The Boggart (7 page)

Pete Defarge lay still. And in the instant before rushing to pick him up, everyone glanced reproachfully at Jessup, who seemed to have tripped him deliberately with a vicious foul play.

“B
UT
I
DIDN
'
T!
” Jessup said indistinctly, through his mouth guard.

“He's not hurt,” Coach Bonhomme said. “Fortunately.”

“Coach, I didn't trip him! I was just coming up the ice, I didn't have time!”

Coach Bonhomme sighed. He was a burly man with a flattened nose, an ex-professional who had seen every dirty trick that can be played on a hockey rink, and had indeed played most of them. He said, “I saw you, Volnik. Seein's believin'.”

Jessup pulled off his helmet and spat out the mouth guard. “You saw the puck go up in the air and fly around the rink three times too — did you believe that?”

Coach Bonhomme shrugged. “Seein's believin',” he said again. “Sure I did. Didn't you?”

     
J
ESSUP SPENT ALL
his next hockey game on the bench, as a punishment for illegally tripping Pete Defarge. He was cross. Nobody, not even his friends, really seemed to believe that he hadn't done it. They believed he hadn't
intended
to, but like Coach Bonhomme, they couldn't get past the evidence of their own eyes. Or in his parents' case, the evidence of so many other eyes. “Never mind,” they said forgivingly, infuriatingly, to Jessup. “You didn't mean to hurt him. It was an accident.”

The only person who was sympathetic, to his surprise, was Emily.

“Grown-ups can be so dumb,” she said. “If you know you didn't do it, then of course you didn't.”

“But who did?”

“Maybe Pete tripped.”

“No way. One minute he was coming toward me, and the next he was flying in the other direction. I mean
flying
.”

“Weird,” Emily said, shaking her head. “Like the TV, and the lights flickering, and stuff. I was telling Nat about that today. She said maybe it was sunspots.” Nat was Natalie, her closest friend at school, who was a serious astronomer and on fine winter nights spent hours of after-school time looking through her telescope.

“Emily! Jessup!” It was Maggie calling them to supper. They ran, and the Boggart breathed an impatient sigh of relief. He had been waiting for them to get out of Jessup's room so that he could leave a surprise present there.

Since the hockey game, the Boggart had been feeling guilty. It was an emotion he had never felt before, and he found it very uncomfortable. But he knew he had given Jessup a bad time, in ways he hadn't intended. Robbing his lunch box was one thing — getting him labeled as a cheat and a liar was far more serious. What's more, he, the Boggart, had broken his own rules: He had attacked Pete Defarge on the ice not for fun but for furious revenge. The laws of the Wild Magic allowed this as a defense against evil and murder, but not against an accidental whack from a hockey puck.

So the Boggart wanted to do something nice for Jessup. He had thought back over all his brief experience to find the thing that seemed to give Jessup the most pleasure, and he felt he had found the answer. He had made him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

It wasn't a very elegant sandwich, because it had been done in a hurry, during the few hasty minutes when Emily was filling the lunch boxes that day. Hovering close and invisible over Emily's hands, and flickering fast through the air like a mad hummingbird, the Boggart had managed to grab two slices of whole-wheat bread, a big handful of peanut butter and a handful of jelly. He had then put them all together as fast as he could, before the jelly leaked through his fingers or the bread — very healthy, but very crumbly — fell apart. Then he flittered off to Jessup's bedroom, carrying a sandwich which looked rather like the planet Saturn surrounded by its rings: a golf-ball-sized glob of peanut butter encased in bread, with a rim of bread crust out of which red jelly oozed like thick blood.

He put the sandwich down, now, with a sigh of relief — and some regret, since the smell of peanut butter was making him ravenous. Before he could be tempted to eat it, he flittered out of Jessup's room and back to his brass-vase refuge on Emily's bookshelf. Good deeds were very tiring, though surprisingly satisfying, and he needed a rest. He curled up on his bed of cotton balls, smiling contentedly, for perhaps a three-day sleep.

And Jessup came running upstairs after supper to catch up with computalk among the members of the Gang of Five, and without switching on his bedroom light he settled himself happily down to turn on his computer.

Then he yelled, and slowly and stickily, he stood up.

The Boggart had carefully left his gift in the place where he felt Jessup was most likely to see it — his computer chair.

T
OMMY SENT
Emily another postcard. The picture showed a small island called Staffa, with strange dark cliffs like carvings. The postcard said, “Staffa is seven miles away and Mendelssohn composed
Fingal's Cave
there. Life here is uninteresting but there is snow on the hills. The castle is empty and no one comes to see it. I hope you and Jessup are well. Yours sincerely, Tommy.”

Emily stuck the postcard up on her bulletin board next to the seal and River Phoenix, and went to the record store, which was rocking to the beat of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to investigate the music of Mendelssohn. One of the clerks had never heard of him, a second said vaguely, “Classical — upstairs,” and a third said, “Of course — his
Hebrides Overture
,” and found her a tape. He was a husky young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned
SAVE THE DOLPHINS.
This endeared him to Emily, who felt passionately about endangered species and wanted to save everything.

“Nice piece,” said the young man amiably. “You know it?”

“Not yet,” said Emily.

He smiled at her as he handed over her change. “See if you can find the words inside it. They aren't there but you can hear them. They say, ‘How lovely the sea is!'”

Emily went home and played the tape, and instantly heard the words in the tune — even though, as the young man had said, there were really no words there. She sat for a while thinking about this, looking vacantly at Tommy's postcard. Then she wrote back to him, on a postcard showing a picture of a Canadian pine forest.

“This is a painting by Emily Carr,” she wrote. “I am named after her. Our castle furniture has come. I am going to be a vampire for Halloween. Jessup and I are very well. Yours sincerely, Emily.”

Then she scribbled at the bottom, in small hasty letters, “Weird things are happening here, like the words in
Fingal's Cave
that aren't really there.”

L
ATE ON THE
afternoon of Halloween, Emily stopped at the theater hoping that Dai might have had time to finish her costume. She was half expecting not to get one, since Robert had given her a chilly lecture at breakfast about bothering busy professionals in the crucial time just before a play opens. He had said a number of other things too that she was trying to forget. The blame for Jessup's peanut-buttered pants had landed squarely on Emily, in spite of all her denials. Who else in the family could possibly have booby-trapped Jessup's chair?

But Dai was waiting for her, and he had outdone himself. He dressed Emily in black tights, and a close-fitting long-sleeved black top with black sequins glued all over it. On her feet he put soft leather boots that seemed black in the daylight, but in the dark glowed spookily with an awful greenish light. A sweeping black cloak went over everything, and its lining glowed with the same green fluorescence. Dai shut Emily briefly in a dark room so that she could see it, and she was happily terrified.

“How does it
do
that?” she demanded.

“Trade secret, darling,” said Dai. He was a small brown-faced man of indeterminate age, originally from Wales, with dark curly hair. “Shut up, now, and open your mouth.”

Emily obeyed, and he fitted a magnificent vampire fang over each of her two top canine teeth. They curved out and down over her lower lip, looking alarmingly real. “Just a touch of glue,” Dai said. “They'll stay on for about three hours, if you're careful. Course, you won't be able to eat, but you could always suck blood.” He winked at her.

“I look terrible,” Emily said contentedly, leering at the mirror.

“Last touch,” Dai said, and over her blonde hair he fitted an unnerving black wig made not from hair but from long black velvet ribbons. Emily tossed her head, watching the mirror, and giggled. “Awesome!”

“And if you want to dribble some nice bright blood, you bite on this.” He handed her a capsule that looked like a large vitamin pill. “Coming to the party, then?”

Louise Spring the general manager, owner of Fred the dog, gave a famous party every Halloween, to which the working members of the Chervil company came very late, after their performance. Sometimes Emily and Jessup were allowed to spend a sleepy hour there before bed. Not this year.

Emily's spirits dropped, as she remembered her father's cold lecture of the morning. “No. We're grounded. We can't even go trick-or-treating, we have to just be home in our costumes and open the door to other kids.”

Dai clicked his tongue in friendly concern. “Poor babies. What's Dragon-Daddy mad about?”

Emily smiled mournfully. She had discovered only recently that when Robert was in a rage, he was known to the company, behind his back, as Dragon-Daddy. But the smile drooped into gloom under Dai's sympathetic gaze, and suddenly she found herself telling him all about the sandwich mishap, and Jessup's hockey problem, and the flying hockey puck and the erratic television and Polly's odd behavior, and all the other peculiar things that had begun creeping into the life of the Volnik family. The words all came out with a slight lisp, because Emily had to talk past the vampire teeth.

She was in midflow when the door opened, and a large new presence was filling the room: an elderly man with a very round face and a deep, resonant voice. “Sorry I'm late, dear boy. I have lunched well — too well, perhaps —” He caught sight of Emily, and lurched backward in exaggerated terror. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us! A vampire!”

“Hi, Willie,” said Emily. William Walker was the senior actor in her father's company; not the best, but the most permanent. He was a genial, talkative man who played venerable dukes in Shakespeare, and elderly character parts in everything else, and though he would never be a Lear or a Falstaff everybody loved him. So did Robert, even when he mocked Willie's plummy English diction, which took on a noticeable Scottish burr whenever he had had one drink too many.

Willie took Emily's hand and turned her in a circle, inspecting her. “Stupendous,” he said to Dai, in warm congratulation. The two of them shared a house on the edge of a Toronto ravine, and had three cats.

Dai was frowning. “She has a problem you should hear about,” he said. He made Emily repeat her story, in every detail. As she finished, trying unsuccessfully not to lisp, she saw them looking thoughtfully at each other. Dai raised his eyebrows in some private inquiry; Willie nodded, slowly.

“It's a boggart,” Willie said.

“That's what I was thinking,” said Dai.

“What?” said Emily.

“Something they don't teach you in school,” Dai said. He hesitated; then went on in a rush. “He's a spirit, like. Lives in a family, and plays tricks. The Scots call him a boggart. In Wales we call him a
pwca
. Dunno what the English call him — maybe they have dogs instead.” He chuckled to himself. Dai had once been a Welsh Nationalist, and liked to be rude to any members of the company who had English blood. He added regretfully, “I've never run into one. Willie has, though. Twice.”

“I could have done without it,” Willie said.

Emily said slowly, “You mean a ghost?”

“No — a spirit,” Willie said. He sounded suddenly much more Scottish than usual. “Not something left over from a dead person. A boggart's a person himself — just not human. And you can't see him or hear him, not unless he wants you to. He's not a bad fellow, he's like a kid, really. Wants to have fun. I never heard of one this side of the ocean, though.”

“Nor did I,” Dai said. He looked at Emily oddly. “What did you bring back from that Scottish trip of yours, Em?”

“If you two are putting me on, I wish you wouldn't,” Emily said uneasily.

Willy flashed a sudden smile at her. The light bulb was behind him, turning the remaining hair on his bald head into a glowing halo. He clapped his hands, and it was like a release. “Go off trick-or-treating, Mistress Vampire,” he said. “Have a good time.”

Emily jumped up, relieved, and gave them a fang-toothed grin. “Thanks for the costume, Dai. Happy Halloween!”

Willy said casually, “But if you have any more trouble, come back and tell me, okay?”

“I will,” Emily said.

F
OUR OF THE
members of the Gang of Five were waiting for Emily at the Volniks' house, dressed as characters from their new computer game. This game, which was called Black Hole, was in a constant state of development; the Gang never seemed to finish it, because one or other of them was always having a new idea. It was all about spaceships which discovered numbers of different worlds while trying to avoid being dragged through black holes in space. Emily's vampire came from one of these worlds, and so did the spider-like creature represented by Chris's costume, which had a round black body fitted over his head and most of his own body, and six extra legs the same size and shape as his own. He scuttled down the sidewalk to meet Emily, looking hideously lifelike with all eight legs moving at once.

“Terrific!” said Emily, baring her fangs at him. The spider gave a muffled squeak, and backed away, narrowly missing a seven-foot shiny rocket with flame-colored legs, which was standing at a rather drunken angle beside the front door.

“Hey babe,” said Barry's voice hollowly from inside the rocket. “Neat teeth.”