The Boggart and the Monster Read online

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

  NINE LOOK!” 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.”

  * * *

  WITH 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 wi
th 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!”

  TEN NESSIE REARED UP over the lake, enormous, terrifying. He was an astonishing sight. His neck and head towered over the nearest of the approaching research boats, taller than a tall tree, and the top of his great body rose out of the water like the side of an ocean liner. For anyone close enough, there was a strong smell of fish and seaweed, like the low-tide stink of a muddy beach.

  On the bank, amongst shrieking, pointing tourists and their children, Angus Cameron ecstatically juggled his cameras, taking picture after picture, zooming in on a sight he had never believed it possible for anyone to see. He had switched to his video camera, filling the frame with a wonderful close-up of the huge head and neck, when Nessie opened his mouth, showing rows of alarmingly pointed long teeth, and uttered a shattering bellow like the grunting roar of an angry hippopotamus. While Angus watched and filmed in breathless delight, the Monster moved threateningly toward the approaching line of research boats, and their pattern changed. The nearest boats broke away, fleeing in panic, tossing on the swells that rolled over the lake from the angry churning of Nessie’s massive tail. Only Harold Pindle’s bigger research vessel, further away, held its course.

  The Boggart, changed back now to his own invisible formless self, flittered agitatedly over the choppy grey water, close to his huge cousin’s waving neck. For the moment, there was nothing he could do. Like Nessie he had felt in an instant the overwhelming effect of the car accident, the sudden total loss of the support that had been giving confidence and form to the little swimming grey seal. Like Nessie, he didn’t know about the car accident itself. He had only felt Nessie’s utter panic, and known the inevitability of the disastrous second in which he switched back again into monster shape, rearing up over the surface of the loch.

  He hovered around the dripping hole that was one of Nessie’s ears, and hissed at it. “Dive!” he whispered. “Dive, cuz! ”

  And Nessie, bewildered and lost as an enormous child, lifted his head with one more anguished, helpless bellow and then bent his neck and dived, with a sweep of his powerful flippers, into the deep cold water of Loch Ness.

  The Boggart, reluctantly, dived after him.

  Up in his research boat, Harold Pindle was almost speechless with delight, the happiest man in Scotland. He had found his Monster, he had seen it, filmed it, photographed it. He danced a little jig with Jenny; he shouted into the intercom microphone that linked him with the scattered gaggle of smaller boats. “Come back here, you chickens! The eighth wonder of the world and you run away from it! Sonar One, Sonar Two, Sonar Three, get back in line!”

  Kevin’s voice crackled out of the speaker, its Irish accent strengthened by indignation. “Sonar Three, Sonar Three — it’s all very well for you in your great hulking boat! Try being a little feller, tossed about out here and like to be swamped or swallowed!”

  Harold snorted unrepentantly. “Stand by, chickens! We’re going after him, I’m launching ROV One! Stand by, Sonar Three, stand by, One and Two — the rest of you keep on going!” He strode over to a hatchway and yelled out to the deck. “Chuck! Launch Sydney — now!”

  Chuck was standing tense and watchful in the stern, where the gleaming yellow form of Sydney the Remotely Operated Vehicle was rigged and ready, hanging from the arms of a davit over the water. He pressed a lever, and Sydney splashed into the loch and disappeared, while a winch paid out a long flexible wire behind him.

  Jenny sat pressing switches and buttons, eagerly. In the bank of screens before her, a green square sprang into life, speckled by blips that were the fleeing fish startled by Sydney’s sudden arrival.

  “Come on, Sydney!” said Harold, watching the screen greedily. “Fetch! Fetch!”

  Up on the road, Mr. Maconochie and Bobby King were scribbling on little scraps of paper, exchanging names and addresses, and whatever other details they felt their insurance companies would demand before agreeing to repair the damage to the two cars. Emily, Jessup, Tommy and Miss Urquhart were paying no attention at all. Escaping the kindly ministrations of helpful passers-by, they slipped away one by one to stand on the grassy roadside bank in sight of the loch, staring out at the water, trying to will Nessie the strength to get out of his monster shape.

  But Nessie was far below them, two hundred feet down, on his way to the muddy bottom of the loch. He moved blindly, in instinctive retreat, and the Bog
gart whirled around him like a small agitated invisible fish, trying without success to attract his attention. Even boggart-speech failed. Nessie was in shock, and for the time being his troubled mind was out of reach.

  But at the same time, he was being pursued. Looking up, the Boggart could see the glimmer of Sydney’s metallic frame dropping slowly toward them through the dark water. He paused, suspicious, and flittered up through the water to investigate. What was this thing that was following Nessie? How could it see him? In this deep water there was no light at all, and fish and boggarts saw the world around them either by the light of a phosphorescence they generated themselves, or by using senses other than sight. Did Sydney have other senses? What were they?

  The Boggart began to glow faintly, from the unusual effort of rational thought — something boggarts are not fond of, under normal circumstances. He turned himself into a treacly liquid, denser than water, and flowed all over Sydney’s frame, investigating it. He had seen the ROV above the water, hanging from the davits of the parent research boat, and he knew it to be not a creature but a machine — but this was clearly no ordinary machine. Flowing over its surface the Boggart could sense a very faint hum, the tiny vibrations of the mini-computer that functioned as Sydney’s brain. It reminded him of something he had heard before, a long time ago; something that had intrigued him, that had worked a great change in his life. What was it?

  Boggarts have the worst memories of all the creatures in the universe. Hovering there, glowing, the Boggart tried to remember.

  * * *

  UP IN THE CONTROL ROOM of his research vessel, Harold Pindle peered over Jenny’s shoulder at the little green screen that showed the findings of Sydney’s laser line scan. There against the bright green background was the distinct outline of Nessie’s monster body, drawn by the invisible laser beams that darted continually out from Sydney’s sturdy frame and bounced back again.

  “Look at that!” said Harold reverently. “There’s our Nessie! Good old Axel — what a system! Keep it focused, Jenny — don’t lose him!”