The Boggart Fights Back

by Susan Cooper

  “Hmmph,” said Tom Cameron, though he didn’t argue. “Well, when Mr. Mac moved into the castle, the Boggart started playing tricks on him—stealing things, stuff like that. Mr. Mac didn’t know anything about boggarts, and he thought he was going mad. So even though he was a very levelheaded lawyer, he went up the stairs to the castle library and he took out a book he’d noticed called—what was it, Dad?”

  Granda said, “Hauntings of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. It’s still up there. And inside the book, to his great surprise, Mr. Mac found an envelope addressed ‘To the New Owner of Castle Keep.’ With a letter in it, written by Devon MacDevon, the last chieftain of the MacDevon clan.”

  “A lovely old man,” Tom said softly.

  “And this is what it said.”

  Granda picked up the folder, put a gentle finger on the letter, and began to read.

  “So you’ve found him. And you have an intelligent head on your shoulders if you’ve come to this room and this book to find out what to do. I’d have liked to meet you.

  “Don’t be feared of him. He means no harm, but his tricks will drive you wild if you let them. Be patient. He’s older than you or me or the castle or the clan, and he’ll be here when we’re all gone. He’s a thieving rascal, but he eats seldom and little. He likes porridge and cream and new wholemeal bread, apples and cheese, ice cream, ketchup, pickled onions and fish. Fish above all—he is kin to the seals, as are we MacDevons. And like us too, he enjoys his dram. But if you’re short of whisky, he has a great taste for Ovaltine.”

  Granda looked up at them. “Mr. Mac told me that he liked Ovaltine himself, and he had a full mug of it with him in the library when he was reading this. And he looked down at the mug and saw that it was empty.”

  “Wow,” Jay said.

  Granda read,

  “He’s a good soul, but he’ll forget me when I’m gone. There’s not but a few left like him, cousins here and there, not many. Have him stay, if you can. He’s the Boggart of Castle Keep, and I’m fond of him. Good luck to you.”

  He looked up again. “And then there was a line in the Gaelic. ‘Tha mo chridhe maille ruibh.’ ”

  Allie tried to repeat it after him. “That sounds like what Dad said at first to . . . to the Boggart. At the loch.”

  “That’s right,” Tom said. “Well done. It means, my heart is with you.”

  Outside, there was a great crash from the direction of the loch, and they saw that a load of rescued planks had slipped from the Trout Corporation crane. Half of them had splashed back into the water; the rest lay on the ground and the jetty, dripping.

  “And all of this,” Granda said, “is one more reason why hell will freeze over before I let Castle Keep become part of a Trout tourist development.”

  “They’ve already started,” Portia said. “You should see what the old Robertson farm looks like now. How can you stop them?”

  Tom Cameron said, “Maybe now we’ll have a little help.”

  * * *

  Freddy the Site Manager came stumping into the castle kitchen, puffing a little from his climb up the steps from the rocky shore, and dropped his rucksack on the floor. He flopped into a chair and put his feet on the table. It had been a long day, thanks to the need to pull all those drowned piles of lumber out of the loch. He wished he were in some comfortable local hotel, able to order himself a beer, preferably American and ice-cold and in a can. But William Trout had ordained that he should spend his first few nights in charge of Castle Keep, where nobody had lived for years and where the refrigerator was almost certainly empty.

  He got to his feet, and checked. The refrigerator held two bottles of water and a package of baking soda. Freddy sighed. Then he shivered suddenly. Within its thick stone walls, the castle was chilly, and growing dark. It was also unnervingly silent. He switched on the lights, took his cell phone out of his pocket and began playing some rock music for company. It sounded terrible, but it was comforting.

  He was hungry, but there was nothing to eat except a sandwich and an apple in his rucksack, left over from lunchtime. He should have been able to buy food at the store run by old man Cameron, but for some reason it had closed early. What a pain that man was, turning down all the money he’d been offered to buy him out. Freddy had worked on three other William Trout developments before this, two in America and one in Ireland, but none of them had produced anyone as irritating and obdurate as Angus Cameron.

  Freddy unwrapped his sandwich and turned up the volume of his music. It was a ham sandwich with more lettuce than ham inside it, and he was still hungry when he had eaten it. The apple didn’t help much. Investigating the jars on the kitchen shelf, he found that one of them was full of tea bags; at least he could make himself a cup of tea. He found a kettle, took it to the sink and turned on the tap.

  The tap made a small rattling sound, and no water came out of it.

  Freddy said several words that he would not have said in front of his small son at home in New Jersey, and dropped the kettle into the sink. He remembered Angus Cameron’s bitter complaints about the water supply cut off by the Trout bulldozers—which he had deliberately ignored, to teach Cameron a lesson—and he realized, too late, that Castle Keep must rely on that same water supply. His own bulldozer had deprived him of his tea.

  Now he had the two bottles of water in the refrigerator to last him until next morning, and he could choose between using them to make tea, or to wash his hands and face and clean his teeth. There was always the brackish water of the loch, but he didn’t fancy the thought of clambering down the rocky steps with a bucket in the darkness.

  Freddy sighed, and wished William Trout had never set eyes on the coast of Scotland. He took the two bottles of water out of the refrigerator, put them in his rucksack and went upstairs to find himself a bedroom. With him he took not only the rucksack but the music-blasting cell phone, to keep him company in the silent corridors—which, though he would never have admitted it, he found decidedly spooky.

  First he found a bathroom, and used it, promising himself that he would flush its toilet with water from the loch in the morning. It occurred to him that Angus Cameron, with four people in his house, would be facing the same problem, but he felt satisfaction rather than sympathy.

  Then he chose a bedroom, and found that underneath the tartan bedspread there were no sheets, but only some venerable and hairy blankets. Freddy said a few more cross words, and drank one of his bottles of water to cheer himself up. Then he attached his cell phone to its charger cord, stripped down to his shorts, wrapped himself in a hairy blanket, and lay down to rest.

  Since he was alone in the castle, he saw no reason to turn his music off.

  * * *

  In the library, curled snugly beside Nessie in the gap between stones on a high shelf, the Boggart was jolted out of sleep by an intrusive sound he had never heard in the castle before: a rhythmic thumping sound, overlaid with a strange whining and the occasional loud shriek.

  Suddenly he was wide awake, and resentful. He could feel Nessie stirring too.

  “Did your people come over?” Nessie said, yawning. “That’s a terrible yawky noise out there. Is it supposed to be a singing?”

  The Boggart said crossly, “It’s the invading man again, or one of his fellows. Always breaking the peace. My people never behave so.”

  He floated out into Freddy’s bedroom, with Nessie following, and put a silencing finger on the cell phone. Freddy was now snoring, and did not stir. The Boggart looked round for some means of retribution. He found Freddy’s sneakers, and tied their laces together. Nessie found his shirt and tied the sleeves in a knot; then took his pants, and tied the legs together in a neat bow. They looked in Freddy’s rucksack and shared the water from his remaining bottle, which they left, empty, on his bedside table.

  Then, in unspoken agreement, they wafted out into the night to check what Freddy and his workmen might have done while they had been taking their nap, and they were not pleased to see the
piles of lumber back on the jetty—very wet, but lashed down this time with ropes in defense against marauding seals.

  A night wind was blowing over the loch, sending small clouds scudding over the dark sky. The boggarts flew inland across the jetty, across the shore, over shadowy fields, and drifted past the rambling old farmhouse that had been there as long as they could remember, and its sheltering wood of oak trees. Through the dark wood they heard the scuffle of rabbits and hedgehogs and mice, and the grunt of a passing badger; they laughed as bats darted through them from tree to tree. A barn owl screeched softly, and the Boggart screeched back at her.

  They flew higher, and at the edge of the wood they saw something they did not expect: trees lying uprooted, dragged out of the earth, left in rough heaps. They hovered there, making small sounds of sympathy and distress.

  A half-moon rode in and out of the clouds above them, its light glimmering on the water, on the roof of Granda’s store, and on something else, half-hidden beside the wood. Something yellow, gleaming.

  The Boggart and Nessie flittered down toward it, and found themselves looking down at one of the bulldozers. They had seen many cars and trucks and buses in their time, but never a bulldozer.

  “It’s a machine.”

  “It’s a nasty machine. Look, it’s been digging up the trees!”

  “It’s sleeping now,” Nessie said.

  The Boggart said, “It is.”

  They looked at each other, and they flittered down through the darkness, down to their dying friends the trees, down toward the enemy.

  EIGHT

  Sam Johnson had finally called Granda back, full of apologies. He had said he would do his best to have the water supply restored, though he did point out gently that he had no responsibility for William Trout’s development and his bulldozers.

  “If you werenae selling him Castle Keep, his development wouldnae be here at all,” Granda said bitterly.

  “Ah well,” said Sam Johnson. “Let’s think of it as sharing the castle with more people.”

  Granda snorted. “Sharing! But not with the folk who’ve been looking after it for you all these years. We’re banned frae going there now, you know that? Only Trout Corporation workers allowed in, until he’s finished whatever monstrosity he’s got in mind.”

  Sam Johnson said feebly, “Oh dear. But he has the right, doesn’t he, if he’s buying it. I’m sure it won’t become a monstrosity. Oh dear. I thought he’d be using you and Portia, same as always.”

  “What else does he have the right to do?” demanded Granda. “Knock it down? Turn it into a casino?”

  “I’m sorry, Angus. It’s Eric—he’s dying to sell to Trout, and wriggle out of the trust. I’d have been happy to buy him out and keep the castle—I even thought I might live there, when I retire. But there’s no way I can match what Trout’s offering.”

  “Your brother thinks only of money,” Granda said. “He’s as bad as Trout.”

  “I’m really sorry, Angus!” Sam Johnson said. He gave a long, unhappy sigh. “I’ll talk to Eric again, I’ll see if I can change his mind.”

  “Good luck wi’ that,” Granda said, and he had put down the phone.

  * * *

  And now he lay sleeping, dreaming of boggarts, dreaming his favorite dream of flying; dreaming of flying over a loch, its small waves crawling far below him, with a boggart flying on either side of him, holding his hand. Dreaming of a world with no William Trout and no threats of sewage overload, howling jet-skis, or roaring roads, but only green fields and grazing sheep, and taps that gushed fresh clean water when you turned them on.

  * * *

  Tom Cameron was dreaming too, dreaming of a day long ago when he was the age that his twins were now, when he had ferried the old MacDevon across from his castle to his parents’ store in his little boat, as he did every week. When, inside the store, he had seen an apple rise up into the air with no visible support, because the Boggart had come shopping too. . . .

  * * *

  Allie was dreaming of the round dark eyes of a seal, a seal with a faint glow to its skin: a boggart seal who heaved himself around and dropped down toward the water of the loch, and then suddenly was not there at all. . . .

  * * *

  Jay, to his surprise even in sleep, was dreaming of driving a bulldozer.

  * * *

  Seated in his small inflatable Trout dinghy next morning, Freddy puttered over from Castle Keep to the shore in a very bad mood. He had gone searching through all the castle corridors and rooms, even up the stairs to the turrets; nobody was there. And nobody, for heaven’s sake, would have come to the castle in the middle of the night to play a silly trick, and then gone quietly away again.

  It was possible, perhaps, that he himself had woken up in the middle of the night feeling very thirsty, had drunk his bottle of water, and gone back to sleep and forgotten it. That could be why this bottle whose water he really, really needed was sitting here empty. But could he possibly have woken up and tied his shirt and pants and shoelaces into knots, and forgotten that?

  Two Trout Corporation workmen were waiting for him on the decrepit little jetty; they took the bow line of his dinghy as it bounced on its own wake, and helped him out.

  “Got something to show you,” said one.

  “Whatever it is, it can wait till I’ve had a cup of coffee,” Freddy said grumpily, and he headed for his Site Office. He called back over his shoulder to the taller of the two men, “Joe! Just keep on clearing those trees.”

  “Can’t!” Joe called back. “The bulldozer’s in the loch!”

  Freddy stopped. “What?”

  They took him past Granda’s store and along the shore, to the pile of uprooted trees that one of the bulldozers had made. Freddy had last been there the evening before, on his routine check of the day’s work. Then, one bulldozer had been parked up at the old farmhouse that it was starting to demolish. The other had been sitting higher up, beside the pitted land where trees had been ripped out, waiting to start again the following morning.

  But it wasn’t there now, that second bulldozer; it was down in the loch, under the water. Only the yellow roof of its driver’s cab poked up above the surface.

  “Holy cow!” Freddy said. “Must have slid down the hill. Some fool parked it in neutral.”

  “I parked it,” Joe said. “It wasn’t in neutral, and the brake was full on. And the bucket was down.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Joe said irritably. They were both big men, but he was several inches taller than Freddy. He was also Scottish, and although he was working for the Trout Corporation, he wasn’t about to be doubted by an American.

  “Okay, okay,” Freddy said at once. “Then it’s vandalism. I’ll call the cops.”

  He thought about his knotted shirtsleeves. Then he thought about Angus Cameron’s two grandchildren, and their hostile shouts at the press conference. He thought about Angus Cameron. He turned and looked along the shore toward the store.

  “Get the other dozer,” he said. “See if it can pull this one out. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  * * *

  The twins were looking out at a beautiful sunlit morning. Far out over Loch Linnhe, traces of mist still hung over the water, but the air in the kitchen was warm, and the windows were open. From the loch they could hear the high repeated call of a herring gull. Inside, there were only muted sounds from behind the door into the store, where Portia was on duty.

  Allie said, “But if the Boggart and Nessie are going to help us, and they’re in the castle and we can’t go there, how do we get in touch with them?”

  “We send them a message,” Granda said, from the stove. It was breakfast time, and he was stirring a pan of porridge.

  “How?”

  Tom Cameron grinned. “Your granda is doing that right now,” he said. “Boggarts can smell something they like to eat from a mile away. They don’t actually need to eat, but if there’s something aroun
d that they really fancy—remember the MacDevon’s letter?”

  “Porridge and cream,” Jay said.

  “And cheese, and pickled onions,” said Allie. “What are pickled onions?”

  “Little white onions, in vinegar.”

  “Eeeuw.”

  Granda tasted the porridge. “This is ready, so we don’t need pickled onions. Give them their own dishes, d’ye think, Tom?”

  “I think so. They prefer pinching things off your plate, but porridge is messier than a piece of bacon.”

  So four plates of porridge were set out on the kitchen table, with two empty plates at the end closest to the open window, waiting for boggarts.

  “Cream!” said Jay, and fetched the jug from the refrigerator, to join the bowl of brown sugar. They all helped themselves, and there were some moments of contented silence, until Portia put her head round the door from the store.

  “Want some porridge, Portia?”

  “No thanks, I had breakfast. Angus, one of your favorite people is here to see you.”

  Granda looked at her expressionless face. “I take it you are speaking ironically,” he said.

  “You bet,” said Portia.

  “Can’t you tell him I’m eating my breakfast?”

  “He says it’s urgent.”

  Granda sighed, put a plate over his porridge dish and went out with her into the store. There at the counter stood William Trout’s unhelpful Site Manager, chunky and muscular, in a very rumpled T-shirt and jeans.

  Freddy looked at Granda without pleasure and nodded.

  “I called the water company,” he said. “They’re coming to fix the pipe.”

  “Good,” Granda said.

  “I also called the police, in case anybody gets any more bright ideas.”

  Portia said, “What d’you mean?”

  Freddy said, keeping a close eye on Granda, “Did you hear any noise out there during the night?”

  “Not after you lot stopped making it. Why?”

  “Somebody drove one of my bulldozers into the loch. Was it you?”