The Boggart Fights Back Read online

  “And Mom’s family was part Scottish,” Allie said. “Her dad, our Canadian grandad, he owned Castle Keep for a little while, did you know, Portia?”

  “I heard,” Portia said. “He inherited it when the MacDevon died, right? Because he had MacDevon blood.”

  “If only he’d kept it!” Allie said mournfully. “Mom loves it too. She was about our age when they came over to look.”

  “Very expensive, taking care of a place with an ocean in the way,” Portia said. “If I inherited a house in Canada, I’d sell it in a flash.”

  Jay said to Allie, “Think positive. At least that was how Mom and Dad met.”

  “I know. That’s what she always says.” Allie sighed. Then she brightened. “And we have dual citizenship, Jay and me, you know that, Portia? Dad’s had us doing Highland Dance since we were tiny. Competitions.”

  Portia speeded up again, between waves. “Do you win?”

  “Sometimes,” Allie said. “And Jay sings. Scottish ballads and stuff.” She added, generously, “He’s good.”

  “Do you sing too?”

  “No way. I sound like a frog.”

  “She does,” Jay said cheerfully. “And maybe I will too, when my voice breaks.”

  “What sort of ballads?” Portia said.

  “A mix,” Jay said. He thought for a moment, and then he began to sing. It was a clear true soprano voice, which he had taken great care never to reveal to his school friends on the hockey team, and it flowed out like dawning light over the water of the loch. Instinctively Portia slowed the engine down to a murmur.

  “Bonnie Charlie’s noo awa,” sang Jay,

  “Safely o’er the friendly main,

  Mony a heart will break in twa

  Should he ne’er come back again.”

  His voice echoed out through the air—

  —and through the water, and at the bottom of the loch, the Boggart heard, and the last traces of his long sleepiness fell away.

  “Listen!” he called joyously, in the silent Old Speech that only the Old Things can hear. “Cuz! Listen!”

  But his cousin, the only other boggart in the Highlands and the Western Isles of Scotland, was still deep in the long sleep that had held them both there for years. Invisible to all but another boggart, he made long soft grunting noises into the peaty mud: Hnnnnnn . . . Hnnnnnn . . .

  “Wake up!” shouted the Boggart.

  And Jay’s clear voice came lilting down again:

  “Will ye no’ come back again?

  Will ye no’ come back again?

  Better lo’ed ye canna be

  Will ye no’ come back again?”

  The Boggart’s cousin stopped making his grunting noises, and he shifted uneasily.

  The Boggart whirled in a fury, stirring up a cloud of mud, shouting at him. “Wake up, wake up, you great gummock! Listen! You remember that song!”

  Up in the bow of the dinghy, Jay stopped.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  “But it’s beautiful,” Portia said. “Just sing the chorus again.”

  “Go on,” Allie said. “It might bring the seals.”

  “Oh, for—” said Jay. But he sang it once more.

  “Will ye no’ come back again?

  Will ye no’ come back again?

  Better lo’ed ye canna be

  Will ye no’ come back again?”

  And the Boggart’s cousin, whose name was Nessie, heard the clear young voice and was suddenly wide awake. He blinked in the mud-misted water.

  “It’s the Stuart song!” he cried. “The song for Prince Charlie!”

  “And that’s a wee lad singing it, and he’s a . . . he’s a . . .” The Boggart strained to hear, but the voice had stopped. He tried desperately to call back whatever it was that he had sensed, but boggarts have very little memory. They are shape-shifters and jokesters; they very seldom remember the people they have encountered, or even loved. Only once in a while, once in a very great while.

  Nessie felt a twinge of envy. “Is it one of your MacDevon people?” he said.

  The Boggart gave up trying to remember. It was too hard.

  “Let’s be seals!” he said.

  And up through the water of the loch they shot, changing as they went into the chunky streamlined shapes of the local seals—who were all at that moment away nearer the Isle of Lismore, fishing, and so did not witness the wakening return of the jokesters they had not seen for fifteen years.

  The dinghy slowed as Portia brought it close to the Seal Rocks, glistening mounds that rose up higher than their heads, fringed with brown bladderwrack seaweed.

  “Nobody here,” she said. “You’re out of luck, I’m afraid. But they’ll be back—we’ll come again in a day or so.”

  Allie was gazing out at the loch, hoping for even the briefest sight of the swimming doglike heads that had enchanted both her and Jay when they were five years old.

  “It’s the seals I remember best,” she said wistfully.

  And then from the bow Jay gave a shout, pointing, and out beyond the rocks they saw two gleaming dark heads poking out of the water, rising and falling in the small waves. One of them disappeared and rose again, then the other; it was as though they were playing, almost like a dance.

  There was the faintest silvery quality to their skins, which would have told a real seal that these two were in fact shape-shifting boggarts, but Allie, Jay and Portia did not have the eyes of seals.

  “There they are! Two of them!”

  Allie laughed aloud, and even Portia was smiling. They stared out at the seals from the rocking boat, trying to guess where a head might next emerge. Then Allie gasped as she saw, right beside the bow of the boat, a surfacing head so close that she could see every detail of the doglike muzzle, the dripping whiskers and the big, round dark eyes.

  And for an instant, the eyes were looking intently at Jay, who was facing in the other direction and could not look back.

  “Jay!” Allie shrieked. But it was too late; the seal had disappeared under the water again.

  The surface of the loch was empty, but for the lapping waves. The seals had gone.

  “He was looking right at you and you didn’t see!” Allie moaned. “He was so close!”

  “Well, that’s okay,” Jay said. “We’ll be back.”

  “So close!” Allie was still gazing out at the choppy grey water. She sighed.

  And though of course she had no idea of this, the Boggart and Nessie were now even closer, hovering invisible and weightless alongside the dinghy as it hummed toward Castle Keep. They had stopped being seals. Shape-shifting took a lot of effort, whether they were putting themselves into the shape of a horse or a butterfly, and they were out of practice.

  “They’re heading for the castle!” the Boggart called happily, silently, to Nessie as the morning breeze blew through him.

  “Your people’s castle,” Nessie said mournfully. The castle of his own chosen clan, whom he too had haunted and tricked for centuries, was miles inland on Loch Ness, and had been blown up by hostile Englishmen in 1692.

  “And my clan’s castle is yours too, you’re my cuz!” the Boggart said. “Look, we’re here!”

  With Nessie following, he hovered round Portia’s head as she tied up the boat and followed the eager twins up the steep, perilous steps to the heavy door of Castle Keep. He waited restlessly for her to open the door. The insubstantial forms of boggarts can pass through almost any door or window that exists, but this door was fortified from long ago with broad strips of iron, the one substance whose ancient magic no Old Thing can pass.

  The key was so big that Portia needed both her hands to turn it.

  “There!” she said finally, pushing the big door open—and staggered for a moment, as the air around their heads whirled in the impatient passage of two unseen, unheard boggarts.

  It was a comfortable castle, as medieval castles go. The departed Mr. Mac had done his best to convert its echoing inner space into comfortabl
e bedrooms and bathrooms, with thick, warm rugs muffling the cold stone floors of the linking corridors. For the past thirty years the castle had even had electricity. By its light, the twins happily investigated every room of the castle with Portia, dutifully dusting and vacuuming as they went.

  At first the boggarts followed them, full of warm curiosity, but they had forgotten how noisy humans could be, and after a while they escaped to rooms where the howl of the vacuum cleaner was only a distant hum. Here they flittered about, once in a while capturing a vague memory of tricks played on tolerant clansmen centuries ago.

  Allie gazed out of a slit-like window, across the loch to the purple hills of the Isle of Lismore, trying to take herself back in time. “Isn’t it great? Imagine living here! All those generations of MacDevons . . . Can we come every day?”

  “Your granda is hoping to take you fishing, I believe,” Portia said, polishing a mirror with an old towel. “And hiking. He has bikes for you too.”

  Jay said, “And there’s the seals.”

  “Well, almost every day,” Allie said. “I just can’t understand why those brothers who own it never come.”

  “No,” said Portia sadly, “nor can your grandfather. He loves it much more than they do, if you ask me.”

  And in a while they were sitting at the big table in the welcoming modern kitchen, for a sustaining snack of chocolate cookies and mugs of tea. If the Boggart and Nessie had been in the room with them, the plate of cookies might puzzlingly have emptied sooner than it did, since boggarts have a great taste for chocolate and certain other treats, even though they need neither food nor drink at all. But the two boggarts had slowed down. They were tired, after the effort of hauling themselves not only back into consciousness, but into the shape of living creatures, swimming all the way across the loch to the castle.

  “A wee nap?” Nessie suggested hopefully.

  “Aye,” the Boggart said. “I’ll show you where.”

  And with Nessie following, he flittered along a hallway, up some broad stone steps and along an upper corridor, following an instinctive memory that he did not know he had—until he came to a big room with broad tables, several roomy armchairs, a big desk and a great many books.

  He smiled.

  All the walls of the room were lined with bookshelves and laden with centuries of books, carefully dusted by Portia not just today but every week, for this had been the library of Devon MacDevon, the last clan chief to live in Castle Keep. Even though the Johnson brothers seldom visited their castle, they vaguely respected the memory of the MacDevon and his vanished time, and had left the books where they were.

  “This way,” said the Boggart to Nessie, and he flittered into the library, and up to a space on a high shelf that he had occupied often, over the centuries, once for a very long time. There was more than enough room there for two boggart cousins, in a space between two blocks of stone, where three hundred years ago an absentminded mason had forgotten to put mortar, and an absentminded carpenter had covered the forgetfulness with a shelf.

  So Nessie and the Boggart flowed peacefully into the space, and went back to sleep.

  FOUR

  When Portia arrived at the store on her bicycle early next morning, Allie was standing at the kitchen stove, patiently stirring the contents of a large saucepan with a wooden spoon. On the other side of the kitchen the connecting door led into the store, but otherwise Granda’s house was the shape of a normal house, with the kitchen and a living room downstairs, and two bedrooms, a bathroom and his office upstairs. The front bedroom, where Allie and Jay were sleeping, looked out at the loch and Castle Keep, the other at the green sweep of the hillside, dotted sometimes with grazing sheep.

  Portia looked at Allie’s saucepan. “Cooking?” she said.

  “It’s oatmeal.”

  “Porridge,” Jay said. “Get it right. Porridge.”

  Allie said, “Made with those old-fashioned oats that Granda sells.”

  Jay said, taking dishes from the shelf, “Isn’t it done yet?”

  “Get a plate for Portia too.” Allie went on stirring. “Dad taught us how, ages ago. With water, and salt. Granda brings oats over every time he comes to Toronto, he says no self-respecting Scot uses those little instant packages to make oatmeal.”

  “Porridge,” said Portia in her very English voice. “That’s what those self-respecting Scots call it, and so do I.” She was from London, they knew: Granda had reported that Portia’s Scottish partner, Julie, had brought her to live in Port Appin after they both retired as librarians, but that Julie had unexpectedly died. “So Portia was lonely and she looked for a job,” he had said, “luckily for the store and me.”

  “The only trouble with porridge,” Jay said, “is that it takes forever to cook.”

  “But is worth it.”

  “So long as there’s brown sugar on top. And cream.” He reached into the refrigerator for the jug. On the wall above his head, the long neck of the Loch Ness Monster curved up in Granda’s famous long-ago photograph, just as it did in the framed copy in their house in Toronto.

  And they were all three reaching for their spoons when they heard Granda’s howl of rage from his office upstairs. At first they didn’t know it was rage; they stared uneasily at one another for an instant, and then jumped to their feet to rescue him from whatever disaster had struck. But as they reached the stairs he was clattering down them, unharmed and cross, his white hair curling in a wild halo.

  “Good morning!” said Portia.

  “Damn these people!” Granda said gruffly. He stomped past them, heading for the door into the store.

  “What people?” Jay said. “What’s happening?”

  “I’ve made porridge,” Allie said.

  Granda glanced at her and seemed to see everyone for the first time. “Uh,” he said.

  “It’s still hot,” Allie said. “I remembered the salt. Would you like some?”

  “Look out there!” Granda stomped on through the door. “Look out there—and not a word to me!”

  They followed him, and across all the displays in the store, out beyond the wide front window that faced the loch and the sky, they saw a gigantic black bus, emblazoned with the word TROUT in bright yellow capital letters. It drew slowly into the parking lot, where only two or three tourists had yet arrived today, and behind it came a long, sleek black car.

  They all hurried after Granda as he made for the front door.

  Portia said, “Mr. Johnson must have given them permission.”

  Granda snorted. “Wi’out asking me?”

  “Well, you said he owned the parking lot,” Portia said. “And they’re . . . parking.”

  It was a beautiful morning, with strands of mist floating over the still surface of the loch. The sun glinted on the narrow windows of Castle Keep. The towering TROUT bus came gradually to a halt alongside the black car, and gave a loud, weary hiss as the driver switched off its engine.

  A man in a battered raincoat emerged from the rear door of the car and hurried toward Granda, beaming. He had untidy long hair and a scraggly beard, with spectacles hanging round his neck.

  “Angus!” he cried. “I’ve brought someone to meet you!”

  “That’s Sam Johnson!” Portia hissed to the twins.

  Jay and Allie eyed the man doubtfully; he was about the same age as their father, and looked most unlike the owner of a castle. He waved to Portia, smiling, and shook Granda’s hand warmly.

  “Did you get my texts?” he said.

  “No,” Granda said. “My phone’s a real phone.”

  “Oh,” said Sam Johnson, taken aback. “Well, as you may have heard—”

  And striding out of the car in his wake came William Trout, tall and wide, in his black rain jacket and pants to match. His gleaming bald head and broad white smile were heading straight for Granda.

  “Mr. Cameron!” he cried. “William Trout—honored to meet you, sir! A privilege! Honored to meet the man who took that historic picture, whi
ch transformed the Scottish tourist industry!”

  Granda looked at him coldly, ignoring the outstretched hand. “I’m no’ sellin’ you my store,” he said, in a Scottish accent three times as broad as usual. “Or my land!”

  Mr. Trout’s eyes narrowed a little, and his smile faded. He lowered his hand. He said, “We’ve made you an excellent offer, a really excellent offer. I can’t believe you’d want to reject it—not for such an exciting project, a project that does so much for the Scottish people!”

  “Well, this Scottish person rejected it when it first came,” Granda said. “I said no, so just tell your people tae stop asking.”

  “Mr. Cameron, as everyone will tell you, my projects are all first class, highly successful, amazingly successful, and I am a persistent man,” William Trout said, unmoved. “And I’m not about to let one person get in the way of a development that brings so much good to the area.”

  Granda shook his head. “I’ll not let Cameron land lie under a resort hotel,” he said. “Never!”

  “ ‘Never’ is a word I don’t listen to, Mr. Cameron,” said William Trout. “Not me, oh no. I’m a man who makes things happen. Once we sit down together with our lawyers, I’m sure we can make a deal.”

  Granda was looking hard at Sam Johnson, who flinched a little.

  “And is that what ye’ve done wi’ the castle, Sam? Made a deal wi’ this fellow to turn it into a hotel? Your good uncle must be revolvin’ in his grave!”

  “They’re just renting the castle for the moment,” said Sam Johnson defensively. “And their hotel’s going to be here on the mainland.”

  Granda’s blue eyes were still fixed on him, belligerent and accusing. “Your uncle didnae want you to sell the castle—he put it into a trust, did he not? He told me that, before he died.”

  “Uh,” said Sam Johnson. “Uh, well—”

  Mr. Trout said easily, “Just a legal formality, the trust—my lawyers are taking care of that.” He swept his gaze away from Granda, and it brushed over Allie and Jay and landed on Portia, standing there listening in her jeans and sweater.

  “Mrs. Cameron, yes?” Trout said, flashing his smile again. “And your grandchildren, I guess?”