The Boggart Read online

  “He’s a creep,” Jessup said simply. “He always was.”

  Maggie wasn’t listening. She was beginning to sound extremely English, as she always did when upset. “If he thinks I’m going to let him do his bloody research on my daughter, he’s got another think coming! How dare he talk about us in public, the rotten publicity hound! He’s never coming near this family again — I don’t care how many chairs get thrown about!”

  Emily said, “I don’t think there’ll be any more.”

  But Maggie had caught sight of Barry. She stared at him, her hand going instinctively to push back the long hair loose about her face. “What are you doing here?”

  “Working,” Barry said.

  “That makes a change,” Maggie said tartly.

  Barry flushed. He opened his mouth to retaliate, and then changed his mind. “It does, doesn’t it?” he said.

  Emily was about to start loathing her mother when Maggie did one of the quick engaging mood changes for which she was famous in the family. “I’m sorry, Barry, that was a bitchy thing to say. I’ll find better ways of nagging you to finish school. You seem to have worked a miraculous cure on my son, at any rate.”

  They all looked at Jessup, fully clothed, bright-eyed, the picture of health. He had forgotten he was supposed to have the flu. He looked down modestly, and his hand closed over the computer disc.

  “Let’s all go have breakfast, and drink bad health to Dr. Stigmore,” Maggie said.

  “In just a moment,” Emily said. “Jess and I have a quick letter to write.”

  FOURTEEN

  IT WAS A Saturday morning in Port Appin, four days after Christmas, and Tommy Cameron was helping his father Angus load boxes into his car. Angus had found no newspaper stories for several weeks, so he was at home working in the shop, and Tommy’s mother was looking much happier. Business was brisk, and they had even sold nineteen of the six-dozen boxes of Christmas crackers Angus had insisted on buying secondhand in a fire sale. Tommy was as glad to see the car as he was to see his father. Making special delivery runs on a bicycle in December was a chilly business.

  There was a fine mist of rain in the air, and clouds hung ragged and low over the hills and the islands. But sea gulls were weaving endlessly to and fro over the sea, calling, calling. Tommy looked up at them curiously, wondering what could be making them so restless on a dank winter day.

  Another sound came from the direction of the road, the growing raucous rattle of an engine in trouble, and around the corner came the bright familiar van of the mailman. It was traveling in a series of strange jerky hiccups, coughing and spluttering alarmingly.

  “Lord!” said Tommy’s father, straightening up, peering. “What does David Ross have in his petrol tank today, do you suppose?”

  The van zigzagged toward them, and stopped with a final violent tremor and cough. The mailman got out; he was a portly man with a neat grey beard. “New Year!” he said bitterly. “It has to choose New Year to die on me!” He glared at his van, and kicked its rear tire.

  “Poor thing,” said Angus Cameron. “You should be kinder, David — we are all getting older.”

  “This van is only two years old and it had a checkup last week,” said David Ross the mailman. He opened the rear doors and began pulling parcels out of a mailbag. “The Post Office is having some sort of epidemic, if you ask me. Last night’s mail train from Glasgow nearly crashed, with some sort of brake failure — and last week one of the transatlantic planes came in on one engine —”

  “Dangerous occupation, mail delivery,” Angus said solemnly. “You should take up hang gliding.”

  “A happy New Year to you too,” said David Ross dourly. He handed over several boxes and a package of mail, then reached back into his bag. “Oh, and there is a registered piece for Tommy here. A late Christmas present, I dare say.”

  He pulled out a brown padded envelope — and staggered suddenly, juggling the envelope between his two hands as if it were all at once very hot, or very heavy. He handed it hastily to Tommy who took it warily but was surprised to find it very light.

  “Sign here,” David Ross said. Tommy signed his name.

  “Maybe you should take my bike, Mr. Ross,” he said cheerfully.

  “It’s been getting worse and worse all day,” the postman said morosely. He climbed back into his van and raised a resigned hand in farewell. Then he turned the ignition key.

  And the engine purred into life as quietly as a kitten, and David Ross’s astonished face disappeared with his van, driving smooth as silk away down the road.

  “Registered, eh?” said Angus. “Who’s it from?”

  Tommy looked at the stamps on his package, and the warnings printed all over it in careful capital letters: FRAGILE . . . URGENT . . . HANDLE WITH CARE. . . .

  “It’s from Canada,” he said.

  “DEAR TOMMY,” said the letter, when finally, privately, he opened it.

  Be very VERY careful with this disc, because the Boggart has put himself inside it. It was the only way he could find to get to talk to us, and to have himself sent home. There isn’t time to explain it all right now, we will write to you later.

  When you are absolutely sure there is nobody else around, read the instruction bit of this letter and put the disc in your computer. There is a space game on it called Black Hole. Go into this, and follow the instructions to begin space travel.

  Once you are in space, IGNORE all the warnings on the screen that try to keep you from being swallowed up by the black hole. You HAVE to be swallowed up by the Black Hole, because the Boggart will be waiting for you on the other side of it. It is very scary having to do what the Boggart wants and not what the computer wants, but it is the only way. YOU JUST HAVE TO FLY. TRUST US.

  Once you reach the Boggart, we think he will take over, and go home to the castle. He is a pain but we will miss him. A lot.

  Thanks for helping.

  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

  Jessup and Emily

  P.S. We miss you too.

  Love,

  Emily

  The letter had one final page after this, headed “Instructions for Black Hole Game.”

  Sitting up in bed, Tommy took a deep breath, and let it out in a long soundless whistle. He looked at the small unremarkable disc lying beside him on the quilt. The Boggart had always roamed so free, here in Port Appin, in his own small world. Life must have become terribly complicated for him, over there, if the only way he could find to escape was by locking himself up.

  He listened to the sounds of his parents preparing for bed, in the room next door. In this small house, there was no chance of running his computer undetected at night. But he knew what he would do. Tomorrow night there would be a ceilidh at the village hall, a splendid communal party at which everyone would perform and sing and dance, eat and drink, and generally enjoy being together. Tommy would be part of it; unknown to Jessup and Emily, he was one of the best Scottish dancers Appin had ever produced, and he was to do a sword dance from the Isle of Skye. But after that, when the dancing had become general and his parents were laughing and talking with their friends, he knew he could slip away.

  He looked at the disc again; then slid it under his pillow, and lay down. Before he turned out the light, he reached for the letter. He re-read the postscript, several times. Then he pushed the letter under his pillow too.

  LIGHT AND music and laughter poured out of the windows and door of the village hall, with the rhythm of dancing feet and furious fiddle playing. At one moment Tommy was standing at the door, smiling, applauding, resplendent in his kilt and velvet jacket; at the next he had backed quietly away and disappeared into the night. Nobody noticed him go. He ran down the dark road, grateful that he didn’t have to worry about bumping into the new owner of Castle Keep. Mr. Maconochie had left the ceilidh early, with his two small visiting great-nephews. The little boys had had a fine time, but one of them had already fallen asleep and the other was well on the way.
r />   Like the Volniks, Mr. Maconochie the lawyer had fallen in love with Castle Keep; unlike them, he had decided to change his life and move there. Perhaps he had been waiting for an excuse to start again. For that was what he had done: he had sold his house in Edinburgh, bought all the MacDevon’s remaining books and furniture from Maggie and Robert, and, just last week, sent them a large check that made him the new master of Castle Keep. To the great relief of the Camerons and the rest of Port Appin, his intention seemed to be to change the castle only in ways that made it safer, warmer and more weatherproof. He had already settled happily into worn tweeds and corduroys, and bought a dog.

  Tommy sat down at his desk, spread out the letter of instruction, put the disc in his computer and launched himself into Jessup’s Black Hole game. Soon his screen took him into space, among the glittering stars. He found that his fingers were trembling. He could feel his heart beating faster too, faster than it had beaten after his sword dance, or even before it, when he had been nervous.

  Looking up at the windows, he realized that he had forgotten to draw the curtains, so he switched off his desk lamp. Now the only light in the room was that from the glimmering computer screen — and, beyond it, from the few faintly-glowing windows of Castle Keep. With his great-nephews staying, Mr. Maconochie kept night lights on all night long, in case they should wake up and feel lonely or alarmed.

  Tommy looked back at the screen, and it drew him into the feeling of flying in a spaceship, deeper and deeper, out among the stars. The game carried him on, far into space. Like Emily and Jessup he traveled through galaxies, billions of light years in seconds, until like them he began to see the perilous quivering of the stars, and the warnings thrown up at him by the computer game. Slowly he went on, and on, nervous all the time that his inexperience with the computer would lead him to make some terrible mistake.

  Suddenly the screen was full of huge glaring words.

  DANGER!!!

  DANGER!!!

  DANGER!!!

  In a hasty, frightened reflex Tommy pushed the keys that would interrupt the course of any program in the computer. He must have made some dreadful mistake. If he could stop the game, he could reread the instructions to find out where he had gone wrong.

  But to his horror, the computer ignored him. It was too late to stop.

  Image after image whirled by on the screen, warning after warning. The spaceship of his imagination flew on, undeterred. Tommy could feel himself rushing through space as if it were really happening, and he fought to keep himself out of the illusion. In panic he stabbed at the keyboard, desperately trying to find some way to obey the computer and avert disaster. What had he done wrong? He was going to kill the Boggart!

  Then looking wildly around, he caught sight of the words in Emily’s sprawling black capitals on one of the pages beside him.

  YOU JUST HAVE TO FLY. TRUST US.

  The words filled Tommy’s mind, pulling him out of panic, and with a sound like a sob he forced his hands away from the computer keyboard. He felt himself let go, give up control. And he was staring wide-eyed at the screen, reaching his arms wide as if for balance, as the terrifying whirlpool of the Black Hole pulled him down into the dark, down, down, into unending deathly emptiness. . . .

  The screen was black, quite black, save for one point of blazing blue light in the center. Giddy, breathless, Tommy stared at it.

  The blue light bounced a little, as if it were dancing. And very gradually, Tommy began to feel all the tension being drawn out of him. His mind and his body began to relax, free now from anxiety. He seemed to hear the sound of this relaxation too, warm, comforting, filling the room — and he laughed aloud as he realized it was exactly like the purring of a cat. A sense of laughter was all around him; he was at the center of the Boggart’s happiness. He stood up, wondering, and the purring sound enveloped him like music.

  All at once there was a noise like a gunshot inside his computer, and it spat out the disc in an explosion of blue flame. Tommy jumped back. The disc lay on the carpet, burning and yet cold, flickering without smell or sound. Against his face he felt for an instant a cool brief touch, as if a small hand had stroked his cheek.

  He stood very still, holding his breath.

  Then he heard another sudden crash, and he spun around and saw that a pane of one of his windows had shattered. And through the window, out over the dark water, he saw a blue flame flying like an arrow, through the clear night, curving out, until it touched the roof of Castle Keep, leaped up for an instant as if in triumph, and disappeared.

  Tommy stood looking out, in the formal Scottish kilt and shirt and jacket of the sword dancer, and he smiled. “Do bheatha dhachaidh, Boggart,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  IN A GENTLE WHIRL of sooty dust the Boggart dropped down the chimney and out into the broad living-room hearth of Castle Keep. He breathed a long happy sigh. Then he put himself through the gap under the door and flittered into the kitchen, which seemed warmer than he remembered, and he twitched at the tail of a prowling mouse. The mouse squeaked indignantly, and the Boggart saw fragments of sandwich lying on the table near two small plates, as if two small people had left the remnants of a snack. He popped a piece into his mouth, and tasted peanut butter. He smiled.

  In the glow of the night-lights he flittered happily around the castle, greeting every stone and board and corner, every room and door. Nothing had changed. It was all the same as before, though cleaner. He drifted into the MacDevon’s bedroom, and found the wardrobe full of clothes that were not the MacDevon’s but similar, and in the MacDevon’s bed a sleeping man who breathed with the same right kind of gentle snore. The Boggart beamed a welcome, and tied Mr. Maconochie’s shoelaces together to greet him in the morning.

  In the next room, to his delight, he found two small sleeping boys, of a perfect age for Boggart teasings, and he flittered busily about the house until he found a needle and thread. Then he came back and sewed neat little stitches across the ends of the sleeves of one boy’s shirt, and the legs of the other one’s jeans. He would take care to be hovering, appreciative and invisible, when they woke up and began to dress.

  In a sheltered corner downstairs he heard a sleeping dog whimper at his passing, and when he went to investigate he found not an experienced adult dog or a tired half-blind wreck, but a big-pawed, flop-eared Labrador puppy. The Boggart could hardly believe his luck. Here was someone else with whom he could have great fun. As a beginning, he caught a large black beetle and dropped it in the puppy’s water bowl.

  In the sleeping castle, the Boggart paused at one of the narrow outer windows that opened toward the Island of Mull. Tomorrow he would visit the seals, on the rocks out there. A picture flickered through his wild mind, of two boys and a girl, whom he had watched visiting the seals once, but he could not remember their names.

  He looked out at the glimmering sea and the islands, and the sky lit with stars that had seen all the great or terrible things that ever happened in Scotland, through more years even than a boggart. Echoing faintly over the water from the village hall, he heard the joyful skirl of a single bagpipe. Then he flittered away to the library and found that his own special place was still there, the space between two blocks of stone high in the library wall, where three hundred years earlier an absentminded mason had forgotten to put mortar, and an absentminded carpenter had hidden the forgetfulness with a shelf. The Boggart curled up, contented, at home, and went to sleep.