The Boggart Page 11

  Britain was five hours ahead of Ontario. He remembered that, from changing his watch when they reached London. That meant it was seven-fifteen in the morning now, in Port Appin. What was the Camerons’ telephone number? He knew Emily had the address, written carefully in the little book he had given her last Christmas; though she was not a neat person, she was very good at making lists and filling out forms and such. It would be just like her to have written down the telephone number as well. Now if he could just find Emily’s address book, in her untidy room . . .

  Fifteen minutes later, in bathrobe and socks, he was shutting himself carefully, silently, into the kitchen, whose telephone extension was the most distant from his parents’ bedroom. The kitten, Polly, rubbed herself against his legs, delighted, purring. Very carefully, Jessup picked up the telephone and dialed.

  “Hello, operator? I want to make a call to Scotland, please. And I need to find out how much it costs. . . .”

  When the ringing tone finally came at the other end it was echoing and old-fashioned, a truly bell-like sound, and suddenly Jessup was back in the crowded little shop, with the grey sky outside its window and the dark shape of Castle Keep lowering against the misty hills of Mull. After the third ring, Tommy’s voice said clearly, “Hello?”

  “Thank goodness you’re there,” Jessup said. “I was afraid I’d wake your parents up. It’s Jessup.”

  There was a short astounded pause. “Jessup! You just caught me, I’m off to school. I thought you were Angus Mackay wanting a book again. Where are you?”

  “Toronto.”

  “You sound as if you were next door.”

  “It’s fiber optics,” said Jessup, but science was not in the front of his head, for once. He took a breath. “Tommy, this is urgent You have to tell me about the Boggart.”

  After another moment’s pause Tommy said cautiously, “Tell you what?”

  “We’ve got him,” Jessup said. “He’s over here. He must have come with the furniture. He’s making all sorts of trouble.”

  “So that’s it!” Tommy said. “There’s been no sign of him, I thought he was asleep.”

  “Tell me!”

  “He lives in the castle, he belongs with the MacDevon. Or he used to. He’s a jokey fellow, but he means no harm. He doesn’t speak. Animals know he’s there but not people, generally. Only Mr. MacDevon and me knew.”

  “How do you control him? Stop him doing things?”

  “You can’t,” Tommy said. There was a blurry noise in the background. “I have to go, the car’s here. The school bus.”

  ‘“We can’t? Not at all?”

  “He’s an Old Thing, Mr. MacDevon said, an Old Thing with capital letters — and they do what they want to do. They’re outside the rules. They won’t do anything unless it’s what they want. Jessup, write to me, tell me what’s happening.”

  “Okay,” Jessup said bleakly

  “There’s one thing. They sleep a lot. For days, or weeks. Sometimes when you think he’s not there, he’s just asleep. I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll write to you.”

  “Love to Emily,” Tommy said, and he was gone.

  Jessup put the phone down and sat staring at it. They sleep a lot. For days, or weeks. Perhaps for a while they could stop worrying about what the Boggart might be doing if he wasn’t playing with furniture or lights. He rubbed Polly between the ears and put her back in her cat bed.

  The telephone rang.

  Jessup leaped at it in horror and caught it in the middle of the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Eleven-fifty,” said the operator’s voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The cost of your call was eleven dollars and fifty cents. Have a nice night.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  He hung up, and yawned.

  UP IN Maggie and Robert’s bedroom, Robert stirred and groaned as the telephone rang once, twice. Maggie reached a groggy arm over him toward the bedside table, but the ringing had stopped. Robert rolled over in bed, and tugged her arm down.

  “Leave it,” he said, his voice thick with sleep, “It’s just that damn poltergeist.”

  “But Emily isn’t here,” Maggie said. “She’s the one who’s supposed to be making those things happen.” She paused, concerned. “D’you think Dr. Stigmore is really right about that?”

  There was no answer but heavy breathing. Robert was asleep again.

  ELEVEN

  “SO HE MUST BE ASLEEP somewhere,” Jessup said. “In here, or in my room, or who knows where.”

  “That’s all very well until he wakes up.” Emily reached for another tissue and blew her nose. She had been shut up in the house for two days, having brought home from the hospital not only her plaster-encased leg and spectacular bruises but a ferocious cold in the head.

  “For days or weeks, Tommy said.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Not much. I said we’d write and tell him everything You could do that while I’m at school.” Jessup may have been a genius with figures and computer screens, but he was not fond of putting words together.

  “Did he get my last postcard?”

  “We didn’t talk about you, we were talking about the Boggart.” Jessup paused, then relented. “Well, he did say hi. When he rang off, he said, Love to Emily.”

  Emily sat up straighter in bed. “Did he really?”

  Jessup crowed, and pointed a finger at her. “You’re blushing! Your face is all red!”

  “My face is red because I have a fever of a hundred and two,” Emily said with dignity, lying down again. “And if Mom catches you in here she’ll have your ears off.”

  “Bye. Send Tommy my love.” Jessup withdrew, grinning.

  Emily lay contemplating the effort of writing a letter to Tommy Cameron, and decided against it. Her head ached as much from the stuffed-up effect of her cold as it had from being bashed against the road surface, and she felt miserable with worry. Everything was terrible. It had been bad enough having to cope with the Boggart, but now they had Dr. Stigmore and his poltergeist theories as well. She thought despondently of telling her parents about the Boggart, and knew that it was too late: however much they loved her, they wouldn’t be able to forget that a sensible helpful doctor was telling them she was creating all the Boggart disturbances herself. Though for Emily this seemed quite as difficult as believing in magic. How could the mind of a twelve-year-old girl make a big heavy sofa fly through the air?

  She blew her nose again, and gave a miserable little moan.

  “Oh poor baby,” said Maggie sympathetically, coming through the bedroom door with a tray. “You really don’t deserve a cold as well. Here, I brought you some hot honey and lemon. And a baby-sitter for the afternoon.”

  Emily looked over her shoulder, and saw Willie looming in the doorway. He nodded at her gravely.

  “Good afternoon. Miss Volnik,” he said in his plummiest actor’s voice.

  “Oh Willie!” said Emily. She was so glad to see him she felt she might cry.

  “I know you’re perfectly all right on your own,” Maggie said. “But Willie stopped by, and he says he has a part to learn anyway, and I’d just feel happier if there’s someone in the house. Okay? I’ll be at the shop if you need me.” She kissed Emily on the forehead, and then felt the forehead anxiously with her hand. “Oh dear, you’re still hot. Have you had an aspirin?”

  Emily nodded.

  “Stay in bed, now. I won’t be late — it’s supposed to snow.”

  “Buzz off, Mags,” said Willie amiably. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “You’re an angel. Good-bye, loves.”

  She was gone.

  Willie sat down on the small chair beside Emily’s bed. It creaked protestingly. He said, “I came to warn you.”

  “What about?” Emily said in alarm.

  “There were a lot of people in the theater the other day, when the Boggart was having his fling, and at least one of them has been talking. You know what a
village this city can be, especially in our trade. Have you heard of a TV program called ‘Beyond Belief’?”

  Emily wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, Mom watches it sometimes. It’s a sort of documentary series, about flying saucers and stuff like that. I watched once, but it was really talky.”

  “Yes,” Willie said. “The thinking man’s Believe It Or Not. Well, apparently they’re working on a program about ghosts, and someone from the Chervil has given them the idea that the theater’s haunted. So they keep hovering with a camera, even though Robert’s told them to bug off.”

  Emily gave a small wry smile. “They’ll have trouble filming the Boggart.”

  Willie said grimly, “They wouldn’t have trouble filming his little tricks, if they happen across him. And then the place would go crazy, and Lord knows what he’d get up to. He goes where you go, Em — you’re going to have to keep away from the theater and just pray the TV people don’t come here.”

  Emily’s head began to ache even more. “And the doctor,” she said.

  “What doctor?”

  “His name’s Stigmore, he’s a psychiatrist. Mom knows him. He says it’s Jess and me making the Boggart things happen — he wants to study us.”

  Willie snorted. “Fellow’s an imbecile.” He got up, and pulled a paperback from his pocket. “Now I’m going to learn lines and you’re going to have a sleep.”

  “I’m not sleepy. Can I cue you?” Emily was an old hand at hearing actors rehearse their lines. On the rare occasions when her father acted, he took weeks to learn his words and was always convinced he was going to forget them.

  “Yes please,” said Willie promptly. But before he could even hand her the book, there was a ring at the front doorbell.

  “Ignore it,” Emily said.

  “Better not. Might be your mother, forgot her key.” Willie went out, and shortly Emily heard the murmur of male voices from downstairs. When the voices didn’t stop, but instead began to rise a little, she hauled her cast out of bed and put her head out of the bedroom door to listen.

  “There is absolutely no question of that!” Willie was announcing stiffly, sounding like a nineteenth-century English butler. “It’s not my place to make such decisions.”

  Rumble-rumble-rumble, went the other voice persistently. Whoever he was, he didn’t have William Walker’s powers of voice projection.

  “Don’t you understand, my good man — the child is sick!” Willie’s voice said testily.

  Rumble-rumble. Rumble-rumble.

  “That’s for Mrs. Volnik to decide,” said Willie. “Good afternoon!” The door slammed.

  Emily hobbled back into bed just before Willie came puffing upstairs. “Speak of the devil!” he said, now sounding his Scottish self again. “That was your Dr. Stigmore. Not a lovable man, not at all.”

  “Jess and I call him the creep.”

  “Very apt. He was insisting Maggie would like him to talk to you, so I sent him away with a flea in his ear. I think I’m going to make us both a cup of tea, to soothe the nerves.”

  “Oh Willie, I’m so glad you’re here.” Emily said. She slid back under the covers again as he went downstairs, and lay there feeling safe and protected. It was a wonderful change from the nervous uncertainty that had become her normal state of mind since the Boggart first appeared. She closed her eyes, and the aspirin began to carry her headache away, and very soon she drifted into sleep.

  Up on Emily’s bookshelf the Boggart slept too, a long exhausted sleep unbroken since the day of his travels into the theater light board and the city traffic lights. He didn’t stir, not even when the sky outside grew thick and ominous, full of grey cloud, and the first snowflakes began to float down.

  THE SNOW FELL for two days and nights, whirling in the wind that blew off Lake Ontario, muffling the trees and ravines of Toronto, turning the whole city white. It was the kind of storm that belonged normally to January, not November, and it was followed by what the weather forecasters called “a frigid blast of Arctic air,” which spread a murderous coating of ice over streets and sidewalks where the snow had been cleared. Most of the schools closed down, and a great many offices. Jessup had a happy time with the Gang of Five, dividing his days between the computer screen and the hockey rink. Emily rested. She read a lot. Her temperature went down and her bruises began to change to a remarkable shade of brownish-yellow, and she began to practice walking on crutches, though so far only on trips to the bathroom.

  There was still no sign of the Boggart. Maggie was greatly relieved to find that the house, the shop and the theater were all blessedly free of strange sounds or flying furniture, until Dr. Stigmore suggested over the telephone that this was due only to the fact that Emily had been confined to bed.

  Emily wrote to Tommy Cameron telling him all the details of the previous few weeks, but her letter crossed one from him. He sent her a fat envelope full of pictures of the Scottish Highlands and the Western Isles: postcards, photographs, pictures torn from calendars or magazines. They were wonderful images of misted purple mountains and grey-blue lochs and seas; there was a big, romantic picture of Castle Keep brooding dark and lonely on its rock, and an even bigger one of the seals, all wide dark eyes and bristling whiskers. Tommy wrote, “I don’t know what good it will do, but I think you should put these all over your bedroom walls. They might remind him of where he ought to be. The problem will be, how to persuade him to go there.”

  Emily said to Jessup, “And how would he go? Can you imagine what he’d do to a plane?”

  Jessup said without much hope, “D’you suppose any birds migrate from Canada to Scotland?”

  They pinned up the pictures of Scotland all around Emily’s room, so that the room began to look like a sort of small shrine to Scottishness. Maggie brought Robert in to look at it late one evening when Emily was asleep, and then took him back downstairs and asked if he thought they should be worried.

  “Worried?” said Robert. “They’re great pictures. She liked Scotland. Why worry?”

  “It’s so sudden. And different. Dr. Stigmore said we should tell him if either of them does anything different.”

  “If you ask me, your friend Stigmore has an overactive imagination.”

  Maggie said, “You weren’t in the shop when the furniture was flying around.”

  “No,” said Robert, who had heard such highly colored descriptions of this incident from Maggie and Dr. Stigmore, each slightly different in detail, that he wasn’t sure what he believed.

  “And what about the things that happened when Em was at the theater?” Maggie persisted. “The lights going insane, and the computer.”

  Robert said mildly, “Computerized light boards aren’t perfect, you know. They’re a great modern advance until the day something goes wrong, and then it’s not just a little mistake, it’s a great screaming disaster.”

  Maggie gave a doubtful sniff, and took the coffee cups out to the kitchen. Robert sat thinking wistfully of the magical lighting effects that had filled his stage that day. They were more hauntingly beautiful than any he had ever seen in a theater. He had worked for hours with Phil the designer to try to reproduce some of them, but with no success. It was as if the effects were impossible to achieve without something more than the equipment the Chervil owned.

  Which was, of course, quite true.

  THE BOGGART woke up on a bright morning when the temperature outside the house was several degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The first thing that he saw, in the clear light filling the room, was the hypnotic array of photographs of Appin: his castle, his landscape and loch, his friends the seals.

  He flittered from one picture to the next, filled suddenly with longing for the smell of the seaweed and the damp fallen leaves, for the soft salty air and the fine mist that was not quite rain; for drafty Castle Keep and the sea gulls mewing around its roof. These pictures brought it all back to him, acutely vivid, and at the same time reminded him that he was in quite another place. The Boggart had very little sense o
f geography, and made no distinction between one place or country and another inside the North American continent. But he did know, as instinctively as a bird or any other wild thing, that he was on the other side of a very large ocean, a long way from home. And he was consumed by a desperate homesickness.

  He flittered across to the window, and was startled by the whiteness. He had never seen snow so deep. It was mounded a foot high on the windowsills, against the glass, and the streets outside seemed all white and grey and black, with no color anywhere. In banks and drifts the snow gleamed in the sunshine. Faintly he heard voices and laughter, and he saw Jessup and Chris chasing Barry down the sidewalk, throwing snowballs.

  The Boggart’s homesickness faded a little. He looked out at this crisp glittering world, fascinated. In the winters of his part of Scotland snow did not fall often, and it did not lie for long; only the mountaintops were white until spring. The snowy Toronto street beckoned him; he wanted to be out there, sharing the sunshine and the brilliant whiteness.

  He flittered downstairs, hoping that someone might open a door. He had learned already that the Volniks’ house, unlike Castle Keep, was tightly closed, with no cracks or crannies through which a boggart could come and go. The windows had not only one layer of glass, but two. These people seemed to be determined to keep out the good fresh air.

  He hovered hopefully in the front hall, and in a little while his patience was rewarded; Jessup came bursting in, his face gleaming red, and disappeared into the bathroom. When he came out, the Boggart dived to his shoulder, and sat there clutching the jacket collar for balance as Jessup ran outdoors again.

  But it wasn’t what he had expected at all. The shock nearly paralyzed him. In an instant, the fiercely cold air sucked the energy out of his insubstantial, invisible body like a vacuum cleaner sucking out dust. Just as the Boggart had never seen deep long-lying snow, so he had never felt anything like the bitter cold of the Canadian winter; his coastal Scottish climate was gentle in comparison. Gasping for consciousness, he wound his long fingers in the fur edging Jessup’s hood, and with his last thread of strength managed to haul himself over the edge and down inside Jessup’s shirt. Jessup wriggled, feeling the sudden prickle of cold — but then ducked to avoid a snowball, and forgot everything but the swift noisy compulsion to grab up his own handful of snow and send it whizzing back. He yelled in triumph as the snowball hit Barry’s shoulder, and the Boggart winced as the noise of the yell flooded his chilly ears.