Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L'engle

  ‘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 upwards 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 know 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 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 tha
t 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.

  ‘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 fathers 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.

  Meg blinked at the blurred figures of Charles and her father, and wondered why they did not clear. Then she grabbed her own glasses out of her pocket and put them on, and her myopic eyes were able to focus.

  Charles Wallace was tapping one foot impatiently against the floor, ‘IT is not pleased,’ he said, ‘IT is not pleased at all.’

  Mr Murry released Meg and knelt in front of the little boy. ‘Charles,’ his voice was tender. ‘Charles Wallace.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m your father, Charles. Look at me.’

  The pale blue eyes seemed to focus on Mr Murry’s face. ‘Hi, Pop,’ came an insolent voice.