A Wind in the Door: Chapters 1–2

Suddenly sounding forlorn, younger than his six years, he said, “I wish the high-school bus got home earlier. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you.”

She did not like the way he looked, and she turned her mind back to the unlikely tale of dragons, picking her way around the luxuriant pumpkin vines.

His end-of-summer tan could not disguise his extreme pallor, nor his shadowed eyes; why hadn’t she noticed this?

It was easier to blame Charles Wallace’s paleness and lethargy on his problems at school.

They had finished crossing the orchard and Charles Wallace climbed up onto the wall again and stood there, looking across an unused pasture where there were two large outcroppings of glacial rock.

In a strange way she did believe him. Not, perhaps, that he had seen actual dragons—but Charles Wallace had never before tended to mix fact and fancy. Never before had he separated reality and illusion in such a marked way.

There was no sign of dragons. She had not really expected that there would be. Nevertheless, she was disappointed, her anxiety about Charles subtly deepened.

His vocabulary itself was against him; he had, in fact, not started talking until late, but then it was in complete sentences, with none of the baby preliminaries.

It wasn’t surprising that Charles was resented; everybody expected him to be backward, and he talked like a dictionary.

“Now, children”—the first-grade teacher smiled brightly at the gaggle of new first-graders staring at her that first morning—“I want each one of you to tell me something about yourselves.”

Meg waited for what she calculated was five minutes, then emerged, pressing her forefinger against her upper lip to stifle a sneeze.

She was a special pet of the twins, and they had watched her grow from a small snakelet to her present flourishing size.

Didn’t snakes and birds, way back in evolution, didn’t they evolve originally from the same phylum, or whatever you call it?

They’re so small that all anyone can do is postulate them; even the most powerful microelectron microscope can’t show them. But they’re important to us—we’d die if we didn’t have farandolae.

“Mitochondria are tiny little organisms living in our cells. That gives you an idea of how tiny they are, doesn’t it?”

Louise the Larger was slithering along the stones of the wall towards them, moving rapidly, sinuously, her black curves shimmering purple and silver in the autumn light.

I’m in the difficult position of knowing more about the possible ailments of mitochondria than almost anybody else today.

Charles Wallace not only has a good mind, he has extraordinary powers of intuition.

Meg could feel herself flushing. She put her hands up to her cheeks.

“I think Calvin confuses you with Pallas Athene. You’re his absolute ideal. And he likes all of us. His own family’s certainly a mess. I really think he likes me only because of our family.”

“Stop being self- deprecating, Meg.”

Several houses nearby had been broken into that autumn, and while nothing of great value had been taken, drawers had been emptied with casual maliciousness, food dumped on living-room floors, upholstery slashed.

Even their safe little village was revealing itself to be unpredictable and irrational and precarious, and while Meg had already begun to understand this with her mind, she had never before felt it with the whole of herself.

If there really were dragons, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in the north pasture, oughtn’t their parents to know?

“Not that we don’t think science is the real world, Mother,” Dennys said, “but you and Father aren’t practical scientists, you’re theoretical scientists.”
Mrs. Murry demurred. “I’m not wholly impractical, you know, Sandy, and neither is your father.”

“It’s all much too complicated for me. I’m sure banking is a lot simpler.”
“And more lucrative,” Dennys added.

Charles Wallace pale and listless.

—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.

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.

She looked warily about.

He held out a hand, pale in the moonlight wavering behind the clouds.

Mr. Jenkins screamed, in a way that she had never known a man could scream, a high, piercing screech.

She thought she saw Louise slithering back through a dark recess in the stone wall, disappearing—

A thick, ugly smell, like spoiled cabbage, like flower stalks left too long in water, rose like a miasma from the place where Mr. Jenkins had been—

Meg adjusted her spectacles with her usual rough shove up the nose, just as a shaft of moonlight broke through the clouds and illuminated Calvin’s troubled expression.

“I must have had a mental aberration or something, about Louise and Mr. Jenkins, mustn’t I?”

He dropped his bantering tone.

Uppermost in Meg’s mind, superseding fear, was the need to prove that she and Charles Wallace weren’t just making something up, that the wild tales she had told Calvin were real—not Mr. Jenkins turning into a flying emptiness in the sky, she did not want that to be real, but the dragons.

Anyhow, my parents and grandparents were born right here in the village, and so were my great-grandparents. The O’Keefes may be shiftless, but at least they’re not newcomers.