The Boggart Read online

  So the Boggart wanted to do something nice for Jessup. He had thought back over all his brief experience to find the thing that seemed to give Jessup the most pleasure, and he felt he had found the answer. He had made him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

  It wasn’t a very elegant sandwich, because it had been done in a hurry, during the few hasty minutes when Emily was filling the lunch boxes that day. Hovering close and invisible over Emily’s hands, and flickering fast through the air like a mad hummingbird, the Boggart had managed to grab two slices of whole-wheat bread, a big handful of peanut butter and a handful of jelly. He had then put them all together as fast as he could, before the jelly leaked through his fingers or the bread — very healthy, but very crumbly — fell apart. Then he flittered off to Jessup’s bedroom, carrying a sandwich which looked rather like the planet Saturn surrounded by its rings: a golf-ball-sized glob of peanut butter encased in bread, with a rim of bread crust out of which red jelly oozed like thick blood.

  He put the sandwich down, now, with a sigh of relief — and some regret, since the smell of peanut butter was making him ravenous. Before he could be tempted to eat it, he flittered out of Jessup’s room and back to his brass-vase refuge on Emily’s bookshelf. Good deeds were very tiring, though surprisingly satisfying, and he needed a rest. He curled up on his bed of cotton balls, smiling contentedly, for perhaps a three-day sleep.

  And Jessup came running upstairs after supper to catch up with computalk among the members of the Gang of Five, and without switching on his bedroom light he settled himself happily down to turn on his computer.

  Then he yelled, and slowly and stickily, he stood up.

  The Boggart had carefully left his gift in the place where he felt Jessup was most likely to see it — his computer chair.

  TOMMY SENT Emily another postcard. The picture showed a small island called Staffa, with strange dark cliffs like carvings. The postcard said, “Staffa is seven miles away and Mendelssohn composed Fingal’s Cave there. Life here is uninteresting but there is snow on the hills. The castle is empty and no one comes to see it. I hope you and Jessup are well. Yours sincerely, Tommy.”

  Emily stuck the postcard up on her bulletin board next to the seal and River Phoenix, and went to the record store, which was rocking to the beat of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to investigate the music of Mendelssohn. One of the clerks had never heard of him, a second said vaguely, “Classical — upstairs,” and a third said, “Of course — his Hebrides Overture,” and found her a tape. He was a husky young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned SAVE THE DOLPHINS. This endeared him to Emily, who felt passionately about endangered species and wanted to save everything.

  “Nice piece,” said the young man amiably. “You know it?”

  “Not yet,” said Emily.

  He smiled at her as he handed over her change. “See if you can find the words inside it. They aren’t there but you can hear them. They say, ‘How lovely the sea is!’”

  Emily went home and played the tape, and instantly heard the words in the tune — even though, as the young man had said, there were really no words there. She sat for a while thinking about this, looking vacantly at Tommy’s postcard. Then she wrote back to him, on a postcard showing a picture of a Canadian pine forest.

  “This is a painting by Emily Carr,” she wrote. “I am named after her. Our castle furniture has come. I am going to be a vampire for Halloween. Jessup and I are very well. Yours sincerely, Emily.”

  Then she scribbled at the bottom, in small hasty letters, “Weird things are happening here, like the words in Fingal’s Cave that aren’t really there.”

  LATE ON THE afternoon of Halloween, Emily stopped at the theater hoping that Dai might have had time to finish her costume. She was half expecting not to get one, since Robert had given her a chilly lecture at breakfast about bothering busy professionals in the crucial time just before a play opens. He had said a number of other things too that she was trying to forget. The blame for Jessup’s peanut-buttered pants had landed squarely on Emily, in spite of all her denials. Who else in the family could possibly have booby-trapped Jessup’s chair?

  But Dai was waiting for her, and he had outdone himself. He dressed Emily in black tights, and a close-fitting long-sleeved black top with black sequins glued all over it. On her feet he put soft leather boots that seemed black in the daylight, but in the dark glowed spookily with an awful greenish light. A sweeping black cloak went over everything, and its lining glowed with the same green fluorescence. Dai shut Emily briefly in a dark room so that she could see it, and she was happily terrified.

  “How does it do that?” she demanded.

  “Trade secret, darling,” said Dai. He was a small brown-faced man of indeterminate age, originally from Wales, with dark curly hair. “Shut up, now, and open your mouth.”

  Emily obeyed, and he fitted a magnificent vampire fang over each of her two top canine teeth. They curved out and down over her lower lip, looking alarmingly real. “Just a touch of glue,” Dai said. “They’ll stay on for about three hours, if you’re careful. Course, you won’t be able to eat, but you could always suck blood.” He winked at her.

  “I look terrible,” Emily said contentedly, leering at the mirror.

  “Last touch,” Dai said, and over her blonde hair he fitted an unnerving black wig made not from hair but from long black velvet ribbons. Emily tossed her head, watching the mirror, and giggled. “Awesome!”

  “And if you want to dribble some nice bright blood, you bite on this.” He handed her a capsule that looked like a large vitamin pill. “Coming to the party, then?”

  Louise Spring the general manager, owner of Fred the dog, gave a famous party every Halloween, to which the working members of the Chervil company came very late, after their performance. Sometimes Emily and Jessup were allowed to spend a sleepy hour there before bed. Not this year.

  Emily’s spirits dropped, as she remembered her father’s cold lecture of the morning. “No. We’re grounded. We can’t even go trick-or-treating, we have to just be home in our costumes and open the door to other kids.”

  Dai clicked his tongue in friendly concern. “Poor babies. What’s Dragon-Daddy mad about?”

  Emily smiled mournfully. She had discovered only recently that when Robert was in a rage, he was known to the company, behind his back, as Dragon-Daddy. But the smile drooped into gloom under Dai’s sympathetic gaze, and suddenly she found herself telling him all about the sandwich mishap, and Jessup’s hockey problem, and the flying hockey puck and the erratic television and Polly’s odd behavior, and all the other peculiar things that had begun creeping into the life of the Volnik family. The words all came out with a slight lisp, because Emily had to talk past the vampire teeth.

  She was in midflow when the door opened, and a large new presence was filling the room: an elderly man with a very round face and a deep, resonant voice. “Sorry I’m late, dear boy. I have lunched well — too well, perhaps —” He caught sight of Emily, and lurched backward in exaggerated terror. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us! A vampire!”

  “Hi, Willie,” said Emily. William Walker was the senior actor in her father’s company; not the best, but the most permanent. He was a genial, talkative man who played venerable dukes in Shakespeare, and elderly character parts in everything else, and though he would never be a Lear or a Falstaff everybody loved him. So did Robert, even when he mocked Willie’s plummy English diction, which took on a noticeable Scottish burr whenever he had had one drink too many.

  Willie took Emily’s hand and turned her in a circle, inspecting her. “Stupendous,” he said to Dai, in warm congratulation. The two of them shared a house on the edge of a Toronto ravine, and had three cats.

  Dai was frowning. “She has a problem you should hear about,” he said. He made Emily repeat her story, in every detail. As she finished, trying unsuccessfully not to lisp, she saw them looking thoughtfully at each other. Dai raised his eyebrows in some private inquiry; Will
ie nodded, slowly.

  “It’s a boggart,” Willie said.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” said Dai.

  “What?” said Emily.

  “Something they don’t teach you in school,” Dai said. He hesitated; then went on in a rush. “He’s a spirit, like. Lives in a family, and plays tricks. The Scots call him a boggart. In Wales we call him a pwca. Dunno what the English call him — maybe they have dogs instead.” He chuckled to himself. Dai had once been a Welsh Nationalist, and liked to be rude to any members of the company who had English blood. He added regretfully, “I’ve never run into one. Willie has, though. Twice.”

  “I could have done without it,” Willie said.

  Emily said slowly, “You mean a ghost?”

  “No — a spirit,” Willie said. He sounded suddenly much more Scottish than usual. “Not something left over from a dead person. A boggart’s a person himself — just not human. And you can’t see him or hear him, not unless he wants you to. He’s not a bad fellow, he’s like a kid, really. Wants to have fun. I never heard of one this side of the ocean, though.”

  “Nor did I,” Dai said. He looked at Emily oddly. “What did you bring back from that Scottish trip of yours, Em?”

  “If you two are putting me on, I wish you wouldn’t,” Emily said uneasily.

  Willy flashed a sudden smile at her. The light bulb was behind him, turning the remaining hair on his bald head into a glowing halo. He clapped his hands, and it was like a release. “Go off trick-or-treating, Mistress Vampire,” he said. “Have a good time.”

  Emily jumped up, relieved, and gave them a fang-toothed grin. “Thanks for the costume, Dai. Happy Halloween!”

  Willy said casually, “But if you have any more trouble, come back and tell me, okay?”

  “I will,” Emily said.

  FOUR OF THE members of the Gang of Five were waiting for Emily at the Volniks’ house, dressed as characters from their new computer game. This game, which was called Black Hole, was in a constant state of development; the Gang never seemed to finish it, because one or other of them was always having a new idea. It was all about spaceships which discovered numbers of different worlds while trying to avoid being dragged through black holes in space. Emily’s vampire came from one of these worlds, and so did the spider-like creature represented by Chris’s costume, which had a round black body fitted over his head and most of his own body, and six extra legs the same size and shape as his own. He scuttled down the sidewalk to meet Emily, looking hideously lifelike with all eight legs moving at once.

  “Terrific!” said Emily, baring her fangs at him. The spider gave a muffled squeak, and backed away, narrowly missing a seven-foot shiny rocket with flame-colored legs, which was standing at a rather drunken angle beside the front door.

  “Hey babe,” said Barry’s voice hollowly from inside the rocket. “Neat teeth.”

  “Neat legs,” said Emily. “Dad should put you in Cymbeline.”

  “Your father’s not in a great mood,” said the rocket bleakly.

  “Emily, you look wonderful!” It was Yung Hee’s soft voice, from a floating ghostly form draped in several different shades of yellow, orange and red chiffon. She was Fire Burst, one of the dire fates that could overcome a player in the game of Black Hole. Beside her was Jessup, his head, hands and legs sticking out of a white cube of Styrofoam supposed to represent Ice Death, another hazard. By the time the Gang’s Halloween plans had reached the design of Ice Death, their inventiveness had started to run down.

  “So what’s up with Dad?” said Emily to Jessup.

  Two very small ghosts in white sheets came along the street and paused, giggling nervously. One of them saw Chris in his spider costume and darted back to clutch its mother’s hand.

  “Crazy things happening,” Jessup said. “Tell you later. He’s gone to the theater.” He picked up a basket of candy bars and stalked over to the ghosts and their mother.

  Yung Hee came close to Emily and spoke into her ear. She said, “You know that carved-out pumpkin you had on the doorstep? Your father came out of the door and it smashed on the ground right in front of him, spattered bits of pumpkin guck all over his jacket. He yelled at Jessup for throwing it at him — but I saw, Jessup and I were right here in front of the house. And we saw that pumpkin jump up in the air and smash itself down on the concrete. We did, Em, truly. It jumped!”

  THE BOGGART had woken only; two hours before, on his cotton-ball bed in the vase on Emily’s shelf. He stretched, and gave a large happy yawn. He wondered why he felt so cheerful, and then remembered his good deed, the gift of Jessup’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The cheerfulness was a pleasant surprise, though the good deed had involved so much effort that he didn’t especially want to repeat it. He flittered up out of the vase and sat on the edge of the bookshelf.

  The daylight was beginning to die, at this time of the year when the sun went down at about four in the afternoon. Outside the window a half-moon hung in the sky, which was tinged a strange pinkish violet after the sunset. A small sudden wind shifted the top shoots of the tall holly bush that grew beside the house — a bush very rare in winter-frigid Toronto, and much cherished by Robert. The Boggart stiffened, as if he were hearing a warning sound, and all at once he realized what day would dawn tomorrow. Samhain!

  The Boggart still clung to the oldest beliefs about the shape of the year, Celtic beliefs that had been in his head for two thousand years and more. For him, Halloween was not All Hallows Eve but the ancient Eve of Samhain, the marker between summer and winter. From that night on, the world was ruled all through the winter by the skinny blue-faced hag, the Cailleach Bheur. All summer long the Cailleach Bheur had been shut up inside a stone, a grey stone lying under a holly tree. But on the Eve of Samhain she sprang up out of the stone, with her black eyes glittering like cold pebbles in her pinched blue face, and she seized her staff and went about the countryside striking at the earth, to kill all green growth. Her breath frosted the windows and set icicles on branches and the corners of roofs, and when she sang her terrible winter song into the sky, the words froze into snowflakes and whirled down to cover the bare trees and mound deep drifts against houses and barns.

  The red-berried holly was one of the few plants to survive unchanged through her icy dominion, and so people would set branches of holly over their doors and windows and mantels, to persuade her to stay out. And on their doorsteps they left harvest offerings of vegetables and fruit, so that she would eat there, instead of storming into their kitchens in a whirl of hail and snow.

  The Boggart was alarmed. Now it was the Eve of Samhain once more, and the Cailleach Bheur would be out roaming the world, and nobody in this house had done anything to protect it against her wrath. Her wrinkled blue face would be at the window soon, her cold breath blowing down the chimney. In a panic the Boggart flittered downstairs and out through the part-open front door. He quivered as he saw strange creatures standing out there, surely part of the wild retinue of the Cailleach Bheur; but then his sense told him that they were only Jessup and his friends.

  He saw with relief that they had at least left out a pumpkin on the step, as an offering — but it was not chopped up small as it properly should be, for the winter hag’s toothless jaws. He dived down and snatched up the pumpkin, and hastily dropped it on the step, smashing it into small pieces, ignoring the tiresome interruption of Robert Volnik, who chose that moment to come out the front door.

  Then he flittered back indoors, to find other ways of defending the house against the rage of the blue-faced Cailleach Bheur, and so he missed the sound of Robert’s pumpkin-spattered rage, and the arrival of Emily with her vampire teeth.

  THE CREATURES of the Black Hole failed to notice the Boggart’s comings and goings; they were too busy scaring trick-or-treaters. In theory they — or at any rate Emily and Jessup — were restricted to spending the evening meekly inside the front door, waiting to answer the doorbell and hand out candy to more fortunate, mobile c
hildren. But in the absence of his parents Jessup, with the help of the Gang, had no intention of behaving so passively. If he wasn’t allowed to go out collecting candy, he was at least going to make sure he didn’t have to give any away.

  So in the dark street outside the house, Chris the spider patroled the sidewalk, in short scuttling dashes that sent the smallest trick-or-treaters shrieking away to a less alarming front door. For any older and more intrepid visitors who got as far as the front path, Jessup the Ice Death lurched to and fro uttering short awful noises like a kind of mechanical belch; Yung Hee the Fire Burst floated half-visible in the darkness beside the house, moaning softly and heartrendingly as if she were in great pain, and Barry, lurking behind a crab-apple tree, filled his silver rocket with ominous unintelligible words in a deep, booming, truly terrifying voice. Listening to it from behind the front door, Emily felt a prickling sensation at the back of her neck.

  Emily was the last defense. If any bold adolescent had the resilience to ring the doorbell, she would open the door very slowly, shining an unseen flashlight to illuminate her fangs, and say softly, “Come in!” And as she smiled, a sharp side tooth would pierce the capsule hidden in her mouth, and fake blood would run over her lips and down her chin. In fact she only once had to go this far, facing a plump pale boy of at least fourteen, who was carrying far more candy than he deserved in a pillowcase. He squeaked at the sight of the blood and backed away, bug-eyed, keeping just enough presence of mind to clutch his pillowcase away from the reaching hands of the Ice Death and the Fire Burst.

  The Boggart paused briefly in his invisible activities and looked down at the Gang with approving surprise. He had never seen such subtle and lifelike tricks used by ordinary humans before, in the annual struggle to keep the Cailleach Bheur at bay. They were almost worthy of a boggart.