Rain was still spattering against her window, but with diminishing force. The wind was swinging around from the south to the west; the storm was passing and the temperature falling. Her room was cold, but she did not plug in the little electric heater her parents had given her to supplement the inadequate heat which came up the attic stairs. Instead, she shoved her books aside and tiptoed back downstairs, stepping carefully over the seventh stair, which not only creaked but sometimes gave off a report like a shot.
The twins were still practicing. Her mother was in the living room, in front of the fire, reading to Charles Wallace, not from books about trains, or animals, which the twins had liked at that age, but from a scientific magazine, an article called “The Polarizabilities and Hyperpolarizabilities of Small Molecules,” by the theoretical chemist, Peter Liebmann.
Ouch, Meg thought ruefully. —This kind of thing is Charles Wallace’s bedtime reading and our parents expect him to go to first grade and not get into trouble?
Charles Wallace lay on the floor in front of the fire, staring into the flames, half listening, half brooding, his head as usual pillowed on Fortinbras’s comfortable bulk. Meg would have liked to take Fort with her, but that would mean letting the family know she was going out. She hurried as quickly and silently as possible through the kitchen and out into the pantry. As she pulled the kitchen door closed behind her, slowly, carefully, so nobody would hear, the pantry door flew open with a bang, and the door to her mother’s lab, on the left, slammed shut in a gust of wind.
She stopped, listened, waited for one of the twins to open the kitchen door and see what was going on. But nothing happened except that the wind blew wildly through the pantry. She shivered, and grabbed the first rain clothes that came to hand, a big black rubber poncho that belonged to the twins and had done double duty as a ground cloth for a tent; and Charles Wallace’s yellow sou’wester. Then she took the big flashlight from the hook, shut the pantry door firmly behind her, and ran across the lawn, tripping over the croquet wicket. Limping, she crossed the patch of dandelion, burdock, and milkweed that was growing up in the opening the twins had cut in the barberry fence. Once she was in the vegetable garden she hoped that she would be invisible to anybody chancing to look out a window. She could imagine Sandy’s or Dennys’s reaction if they asked her where she was going and she told them she was looking for dragons.
Why, in fact, had she come out? And what was she looking for? Was it dragons? Fortinbras and Louise both had seen—and not been afraid of—something, something which had left the feathers and scales. And that something—or somethings—was likely to be uncomfortable in the wet pasture. If it—or they—came to seek shelter in the house, she wanted to be prepared.
Not only for dragons, in which she did not quite believe, despite her faith in Charles Wallace and the feather with the peculiar rachis, but also for Louise the Larger. The twins insisted that Louise was an unusual snake, but this afternoon was the first time Meg had seen any signs that Louise was anything more than a contented, common garden-variety snake.
Meg checked the shadows on the wall, but there was no sign of Louise, so she lingered, not at all anxious to cross the apple orchard and go into the north pasture to the two glacial rocks. For a few minutes she would stay in the homely garden, and gather her courage, and be safe from discovery: the twins were hardly likely to come out after dark in the cold and wet, to admire the last few cabbages, or the vine which had borne their prize cucumber, the size of a vegetable marrow.
The garden was bordered on the east by two rows of sunflowers which stood with their heavy, fringed heads bowed over so that they looked like a huddle of witches; Meg glanced at them nervously; raindrops dripped from their faces with melancholy unconcern, but no longer from the sky. There was a hint of light from the full moon behind the thinning clouds, turning all the vegetables into beings strange and unreal. The gaping rows where once beans had stood, and lettuce, and peas, had a forlorn look; there was an air of sadness and confusion about the carefully planned pattern.
“Like everything else”—Meg spoke to the few remaining cauliflower heads—“it’s falling apart. It’s not right in the United States of America that a little kid shouldn’t be safe in school.”
She moved slowly along the orchard wall. The cidery smell of fallen apples was cut by the wind which had completely changed course and was now streaming across the garden from the northwest, sharp and glittery with frost. She saw a shadow move on the wall and jumped back: Louise the Larger, it must be Louise, and Meg could not climb that wall or cross the orchard to the north pasture until she was sure that neither Louise nor the not-quite-seen shape was lurking there waiting to pounce on her. Her legs felt watery, so she sat on a large, squat pumpkin to wait. The cold wind brushed her cheek; corn tassels hished like ocean waves. She looked warily about. She was seeing, she realized, through lenses streaked and spattered by raindrops blowing from sunflowers and corn, so she took off her spectacles, felt under the poncho for her kilt, and wiped them. Better, though the world was still a little wavery, as though seen under water.
She listened; listened. In the orchard she heard the soft plomp of falling apples; wind shaking the trees; branches rustling. She peered through the darkness. Something was moving, coming closer—
Snakes never come out in the cold and dark, she knew that. Nevertheless—
Louise—
Yes, it was the big snake. She emerged from the rocks of the stone wall, slowly, warily, watchfully. Meg’s heart was thumping, although Louise was not threatening. At least, Louise was not threatening her. But Louise was waiting, and this time there was no welcome in the waiting. Meg looked in fascination as the head of the snake slowly weaved back and forth, then quivered in recognition.
Behind Meg a voice came. “Margaret.”
She whirled around.
It was Mr. Jenkins. She looked at him in complete bewilderment.
He said, “Your little brother thought I might find you here, Margaret.”
Yes, Charles would guess, would know where she was. But why would Mr. Jenkins have been speaking to Charles Wallace? The principal had never been to the Murrys’ house, or any parents’, for that matter. All confrontations were in the safe anonymity of his office. Why would he come through the wet grass and the still-dripping garden to look for her instead of sending one of the twins?
He said, “I wanted to come find you myself, Margaret, because I feel that I owe you an apology for my sharpness with you last week when you came to see me.” He held out a hand, pale in the moonlight wavering behind the clouds.
In utter confusion she reached out to take his hand, and as she did so, Louise rose up on the wall behind her, hissing and making a strange, warning clacking. Meg turned to see the snake, looking as large and hooded as a cobra, hissing angrily at Mr. Jenkins, raising her large dark coils to strike.
Mr. Jenkins screamed, in a way that she had never known a man could scream, a high, piercing screech.
Then he rose up into the night like a great, flapping bird, flew, screaming across the sky, became a rent, an emptiness, a slash of nothingness—
Meg found that she, too, was screaming.
It could not have happened.
There was no one, no thing there.
She thought she saw Louise slithering back through a dark recess in the stone wall, disappearing—
It was impossible.
Her mind had snapped. It was some kind of hallucination caused by the weather, by her anxiety, by the state of the world—
A thick, ugly smell, like spoiled cabbage, like flower stalks left too long in water, rose like a miasma from the place where Mr. Jenkins had been—
But he could not have been there—
She screamed again, in uncontrollable panic, as a tall shape hurtled towards her.
Calvin. Calvin O’Keefe.
She burst into hysterical tears of relief.
He vaulted over the wall to her, his strong, thin arms tight around her, holding her. “Meg. Meg, what is it?”
She could not control her terrified sobbing.
“Meg, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” He shook her, urgently.
Gasping, she tried to tell him. “I know it sounds incredible—“ she finished. She was still trembling violently, her heart racing. When he did not speak, but continued soothingly to pat her back, she said, through a few final, hiccup-ing sobs, “Oh, Calvin, I wish I had imagined it. Do you think—do you think maybe I did?”