1 Mrs. Whatsit
It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of
her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees
clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them,
creating wraith‐ like shadows that raced along the ground.
The house shook.
Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.
She wasn't usually afraid of weather. —It's not just the weather, she thought. —It's the
weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.
School. School was all wrong. She'd been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade.
That morning one of her teachers had said crossly, "Really, Meg, I don't understand how a child
with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don't
manage to do a little better you'll have to stay back next year."
During lunch she'd rough‐housed a little to try to make herself feel better, and one of the girls
said scornfully, "After all, Meg, we aren't grammar‐school kids any more. Why do you always act
like such a baby?"
And on the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one of the
boys had said something about her "dumb baby brother." At this she'd thrown die books on the
side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with
her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye.
Sandy and Dennys, her ten‐year‐old twin brothers, who got home from school an hour earlier
than she did, were disgusted. "Let us do the fighting when it's necessary," they told her.
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—A delinquent, that's what I am, she thought grimly. — That's what they'll be saying next. Not
Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father—
But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her
mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, "When your father gets back—"
Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were saying,
must be aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg. But if it did she
gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity other expression.
—Why can't I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?
The window rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt dose about her. Curled up on
one of her pillows a gray fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head under
again, and went back to sleep.
Everybody was asleep. Everybody except Meg. Even Charles Wallace, the "dumb baby
brother," who had an uncanny way of knowing when she was awake and unhappy, and who
would come, so many nights, tiptoeing up the attic stairs to her—even Charles Wallace was
asleep.
How could they sleep? All day on the radio there had been hurricane warnings. How could
they leave her up in the attic in the rickety brass bed, knowing that the roof might be blown right
off the house, and she tossed out into the wild night sky to land who knows where?
Her shivering grew uncontrollable.
—You asked to have the attic bedroom, she told herself savagely. —Mother let you have it
because you're the oldest. It’s a privilege, not a punishment.
"Not during a hurricane, it isn't a privilege," she said aloud. She tossed the quilt down on the
foot of the bed, and stood up. The kitten stretched luxuriously, and looked up at her with huge,
innocent eyes.
"Go back to sleep," Meg said. "Just be glad you're a kitten and not a monster like me." She
looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and made a horrible face, baring a mouthful of teeth
covered with braces. Automatically she pushed her glasses into position, ran her fingers through
her mouse‐brown hair, so that it stood wildly on end, and let out a sigh almost as noisy as the
wind.
The wide wooden floorboards were cold against her feet. Wind blew in the crevices about the
window frame, in spite of the protection the storm sash was supposed to offer. She could hear
wind howling in the chimneys. From all the way downstairs she could hear Fortinbras, the big
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black dog, starting to bark. He must be frightened, too. What was he barking at? Fortinbras
never barked without reason.
Suddenly she remembered that when she had gone to the post office to pick up the mail she'd
heard about a tramp who was supposed to have stolen twelve sheets from Mrs. Buncombe, the
constable's wife. They hadn't caught him, and maybe he was heading for the Murry's house right
now, isolated on a back road as it was; and this time maybe he'd be after more than sheets. Meg
hadn't paid much attention to the talk about the tramp at the time, because the postmistress,
with a sugary smile, had asked if she'd heard from her father lately.
She left her little room and made her way through the shadows of the main attic, bumping
against the ping‐pong table. —Now I'll have a bruise on my hip on top of everything else, she
thought.
Next she walked into her old dolls' house, Charles Wallace's rocking horse, the twins' electric
trains. "Why must everything happen to me?" She demanded of a large teddy bear.
At the foot of the attic stairs she stood still and listened. Not a sound from Charles Wallace's
room on the right. On the left, in her parents' room, not a rustle from her mother sleeping alone
in the great double bed. She tiptoed down the hall and into the twins' room, pushing again at her
glasses as though they could help her to see better in the dark. Dennys was snoring. Sandy
murmured something about baseball and subsided. The twins didn't have any problems. They
weren't great students, but they weren't bad ones, either. They were perfectly content with a
succession of B's and an occasional A or C. They were strong and fast runners and good at
games, and when cracks were made about anybody in the Murry family, they weren't made
about Sandy and Dennys.
She left the twins' room and went on downstairs, avoiding the creaking seventh step.
Fortinbras had stopped barking. It wasn't the tramp this time, then. Fort would go On barking if
anybody was around.
—But suppose the tramp does come? Suppose he has a knife? Nobody lives near enough to
hear if we screamed and screamed and screamed. Nobody'd care, anyhow.
—I’ll make myself some cocoa, she decided. —That'll cheer me up, and if the roof blows off at
least I won't go off with it.
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In the kitchen a light was already on, and Charles Wallace was sitting at the table drinking milk
and eating bread and jam. He looked very small and vulnerable sitting there alone in the big oldfashioned
kitchen, a blond little boy in faded blue Dr. Dentons, his feet swinging a good six
inches above the floor.
"Hi," he said cheerfully. "I've been waiting for you."
From under the table where he was lying at Charles Wallace's feet, hoping for a crumb or two,
Fortinbras raised his slender dark head in greeting to Meg, and his tail thumped against the floor.
Fortinbras had arrived on their doorstep, a half‐grown puppy, scrawny and abandoned, one
winter night. He was, Meg's father had decided, part Uewellyn setter and part greyhound, and
he had a slender^ dark beauty that was all his own.
"Why didn't you come up to the attic?" Meg asked her brother, speaking as though he were at
least her own age. "I've been scared stiff."
"Too windy up in that attic of yours," the little boy said. "I knew you'd be down. I put some
milk on the stove for you. It ought to be hot by now."
How did Charles Wallace always know about her? How could he always tell? He never knew—
or seemed to care— what Dennys or Sandy were thinking. It was his mother's mind, and Meg's,
that he probed with frightening accuracy.
Was it because people were a little afraid of him that they whispered about the Murry's
youngest child, who was rumored to be not quite bright? "I've heard that clever people often
have subnormal children," Meg had once overheard. "The two boys seem to be nice, regular
children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren't all there.”
It was true that Charles Wallace seldom spoke when anybody was around, so that many
people thought he'd never learned to talk. And it was true that he hadn't talked at all until he
was almost four. Meg would turn white with fury when people looked at him and clucked,
shaking their heads sadly.
"Don't worry about Charles Wallace, Meg." her father had once told her. Meg remembered it
very clearly because it was shortly before he went away. "There's nothing the matter with his
mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.”
"I don't want him to grow up to be dumb like me," Meg had said.
"Oh, my darling, you're not dumb," her father answered. "You're like Charles Wallace. Your
development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn't happen to be the usual pace."
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"How do you know?” Meg had demanded. "How do you know I'm not dumb? Isn't it just
because you love me?"
"I love you, but that's not what tells me. Mother and I've given you a number of tests, you
know."
Yes, that was true. Meg had realized that some of the "games" her parents played with her
were tests of some kind, and that there had been more for her and Charles Wallace than for the
twins. "IQ tests, you mean?"
"Yes, some of them."
"Is my IQ okay?"
"More than okay."
"What is it?"
"That I'm not going to tell you. But it assures me that both you and Charles Wallace will be
able to do pretty much whatever you like when you grow up to yourselves. You just wait till
Charles Wallace starts to talk. You'll see."
How right he had been about that, though he himself had left before Charles Wallace began to
speak, suddenly, with none of the usual baby preliminaries, using entire sentences. How proud
he would have been!
"You'd better check the milk," Charles Wallace said to Meg now, his diction clearer and cleaner
than that of most five‐year‐olds. "You know you don't like it when it gets