‘Try,’ Calvin urged. He sounded now as though he were very angry with her. ‘Wiggle your toes. Wiggle your fingers.’
‘I can’t. Where’s Charles Wallace?’ Her words were blunted by the stone tongue. Perhaps they could not understand her, for there was no answer.
‘We were knocked out for a minute, too,’ Calvin was saying. ‘You’ll be all right, Meg. Don’t get panicky.’ He was crouched over her, and though his voice continued to sound cross he was peering at her with anxious eyes. She knew that she must still have her glasses on because she could see him clearly, his freckles, his stubby black lashes, the bright blue of his eyes.
Her father was kneeling on her other side. The round lenses of Mrs Who’s glasses still blurred his eyes. He took one of her hands and rubbed it between his. ‘Can you feel my fingers?’ He sounded quite calm, as though there were nothing extraordinary in having her completely paralysed. At the quiet of his voice she felt calmer. Then she saw that there were great drops of sweat standing out on his forehead, and she noticed vaguely that the gentle breeze that touched her cheeks was cool. At first his words had been frozen and now the wind was mild: was it icy cold here or warm? ‘Can you feel my fingers?’ he asked again.
Yes, now she could feel a pressure against her wrist, but she could not nod. ‘Where’s Charles Wallace?’ Her words were a little less blurred. Her tongue, her lips were beginning to feel cold and numb, as though she had been given a massive injection at the dentist’s. She realized with a start that her body and limbs were cold, that not only was she not warm, she was frozen from head to toe, and it was this that had made her father’s words seem like ice, that had paralysed her.
‘I’m frozen –’ she said faintly. Camazotz hadn’t been this cold, a cold that cut deeper than the wind on the bitterest of winter days at home. She was away from IT, but this unexplained iciness was almost as bad. Her father had not saved her.
Now she was able to look around a little, and everything she could see was rusty and grey. There were trees edging the field in which she lay, and their leaves were the same brown as the grass. There were plants that might have been flowers, except that they were dull and grey. In contrast to the drabness of colour, to the cold that numbed her, the air was filled with a delicate, springlike fragrance, almost imperceptible as it blew softly against her face. She looked at her father and Calvin. They were both in their shirtsleeves and they looked perfectly comfortable. It was she, wrapped in their clothes, who was frozen too solid even to shiver.
‘Why am I so cold?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Charles Wallace?’ They did not answer. ‘Father, where are we?’
Mr Murry looked at her soberly. ‘I don’t know, Meg. I don’t tesser very well. I must have overshot, somehow. We’re not on Camazotz. I don’t know where we are. I think you’re so cold because we went through the Black Thing, and I thought for a moment it was going to tear you away from me.’
‘Is this a dark planet?’ Slowly her tongue was beginning to thaw; her words were less blurred.
‘I don’t think so,’ Mr Murry said, ‘but I know so little about anything that I can’t be sure.’
‘You shouldn’t have tried to tesser, then.’ She had never spoken to her father in this way before. The words seemed hardly to be hers.
Calvin looked at her, shaking his head. ‘It was the only thing to do. At least it got us off Camazotz.’
‘Why did we go without Charles Wallace? Did we just leave him there?’ The words that were not really hers came out cold and accusing.
‘We didn’t “just leave him”,’ her father said. ‘Remember that the human brain is a very delicate organism, and it can be easily damaged.’
‘See, Meg,’ Calvin crouched over her, tense and worried, ‘if your father had tried to yank Charles away when he tessered us, and if IT had kept grabbing hold of Charles, it might have been too much for him, and we’d have lost him for ever. And we had to do something right then.’
‘Why?’
‘IT was taking us. You and I were slipping, and if your father had gone on trying to help us he wouldn’t have been able to hold out much longer, either.’
‘You told him to tesser,’ Meg charged Calvin.
‘There isn’t any question of blame,’ Mr Murry cut in severely. ‘Can you move yet?’
All Meg’s faults were uppermost in her now, and they were no longer helping her. ‘No! And you’d better take me back to Camazotz and Charles Wallace quickly. You’re supposed to be able to help!’ Disappointment was as dark and corrosive in her as the Black Thing. The ugly words tumbled from her cold lips even as she herself could not believe that it was to her father, her beloved, longed-for father, that she was talking in this way.
She had found her father and he had not made everything all right. Everything kept getting worse and worse. If the long search for her father was ended, and he wasn’t able to overcome all their difficulties, there was nothing to guarantee that it would all come out right in the end. There was nothing left to hope for. She was frozen, and Charles Wallace was being devoured by IT, and her omnipotent father was doing nothing. She teetered on the seesaw of love and hate, and the Black Thing pushed her down into hate. ‘You don’t even know where we are!’ she cried out at her father. ‘We’ll never see mother or the twins again! We don’t know where Earth is! Or even where Camazotz is! We’re lost out in space! What are you going to do!’ She did not realize that she was as much in the power of the Black Thing as Charles Wallace.
Mr Murry bent over her, massaging her cold fingers. She could not see his face. ‘My daughter, I am not a Mrs Whatsit, a Mrs Who or a Mrs Which. Yes, Calvin has told me everything he could. I am a human being, and a very fallible one. But I agree with Calvin. We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’
‘The Black Thing!’ Meg cried out at him. ‘Why did you let it almost get me?’
‘You’ve never tessered as well as the rest of us,’ Calvin reminded her. ‘It never bothered Charles and me as much as it did you.’
‘He shouldn’t have taken me, then,’ Meg said, ‘until he learned to do it better.’
Neither her father nor Calvin spoke. Her father continued his gentle massage. Her fingers came back to life with tingling pain. ‘You’re hurting me!’
‘Then you’re feeling again,’ her father said quietly. ‘I’m afraid it is going to hurt, Meg.’
The piercing pain moved slowly up her arms, began in her toes and legs. She started to cry out against her father when Calvin exclaimed, ‘Look!’
Coming towards them, moving in silence across the brown grass, were three figures.
What were they?