“I guess you could put it that way.”
“Who makes you feel the least you?”
“Mr. Jenkins.”
Proginoskes probed sharply, “Why are you suddenly upset and frightened?”
“He’s the principal of the grade school in the village this year. But he was in my school last year, and I was always getting sent to his office. He never understands anything, and everything I do is automatically wrong. Charles Wallace would probably be better off if he weren’t my brother. That’s enough to finish him with Mr. Jenkins.”
“Is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you say Mr. Jenkins, I feel such a cold wave of terror wash over you that I feel chilly myself.”
“Progo—something happened last night—before we met you and Blajeny—when I was all alone in the garden—“ Her voice tailed off.
“What happened, earthling? Tell me. I have a feeling this may be important.”
Why should it be difficult to tell Proginoskes? The cherubim himself was just as unbelievable. But the cherubim was himself, was Proginoskes, while Mr. Jenkins had not been Mr. Jenkins.
As she tried to explain to Proginoskes she could sense him pulling away, and suddenly he flung all his wings about himself in a frantic reflex of self-preservation. Then two eyes looked out at her under one wing. “Echthroi.” It was an ugly word. As Proginoskes uttered it the morning seemed colder.
“What did you say?” Meg asked.
“Your Mr. Jenkins—the real one—could he do anything like the one you just told me about? Could he fly into a nothingness in the sky? This is not a thing that human beings can do, is it?”
“No.”
“You say he was like a dark bird, but a bird that was nothingness, and that he tore the sky?”
“Well—that’s how I remember it. It was all quick and unexpected and I was terrified and I couldn’t really believe that it had happened.”
“It sounds like the Echthroi.” He covered his eyes again.
“The what?”
Slowly, as though with a great effort, he uncovered several eyes. “The Echthroi. Oh, earthling, if you do not know Echthroi—“
“I don’t want to. Not if they’re like what I saw last night.”
Proginoskes agitated his wings. “I think we must go see this Mr. Jenkins, the one you say is at your little brother’s school.”
“Why?”
Proginoskes withdrew into all his wings again. Meg could feel him thinking grumpily, —They told me it was going to be difficult . . . Why couldn’t they have sent me off some place quiet to recite the stars again? … Or I’m even willing to memorize farandolae . . . I’ve never been to Earth before, I’m too young, I’m scared of the shadowed planets, what kind of a star has this planet got, anyhow?
Then he emerged, slowly, one pan- of eyes at a time. “Megling, I think you have seen an Echthros. If we are dealing with Echthroi, then—I just know with every feather on my wings (and you might try counting my feathers, sometime) that we have to go see this Mr. Jenkins. It must be part of the trial.”
“Mr. Jenkins? Part of our first test? But that’s—it doesn’t make sense.”
“It does to me.”
“Progo,” she objected, “it’s impossible. I can slip off my school bus and then walk to the grade school the way I did when I went to talk to Mr. Jenkins about Charles Wallace— and a fat lot of good that did—“
“If you have seen an Echthros, everything is different,” Proginoskes said.
“Okay, I can get to the grade school all right, but I can’t possibly take you with me. You’re so big you wouldn’t even fit into the school bus. Anyhow, you’d terrify everybody.” At the thought she smiled, but Proginoskes was not in a laughing mood.
“Not everybody is able to see me,” he told her. “I’m real, and most earthlings can bear very little reality. But if it will relieve your mind, I’ll dematerialize.” He waved a few wings gracefully. “It’s really more comfortable for me not to be burdened with matter, but I thought it would be easier for you if you could converse with someone you could see.”
The cherubim was there in front of her, covering most of the star-watching rock, and then he was not there. She thought she saw a faint shimmer in the air, but it might have been the approach of dawn. She could feel him, however, moving within her mind. “Are you feeling extremely brave, Megling?”
“No.” A faint light defined the eastern horizon. The stars were dim, almost extinguished.
“I think we’re going to have to be brave, earth child, but it will be easier because we’re together. I wonder if the Teacher knows.”
“Knows what?”
“That you’ve seen an Echthros.”
“Progo, I don’t understand. What is an Echthros?”
Abruptly, Proginoskes materialized, raised several wings, and gathered her in. “Come, littleling. I’ll take you some place yesterday and show you.”
“How can you take me yesterday?”
“I can’t possibly take you today, silly. It’s time for you to go in to breakfast and your mother dislikes tardiness. And who knows what we may have to do or where we may have to go before tomorrow? Come.” He drew her further in to him.
She found herself looking directly into one of his eyes, a great, amber cat’s eye, the dark mandala of the pupil, opening, compelling, beckoning.
She was drawn towards the oval, was pulled into it, was through it.
Into the ultimate night on the other side.
Then she felt a great, flaming wind, and knew that somehow she herself was part of that wind.
Then she felt a great shove, and she was standing, on a bare stone mountain top, and Proginoskes was blinking and winking at her. She thought she saw the oval, mandala-eye through which she had come, but she was not sure.
The cherubim raised a great wing to sketch the slow curve of sky above them. The warm rose and lavender of sunset faded, dimmed, was extinguished. The sky was drenched with green at the horizon, muting upwards into a deep, purply blue through which stars began to appear in totally unfamiliar constellations.
Meg asked, “Where are we?”
“Never mind where. Watch.”
She stood beside him, looking at the brilliance of the stars. Then came a sound, a sound which was above sound, beyond sound, a violent, silent, electrical report, which made her press her hands in pain against her ears. Across the sky, where the stars were clustered as thickly as in the Milky Way, a crack shivered, slivered, became a line of nothingness. ‘
If this kind of thing was happening in the universe, no matter how far away from earth and the Milky Way, Meg did not wonder that her father had been summoned to Washington and Brookhaven.
“Progo, what is it? What happened?”
“The Echthroi have Xed.”
“What?”
“Annihilated. Negated. Extinguished. Xed.”
Meg stared in horrible fascination at the rent in the sky. This was the most terrible thing she had ever seen, more horrifying than the Mr. Jenkins-Echthros the night before. She pressed close to the cherubim, surrounding herself with wings and eyes and puffs of smoke, but she could still see the rip in the sky.
She could not bear it.
She closed her eyes to shut it out. She tried to think of the most comfortable thing possible, the safest, most reasonable, ordinary thing. What, then? The dinner table at home: winter: the red curtains drawn across the windows, and a quiet snow falling softly outdoors; an applewood fire in the fireplace and Fortinbras snoring happily on the hearth; a tape playing Hoist’s The Planets—no, maybe that wasn’t too comforting; in her mind’s ear she shifted to a ghastly recording of the school band, with Sandy and Dennys playing somewhere in the cacophony.
Dinner was over, and she was clearing the table and starting the dishes and only half listening to the conversation of her parents, who were lingering over their coffee.
It was almost as tangible as though she were actually there, and she thought she felt Proginoskes pushing at her mind, helping her remember.
Had she really listened that attentively to her parents while she stood running hot water over the plates? Their voices were as clear as though she were actually in the room.
Her father must have mentioned the terrible thing which Proginoskes had-just shown her, the terrible thing which was terrible precisely because it was not a thing, because it was nothing. She could hear, too clearly, her father’s voice, calm and rational, speaking to her mother. “It isn’t just in distant galaxies that strange, unreasonable things are happening. Unreason has crept up on us so insidiously that we’ve hardly been aware of it. But think of the things going on in our own country which you wouldn’t have believed possible only a few years ago.”
Mrs. Murry swirled the dregs of her coffee. “I don’t think I believe all of them now, although I know they’re happening.” She looked up to see that the. twins and Charles Wallace were out of the room, that Meg was splashing water in the sink as she scoured a pot. “Ten years ago we didn’t even have a key to this house. Now we lock up when we go out. The irrational violence is even worse in the cities.”