A Wind in the Door (4 page)

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Authors: Madeleine L'Engle

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Classics, #Time Travel, #Retail, #Personal

BOOK: A Wind in the Door
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Mrs. Murry looked down at the checked tablecloth, and at the remains of an equation which had not come out in the wash; doodling equations on anything available was a habit of which she could not break her husband. “It’s not really secret. There’ve been several bits about it in the papers recently.”
“About what?” Sandy asked.
“There’s been an unexplainable phenomenon, not in our part of the galaxy, but far across it, and in several other galaxies—well, the easiest way to explain it is that our new supersensitive sonic instruments have been picking up strange sounds, sounds which aren’t on any
normal register, but much higher. After such a sound—a cosmic scream, the
Times
rather sensationally called it—there appears to be a small rip in the galaxy.”
“What does that mean?” Dennys asked.
“It seems to mean that several stars have vanished.”
“Vanished where?”
“That’s the odd part. Vanished. Completely. Where the stars were there is, as far as our instruments can detect, nothing. Your father was out in California several weeks ago, you remember, at Mount Palomar.”
“But things can’t just vanish,” Sandy said. “We had it in school—the balance of matter.”
Their mother added, very quietly, “It seems to be getting unbalanced.”
“You mean like the ecology?”
“No. I mean that matter actually seems to be being annihilated.”
Dennys said flatly, “But that’s impossible.”
“E = MC
2
,” Sandy said. “Matter can be converted into energy, and energy into matter. You have to have one or the other.”
Mrs. Murry said, “Thus far, Einstein’s law has never been disproved. But it’s coming into question.”
“Nothingness—” Dennys said. “That’s impossible.”
“One would hope so.”
“And that’s what Father’s going off about?”
“Yes, to consult with several other scientists, Shasti from India, Shen Shu from China—you’ve heard of them.”
Outside the dining-room windows came a sudden brilliant flash of light, followed by a loud clap of thunder. The windows rattled. The kitchen door burst open. Everybody jumped.
Meg sprang up, crying nervously, “Oh, Mother—”
“Sit down, Meg. You’ve heard thunder before.”
“You’re sure it’s not one of those cosmic things?”
Sandy shut the door.
Mrs. Murry was calmly reassuring. “Positive. They’re completely inaudible to human ears.” Lightning flashed again. Thunder boomed. “As a matter of fact, there are only two instruments in the world delicate enough to pick up the sound, which is incredibly high-pitched. It’s perfectly possible that it’s been going on for billennia, and only now are our instruments capable of recording it.”
“Birds can hear sounds way above our normal pitch,” Sandy said, “I mean, way up the scale, that we can’t hear at all.”
“Birds can’t hear this.”
Dennys said, “I wonder if snakes can hear as high a pitch as birds?”
“Snakes don’t have ears,” Sandy contradicted.
“So? They feel vibrations and sound waves. I think Louise hears all kinds of things out of human range. What’s for dessert?”
Meg’s voice was still tense. “We don’t usually have thunderstorms in October.”
“Please calm down, Meg.” Mrs. Murry started clearing the table. “If you’ll stop and think, you’ll remember that we’ve had an unseasonable storm for every month in the year.”
Sandy said, “Why does Meg always exaggerate everything? Why does she have to be so cosmic? What’s for dessert?”
“I don’t—” Meg started defensively, then jumped as the rain began to pelt against the windows.
“There’s some ice cream in the freezer,” Mrs. Murry said. “Sorry, I haven’t been thinking about desserts.”
“Meg’s supposed to make desserts,” Dennys said. “Not that we expect pies or anything, Meg, but even you can’t go too wrong with Jell-O.”
Charles Wallace caught Meg’s eye, and she closed her mouth. He put his hand in the pocket of his robe again, though this time he did not produce the feather, and gave her a small, private smile. He may have been thinking about his dragons, but he had also been listening carefully, both to the conversation and to the storm, his fair head tilted slightly to one side. “This ripping in the
galaxy, Mother—does it have any effect on our own solar system?”
“That,” Mrs. Murry replied, “is what we would all like to know.”
Sandy brushed this aside impatiently. “It’s all much too complicated for me. I’m sure banking is a lot simpler.”
“And more lucrative,” Dennys added.
The windows shook in the wind. The twins looked through the darkness at the slashing rain.
“It’s a good thing we brought in so much stuff from the garden before dinner.”
“This is almost hail.”
Meg asked nervously, “Is it dangerous, this—this ripping in the sky, or whatever it is?”
“Meg, we really know nothing about it. It may have been going on all along, and we only now have the instruments to record it.”
“Like farandolae,” Charles Wallace said. “We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
“But is it dangerous?” Meg repeated.
“Meg, we don’t know enough about it yet. That’s why it’s important that your father and some of the other physicists get together at once.”
“But it could be dangerous?”
“Anything can be dangerous.”
Meg looked down at the remains of her dinner. Dragons and rips in the sky. Louise and Fortinbras greeting something large and strange. Charles Wallace pale and listless. She did not like any of it. “I’ll do the dishes,” she told her mother.
They cleaned up the kitchen in silence. Mrs. Murry had sent the reluctant twins to practice for the school orchestra, Dennys on the flute, which he played well, accompanied by Sandy, less skillfully, on the piano. But it was a pleasant, familiar noise, and Meg relaxed into it. When the dishwasher was humming, the pots and pans polished and hung on their hooks, she went up to her attic bedroom to do her homework. This room was supposed to be her own, private place, and it would have been perfect except for the fact that it was seldom really private: the twins kept their electric trains in the big, open section of the attic; the ping-pong table was there, and anything anybody didn’t want around downstairs but didn’t want to throw away. Although Meg’s room was at the far end of the attic, it was easily available to the twins when they needed help with their math homework. And Charles Wallace always knew, without being told, when she was troubled, and would come up to the attic to sit on the foot of her bed. The only time she didn’t want Charles Wallace was when he himself was what was troubling her. She did not want him now.
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 hissed 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?

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