The Boggart and the Monster (6 page)

“The Loch Ness Monster,”
Jessup said.
“Only he's not a monster and he's not a plesiosaur. He's a boggart.”

“A
boggart?
”

“Just like ours. But . . . clumsier.”

Emily looked at him sympathetically.
“This was quite some dream. It must have been the fish and chips. We'll talk about it in the morning.”
She scrambled down off the tailgate, into the shadowy night.

“Wait a minute, Em,”
Tommy said. He reached out, as she paused, and took her hand. Emily stood still, and looked at him sideways.

“Remember when the Monster disappeared, while we were looking at him on Harold's screen?”
Tommy said.
“Remember Mr. Mac saying he couldn't really have been there, because no real creature could disappear like that?”

“Mmm,”
said Emily uncertainly.

“Well, he could too have disappeared — if he were a boggart. Our Boggart does.”

Emily nodded slowly, as a dozen swift images of the shape-shifting Boggart danced around her memory. She looked around at the dark campground and the night sky.
“He came with us, our Boggart, didn't he? Where d'you suppose he's been today?”

“I think he's been giving Jessup a dream,”
Tommy said.

In the air around them, so faint and diffuse that they couldn't tell if it were inside the car or part of the night itself, they heard a low sound growing, a low warm sound, lapping them with approval, like the purring of a cat.

J
ESSUP SAID
,
“And in the minute after the castle exploded, when I was waking up, I had this terrible feeling of how lonely he was. Lonely, lonely, down in that dark water. And I really wanted to do something about it.”

He was sitting beside Mr. Maconochie, looking out at the loch as they drove toward Harold Pindle's trailer. The long gleaming expanse of water stretched beside and before them, and now and then as the road curved they could see the grey-green mound of the ruined Castle Urquhart in the distance.

Tommy said,
“That was what the Boggart was putting into your head. His own feelings. He hates Nessie being lonely.”

“And he wants to do something about it,”
Emily said. Their two earnest heads leaned forward from the back seat, into the gap between Jessup and Mr. Maconochie.

“Nnnnnnnn,”
said Mr. Maconochie. It was a kind of growling hum, full of uncertainty.

Jessup looked at him accusingly.
“You don't believe me!”

“Jessup,”
Mr. Maconochie said.
“I believe in your dream and I certainly believe in your Boggart — our Boggart. It just seems to me that the dream must have come from your imagination.”

“Maybe he'll give you a dream,”
Emily said.

Tommy shook his head.
“No. Mr. Mac would just think his own imagination was making it up.”

Mr. Maconochie turned into the little gravel-topped parking area beside the long metallic rectangle of the Kalling-Pindle Project.
“Oh dear,”
he said.
“Boggarts and monsters and messages in dreams. This is a sore test for an elderly member of the legal profession.”

“The Boggart has to find special ways of talking to us,”
Emily said insistently.
“He always has. He's very bad at spoken words, he can only manage a few at a time.”

Jessup had fallen silent. He was looking at Harold Pindle, who was coming down the steps of the research trailer with a stranger, a small man with a lot of white hair.
“What do we do about Harold?”
he said glumly.
“He's so set on proving Nessie is a plesiosaur. What's he going to do when he finds it's not true?”

*  *  *

T
HE BOGGART WAS SLOWLY
circling Nessie's massive sleeping body, like an invisible coronet of floating weed.
“
Nessie, wake up. Come on now, you're not really asleep, you've had enough sleep for sixteen boggarts, these last few centuries.
”

Nessie opened one eye and regarded him mournfully
“
They blew up my castle,
”
he said.
“
My family went away.
”

“
That was three hundred years ago!
”
the Boggart said.
“
And anyway I'm your family.
”

“
You are. I'm sorry, cuz.
”
Penitent, Nessie raised his long neck and, with a huge effort, tried to shift his shape from solid monster to insubstantial boggart. It took great effort, and he was lamentably out of practice. First he shrank to a thin monster, like a large aquatic giraffe; then a very small one, like a plastic dinosaur from a cereal package. At last he managed to dwindle completely away, reappearing — to the Boggart at least — as the iridescent flicker of energy that was his natural invisible form.

They turned somersaults around each other in the murky water, and the whirling current made by their somersaults rose to the surface and completely turned around the little boat in which Jenny, wearing a baseball cap, was sculling across the lake. Jenny had rowed in the MIT lightweight women's crew when she was a student, and liked to keep in practice wherever she was. She rested on her oars and stared in astonishment at the wooded shore of the lake, which she had been approaching but which she now seemed to be leaving behind.

Nessie and the Boggart, surfacing, watched her with satisfaction, and swam cheerfully away.

The Boggart turned into a seal, and made a figure-eight dive.

“
Don't do that!
”
said Nessie plaintively, as he surfaced again.
“
You make me feel so stupid.
”

The Boggart turned back into a boggart. He said with longing,
“
We could have such fun, if you'd only learn how again. We could go all the way to Loch Linnhe and Castle Keep — my castle wasn't blown up. We could live there and tease my family, and play with the seals.
”

“
I cannae stay boggart-shape long enough,
”
Nessie said.

“
You could swim all the way there, now. They made a canal to join the lochs a hundred years ago — you can swim from Loch Ness to the western sea!
”

But this news not only failed to fill Nessie with delight, it enveloped him in such fear that the water all around him chilled almost to freezing. He looked at the Boggart in terror, and he changed instantly back into monster form and sank down, down toward the mud.

The Boggart groaned, and dived after him.

*  *  *

A
S THEY PILED
out of Mr. Maconochie's car, Harold Pindle waved merrily at them, and made extravagant beckoning gestures. He still wore his battered sweatshirt and faded jeans, but Emily thought he had probably changed his shirt; the collar jutting out of the sweatshirt looked cleaner than before. And his long grey hair showed signs of having been combed.

He beamed at them as they crossed the parking lot.
“Allow me to present Axel Kalling, our wonderful sponsor,”
he said.
“Axel, these are my co-witnesses — Emily,
Jessup, Tommy, and Mr. Maconochie of Castle Keep.”

The small, neat man at Harold's side gave them a small, neat bow, so formally that he almost seemed to click his heels. He wore an old-fashioned dark grey suit with wide flat lapels, and his thick white hair was cut to a carefully elegant shape. Two strongly-marked clefts ran down past his mouth, but the eyes above them were bright and alert, and fanned with little laughter-lines.

“Emily is the name of my sister,”
he said, crinkling the laughter-lines at Emily.
“She grows sweet peas, they smell most delicious, but her llamas eat them if she is not careful.”

Emily blinked at him.
“Her llamas? ”
she said.

“I look forward so great to the Worm!”
said Mr. Kalling warmly. He had a surprisingly deep voice, with the lilting Swedish accent that takes the end of every sentence up and then down.
“And tomorrow night the moon is full! Is that not right, Mr. Maconnie?”

“Er,”
said Mr. Maconochie, taken by surprise.
“Uh. Yes, I expect so, yes.”
He looked down at Mr. Kalling in wonder and bafflement.

“Worm will like that,”
Mr. Kalling said, nodding his head firmly.

“This way, folks. This way to the great Monster show, in the screening room! Axel's flown in to see the tape from yesterday.”
Harold was shepherding them across the parking lot, toward a trailer less boxlike than the first. It had windows, and a bright red door, which he flung open.

“Good!”
said Mr. Kalling. He trotted briskly inside,
and Harold paused just long enough to flash a quick grin over his shoulder.

“Not crazy, not really,”
he whispered.
“He's a great guy, just — different.”
He disappeared after Mr. Kalling.

“And
very
rich,”
said Mr. Maconochie. He took a matchbox out of his pocket and held it up, and under the familiar label that they had never really examined before they saw the words: KALLING MATCH.

Chuck the technician was crunching toward them across the parking lot, with a backpack over his shoulder. He no longer wore his MEAN MAN T-shirt, but his expression was no more cordial than before.
“You on your way in, or out?”
he said, unsmiling.

Emily flashed him a beautiful smile.
“We're following you in.”

Chuck grunted unappreciatively, and marched past her.

Inside, the second trailer was quite different from the first. After a small office, with desks and telephones and a fax machine, they found themselves in a thick-carpeted space filled with comfortable armchairs and an enormous television set. Chuck opened his backpack and began fitting what looked like a miniature video-tape into a machine beside the television. He crouched beside it, twiddling dials. From one of the chairs Harold waved an expansive welcoming arm. Then he bounced to his feet, as they all settled themselves around the largest armchair, which Mr. Kalling was occupying as if it were a throne.

“Axel Kalling, my friend,”
Harold said, in clear
careful tones as if he were making a speech,
“before we see this amazing tape, I want you to know how utterly delighted I am that your trust in this project has been rewarded.”

Mr. Kalling nodded his white head impatiently.
“Happy for sight of the Worm,”
he said.

But Harold wasn't to be rushed. He hadn't finished. He
was
making a speech.

“Without your faith and your financing, none of our research would have been possible,”
he said solemnly, each word weighing at least fifteen pounds.
“No other man on this planet could have had the foresight and the imagination to set up the Kalling-Pindle operation. I want you to know that what you are about to see now — the shattering images that we all witnessed yesterday — these are the justification and reward for your generosity. And they will engrave your name in the annals of scientific history.”
He paused, looking misty-eyed at Mr. Kalling, and then suddenly his face split into a great joyous grin and, to everyone's great relief, he was his bouncy enthusiastic self again.
“Hit it, Chuck!”
he said.

The lights went out, and the television screen grew bright, and turned green. Chuck sat back from his dials, to watch.

Something made Emily put her right hand into her pocket. She found the little cockle shell there, pressing into her fingers, and for an instant had an odd impression that it had summoned her. She clutched it instinctively as she gazed at the screen.

“This is the laser image,”
Harold whispered.
“Gradually you'll see the creature coming toward us,
getting closer, becoming clearer. And then we switch to video from the surface — and my God, Axel, it's such a sight!”

They all stared at the green rectangle. It glowed at them, and flickered a little. But nothing appeared on it at all.

They waited. And waited. The screen remained blank.

Harold said impatiently,
“What's wrong, Chuck?”

Chuck peered at his dials. He pressed a button, he turned a knob. The green square flickered, but remained empty.

“For Pete's sake,”
said Harold.
“We watched it over and over, last night, and it was fine. Is this the right tape?”

“Yes,”
said Chuck. He swallowed hard. Emily began to feel sorry for him. His fingers moved desperately to and fro, and he switched the television off, then on again. The picture vanished and then grew, still green, still empty.

“Oh dear!”
Emily said.
“There's still nothing there!”

“We can see that!”
said Chuck nastily, and her sympathy for him dwindled. Minutes went by as they stared at the blank screen. Irritably Harold pushed Chuck aside and played with the controls himself, but nothing changed. Finally there was a click, and the screen changed from green to black.

“This is impossible!”
Frenziedly Harold rewound the tape and began trying again, to be faced once more with the same unchanging flat green image. He groaned, and clutched his thinning grey hair.

Emily realized suddenly that her fingers were
hurting from the pressure of the cockle shell. She let it go, and took her hand out of her pocket.

Axel Kalling said gravely,
“But you took pictures of Worm, did you not, Harold?”

“It was there on the screen, I swear it was!”
said Harold Pindle, distraught. He looked wildly around him.
“Wasn't it, kids?”

His distress was so acute that none of them could bear to try to explain to him about the erratic behavior of boggarts.
“We did see it, all of us, Mr. Kalling!”
said Jessup bravely.
“A real plesiosaur, humongous, all dripping — and Jenny was out there and she smelled it, it smelled of fish!”

“It was just like the pictures of Nessie,”
Tommy said.

“It really was!”
Emily said.

Axel Kalling turned his well-cut white head to Mr. Maconochie.
“Well, Mr. Maconnie? Did you too see this Worm?”

Mr. Maconochie stood up, tall and silent under the low ceiling of the trailer, and Jessup, Emily and Tommy looked at him with sudden misgiving. But he nodded his head slowly.

“Yes,”
he said.
“We saw it clear enough on the screens, the big body and the long neck and the wee head. Just for a few moments, mind, and only on the screens. But it was good and clear.”