Free A Wrinkle in Time Quintet by Madeleine L'Engle

revived, and she sat up again.
    The shadow was still there, dark and dreadful.
    Calvin held her hand strongly in his, but she felt neither strength nor reassurance in his touch.Beside her a tremor went through Charles Wallace, but he sat very still.
    He shouldn’t be seeing this, Meg thought. This is too much for so little a boy, no matter how different and extraordinary a little boy.
    Calvin turned, rejecting the dark Thing that blotted out the light of the stars. “Make it go away, Mrs Whatsit,” he whispered. “Make it go away. It’s evil.”
    Slowly the great creature turnedaround so that the shadow was behind them, so that they saw only the starsunobscured, the soft throb of starlight on the mountain, the descending circle of the great moon swiftly slipping over the horizon. Then, without a word from Mrs Whatsit, they were traveling downward, down, down. When they reached the corona of clouds Mrs Whatsit said, “You can breathe without the flowers now, my children.”

    Silence again. Not a word. It was as though the shadow had somehow reached out with its dark power and touched them so that they were incapable of speech. When they got back to the flowery field, bathed now in starlight, and moonlight from another, smaller, yellower, rising moon, a little of the tenseness went out of their bodies, and they realized that the body of the beautiful creature on whichthey rode had been as rigid as theirs.
    With a graceful gesture it dropped to the ground and folded its great wings. Charles Wallace was the first to slide off. “Mrs Who! Mrs Which!” he called, and there was an immediate quivering in the air. Mrs Who’s familiar glasses gleamed at them. Mrs Which appeared, too; but, as she had told the children, it was difficult for her to materialize completely,and though there was the robe and peaked hat, Meg could look through them to mountain and stars. She slid off Mrs Whatsit’s back and walked, rather unsteadily after the long ride, over to Mrs Which.
    “That dark Thing we saw,” she said. “Is that what my father is fighting?”

FIVE
The Tesseract
    “Yes,” Mrs Which said. “Hhee iss beehindd thee ddarrkness, sso thatt eevenn wee cannott seee hhimm.”
    Meg began to cry, to sob aloud. Through her tears she could see Charles Wallace standing there, very small, very white. Calvin put his arms around her, but she shuddered and broke away, sobbing wildly. Then she was enfolded in the great wings of Mrs Whatsit and she felt comfortand strength pouring through her. Mrs Whatsit was not speaking aloud, and yet through the wings Meg understood words.
    “My child, do not despair. Do you think we would have brought you here if there were no hope? We are asking you to do a difficult thing, but we are confident that you can do it. Your father needs help, he needs courage, and for his children he may be able to do what he cannotdo for himself.”
    “Nnow,” Mrs Which said. “Arre wee rreaddy?”
    “Where are we going?” Calvin asked.
    Again Meg felt an actual physical tingling of fear as Mrs Which spoke.
    “Wwee musstt ggo bbehindd thee sshaddow.”
    “But we will not do it all at once,” Mrs Whatsit comforted them. “We will do it in short stages.” She looked at Meg. “Now we will tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?”
    “No,” Meg said flatly.
    Mrs Whatsit sighed. “Explanations are not easy when they are about things for which your civilization still has no words. Calvin talked about traveling at the speed of light. You understand that, little Meg?”
    “Yes,” Meg nodded.
    “That, of course, is the impractical, long way around. We have learned to take shortcuts wherever possible.”
    “Sort of like in math?” Meg asked.

    “Like in math.” Mrs Whatsit looked over at Mrs Who. “Take your skirt and show them.”
    “La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia.
Spanish, my dears. Cervantes.
Experience is the mother of knowledge.”
Mrs Who took a portion of her white robe in her