The Boggart

by Susan Cooper

  He thought rather smugly that he might see surprised approval on Tommy’s face for the bowline knot that he had tied, but instead Tommy was looking at him with a queer mixture of anticipation and envy. He said, “That’s the first foot with MacDevon blood in it that’s trod this rock since the old man died.”

  IN THE stone wall of the MacDevon’s study, high above the bookshelves with their rows of dusty leather-bound books, the Boggart stirred. From the depths of his ancient wild mind a threadlike voice had called to him, though he had not heard it, nor felt any cause for his waking. When he opened his eyes, his first instinct was to close them again, fast, and go back to sleep before he could feel the pain of loss that lay waiting for him like a dark dank cloud. As a thing of the Wild Magic, this was his right; the compensation for perpetual life was the ability to retreat from it, to take refuge in a deep, bodiless sleep for days or weeks or years. Even for centuries. His cousin the Boggart of Loch Ness, who liked to take on so large and awful a shape that humans called him the Monster, was well known for sleeping nearly all the time. He would swim up to the surface of his loch only once or twice a year, for the sake of surprising the fish and of frustrating any passing tourist caught without his camera.

  The Boggart curled back toward sleep again, like a snail pulling its horns and body into its shell. He had no desire yet to face a world without the MacDevon in it. But something was tugging him into wakefulness, some unheard call, demanding obedience.

  He lay there resentfully awake, listening.

  MAGGIE VOLNIK stood in the kitchen of Castle Keep, gazing around her with undisguised dismay. Plaster was flaking from the walls, lying in little piles of dirty white fragments on the bare stone floor and the bare wooden countertops, and there were dead flies and mouse droppings in the two enormous stone sinks. A few china mugs and plates, jugs and bowls were set on the wooden shelves that lined one wall, and several saucepans hung from a big wrought-iron circle suspended from the ceiling. Other pots and pans lay on the floor beneath a vast central table, its wooden surface hollowed by centuries of scrubbing. They had lain there ever since the day the Boggart had thrown them happily around the kitchen, just before he found the MacDevon dead.

  This was the first time Tommy had been in the kitchen since then. He had been keeping away, to leave the Boggart undisturbed with his grief. He said, looking nervously around at the chaos, “I’d have come and cleaned the place up, if we’d known you would be staying here.”

  “I expect there’s a broom,” Maggie said bleakly.

  “Oh yes. Mr. MacDevon was a very tidy man. And there is running water here in the kitchen, and gas for the stove and the lights. It comes from a big tank outside, the boat brings a new one every three months.”

  “Gas lamps!” said Robert in wonder, gazing at the walls.

  Tommy showed him how to light one, holding a lighted match and cautiously turning the tap until there was a pop! and the mantle inside the lamp began to glow. Emily and Jessup came in, carrying a box of groceries between them.

  “Where’s the fridge?” said Emily briskly.

  “There’s just the pantry” Tommy said. He opened a door to reveal a capacious closet with a stone shelf set in it. Emily put the milk, eggs and butter on the shelf, looking doubtful. She said, “I guess Mr. MacDevon didn’t buy ice cream.”

  “He did too, once in a while,” Tommy said. “He would take it home wrapped in newspaper and eat it that night. He was very fond of vanilla ice cream, and so was the Bog —” He stopped himself just in time.

  “The bog?” said Jessup.

  “The dog,” Tommy said hastily. “Fergus, the dog.”

  Robert had been prowling the kitchen. “There’s no electricity in the castle, right? So no phone.”

  “That is right. There are paraffin lamps for the bedrooms. Up there.” Tommy pointed to several dusty lanterns on a shelf.

  “Paraffin?” said Jessup.

  “Kerosene to you,” Maggie said.

  “Did you use all those weird names when you were little?” Jessup wrinkled his nose. “Roundabout for rotary, and lorry for truck —”

  “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” said Robert. “So shut up. I need to learn how to light these lamps.”

  “I need to explore the castle!” Jessup made for the door, and Emily darted after him. Tommy called to their vanishing backs, “Keep away from the doors that are barred — they lead to the part that’s falling down!”

  They clattered from room to room, flinging open huge wooden doors, climbing up and down stone stairways, calling in excitement to each other as they discovered the living room with the MacDevon’s tall wing chair, the bedrooms with their four-poster beds. “Come see this!”

  And then they flung open the door of the library.

  “Wow!” cried Jessup. “Look at all these books! And there’s a globe — and an astrolabe —”

  “A what?”

  “An astrolabe. It’s an old instrument for measuring stars — look —”

  Up in his space above the shelves, the Boggart winced at the loud young voices, and peered resentfully out past Volume One of The Lays of Ancient Rome. Who were these noisy disrespectful creatures with the strange accent? He knew the Boy from across the water; the Boy knew him too, and was properly irritated or amused by boggart tricks. But these two had no sense of propriety or place, clearly. He hoped they would go away, at once.

  “Emily! Jessup!” Maggie’s voice came from upstairs. She had been touring too, while Tommy and Robert fetched in a new boatload of sleeping bags and luggage. “Hey kids! Come choose bedrooms!”

  They whooped, and disappeared. The Boggart pressed himself back into his space, wishing sleep were not so strangely unwilling to rescue him.

  The door opened again, a little, and Tommy slipped in. He said to the air, tentatively, “Boggart?”

  There was no sound or movement in the room.

  “They’re harmless, they are really,” Tommy said. “And they won’t be here long.”

  The Boggart sulked in silence. He thought: Yes, I’ll take good care they’ll not be here long.

  FOUR

  BUT, FOR THE BOGGART, the Volniks’ first night in Castle Keep was sadly frustrating. By the time he roused himself from his sulks in the library wall and flittered downstairs, Robert, Emily and Jessup had carried sleeping bags and suitcases up to the bedrooms and Maggie had cooked and served supper. The kitchen was full of a delicious smell of sausages and bacon, two of the Boggart’s favorite foods, but he came into the room just in time to see the last forkful disappear into Jessup’s mouth.

  “That was great!” said Jessup indistinctly. He stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth to join the sausage. There was plenty of bread left on the table, but it was sliced bakery bread from the Camerons’ shop, wrapped in plastic, and the Boggart looked at it with disdain. Compared to the wonderful coarse wholemeal bread the MacDevon had baked once a week, this was poor stuff.

  The Boggart made his invisible way around the four plates, investigating. The smell made his mouth water, but there was nothing left that he thought worth eating. Boggarts need neither food nor drink to survive, but they relish certain things that catch their fancy. For centuries the Boggart had preferred the traditional favorites of his kind: oatcakes spread with butter or honey, and fresh cream to drink. A lifetime spent with the MacDevon, however, had broadened his taste to a range of things from fish sticks to ketchup. Once in a while he even enjoyed a dram of good Scotch whisky, which would put him to sleep for almost a week.

  Frustrated and hungry, he was now suddenly furious with the Volniks, and overturned the milk jug on the table just as Jessup was reaching past it for more bread.

  “Oh, Jessup!” said Maggie mildly. She righted the jug, which had been almost empty, and mopped up a few drops of milk with her paper napkin.

  “It wasn’t me,” said Jessup. He looked uncertainly at the jug. “Was it?”

  “Yes!” shouted the Boggart crossly,
silently at Maggie, but in vain. She patted Jessup on the arm.

  “Never mind,” she said benevolently. “We’re all tired. No harm done.”

  The rest of the night went the same way. The Boggart could neither irritate nor aggravate anyone, nor find any way to make trouble. When he stole Maggie’s hairbrush, she merely sighed and decided she must have left it in the car. When he tripped Emily up on her way to the huge four-poster bed she was to share with Jessup, she blamed a frayed rug instead of yelling angrily at her brother. And when the Boggart moaned heartrendingly on the landing in the dead of night, and made beautifully vivid sounds of clanking chains, nobody even noticed. They were all so exhausted from the journey that they remained fast asleep.

  By sunrise the Boggart was exhausted too. He went sullenly back to the library wall and curled up in his hole, muttering curses which instantly vaporized an unfortunate passing mouse, but had no effect on his unwelcome foreign invaders at all.

  WHILE THE BOGGART slept for the next two days, Emily and Jessup fell in love with Port Appin. They grew quickly bored inside the castle, since its rooms were in general small, dark, damp and very cold, and its more interesting tumbledown half was shut off from exploring by heavy beams of wood barring certain doors. So they roamed the beaches, rocks and caves of the mainland, sometimes in the rain, after being dropped by Robert in the boat he had rented from a local fisherman. Now and then Tommy joined them. He came puttering over to the castle regularly with telephone messages for Robert and Maggie, who were deep in long-distance consultation with Mr. Maconochie the Edinburgh lawyer.

  On their fourth day in Castle Keep the sun came out, and the loch was transformed into a breathtaking picture-book place of blue water and sky, soft purple hills, and gleaming wet rocks and sand. Tommy took Emily and Jessup to a point of land facing the island of Lismore, with the bigger island of Mull misty behind it. Seaweed-draped boulders stretched down to the water, and to a scattering of great part-submerged rocks.

  “Just stay still,” Tommy said, “and watch.”

  The sun warmed their faces, and the air was full of the soft lapping of the waves, and the distant calling of birds. There was a clean smell of the sea, and the tall rock where they sat was pillowed with green mounds of sea thrift, and pink nodding blossoms.

  Suddenly Tommy grasped Emily’s arm. He said softly, “Look!”

  From the water beyond them a head rose, a dog-shaped head, glistening and wet. Water dripped from its whiskers. Another rose beside it, and a dark bulky body with sloping shoulders hoisted itself up onto the rock in the sunshine. Great dark eyes were looking straight at Emily. She gazed back, spellbound.

  Jessup cried joyously, “Seals!”

  Almost before the word was out of his mouth the seals had slipped back into the water and disappeared.

  “They have special ways of closing their nostrils,” said Jessup, excited. “They can stay underwater for twenty minutes, without coming up for air!”

  Emily thought with rueful affection: You care more about the facts and figures than about watching the seals. “They have eyes like people,” she said dreamily. She smiled at Tommy.

  The seals did not come out of the sea again. The children walked back along the rocks, the castle rising ahead of them. Tommy said in an odd, husky voice, “They came up to see you. I have never known them come so fast, for anyone but Mr. MacDevon. He used to say they were his kin.”

  Emily paused. She said cautiously, “My great-great-uncle said he was related to seals?”

  “Do you not believe it?” Tommy said.

  Emily thought of the big dark eyes, looking at her. She said, “I don’t know.”

  Jessup was not listening. His mind was still darting about in its usual unpredictable fashion. He said suddenly to Tommy, “Do you live in the shop?”

  “On top of it,” Tommy said.

  “D’you know Morse code?”

  “Not very well,” Tommy said guardedly. “Why?”

  “The shop faces my bedroom window, in the castle. We could talk to each other, with flashlights.”

  Tommy looked blank. “What’s a flashlight?”

  “You don’t have flashlights?” Jessup said. “Jeeze! A cylinder, like, with batteries inside it, and a light bulb behind glass at one end —”

  Tommy’s blue eyes glinted dangerously. “We have a thing in Scotland that’s a cylinder too. Very thin, made of wood, with graphite in the center. We call it a pencil.”

  Jessup hooted. “You think we don’t have pencils?”

  “You think we don’t have flashlights?” Tommy snapped. “That’s just American dialect. In the English language they’re called torches.”

  Emily said mildly, “Actually we’re Canadians.”

  The words dropped like a damp blanket over the heat the boys were beginning to generate, and they gaped at her. Then Tommy grinned. “Hey, Canadian Jessup,” he said. “If you’re really a computer whiz, how about coming to show me how to use mine?”

  Jessup’s face lit up. He said happily, “You bet!”

  Mrs. Cameron was counting out stamps at the post-office counter when they went into the shop. Tommy said, “D’you need me, Mum? Jessup’s going to teach the computer how to speak American.”

  Emily sighed. “Canadian,” she said.

  “That’s nice,” said Mrs. Cameron vaguely. “Oh, Emily dear — will you tell your parents Mr. Maconochie will be here at ten tomorrow morning, to discuss the sale?”

  Emily stared at her. “What sale?”

  “DARLING,” said Maggie patiently, “how on earth could we possibly keep the castle?

  “You wanted to,” Emily said accusingly to her father.

  Robert looked unhappy, and tugged his beard. “I’d need to be a millionaire, Em.”

  “Toronto is a long way away,” Mr. Maconochie said, looking down sympathetically at Emily. “It is hard to take care of a place halfway across the world.” He had a deep voice, but soft and quiet, surprising in so tall a man. His face was long and lined, with thinning silver hair above it, and his dark business suit looked impractical next to everyone else’s heavy sweaters and jeans. They had a coal fire glowing in the big fireplace of the main room, but the castle was still cold.

  Mr. Maconochie had arrived that morning, after driving from his law office in Edinburgh. He must have left very early, for he had been telling them how beautiful the hills had looked with the sun rising over them. He had sounded as excited and surprised as a small boy let unexpectedly out of school. Emily decided that she liked him; he was the kind of person who would understand how she had felt when she looked into the eyes of the seals.

  Like the Volniks, Mr. Maconochie had never seen Castle Keep before. It was his senior partner who had been Mr. MacDevon’s lawyer and written his will, and the partner had been dead for ten years. Maggie, who enjoyed talking to people about themselves, discovered over a welcoming cup of tea that Mr. Maconochie was a peaceable bachelor in his sixties, living with a great many books and pictures and a housekeeper in his house in Edinburgh, where he ran the remaining law practice and dreamed vainly of fly-fishing and long walks over the hills. He seemed as reluctant to have them sell the castle as they were themselves.

  “Perhaps the National Trust for Scotland . . .” Mr. Maconochie’s voice trailed away, and he shook his head. “No, alas. They couldn’t afford to take the place without an endowment to keep it up.”

  “Endowment?” Emily said.

  “Money,” Robert said gloomily. “The thing we’re all short of.”

  Mr. Maconochie said with regret, “I’m afraid you are right. There seems no alternative to putting it on the market.”

  Maggie put some more coal on the fire. Tommy had shown them a cellar full of coal in an obscure corner of the castle; his father had seen a barge unload the coal years before, and said that two men had been occupied for a week shoveling it into the cellar. There was still enough left for half a lifetime.

  “There are some beautiful bits
of furniture,” Maggie said. “Would it be all right for me to ship them home and sell them in Toronto?”

  Mr. Maconochie said formally, “It’s your furniture, Mrs. Volnik, yours and your husband’s. You may do anything with it that you wish.”

  Maggie sat down cross-legged by the fire, and pushed her long hair out of her eyes. She smiled at him. “But you think it should really stay in Scotland?”

  The lawyer laughed — though rather sadly, Emily thought. He said, “Scotland has been sending men and women to Canada for more than two hundred years — it’s no crime to send a little furniture after them.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Tommy came in. The door creaked and groaned as he pushed it open. “I was looking for Jessup,” he said.

  Emily jumped up. “He’s in the library. Can we show Mr. Maconochie the books, Mom?”

  So it was a troop of all of them that brought voices and footsteps into the dim-lit library, where Jessup was sitting beside a paraffin lamp reading a big book about Scottish railways, and filling the air incongruously with a blast of rap music from his pocket radio.

  The Boggart was pressed far back into his high refuge above the shelves, curled in a ball like an animal trying to hibernate. The beat of the music was like a physical pain that he could not escape, and he had been growing more and more resentful and angry. But there was no way out: Jessup had shut the door behind him when he came in, and a boggart may not pass through a closed door that has an iron lock in it, whether or not the key has been turned. The invasion of five more people, with their tromping feet and their cries and exclamations, was too much for the Boggart, and he uncoiled like a breaking spring and shot out of his hole — and, finding the door open, out into the corridor.