The Boggart and the Monster

  Tommy squatted beside him and passed him the box of biscuits. He said, “The only thing missing is that they don’t tell you how to help.”

  “But they can’t do that because they aren’t actually talking, you’re just plugged into them,” Jessup said, intent, trying to-remember. “It’s like — oh I don’t know, it’s hard to understand without having it happen to you.”

  Tommy stood up again. He said rather stiffly, “Well, I am neither a MacDevon nor an Urquhart, so I dare say I am not qualified to understand.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Jessup said.

  Tommy said, “Though we are all more Scottish than you will ever be, boggarts and all.”

  “Tommy!” Jessup said plaintively.

  Emily got to her feet hastily, found herself standing closer to Tommy’s stiff hostile form than she had intended, but plowed ahead nonetheless. “I think this is all just about both boggarts wanting to be together,” she said. “And not knowing how, because there’s all this space in the way. And that’s tough.”

  She looked valiantly into Tommy’s coldly glinting blue eyes, and he looked back at her. He said quietly, “I know about space getting in the way, for friends.”

  “I mean,” said Emily, growing rather pink, “I mean, maybe there’s something we can do to help them be together, if we can just find out what it is.”

  “Hey!” said a cheerful voice above them, from the path to the tower. “I finally tracked you down!”

  They looked up, startled, and saw the smiling face of Angus Cameron.

  Taken by surprise, Tommy stared up at his father with a marked lack of welcome. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Angus scrambled down over the rocky ledge to stand beside them. His neck was festooned with leather straps, and camera bags and binocular cases hung from them, bumping against his hips.

  “It’s amazing how many Range Rovers full of camping gear there are in the parking lots of Argyll,” he said. “But only Mr. Mac’s has Emily’s ‘Save the Whales’ sticker on its back window.” He suddenly noticed Miss Urquhart next to him, and stuck out his hand to her. “Excuse me,” he said politely. “I’m Angus Cameron.”

  “Mary Urquhart,” said Miss Urquhart amiably.

  “He’s my dad,” Tommy said.

  “Is anything wrong, Angus?” said Mr. Maconochie.

  “No no, not at all. I was just passing by.”

  “You were not passing by, you said you were tracking us down,” said Tommy warily. “I’m a big boy now, Dad, you don’t have to check up on me.”

  “Did you bring William?” said Emily hopefully.

  “No, he’s back with Mrs. Cameron, barking at the seagulls.” Angus Cameron stuck his hands awkwardly into the pockets of his anorak, and gave her a bright, deliberate smile. “Are you having a good time, then?”

  “Great, thanks,” said Emily.

  “I heard you’d been . . . seeing some sights,” Angus said. He looked around at them all with a carefully neutral expression, and a cautious glance at Miss Urquhart. A ring of equally careful blank faces stared back at him.

  Jessup said, “Who told you that, Mr. Cameron?”

  “Your friend Dr. Pindle,” said Angus. He looked about him, to make sure no tourists were in earshot. “Not to put too fine a point on it, he told me you all believed you’d seen the Loch Ness Monster.”

  Tommy said, “I have to warn you, Miss Urquhart, my father is a reporter.”

  “Just a stringer,” said Angus modestly. “I cover the Highlands for a couple of the nationals.” He looked back at Tommy, and this time the look was serious and intent. “Be straight with me, now. Is this true?”

  Tommy sighed. He said reluctantly, “Yes.”

  “It’s quite true, Angus,” said Mr. Maconochie, coming to the rescue.

  Angus turned to him, his eyebrows going up. “And you were really there too, Mr. Mac?”

  “And Emily and me,” Jessup said.

  “We were all in the trailer with the screens when Dr. Pindle’s cameras were running in the loch,” Tommy said. “And on the screen we saw — we saw Nessie. Swimming. The great big body and the long neck.”

  “Lord Almighty,” said Angus Cameron. He shook his head. “I’d never have believed it. All these years I thought it was a bad joke.”

  “So did I,” Tommy said.

  Angus pulled his notebook out of his pocket. “Tell me what you saw. I have it from Dr. Pindle but I want your own words. All of you.”

  Haltingly they recited their memories to him, each acutely aware of the one crucial element that they were leaving out. Angus Cameron might accept a monster, but it was useless to expect him to believe in boggarts; Tommy, they knew, was the only member of his family to whom their Boggart had ever shown himself.

  Angus scribbled eagerly, filling page after page.

  “But the creature vanished, and so did Harold Pindle’s pictures of it,” Mr. Maconochie said. He struck a match to relight his pipe. “So I don’t know how good a story this is, Angus.”

  “Without pictures it’s not a story at all,” Angus said grimly He put his notebook back in his pocket. “But the first person to get the first picture will have his fortune made. And I hope it will be me. You have cameras with you, of course?”

  “Emily has one,” said Jessup.

  Emily looked around vaguely at the debris of their lunch. “It’s here somewhere,” she said.

  “Well good grief, get it out!” said Angus Cameron. He looked at them all curiously. “I must say, of all the people I’ve interviewed who claim to have seen Nessie, you lot are the calmest. Usually they’re so excited they can hardly talk straight.”

  Miss Urquhart said quietly, “I saw Nessie once. Out there in the middle, swimming by, head up in the air.”

  “You did?” Angus said.

  She smiled at him. “But that was forty years ago. I don’t think you were writing for the newspapers then.”

  Angus studied them all again for a moment as if he were trying to work out a puzzle. Then he stood up, reaching to untangle the assorted leather cases dangling from his neck. “Just keep that camera handy, Emily. I’m off back to the survey boats. They’ll be halfway up the loch by now.”

  Jessup jumped to his feet in alarm. “Harold’s started his survey? Already?”

  “Driving Nessie down toward you!” said Angus cheerfully “Aye, he’s been at it since ten. Good-bye all. Keep your eyes skinned. Nice to meet you, Miss Urquhart.”

  “Good day to you, Mr. Cameron,” said Miss Urquhart, but nobody else paid much attention to Angus Cameron’s departure. Tense with concern, they were peering out at the loch, craning their necks to see any sign of the Kalling-Pindle expedition on its ominous, optimistic way south.

  “There isn’t a thing,” Emily said. “Just grey water, empty, as far as you can see. Oh poor Nessie, poor Boggart, what’s this going to do to them?”

  “Where is the Boggart?” Jessup said anxiously. “We have to warn him! Miss Urquhart —” he swung around, looking for her — “that thing you did, the listening, can we do it in reverse?”

  Miss Urquhart was getting carefully to her feet, tucking her jeans back into her boots. “In reverse? You mean call him?”

  “I guess. If we all focused on him — Emily and Tommy and me —”

  Tommy said with bitter dignity, “Not me. I am not a MacDevon.”

  “Oh for Pete’s sake!” said Jessup. “You’re his friend! Miss Urquhart — could we?”

  Miss Urquhart’s green eyes contemplated them from the wise, lined face. She said gently, “I think you have been calling him for some minutes already.”

  “Look!” Emily said suddenly “Look at that!”

  She was staring up over the loch, and following her gaze, they saw a great bird come gliding down out of the sky in a long sideways slant, the end feathers of its broad wings spread like fingers. Slowly it coasted to and fro before them, golden, beautiful, coming closer and closer.

 
“My stars,” said Mr. Maconochie, awed. “It’s a golden eagle! I thought you could only ever see them up in the hills!”

  Behind them they heard excited cries from a bus-load of tourists who were just beginning to spread through the castle ruins — “An eagle! Look at the eagle!” And then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the bird was gone, and though every watching person felt that it must simply have dropped past the edge of the castle wall, out of sight, there were a few who knew better.

  Emily, Tommy and Jessup looked up and around, turning, searching the empty air for any sign they might recognize.

  “Boggart?” Tommy said. “Is that you?”

  * * *

  THE BOGGART HOVERED in a whirling invisible little vortex of air over the surface of the loch, looking up at the three anxious young faces searching for him. Then he turned downward, and called loudly, clearly, sternly, through the cold water to the bottom of the loch, hundreds of feet below. It was not a call that any but one creature would be able to hear.

  “Nessie! Wake this minute, and pay attention! There are friends up here concerned about you. And about me.”

  A long low grumbling sound came drifting up from the bottom of the loch. “It’ll be those who were trying to reach down at me just now,” Nessie said crossly. “I want no part of it. A boggart doesnae have friends, except for other boggarts.”

  “He has family,” the Boggart said.

  “You said you were my family,” said Nessie, reproachful.

  “So I am, but you were the Urquhart boggart and there are still Urquharts in this world too. Even if they cannae live in your castle any more. And there are still MacDevons for me. And I can hear my people calling me, and yours calling you.”

  “I’m not listening,” Nessie said.

  The Boggart lost his patience. Up above the surface of the loch, people looking down from the castle were startled to see a sudden squall churn the water, as if a very small tornado had appeared out of nowhere. But the squall was not weather, it was the ferocious concentrated energy of an angry boggart, leaping in the air and diving down to the bottom of the deep cold lake. Nessie felt it coming, and cowered into the mud.

  The Boggart had had enough. He drove into the muddy bottom of Loch Ness like an errant torpedo, and he whirled underneath Nessie’s great inert bulk and up again on the other side, screeching like a banshee, stirring up a whirlpool of cloudy sediment. Every fish for hundreds of yards around fled in panic. Nessie moaned.

  “You big ungrateful git!” the Boggart yelled. “Three hundred years you’ve been lying there feeling sorry for yourself, idle, lazy, wasting all your boggartry! You know what’s going to happen to you now? Coming up that loch there’s a row of boats with eyes that can see you and picture you and make your life miserable for every moment of every day from now on! You’ll have no peace, there’ll be no sleeping sound in the mud for years any more. You’ll be poked and prodded from one end of the loch to the other, with no escape ever!”

  Nessie moaned, heartrendingly.

  The Boggart went on, unrelenting. “If you’re a true boggart you’ll come with me out of here, out to the sea, and there are Urquharts and MacDevons who will help you on the way. But there’s to be no more skulking around, no more sleeping. The time has come to change, cuz, and you have to do it right now! Or those friends up there will leave you here alone, and so shall I!”

  A large tear formed in each of Nessie’s large brown eyes and drifted away in the muddy water around them. “I’m sorry, cuz, I’m sorry. Don’t leave me. I’ll do whatever you tell me. I’ll try my best, I promise. What should I do?”

  * * *

  “WHAT’S GOING ON down there?” Jessup said. He peered down at the ruffled grey water, which was still churning restlessly as if a small volcano were threatening to erupt far below.

  “I think the Boggart’s cross,” Emily said, staring at the loch, concentrating. “I think he’s telling Nessie off.”

  Mr. Maconochie had the rapt expression of someone listening to music faintly heard, played a long way off. “And Nessie’s going to . . . going to . . . I don’t know yet. I can see a sort of picture — I think it looks like a seal.”

  * * *

  THE BOGGART SAID, more gently now, “We’ll help you. We will. I know you have this trouble with the shape-shifting, I know it’s hard. But you cannae stay in the great monster shape, because you have to leave Loch Ness and the deep water. It’s shallower, the rest of the way — you have to take another shape, until we get you to the sea. And we’ll help you, your family and mine, and me too.”

  Nessie said tearfully, “I’ll do whatever you say, cuz.”

  “A seal,” the Boggart said. “Be a seal, and I’ll be another, swimming beside you. That’s a creature small enough to swim from the loch to the sea, and big enough not to be eaten by any other creature.”

  “But the shape!” Nessie said in panic. “I cannae keep the shape!”

  “You can do it with help,” the Boggart said. “There’ll be three minds making your picture, helping you keep the shape in your own mind. Three minds or four, or maybe even five. That’s why you must go seal-shape, not boggart-shape. They can picture a seal, but they can’t picture a boggart.” He smiled to himself. “They saw me once, but there’s not one of them could say what they saw.”

  Nessie heaved himself clear of the mud, and up into the water, with a flick of his massive tail. He said nervously, “Will they really help?”

  The Boggart said, “Come along up, and find out.”

  * * *

  THE CLOUDS WERE growing thicker over Castle Urquhart, hiding all sign of the sun, turning the sky to a mounded layer of white and grey. The air was chill, and in twos and threes the tourists were leaving the castle’s romantically ruined tower for the refuge of the bus that stood waiting for them in the parking lot. But Emily and Jessup, Tommy and Mr. Maconochie and Miss Urquhart still hovered at the edge of the grass-clothed outer wall overlooking the loch, waiting, listening.

  Tommy saw a pair of tourists veer away from the rest and come down toward the loch: a tall young man and a tall young woman, both in shorts and Fair Isle sweaters. They were talking animatedly in German, and they were both very blond. Tommy frowned, wondering why they looked familiar, wondering how he could send them in another direction. The girl glanced at him without interest, and then her eyes went to Jessup. She stopped short, and clutched her companion’s arm, and they both looked hard at Jessup and instantly swung around and hurried away.

  Tommy grinned.

  Miss Urquhart was telling Emily about the beginnings of Castle Urquhart. It had been built in the thirteenth century, she said, on the ruins of an Iron Age fort hundreds of years older, and Urquharts — and their boggart — had lived in it for most of the time after that until 1689. But then there was the Jacobite Rebellion, one of many bloody arguments between the English and the Scots about whether a Scotsman should occupy the British throne. “So the English blew the castle up,” she said. “And it’s been in ruins ever since. With Nessie sad in his loch beside it, missing his people.”

  “With nobody to play tricks on,” Emily said.

  “No. Though to tell you the truth I think he lost his sense of fun long since. Boggarts are gay, flittering creatures — they’re not meant to spend so long in one great hulking shape.”

  Jessup and Mr. Maconochie were sitting together, staring mutely at the water. Suddenly, with no warning, a head broke the surface and rose out of the loch, a head the size of a cow’s head, perhaps, at the end of a long neck. The neck rose a foot or two out of the water, the head looked at them out of large brown eyes, and then instantly submerged again, as quickly as it had come.

  Jessup and Mr. Maconochie yelled, simultaneously.

  “Nessie!”

  But by the time the others had looked up, there was only a faint swirl of water on the surface of the loch.

  “Come back,” Mr. Maconochie said softly, longingly. “Nessie, come back.”

&
nbsp; The water lay still. But suddenly a small wind blew around them on the edge of the slope, where they sat on the grass-clad rocks above the water; a small wind tugging at their sleeves and collars; a small wind catching up a paper bag from their picnic lunch, and blowing it around in a little flurry, like a toy. It was their own private small wind, existing for this one patch of place and time, and out of it a husky voice spoke, a voice that they could hear but that drew no attention from anyone else nearby.

  “Thoir dhomh aire,” it said, soft: and insistent. “Thoir dhomh aire!”

  Everybody looked imploringly at Tommy.

  Tommy said, “I hear you, Boggart. What do you want us to do?”

  And the voice of the invisible Boggart spoke to them haltingly in Gaelic, for longer than he had ever spoken before, the soft guttural words singing low like the breathing of the small wind, and Tommy listened and translated for them. And what the Boggart said to them was this:

  “I shall take him through the water to Castle Keep. I shall swim with him and we shall be in the shape of seals. But he cannot hold his shape on his own, he must have you helping him, you thinking him into that shape. Your thinking must make him a seal, all the way.”

  “Ni sinn sin,” Tommy said. “We’ll do it.”

  Jessup said in a whisper, “Our thinking?”

  “Our imaginations,” Tommy said. The wind lifted the lock of black curly hair that lay across his forehead. “All the time they will be swimming down there, we have to see Nessie in our minds, have to imagine this little swimming seal, every minute he is on his way.”

  The wind was still whispering around them.

  Emily said nervously, “What happens if we stop, if we think about something else?”

  Miss Urquhart was looking out at the water. “He will turn back into his monster shape,” she said. “And everyone will know where he is.”

  The wind whispered, softly, soundlessly.

  “When do we start?” said Mr. Maconochie.

  “C’uin?” said Tommy to the air.

  “A-nis,” said the Boggart’s soft voice. “A-nis. A-nis.” It grew softer still, as if he were moving away.