The Boggart Read online

  “Mmmf,” he said through the pins, managing to sound welcoming, concerned and apologetic all at once.

  “Can we do anything useful?” Emily said timidly.

  “Yes!” said the assistant with the boots. “Hold this bloody dummy while I give him his feet.”

  Emily and Jessup shoved at the dummy’s headless shoulders while the assistant shoved the boots at the other end. “Who is he?” Jessup said.

  “He’s me, after I get knocked off,” said the actor, and looking at him, they realized that his costume was identical to the dummy’s. Dai finished pinning his tunic, and patted his leg dismissively. The actor jumped off the chair and made Emily and Jessup a sweeping bow. “Cloten, at your service,” he said.

  “Act Four beginners, Act Four beginners,” said a metallic voice from a speaker on the wall.

  “Whoops!” said Cloten, and he grabbed a sword belt and scurried out of the door, buckling it on. Two of the assistants scrambled after him with the dummy.

  Dai looked hard at Emily and Jessup. “What’s up?” he said.

  Emily tried to sound casual. “Is Willie around?”

  “It’s that boggart, isn’t it?” said Dai.

  “It sure is,” Jessup said.

  “He’ll be in, but only for a minute. This is the first tech run-through — your father and Phil are setting light cues.”

  Phil was Philip Warrior, the lighting designer for Cymbeline. Emily said helpfully to Jessup, “They watch the play and decide how the lighting has to change, all the way through.”

  “I know,” said Jessup irritably. The computerized board from which the lights were controlled was the only thing in the Chervil Playhouse that really interested him.

  Their father’s voice yelled faintly from the loudspeaker, “Joe! The mike on this board is on the fritz!”

  “Oh dear,” said Dai. “Trouble.”

  Willie came hurrying in, with a young actress who was one of Emily’s favorite people in the company. Her name was Meg Bootle; she was a quiet girl with long blonde hair. Offstage few people noticed her; onstage her voice was strong and musical and she was suddenly beautiful. Although Emily knew her own destiny was to save the whales, she often wished she had been born with the talents of Meg Bootle. Just for once, though, she wished Meg were somewhere else; she desperately wanted Willie’s advice about the Boggart.

  Meg was dressed as a young man, in vaguely Elizabethan tights and tunic. Willie looked extremely strange in a costume made of strips of leather and fur, with long boots and a very peculiar feathered bonnet. He whipped this last from his head and dropped it fastidiously on the floor.

  “Robert killed the hat, thank God. And he says the boots are too high.”

  Dai said cautiously, “What did Sarah say?” Sarah was the costume designer.

  “She said, Have Dai fix them.”

  “All right then.” Dai dropped on his knees beside Willie and began folding down the boot tops.

  Jessup said, “Who are you playing, Willie?”

  “Hello, my loves!” Willie turned to beam at them. He struck a heroic attitude. “I am Belarius, a lord from the court of Cymbeline, disguised as a rural hick. Twenty years ago he banished me, so I pinched his two baby sons and have disguised them as rural hicks ever since. Imogen here” — he took Meg’s hand — “is Cymbeline’s daughter, disguised as a young man, who is being chased by her evil stepbrother disguised as her husband. Don’t you wish you hadn’t asked that question?”

  “It gets worse,” said Meg cheerfully. “Where are the safety pins, Dai?”

  “Em knows,” Dai said, busy with Willie’s left boot. Emily hastened to fetch the safety-pin box, but just as she reached for it, it jumped to the shelf below. Oh no! thought Emily. She reached again, swiftly, but the box jumped sideways to a table — where she managed to grab it with her other hand, just in time. She heard a faint ripple of sound in the air, like an echo of laughter.

  Meg hadn’t noticed. “Thank you, darling,” she said, and busied herself with the pins. But Willie was looking hard at Emily.

  He said gently, “Has someone been giving you problems, Em?”

  Emily nodded unhappily. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “And now he’s followed us here too.”

  “Hold on,” said Willie. “We’ll think of something.”

  The loudspeaker crackled, and Robert’s faint voice said, “Okay, let’s go! Act Four!”

  Willie turned to go. “You going to watch this rigmarole?” he said. “Sit at the back, and I’ll get to you when I can; through Robert’s door.”

  Robert’s door was in the back wall of the auditorium, next to the window behind which the stage manager sat working the light board. It was a very small and discreet door, and had been especially cut a few years before so that Robert could slip in and out of a back-row seat during performances without being seen by what he described as “the dreaded audience.” It opened onto a walkway next to the little room which enclosed the light board, and a staircase ran down from it and led, eventually, to the area backstage. The whole theater was like a small rabbit warren, which Emily knew very well and Jessup hardly at all.

  Emily led her brother up the staircase to the door, opened it very quietly and let him in. Before following, she half closed the door again and turned to face the stairwell. She said to the empty air, in a whisper, “Boggart, please don’t do anything to get us into trouble here.”

  There was silence. Emily tried to sense whether anyone invisible was there, and failed. She sighed, and went into the auditorium, and the Boggart flittered in with her. He felt wounded by the implication that he might ever intend to damage anyone. Didn’t the girl know that boggarts live for mischief, not for harm?

  Jessup and Emily sat quietly in the back row, hoping nobody would notice them. Robert was halfway down the auditorium, sitting with two other people at a table which had been laid across the tops of several seats. They wore earphones, and had microphones and muted lights on the table in front of them.

  The stage had been made into a rocky landscape, with real trees and bushes, and in front of the bushes stood Cloten, looking around him belligerently. “Posthumus,” he was saying, “thy head, which now is growing on thy shoulders, shall within this hour be off!” It was not clear whom he was talking to, because he was alone on the stage, but he grew very fierce and drew his sword. As he spoke, down in the stalls the lighting designer muttered into his microphone, and the light on the stage grew brighter and then darker again, and then very bright, as if it were first afternoon, then evening, then early morning. Cloten marched off the stage, waving his sword, and two of the bushes moved gracefully sideways, to reveal the entrance to a cave. There was a yell from the group huddled around Robert in the stalls. “Hold it!”

  The Boggart watched all this in speechless delight. From the moment he entered the auditorium, he had been enchanted. This building held a small world in which he felt instantly totally at home; a world of magic, where the rules of ordinary human life seemed not to apply. A wooden floor could become a living forest; an actor with pins stuck all around his tunic could become a wild young man threatening murder; night could become day. The Boggart was particularly entranced by the lighting changes. That was more than he could manage in his world. How did they do it? He flittered down over the seats to Robert’s table, inquisitive.

  Robert was studying the stage. “Too warm, don’t you think?” he said to one of the men with earphones.

  “Let’s pull down the amber on the cyc,” said the man into his microphone. “Give me twenty percent, okay?”

  The Boggart did not find this helpful. He flittered on around the theater, up onto the stage, where he looked up and saw the battery of light instruments hanging from the roof grid, blazing at him; out again into the darkness of the auditorium. At the back of the house he saw a square of light and flittered over to investigate that. Behind the window he saw the stage manager sitting at the light board, wearing earphones, her fingers pla
ying with a keyboard as the Boggart had seen Jessup play with his computer. The computer had never seemed of much interest to the Boggart, but this keyboard, it appeared, was the source of every change in that magical array of lights over the stage. Fascinated, the Boggart began looking for a way into the little room.

  Under the light board, docile old Fred the theater dog lifted his head from the stage manager’s feet, his ears suddenly erect. He jumped to his feet, nearly knocking the stage manager out of her chair, and began barking hysterically.

  “Shut up, Fred!” said the stage manager irritably.

  Fred barked louder. He bared his teeth, snarling between barks, straining to see out of the window into the theater. The stage manager whacked at him ineffectually, trying to hear the instructions squawking into her headset. Fred swung around and began barking at the door, leaping up at it, whining, frantic.

  “Get out, then, you idiot!” yelled the stage manager, and she pulled the door open. Fred tumbled out in a clamor of barks and yelps — and just before the door closed, the Boggart flittered calmly in.

  Fred sniffed the air, snarled and reversed himself, attacking the door again in a noisy frenzy. A passing stagehand seized him by the collar and dragged him away.

  The play went on. Onstage, out of the entrance to the cave came Willie, booming away in his leathery costume, with Meg dressed as a young man, and two real young men dressed in the same curious fashion as Willie. Emily and Jessup sat watching in the back row. The two young men seemed to be brothers, and to think that Meg was also their brother. They were going hunting, but when they weren’t looking Meg secretly and mysteriously swallowed some kind of drug, and retreated into the cave to sleep. Then Cloten came on with his sword, and was left alone with one of the young men, Polydore, whom he rudely called a “villain mountaineer.” They began to fight.

  Jessup loved the fight, and tried not to bounce in his seat. Cloten had a sword and Polydore had only a dagger, but was clearly going to win. It was at the end of the fight, as they clashed their way off the stage, that the lights in the theater began to go mad.

  The changes were gradual, but extraordinary. At first, the brightness of the lighting remained the same, but it took on a faint reddish tinge, growing stronger in color until it was a deep scarlet. From the cries of consternation in Robert’s group, Emily realized this was not a light cue planned by the director or his designer. She crept out of her seat and down the aisle until she was in earshot, and heard her father uttering a number of four-letter words he did not normally use in her presence. In the darkness, she grinned to herself.

  The lighting began to change color again, and she realized that it was going very slowly through the spectrum: red, orange, yellow. . . . Jessup slipped into a seat beside her. On the stage, the actors, occasionally looking nervously up at the light grid, went on speaking their lines, probably because Robert was too busy cursing to tell them to stop. As the lights began to turn from yellow to green, Polydore came back onstage proudly holding Cloten’s chopped-off head aloft. Emily heard Jessup cheer.

  The lights began to darken to blue. The lighting designer was shouting into his microphone. Up in the light booth the stage manager was waving her arms about. Onstage, just as the lights changed from blue to indigo and began to merge into purple, Willie came deliberately down to the front of the stage and recited his next lines straight at Robert.

  He boomed:

  “O thou goddess,

  Thou divine nature, thou thyself thou blazon’st

  In these two princely boys! They are as gentle

  As zephyrs blowing below the violet —”

  Willie paused. “Vi-o-let!” he said pointedly. “Who’s running the light board — Shakespeare?”

  Emily said softly, “No — the Boggart.”

  “Oh my gosh!” said Jessup in horror.

  Ahead of them Robert called back grimly, “Just keep going, Willie.”

  “Never trust a computer,” said Willie. He went back to his Shakespeare voice. “They are as gentle . . .”

  Jessup craned his head to look back at the window behind which the stage manager and an electrician were both now flapping their arms. He hissed at Emily, “You really think he’s in there operating the board, invisible?”

  Emily said, “Don’t you?”

  But then the lights made a different kind of change. The purple glow which dominated the stage faded swiftly away into a clear light like early morning, fresh and cool. It seemed to ripple gently, as if wisps of cloud were floating over an unseen sun.

  “Now that’s more like it!” said Robert in relief. “What gobo is that, Phil?”

  “I’m not sure,” said the designer. He peered at the stage nervously.

  “It’s beautiful!” Robert said. He settled back happily into his seat, and on the stage the actors’ voices began to lose the tension that had made them all, even Willie, sound much higher-pitched than normal. Polydore came back onstage and announced that he had sent Cloten’s chopped-off head floating down the stream, and as Willie laughed the light seemed to laugh with him, taking on a wonderful brilliant gaiety. Then unexpectedly the theater filled with deep, slow, solemn music, and the actors expressed surprise and the light seemed to glimmer with it too.

  “Lovely!” said Robert, enchanted. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s perfect!”

  The lighting designer made a small strangled noise of baffled gratitude, and whispered frantically into his microphone.

  On the stage, Polydore’s brother entered, carrying Meg in his arms. He didn’t know she was only asleep after taking the mysterious drug — he thought she was dead, and so did Polydore and Willie. Watching the way Meg let her body droop into emptiness, so did Emily. “O melancholy!” cried Willie, and the light filling the stage became muted and strange, like an embodiment of grief.

  “Oh yes!” cried Robert in delight. He clapped Phil the lighting designer on the back.

  “What is that?” hissed Phil into his microphone to the stage manager at the light board.

  But the stage manager didn’t know. Watching, admiring but desperate, she knew she would never be able to reproduce the wonderful effects the computer was instructing the lights to shine at the stage — because she was not controlling the computer. It was taking no notice of any instructions she punched into its keyboard. It was designing the lighting pattern itself.

  And inside the computer, the Boggart was beside himself with delight. He had taken the lights through the spectrum of all the colors as an exercise, a way of teaching himself how to use them. Now, he knew the language of light and he was speaking it. By his own magic, he was using the magic of this new technological world in which he found himself — and the mixing of the two magics was a wonder. In the theater, Emily and Jessup and all the company members watched it without daring to breathe, knowing they had never seen anything like this on a stage before. Lyrical and mysterious, the lights shifted and flickered and glowed, like echoes of the words the bemused actors were saying on the stage.

  They lasted until the song. It was a song of mourning over the supposed dead body of Meg / Imogen, and its words were not actually sung, but spoken, because the character Polydore in the play claimed that he would weep if he tried to sing. (“Shakespeare wrote it that way because he had an actor with a lousy singing voice,” Robert told them pithily, much later.) But the words themselves, having been written by the man who was the greatest master of the English language who will ever live, held an enchantment that cut right through the Boggart’s magic to the Boggart himself. They reached his heart, and found in it the old deep sorrow of his double loss: the deaths of the only two human beings he had loved, Duncan and Devon MacDevon.

  “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. .
. .”

  The words overwhelmed the Boggart, filling him with a terrible grief at the loss not only of Duncan and the MacDevon, but of his own home. He came blundering out of the computer that governed the theater lights, and flittered back unthinking into the auditorium. He was filled with love and grief and longing, and the force of his feeling took hold of everyone inside the theater, on the stage or behind it or in front of it.

  The whole place was possessed by his sorrowing. Like a dark cloud it swallowed the consciousness of everyone listening. Emily felt a misery blacker than anything she had ever felt before; Jessup felt himself a desolate deserted baby wanting to howl for his mother; Robert was back in the bleakest moment of his own much longer life, the moment he tried always unsuccessfully to forget, and so was every grown man or woman there.

  The voices of the two actors went on, clear, intertwining.

  “No exerciser harm thee!

  Nor no witchcraft charm thee!

  Ghost unlaid forbear thee!

  Nothing ill come near thee!

  Quiet consummation have,

  And renowned be thy grave!”

  The voices fell silent. And in the dim light that was left, gradually the theater began to fill with an eerie sound which belonged not to the play but to the Boggart, to the pain of life and loss that he was feeling. Soft, faraway, coming closer, there was the throb of a muffled drumbeat, ta-rum . . . ta-rum . . . ta-rum . . . and over it the plaintive music of a lament played on a single bagpipe; and over that too, like an echo, the curious husky sound of the shuffling of many feet.

  The sound grew and grew, louder and louder, closer and closer, intolerably close and loud, filling the theater so that all the listeners inside it longed to flatten their hands against their ears to shut out the terrible wave of grief.