The Boggart and the Monster

by Susan Cooper

  Emily realized suddenly that her fingers were hurting from the pressure of the cockle shell. She let it go, and took her hand out of her pocket.

  Axel Kalling said gravely, “But you took pictures of Worm, did you not, Harold?”

  “It was there on the screen, I swear it was!” said Harold Pindle, distraught. He looked wildly around him. “Wasn’t it, kids?”

  His distress was so acute that none of them could bear to try to explain to him about the erratic behavior of boggarts. “We did see it, all of us, Mr. Kalling!” said Jessup bravely. “A real plesiosaur, humongous, all dripping — and Jenny was out there and she smelled it, it smelled of fish!”

  “It was just like the pictures of Nessie,” Tommy said.

  “It really was!” Emily said.

  Axel Kalling turned his well-cut white head to Mr. Maconochie. “Well, Mr. Maconnie? Did you too see this Worm?”

  Mr. Maconochie stood up, tall and silent under the low ceiling of the trailer, and Jessup, Emily and Tommy looked at him with sudden misgiving. But he nodded his head slowly.

  “Yes,” he said. “We saw it clear enough on the screens, the big body and the long neck and the wee head. Just for a few moments, mind, and only on the screens. But it was good and clear.”

  There was a pause, and then Axel Kalling let out a sudden shrill cackle of laughter. They all stared at him. His bright eyes glittered at them from the neat little figure sitting doll-like in the tall chair.

  “This is shy Worm!” he said merrily. “He does not want picture to be taken! He remove himself from your machine!”

  Harold snapped the tape out of its slot, with an angry click. “It’s a technical failure, Axel, and I apologize more than I can tell you. We’ll see if there’s some way of fixing it.” He thrust the tape at Chuck, with a cold glare, and Chuck pushed his way sullenly out of the trailer.

  But Axel was still cackling. “No no, is quite fine, do not worry, Harold! I am happy with shy Worm, I was shy too in my youth days!” He stood up, patting Harold on the arm and beaming around the small room. “I shall go happy back to Stockholm now, and you will creep up on Worm one day when he is not looking, and take picture then. And he cannot then take himself off your screen if he does not know that he is there. Yes?”

  Harold moaned softly. “Oh Axel, please — this is a solid prehistoric survivor, not a creature from outer space. Wait for Chuck to fix the tape — I want you to see the evidence.”

  But Axel Kalling was on his feet. “No problems, Harold! You are doing wonderful, I am very pleased.” He marched briskly over the carpeted floor of the trailer to the doorway, calling in musical Swedish to the driver of the long black car that stood waiting in the parking lot. As the car door opened, he glanced back over his shoulder and beamed at them.

  “Good-bye, little Emily!” he called. “Watch for Worm, and my sister will send you llama!”

  He disappeared inside the car, and it slid away.

  “He probably means that,” Harold said. He rubbed his head ruefully. “Oh Lord, what a disaster. I guess we were just in too much of a hurry to get those pictures on tape. Chuck must have blown it somehow. Wiped them off by accident. I can’t believe this happened!”

  Emily said diffidently, “D’you think maybe . . . Mr. Kalling might be right, about it not wanting to be photographed?”

  Harold Pindle looked at her indulgently, and laughed. He straightened his back, and his face began to brighten with new determination. “Come on, Emily honey, get real — we’ve seen this beast now, we know it exists. It’s in that loch, and there’s no way it can escape the Kalling-Pindle survey. Soon as I possibly can I’m going to put Sydney and Adelaide down there to comb every inch of Loch Ness — every square inch of the bottom, with sonar boats checking all the water above it. We’re on our way!”

  He beamed around at them all, as they looked at him with assorted degrees of misgiving and dismay.

  “Stick around, kids! You’re in on the last great search, the one that’ll really find the Monster. We’re going to make history!”

  SEVEN ANGUS CAMERON swallowed the last bite of his cheese-and-tomato sandwich. He was sitting in the railway station cafe in the town of Fort William, having called in at the station to pick up a new timetable. When he was not away chasing a story he drove to Fort William once a week, in his elderly but reliable little van, to pick up any extra supplies his wife needed for the Port Appin store.

  He stood up, and took his empty plate to the counter. “Cup of tea, please, Marge.”

  “With milk and two sugar,” said Marge, “and a chocolate biscuit for afters.” She was a large, billowy, smiling lady with a high pile of blonde hair, and a soft spot for regular customers.

  “Aye,” said Angus. “And a nice juicy murder, please. Or even a scandal in City Hall. Anything, for a bit of news in this town.”

  Marge poured him his tea. She said cheerfully, “I’ll hit my husband over the head with a bottle when I go home tonight. You’ll be the first to know.”

  Angus grinned, and took his cup.

  Beside him, a precise, accented voice said clearly, “A cup of your delicious coffee, please. Black.”

  Angus turned, to see who could be lunatic enough to describe British railway coffee as delicious, and saw the immaculate white head of Axel Kalling. “Mr. Kalling!” he said. “I thought you’d gone back to Sweden.”

  Axel Kalling blinked up at him. He smiled, courteous but vague.

  “Angus Cameron,” said Angus helpfully, holding out his hand. “I interviewed you for the Glasgow Herald.”

  “Of course!” said Mr. Kalling, and shook the hand heartily. “Ah well yes, I went home, but here I am again. We flew in yesterday, my assistant Nils and I. But really I do not like to fly, so now we take train to Newcastle and ferry to Göteborg. The sea, the wonderful sea, Mr. Cameron!”

  “Black coffee,” said Marge, cautiously handing him a cup.

  “Allow me,” said Angus. He put down some money and took both tea and coffee to his table. Axel Kalling followed him, with the ease of a man accustomed to being looked after, and sat down. “Most kind,” he said. “I shall wait for Nils — he gets tickets.” Then he leaned forward to Angus conspiratorially, with a glint in his bright old eyes.

  “We have found Worm!” he whispered.

  “What?” Angus said.

  “Worm! He has found him, my friend Professor Pindle! He has found your Loch Ness Monster!”

  Angus eyed him carefully, and stirred his tea. It had taken him only the first two minutes of his interview with Axel Kalling to classify him as a charming but hopeless nut case. In his career as a journalist he had met several lunatics, and at least half of them had claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster. He said cautiously, “Did you see him?”

  “Of course! He is very happy, he calls me instantly on telephone!”

  “No, Mr. Kalling, not Professor Pindle — the Monster.”

  Axel Kalling gave his high-pitched cackle of laughter. “Ah — he has not called me yet. But soon perhaps!” He sipped his coffee, and looked mischievously at Angus over the top of the cup. “No, I did not see Worm. But Professor Pindle saw him very clear, with his laser instruments. The great Worm, with the long neck. Just as we were hoping for, Mr. Cameron!”

  “So the professor showed you pictures?” Angus said.

  “Pictures did not come out,” said Mr. Kalling.

  Angus tried valiantly not to smile. “No. It’s a funny thing — they never do.”

  Axel Kalling wagged a finger at him. “You journalists! You have no faith! Worm appeared to many people, not just to my Harold. To his assistants, two of them. To a lawyer. And to some children. All these people swore solemnly they saw Worm!”

  “Children?” said Angus skeptically.

  Axel Kalling nodded his white head vigorously. “One of these children is named after my sister!”

  “Indeed,” Angus said. He took a gloomy swig of tea, and longed again for news of a murder. Pe
rhaps he could write a story about unbalanced foreign monster-hunters? No, no, it had been done too often before. . . .

  A straight-backed young man in a dark suit came and stood respectfully in front of Axel Kalling and addressed him in Swedish. Mr. Kalling got up, and wagged his finger again at Angus. “We go,” he said. “Tak for coffee. But I am shocked you do not believe word of lawyer. Especially when he is good Scottish lawyer.”

  He grinned at Angus, and followed the young man toward the station door. As Angus watched him go, he found a few of the lilting accented words echoing through his head, persistent, nudging . . . some children . . . good Scottish lawyer . . . He jumped to his feet, calling out, as the Swedes reached the door.

  “Mr. Kalling! How many children were there?”

  Axel Kalling looked back over his shoulder. He said, “Three.”

  Angus blinked. “And — what’s your sister’s name?”

  “Emily,” said Axel Kalling. He waved, and disappeared.

  * * *

  ANGUS SAID into the telephone, “But suppose, just suppose the reports were genuine. Really true.”

  “Who’s to say what’s true?” said the weary voice of the News Editor from the newsroom of the Glasgow Herald. “Come on, Angus. We’ve both been through this before. Anyone can claim to have seen Nessie swimming along — when there just didn’t happen to be a camera handy by.”

  “I know,” Angus said gloomily.

  “Just three days ago we had a respectable medical doctor in here claiming he’d been riding in a UFO with little green men.”

  “I know,” Angus said again. “Old Doc Grant. He tries it every summer.”

  “I want proof,” said the News Editor. “No proof, no story.”

  “All right, George.”

  “Listen, you want to go there, go. There’s not much else happening, Lord knows. But even if you see the Monster with your very own eyes it’s no story unless I get pictures. Great big beautiful clear pictures. Savvy?”

  “Okay,” said Angus Cameron.

  “Pictures!” said the News Editor.

  * * *

  NESSIE LAY SULKING, a mountainous heap on the muddy bottom of the loch. “I belong here. I don’t want to leave. Don’t keep on at me.”

  “But you’re a boggart, you should be having fun,” the Boggart said urgently. “With me. Out under the sun and the stars, out in the air and the sea. Out there enjoying life, not lying here like a blob!” He turned an agitated somersault, in a whirl of cold sparks of light. “Don’t you remember it all? Wasn’t it fun turning round the girl in her boat the other day? Don’t you remember the old days, playing with the seals?”

  “I do. And it was,” Nessie said, begrudgingly but with a glimmer of boggart mischief. Then he drooped again. “But I’ve lived here too long, cuz. I haven’t the heart to leave. This is my home.” He stretched out his huge neck and laid his head on the mud.

  The Boggart flittered to and fro above him, a restless glimmer in the cool dark water. He was not used to anxiety, to the distress of affection. Unhappiness flowed all around him, like a murky cloud. He longed to bring his forlorn cousin back to the proper life of a boggart, and he had no idea of what to do. Unheard in the deep loch, he whimpered plaintively.

  * * *

  “LISTEN!” EMILY SAID. She peered out over the tangled hawthorn hedge, toward the distant glint of Loch Ness. They had driven back to the campground to pick up Mr. Maconochie’s favorite pipe, which he had left in his tent. He carried two or three other pipes in his car, together with a plentiful supply of tobacco, but this particular pipe was a kind of comforting talisman. They saw it clenched firmly between his teeth now as he emerged from his tent, zipping the door closed behind him.

  Jessup shook his head in wonder. “I suppose the best you can say is that he doesn’t actually smoke it much.”

  “It’s his security blanket,” Tommy said wisely. He slid out of the driving seat of Mr. Maconochie’s car, where he had been practicing imaginary gearshifts.

  “Listen!” Emily said again insistently, from the hedge.

  “What is it?” said Mr. Maconochie through his teeth and his pipe, as he came back to them.

  “Didn’t you hear it? A kind of wail. A sad noise.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. In the air, sort of.”

  “It’s a bird,” said Jessup. “The greater speckled wailer, native to the west coast of Scotland.”

  “It wasn’t a bird.”

  Tommy looked at her more closely, and came over and patted her briefly on the shoulder. “You all right, Em?”

  “I guess so. It was just such a sad noise.” Emily gave her head a shake, and turned back to them. “What are we going to do about Harold?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to be done,” Mr. Maconochie said. “He’ll send Sydney and Adelaide out to do an elaborate survey of the loch, and perhaps they’ll pick up the Monster. But if the Monster is indeed a boggart, it’ll disappear, just as it did when we were watching.”

  “Harold got pictures, though,” Emily said.

  “And they disappeared too,” said Tommy.

  “That could just have been a technical hitch, like he said.”

  “There’s something more complicated going on,” Jessup said. He chewed his thumbnail. “Why did our Boggart give me that dream? I know it was him. And where is our Boggart?”

  Tommy said to the air, “Boggart? Are you there? Bheil thu an sin?”

  They looked around, at the windblown trees, at the cloud-patched blue sky, but found no kind of answer anywhere.

  “I don’t know what that wailing sound was, but it was really unhappy,” Emily said.

  “I think he wants us to go to Castle Urquhart,” Jessup said. “It was Nessie’s place and he wants us to go there. But I don’t know why.”

  Mr. Maconochie took his pipe out of his mouth and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He opened the car door.

  “Come on, then,” he said. “I’ll buy us a picnic lunch on the way.”

  * * *

  WHIRLING IN A TINY invisible eddy, the Boggart hovered persistently over Nessie’s recumbent head.

  “Castle Urquhart!” he whispered. “Castle Urquhart!”

  “Leave me alone,” Nessie said. He nuzzled his head down into the soft mud.

  “I havenae seen your castle for centuries. Take me there.”

  “My castle’s ruined. They blew it up.”

  “It’s not gone. It’s still there, ruined or not. Come on, cuz, just this once, just for me. Take me there.”

  Nessie made muffled, snuffling noises of protest into the dark mud that was his bed, and then, with great reluctance, raised his long neck. “All right. Because it’s you asking. But I’m no treat to be with, these days — I’m not good at fun any more. You’d be happier if you left me on my own.”

  “Castle Urquhart!” said the Boggart, darting to and fro, visible now as a little whirling flurry of phosphorescence in the black water. “Come on!”

  Busy as a pilot fish he swam off down the loch, and Nessie lifted his huge bulk from the bottom of the loch and came after him, driving himself through the water with great sweeps of his powerful flippers. They headed south, toward Castle Urquhart.

  And above them, on the Inverness road, Harold Pindle, Chuck, Jenny and several local Scottish assistants drove in the opposite direction toward the northern end of the loch, in a small convoy. They were headed for the point from which Sydney and Adelaide and half a dozen survey boats, all their electronic searching equipment humming with life, would be launched into the water to examine the entire loch. Inexorably south they would go, submerged, unstopping, from one end of the loch to the other, scouring every inch of the water in a search that no large creature could possibly escape.

  * * *

  WHEN THE RANGE ROVER turned into the parking lot of the little cafe along the road back to Castle Urquhart, it was Tommy and Jessup who were detailed to go in and buy sandwiches. Mr.
Maconochie had caught sight of a nursery on the opposite side of the road, with a discreet noticeboard reading FLOWERS, SHRUBS, HEATHS AND HEATHERS. His eyes lit up.

  “Look!” he said. “Just what I need!”

  Emily had a quick mental image of the windswept rocky islet on which Castle Keep stood. “But you haven’t got a garden,” she said.

  “There are little pockets of soil here and there,” said Mr. Maconochie defensively. “Heather is very hardy, heather would be just the thing. I shall go and enquire.”

  “I’ll come too,” Emily said.

  “Lunch!” said Jessup plaintively.

  Mr. Maconochie pulled some bills from his wallet and thrust them at him. “You and Tommy can go buy us a picnic — we shan’t be long.”

  The boys scrambled out of the car, and Mr. Maconochie performed some elaborate turning maneuvers and roared across the road and up the nursery’s curving unpaved driveway When he turned off the engine, silence swallowed them so completely that Emily found herself trying to open and shut the car door without making a sound. Suddenly they were in a very peaceful place: a haven of green and growing things, without a human being to be seen anywhere. Racks of plants and flowers stretched all around, and beyond them a small wood of shrubs and trees, some growing in pots, some anchored to the ground by roots that had grown out of ancient, long-undisturbed sacking. Somewhere a solitary bird was singing, a long sweet chirruping trill. Looking around, Emily felt that she was in somebody’s garden, a private refuge; that if this were a shop, it was the shop of someone who could never bear anything to be sold.

  Neither she nor Mr. Maconochie spoke. They drifted among the rows of plants, separate yet together, in a daze of peacefulness. Emily thought of her father, on the rare days when he had time to work in their little city garden in Toronto; he would seem to spend hours, sometimes, on one small job like pruning a rosebush. Slowly and dreamily he would take hold of a stem and stare at its buds and leaves, waiting until he seemed to have learned its whole length by heart before he carefully raised the clippers and made one small gentle cut. It was as though time moved at a different speed, for gardeners.