The Boggart and the Monster (10 page)

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

*  *  *

T
HE 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.”

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.

Tommy gave a short hiccup of nervous laughter. He said,
“We start
now!
”

L
OOK
!” Jessup said.
“Harold's coming!”

They followed the direction of his pointing finger, and saw a line of boats approaching them from the northern end of Loch Ness. Emily counted: there were twelve of them, moving in parallel, slowly but steadily drawing closer. Watching them, she felt she could almost see the invisible electronic net that stretched below them, sweeping through all the water of the loch. She wondered if Nessie could feel it coming.

There was a splash below them, and they looked down just in time to see the shining back of a seal turning in the water, disappearing under the surface, rising again six feet away. Then the seal's head emerged, whiskered, gleaming, and they saw the big dark eyes looking up at them and knew that it was the Boggart.

And beside him, barely visible under the surface of the loch, they saw with amazement the outline of Nessie's enormous body. It was very faint, there under the dark water, and he must have had his head bent
down, for there was no sign of the long neck or any other part of him jutting out. But the body was so huge they could scarcely believe they were looking at it.

“We have to help him change shape!”
Tommy said.
“We have to think him a seal!”

He stared down at the great shadowy mass under the water, trying to imagine it as small and lithe as their transformed Boggart swimming beside it, and so did they all. Jessup concentrated on the seal he could see, the seal that was the Boggart; Emily thought hard of the doglike head, with its liquid brown eyes and dripping whiskers, that had emerged from the sea to gaze at her days before. And Mr. Maconochie, smiling a little, made strongly in his mind an image of the fat barnacle-encrusted seal he had seen basking on the Seal Rocks near Castle Keep.

Miss Urquhart did not put her mind to making a picture of a seal, but concentrated on trying to put herself into Nessie's mind instead. She thought, as if she were calling aloud:
Come on now, Nessie, you can do anything you try to do. You're the Urquhart boggart — here's the strength of all the Urquharts to back you up. Come on now, Nessie, get out of that Monster shape
—

And buoyed up by all that they were wishing him, Nessie let go of his fear and his uncertainty, and all at once his monstrous shadowy form was gone, and instead a second seal was there, swimming with the first.

“Oh well done, Nessie!”
Jessup shouted in delight.

This was a mistake; it made Nessie think about
what he had done. His fear came rushing back, and just as suddenly as it had appeared, the seal vanished, and the huge underwater shadow-shape was there again instead.

“
I cannae let go!
”
Nessie whimpered.
“
I cannae do it!
”

“
Of course you can!
”
snapped the Boggart, beside him.
“
You just did! Change, cuz — everything is change! And you'd better change soon, those boats are getting awful close to us
—”

Jessup said anxiously,
“Harold's boats are almost in range! They'll find him!”

“Do it again — we almost had it right!”
Emily said.
“We stopped concentrating when he changed. That's what went wrong. Think, think —”

They forced their imagining down at Nessie's huge monster-form, a huge dim mass under the grey-green water, and Nessie tried his hardest to change — and as they watched, he went through a sequence of the wrong shapes, born out of his nervousness. For a moment he was a humpback whale, blowing a spout of water; then just as they were ducking under the shower of drops, the spout died away and Nessie was suddenly an enormous eel, sliding through the water so fast that they glimpsed the rippling body only as a blur of speed. Then abruptly the movement ceased, and he was an enormous ugly fish, staring up at them from under the surface, wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed, a monstrous version of the surviving prehistoric coelacanth.

Down on the bank of the loch fifty yards away, clutching his camera, Angus Cameron stared baffled at
the water, wondering whether he had actually seen a waterspout shoot up for a second, wondering whether it would come again.

The children gazed down at the flickering image of the fish, desperately willing it to change.
“Be a seal, Nessie!”
Jessup whispered.
“Be a seal!”

The survey boats crept nearer, nearer, down the loch. The research assistant in charge of the leading boat, a red-headed Irishman named Kevin, peered at his sonar screen, seeing for a moment a suspicious-looking mass — and then suddenly the mass was gone.

“Sonar Three,”
said Kevin swiftly into the microphone that connected him to Harold Pindle in the control boat, further back.
“Had a sounding at two o'clock, near the surface.”
He stood up, looking through his binoculars, and shook his head in disappointment.
“Nah. It's just a couple of seals.”

Ahead of the boats, two grey seals were playing once more in the water below Castle Urquhart. Nessie dived underneath the Boggart and came up again, blowing happy bubbles, sleek and gleaming. The Boggart dived in turn, rolling over, playing with him, but beginning gradually to lead him down the loch, away from the probing sonar of Harold's fleet of boats.

“Quick!”
Tommy said urgently.
“We have to follow them in the car! The road runs right along the loch — we can be with him all the way till they're safe in the canal!”

“But don't stop concentrating!”
said Miss Urquhart sharply as they scrambled to make for the parking lot.
“Keep the seal shape in your minds — don't talk, don't even think of anything else. If he loses the feel of you helping him, he'll fall back into monster shape in a flash.”

In silence they hastened to the Range Rover; in silence Mr. Maconochie unlocked the doors and Tommy, Jessup and Emily tumbled into the back seat. Miss Urquhart slipped into the front passenger seat, eyes half-closed, concentrating now as fiercely as all of them on keeping the picture of the two frolicking, traveling grey seals vivid and alive in her mind. Trying desperately to drive safely while mentally seeing seals, Mr. Maconochie steered them through the groups of wandering tourists, swathed now in parkas and mackintoshes against a beginning soft rain, and out on to the road.

Down on the grassy bank of the loch, Angus Cameron juggled his cameras and his binoculars, peering hopefully out at the rippled grey water, shooting pictures of the line of research boats as they came slowly toward him. He clipped on a zoom lens and took a longshot of Harold's research boat, larger than the rest, chugging along behind the others. Sydney and Adelaide, the Remotely Operated Vehicles, hung ready from davits on her deck like large yellow mosquitoes.

Directly below the spot where Angus stood, two grey seals dived and somersaulted on their way toward the end of the loch. Angus turned his camera in their direction, and then thought better of it. He was not interested today in pictures of seals.

“Come in Sonar Three,”
said Harold Pindle hopefully into his microphone on the parent research boat.
“Sonar Three, anything else on your sonar now?”

“Just seals,”
said Kevin's voice faintly from the loudspeaker, in a dispirited crackle.
“And a few fish diving out of their way.”

*  *  *

W
ITH THE POWER OF
five imaginations buoying him up, Nessie swam confidently down the lake, reveling in his sleek lithe body and the contentment of being with the Boggart.

“
This is wonderful, cuz!
”

“
Keep it up!
”
the Boggart said encouragingly.
“
You're a great little selkie, you're doing just fine!
”

From the Range Rover, Emily craned her neck out of the back window and caught sight of the two gleaming bodies rising for a moment between choppy waves. The wind was picking up a little, as the fine rain grew heavier, and Mr. Maconochie had his windshield wipers slowly flicking to and fro.

“I see them!”
Emily said.
“They're right down there!”
She strained to see more, but a patch of trees was in the way for a while.

Jessup's eyes were tightly shut, his face wrinkled with effort.
“Concentrate, Em! See them in your mind!”

Dutifully Emily closed her eyes. The air inside the Range Rover was silent and tense, prickling with effort, like a circus tent where five thousand people are holding their collective breath, willing an acrobat not to fall off a high wire.

Coming in the opposite direction on the road from
Fort William to Inverness, a small white ice cream van was bowling along, on its way to the Castle Urquhart parking lot. Bobby King, the wiry, crew-cut eighteen-year-old behind the wheel, was looking forward to a good crop of hungry tourist children. The Castle Urquhart gift shop sold ice cream too, but Bobby felt this was ice cream of an inferior brand, and he was confident that he would get a great popular welcome when he parked illegally just outside the castle gate, honked his horn just a little, and switched on the loudspeaker that would send the jingling strains of
“Will Ye No Come Back Again?”
blaring over the parking lot. Just the thought of it made him reach down instinctively for the switch.

In the moment that his hand was off the wheel, a car ahead of him braked sharply to avoid hitting a sheep that had begun to amble foolishly across the road. Bobby caught his breath — braked, swerved — and on the greasy wet road surface his lightweight van skidded into the oncoming traffic on the other side. With a nasty crunching sound it hit the right front mudguard of Mr. Maconochie's Range Rover.

Panic flooded over everyone inside the Rover. In silent horror Mr. Maconochie wrenched at his steering wheel, while his foot thrust instinctively at the brake, and Miss Urquhart beside him let out a small strangled shriek as the impact threw her forward against the windshield. Emily, Jessup and Tommy were tumbled into a heap in the back seat, and the car lurched sideways and skidded to a stop against a grassy bank.

Mr. Maconochie, knocked breathless by his own steering wheel, struggled to peer around the back of his seat. He saw, to his immense relief, three frightened but undamaged faces blinking at him in the blankness of shock.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I think so.”

“I'm okay.”

He put his arm gently around Miss Urquhart, who was gingerly feeling the top of her head. She looked at him with eyes that had momentarily forgotten how to focus.

Doors were opening in the cars that had stopped on either side of the road, and two people were already helping a dazed Bobby King out of the battered ice cream truck. Its side was crumpled where it had hit the much sturdier Range Rover, and the cover of the side from which Bobby made his sales had sprung open, scattering bars and sticks of gaily-wrapped ice cream all over the road. A fine rain was still falling, making everyone damp.

A large bald holidaymaker in shirtsleeves and braces opened the Rover's passenger door and carefully supported Miss Urquhart as she eased herself out.
“Here you come, hinny,”
he said comfortingly.
“Don't you fret now, everything's all right.”

Emily, Jessup, Tommy and Mr. Maconochie climbed out too, on legs whose knees seemed suddenly a little wobbly. They found Bobby King wavering toward
them on the arm of a solicitous bystander, his face pale and concerned.
“I'm awfu' sorry, mister,”
he said to Mr. Maconochie.
“It just skidded on me.”

“Not your fault,”
said Mr. Maconochie.
“Not your fault.”

Bobby King grabbed up a handful of ice cream bars and thrust them at Jessup and Tommy.
“Have a Skootchy Bar!”
he said wildly.

From the road behind them, shouts and squeals rose suddenly from the cars stopped in line by the accident. Looking back, they saw people tumbling out in excitement and running — not toward the crumpled van but across the road, toward the loch. And then they turned their heads, and looked at the loch.

“Nessie!”
Emily said, her voice shrill with horror.
“We stopped thinking, we forgot Nessie!”