The Boggart and the Monster Page 4

  “We’ll telephone,” said Mr. Maconochie reassuringly. “The first stop is Loch Ness.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Cameron noncommittally. “Looking for the Monster, are you?”

  “No!” said Tommy.

  Emily said, “Jessup met this professor on the plane who’s heading an expedition. He promised to go visit.”

  “Cool guy,” said Jessup, joining them. “He uses laser images from submersibles.”

  Mr. Cameron said unexpectedly, “You mean Pindle?”

  “Yes! Harold Pindle. D’you know him?”

  Tommy’s father smiled faintly, in the same dismissive way as his son. “I interviewed the man who’s hired him — a Swedish millionaire called Axel Kalling.”

  “What’s he like?” said Jessup eagerly.

  “A nice man,” said Angus Cameron. “Very sweet. And raving mad.”

  * * *

  THIS TIME JESSUP was sitting in the front seat of the Range Rover beside Mr. Maconochie. They were driving along the north shore of Loch Ness, a great grey stretch of water running for miles down the ancient valley that the glaciers of the Ice Age had carved out five thousand years ago. The hills rose purple-brown from the other side of the loch, half a mile away, and gorse bloomed bright yellow and gold along the bank on this side, between the loch and the road. A steamer was moving down the center of the loch, leaving long spreading folds of water behind it.

  “Look at the wake of that boat,” Tommy said from the back seat. “All you need is a couple of seals to surface in the middle of it, and half a dozen idiots will see a huge swimming monster.”

  Emily said eagerly, “Are there seals in the loch?”

  “Sometimes. But they live in the sea.”

  The car slowed down, and Mr. Maconochie could be heard muttering under his breath. Ahead of them, a line of vehicles was crawling impatiently behind a large motor-home. They curved slowly around a bend, and a grassy promontory came into view, jutting into the lake, a gentle green against the steely grey water. On it were the unmistakable timeworn half-walls of a ruin.

  “There’s a castle!” Jessup said.

  “Castle Urquhart,” Tommy said, as three cars ahead of them pulled into the crowded parking lot above the castle. “Pretty little ruin for tourists to photograph. Very popular on postcards.”

  Emily looked at the scornful curl of his lip and felt vaguely wounded, as if this were a personal attack. “Well, it is pretty,” she said rebelliously. “And what’s wrong with postcards? Jessup and I are tourists, if it comes to that.”

  “We are not!” Jessup said with spirit. “Our great-grandmother was a MacDevon.”

  “We’re Canadians and we’re visiting,” Emily said. “And when Scottish people come to visit Canada, they all go and take photographs of Niagara Falls, and send postcards.”

  “My auntie did that last year,” Tommy said. He grinned at her, and looking at his white teeth and black hair and very blue eyes, Emily felt the hollow feeling in her chest again. She tried to look stern, to cover it up.

  Mr. Maconochie made an explosive sound like a cross grunt, and roared past two cars, narrowly missing a tour bus coming at them from the other direction. Turning in her seat, Emily saw Castle Urquhart come into view again behind them on the edge of the loch, its broken grey walls smoothed into mounds by time and the low green grass. She wished they were not leaving it behind quite so fast.

  But Mr. Maconochie was hurrying, she found, only because he wanted to be sure they had a place at the campground halfway down Loch Ness. He relaxed, and even pulled off his sweater and rolled up his shirtsleeves, once they were tucked into a corner of the big grassy field overlooking the loch. They set up a small tent for Emily, and a larger one for Mr. Maconochie’s lanky frame, and Tommy and Jessup announced their intention of sleeping in the back of the Range Rover, amongst the gear.

  “Safe from wandering monsters,” said Tommy with a grin.

  “Plesiosaurs only eat fish,” Jessup said.

  “Well, we aren’t eating fish, not tonight,” said Mr. Maconochie. He busied himself with the ice chest and the supply box in the car while Tommy and Jessup argued about the best way to light a campfire. When they finally had a suitably glowing red mound he fried sausages and bacon and thickly sliced tomatoes in a large frying pan, and served them up with chunks of homemade bread brought from Castle Keep, and what he described as “Vedge.” The children looked with grave doubt at Vedge, which turned out to be sprigs of broccoli and cauliflower, small green beans, and chopped red peppers, all precooked but crunchy, cooled and marinated in a dressing of oil, vinegar, brown sugar and mustard. But when they took a first cautious bite they found it so delicious that they gobbled it as fast and thoroughly as the apple pie that followed.

  One piece of pie was left on the plate, but everyone had eaten too much to finish it. Mr. Maconochie watched them, beaming indulgently, as if he were their mother. “Fresh fruit from now on, not pie,” he said. “Campers are supposed to be simple folk.”

  Deep inside the Range Rover, tucked in his rolled blanket, the Boggart stirred, roused out of his faintly hungover sleep by the alluring smell of frying sausages. When he came flittering hastily out he was infuriated to find nothing left but an empty, greasy frying pan; he never seemed to be in time to encounter sausages, except in their unpleasant naked precooked state. In revenge he gobbled up the last piece of apple pie, and flittered off to the other side of the darkening campground, where a couple of young campers in boots and corduroy shorts were attacking slices of pork pie decorated with ketchup. The Boggart filched a little ketchup, sniffed disdainfully at the pork pie, and floated over the hedge to look down at the loch.

  The water lay still and grey in the dying light, unruffled now by any boat or bird. House lights were beginning to glimmer far away on the other side, like little stars prickling the dark mass of trees.

  And then the Boggart was suddenly stopped, as if he had flown into an invisible wall.

  He dropped down onto the branch of a tree and sat there, very still. Something most unexpected, something long forgotten, was beginning to happen inside his head. He could feel his senses quivering, calling deep inside him to the few very faint memories that lie far back and neglected in a boggart mind. What were they trying to say to him? He tried hard to concentrate: What is it? What is it?

  Somehow he knew this place . . . there was somebody in this place that he had known, a long time ago, long ago in the beginning of things . . . Someone he had known as well as a brother, someone close . . . cousin, cuz . . . cousin, cuz . . . Someone of whom he had heard no word or hint for years, for decades, for centuries . . . someone . . . cousin . . . cuz. . . .

  He shot upward suddenly into the sky, astonishing a dozing owl and a dozen busy swallows. “ Nessie!” he cried joyfully. “Nessie! Where are you? It’s me, it’s your cuz!”

  Over the loch he swooped and darted, excited, rediscovering, feeling deep in his misty boggart mind the stirrings of a huge affection he had forgotten long ago. He called and he called, happily, imploringly.

  And down at the bottom of the loch, seven hundred feet down in the mud and slime, his boggart cousin Nessie stirred. He shifted his huge bulk, just a little, hearing a dim echo of a voice he had not heard for hundreds of years. But he was deep, deep asleep, without ever having moved so much as a muscle for a decade, and the call was not loud enough nor near enough to reach his fuddled brain.

  Nessie lifted his head a fraction of an inch, just enough to stir the mud and to cloud the deep, cold water a very little. He heard nothing. He dropped again into stillness, and went back to sleep.

  FOUR ALL NIGHT the Boggart flittered restlessly to and fro, over the shores and the silent water of Loch Ness. His passing blurred the radar of the local bats, as they swooped low, hunting for mosquitoes, and they scolded him in tiny piping voices. He paid no attention; he was unsettled, caught in a mist of unaccustomed emotion. What was happening to him? For an unattached, carefree creature like a bog
gart, it was strange to feel anything more intense than a faint twitch of greed — and what he was feeling now was a deep, ancient ache, the longing for family. He whimpered softly to himself, knowing without comprehension that suddenly he felt incomplete.

  He flittered over the dark water, disconsolate, while the moon gradually rose and fell and the bright stars prickled the sky. He called to his cousin, or the thought of his cousin, sometimes aloud and sometimes in the silent speech of the Old Things.

  But still, at the bottom of the loch, Nessie slept on.

  * * *

  Jessup woke at first light, sat bolt upright, and banged his head on the roof of the Range Rover. His startled yelp woke Tommy, who rolled over and stared owlishly at him out of his sleeping bag.

  “Sorry,” Jessup said.

  Tommy yawned, and tried to push his tousled black hair out of his eyes. “Now if we’d slept in a tent, you’d not be hitting your head.”

  “I was dreaming. I was in one of Harold’s submersibles, and there was this huge white shark, like in ‘Jaws.’ Up against the window, all teeth, trying to bite the glass.”

  “I thought you said those submersible things didn’t carry people.”

  “They don’t. It was a dream, Tommy.”

  “I like the shark,” Tommy said. “It could help us cut down on visitors.” He wriggled out of his sleeping bag and began hastily pulling on his clothes. Jessup suddenly realized how cold he was feeling, and did the same.

  “It’s freezing! And it’s August!”

  “You’re in Scotland,” Tommy said without sympathy. “A country for men.” He rubbed a hole in the mist on the car window, and looked out. “And boggarts.”

  Jessup rubbed a hole of his own, and saw twigs and sticks of kindling arranging themselves over the dead ashes of the campfire. Two small logs rose into the air and perched on top of the sticks. A large matchbox hovered nearby and opened, and a match jumped out and struck itself on the side of the box. Flaming, it moved gently downward and set light to the twigs. The twigs flared up, as did the kindling, and one side of the little fire glowed brighter than the rest, as if someone were blowing on it.

  Jessup watched, entranced. “Cool!”

  Tommy scrambled over the back of the driver’s seat and pressed the button to open the tailgate window. “Not so cool if anyone else sees him.” He scrambled back again, dropped the tailgate, and sat on the edge, peering around the campsite. But nobody was stirring nearby: only a tall blond couple on the other side of the field, busily folding up their tent.

  Jessup pulled on his sneakers and a second sweater, and prepared to tiptoe to Emily’s small round tent and make hideous plesiosaur noises outside. But a movement caught his eye, and he looked up. He froze.

  The water bucket, from which they had filled kettle and washbowls last night, had been left empty outside Mr. Maconochie’s tent. Suddenly now it rose into the air, and began moving briskly across the campground toward the standpipe from which all campers drew their water. Suspended about eighteen inches from the ground, it made a beeline for the faucet: an impossible sight, an empty bucket, flying. And Jessup saw that to reach the standpipe, it would have to pass the two blond campers folding up their tent.

  Appalled, he opened his mouth to yell after the invisible Boggart, but promptly shut it again. If the campers heard him shout, they would look up — and see the flying bucket. Jessup took off across the field, running as fast as he could — not directly after the Boggart, but in a wide curve that would take him to the other side of the campers’ field of vision. Tommy watched him in astonishment.

  Jessup came tearing across the grass to the two strangers, and skidded to a halt, smiling a big false smile at them. “Can I help?” he said brightly.

  They stared at him blankly: two very large young people, a man and a woman, with pale skin and hair so fair it was almost white. They wore shorts and boots, and fuzzy Fair Isle sweaters. “Excuse?” said the young man politely.

  “Uh — I wondered if I could help you pack,” Jessup said. Over the young woman’s shoulder he saw the bucket float merrily past on its way to the standpipe. He smiled even wider, gazing up into her puzzled blue eyes. “Help?” he said, beaming idiotically. He noticed that the tent was now neatly folded, waiting to go into one of their two bulging backpacks. Everything else was clearly already packed. Still desperately smiling, Jessup seized the tent, and tried to stuff it into the backpack.

  “Nein, nein!” said the young man indignantly. He ripped the tent out of Jessup’s hands and turned to two sturdy bicycles which, Jessup now saw, were waiting beside the hedge. Their panniers were laden, but in one pannier there was still a neat tent-sized space. The young man fitted in the tent, and gave Jessup a wary, unsmiling nod.

  “Ah,” Jessup said weakly. In the background he saw the bucket descend to the ground underneath the standpipe. The faucet turned, in the Boggart’s invisible fingers, and water began to gush loudly down. As the two blond heads began to turn, Jessup let out a shrill cackling laugh. The heads snapped back in alarm, and the young woman shot her partner a quick look and swung her backpack up onto her shoulders. The man did the same, and Jessup gave his backpack a helpful push. Over his shoulder he could see that Tommy had come running up to the standpipe, so that the bucket no longer seemed to be self-propelled.

  “Danke schon,” said the blonde young woman to Jessup, retreating nervously to her bicycle. “Dank you very moch.”

  The young man ducked his head stiffly in Jessup’s direction, and the two of them climbed rapidly onto their bicycles and rode away, bumping uncomfortably over the grass. Jessup saw them looking uncertainly back at him from the gate of the field, as he crossed to join Tommy and the bucket.

  “Boggart,” Tommy was saying reprovingly to the air in the general region of the bucket, “we all have a great time with your tricks, but they’re not such a good idea with strangers around.”

  From somewhere in the field close by them, a strange, creaky voice spoke; the same husky, whispering voice that they had heard in the library of Castle Keep.

  “Is fada fuar an oidhche a bh’ann,” it said. “Tha feum oirnn cupan teatha gasda teth.”

  There was silence again, except for the gulls crying faintly, out over the loch.

  “He’s talking again!” Jessup said softly “It’s amazing! He never used to do that. That’s Gaelic, isn’t it? What did he say?”

  Tommy was grinning. He picked up the brimming bucket of water. “It wasn’t a game, just for once. He says it was a long cold night. He says we need water for a nice hot cup of tea.”

  * * *

  THEY CAME BLINKING out into the daylight from the Loch Ness Tourist Centre, where films and photographs and models had given them an exhaustive survey of the sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. Before them, the road ran along the length of the loch; the water glinted under patchy sunshine. Tommy had a handful of leaflets, and was peering at them crossly.

  “Lot of rubbish,” he said, scowling.

  “It does seem to me,” said Mr. Maconochie mildly, “that there was a remarkably long gap between St. Columba seeing a monster in the year five sixty-five A.D., and all those reports of sightings in the early nineteen-thirties.”

  “But that was just the newspapers,” Jessup said. “People have been seeing monsters for centuries, there just weren’t any papers to write about them.”

  “Monsters?” said Emily. “Plural?”

  “Harold says there’s a family. And there must be, because one single creature could never have survived this long. The parent plesiosaur dies, and then people see the next generation and think it’s the same one.”

  Tommy waved a leaflet at him. “This was the only plesiosaur picture, right? The famous one, with the long neck? And then in nineteen ninety-one the man who took it confessed he’d really photographed a model, made from plastic wood stuck on a toy submarine from Woolworth. Just another hoax!”

  Emily looked at him unhappily. His Scottish accent was s
uddenly very marked, and his blue eyes bright with passionate disbelief. She was not accustomed to having her brother and Tommy furiously disagree; it made her nervous.

  “You need to meet Harold,” Jessup said obstinately.

  They all turned to look at the long windowless rectangular building set in the parking lot beside the Tourist Centre. It was labeled “Kalling-Pindle Research Project,” and it had been locked and silent when they arrived. Now, a big door at one end stood open, with a four-step stairway jutting down from it, and a bicycle was leaning against its wall.

  Jessup ran over to the open door. “Harold?” he called. But there was no answer from inside.

  The Boggart rose from his comfortable seat on Mr. Maconochie’s broad, unwitting shoulder, and flittered in through the trailer door. He found a jungle of wires and small glowing screens, in a narrow corridor that linked three spaces like small rooms. Each room held a desk with a bank of instruments and larger screens. Venturing into the third and furthest room, he bumped into a chunky young man wearing shorts, a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and earphones. The black T-shirt was decorated across the chest in large white letters with the words MEAN MAN.

  The young man spluttered, and wiped a hand over his face as if brushing off a cobweb. Caught unawares, the Boggart rolled head over heels in the air and reeled giddily back down the little corridor, passing Jessup, who was now standing inside the trailer calling tentatively, “Harold?”

  “Harold’s not here,” said the young man, firmly blocking Jessup’s way. He had a nasal American accent, and a rather high voice in spite of the bulging biceps revealed by the torn-off sleeves. He looked down past Jessup at Tommy, Emily and Mr. Maconochie. “This trailer’s private,” he added.

  The Boggart flittered upward and sat in a tree. He watched the muscular young man with an unfriendly eye.