal noise.
‘Calvin.’ Meg turned on him, clasping her hands intensely. ‘Try to get to father.’
Calvin shook his head. ‘Charles almost came out. I almost did it. He almost came back to us.’
‘Try father,’ Meg said again.