‘How?’
‘Your cloven pine thing. Isn’t father imprisoned in a cloven pine even more than Charles? Look at him, in that column there. Get him out, Calvin.’
Calvin spoke in an exhausted way. ‘Meg, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to get in. Meg, they’re asking too much of us.’
‘Mrs Who’s spectacles!’ Meg said suddenly. Mrs Who had told her to use them only as a last resort, and surely that was now. She reached into her pocket and the spectacles were there, cool and light and comforting. With trembling fingers she pulled them out.
‘Give me those spectacles!’ Charles Wallace’s voice came in a harsh command, and he scrambled up off the floor and ran at her.
She barely had time to snatch off her own glasses and put on Mrs Who’s, and, as it was, one earpiece dropped down her cheek and they barely stayed on her nose. As Charles Wallace lunged at her she flung herself against the transparent door and she was through it. She was in the cell with the imprisoning column that held her father. With trembling fingers she straightened Mrs Who’s glasses and put her own in her pocket.
‘Give them to me,’ came Charles Wallace’s menacing voice, and he was in the cell with her, with Calvin on the outside pounding frantically to get in.
Meg kicked at Charles Wallace and ran at the column. She felt as though she were going through something dark and cold. But she was through. ‘Father!’ she cried. And she was in his arms.
This was the moment for which she had been waiting, not only since Mrs Which whisked them off on their journeys, but during the long months and years before, when the letters had stopped coming, when people made remarks about Charles Wallace, when Mrs Murry showed a rare flash of loneliness or grief. This was the moment that meant that now and for ever everything would be all right.
As she pressed against her father all was forgotten except joy. There was only the peace and comfort of leaning against him, the wonder of the protecting circle of his arms, the feeling of complete reassurance and safety that his presence always gave her.
Her voice broke on a happy sob. ‘Oh, Father! Oh, Father!’
‘Meg!’ he cried in glad surprise. ‘Meg, what are you doing here? Where’s your mother? Where are the boys?’
She looked out of the column, and there was Charles Wallace in the cell, an alien expression distorting his face. She turned back to her father. There was no more time for greeting, for joy, for explanations. ‘We have to go to Charles Wallace,’ she said, her words tense. ‘Quickly.’
Her father’s hands were moving gropingly over her face, and as she felt the touch of his strong, gentle fingers, she realized with a flooding of horror that she could see him, that she could see Charles in the cell and Calvin in the corridor, but her father could not see them, could not see her. She looked at him in panic, but his eyes were the same steady blue that she remembered. She moved her hand brusquely across his line of vision, but he did not blink.
‘Father!’ she cried. ‘Father! Can’t you see me?’
His arms went around her again in a comforting, reassuring gesture. ‘No, Meg.’
‘But, Father, I can see you –’ Her voice trailed off. Suddenly she shoved Mrs Who’s glasses down her nose and peered over them, and immediately she was in complete and utter darkness. She snatched them off her face and thrust them at her father. ‘Here.’
His fingers closed about the spectacles. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid your glasses won’t help.’
‘But they’re Mrs Who’s, they aren’t mine,’ she explained, not realizing that her words would sound like gibberish to him. ‘Please try them, Father. Please!’ She waited while she felt him fumbling in the dark. ‘Can you see now?’ she asked. ‘Can you see now, Father?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. The wall is transparent, now. How extraordinary! I could almost see the atoms rearranging!’ His voice had its old familiar sound of excitement and discovery. It was the way he sounded sometimes when he came home from his laboratory after a good day and began to tell his wife about his work. Then he cried out, ‘Charles! Charles Wallace!’ And then, ‘Meg, what’s happened to him? What’s wrong? That is Charles, isn’t it?’
‘IT has him, Father,’ she explained tensely. ‘He’s gone into IT. Father, we have to help him.’
For a long moment Mr Murry was silent. The silence was filled with the words he was thinking and would not speak out loud to his daughter. Then he said, ‘Meg, I’m in prison here. I have been for –’
‘Father, these walls. You can go through them. I came through the column to get in to you. It was Mrs Who’s glasses.’
Mr Murry did not stop to ask who Mrs Who was. He slapped his hand against the translucent column. ‘It seems solid enough.’
‘But I got in,’ Meg repeated. ‘I’m here. Maybe the glasses help the atoms rearrange. Try it, Father.’
She waited, breathlessly, and after a moment she realized that she was alone in the column. She put out her hands in the darkness and felt its smooth surface curving about her on all sides. She seemed utterly alone, the silence and darkness impenetrable for ever. She fought down panic until she heard her father’s voice coming to her very faintly.
‘I’m coming back in for you, Meg.’
It was almost a tangible feeling as the atoms of the strange material seemed to part to let him through to her. In their beach house at Cape Canaveral there had been a curtain between dining and living room made of long strands of rice. It looked like a solid curtain, but you could walk right through it. At first Meg had flinched each time she came up to the curtain; but gradually she got used to it and would go running right through, leaving the long strands of rice swinging behind her. Perhaps the atoms of these walls were arranged in somewhat the same fashion.
‘Put your arms around my neck, Meg,’ Mr Murry said. ‘Hold on to me tightly. Close your eyes and don’t be afraid.’ He picked her up and she wrapped her long legs round his waist and clung to his neck. With Mrs Who’s spectacles on she had felt only a faint darkness and coldness as she moved through the column. Without the glasses she felt the same awful clamminess she had felt when they tessered through the outer darkness of Camazotz. Whatever the Black Thing was to which Camazotz had submitted, it was within as well as without the planet. For a moment it seemed that the chill darkness would tear her from her father’s arms but they tightened about her, and she was no longer lost in panic. She knew that if her father could not get her through the wall he would stay with her rather than leave her; she knew that she was safe as long as she was in his arms.
Then they were outside. The column rose up in the middle of the room, crystal clear and empty.