The Boggart and the Monster

by Susan Cooper

  She gazed at an array of small pots of heathers, and tried to choose one of them to take back to Toronto to remind Robert Volnik of Scotland. Their tiny leaves ranged through every shade of green from dark olive to almost-yellow, and of those that were in flower, the blossoms were pink or purple or any of twenty colors in between. Mr. Maconochie, moving very slowly and carefully, was picking out a pot here, a pot there, and setting them in a little line on the ground. Like Emily, he seemed to be in a happy trance.

  A quiet voice said, “Can I help you, my dear?”

  Emily jumped, and looked around. Very close, she saw an old lady smiling at her: a warm, welcoming smile in a soft-skinned face creased by hundreds of fine lines. She was a small old lady, shorter than Emily, with white hair as snowy as Mr. Kalling’s but far more wild and wispy. She wore jeans, a blue corduroy shirt and bright red Wellington boots.

  Emily said impulsively, “I love your boots.”

  The old lady laughed. “And my heathers?” she said.

  “Oh of course. I want one I can take to Toronto for my dad’s garden. It gets pretty cold there.”

  “It gets pretty cold here too,” the old lady said equably. “But I’m not sure Canadian Customs will let you take one to Toronto. They worry about importing evil foreign insects.”

  “Oh!” said Emily in disappointment.

  “Maybe if you washed all the soil off the roots,” said the old lady. “And wrapped it in a wet paper towel.”

  “We’ll look up the rules, Emily,” said Mr. Maconochie, appearing at her side with an armful of small pots. “Choose yourself a heather and I’ll buy it for you.”

  “This one,” said Emily promptly, picking up a plant covered in tiny, sturdy purple flowers. “Thank you, Mr. Mac.”

  “Erica vulgaris. Very hardy,” said the old lady approvingly. “An excellent choice.” Her eye traveled over the pots in Mr. Maconochie’s arms. “And so are these. My goodness, you have quite remarkable taste, you people. Come along into my office.”

  She led them toward a long, low greenhouse tucked behind the rows of plants. It was filled with long tables bearing rows of very small heathers in very small pots, and it bore no resemblance to an office except that in one corner there was a battered wooden desk and two canvas chairs, one on either side of it. On the desk were a cash register, a cup of tea and a sleeping cat.

  Mr. Maconochie followed her meekly, clutching his pots. He had to duck his head to go through the door. “It’s a very exposed area, where I live,” he said. “And the soil’s pretty poor. I hope they won’t mind.”

  “For the right person, my dear, they will grow anywhere,” the old lady said. “Where do you live?” She pulled off one of her red Wellington boots and tipped out a small stone, without holding onto anything for balance. Mr. Maconochie watched in admiration.

  “Port Appin,” he said. “Castle Keep.”

  In the middle of pulling her boot back on, the old lady suddenly lost her balance completely. She clutched at her desk, and recovered herself.

  “Castle Keep,” she said. “Well, well. Are you the new owner?”

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Maconochie. “Emily here inherited it, or rather her father did, and I bought it from him.”

  “Really,” said the old lady. She took Mr. Maconochie’s heathers from him one by one and began packing them into a low-sided cardboard box. “And is it a quiet life you have there?”

  Emily glanced at her sharply. It seemed an odd question, from a stranger. But the lined old face was smiling and open.

  Mr. Maconochie said guardedly, “Most of the time.”

  “Devon MacDevon was a good friend of mine,” the old lady said. “Many years ago, when I was young.” She took a miniature pair of clippers, and carefully trimmed off a broken shoot from one of the heathers.

  “Did you know his sister?” Emily said.

  The old lady laughed. “The black lamb of the family? No, my dear, I am very old but not quite as old as that. But I remember the story. She ran away with a Campbell, and married him, so the family never spoke to her again.”

  “We are a foolish, tribal race,” Mr. Maconochie said, lighting his pipe. “With long memories.”

  “We are that. She and her husband went abroad, I believe.”

  “To Canada. She was my great-grandmother,” Emily said proudly.

  “Was she now?” said the old lady, smiling at her, and for an instant Emily had the strong, startling impression that this piece of news was not news to her at all. “Then you are a MacDevon, and the first one to have stood amongst my heathers for a very long time.” She fed some numbers into the cash register, and looked up at Mr. Maconochie.

  “Eight at three-fifty, that will be twenty-eight pounds,” she said.

  “Very reasonable,” said Mr. Maconochie, and he wrote her a check, being a careful and reactionary man who did not approve of credit cards.

  The old lady studied the check. “James U. Maconochie,” she read. She looked up at him again, and Emily saw that she had very green eyes, like his own. “So you would be an Urquhart, Mr. Maconochie.”

  She punched at the cash register, which made a resounding ping and woke up the sleeping cat. The cat stretched, purring. It was completely black, from its nose to its tail.

  “My mother was an Urquhart,” Mr. Maconochie said.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Emily. She looked with interest at the old lady, whom she was beginning to suspect of being a friendly witch. “How did you know that?”

  “Not many names begin with the letter U in this country,” said the old lady mildly. “And besides, I am Miss Mary Urquhart. How do you do?”

  She held out a small strong hand, and first Emily and then Mr. Maconochie shook it, politely. “How do you do?” they said in turn.

  There was an eruption of noise through the open door of the greenhouse, and the black cat jumped down to the ground. Tommy and Jessup came in, their arms full of paper bags. “We bought a lot!” Jessup said with satisfaction. “Sodas too. And if you want it, there’s a touristy talk at the castle in ten minutes’ time.”

  “This is Miss Urquhart,” Emily said. “Miss Mary Urquhart.”

  Suddenly still, the boys stared at the old lady. She smiled at them, untroubled.

  “Wow!” Jessup said. “Do you own Urquhart Castle?”

  “It belongs these days to the National Trust for Scotland,” Miss Urquhart said. “But you could say that by blood I am still part of it, and so is your Mr. Maconochie, from his mother’s side. Just as you and your sister are still part of Castle Keep.”

  Jessup’s eyes went from Miss Urquhart’s face to Emily’s and back again, curious. They were saying to Emily: Who is this person, and how does she know about us?

  “So Mr. Maconochie is one of the links between both castles, now that he has bought your own,” Miss Urquhart added.

  Tommy said, “One of the links?” There was a challenge in his voice, and like Jessup, he was watching her cautiously. The two of them reminded Emily of young dogs meeting a stranger; sniffing warily, unsure whether to wag their tails or bark.

  “Miss Urquhart is a link herself,” said Mr. Maconochie. “She used to know old Mr. MacDevon.”

  The old lady smiled at Tommy, and closed Mr. Maconochie’s check inside her cash register with a smart ping. “You must be Tommy Cameron,” she said. “He was very fond of you.”

  Tommy flushed a little, looking pleased, and she rose briskly to her feet. Reaching for a cardboard sign reading OPEN, which was hanging inside the greenhouse’s front windowpane, she turned it around to read CLOSED. “Now that I’ve made this excellent sale,” she said, “I think I shall shut up shop for the day. And if you would care for it, I will cross the street with you and tell you a few things about the castle far more interesting than those that the tourists would hear.”

  “Great!” said Jessup.

  “That would be very kind,” Mr. Maconochie said, picking up his box of heather pots. “And I hope you
will share our picnic lunch.”

  “What will you tell us about?” said Emily, as they filed out of the greenhouse.

  Miss Urquhart turned a large rusty key in the lock, and put it in her jeans pocket. “Well, for one thing, of course,” she said, “boggarts.”

  EIGHT THEY SAT ON THE GRASS with their backs to one of the ruined walls of Castle Urquhart, eating ham sandwiches. The castle’s other visitors had all drifted away to examine the tower, the only part of the castle that remained at least partly intact.

  “I remember when I was a girl hearing a vague old tale that a boggart used to live in this castle before it was blown up,” Miss Urquhart said. “A family trickster, an invisible creature. But that was so long ago that I never gave the story much thought — I mean, the castle’s been a ruin for more than three hundred years. It was only when I went to stay with Devon MacDevon that I learned about boggarts properly.”

  She took a long thoughtful drag at the straw sticking out of her can of Pepsi-Cola, which looked almost as incongruous next to her snow-white hair as the red Wellington boots.

  “You met our Boggatt,” said Jessup with pride.

  “Not exactly. Your Boggart tried to get rid of me. Salt in my drinking water, sand in my soap dish, thistles in my bed. All his tricks said loud and clear, go home. My brother was staying at Castle Keep too, but nothing at all happened to him.”

  “Oh dear,” Emily said. “Why didn’t the Boggart like you?”

  “To tell the truth,” said Miss Urquhart, “I think he was afraid I was wanting to marry the MacDevon.”

  “And were you?” Jessup said.

  “Jess!” said Emily.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Miss Urquhart said. She smiled, rather wistfully, and Emily could suddenly see the echo of a pretty young face inside the old, lined one. “I did find him very attractive, I must say. But I was only in my early twenties, and he was forty-five at least, and already set in his ways. He never did marry anyone. I think perhaps he found it easier to live with a boggart than with a wife.”

  “That was his loss,” said Mr. Maconochie gallantly, even though he had never wanted to live with a wife either.

  “Have a chocolate biscuit,” Tommy said.

  “Thank you,” said Miss Urquhart to both of them, and she took a biscuit. “Anyway, he spoke to me quite openly about the Boggart, and apologized for him. And when I came home I found myself coming quite often to this castle, here where we sit now, and listening for our own boggart.”

  Mr. Maconochie said, “Listening?”

  “That’s the only word I can think of for it,” Miss Urquhart said. She took a bite of her chocolate biscuit.

  “Feeling what he’s feeling,” said Emily. She thought of the sad wail she had heard from the loch that morning, which nobody else had been able to hear.

  “That’s right,” said Miss Urquhart.

  “Hmm,” said Mr. Maconochie noncommittally.

  Miss Urquhart ate the rest of her biscuit, got to her feet and held out a hand to him. “Come with me and I’ll show you,” she said.

  “What?” said Mr. Maconochie. He peered up at her through his bristly grey eyebrows.

  “Come!” Miss Urquhart stood there small and insistent, holding out her hand. “You are an Urquhart and so am I, and with that much family feeling focused on Nessie, we shall hear what he is feeling. You just have to concentrate. I’ll show you.”

  Since she showed no sign of moving, Mr. Maconochie, looking very skeptical, unfolded his long legs and stood up, and the old lady took his hand and led him toward the outer wall of the castle. Beyond it, a little path ran along the top of a grassy slope overlooking the loch. Like a mother settling a small child, she sat him down on the edge of the path, looking out over the water, and sat herself beside him. Loch Ness lay below them, and from its further bank the forested green hillside rose to ridges of bare rock.

  Emily, Jessup and Tommy stayed behind, in the grass-wrapped center of the castle.

  “Okay then, Jess,” said Emily “The Boggart wanted us to come here, you said — and we’ve come. So what happens next?”

  “Beats me,” Jessup said.

  “Maybe it’s already happening” said Tommy. “Maybe it’s Miss Urquhart, and the listening.”

  * * *

  NESSIE SLOWED DOWN, and drifted upward a little, closer to the surface of the water. The Boggart could see it like a glimmering ceiling several feet above them.

  “My castle’s just over that way,” Nessie said. “My poor ruined castle.”

  “Take boggatt-shape,” the Boggart said, “and we’ll go up and have a look.”

  Nessie groaned. “I’m tired, cuz. You’ve no idea how exhausting it is, hauling all this weight around. I need a rest.”

  “If you’d just practice your shape-shifting,” said the Boggart in exasperation, “you’d have no weight at all.”

  “A wee nap,” Nessie said. “A wee nap, that’s what I need.” And he closed his eyes and slowly sank, yet again, huge and inert, to the bottom of the loch.

  The Boggart twirled irritably and invisibly in the water, giving a considerable fright to two small lake trout who suddenly found themselves revolving upside down, and he shot up to the surface and out into the air. Just for the pleasure of flying with wings, he shifted his shape to that of a golden eagle, the rarest and most powerful bird in all Scotland. He soared up out of the water, and a bird-watching clergyman from Dundee, peering through his binoculars from his folding canvas chair on the bank, was so surprised and delighted that he nearly fell into the loch. He went home and wrote an ecstatic letter to the Times, and for years afterward his sermons glowed with an image of hope and wonder: the great golden eagle that he had seen so improbably fly up out of the dark waters of Loch Ness.

  The Boggart wheeled over the loch, high up, resting on his wings. Far at the northern end of the long lake he could see something strange: a line of boats, spread across the whole width of the loch, moving in unison, very slowly, toward him.

  * * *

  ANGUS CAMERON WAS writing busily in his notebook, in the control room of the Kalling-Pindle Project’s trailer. Squashed between the back of Harold Pindle’s chair and a very knobbly bank of batteries, he barely had space to turn a page.

  “So what speed are they moving at?” he asked.

  “Two knots,” Harold said. “Very slow. Very thorough. But they have a good burst of speed if they should need to chase anything.”

  “And nothing can get past them?”

  “Nothing of any real size. The ROVs are scanning the deep water while the sonar on the boats takes care of the top two hundred feet. They are covering every inch of this loch, and the screens will show anything they meet that’s larger than a two-pound salmon. Today or tomorrow, Mr. Cameron! This is it!”

  He pulled his earphones over his ears and sat peering happily at his array of blank green screens, with Chuck beside him intent on gauges and dials. The air in the little room prickled with tension.

  Behind them, Angus Cameron was overcome by a great wave of disbelief. He had seen all this too often before: the passionate monster-hunters, bubbling with hope and conviction, longing to be the first to prove that Nessie was really there. They always knew they were going to find proof, and they never found it. Over the years, only the technology changed.

  He shut his notebook. In spite of all those boats and screens and submersibles, he knew that he was being driven to chase this story not by any faith in the Kalling-Pindle expedition, but by the hint of possibility that his own son, his levelheaded skeptical Tommy, might actually have seen the Loch Ness Monster. If Tommy were to swear to its existence, even without pictures, then Angus would become the most passionate monster-hunter of all.

  “Thanks, Dr. Pindle,” he said. “I’ll be back later, if I may.”

  “Feel free,” said Harold, his eyes on the screens. “Sorry I don’t know where the kids have gone. Try the campground.”

  “I’ll find them,” A
ngus said.

  * * *

  EMILY SHIVERED, and opened her eyes. She had been lying on her back on the grass, listening to a lark’s faint bubbling song, while the boys went off to investigate the tower, but now a large billowing cloud was crossing the sun, and the air was suddenly cool. She sat up, reaching for her sweater, and saw Tommy and Jessup scrambling back toward her over the ruined walls. High above her the lark was still singing. Emily looked up, but could see no sign of it; only a speck that was a much larger bird, some kind of hawk perhaps, drifting to and fro very high in the sky.

  Jessup came skidding down beside her as she pulled the sweater over her head. “Here they come,” he said. “Over there!”

  Tommy said, “Mr. Mac looks a bit green.”

  Miss Urquhart came toward them from the castle’s outer wall, a small neat figure in her jeans and red boots, with Mr. Maconochie behind her. He folded his long legs and sat down next to Emily on a pile of rock, and took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Oh my,” he said.

  Emily studied his face. “Are you all right?” she said.

  Miss Urquhart helped herself to a chocolate biscuit, and passed the box to Tommy. “He’s all right,” she said. “But poor Nessie is not happy at all.”

  “That was very strange indeed,” Mr. Maconochie said slowly. He peered absently into the bowl of his pipe, as if it might explain something to him. “We sat there . . . listening, I suppose. And then it was like . . . being inside somebody else’s emotions. Feeling them as if they were yours, even though they weren’t. It’s very hard to describe.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Emily comfortingly.

  Jessup said, “So what does Nessie feel?”

  “Frightened,” said Mr. Maconochie.

  “And restless,” Miss Urquhart said. “He wants to change but he’s forgotten how.”

  Mr. Maconochie waved his pipe stem at them like a pointer. “And he wants to stay but he wants to leave. Wants to be with our Boggart but wants to be left alone.” He paused. “Most of all it was like hearing someone calling, ’Help, help!’”

  “So was the dream the Boggart gave me,” Jessup said. “Showing the two of them together, wanting things to be like that again.”