The Boggart

by Susan Cooper

  The door facing him at the end of the corridor was thick and ancient; it had no lock, but was held shut by a huge wooden bar set across it in two rests. In his rage, the Boggart lashed at the bar with a spell he had forgotten he knew, and it leaped out of the rests and crashed to the floor, leaving the great door to swing slowly open. In an instant the Boggart was through it — and high in the sun-warmed air, for this door was one of the safety barriers shutting off the ruined half of the castle, and beyond it was only a broken stone staircase ending in space.

  The Boggart flickered crossly through the air, twitching a tail feather from a passing sea gull, which squawked resentfully. Then he dived down to the rocks to bother the seals.

  In the library, the adults were at the far end of the room admiring Mr. MacDevon’s astrolabe, but Emily heard the crash of the falling bar through the beat of Jessup’s music. She ran out into the corridor, dazzled by the bright light that now filled it — and gasped in terror as she skidded up against the fallen beam lying in her way. She would have toppled over it to the broken staircase below if Tommy, following, had not managed to grab her from behind.

  He yelled angrily into the sky beyond her, “You stupid idiot!” Dazed, Emily knew she was not the person he was yelling at, but she couldn’t imagine who else it could be. Tommy let her go hastily, embarrassed to find himself still clutching her arm. He said, “You all right?”

  “Sure,” Emily said shakily. “Thank you.”

  It took the combined strength of Robert, Maggie, Mr. Maconochie and all three children to get the wooden beam back in position, barring the perilous door. None of them actually spoke aloud their mind-shaking speculation over how on earth it could have been released in the first place. In their parents’ pale startled faces, as they looked out at the gaping hole before the door closed it again, Emily and Jessup saw the end of any reluctance to sell Castle Keep.

  “YOU CAN HAVE one thing, to remind you,” Maggie said. “One each. But it’s got to be something that will go through the door at home.”

  She was brisk in sweater, jeans and a kind of smock, looking like a dusty painter, with her hair tied back by a scarf, and a clipboard in her hand. In the company of Mr. Maconochie, who seemed far more relaxed now in corduroys and an ancient sports coat, she was touring the castle and choosing some of the more manageable pieces of furniture to be shipped to Toronto.

  Emily said promptly, “The little desk.”

  In a corner of the MacDevon’s library she had found a rolltop desk even more alluring than the one carried off by the dark impatient customer in her mother’s shop.

  Maggie laughed. “I thought so. Okay, it’s yours. Jessup?”

  “That table in our bedroom,” Jessup said. “Under my computer it’ll look magnificent.”

  “But it’s a washstand,” said Maggie. “A nineteenth-century washstand. It was meant to have a jug and a basin standing on it, in the days before bathrooms.”

  “Well,” said Jessup placidly, “now it’s going to have a computer.”

  Emily said, “Can we put a few of the books into my desk?” She knew Mr. Maconochie was arranging to have an Edinburgh bookseller come and inspect the contents of the MacDevon’s library.

  “Six, maximum. Packed so they won’t bounce around.”

  “All right!” said Emily happily.

  THE BOGGART spent three days down on the seal rocks. Sometimes he would take the shape of a fish, and disappear just as a hungry seal tried to gulp him down; sometimes he would sit on the weed-covered rock and give an emerging seal just enough of a push to send it sliding back into the sea. He had an excellent time, and the seals, amiable, patient creatures, tolerated his antics with resignation. For them the Boggart was like the rocks or the ocean; he had always been there.

  Satisfied, the Boggart flittered back into Castle Keep while everyone slept. In the pantry he helped himself to an orange, which he ate skin and all, and a hunk of cheese. He drank the top three inches from a carton of milk. He floated silently into the children’s bedroom, where Emily and Jessup lay curled up in their sleeping bags at either side of an enormous four-poster bed, and he tied together the laces of Emily’s sneakers and hid all Jessup’s socks in Emily’s duffel bag. He loved the extra edge of being able to play tricks on two people at once, so that they could blame each other.

  He ignored Maggie and Robert, since their door was closed, and with a sigh of home-coming contentment he flittered into the library. A silver bar of moonlight shone through one of the narrow windows and fell upon a book of poetry, lying on the open top of the rolltop desk. It was the last of the six books chosen by Emily and Jessup, which ranged from a centuries-old volume by King James I called Daemonologie to a sturdy History of the Clans of the Western Highlands, and it was full of Scottish ballads.

  The Boggart was very partial to poetry, especially ballads. Over the years he had done a lot of reading, and even some tuneless private singing, in the library of the MacDevon family. He sat on the desk top, reading, entranced, until the shaft of moonlight moved sideways and fell away from the book, leaving it in the dark. Then suddenly he felt so agreeably tired that instead of flittering up to his usual high refuge, he crept into one of the inner compartments of the rolltop desk and fell asleep.

  And so he was still there the next morning, sleeping soundly, when Emily came in and packed all six books in there with him, wedging them with crumpled newspaper, turning the iron key to lock them inside the desk to be shipped to Toronto.

  FIVE

  JESSUP WAS A founder-member of the Gang of Five, a group of computer freaks. That was the phrase that had begun it, in an advertisement in the school newspaper: COMPUTER FREAKS UNITE! And then in smaller letters: “Anyone who lives in the Annex and is starved for computalk, write to Box 142.”

  The Annex was the area of Toronto in which the Volniks lived. Box 142 had been Jessup, then aged nine, who had fallen in love with his father’s computer at seven years old, inherited it at eight, and been communicating with it ever since in languages which none of his family could understand. He was said to have the IQ of a genius, but since this only showed itself in his mathematical relationship with the computer, nobody — including Jessup — paid it much attention. As far as Emily was concerned he was a normal pestiferous little brother, who happened to have some rather weird friends.

  Two of these were gathered with Jessup now in his room, around his computer: Chris, a square, overweight eleven-year-old who in spite of his size was an amazingly agile goalie on Jessup’s school hockey team, and Yung Hee, a small, exquisite and rather silent Korean-Canadian who at thirteen was already taking classes at the University of Toronto. The two other members of the Gang of Five were Raju, a slender twelve-year-old from Trinidad who had been carried off to England for a year by his academic parents, and Barry, a sixteen-year-old high school dropout from an alarmingly old and wealthy Toronto family. Barry described himself as a consultant auto mechanic, and was not welcome in the Volnik household because Maggie suspected him of dealing drugs. “He’s too old for you,” she would say disapprovingly to Jessup. Emily’s private opinion was that Barry looked permanently spaced-out not because he was stoned but because he was naturally weird. They all were, all the Gang of Five.

  She stood in the open doorway, listening to the usual incomprehensible conversation.

  “It runs at fifty megahertz; it’s got a one gigabyte SCSI hard drive, a twenty-four Bit, eight megabyte graphics accelerator, and a thirty-four-inch color monitor.”

  “Wow!”

  “How much?”

  “About ten grand.”

  “I’d rather have a work station. . . .”

  It was a Friday evening, and Emily had just come home from her father’s theater. She had dropped in after school to see her friend Dai, the wardrobe master, who was deep in the designs for a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline but had promised to dress Emily as a truly amazing vampire for Halloween. Though Halloween was still some way off, Emily was
getting nervous.

  “Jessup?” she said.

  “Uh,” said her brother. His eyes were on the computer screen, and his fingers darting over its keyboard.

  “Are you guys still doing Halloween?”

  The Gang of Five had planned to dress up as characters from the new computer game they were designing. Emily’s vampire was one of them too.

  “Sure we are,” Chris said.

  “D’you have costumes yet?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Em,” Jessup said, preoccupied. He pressed the keys, and a rocket shot across the screen and vaporized an asteroid.

  “You don’t have long.”

  “My mom’s doing them,” Chris said. He was staring at the screen too. “That’s command zero, Jess.”

  “Command oh-six.”

  “Really?”

  “Command six-two,” Yung Hee said, in her soft musical voice.

  Emily gave up, and went downstairs to feed the cat. This looked like being a night to send out for pizza. Maggie worked late at the shop every Friday, and at the theater Emily had left her father besieged by people trying to solve the technical troubles of a new play set in the Arctic. Apparently the fake snow kept blowing from the stage into the auditorium, and making the audience sneeze. Robert would be home late again.

  In the kitchen, small black Polly rubbed herself around Emily’s legs, purring like a helicopter. There was a sudden ferocious bang at the front door, followed by the sound of the door opening and a cheerful shout. “Em! Let’s ’ave yer!” Emily, put down the cat dish and grinned. That was Ron, one of the two drivers her mother hired whenever furniture had to be transported from house to shop, or shop to customer. He was large and cheery and newly immigrated from London, and nobody could understand more than half the things he said.

  Ron loomed in the doorway, beaming at her, his muscles bulging out of a thin undershirt in spite of the cool air of October. “Got some furniture for you, me love! Straight from Scotland — full a’ porridge, by the feel of it!”

  “Oh!” said Emily. Everyday life had swallowed them so completely since they came back from Scotland that she had forgotten all about the furniture from Castle Keep — and even the castle itself. She had sent Tommy a postcard of Toronto the day after they came home, and he had sent her one with a picture of a seal, which was pinned up on her bulletin board between a Wilderness Society decal and an old photograph of Jessup and herself throwing snow at each other, laughing. . . . But Appin seemed another world, distant and magical and different. Suddenly now it blossomed in her mind, the grey sea and misted mountains, and the dark romantic shape of Castle Keep, and she was filled with excitement that a real piece of it would soon be in her room.

  The members of the Gang of Five begrudgingly paused in the development of their computer game while Ron and his equally large friend Jim steered Jessup’s Scottish table — or washstand — up the narrow stairs to the third floor.

  “Up the apples!” sang Ron. “Mind y’ backs, boys!” He hoisted the table over the banister.

  “Apples?” said Chris.

  “Apples and pears,” Emily said promptly. “That means stairs. It rhymes. Use your loaf.”

  Chris stared at her. Emily giggled. She and Jessup had adopted Ron’s Cockney rhyming slang with such delight, when their mother first hired him, that Robert had started fining them five cents for every unintelligible word used in family conversation.

  “Loaf means loaf of bread. Which means head.”

  “Gobbledegook,” Chris said.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Emily. “How do you think computalk sounds to normal people?”

  “All right, Em me old china,” said Ron. “Where d’you want the desk?”

  “In here!” She ran eagerly to clear a space in her bedroom, while the two big men clattered down the stairs. They came back in an oddly erratic course, rocking from side to side of the staircase.

  “Watch it, Jim!”

  “Keep it steady, then!”

  “Whoops —” Ron grabbed one corner of the desk as it threatened to gouge a hole in the wall. “Gorblimey,” he said. “Talk about the end of a perfect day! It’s been crazy, bringing this stuff over. Traffic lights going dead, cars stopping right under our wheels — never known nothin’ like it. Thank Gawd this one’s the last.” He dropped his end of the desk — and Jim roared, as it lurched sideways onto his foot.

  “Stone me,” said Ron in disgust. “It’s bewitched. Sorry, mate.”

  They left, muttering, and Emily surveyed her desk proudly. It looked very pretty, set between the tall bookcase and the door opposite her bed. She unhooked the little key that had been hanging all this time from a thumbtack on her bulletin board, above Tommy’s postcard, and she unlocked the desk and rolled back its graceful wooden top.

  And the Boggart, who had slept for two months and woken to find himself in a small dark space surrounded by lurching books, came flittering resentfully out into the air of Canada.

  JESSUP STARED in pained astonishment at the paper tray on the kitchen table. “Who took the last slice of pizza?”

  “Not me,” said Emily.

  “Not me,” said Chris with his mouth full.

  Emily took a swig from her glass of milk. “It was you, Jess. The computer’s sucked out your brain.”

  “But it was there just a second ago,” Jessup said. He looked up from the tray, confused. “Wasn’t it?”

  The Boggart sat on the shelf above the gas stove, among the pots and pans, chewing ecstatically. What was this wonderful, extraordinary new dish? He had always loved cheese, but this was delicious beyond belief, a quintessence of cheese. And mingled with it were several other alluring tastes, savory, delectable. His horrified resentment of the strange new world in which he found himself began to change into a cautious wondering.

  He finished the stolen piece of pizza, looked around unsuccessfully for more, and flittered down to drink from Emily’s glass of milk. This was an extra treat; the MacDevon had drunk only tea, which the Boggart found uninteresting.

  Emily stomped on the pizza box and thrust it into the garbage bin. Turning back to the table, she saw her glass, now empty. She stared for a moment, then looked at Jessup. “Oh, very funny” she said.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I’m supposed to say, Who drank the rest of my milk? — so you can say Not me.”

  “I should think I would,” said Jessup with energy. “Drink your milk? Guck! What a disgusting idea.”

  Emily looked uncertainly from him to Chris to the empty glass, and hesitated. Up on his shelf, the Boggart chuckled silently to himself.

  “Ice cream,” Jessup said briskly. He went to the refrigerator and opened the freezer compartment, standing on tiptoe to peer in. “There’s vanilla, chocolate or butter crunch. Chris?”

  The Boggart’s eyes grew round.

  Chris said hopefully, “Got any fudge sauce?”

  Jessup opened the main door of the refrigerator, took out a jar and handed it wordlessly to Emily. Chris beamed. “Vanilla, please,” he said.

  “And chocolate for Em, and butter crunch for me.” Jessup withdrew from the freezer with an armful of large ice-cream tubs. Emily unscrewed the cap of the fudge sauce jar, set the jar in the microwave oven and punched several buttons. The microwave produced a humming whir for a little while, ending with a loud chirrup and three bleeps, and the Boggart’s eyes grew rounder still. By the time he saw three dishes of ice cream put on the table, all different colors, with shining dark sauce topping each like a glossy hat, his mouth was watering so hard it was all he could do not to snatch one of the dishes out of Jessup’s hand. Instead, while they were all busy eating, he flittered down and stole the fudge sauce jar, which still had an inch or so of sauce inside. He was about to help himself to a handful of ice cream as well when Emily suddenly noticed that the three tubs were still there on the table, in the warm room, and she whisked them back into the freezer.

  The Boggart watched sadly as they
disappeared. He had seen a refrigerator before, in the Camerons’ store; he knew it to be a box with a metal door, which no boggart could open. But the first taste of the fudge sauce sent all longing memories of ice cream right out of his head. What was this? The smooth chocolatey sweetness was like an explosion of delight in his mouth. He ate by putting his small hand into the jar and scooping up a little at a time, slowly, happily, licking the sticky dark sauce lingeringly off each long finger. He was in love. He had forgotten all about Castle Keep. The astounding luscious taste of fudge sauce made him feel that this odd new world in which he found himself just might be heaven.

  Emily said, “I don’t believe this. Where’s the jar of fudge sauce gone?”

  THE BOGGART began his tricks gently. Over his centuries of mischief, he had learned not to rush things. The temptation was, of course, to dive into someone’s life like a puppy running rampage in a tidy room; to turn everything upside down, all at once, in a great gleeful eruption of trickery. But that was like gobbling a whole bag of candy in five minutes. In the long run, there was much more fun to be had by taking your time.

  So in a leisurely, temperate way, he started by hiding things. Robert left his razor on the bathroom window sill as usual after his morning shave, came back next morning and reached for it sleepily — and found it gone. He turned the whole bathroom upside down in a furious unsuccessful search, and only when he was frustrated, cross and late for an appointment did Maggie come across the razor quite by accident in the bedroom.

  Where did you find it?

  On your bedside table.

  What the hellwasit doing there?

  I guess you put it there, honey. . . .

  And the Boggart sat there listening, smiling. He would not play another trick on Robert until he had similarly removed Emily’s algebra book from her bedroom desk to the kitchen vegetable rack, Maggie’s favorite hat from the hallway coatrack to the upstairs linen cupboard, and Jessup’s hockey stick to the basement laundry room. And in a careful patterning these tricks would be interspersed with others.