A Wind in the Door: Chapters 3–4

A huge dark form strode swiftly through the woods and into the pasture; it reached them in a few strides, and then stood very still, so that the folds of the long robe seemed chiseled out of granite.

The stranger was dark, dark as night and tall as a tree, and there was something in the repose of his body, the quiet of his voice, which drove away fear.

Flame spurted skywards in indignation at the doubt in the atmosphere.

“It is a constant amazement to me,” the cherubim thought at them, “that so many earthling artists paint cherubim to resemble baby pigs.”

“Age, for cherubim, is immaterial. It’s only for time-bound creatures that age even exists. I am, in cherubic terms, still a child, and that is all you need to know. It’s very rude to ask questions about age.”

It’s a question of learning to adapt, and nobody can do that for me. If everybody will leave me alone, and stop trying to help me, I’ll learn, eventually, how not to be conspicuous.

Despite his height and girth he moved, Meg thought, as though he were used to a heavier gravity than earth’s.

Meg lay beside him, with Calvin on her other side, so that she felt protected, not only from the cold night wind but from the cherubim, who had reached the rock with the beat of a wing and assorted himself into an assemblage of wings and eyes and puffs of smoke at a discreet distance from Charles Wallace, who was on Blajeny’s other side.

Then he sat up and folded his arms across his chest, and his strange luminous eyes turned inwards, so that he was looking not at the stars nor at the children, but into some deep, dark place far within himself, and then further.

“Where is my school? Here, there, everywhere. In the schoolyard during first-grade recess. With the cherubim and seraphim. Among the farandolae.”

“Are we your whole class?” Calvin asked. “Meg and Charles Wallace and me?”
Proginoskes let out a puff of huffy smoke.
“Sorry—and the cherubim.”

When they reached the stone wall to the apple orchard, the moon was shining clearly, with that extraordinary brightness which makes light and dark acute and separate.

Now Louise was weaving slowly back and forth in a gentle rhythm, almost as though she were making a serpentine version of a deep curtsy; and the sibilant sound was a gentle, treble fluting.

They did not ask him where he was going to spend the night—though Meg wondered—because it was the kind of presumptuous question one could not possibly ask Blajeny.

They left him standing and watching after them, the folds of his robes chiseled like granite, his dark face catching and refracting the moonlight like fused glass.

In one corner were two comfortable chairs and a reading lamp, which softened the clinical glare of the lights over the counter.

She looked up from the strange convolutions of the microelectron microscope.

She, too, had turned her back on the glitter of worldly success. Meg knew that her parents, despite the fact that they were consulted by the president of the United States, had given up much when they moved to the country in order to devote their lives to pure research.

Dr. Colubra’s work was perforce more straightforward, and Meg was not sure how she would respond to talk of a strange dark Teacher, eight or nine feet tall, and even less sure how she would react to their description of a cherubim.

“From our artesian well. The very best water.”

“Do you remember those first steps on the moon, so tentative to begin with, on that strange, airless, alien terrain? And then, in a short time, Armstrong and Aldrin were striding about confidently, and the commentator remarked on this as an extraordinary example of man’s remarkable ability to adapt.”

Mrs. Murry said firmly, “You are not going back out tonight to find if the snake, magnificent though she be, likes cocoa. Save your experimental zeal for daylight. Louise is undoubtedly sound asleep.”

Many years ago when I was working in a hospital in the Philippines I had a boa constrictor for a pet; we had a problem with rats in the ward, and my boa constrictor did a thorough job of keeping the rodent population down.

He also had impeccable judgment about human nature. He was naturally a friendly creature, and if he showed me that he disliked or distrusted somebody, I took him seriously.

Meg sighed, in resignation, in fear, and, surprisingly, in relief.

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

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.

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.

It was almost as tangible as though she were actually there, and she thought she felt Proginoskes pushing at her mind, helping her remember.

“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.

We have to see a great, dramatic fissure in the sky before we begin to take danger seriously.

She blushed slightly at the compliment; she had a feeling that paying compliments is a habit not often indulged in by cherubim.

She felt a wave of apprehension roll through her.

“Whatever you think best,” Proginoskes said meekly.

She felt an acquiescing response from the cherubim, and then he disappeared; she could not see even a shimmer, or feel a flicker of him in her mind.

Louise uncoiled, waving slightly in greeting, still looking intently at Meg.

“You look a little pale. Sure you aren’t coming down with something?”
—She’s worried about all of us with this mitochondritis stuff. “Just the normal throes of adolescence,” she smiled at her mother.

When she left the house she had a horrid, premonitory feeling that it would be a long time before she returned.

But this morning he showed no inclination to leave the warmth of the kitchen.