“That might be a good idea. Ouch, Progo, you hurt!”
“This isn’t any time for self-indulgence.”
“When Mr. Jenkins is being nice, he’s not being Mr. Jenkins. Being nice on Mr. Jenkins would be like blond hair on me.”
Proginoskes sent ice-cold anger through her. “Meg, there’s no more time. They’ll be back any moment now.”
Panic churned in her. “Progo, if I don’t Name right, if I fail, what will you do?”
“I told you. I have to choose.”
“That’s not telling me. I want to know which way you’re going to choose.”
Proginoskes’s feathers shivered as though a cold wind had blown through them. “Meg, there isn’t much time. They’re on their way back. You have to Name one of them.”
“Give me a hint.”
“This isn’t a game. Mr. Jenkins was right.”
She shot him an anguished glance, and he lowered several sets of eyelashes in apology. “Progo, even for Charles Wallace, how can I do the impossible? How can I love Mr.” Jenkins?”
Proginoskes did not respond. There was no Same, no smoke; only a withdrawing of eyes behind wings.
“Progo! Help me! How can I feel love for Mr. Jenkins?”
Immediately he opened a large number of eyes very wide. “What a strange idea. Love isn’t feeling. If it were, I wouldn’t be able to love. Cherubim don’t have feelings.”
“But—“
“Idiot,” Proginoskes said, anxiously rather than crossly. “Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do. I’ve never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.”
“Progo, you matter to me.”
Proginoskes puffed enveloping pale blue clouds. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that cherubim only matter with earth people. You call it materializing.”
“Then, if you become visible only for us, why do you” have to look so terrifying?”
“Because when we matter, this is how we come out. When you got mattered, you didn’t choose to look the way you do, did you?”
“I certainly did not. I’d have chosen quite differently. I’d have chosen to be beautiful—oh, I see! You mean you don’t have any more choice about looking like a drive of deformed dragons than I do about my hair and glasses and everything? You aren’t doing it this way just for fun?”
Proginoskes held three of its wings demurely over a great many of its eyes. “I am a cherubim, and when a cherubim “ takes on matter, this is how.”
Meg knelt in front of the great, frightening, and strangely beautiful creature. “Progo, I’m not a wind or a flame of fire. I’m a human being. I feel. I can’t think without feeling. If you matter to me, then what you decide to do if I fail matters.”
“I fail to see why.”
She scrambled to her feet, batting at the last wisps of pale blue smoke which stung her eyes, and shouted, “Because if you decide to turn into a worm or whatever and join the Echthroi, I don’t care whether I Name right or not! It just doesn’t matter to me! And Charles Wallace would feel the same way—I know he would!”
Proginoskes probed gently and thoughtfully into her mind. “I don’t understand your feelings. I’m trying to, but I don’t. It must be extremely unpleasant to have feelings.”
“Progo! What will you do?”
Silence. No flame. No smoke. All eyes closed. Proginoskes folded the great wings completely. His words were very small as they moved into her mind. “X. If you fail, I will X myself.”
He vanished.
Meg swung around and three Mr. Jenkinses were walking towards her from the direction of the parking lot. She-faced them. “Mr. Jenkins.”
Identical, hateful, simultaneous, they stepped towards her.
Mr. Jenkins One sniffed, the end of his pink nose wriggling distastefully. “I am back. I left Charles Wallace with your mother. Now will you please get rid of these two—uh —pranksters. I resent this intrusion on my time and privacy.”
Mr. Jenkins Two pointed to One accusingly. “That impostor lost his temper and showed his true colors when your little brother brought his snake to school. The impostor forgot himself and called the child a sn—“
“Delete,” Mr. Jenkins Three said sharply. “He used words unsuitable for a child. Blip it.”
Mr. Jenkins Two said, “He doesn’t love children.”
Mr. Jenkins Three said, “He can’t control children.”
Mr. Jenkins Two said, “I will make Charles Wallace happy.”
Mr. Jenkins, Three said, “I will make him successful.”
Mr. Jenkins One looked at his watch.
Meg closed her eyes. And suddenly she did not feel. She had been pushed into a dimension beyond feeling, if such a-thing is possible, and if Progo was right, it is possible. There was nothing but a cold awareness which had nothing to do with what she normally would have thought of as feeling. Her voice issued from her lips almost without volition, cold, calm, emotionless. “Mr. Jenkins Three—“
He stepped forward, smiling triumphantly.
“No. You’re not the real Mr. Jenkins. You’re much too powerful. You’d never have to be taken away from a regional school you couldn’t control and made principal of a grade school you couldn’t control, either.” She looked at Mr. Jenkins One and Two. Her hands were ice-cold and she had the sensation in the pit of the stomach which precedes acute nausea, but she was unaware of this because she was still in the strange realm beyond feeling. “Mr. Jenkins Two—“
He smiled.
Again she shook her head. “I wasn’t quite as sure about you at first. But wanting to make everybody happy and just like everybody else is just as bad as Mr. Jenkins Three manipulating everybody. Bad as Mr. Jenkins is, he’s the only one of the three of you who’s human enough to make as many mistakes as he does, and that’s you, Mr. Jenkins One—“ Suddenly she gave a startled laugh. “And I do love you for it.” Then she burst into tears of nervousness and exhaustion. But she had no doubt that she was right.
The air about the schoolyard was rent with a great howling and shrieking and then a cold nothingness which could only be the presence of Echthroi. It was as though rip after rip were being slashed in the air, and then the edges were drawn together and healed.
Silence. And quiet. And a small, ordinary, everyday wind.
Proginoskes materialized, delicately unfolding wing after wing to reveal his myriad various eyes.
Mr. Jenkins One, the real Mr. Jenkins, fainted.
7 Metron Ariston.
Meg bent over Mr. Jenkins. She did not realize that Blajeny was there until she heard his voice.
“Really, Proginoskes, you ought to know better than to take anyone by surprise like that, particularly a still-limited one like Mr. Jenkins.” He stood between the cherubim and Meg, almost as tall as the school building, half amused, half angry.
Proginoskes fluttered several wings in halfhearted apology. “I was very relieved.”
“Quite.”
“Will this—uh—Mr. Jenkins ever be anything but a limited one?” —
“That is a limited and limiting thought, Proginoskes,” Blajeny said sternly. “I am surprised.”
Now the cherubim was truly abashed. He closed his eyes and covered them with wings, keeping only three eyes open, one each to gaze at Blajeny, Meg, and the prone Mr. Jenkins.
Blajeny turned to Meg. “My child, I am very pleased with you.”
Meg blushed. “Shouldn’t we do something about Mr. Jenkins?”
Blajeny knelt on the dusty ground. His dark fingers, with their vast span, pressed gently against Mr. Jenkins’s temples; the principal’s usually pasty face was grey; his body gave a spasmodic twitch; he opened his eyes and closed them again immediately; moaned.
Tension and relief had set Meg on the verge of hysteria; she was half laughing, half crying. “Blajeny, don’t you realize you must be almost as frightening to poor Mr. Jenldns as Progo?” She, too, dropped to her knees beside the principal. “Mr. Jenkins, I’m here. Meg. I know you don’t like me, but at least I’m familiar. Open your eyes. It’s all right. Really it is.”
Slowly, cautiously, he opened his eyes. “I must make an appointment with a psychiatrist. Immediately.”
Meg spoke soothingly, as to a very small child. “You aren’t hallucinating, Mr. Jenkins, honestly you aren’t. It’s all right. They’re friends, Blajeny and Progo. And they’re real.”
Mr. Jenkins closed his eyes, opened them again, focused on Meg.
“Blajeny is a Teacher, Mr. Jenkins, and Progo is a— well, he’s a cherubim.” She could hardly blame Mr. Jenkins for looking incredulous.
His voice was thin. “Either I am in the process of a nervous breakdown, which is not unlikely, or I am dreaming. That’s it. I must be asleep.” He struggled to sit up, with Meg’s assistance. “But why, then, are you in my dream? Why am I lying on the ground? Has somebody hit me? I wouldn’t put it past the bigger boys—“ He rubbed his hand over his head, searching for a bruise. “Why are you here, Margaret? I seem to remember—“ He looked once more at Blajeny and Proginoskes and shuddered. “They’re still here. No. I am still dreaming. Why can’t I wake up? This isn’t real.”