Did a shadow fall across the moon or did the moon simply go out, extinguished as abruptly and completely as a candle? There was still the sound of leaves, a terrified, terrifying rushing. All light was gone. Darkness was complete. Suddenly the wind was gone, and all sound. Meg felt that Calvin was being torn from her. When she reached for him her fingers touched nothing.
She screamed out, “Charles!” and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know. The word was flung back down her throat and she choked on it.
She was completely alone.
She had lost the protection of Calvin’s hand. Charles was nowhere, either to save or to turn to. She was alone in a fragment of nothingness. No light, no sound, no feeling. Where was her body? She tried to move in her panic, but there was nothing to move. Just as light and sound had vanished, she was gone, too. The corporeal Meg simply was not.
Then she felt her limbs again. Her legs and arms were tingling faintly, as though they had been asleep. She blinked her eyes rapidly, but though she herself was somehow back, nothing else was. It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void.
It was the same way with the silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on’ its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.
I am asleep; I am dreaming, she thought. I’m having a nightmare. I want to wake up. Let me wake up.
“Well!” Charles Wallace’s voice said. “That was quite a trip! I do think you might have warned us.”
Light began to pulse and quiver. Meg blinked and shoved shakily at her glasses and there was Charles Wallace standing indignantly in front of her, his hands on his hips. “Meg!” he shouted. “Calvin! Where are you?”
She saw Charles, she heard him, but she could not go to him. She could not shove through the strange, trembling light to meet him.
Calvin’s voice came as though it were pushing through a cloud. “Well, just give me time, will you? I’m older than you are.”
Meg gasped. It wasn’t that Calvin wasn’t there and then that he was. It wasn’t that part of him came first and then the rest of him followed, like a hand and then an arm, an eye and then a nose. It was a sort of shimmering, a looking at Calvin through water, through smoke, through fire, and then there he was, solid and reassuring.
“Meg!” Charles Wallace’s voice came. “Meg! Calvin, where’s Meg?”
“I’m right here,” she tried to say, but her voice seemed to be caught at its source.
“Meg!” Calvin cried, and he turned around, looking about wildly.
“Mrs. Which, you haven’t left Meg behind, have you?” Charles Wallace shouted.
“If you’ve hurt Meg, any of you-” Calvin started, but suddenly Meg felt a violent push and a shattering as though she had been thrust through a wall of glass.
“Oh, there you are!” Charles Wallace said, and rushed over to her and hugged her.
“But where am I?” Meg asked breathlessly, relieved to hear that her voice was now coming out of her in more or less a normal way.
She looked around rather wildly. They were standing in a sunlit field, and the air about them was moving with the delicious fragrance that comes only on’the rarest of spring days when the sun’s touch is gentle and the apple blossoms are just beginning to unfold. She pushed her glasses up on her nose to reassure herself that what she was seeing was real.
They had left the silver glint of a biting autumn evening; and now around them everything was golden with light. The grasses of the field were a tender new green, and scattered about were tiny, multicolored flowers. Meg turned slowly to face a mountain reaching so high into the sky that its peak was lost in a crown of puffy white clouds. From the trees at the base of the mountain came a sudden singing of birds. There was an air of such ineffable peace and joy all around her that her heart’s wild thumping slowed.
“When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning, or in rain,”
came Mrs. Who’s voice. Suddenly the three of them were there, Mrs. Whatsit with her pink stole askew; Mrs. Who with her spectacles gleaming; and Mrs. Which still little more than a shimmer. Delicate, multicolored butterflies were fluttering about them, as though in greeting.
Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who began to giggle, and they giggled until it seemed that, whatever their private joke was, they would fall down with the wild fun of it. The shimmer seemed to be laughing, too. It became vaguely darker and more solid; and then there appeared a figure in a black robe and a black peaked hat, beady eyes, a beaked nose, and long gray hair; one bony claw clutched a broomstick.
“Wwell, jusstt ttoo kkeepp yyou girrlls happpy,” the strange voice said. and Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who fell into each other’s arms in gales of laughter.
“If you ladies have had your fun I think you should tell Calvin and Meg a little more about all this,” Charles Wallace said coldly. “You scared Meg half out of her wits, whisking her off this way without any warning.”
“Finxerunt animi, faro et perpauca loquentis,” Mrs. Who intoned. “Horace. To action little, less to words inclined.”
“Mrs. Who, I wish you’d stop quoting!” Charles Wallace sounded very annoyed.
Mrs. Whatsit adjusted her stole. “But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own.”
“Anndd wee mussttn’tt looose oun- sensses of hummorr,” Mrs. Which said. “Thee onnlly wway ttoo ccope withh ssometthingg ddeadly sseriouss iss ttoo ttry ttoo trreatt itt a llittlle lligghtly.”
“But that’s going to be hard for Meg,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “It’s going to be hard for her to realize that we are serious.”
“What about me?” Calvin asked.
“The life of your father isn’t at stake,” Mrs. Whatsit told him.
“What about Charles Wallace, then?”
Mrs. Whatsit’s unoiled-door-hinge voice was warm with affection and pride. “Charles Wallace knows. Charles Wallace knows that it’s far more than just the life of his father. Charles Wallace knows what’s at stake.”
“But remember,” Mrs. Who said, “Aeiproft ovSev, iravra 8 cfJvl^civ wcwT. Euripides. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”
“Where are we now, and how did we get here?” Calvin asked.
“Uriel, the third planet of the star Malak in the spiral nebula Messier 101.”
“This I’m supposed to believe?” Calvin asked indignantly.
“Aas yyou llike,” Mrs. Which said coldly.
For some reason Meg felt that Mrs. Which, despite her looks and ephemeral broomstick, was someone in whom one could put complete trust. “It doesn’t seem any more peculiar than anything else that’s happened.”
“Well, then, someone just tell me how we got here!” Calvin’s voice was still angry and his freckles seemed to stand out on his face. “Even traveling at the speed of light it would take us years and years to get here.”
“Oh, we don’t travel at the speed of anything,” Mrs Whatsit explained earnestly. “We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle.”
“Clear as mud,” Calvin said.
Tesser, Meg thought. Could that have anything to do with Mother’s tesseract?
She was about to ask when Mrs. Which started to speak, and one did not interrupt when Mrs. Which was speaking. “Mrs. Whatsit iss yyoungg andd nnaive,”
“She keeps thinking she can explain things in words,” Mrs. Who said. “Qui plus salt, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”
“But she has to use words for Meg and Calvin,” Charles reminded Mrs. Who. “If you brought them along, they have a right to know what’s going on.”
Meg went up to Mrs, Which. In the intensity of her question she had forgotten all about the tesseract. “Is my father here?”
Mrs. Which shook her head. “Nnott heeere, Megg. Llett Mrs, Whatsitt expllainn. Shee isss yyoungg annd thee llanguage of worrds iss eeasierr fforr hherr thann itt iss fforr Mrs. Whoo andd mee.”