The Boggart and the Monster Page 13

  The changes in pace caused great difficulties for Angus, who was trying desperately to keep the Range Rover always in sight without being seen himself. Once, he went shooting past the Rover when it was parked, and was terrified that Tommy might have recognized his van. But Tommy was gazing out at the water, rapt. Angus was too preoccupied to have noticed, yet, that the children were keeping pace with the seals. He thought they were making their erratic stops because they were bird-watching. Geese, perhaps, or cormorants, or even an osprey.

  It was when they had reached Loch Lochy that he brought disaster on himself. It was a pretty lake, fringed with trees and mountains like a smaller version of Loch Ness. Angus had been driven by hunger to stop and buy a take-out cheese roll and coffee at a roadside pub, and he was driving faster than usual, chewing his roll as he went, for fear that the Rover had gone far enough ahead to be out of his reach. He came bowling around a corner to find a large ROAD WORKS sign blocking the road and directing him into a rest area beside the lake. The exit from the rest area was blocked by a coach full of Japanese tourists, waiting for its last occupants to board after a picture-taking stop. The only other vehicle there, suddenly visible as Angus came skidding around toward it, was Mr. Maconochie’s Range Rover, with Tommy and Jessup, Emily and Mr. Maconochie all standing beside it. The back of the car was open, and they were repacking a pile of camping gear that had tumbled apart: Emily and Mr. Maconochie were picking up fallen cutlery, Tommy and Jessup folding a blanket.

  They turned, and Angus found himself facing his son’s startled face through the windshield. He smiled, sheepishly.

  Tommy was appalled. “Dad!”

  Since he could think of nothing else to do, Angus turned off his engine and got out. “Good morning!” he said.

  Tommy thrust his half of the blanket into Jessup’s arms and confronted his father angrily. “Why aren’t you back there at the loch with the rest of them? You’ve been following us again, haven’t you?”

  The last Japanese tourist scurried into the bus, and its engine roared like a bull. It drove slowly out of the rest area and away up the road.

  “Off to see the Monster!” said Angus genially, watching it go.

  “You’ve been following us! Why can’t you leave us alone!”

  Angus looked at him expressionlessly. He was a great believer in the art of avoiding confrontation by refusing to answer challenging questions. He pointed over Tommy’s shoulder.

  “There’s cormorants flying over the loch. Must be bad weather coming, if they’re in from the sea.”

  “Dad!” Tommy said furiously. “Will you stop treating me like a wee boy! Will you just go off and do your reporting and leave us be!”

  * * *

  “I‘VE LOST THEM!” Nessie said in sudden panic to the Boggart.“Their minds have gone away! I feel my shape going!”

  “Hold on, cuz! If you have to change, try to go to boggart shape! Don’t go back!”

  “I’m going — I’m going —”

  “But you’ve nearly made it!” the Boggart said imploringly. “Another half-hour and it’s a full day you’ll have been out of monster shape — and that will do it, after that you can —”

  * * *

  BUT IT WAS TOO LATE. Out in the water of Loch Lochy, one of the grey seals was no longer there, and instead the huge plesiosaur bulk of the Loch Ness Monster loomed up over them. Water dripped down from his towering neck, and the low-tide smell of mud and seaweed filled the air. The loch was not deep enough for him to dive; he stood there belly–deep, helpless, big as a house. It was Nessie in his familiar shape, but no longer now a shape that he wanted. He looked down at the children from his rooftop height and made a small incongruous whining sound, like a sad puppy.

  Angus shouted with surprise and excitement. He lunged into his van for his cameras. “I knew it, I knew you were following something —” Frantically he began taking pictures, clicking in delight at the outline of Nessie’s head against the sky.

  “Angus,” said Mr. Maconochie, “leave the beast be. Has it not had enough bothering?”

  Angus switched to his video camera, whirring busily, turning for a long slow shot along the lake to reveal Nessie. He was trying to keep his hands from shaking with excitement. “Are you joking? Here this minute is the scoop of the century, and it’s all mine — the Loch Ness Monster leaves Loch Ness —”

  “Oh please, Mr. Cameron,” said Emily in distress. “Please leave him alone! He’s not really a monster!” Her hand shot into the pocket of her parka as if pulled by a string, and her fingers hit the little fossil shell and rolled it around distractedly.

  Angus paid no attention. He was changing the cassette in his video camera, breathless and intent.

  Tommy leaned close to Jessup’s ear, and whispered. Jessup’s eyes widened, and his mouth twitched into a nervous grin. Keeping hold of one side of the blanket that was still draped over his arms, he held out the other side to Tommy, and Tommy grabbed it, and together they shook the blanket open and whisked it up into the air and down over Angus’s head and body.

  Taken totally by surprise, Angus let out a muffled shout, staggered, and fell down, dropping his cameras, and the two boys jumped on him and rolled him in the blanket.

  “Em, quick, get some rope!” Jessup said urgently, clutching to hold Angus’s kicking feet. One of the feet caught him on the knee, and he yelped and rolled sideways. Tommy flung himself across his father’s chest, pulling the blanket tight around his arms.

  Emily dived into the back of the car, searching for anything that could serve as rope. “Mr. Mac, help!” she said. “Quickly!”

  Mr. Maconochie stood frozen, staring at the thrashing heap of bodies.

  “Quick!” said Emily. Her voice came out in a desperate squeak. She scrabbled in the car, and pulled out a sleeping bag. Tommy caught sight of it as he struggled to hold Angus still.

  “Yes!” he said breathlessly. “Brilliant!” He lunged at Angus’s feet again, with Jessup at his side. But Angus was a muscular man, for his size, and very determined, and he began jack-knifing his body in fierce, powerful jerks that shook the boys away and threatened to free him from the blanket. Emily dropped the sleeping bag over him, and knelt on top of it, only to be shaken off like a fallen leaf. “Mr. Mac!” she shrieked.

  Mr. Maconochie seemed to wake out of a trance, and suddenly he moved very fast. In an instant he was lying slantwise over Angus’s shrouded body, grasping his ankles in two large hands, and the children were realizing for the first time that he was not only very tall and lean but extremely strong.

  “Get that bag, Tommy!” said Mr. Maconochie firmly, and he thrust Angus’s legs into the sleeping bag as Tommy and Jessup held it open. Then he grabbed Angus’s arms, which were starting to flail now as the blanket fell away, and held them still while the boys tugged the bag up to his neck, and tied it securely closed. Angus writhed on the gravel like a helpless, wriggling sausage. His face was red with exertion, and very angry indeed. “You’re all insane!” he gasped. The top half of the sleeping bag bulged as he tried to work his hands up to his neck.

  Mr. Maconochie took off his belt. “I’m sorry about this, Angus,” he said, and he knelt — as gently as possible — on Angus and buckled the belt around the outside of the bag.

  With his arms pinned to his sides, Angus stopped struggling. “And you a lawyer!” he said bitterly. “I’ll have the law on you indeed, when I’m out of here! Assault and battery, and loss of livelihood! The best story of my life I had here, a minute ago, and you idiots scare it away!”

  For the first time since the brief breathless scuffle began, they all looked up at the loch.

  The water lay quiet and steel-grey, ruffled by a small wind. The seal and the Monster were gone.

  THIRTEEN THEY STARED at the empty water, and then up in the direction they had been traveling. Though they could see a long way up the loch, there was no sign of anyone or anything.

  “Did he turn back to a seal?” Emily said. “W
here did they go?”

  Two cars crackled their way into the graveled rest area and out again, around the ROAD WORKS sign.

  “Help!” shouted Angus loudly in their direction, but the cars had gone.

  Tommy crouched beside his father and looked fiercely into his eyes. “Dad,” he said, “unless you promise not to do that again I’m going to tie something over your mouth.”

  “I won’t promise any such thing,” said Angus crossly.

  “All right then,” Tommy said. He went over to the car and came back with a dish towel. “Pick up his head, Em,” he said, looking grim.

  “Aargh,” said Angus in disgust. “All right. I promise. What on earth is the matter with you all? I thought Harold Pindle was your friend, Jessup.”

  “It’s complicated,” Jessup said.

  Another car came through the rest area. This time it slowed as it passed them, and they saw faces looking curiously at Angus’s trussed form. But one of the faces grinned, clearly dismissing it as a joke, and the car went on.

  “Come with me, Tommy,” said Mr. Maconochie. “I think we’d better head off the traffic, before we get arrested. That sign’s a leftover — they obviously finished their Road Works days ago.” He loped over to the road and with Tommy at the other end, shifted the ROAD WORKS sign so that it no longer blocked the road but instead blocked the entrance to the rest area. Another car sped along the road, without giving them a glance.

  Emily was staring up the loch, vainly hunting some sign of the Boggart and Nessie. “They must have gone on without us,” she said. “Let’s drive until we catch up.”

  Tommy came and stood beside her. “Are you sure?” he said.

  “No,” said Emily. She nibbled at the side of her thumbnail. “I can’t feel anything about them at all. It’s very worrying.”

  Angus wriggled irritably inside the sleeping bag. “Mr. Maconochie,” he said, “you are a reasonable man and this whole thing is ludicrous. Will you please let me out of here.”

  Mr. Maconochie was lighting his pipe, sending up a cloud of blue smoke to be blown sideways by the breeze. He sat down beside Angus on the discarded blanket, with his long legs bent up in front of him. “Well, I’ll tell you, Angus Cameron,” he said, “it is a very strange sensation for a man of the law to find himself breaking the law, but this is a particular situation, you see. Your son and Emily and Jessup and I are very much concerned that nobody, nobody at all in the world, should know that Nessie has left the loch. We think he deserves a quiet life.”

  “Why?” said Angus. “Good grief, man, it’s amazing that the Monster exists! He’s an anthropological treasure, he has to be studied! And he’s also a huge great creature who could be dangerous — are you seriously suggesting he just roam about the countryside?”

  “No,” Mr. Maconochie said. He ran one hand distractedly through his thick grey hair and stood up.

  “You’re going to have to tell him, Mr. Mac,” Tommy said. “He’s more likely to believe it if it comes from you.”

  “You’re all daft,” said Angus Cameron with conviction. “All the four of you.”

  Mr. Maconochie took his pipe out of his mouth and blew out a plume of smoke. “The thing is, Angus,” he said, “Nessie’s not a plesiosaur, or even a monster. He’s not a dangerous great huge creature. He’s . . . magic.”

  Even lying trussed on the ground, even with only his head visible, Angus Cameron was able to express absolute and complete scorn in one word. “Magic!” he said.

  “He is!” said Emily.

  “You’ve lost your marbles,” said Angus.

  “A magical invisible creature,” said Emily, “with no shape except the shape he chooses. And he changes that any way he wants, like from a monster to a seal.”

  Jessup said, “He’s a boggart. And he’s with another boggart, who’s been our friend for years.”

  Angus snorted. “There’s no such things as boggarts!” he said.

  There was a faint sound over the loch, like the wind blowing in the trees, and the blanket that was lying on the ground beside Angus rose up into the air. Hanging vertically in the air, it moved around Angus in a circle, counter-clockwise.

  Angus watched it. His eyes moved suspiciously from Tommy to Emily to Jessup. He said, “How are you doing that?”

  The blanket flipped up into the air, folded itself into a neat pile, and put itself into the back of the car. The children and Mr. Maconochie stood very still, watching, beginning to smile. They saw Angus’s eyes widen in wonder, and then the look in them changed subtly, and became fear.

  At his neck, the sleeping-bag strings tied so firmly and carefully by Tommy were undoing themselves. When they were loose, the belt that was buckled around the bag drew itself out of the buckle and dropped away, and Angus sat up, jerkily, as if he were being pulled. The sleeping bag peeled itself away from his shoulders and arms, and then in an instant he was drawn to his feet, like a marionette pulled by invisible strings. The sleeping bag dropped away, and he stepped out of it. There was no change in expression on his face at all; it was frozen in apprehension.

  A car hummed by, on the road, and was gone.

  The loch was very still now; the breeze had dropped, and the leaves hung motionless on the trees. Angus was standing on the grass between the rest area and the bank of the loch; they saw him raise his arms wide and hold them outstretched, facing the water, as if unseen hands were grasping his own. They heard a voice murmuring softly, so softly they could not make out what it said, though Tommy said afterward that it was speaking the Gaelic. They saw the fear fade out of Angus’s face, and all the tension relax, so that he looked younger, and tranquil, and eager.

  And then they saw him fly.

  He rose up into the sky, arms still held wide; slowly at first and then more swiftly. His body tilted forward and like a coasting bird he lay in space, rising, rising, banking first to one side and then the other. The children and Mr. Maconochie watched him enviously, trying to imagine how he must feel, what he could see; knowing that the two boggarts, invisible, were up there holding his hands in theirs, carrying him through the air.

  Out over the loch Angus flew, and grew smaller and smaller, until they could scarcely see him. He was a smudge against the mounded clouds, a tiny speck in the grand sweeping landscape of purple-brown mountains, dark trees and glinting loch. They watched and watched, holding their breaths, caught in wonder. Then just when they thought they could no longer see him, he grew larger again, coming back, flying.

  He flew along the loch, swift and yet motionless. Then he swooped around in a great arc and came back toward them, arms wide still, lying on the air. A seagull flapping lazily over the loch veered toward him, inquisitive, and then dived away in alarm. Angus flew low over the still grey water, rose high over the treetops, banked back again, and then he came toward them over the water, and his legs dropped downward, as the legs of a bird come down to the vertical when it is about to land.

  And in the next moment he was stumbling forward, up the small stony beach that edged the loch, onto the grass where they stood. His arms were down at his sides again, and his face was alight with a joy none of them had ever seen on a face before.

  “It was my dream!” Angus Cameron said. “When I was a boy, I used to dream I was flying. Up in the sky, like that, lying on the wind, up over the trees and the fields. It was a wonderful dream, I had it three or four times, I never forgot it. But then it went away.”

  Emily said softly, “The boggarts gave it back to you again.”

  Angus looked at her vaguely, as if he were not properly seeing her. His face was still caught in wonder.

  “You’re a lucky man, Angus,” said Mr. Maconochie.

  “And you don’t deserve it,” Tommy said.

  “I don’t,” Angus said. He put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “It’s true, I don’t. Nessie was talking to me, up there. And the other fellow too.”

  He came up the grassy slope, walking a little unsteadily, like a man who has
not quite got his land legs back after a long voyage at sea, and he went to where his cameras were lying on the ground, near the crumpled sleeping bag. He picked up the still camera, opened it, and pulled out the exposed strip of film from its reel so that it was instantly spoiled. Then he took the cassette of film out of the video camera and threw it in the loch.

  “I took Nessie’s picture in Loch Ness,” he said. “And so far as the world knows, that’s where he’ll always be.”

  “And nobody else will ever take a picture of him again,” Jessup said.

  “I never thought of that,” Angus said. He grinned. “You’re right. I’m a lucky man right enough.” Then the grin faded, and he looked slowly around at the four of them, Emily, Jessup, Mr. Maconochie and his own son Tommy. “And I ask you all to forgive me,” he said, “because you have been seeing the far shore of truth while I have been blind as a bat. It’s an amazing thing you’ve done.”

  “Put that in writing,” Tommy said. “I may need to use it against you some day.”

  Very close, a car horn hooted, and they all jumped, and looked up hastily at the rest area. But there was no other car in sight: only Mr. Maconochie’s Range Rover and Angus’s battered van. All the doors of the Rover were open, and for a moment they thought they saw a blur of brightness in the driver’s seat. Then it was gone, and the sleeping bag lying on the ground before them rose into the air and moved toward the car. It disappeared into the back, folded over neatly by invisible hands, and the rear door closed. The horn sounded again, an insistent little blip.

  “I think we’re being invited to go home,” Mr. Maconochie said. “With passengers.”

  Jessup said, “I wonder what finally got Nessie able to find his boggart-shape. And to stay there.”