The Boggart Fights Back

by Susan Cooper

  Granda tried not to smile. “Now that’s a great notion,” he said. “But I’ve not got the remotest idea how to drive a bulldozer.”

  Portia scowled at Freddy. “Making false accusations is not just rude, it’s slanderous,” she said.

  “And there were other things,” Freddy said darkly.

  “Were there now,” said Granda.

  “There’d better not be any more.”

  Suddenly Granda lost his patience with all things Trout. “I don’t think I know your name,” he said.

  “Fred Winter,” said Freddy.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Winter,” said Granda, and he went back into the kitchen. Tom and the twins, who had been listening at the door, backed hastily out of his way.

  Granda closed the door behind him, sat down at the table, removed the plate from his porridge dish, and picked up his spoon.

  Tom Cameron said, “I have a thought about who moved that bulldozer, Dad.”

  “Aye,” Granda said, “I do too, but first I want my breakfast.”

  “Uurgh!” said Jay suddenly.

  It was a strangled, wordless gasp, and past his pointing finger they saw the saucepan sailing through the air from the stove toward the empty dishes at the end of the table. The ladle filled the dishes with porridge; the saucepan sailed back to the stove; the cream jug rose into the air and poured cream first onto one dish and then the other.

  Then the sugar bowl came hovering, and its spoon sprinkled sugar over porridge and cream. Quite a lot of sugar.

  Then both dishes rose into the air, and hovered.

  The Camerons sat down wordlessly to finish their breakfast, and there was no telling whether any small, busy slurping sounds were coming from visible or invisible mouths. But in a while, they heard in the warm air a low, happy sound like the purring of a cat. Two cats.

  Allie and Jay sat listening, bemused, and the two dishes returned to the table beside them, empty.

  Granda put down his spoon. “All right, Boggart,” he said. “Tell me now, have you been at your tricks with the man’s bulldozer?”

  Nessie said to the Boggart, in their silent speech, “What’s a bull dozer?”

  “Does he mean the nasty machine, you think?” The Boggart gave a little happy bounce. “He does! They’ve seen what we did!”

  Jay said in awe, “Could they really move a bulldozer, without driving it?”

  “You’ll be amazed what they can do,” his father said.

  “Yes!” said the Boggart proudly; he bounced again, and the Camerons saw the air seem to flicker for a moment over the kitchen table.

  And somewhere out of the quivering air, his husky voice said softly, “Machine. Nasty machine.”

  Granda smiled. He said something in Gaelic; the Boggart answered, and so did another, lighter voice. Tom Cameron joined in, and Allie and Jay fidgeted in frustration at not being able to understand anything anybody said. It grew worse when both men and both unbodied voices began to laugh.

  Tom turned to them, still smiling. “I’m sorry, we should stick to English—they’re just more comfortable with the Gaelic. It’s amazing they’re talking to us at all—they never used to, ever.”

  “So what did they say?” Allie said.

  “They did put the bulldozer in the water. They were planning to do the same to the other one, but Granda told them it wouldn’t help for long.”

  “What made you laugh?” Jay said enviously.

  “Nessie said maybe they should put Mr. Trout in the water.”

  “But are they going to get serious and help us? We have to do something! He’s going to ruin this whole wonderful place!”

  “They were trying,” Tom said.

  Allie said slowly, “They can’t stop him by things like that, can they, and nor can we. He’s one of those people who do just what they want, all the time. The only hope is to make him change his mind.”

  Out of the air, above their heads, the husky voice of the Boggart said, “Change his mind.”

  And another voice, lighter, said slowly, “The wee girl is right.”

  Allie and Jay sat very still, listening.

  “Maybe she is, Nessie,” Granda said.

  The Boggart said, slowly, carefully, finding his words, “We havenae got an army—this is not like the old battles. It’s the invader himself that has to decide he wants to take his machines away, and leave our place alone.”

  Nessie’s voice said, “If we scared him?”

  “Now there’s a thought,” Tom Cameron said.

  “If we scared him enough,” said the Boggart, uncertainly; he had always had much more fun from playing tricks on people than inducing terror.

  “I know how to scare people,” Nessie said happily, remembering his centuries in Loch Ness.

  From the loch, wafting through the window on the summer air, came a noise none of them was expecting: a loud mechanical hoot, shattering the peace of the morning. It came again, twice, like the honk of a gigantic intrusive bird.

  Granda said, “What on earth—?”

  They peered out at the loch, and on the water beyond Castle Keep and its small green island, between the mainland and the coast of the island of Lismore, they saw a huge boat. It was a motor yacht, almost as big as the island ferry that made its peaceful way past them twice a day; its high white bow was facing them like a pointing finger.

  “I know how to scare people,” Nessie said again.

  And as the boat slowly turned, they saw its name written large and proud along its side: TROUT QUEEN.

  NINE

  “He’s back,” said Jay. “He said he would be. ‘In my yacht, the Trout Queen.’ ”

  “A large and vulgar vessel, like its owner,” said Granda.

  They watched, as the massive boat moved slowly into shallower water beyond the castle, and they heard rattling noises as its anchor was lowered.

  Allie said, “How can it be a yacht when it doesn’t have any sails?”

  “Motor yachts were invented for rich people who don’t know how to sail,” said Jay.

  His father grinned. “Very true,” he said. He turned away from the open window and spoke to the air above the two empty porridge plates.

  “Boggart, have you seen this boat before?”

  Then he said it again, in Gaelic.

  There was a long silence. Granda and the twins turned too, wondering.

  “Boggart?” Tom said. “Nessie? Are you still there?”

  But there was no answer.

  * * *

  In their invisible, insubstantial boggart form, the Boggart and Nessie slipped through the water of the loch, pausing now and then to tickle a startled fish. Above their heads they heard a small buzzing sound, and they soared upward and saw Freddy the Site Manager bouncing across the small waves in his little inflatable dinghy, headed, as were they, for the Trout Queen.

  “He’s off to see the invading man,” Nessie said. “On the man’s big boat.”

  The Boggart said, “The man has to go!” He twirled in the water like a corkscrew, as if he might find an idea among the fish.

  “I’m going to scare him away,” Nessie said. “I know how!”

  The Boggart stopped twirling. He said, “You mean by turning monster?”

  “It scares them!” Nessie said happily. “They scream!”

  “Oh, do take care,” the Boggart said, worried. “Ye munnae get stuck.”

  Nessie laughed. “Watch me!” he said.

  He began to glow very faintly, as boggarts do when they are thinking hard, and suddenly, there under the choppy surface of the loch, he took on the prehistoric shape in which he had once lived for hundreds of years, and he became the Loch Ness Monster. From his massive body a long, long neck rose, topped by a small head; he had flipperlike legs and a long, long tail. He was truly prehistoric.

  He shot joyously round the Boggart in a circle, his enormous frame driven by great sweeps of the powerful tail.

  “Look, cuz!” he cried. “I’m back!”


  “Be careful!” the Boggart called, agitated. “Be careful, cuz! Be sure you dinnae get stuck again, be sure you can change back!”

  But Nessie was on his way, swimming fast toward the Trout yacht and diving down to the bottom of the loch. He found the boat’s anchor, wedged only loosely into the mud, and he pushed his doglike head underneath it and closed his jaws round the anchor chain. Then he shot up toward the surface, with the Boggart in nervous pursuit.

  Freddy’s empty dinghy was bobbing beside the yacht, and Freddy was up on the high foredeck, with two other men and the tall, bald, imposing figure of William Trout.

  In a great spray of water, Nessie broke the surface, his long grey-green neck towering over the boat, and he dropped the anchor on the deck, amidships. He opened his mouth, showing rows of alarmingly pointed long teeth, and gave a shattering bellow like the grunting roar of an angry hippopotamus.

  Freddy and the two sailors cowered away, crouching to escape the teeth. Nessie dripped mud and water all over them, and they found themselves breathing air that reeked of fish and seaweed, like the low-tide stink of a muddy beach.

  Cries of alarm came from other parts of the boat, and its engine started up again.

  Snarling, Nessie peeked down at William Trout, waiting happily for his shriek of terror.

  But William Trout wasn’t scared. He gazed at Nessie in astonishment and disbelief, and slowly the astonishment changed to delight. “It’s the Loch Ness Monster!” he cried. “Look! Just like the picture! It has to be! We’ve got the Loch Ness Monster in our loch here!”

  He beamed up at Nessie, a broad white smile on his suntanned face, and he went on beaming even as Nessie raised his head and roared again.

  “This is wonderful!” he cried. “The whole world will come! Terrific, just terrific!”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone and began frantically shooting a video of Nessie. “Freddy!” he yelled. “Get up, man—get pictures, quick!”

  The Boggart whirled round Nessie’s enormous tail and shot up out of the water, invisible but highly agitated. “Dive, cuz! Dive! It’s no’ working!”

  Nessie gave a final angry roar, sending a blast of warm fishy air at William Trout, and dropped back into the loch.

  Mr. Trout, flushed with excitement and triumph, gazed longingly down at the swirling water, and then all around, in the hope that the monster would reappear. He shook his head at Freddy and the sailors, getting to their feet and shaking off water and scraps of weed.

  “Chickens!” he cried. “Chickens, all of you! Good thing one of us has his head screwed on! This is amazing! Fantastic! You realize what a tourist draw this will be for us? Just wait till I tweet about it! Look, folks, this is why there hasn’t been a clear sighting of the Loch Ness Monster in Loch Ness in twenty years—he’s mine now! I’ve got him!”

  He spun round, clutching his phone, staring out at the water, but there was still no sign of movement. A few strands of seaweed bobbed up and down in the small waves.

  The Trout Queen’s engine gave a throaty snarl, and the boat began to move away from the castle, farther up the loch. Two more crewmen came hurrying forward and grabbed the anchor and its chains, carrying them to the bow, and after them came the boat’s captain, scowling, heading for William Trout. He was a stocky, grey-haired Scot named David Macdonald; he had come with the yacht when Trout bought it from its previous owner the year before, and he was not happy at the change.

  “I told you she’d drag her anchor,” he said crossly. “It’s the wrong place—the bottom won’t hold.”

  William Trout’s voice rose in disbelief. “You didn’t see?”

  “See what?” said David Macdonald.

  “The Monster, man! The Loch Ness Monster! Right here, leaning over us—can’t you smell the stink it made? And our anchor didn’t drag—the Monster pulled it up!”

  “Tell me another one,” David Macdonald said.

  “It’s true,” Freddy said. “Look at the mess it made!”

  Still dripping, he waved his arms over the pools of water and seaweed on the deck.

  “The mess you made,” said David Macdonald. “Been swimming, eh, Freddy?”

  William Trout was busy with his cell phone. “Look at this, then!”

  David Macdonald sighed. “The Loch Ness Monster is a fabrication,” he said, “kept alive only by the imaginations of gullible tourists.”

  “Here you are!” said Mr. Trout triumphantly. “Just you wait! Look at this!” And he pressed the small play arrow on his screen.

  They all looked, and saw a short, uneventful video of Castle Keep and the loch, with the railing of the Trout Queen in the foreground.

  “Very nice,” said David Macdonald.

  Mr. Trout cursed loudly, and his fingers talked to his phone. Obediently it showed him, over and over, the landscape at which its camera had been pointed—but with no sign of Nessie in the picture at all.

  David Macdonald rolled his eyes, and headed for the wheelhouse. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have work to do.”

  “Where’s it gone?” shouted William Trout in fury. “I had its picture, clear as day—where’s it gone?”

  * * *

  Nessie headed for the deep water, great sweeps of his powerful tail driving him south, away from the Trout Queen and Castle Keep. His head was just above the water, his long neck thrust out straight; his legs steered him like the flippers of a seal. The Boggart, invisible, whizzed along in pursuit.

  “That’s enough, cuz! Change back!”

  “But it’s fun!” Nessie called. “I’d forgotten the feel of it! It always was fun!”

  “Change back! You’re a boggart! The Monster shape was to scare the man, and the man wasnae scared!”

  Nessie slowed down. He sighed.

  “You’ll get stuck!” the Boggart yelled.

  “Oh, all right,” Nessie said regretfully, and in an instant his massive body was gone, and he was a boggart again: weightless, formless, invisible, an embodiment only of energy and enchantment and mind.

  He turned a somersault around the Boggart. “That’s an unnatural man,” he said. “I did my best. I scared all of them but him. And he laughed! He was pleased!”

  The Boggart said unhappily, “He made pictures of you with his little camera-thing.”

  “No,” Nessie said. “I saw to that. No more pictures, not since I left my loch, not ever. They can see me, but their camera-things can’t.”

  He turned another somersault, and a small school of pollock swam through him and scattered in alarm. Then he slowed down again, sobered by a thought. “But he wasnae scared,” he said. “How do we scare him away?”

  The Boggart thought hard, and began to glow a little. Though boggarts have very little care for memory over the centuries of their long, long lives, he tried to look back through the years to a distant time that might give him an idea. For an instant, flickering in the depths of his mind, he saw the image of a horse.

  Then it was gone.

  “The Old Things,” he said. “Our people have no clan left, and no army, so we must get help from the other Old Things.”

  Nessie drifted through the water in silence for a moment. “It’s been so long,” he said. “Are they still here?”

  “If we’re here, they are too,” the Boggart said. “We’ll find them. And one of them will help us fight the invading man.”

  He smiled to himself, a small, ominous smile.

  “Maybe he has to meet the Each-Uisge,” he said.

  * * *

  From the store, it had been the twins who first saw the long prehistoric neck rise out of the water, as they gazed disdainfully across the loch at the Trout Queen.

  “Dad! Is that Nessie?”

  “Granda! It’s just like your photograph!”

  “Oh my Lord,” Tom Cameron said. “That’s our Nessie all right, back in monster mode. That’s where they went!”

  “To scare away William Trout,” Granda said. “But will it work?”r />
  And Allie had grabbed her cell phone and taken pictures, over and over again, for as long as the huge prehistoric body was towering there over the boat. Nessie was a long way out on the loch and rather blurry, but he filled the frame, and Allie gazed at the little screen, fascinated.

  But when he had dropped back into the water, and everyone gathered round as Allie played back the photographs and video captured on her phone, there had not been a sign of Nessie in any of them.

  “I guess he didn’t want his picture taken,” said Tom to his disappointed daughter. “The only thing he wanted to do was scare the daylights out of Trout.”

  “He let Granda take his picture,” said Allie sadly.

  “That was in Loch Ness,” Granda said. “And he wants everyone else in the world to think he’s still there.”

  Before long they heard the door of the store crash violently open, and at once William Trout’s big voice was filling the air, calling, insistent.

  “Angus Cameron! I need to talk to Angus Cameron!”

  Portia’s voice said calmly, “He’s not available.”

  “Well, make him available,” said William Trout. “Tell him it’s me.”

  “That will have no effect at all,” Portia said.

  Granda sighed. “She’s a great watchdog,” he said, “but she’ll not be a match for this one. An attack dog, that’s him. And from the sound of him, Nessie’s only managed to make him worse.”

  He went out into the store, where William Trout’s gleaming bald head was brushing against the helium balloons that bobbed along the ceiling, for sale to the smallest tourists. Everyone followed him.

  “Mr. Trout?” said Granda.

  Trout glared at him, exasperation now mixed with a kind of respect. “You knew, didn’t you? The Loch Ness Monster, here in Loch Linnhe! That’s why you want to keep me out! You knew the Monster was here, you knew what a huge success that would be for the resort. Well, you can’t stop me now—I’ve seen him! I’ll tweet it to the world!”

  “Will you now?” said Granda. “And will the world believe you?”

  “Are you joking?” said Mr. Trout with scorn. “When it comes from the Trout? Besides, I have witnesses.”

  “But do you have proof?” Granda said.