Wind in the Door Page 10
“If you had gorgeous blond hair, you wouldn’t be you.”
“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 flame, 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.
SEVEN
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 stilllimited 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.
Jenkins 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.”
Meg echoed Blajeny. “What is real?” She turned to the Teacher, but he was no longer paying attention to Mr. Jenkins. She followed Blajeny’s gaze, and saw Louise slithering rapidly towards them.
A fresh shudder shook Mr. Jenkins. “Not the snake again—I have a phobia about—”
Meg soothed. “Louise is really very friendly. She won’t hurt you.”
“Snakes.” Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “Snakes and monsters and giants … It’s not possible, none of this is possible …”
Blajeny turned from his conversation with Louise the Larger, spoke urgently. “We must go at once. The Echthroi are enraged. Charles Wallace’s mitochondritis is now acute.”
“Oh, Blajeny, take us home quickly,” Meg cried. “I must be with him!”
“There isn’t time. We must go at once to Metron Ariston.”
“Where?”
Without answering, Blajeny turned from Meg to Mr. Jenkins. “You, sir: do you wish to return to your school and continue your regular day’s work? Or will you throw in your lot with us?”
Mr. Jenkins looked completely bewildered. “I am having a nervous breakdown.”
“You don’t need to have one if you don’t want to. You have simply been faced with several things outside your current spheres of experience. That does not mean that they—we—do not exist.”
Meg felt an unwilling sense of protectiveness towards this unattractive little man she had Named. “Mr. Jenkins, don’t you think you’d better report that you’re not well today, and come with us?”
Mr. Jenkins held out his hands helplessly. “Were there—there were—two other—two men who resembled me?”
“Yes, of course there were. But they’ve gone.”
“Where?”
Meg turned to Blajeny.
The Teacher looked grave. “When an Echthros takes on a human body, it tends to keep it.”
Meg caught hold of the stone grey of the Teacher’s sleeve. “The first test—how did it happen? You didn’t make it up, did you? You couldn’t have told the Echthroi to turn into Mr. Jenkins, could you?”
“Meg,” he replied quietly, “I told you I needed your help.”
“You mean—you mean this was going to happen, anyhow, the Echthroi turning into Mr. Jenkins, even if—”
“Mr. Jenkins was a perfect host for their purposes.”
Rather shakily, Mr. Jenkins tottered towards Blajeny, sputtering, “Now, see here, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care, but I demand an explanation.”
Blajeny’s voice was now more like an English horn than a cello. “Perhaps in your world today such a phenomenon would be called schizophrenia. I prefer the old idea of possession.”
“Schiz—are you, sir, questioning my sanity?”
Louise’s small voice whistled urgently.
“Mr. Jenkins,” Blajeny said quietly, “we must leave. Either return to your school or come with us. Now.”
To Meg’s surprise she found herself urging, “Please come with us, Mr. Jenkins.”
“But my duty—”
“You know you can’t just go back to school again after what’s happened.”
Mr. Jenkins moaned again. His complexion had turned from grey to pale green.
“And after you’ve met the cherubim and Blajeny—”
“Cheru—”
Louise whistled again.
Blajeny asked, “Are you coming with us or not?”
“Margaret Named me,” Mr. Jenkins said softly. “Yes. I will come.”
Proginoskes reached out a great pinion and pulled Meg in to him. She felt the tremendous heartbeat, a beat which reverberated like a brass gong. Then she saw the ovoid eye, open, dilating …
She was through.
It was something of an anticlimax to find that they were no farther from home than the star-watching rock.
Wait: was it, after all, the star-watching rock?
She blinked, and when she opened her eyes Mr. Jenkins and Blajeny were there, and Calvin was there, too (oh, thank you, Blajeny!), holding his hand out to her, and she was warmed in the radiance of his big smile.
It was no longer autumn-cold. There was a light breeze, warm and summery. All about them, encircling them, was the sound of summer insects, crickets, katydids, and—less pleasantly—the shrill of a mosquito. Frogs were crunking away, and a tree toad sang its scratchy song. The sky was thick with stars, stars which always seemed closer to earth in summer than in winter.
Blajeny sat down, cross-legged, on the rock, and beckoned to them. Meg sat in front of him, and saw that Louise was coiled nearby, her head resting on one of Proginoskes’s outstretched wings. Calvin sat beside Meg, and Mr. Jenkins stood awkwardly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
Meg moved a little closer to Calvin and looked up at the sky.
And gasped. The stars, the low, daisy-thick summer stars, were not the familiar planets and constellations she had so often watched with her parents. They were as different as had been the constellations where Proginoskes had taken her to see the terrible work of the Echthroi.
“Blajeny,” Calvin asked, “where are we?”
“Metron Ariston.”
“What’s Metron Ariston? Is it a planet?”
“No. It’s an idea, a postulatum. I find it easier to posit when I am in my home galaxy, so we are near the Mondrion solar system of the Veganuel galaxy. The stars you see are those I know, those which I see from my home planet.”
“Why are we here?”
“The postulatum Metron Ariston makes it possible for all sizes to become relative. Within Metron Ariston you may be sized so that you are able to converse with a giant star or a tiny farandola.”
Meg felt a moment of shock and disbelief. Farandolae were still less real to her than Charles Wallace’s “dragons.” “A farandola! Are we really going to see one?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s impossible. A farandola is so small that—”
“How small is it?” Blajeny asked.
“So small that it’s beyond rational conceiving, my mother says.”
Mr. Jenkins made a small confused noise and shifted weight again. Blajeny said, “And yet Mrs. Murry is convinced that she has proved the existence of farandolae. Now let us suppose: here we are in Veganuel galaxy, two trillion light-years away. Veganuel is just about the same size as your own Earth’s galaxy. How long does it take the Milky Way to rotate once around?”
As no one else spoke, Meg answered, “Two hundred billion years, clockwise.”
“So that gives us a general idea of the size of your galaxy, doesn’t it?”
“Very general,” Calvin said. “Our minds can’t comprehend anything that huge, that macrocosmic.”
“Of course.”
“Think of yourselves, now, in comparison with the size of your sun. Think how much smaller you are. Have you done that?”
“Sort of,” Meg said.
“Now think of a mitochondrion. Think of the mitochondria which live in the cells of all living things, and how much smaller a mitochondrion is than you.”
Mr. Jenkins said, to himself, “I thought Charles Wallace was making them up to show off.”
Blajeny continued, “Now consider that a farandola is as much smaller than a mitochondrion as a mitochondrion is smaller than you are.”
“This time,” Calvin said, “the problem is that our minds can’t comprehend anything that microcosmic.”
Blajeny said, “Another way of putting it would be to say that a farandola is as much smaller than you are as your galaxy is larger than you are.”
Calvin whistled. “Then, to a farandola, any of us would be as big as a galaxy?”
“More or less. You are a galaxy for your farandolae.”
“Then how can we possibly meet one?”
Blajeny’s voice was patient. “I have just told you that in Metron Ariston we can almost do away with variations in size, which are, in reality, quite unimportant.” He turned his head and looked in the direction of the great glacial rocks.
“The rocks,” Meg asked, “are they really there?”
“Nothing is anywhere in Metron Ariston,” Blajeny said. “I am trying to make things as easy for you as I can by giving you a familiar visual setting. You must try to understand things not only with your little human minds, which are not a great deal of use in the problems which confront us.”
At last Mr. Jenkins sat, crouching uncomfortably on the rock. “With what can I understand, then? I don’t have very much intuition.”
“You must understand with your hearts. With the whole of yourselves, not just a fragment.”
Mr. Jenkins groaned. “I am too old to be educable. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I have lived beyond my time.”