The Wrinkle in Time Quintet

by Madeleine L'engle

  “No, I’m much too excited to be hungry, but if I don’t turn up on time, it won’t go down very well if I explain that I was late because I was talking with a cherubim. My mother doesn’t like tardiness, either.”

  Proginoskes said, “Much can be accomplished in an hour. We have to find out what our first ordeal is.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “You’re a cherubim.”

  “Even a cherubim has limits. When three ordeals are planned, then nobody knows ahead of time what they are; even the Teacher may not know.”

  “Then what do we do? How do we find out?”

  Proginoskes waved several wings slowly back and forth in thought, which would have felt very pleasant on a hot day, but which, on a cold morning, made Meg turn up the collar of her jacket. The cherubim did not notice; he continued waving and thinking. Then she could feel his words moving slowly, tentatively, within her mind. “If you’ve been assigned to me, I suppose you must be some kind of a Namer, too, even if a primitive one.”

  “A what?”

  “A Namer. For instance, the last time I was with a Teacher—or at school, as you call it—my assignment was to memorize the names of the stars.”

  “Which stars?”

  “All of them.”

  “You mean all the stars, in all the galaxies?”

  “Yes. If he calls for one of them, someone has to know which one he means. Anyhow, they like it; there aren’t many who know them all by name, and if your name isn’t known, then it’s a very lonely feeling.”

  “Am I supposed to learn the names of all the stars, too?” It was an appalling thought.

  “Good galaxy, no!”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  Proginoskes waved several wings, which, Meg was learning, was more or less his way of expressing “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Well, then, if I’m a Namer, what does that mean? What does a Namer do?”

  The wings drew together, the eyes closed, singly, and in groups, until all were shut. Small puffs of mist-like smoke rose, swirled about him. “When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job. Maybe you’re supposed to make earthlings feel more human.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She sat down on the rock beside him; she was somehow no longer afraid of his wildness, his size, his spurts of fire.

  He asked, “How do I make you feel?”

  She hesitated, not wanting to be rude, forgetting that the cherubim, far more than Charles Wallace, did not need her outward words to know what was being said within. But she answered truthfully, “Confused.”

  Several puffs of smoke went up. “Well, we don’t know each other very well yet. Who makes you least confused?”

  “Calvin.” There was no hesitation here. “When I’m with Calvin, I don’t mind being me.”

  “You mean he makes you more you, don’t you?”

  “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 pair 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 an
d 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 mountaintop, 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 Holst’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.”

  Mr. Murry absentmindedly began working out an equation on the tablecloth. For once Mrs. Murry did not even seem to notice. He said, “They’ve never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove home from Washington the traffic was so bad I could have made better time with a horse. There were huge signs proclaiming SPEED LIMIT 65 MPH, and we were crawling along at 20.”

  “And the children and I kept dinner hot for you for three hours, and finally ate, pretending we weren’t worried that you might have been in an accident,” Mrs. Murry said bitterly. “Here we are, at the height of civilization in a well-run state in a great democracy. And four ten-year-olds were picked up last week for pushing hard drugs in the school where our six-year-old is regularly given black eyes and a bloody nose.” She suddenly noticed the equation growing on the tablecloth. “What are you doing?”

  “I have a hunch that there’s some connection between your discoveries about the effects of farandolae on mitochondria, and that unexplained phenomenon out in space.” His pencil added a fraction, some Greek characters, and squared them.

  Mrs. Murry said in a low voice, “My discoveries are not very pleasant.”

  “I know.”

  “I isolated farandolae because something beyond increasing air pollution has to account for the accelerating number of deaths from respiratory failure, and this so-called flu epidemic. It was the micro-sonarscope which gave me the first clue—” She stopped abruptly, looked at her husband. “It’s the same sound, isn’t it? The strange ‘cry’ of the ailing mitochondria, and the ‘cry’ picked up in those distant galaxies by the new paraboloidoscope—there’s a horrid similarity between them. I don’t like it. I don’t like the fact that we don’t even see what’s going on in our own backyard. L.A. is trying as honorably as a president can try in a world which has become so blunted by dishonor and violence that people casually take it for granted. We have to see a great, dramatic fissure in the sky before we begin to take danger seriously. And I have to be deathly worried about our youngest child before I regard farandolae except in a cool and academic manner.”

  Meg had turned from the kitchen sink at the pain in her mother’s voice, and had seen her father reach across the table for her mother’s hand. “My dear, this is not like you. With my intellect I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can’t settle for what my intellect tells me. That’s not all of it.”

  “What else is there?” Mrs. Murry’s voice was low and anguished.

  “There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises. Even little ones, like your cooking stew over your Bunsen burner. You may be in the middle of an experiment, but you still remember to feed your family. That’s enough to keep my heart optimistic, no matter how pessimistic my mind. And you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

  Proginoskes said, “He’s a wise man, your father.”

  “Could you hear me remembering?”

  “I was remembering with you. Most of that conversation you didn’t hear with your conscious mind, you know.”

  “I have a very good memory—” Meg started. Then she stopped herself. “Okay. I know I couldn’t have remembered all that by myself. I suppose I just sort of took in the sound waves, didn’t I? But how did you get it all from me?”

  Proginoskes looked at her with two, ringed owl-like eyes. “You’re beginning to learn how to kythe.”

  “To what?”

  “Kythe. It’s how cherubim talk. It’s talking without words, just the same way that I can be myself and not be enfleshed.”

  “But I have to
be enfleshed, and I need words.”

  “I know, Meg,” he replied gently, “and I will keep things worded for you. But it will help if you will remember that cherubim kythe without words among each other. For a human creature you show a distinct talent for kything.”

  She blushed slightly at the compliment; she had a feeling that paying compliments is a habit not often indulged in by cherubim. “Progo, I wish I’d been able to see the equation Father was doodling on the tablecloth. If I’d seen it, then it might be somewhere in my mind for you to pull out.”

  “Think,” Proginoskes said. “I’ll help.”

  “Mother put the tablecloth in the wash.”

  “But you remember there were some Greek letters.”

  “Yes …”

  “Let me try to find them with you.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “That’s right. Relax, now. Maybe this is the way for us to kythe.—Don’t you try to think. Just let me move about.”

  Out of the corner of her mind’s eye she seemed to see three Greek characters among the numbers in the loosely strung equation her father was scribbling on the cloth. She thought them at Proginoskes.

  “εθ. Epsilon, chi, and theta. That’s Echth,” the cherubim told her.

  “Echthroi—but how could Father—”

  “Think of the conversation we just recalled, Meg. Your parents are very aware of the evil in the world.”

  “All right. Yes. I know. Okay.” Meg sounded cross. “Until Charles started school I hoped maybe we could ignore it. Like ostriches or something.”

  The cherubim withdrew its wings from her entirely, leaving her exposed and cold on the strange hilltop. “Open your eyes and look where the sky is torn.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Go on. I’ve got all my eyes open, and you only have to open two.”

  Meg opened her eyes. The rent in the sky was still there. She wondered what this distant phenomenon could have to do with Charles Wallace’s pallor, with mitochondritis, or whatever it was. “How—oh, Progo, how did the Echthroi do that?”

  Like Charles Wallace, he picked up her particular anxiety. “It has to do with un-Naming. If we are Namers, the Echthroi are un-Namers, non-Namers.”