A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle [46]
“Nobody suffers here,” Charles intoned. “Nobody is ever unhappy.”
“But nobody’s ever happy, either,” Meg said earnestly. “Maybe if you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t known how to be happy. Calvin, I want to go home.”
“We can’t leave Charles,” Calvin told her, “and we can’t go before we’ve found your father. You know that. But you’re right, Meg, and Mrs Which is right. This is Evil.”
Charles Wallace shook his head, and scorn and disapproval seemed to emanate from him. “Come. We’re wasting time.” He moved rapidly down the corridor, but continued to speak. “How dreadful it is to be low, individual organisms. Tch-tch-tch.” His pace quickened from step to step, his short legs flashing, so that Meg and Calvin almost had to run to keep up with him. “Now see this,” he said. He raised his hand and suddenly they could see through one of the walls into a small room. In the room a little boy was bouncing a ball. He was bouncing it in rhythm, and the walls of his little cell seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the ball. And each time the ball bounced he screamed as though he were in pain.
“That’s the little boy we saw this afternoon,” Calvin said sharply, “the little boy who wasn’t bouncing the ball like the others.”
Charles Wallace giggled again. “Yes. Every once in a while there’s a little trouble with cooperation, but it’s easily taken care of. After today he’ll never desire to deviate again. Ah, here we are.”
He moved rapidly down the corridor and again held up his hand to make the wall transparent. They looked into another small room or cell. In the center of it was a large, round, transparent column, and inside this column was a man.
“FATHER!” Meg screamed.
NINE
IT
Meg rushed at the man imprisoned in the column, but as she reached what seemed to be the open door she was hurled back as though she had crashed into a brick wall.
Calvin caught her. “It’s just transparent like glass this time,” he told her. “We can’t go through it.”
Meg was so sick and dizzy from the impact that she could not answer. For a moment she was afraid that she would throw up or faint. Charles Wallace laughed again, the laugh that was not his own, and it was this that saved her, for once more anger overcame her pain and fear. Charles Wallace, her own real, dear Charles Wallace, never laughed at her when she hurt herself. Instead, his arms would go quickly around her neck and he would press his soft cheek against hers in loving comfort. But the demon Charles Wallace snickered. She turned away from him and looked again at the man in the column.
“Oh, Father—” she whispered longingly, but the man in the column did not move to look at her. The horn-rimmed glasses, which always seemed so much a part of him, were gone, and the expression of his eyes was turned inward, as though he were deep in thought. He had grown a beard, and the silky brown was shot with gray. His hair, too, had not been cut. It wasn’t just the overlong hair of the man in the snapshot at Cape Canaveral; it was pushed back from his high forehead and fell softly almost to his shoulders, so that he looked like someone in another century, or a shipwrecked sailor. But there was no question, despite the change in him, that he was her father, her own beloved father.
“My, he looks a mess, doesn’t he?” Charles Wallace said, and sniggered.
Meg swung on him with sick rage. “Charles, that’s Father! Father!”
“So what?”
Meg turned away from him and held out her arms to the man in the column.
“He doesn’t see us, Meg,” Calvin said gently.
“Why? Why?”
“I think it’s sort of like those little peepholes they have in apartments, in the front doors,” Calvin explained. “You know. From inside you can look through and see everything. And from outside you can’t see anything at all. We can see him, but he can’t see us.”
“Charles!” Meg pleaded. “Let me in to Father!”
“Why?” Charles asked placidly.
Meg remembered that when they were in the room with the man with red eyes she had knocked Charles Wallace back into himself when she tackled him and his head cracked the floor;