The Boggart and the Monster Page 12

  The loch grew choppy with the boat’s zigzagging wake. In his swaying cabin Harold watched boat after boat flash by, inches from his hatchway, and clutched his head and moaned.

  * * *

  DEEP IN THE LOCH, where he had been listening to the children’s silent calling, where he had almost regained the courage to answer their challenge and change his shape, Nessie lifted his head and sensed what was happening. He could feel the Boggart’s joy in mischief, like a once-familiar phrase of music not heard for a very long time. He smiled with pleasure, as faint threads of memory stirred in his boggart mind, and he let his great body drift up closer to the surface of the loch. All his instincts longed to join in whatever it was that was causing his cousin such delight.

  But Nessie had changed, since the Boggart first woke him out of his centuries of monster sleep. Now he had a dream, the chance of a life of private gaiety and good company in a quiet place, and his Boggart cousin and his new friends between them had offered him the way to make it come true. Nessie felt, in his creaking sleep-slowed brain, that this dream must not be put at risk, not at any price, not even for a beautiful piece of boggartry. And the calling of the children made him feel that if he were ever to find the truth of his dream, the time to go was now.

  He called through the water, in the Old Speech without words, “Cuz! Cuz, where are you?”

  The Boggart was whipping Harold’s boat around in a tight starboard turn, just in time to avoid hitting the bank.“Over here!” he called gleefully. “Come!”

  “No!” Nessie said firmly. He drifted closer. “No, not now! We have a journey to go, cuz!”

  “Oh later, later!” called the Boggart. “Come have fun — even big as you are, come over here, come see!” He laughed in delight as a group of boys scrambled up the bank to escape the splashing of the research boat’s wake. The boat roared off again across the loch.

  Nessie felt a wave of irritation begin to wash through his happy-go-lucky mind. What about the lectures his cousin the Boggart had given him, the admonitions about snapping out of it, giving up a preoccupation, learning to change? Like a nudging parent, like a stern teacher, he had dragged Nessie out of sleep into a sense of responsibility — and now look at him! Look at him! Nessie’s tail began to twitch, and above the loch a few people noticed the swirling of the water and thought it the ominous precursor of a squall. They were right, in a way.

  For a last time, Nessie called in boggart speech through the water: “Cuz! Our friends are waiting! Come with me!”

  “No!” shouted the Boggart. He zoomed gaily past the bow of the nearest small boat, Sonar Three, spraying Kevin with water, and in the control cabin of the research ship a box fell off a shelf and emptied a dozen tape cassettes on Harold’s unhappy head.

  Under the surface, Nessie uttered a long growl that grew into a roar, casting fear and dread into every underwater creature that heard it, and with fierce strokes of his flippers and tail he shot after the Boggart, across the loch. When he was close to the whirling course of the two linked ROVs and their invisible controller, he put down his head and lifted his huge back out of the water, and Sydney and Adelaide drove straight into it, and stopped.

  The research boat slowed as the tether-towlines relaxed their pull, and lay wallowing in the churned-up water. Harold rolled his eyes at Jenny in relief. “Thank heavens!” he said, pulling a cassette out of the collar of his shirt.

  Sydney and Adelaide, stranded, perched on the gleaming grey hump that was Nessie’s back. To the watchers from the bank, it was as if they had run into a grey island that had suddenly risen out of the loch. Under the water, Nessie curved his long neck around and took their intertwined tethers firmly in his mouth, to prevent any escape.

  The Boggart gave a disappointed whine, like a caged puppy. “You’re spoiling all the fun!” he said petulantly.

  “Cuz!” Nessie said. He let go of the tethers, but the lake and the air all around them were full of the sense of his reproach.

  The Boggart paused. There was a small silence. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, cuz.”

  “Let’s be selkies,” Nessie said. He could feel the call from the children’s imaginations, up on the bank, so strongly now that he could hardly bear to wait.

  “Selkies!” said the Boggart happily, forgetting his game in an instant, and he slipped out of Sydney’s yellow metal frame and became a grey seal.

  And the island of Nessie’s back vanished, and Sydney and Adelaide slid back into the water and hung dangling at the end of their tethers, as the head of a second seal rose through the choppy waves to join the first.

  On the deck of the research ship, Chuck and his crew emerged from the various corners where they had been hanging on to rails or spars to keep themselves from being tossed overboard. They restarted the winches, and began hauling Sydney and Adelaide back to the boat.

  On the bank of the loch, Mr. Maconochie started the engine of the Range Rover, and the children and Miss Urquhart climbed silently into the car, carefully watching the small moving heads of the two grey seals swimming toward the southern end of the lake. They drove slowly down the road, parallel to the loch and the swimming seals.

  And in the field close by, Angus Cameron ran to his van, his cameras banging together around his neck, and climbed in behind the wheel to follow them.

  TWELVE AHELICOPTER THRUMMED over Harold Pindle’s research ship, tilting, circling, as the TV cameraman strapped into his seat behind the pilot leaned out of the open door and pointed his lens. But Harold was paying no attention. He was far too busy at the control panel inside the ship’s main cabin, talking into his microphone to re-establish contact with the line of little sonar-equipped boats strung across the loch.

  “Now listen up, all of you — we’ve got the ROVs back on board now and we’re working on them. What happened was, their programming developed a glitch and they just went off at random, and ended up tangling lines and pulling the boat. As you saw. And they hit the Monster, I guess — how many had it on the sonar?”

  “Sonar Two, we saw it,” said a crackling voice from the speaker. “A big mass, at two o’clock. Then it disappeared.”

  “Sonar Four, we had it too.”

  “Sonar Three,” said Kevin’s voice. “And we had a live sighting too, like you, Prof. Nessie came up, just his back, and the ROVs hit him and he dived. And he was gone, way off the screen. Must move really fast.”

  Harold said urgently, “Now did anyone behind you pick him up on screen? Sonar Six?”

  “Sonar Six, negative. Not a sign.”

  “Sonar Eight, negative.”

  “Sonar Nine, negative.”

  “Sonar Seven — we had him till he dived. But he didn’t come past us. Must have gone back to your end of the loch.”

  “That’s where he is,” said Harold with great satisfaction. “Right up this end, and he can’t come past you ladies and gentlemen without your screens picking him up. All boats hold your present positions, all boats run sonar continually, and I’ll come back on when we’ve got Sydney and Adelaide straightened out. Thanks, guys. Over and out.”

  He pressed the microphone switch, leaned back in his chair, and beamed at Jenny, who was ravenously eating an apple after hours of much stress and no food.

  “And then,” he said happily, “we move up on good old Nessie until he has to come past us, and we get even better pictures than we have already.”

  “Couldn’t be much better,” Jenny said with her mouth full. “The pix we have already are absolutely fabulous.”

  Harold smiled contentedly. He said: “But now we have a creature we can spend the rest of our lives studying, so long as we can get funding from enough folks like Axel Kalling. And all publicity is good publicity, Jen. So we have to make sure Nessie gives us lots of lovely photo ops for those guys out there.”

  He swung around in his chair and pointed through the open stern hatch, and they both gazed out.

  On the rising land beside the loch, the first he
licopter could be seen landing in a grassy field. Two other helicopters were throatily buzzing up the loch toward the line of sonar boats. And behind them, in the distance, the water was white with the churning wakes of high-speed launches rushing reporters and cameras and tape recorders toward the scene of the Monster’s sighting. In larger quantities than ever before in history, the media were descending on Loch Ness.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the two swimming seals, and their anxious road-borne escorts, reached the southern end of the loch, the daylight was dying. The fine rain had stopped falling long since, but the sky had remained heavily clouded, and now greyness was creeping over both land and sky. And fatigue was coming with it.

  “They’ve stopped!” Emily said. Sitting by the lefthand window, she was the car’s prime lookout to check on the progress of Nessie and the Boggart.

  Mr. Maconochie drew the Range Rover to a halt as soon as he could, and they got out and peered through trees at the increasingly shadowy loch.

  “I see them!” Tommy said. “By that rocky bit of beach, down below.“He paused, and looked at Emily uncertainly.“They feel — I mean, doesn’t it seem to you — it feels as though they’re tired.”

  Emily nodded. “I think they’re stopping for the night.”

  “And so should we,” said Mr. Maconochie.

  “But what will Nessie do if we fall asleep?” Jessup said, troubled. “He needs us to keep him in seal shape. He’ll suddenly find himself a Monster again, and they’ll all be after him.” He looked back down Loch Ness, to a distant line of lights that had begun to glimmer in the place where they had left Harold and his boats.

  Miss Urquhart said with quiet certainty, “I don’t think you need bother yourself about that.”

  “Really?” Emily said. She looked curiously at the clear green eyes in the old lady’s timeworn face, and thought again how young they seemed. Miss Urquhart smiled at her absently, and then became suddenly brisk and matter-of-fact.

  “I think they’re probably staying the night in the loch for that very reason,” she said. “So that if Nessie does have the misfortune to find himself huge again, there’s deep water for him to hide in. From here on, the water won’t be near as deep — but every hour he spends out of monster-shape gets him closer to being able to shape-shift as a proper boggart should.”

  “Until he won’t need us at all,” Tommy said. He grinned at Emily. “Well, and a good thing too. I’m getting awful tired of thinking about seals.”

  Jessup said, “I’m having trouble not thinking about food.”

  “Come, James,” said Miss Urquhart to Mr. Maconochie. “I’ll show you the way to a campground in Fort Augustus, just up the road. And you can drive me to the house of a friend of mine who lives there, a lady who’s never been surprised at anything peculiar I might do, these past sixty years. I’ll stay with her — I’m too old now to be sleeping on the ground.”

  “You’re not the only one,” said Mr. Maconochie with a wry grin. But he drove them cheerfully enough to the campground, a half-wooded field beside a stream, occupied only by two quiet tents and a small caravan, and he left Emily, Jessup and Tommy there to pitch camp while he took Miss Urquhart to the home of her friend.

  Miss Urquhart gave each of them a hug before she left. “You won’t need me after this,” she said.

  “Oh but we shall!” said Emily in alarm.

  “Have confidence, my dears,” Miss Urquhart said. “And give it to Nessie. Before you know it, he’ll be playing in his new home — and I’ll come visit you there. After all, he’s still the Urquhart boggart.”

  She climbed back into the car, a small straight-backed incongruous figure with her white hair, jeans and red Wellington boots, and the children were quiet for a while as the Rover disappeared. Then they set up three tents in the unoccupied quarter of the field, and found that it was possible to see the loch if one climbed to the third branch of a venerable but stunted oak tree.

  Darkness fell, and Tommy lit a hurricane lamp. Mr. Maconochie came back looking slightly dazed. “Look at this,” he said, opening the back of the Rover to reveal a line of large brown-paper shopping bags. “The friend turned out to live in a stately home, and she had at least three servants, and a famous garden, and a very hospitable nature. It was all I could do to stop her inviting us all to a four-course banquet.”

  “Why did you stop her?” said Jessup hungrily.

  In the light from the lamp, Tommy and Emily were opening the bags. “There’s homemade bread,” Tommy said, “and butter and cheese, and a ham, boy it smells good, and chutney, and tomatoes and little lettuces, and peaches —”

  “And half a chocolate cake,” Emily said, burrowing, “and lemonade, and a bottle of red wine called Merlot, and pears and apples —”

  “Oh my oh my oh my,” Tommy said.

  “Oh my ears and whiskers,” said Emily. They grinned foolishly at each other.

  “Did she put in a corkscrew?” said Mr. Maconochie.

  “You bet,” said Jessup. “And four glasses.”

  “Just two inches each for you, with water in it,” Mr. Maconochie said. “I’m not wasting a good wine on you heathens. Just enough to make you sleep.”

  And sleep they did, before long, warm in their sleeping bags against the chill damp Scottish night, without dream or interruption until the birds began to musically shout and the light came.

  And all the night, in a room high in her friend’s tall stately home, with a clear view out over Loch Ness, Miss Urquhart kept vigil at a window, drinking sometimes from a thermos of tea to help herself stay awake, and making a picture of a small grey seal in her mind.

  * * *

  ANGUS CAMERON WOKE at dawn, curled in the back of his van in a rest area within sight of the entrance to the campground. He groaned. He was cold, hungry and thirsty, and horribly stiff, and there was such an evil taste in his mouth that he was greatly tempted to drive back instantly to Loch Ness, to find a delicious hot breakfast at one of the hotels where his friends from the press would be staying. He wondered gloomily why his instincts had told him so loudly and clearly to follow Mr. Maconochie and the children.

  The News Editor of the Glasgow Herald had been loud and clear too, on Angus’s car phone the night before.

  “Where the hell are you?” he had demanded. “I’ve got Fergus and Jimmy arriving in some field by helicopter, and they need you.”

  “I’m chasing a lead,” Angus said. “A new development.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Angus — you’ve just broken the pop story of the century and you don’t want to follow it through?”

  “I’ll be right back,” Angus said. “I’ll keep in touch.”

  The News Editor had snorted ominously. “You’d better!” he said.

  Angus got out of his van, very slowly and carefully, and tried to stretch his aching arms and legs and back. He took care not to slam the door, nor make any other loud noise. If Tommy found out his father was following him, he would be furious; he would never forgive him.

  An alluring smell of fresh-brewed coffee was wafting over from the campsite. Angus groaned again.

  * * *

  IN THE RESEARCH BOAT on Loch Ness, Harold Pindle’s joints were aching too, but at least he had hot coffee, made by the faithful Jenny, to greet him at dawn. He had cat-napped all night, in his control-cabin chair or on a cramped bunk, getting up frequently in case a call might come in from the boats that lay out there with lights blazing at the masthead, or from the cabin roof. In each of the sonar boats someone was awake, watching the screen for signs of Nessie making a move, so Harold felt he should be as awake as possible too.

  His clothes were crumpled and there was an itchy grey stubble on his chin, but he was buoyed up by the thought that as soon as the sun was up, the boats and the refurbished ROVs could begin a final sweep up the last part of the loch. Nessie would be waiting there, huge and quiet and amazing, and when inevitably they flushed him out, they would this time get wonderfully comprehe
nsive film and photographs; they might even find where he had his den, or nest, if he had one at all. They might even find. . . .

  Harold daydreamed on, as a thin mist lay over the still water in the pale light of dawn, and at the far end of the loch a small double wake rippled back from the heads of two swimming grey seals. And Nessie and the Boggart swam out into the narrow, peaceful River Oich, leaving Loch Ness.

  * * *

  NESSIE PAUSED in his swimming, rolled over, and looked back at the grey horizon that was his loch. There was an ache in his chest and a tightness in his throat, and his eyes were hot. These were not sensations he was accustomed to, and he knew that they were connected with the loch, this silent, beautiful, ancient lake that had been his home for so long. He felt somehow that it knew he was leaving, and he wanted to explain.

  “You are a beautiful place,” he said to the loch, “and I have been very happy in you. Thank you. I’m only going because I have to. I shall miss you.”

  The Boggart paddled quietly at a respectful distance, waiting for him, and Nessie knew it and was grateful. He looked lovingly back once more at the grey loch, with its wooded hills rising on either side. “Thank you,” he said to it again.

  Then he dived into an underwater somersault, and came up splashing the Boggart, and they swam on down the river.

  Half that day they swam, following the water through the whole great rift that almost cuts Scotland in half, running southwest from Inverness to Fort William, through Loch Ness, Loch Oich, Loch Lochy and Loch Linnhe, from the North Sea to the Sea of the Hebrides. They swam down the river into Loch Oich, which was tiny in comparison to Loch Ness, and out again into the next river, broadened for boat traffic into the Caledonian Canal.

  All the time, Mr. Maconochie, Emily, Jessup and Tommy kept pace with them on the road, holding their minds on Nessie, keeping the picture of him as a seal. Whenever they lost sight of the water, Mr. Maconochie picked up speed and went on until they next found it again, and then they would park and wait for the two steadily moving doglike heads to appear once more around a bend in the river, or through a lock in cautious company with a boat. It was an uneven journey. Partway through the morning they paused for ham sandwiches and apples from the bounty of Miss Urquhart’s nameless friend.