Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  What’s funny is that we really did know. Evan and Sally made a pass at sounding like rational, realistic parents, talking about coincidences and logical possibilities, but nobody paid any attention, including them. This wasn’t West Eighty-third Street, this was old, old Dorset, and what we had had to be a boggart; and the only chance you have with boggarts is catch them in the act. All the tales say they’re night creatures, so Sally set up a kitchen-watch rotation, making sure that she and Evan had the graveyard shift, and not even scheduling Julian at first. But he threw such a fit about being left out she finally penciled him in with me, from eight to eleven. I told him to bring his Snakes and Ladders game, because he’s such a bad loser and a worse winner that I figured we’d stay awake, one way and another.

  The first nights, nothing, not on anybody’s watch. Evan said that figured. “He knows we’re on guard, so he’s going to sit tight for a while, considering. But he’ll make his move soon, because he has to. Boggarts can’t resist a challenge from humans, that’s how they are.”

  I remember Sally asked, “What’s with this he all the time? What if it’s a lady boggart?” Evan said they were always male in the stories, and Meena—her parents let her sit up with Julian and me one night—said that in the little town where her father was born there was a lady boggart, or brownie, whatever, that swept out the temple at night. “Nobody ever saw her, but the priests would leave a bowl of milk out for her, and in the morning the milk would be gone and the temple would be clean. All the years my father lived there, every night, the same.”

  Tony wanted to know how the priests could tell the Indian boggart was a female, if they never saw her, and Sally said because she cleaned up after herself, which you couldn’t get a man to do at gunpoint, never mind a male boggart. Evan said, “Right, then, we’ll just call him it, let it go at that.” Julian said he wanted to play Snakes and Ladders, so he and I and Meena played until Sally relieved us, and we didn’t see a thing. That whole first week, it must have been.

  But maybe ten nights into the boggart patrol, the weather suddenly turned bad. We’d had a week or so of pure summer, which is about the way you get summer in England—a week at a time, scattered around through the other seasons. That night we got rain like horses galloping on the roof, and we got thunder that felt as though someone were pounding the Manor with a huge baseball bat. Evan and Sally were actually out in the storm, trying to protect the new sapling fruit trees, and Julian was scared for them, and I kept telling him they’d be okay, just play already—and in the middle of all that racket, we heard someone laughing. Not a nasty, tittering kind of laugh, like the ones I’d heard in my bathroom— this one was deep and loud enough that Julian and I both heard it through the thunder. We turned around so fast that we knocked over Julian’s Snakes and Ladders board, and we saw him.

  It was a him, all right—I’d have known that much even if he hadn’t had a beard, just from the way he stood there with his thumbs in his belt and his head back, looking around our kitchen as though everything in it was his. I’ve seen three-year-old boys stand like that on playgrounds—you can’t miss it. He wasn’t any bigger than a three-year-old, either: He came about up to Julian’s chest, not counting his silly Seven Dwarfs hat with the green feather. He was dressed like a cross between the Seven Dwarfs and Robin Hood, in a kind of loose red smock, but with the belt, and brown leggings underneath, and heavy little boots, ankle-high— I’d have taken them for Doc Martens, except I don’t think they make them in boggart sizes. And there wasn’t a thing else in the world he could have been.

  Julian had grabbed my hand, and I could feel him trembling right down my arm and into my stomach. He whispered, “Jenny, he came out from under the stove! How could he do that?”

  I didn’t answer. I just held his hand with both of mine, trying to stop his shaking. Julian said, in this small, sad voice, “I don’t like this, Jenny.”

  The boggart looked at us for the first time. You could tell he was really, really old, but I can’t say exactly how I knew, because he didn’t have any gray hair, and no wrinkles at all, just a few lines on his skin, which was red-brown, the same color as the new lettuce fields closest to the Manor. He had a face like a goat’s face—long and high-boned, with the little curly beard, and with big dark-red eyes, wicked eyes. I don’t mean evil, I mean wicked. I know the difference now.

  “Dun’t ye goo a-ztaring,” he said. “There’s rude. Yer ma’d noo like it.”

  That’s the way he sounded to me the first time I heard him speak. He had a deep voice for someone so small, but it didn’t seem out of place coming out of that face, that big chest like my father’s. He said again, “Dun’t goo a-ztaring at me. Else I’ll turn the pair of ye into crabapples and toss ye to the piggies. I will zo.”

  Julian gave a tiny whimper and burrowed against me with his eyes shut tight, like Mister Cat. It took me a couple of tries to make my voice work, but I said, “We don’t have any pigs, and you’re nothing but a dorky boggart, and you can’t turn us into anything,” all in one croaky rush. I don’t know how I got it all out—I was just mad because he was scaring Julian, and enjoying it. Boggart or no boggart, I know that look when I see it.

  The boggart’s eyes twinkled. I’ve heard people say that all my life, but until then I’d never seen anyone actually do it. Like a birthday-cake candle flickering far down a tunnel. He said, “Maight be I can, maight be I can’t. Dun’t be in such a fluster to chance en.” He pointed at me with a thick, stubby forefinger. “Mind yerse’n, or what boggart’s doone’s naught to what boggart will do.” And he grinned at me like a horse with a mouthful of gray and black teeth.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Trashing the kitchen every night, breaking down fences, throwing apples at people—that’s about your speed. You’d be hot stuff at Gaynor Junior High.” Julian was starting to get interested: He sat up, still huddling close against me, and gaped at the boggart. The boggart made a face at him—Julian yelped and dived into my lap again—and the boggart laughed.

  “Noo, noo, tha’s naught but what boggarts is zet to do on this earth”—only it came out thik yearth—“no harm in it, ner zpite.” He was waving that finger at me, dead serious as Mrs. Wolfe at Gaynor used to get when she thought we weren’t paying enough attention to the Congress of Vienna. “But ye—tak shame to yerself, ye ought, grieving yer ma zo wi’ yer zulks and yer pelts and yer mopen to be off back wheer ye do coom vrom. And her a-worken and a-werreten hersen to plain boone vor to mak thikky farm be home vor ye, be home vor ye all. Tak shame, ye Jenny Glookstein!”

  That’s the best I can get it down, and that’s all of that I’m about to do. I’d never heard old-time Dorset talk before, except in little scraps, like when Ellie John says a shriveled-up apple’s all quaddled, or says she doesn’t ho about something, meaning she doesn’t give a damn. Or when William says the weather’s turning lippy, which means it’s going to rain. But nobody talks like Thomas Hardy people, they haven’t for ages. Evan says it’s because of radio and TV and movies. He’ll go on forever about how regional dialects ought to be treated like endangered species before everybody winds up sounding just like everybody else. But that’s what people want, most of them. I knew that in grade school.

  Anyway, I was so startled by his coming on like Jimmy Cricket, the voice of my conscience, that I forgot to be scared. I yelled at him, “I don’t believe this. You’re the one who makes my mother’s life hell, and it’s all my fault? Okay, that is chutzpah.” Let him chew on my native dialect, see how he likes it.

  The boggart wasn’t fazed a bit. “Noo, I do like yer ma, I do like her fine—she’s a rare goodhussy, for an outlander, and pretty wi’ it. There’s bottom to en.” It took me the longest time to figure out that hussy just means a housewife in Dorset talk, and bottom’s like honor, integrity. “But she’s noo raised her darter right, there’s her zorrow. Proper darter, she’d a-zet hersen first thing to riddle out what in t’world might please a boggart. For us can be pleased, aye, us ca
n be sweetened, na great trickses to it—any ninnyhammer’d a-figgured en out by naow. Any ninnyhammer as cared, that’s to say.” And he gave me that horse grin again.

  I was catching on slowly, more to the rhythm than the words. I said, “There’s a way to make you leave us alone? What is it, what do you want? Tell me, I’ll be on it—five minutes, tops. What?”

  But the boggart just shook his head. “Ben’t that simple, can’t be. Think, gel, use yer nogger—think like boggart, think like me.” He folded his arms across his chest and stood there, reaching up now and then to play with his little beard, looking more self-satisfied than I’ve ever seen anyone look. Including Mister Cat.

  Beside me Julian whispered, “Milk.” The storm was still banging away at the house, rattling the windows until I thought the old frames would come apart, and Julian had to raise his voice. “Milk. Ellie John says her mother always leaves milk out for the—the Good Folk.” He ducked his head back down so fast that I hardly heard the last words.

  That got a snort out of the boggart—it sounded like somebody sneezing with a mouthful of hot soup. “Milk? Noo, that’s all trot, that is—what’s boggart want wi’ milk? Is boggart a suckling piggy, then? Is boggart calf or lamb, chetten or poppy? Noo, and not Good Folk neither. Try us again, Joolian McHugh.”

  Julian couldn’t manage it, but he’d got me thinking about the handful of fairy tales I still remembered in bits and pieces. I said, “Wait, wait a minute—hold it… Shoes! That’s it—we make you a terrific pair of shoes, and you’re so happy with them that you dance all over the kitchen, and you never come back. That’s it, right? Has to be.” But the boggart was spluttering and stamping his feet before I was half through.

  “Shoes, is it naow? Shoes, like them great clumsy hommicks you folk wear, and me wi’ a grand pair of kittyboots of me own?” And he held them up, first one, then the other, to show Julian and me the perfect little sort of cleats on the soles, and the way the soles nestled into the uppers, as though there weren’t any stitches at all. They were old, like him, but the best cobbler in Dorchester couldn’t have matched them. Let alone us.

  “Again! Try us again!” He was having a fine time, spinning on his heels, jumping up and down. I hoped he’d stamp his way through the floor, like Rumplestiltskin. Julian was whimpering again, and right then I wanted Sally more than I had in a long time—and Evan, too—because this was all way more than I could handle. But I didn’t want Julian any more scared than he already was, so I put my arm around him and told the boggart, “Enough already, we give up, we don’t want to play anymore. Just for God’s sake tell us what would please you, so we can take care of it, and you can stop messing with us, and we’ll all be pleased. How about it, okay?”

  I had a feeling that wouldn’t cut a lot of ice, and I was right. The boggart got really mad then. He stopped jumping around, and he grabbed off his dumb little feathered hat and slammed it down on the floor. “Noo, Jenny Glookstein,” he said, and that weird deep voice had gotten very quiet, and scarier for it, “noo, ye’ll play awhile wi’ boggart yet, acause I say ye will. Ye’ll goo on a-thinking what might soften boggart’s heart, what might charm boggart to leave ye be. Acause I say so.” And he took a couple of steps toward us, and Julian—I’ll always remember this—Julian wiggled out from under my arm and wiggled himself in front of me. Scared as he was. I’ll remember.

  I never saw Mister Cat. You don’t, until he’s there. He hit the boggart like a bolt of black lightning out of that storm, landing on his shoulders with all four sets of claws out and busy. The boggart squealed and lurched forward—and here came Miss Flufibucket, Miss Dustbunny, that Persian ghost-cat, flashing up from underneath to rake at his face… with real claws? I couldn’t say, even now, but the boggart screamed like a trapped rabbit, falling flat, arms wrapped wildly around his head. Mister Cat pounced on his chest, holding him down, and the Persian stood off, ready for a fast slash anytime he raised his head. You’d have thought they’d been doing this sort of thing forever.

  Julian was chanting, “Mister Cat! Mister Cat! Mister Cat!” like a mob cheering at a football game, but I made him stop. Mister Cat was making that creaky-door, mess-with-me-and-die sound, the way he’d done to me in Heathrow, and the boggart was absolutely cowering and crying, “Gi’m off me! Gi’m off me, missus! Boggart niver meant noo harm, boggart was on’y spoortin-like—gi’m off and ye’ll nivver see boggart more, I zwear!”

  I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. To somebody two feet high, Mister Cat has to look like Bagheera the Black Panther on a bad-hair day. Although the one who seemed to scare him more was the Persian—he wouldn’t even look at her, but kept making funny signs with his fingers, more or less in her direction. Whatever they were supposed to do, they didn’t. The Persian just watched him, licking her left front paw now and then. I wondered if a ghost’s tongue could taste ghost-fur.

  Julian was tugging my arm, whispering, “Jenny, don’t believe him, don’t believe him! He didn’t say he wouldn’t bother us, he just said we wouldn’t see him do it.” Julian’s going to be a lawyer— I don’t think I’ve mentioned that.

  “Got it,” I said; and then, to the boggart, “Okay, you, shut up and listen. Shut up, or I’ll have my attack cat eat your face.” Mister Cat might lose interest any time now, and I had to move before he strolled off somewhere with his hot date. In my toughest, meanest New York voice I said, “Now. No more bullshit. You tell us right now what we have to do so we don’t have any more aggravation from you. Right now, buddy, or that sweet kisser is lunch meat.” Jake and Marta wouldn’t have stopped laughing for a week.

  It did wonders for the boggart, though. He scrunched behind his arms even more, and started babbling so fast I couldn’t understand him at first. “Zpectacles! Zpectacles, it is, so boggart can see past’s nose again. Boggart’s old, he is, boggart’s eyen ben’t what they was—zpectacles, they needs! Laive a pair on t’mat and boggart’ll trouble ye no more.” Mister Cat growled in his throat right at that moment, and the boggart yeeped—can’t find another word for it. “Nivver no more! May kitties coom get me if I lie!”

  I looked at Julian. He nodded. “They have to keep their promises. Ellie John told me.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, still doing the New York gangster. “One pair of eyeglasses, onna mat tonight. Just remember, duh cats know where youse live.”

  I bent down and picked Mister Cat off the boggart. Mister Cat didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue about it. The Persian never moved, and I wasn’t about to touch her, not in my entire life. Again it struck me that the boggart seemed more frightened of her than he was of Mister Cat. He watched her all the time he was getting up and finding his hat, practically groveling if she so much as flicked an ear. I said, “She won’t hurt you,” but the boggart plainly wasn’t buying, and I got the feeling that he had reasons older than I was. He backed slowly away, still hunched and ready to run—then all at once he straightened up, set his hat on his head, and gave us the horse grin one more time.

  “For yer ma’s sake, a single word of advice, like. A warning.” He pointed at the Persian, shaking his finger the same way he’d done at me. “Ware t’servant, ware t’mistress—and ware T’Other Oone most of all.” And you could hear the capital letters on T’Other Oone. Believe it.

  “The mistress,” I said. “Who’s that? The Other One—I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s the Other One?”

  But the boggart laughed like a bathtub drain, and did a sort of weird skip-jig on the kitchen floor. “A single word, a single word, I said, and that ye’ve had. To’morn’s to be zpectacles waiting for boggart on mat—and so farewell, Jenny Glookstein, farewell, Joolian McHugh. Farewell, farewell.”

  And he was gone, the way I’d thought only Mister Cat could vanish. Julian insisted he went back under the stove, flattening himself out—“Like a piece of paper, Jenny, didn’t you see?”—and slipping in through the little space there was. Sally and Evan came sloshing in just then, and Tony
came down, and we all got busy running around bringing them towels, making tea, putting their Wellingtons and their rain slickers in the bathtub. They were all over mud, even with the slickers, and Evan had a huge bruise on one cheekbone where he’d fallen over something in the dark. But they’d saved the new fruit trees. There wasn’t a thing on the planet more important, right then.

  They sat there in the kitchen, laughing and holding hands, looking flushed and scratched up, and really tired, looking like kids—looking the way Julian and I should have been looking, instead of sneaking glances at each other and agreeing without a word that we wouldn’t talk about our night for a bit. The Persian was as gone as the boggart, but Mister Cat was sitting between us, tail curled around his feet, looking utterly bored and sleepy. Julian picked him up and held him tight, practically strangling him, the way he used to hug that gorilla he gave me. Mister Cat usually hates that kind of thing, but hejust purred and purred, while Evan and Sally drank their tea and picked little twigs out of each other’s hair.

  Eleven

  The boggart kept his word. After everybody’d finally gone to bed, I sneaked back down and left an old pair of drugstore reading glasses Julian kept trying to start fires with out on the doormat. They were gone in the morning, and the kitchen was tidier than we’d left it.