A Swiftly Tilting Planet (21 page)

Meg let out a long sigh. “He made the right choice, didn’t he?”

Ananda’s warm tongue gently touched Meg’s hand.

Meg closed her eyes, listening. She thought she heard a howl of defeat, and she whiffed the ugly stench of Echthroi.

So they had been trying to get at Charles Wallace in a much more subtle way than by trying to snatch him from Gaudior’s back or throw him into Projections.

Duthbert Mortmain had nearly killed Chuck. Nothing went in straight lines for him any more, not time, not distance. His mind was like the unstable earth, full of faults, so that layers shifted and slid. It was like being in a nightmare from which there was no possibility of waking. She ached for him, and for Charles Wallace Within him.

* * *

Pain and panic

the world tilting

twirling on its axis, out of control

spinning off away from the sun into the dark

light bursting against his eyes, an explosion of light

a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors assailing his nostrils

“Chuck!” The voice came echoing from a vast distance, echoing along the unseen walls of a dark tunnel.

“Chuck! It’s Beezie, your sister. Chuck, can you hear me?”

He was weighted down by the vast heaviness of the atmosphere, but he managed to lift one finger in response to Beezie’s calling, afraid, as he did so, that if the weight lifted he would fall off the wildly tilting earth …

“He hears me! Ma, Chuck moved his finger!”

Slowly the rampant, out-of-control speed lessened, and the planet resumed its normal pace. Colors stopped their kaleidoscopic dance and stayed in place. Smells became identifiable once more: coffee; bread; apples. Beezie: the gold was not as brilliant as it had been, but it was still Beezie. And their mother: the blue was cloudy now, hardly blue at all, closer to the grey of rain clouds. Grandma: where is Grandma’s smell? Why is there emptiness? Where is the green?

“Grandma!”

“She’s dead, Chuck. Her heart gave out.”

“Gedder pushed her. He killed her.”

“No, Chuck.” Beezie’s voice was bitter, and the bitterness further muted the gold. “Duthbert Mortmain. He was furious with her, and he was going to strike her, but you saved her, and he hit you instead, and you fell all the way down the stairs and fractured your skull. And Grandma—she just …”

“What? Did Gedder—”

“No, no, not Gedder, Chuck, Duthbert Mortmain. He felt as awful as he’s capable of feeling. He and Ma drove you to the hospital, and I stayed home with Grandma, and she looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Beezie, I can’t wait any longer. My Patrick’s come for me.’ And she gave a little gasp, and that was all.”

He heard her, but between the stark words came other sounds and the smell of a hot and alien wind. Time’s layers slipped and slid under him. “But Gwen shouldn’t marry Gedder. Gwydyr’s children shouldn’t marry Madoc’s.”

There was panic in Beezie’s voice. “What are you talking about? Chuck, please don’t. You scare me. I want you to get all the way well.”

“Not Let’s Pretend. Real. Gwen and Gedder—it would be bad, bad …”

The cliff loomed high over him, dark, shadowing. Gedder was at the top of the cliff, waiting, waiting … who was he waiting for?

* * *

Chuck slowly improved, until he could put cans and boxes on the store shelves. Even though he could not manage school, he recovered enough to mark the prices on the store’s stock. He seldom made a mistake, and when he did, Duthbert Mortmain did not box his ears.

Sometimes Chuck saw him as Mortmain, sometimes as Gedder, when his worlds warped. “Gedder is nicer than he used to be,” he reported to Beezie. “He’s nicer to Ma. And to Grandma and me.”

“Grandma—” A sob choked Beezie’s voice. “Chuck, how can you! How can you play Let’s Pretend about that?” Her voice rose with outrage. “How can you go away from me like this when I need you? Don’t leave me!”

He heard and he did not hear. He was caught between the layers and he could not get into the right layer so that he could be with Beezie. “Grandma says I’m not to let him hear me call him Gedder, because that’s not his real name, so I won’t.” He had intended to say, he thought he was saying, “I’ll never leave you, Beezie,” but the words of the other layer came out of his mouth. “Where’s Matthew? I want to talk to him. He has to get Zillah to Vespugia.”

Sometimes the earth started to tilt again and he could not stand upright against the velocity. Then he had to stay in bed until the tilting steadied.

He climbed the attic stairs one day when the earth was
firm under his feet, and crawled into all the dimmest and most cobwebby corners, until his hands felt a packet. At first he thought it was an old tobacco pouch, but then he saw that it was oilskin wrapped about some papers. Letters. And newspaper clippings.

Letters from Bran to Zillah, to Matthew. Urgent letters.

He looked at them and the words danced and flickered. Sometimes they seemed to say one thing, sometimes another. He could not read the small print. He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyeballs and everything sparkled like fireworks. He sobbed with frustration, and took the letters and clippings downstairs and put them under his pillow.

—I’ll tell Grandma. She’ll help me read them.

The kythe came to Meg in distorting waves.

One minute she understood, and the next she was caught up in Chuck’s shifting universe. She pulled herself away from the kythe to try to think.

—What’s coming clear, she thought,—is that it’s important to know whether Mad Dog Branzillo is from Madoc’s or Gwydyr’s line. Somehow or other, it’s between the two babies in the scry, the scry which both Madoc and Brandon Llawcae saw.

We don’t know much about Gwydyr’s line. He was disgraced, and he went to Vespugia eventually, and we think Gedder is his descendant.

We know a little more about Madoc’s line. From each time Charles Wallace has gone Within, we know that most of Madoc’s ancestors stayed around here.

So Branzillo’s ancestors matter. And it’s all in Matthew Maddox’s book that Charles Wallace can’t get at because the Echthroi are blocking him. But what can Charles Wallace do about it, even if he and Gaudior ever do get to Patagonia?

Slowly, she moved back into the kythe.

“Chuck.” It was Beezie’s voice.

“Here I am.”

“How do you feel?”

“Dizzy. The earth’s spinning, like the night we saw the fireflies.”

“The night Pa died.”

“Yes. Like then.”

“You remember?” she asked in surprise.

“Of course.”

“Lots of things you don’t remember. That’s why you can’t go to school any more. Chuck—”

“What?”

“Ma’s going to have a baby.”

“She can’t. Pa’s dead.”

“She’s married again.”

“She and Gedder can’t have a baby. It would be bad.”

“I thought you were talking the way you used to. I
thought you were all right!” Her voice rose in frustration and outrage. “Not Gedder! Mortmain!”

He tried to come back to her, but he could not. “Same difference. Same smell. The baby has to come from Madoc. Bran and Zillah have to have the baby because of the prayer.”

“What prayer?” she shouted.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“The letters.”

“What letters?”

He became impatient. “Bran’s letters, of course.”

“But we’ve read them all. There wasn’t anything like that in them.”

“Found some more.”

“When? Where?”

“In the attic. Grandma helps me read them.”

“Where are they?” she demanded.

He fumbled under his pillow. “Here.”

* * *

Chuck walked through a spring evening, smelling of growing grass, and blossoms drifting from the trees. He walked over the fields, over the brook, drinking the water rushing with melting snow, lifting his head, clambering to his feet, going on to the flat rock. Pain walked with him, and there was a dark veil of cloud between his eyes and the world. If a chair was pulled out of place he walked into it. Trees and rocks did not move; he felt safer at the rock than anywhere else.

He did not tell anybody about the veil.

He began to make mistakes in stamping the prices on the stock, but Duthbert Mortmain assumed it was because the fall had made him half-witted.

The baby came, a boy, and the mother no longer worked in the store. Paddy O’Keefe had dropped out of school and came in to help. Chuck followed Paddy’s instructions, marking the cans with the stamp which Paddy set for him. He heard Paddy say, “He’s more trouble than he’s worth. Whyn’t you send him to the nuthouse?”

Mortmain muttered something about his wife.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll hurt the baby?” Paddy asked.

After that, Chuck stayed out of the way as much as possible, spending the warm days at the flat rock, the cold ones curled up in the attic. He saw Beezie to talk to only in the evenings, and Sunday afternoons.

“Chuck, what’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not seeing properly.”

“It’s all right.”

“Ma—”

“Don’t tell Ma!”

“But you ought to see a doctor.”

“No! All they want is any excuse to put me away. You must have heard them, Paddy and Duthbert. They want to put me in an institution. For my own good, Mortmain said to Ma. He said I’m an idiot and I might hurt the baby.”

Beezie burst into tears and flung her arms around her brother. “You wouldn’t!”

“I know I wouldn’t. But it’s the one thing Ma might listen to.”

“And you’re not an idiot!”

His cheeks were wet with Beezie’s tears. “If you tell them about my eyes they’ll put me in an insane asylum for my own good and the baby’s. I’m trying to keep out of the way.”

“I’ll help you, oh, Chuck, I’ll help you,” Beezie promised.

“I have to stay long enough to make sure Matthew sends Zillah to Vespugia. He’s saving the money.”

“Oh, Chuck,” Beezie groaned. “Don’t let them hear you talk like this.”

* * *

As the veil deepened and darkened, his inner vision lightened. When the weather was fine he lay out on the flat rock all day, looking up toward the sky and seeing pictures, pictures more vivid than anything he had seen with unveiled eyes. His concentration was so intense that he became part of all that was happening in the pictures. Sometimes in the evenings he told Beezie about them, pretending they were dreams, in order not to upset her.

“I dreamed about riding a unicorn. He was like moonlight, and so tall I had to climb a tree to get on his back, and we flew among the fireflies, and the unicorn and I sang together.”

“That’s a lovely dream. Tell me more.”

“I dreamed that the valley was a lake, and I rode a beautiful fish sort of like a porpoise.”

“Pa said the valley was a lake, way back in prehistory. Archaeologists have found fish fossils in the glacial rocks. Maybe that’s why you dreamed it.”

“Grandma told us about the lake, the day we blew dandelion clocks.”

“Oh, Chuck, you’re so strange, the way you remember some things …”

“And I dreamed about a fire of roses, and—” He reached gropingly for her hand. “I can move in and out of time.”

“Oh, Chuck!”

“I can, Beezie.”

“Please—please stop.”

“It’s only dreams,” he comforted. “Well, then. But don’t tell Ma.”

“Only you and Grandma.”

“Oh, Chuck.”

He knew the route to the rock so well that it was easier for him to go in the dark, when he could see nothing, than in sunlight when shafts of brilliance penetrated the veil like spears and hurt his eyes and confused his sense of direction.

Time. Time. There wasn’t much time.

Time. Time was as fluid as water.

He stood by Matthew’s couch. “You can’t wait any longer. You have to get Zillah to Vespugia now, or it will be too late.”

Matthew is writing, writing against time. It’s all in the book Pa talked about. They don’t want me to see the book.

Ritchie is cutting a window in Brandon’s room, before leaving for Wales …

But Zillah isn’t there … Why is there an Indian girl instead?

Because it isn’t Zillah’s time. She comes later, in Matthew’s time

Unicorns can move in time

and idiots

space is more difficult

Paddy wants me out of the way. Paddy and Mortmain. Not much time

Did you not learn in Gwynedd that there is room for one king only?

You will be great, little Madog, and call the world your own, to keep or destroy as you will. It is an evil world, little Madog.

You will do good for your people, El Zarco, little Blue Eyes. The prayer has been answered in you, blue for birth, blue for mirth

Which blue will it be

They are fighting

up on the cliff

on the steep rock

the world

it’s tilting

it’s going too fast

I’m going to fall

ELEVEN

All these I place

The light came back slowly. There had been shadows, nothing but deepening shadows, and pain, and slowly the pain began to leave and healing light touched his closed lids. He opened them. He was on the star-watching rock with Gaudior.

“The wind brought you out of Chuck.”

“What happened to him?”

“Mortmain had him institutionalized. Are you ready? It’s time—” A ripple of tension moved along the unicorn’s flanks.

Charles Wallace felt the wind all about them, cold, and yet strengthening. “What Chuck saw—two men fighting—was it real?”

“What is real?” Gaudior replied infuriatingly.

“It’s important!”

“We do not always know what is important and what
is not. The wind sends a warning to hurry, hurry. Climb up, and hold very tight.”

“Should I bind myself to you again?”