A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle Read Free Book Online

giggle. “Mr. Jenkins always said I have too much imagination—but it’s never been that kind of imagination. I’ve never hallucinated or anything, have I?”

    “No,” he replied firmly. “You have not. What’s that awful stench?”
    “I don’t know. It’s not nearly as bad now as it was just before you came.”
    “It makes silage smell like roses. Yukh.”
    “Calvin—Louise the Larger—it’s not the first time today Louise has done something peculiar.”
    “What?”
    She told him about Louise that afternoon. “But she wasn’t attacking or anything then, she was still friendly. She’s always been a friendly snake.” She let her breath out in a long, quavering sigh. “Cal, let me have your handkerchief, please. My glasses are filthy and I can’t see a thing, and right now I’d like to be able to see what’s going on.”
    “My handkerchief is filthy.” But Calvin fished in his pockets.
    “It’s better than a kilt.” Meg spat on her glasses and wiped them. Without their aid she could see no more of the older boy than a vague blur, so she made bold to say, “Oh, Cal, I was hoping you might come over tonight anyhow.”
    “I’m surprised you’re even willing to speak to me. I came over to apologize for what my brother did to Charles Wallace.”
    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. She returned his handkerchief. “It wasn’t your fault.” Then—“I must have had a mental aberration or something, about Louise and Mr. Jenkins, mustn’t I?”
    “I don’t know, Meg. You’ve never had a mental aberration before, have you?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Fewmets to Mr. Jenkins, anyhow.”
    She almost shouted, “What did you say!”
    “Fewmets to Mr. Jenkins. Fewmets is my new swear word. I’m tired of all the old ones. Fewmets are dragon droppings, and—”
    “I know fewmets are dragon droppings! What I want to know is why you picked on fewmets, of all things?”
    “It seemed quite a reasonable choice to me.”
    Suddenly she was shaking again. “Calvin—please—don’t—it’s too serious.”
    He dropped his bantering tone. “Okay, Meg, what’s up about fewmets?”
    “Oh, Cal, I was so sort of shook about the Mr. Jenkins thing I almost forgot about the dragons.”
    “The what?”
    She told him, all about Charles Wallace and his dragons, “and he’s never hallucinated before, either.” She told him again about Louise greeting the shadow of something they had not quite seen, “but it certainly
wasn’t Mr. Jenkins. Louise wasn’t in the least friendly about Mr. Jenkins.”
    “It’s wild,” Calvin said, “absolutely wild.”
    “But we did see fewmets, Calvin—or something, more like feathers, really, but not like real feathers. Charles Wallace took one home—there was a whole pile of them—these sort of feathers, and dragon scales, by the biggest rock in the north pasture.”
    Calvin sprang to his feet. “Let’s go, then! Bring your flashlight.”
    It was possible now for her to cross the orchard and go into the pasture with Calvin to take the lead. 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. For if nothing that had happened touched on reality, then she was going out of her mind.
    When they reached the pasture, Calvin took the light from her. “I’ll go ahead a bit.”
    But Meg followed close on his heels. She thought she could sense disbelief as he swept the arc of light around the base of the rock. The beam came to rest in a small circle, and in the center of the circle shone something gold and glittering.
    “Phew—” Calvin said.

    Meg giggled with relief and tension. “Don’t you