A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet) (16 page)

“You mean they’re put to sleep while they have a cold, or that they’re murdered?” Calvin demanded.

“Murder is a most primitive word,” Charles Wallace said. “There is no such thing as murder on Camazotz. IT takes care of all such things.” He moved jerkily to the wall of the corridor, stood still for a moment, then raised his hand. The wall flickered, quivered, grew transparent. Charles Wallace walked through it, beckoned to Meg and Calvin, and they followed. They were in a small, square room from which radiated a dull, sulphurous light. There was something ominous to Meg in the very compactness of the room, as though the walls, the ceiling, the floor might move together and crush anybody rash enough to enter.

“How did you do that?” Calvin asked Charles.

“Do what?”

“Make the wall—open—like that.”

“I merely rearranged the atoms,” Charles Wallace said loftily. “You’ve studied atoms in school, haven’t you?”

“Sure, but—”

“Then you know enough to know that matter isn’t solid, don’t you? That you, Calvin, consist mostly of empty space? That if all the matter in you came together you’d be the size of the head of a pin? That’s plain scientific fact, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

“So I simply pushed the atoms aside and we walked through the space between them.”

Meg’s stomach seemed to drop, and she realized that the square box in which they stood must be an elevator and that they had started to move upward with great speed. The yellow light lit up their faces, and the pale blue of Charles’s eyes absorbed the yellow and turned green.

Calvin licked his lips. “Where are we going?”

“Up.” Charles continued his lecture. “On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems. You know that, don’t you, dear sister?”

“No,” Meg said.

“Oh, yes, you do. You’ve seen at home how true it is. You know that’s the reason you’re not happy at school. Because you’re different.”

“
I’m
different, and I’m happy,” Calvin said.

“But you pretend that you
aren’t
different.”

“I’m different, and I like being different.” Calvin’s voice was unnaturally loud.

“Maybe I don’t like being different,” Meg said, “but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either.”

Charles Wallace raised his hand and the motion of the square box ceased and one of the walls seemed to disappear.
Charles stepped out, Meg and Calvin following him, Calvin just barely making it before the wall came into being again, and they could no longer see where the opening had been.

“You wanted Calvin to get left behind, didn’t you?” Meg said.

“I am merely trying to teach you to stay on your toes. I warn you, if I have any more trouble from either of you, I shall have to take you to IT.”

As the word IT fell from Charles’s lips, again Meg felt as though she had been touched by something slimy and horrible. “So what is this IT?” she asked.

“You might call IT the Boss.” Then Charles Wallace giggled, a giggle that was the most sinister sound Meg had ever heard. “IT sometimes calls ITself the Happiest Sadist.”

Meg spoke coldly, to cover her fear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s s-a-d-i-s-t, not s-a-d-d-e-s-t, you know,” Charles Wallace said, and giggled again. “Lots of people don’t pronounce it correctly.”

“Well, I don’t care,” Meg said defiantly. “I don’t ever want to see IT, and that’s that.”

Charles Wallace’s strange, monotonous voice ground against her ears. “Meg, you’re supposed to have
some
mind. Why do you think we have wars at home? Why do you think people get confused and unhappy? Because they all live their own, separate, individual lives. I’ve been trying to explain to you in the simplest possible way that on Camazotz individuals have been done away with. Camazotz
is ONE mind. It’s IT. And that’s why everybody’s so happy and efficient. That’s what old witches like Mrs Whatsit don’t want to have happen at home.”

“She’s not a witch,” Meg interrupted.

“No?”

“No,” Calvin said. “You know she’s not. You know that’s just their game. Their way, maybe, of laughing in the dark.”

“In the dark is correct,” Charles continued. “They want us to go on being confused instead of properly organized.”

Meg shook her head violently. “No!” she shouted. “I know our world isn’t perfect, Charles, but it’s better than this. This isn’t the only alternative! It can’t be!”

“Nobody suffers here,” Charles intoned. “Nobody is ever unhappy.”

“But nobody’s ever happy, either,” Meg said earnestly. “Maybe if you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t known how to be happy. Calvin, I want to go home.”

“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 center of it was a large, round, transparent column, and inside this column was a man.

“FATHER!” Meg screamed.

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 throw up 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 soft cheek against hers in loving comfort. But the demon Charles Wallace snickered. 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 inward, as though he were deep in thought. He had grown a beard, and the silky brown was shot with gray. 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 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 form behind her, with no emotion whatsoever.

“Yes. Don’t you?” Meg demanded, swinging around and glaring at him.

“But of course. That is why we are here.”

“Then what do we
do?
” Meg tried to keep the franticness 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’s 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.

“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.