The Boggart

by Susan Cooper

  Then at the peak of the noise it was gone, vanished, and the light died with it, leaving the theater silent and dark.

  TEN

  A GLIMMER OF LIGHT came into the back of the dark theater, as someone opened the little hidden door near the light booth. Emily turned to look. In the bright oblong she saw the outline of Willie’s figure, and heard him say softly, “Emily? Jessup?”

  They shook themselves out of the spell of emotion, and scurried up the aisle toward him. As they went out, Robert’s voice came sharply after them. “Emily? Is that you?”

  Emily shut the voice behind the door, and ran down the stairs with Jessup and Willie following. Nobody came after them. Too many other problems, Emily thought. She pushed open the outside door and paused in the tree-lined street. A flurry of falling leaves whirled around her head.

  Just before Willie let the door swing back behind them, the Boggart came flittering out and settled, unseen, unheard, on Jessup’s shoulder.

  Willie took a deep breath, and shook his head as if to get rid of what was inside it. “Poor unhappy creature!” he said. “What a terrible sadness!”

  Relief flooded through Emily’s head. “You mean that was him too? I knew the lights were, but I was afraid —”

  “You were afraid it was in your own mind, I dare say” said Willie, looking at her keenly. “Well, it was not.” He was a strange figure, with his costume hidden under an overcoat but his grey hair wild and flowing, and his eyes darkly outlined with makeup in an orange-brown face. He glanced back reluctantly at the theater. “I can’t leave, but you must go home, straight home. He’ll go with you — he’s a family fellow. Call me tonight — I’ll try to work out what to do. This mannie is so strong, and so far out of his element, there’s no knowing what he may get up to if he’s not checked.”

  Jessup said nervously, “He gets up to things at home too.”

  “But smaller things,” Willie said. “That’s the scale he’s used to, that’s where he belongs. He surely doesn’t belong in a theater light board.”

  “Wasn’t that marvelous?” Emily was filled with wonder again as she remembered the magical shifting lights on the stage.

  “Remember it,” Willie said. “You’ll never see the like again.” He patted her shoulder, ruffled Jessup’s hair and went back into the theater.

  The Boggart had not listened to a word they said, and he had only a vague dwindling memory of the ferocious grief which had poured out of him minutes before. The weather changed very fast, in his odd boggart heart. He was busy watching a pair of city pigeons in the gutter, and wondering how best to creep up on them and tweak their tail feathers. The trickster was back at doing what he did best, and with most pleasure: inventing tricks.

  “Come on,” Emily said to Jessup. She set off very fast down the street, and around the corner into the streets where the houses were, with their cherished small front gardens. They passed one still bright with yellow chrysanthemums; another neatly arrayed with late vegetables, set out in decorative precision as if they were flowers. The Boggart flittered down and stole a Brussels sprout, then went back to Jessup’s shoulder and sat there nibbling it, raw. He had not seen very much of Toronto, but his favorite parts were those where people clearly had homes, rather than enormous piles of concrete like inferior copies of cliffs.

  Emily and Jessup turned another corner. “You think Mom will be back?” Jessup said.

  “Oh glory,” Emily said. She walked more slowly, as her head filled with all the images of flying furniture in her mother’s shop. “What are we going to tell her?”

  “It’s more what she’ll tell us,” Jessup said.

  Emily said despondently, “They’ll never believe us, either of them.”

  “Well, Dad saw those light effects. And felt that . . . that whatever it was. The sadness.”

  “They’ll have some really sensible explanation,” Emily said wearily. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and looked around her. “Where are you, Boggart?” she demanded.

  The Boggart, hearing his name, looked at her thoughtfully from Jessup’s shoulder. These children were singularly poorly educated, compared to children of an earlier age. Had nobody ever told them that boggarts do not speak to human beings?

  Emily said, “If we could just talk to him!”

  “He likes food,” Jessup said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The peanut-butter sandwich, the jar of fudge sauce — the sausage Dad said I took off his plate last Sunday morning. Those were all him, I bet you. He’s greedy. I think we should go into Bund’s and buy him some ice cream.”

  The Boggart beamed, and licked his lips.

  Emily hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. It’s worth trying.” She searched her pockets, and found some crumpled dollar bills. “All right, Boggart,” she said to the air. “Now you get to choose whether you want butter pecan or black raspberry. But you’ll have to tell us.”

  They ran down the road and around another corner, the Boggart clinging to Jessup’s collar, and in a little while they came to a major thoroughfare. The Boggart flinched, and clung tighter. It was the first main road he had seen, close up, and he was amazed by the roaring traffic, the crowds of people, the noise and the flashing lights. He stared at the neon scrawled brilliant over the window of the ice-cream shop as they went in; he gazed down in greedy astonishment at the tubs of eighteen different flavors of ice cream. And before anyone could ask him, silently and invisibly he sent the hand and scoop of the girl behind the counter to the tub of his favorite, vanilla ice cream.

  Emily saw the girl looking uncertainly at her own hand as it served out the ice cream, and she said swiftly, “And one mint chocolate chip and one coffee.”

  “You did say vanilla?” the girl said, dazed.

  “Sure,” Emily said kindly and untruthfully. She was beginning to feel that as a ruse for making the Boggart show himself, this was not going to work.

  They took their three dishes of ice cream to a table like a tall mushroom, at which they stood. Bund’s was a shop with many customers and not much space. “There you go, Boggart,” Emily said, and she put the vanilla ice cream in the middle of the table. She and Jessup watched it closely as they spooned up their own, but nothing happened. Instead, the neon sign in the window reading BUND’S ICE CREAM began to flash, off and on, off and on, in time to the rock music which filled the air. Like everyone else in the shop, Emily and Jessup stared at it. There was no way of telling whether the flashing was accidental or deliberate, though it was undoubtedly happening to the same beat as the music.

  When Emily looked back at the table, the dish of vanilla ice cream was empty. She thought she saw the very last mouthful disappear, as if it had evaporated.

  Jessup was looking too. He said belligerently to the invisible Boggart, “Well, was it good?”

  “Delicious, thank you,” said an old lady standing at the next table, a spoonful of strawberry ice cream about to disappear into her mouth. She smiled at him. “How sweet of you to ask!”

  Jessup tried to spread a sickly insincere grin over his face, but he never had to finish it, because at that point the lights went out. Then they came back, then flickered out again. The neon sign in the shop window was still flashing to the music. And beyond it, outside, suddenly the darkening street seemed to be filled with blue fire. They heard muffled shouts and screams.

  “What’s he doing?” Jessup said, appalled. He glimpsed the dismay on Emily’s face, and then they were both diving for the door.

  From his perch on the table, the Boggart had noticed the streetcar wires over the street. Realizing that they must carry the same magical power that seemed to make everything work in this city, he saw an irresistible chance to play tricks on all the people in those streetcars. Out he went, joyously, and flittered up to a wire junction, and he began playing with the power in the wires just as he had played with the channels in the Volniks’ television set. He cut off the power from one car just as it reached the center
of an intersection; sent another one humming down the street even though the startled driver was trying to stop; dived back to the first to give it power again just as the second car seemed about to crash into it. An old man at the back of the first streetcar fainted. People watching in the streets screamed. Electricity danced along the wires like blue lightning.

  The Boggart laughed like a delighted small child, and looked around for another kind of game. The traffic lights caught his eye.

  Below him in the street, among the panicking crowds, Emily and Jessup looked wildly about them for some sign of where the Boggart might be. “He can’t be far!” Emily said, frantic. “He always stays near you or me! Oh, Willie was right — we should have gone straight home —”

  “Boggart!” Jessup yelled, spinning around, looking upward. “Boggart, stop it!”

  “You stay here — I’ll try the other side —” And as the pedestrian signal changed to WALK Emily darted to join a group of people crossing the road.

  But the Boggart was playing with the traffic lights, and though the WALK signal had changed, the green light for traffic had turned not to red but to a delicate turquoise blue. So the traffic didn’t stop. There was a desperate honking of horns, a squealing of brakes; voices screamed, glass shattered, metal crashed into concrete. Jessup swung around in horror and saw that a car had crumpled its fender against a lamppost, and that two people lay unmoving in the road, and that one of them was Emily.

  EMILY LAY looking up at the hospital ceiling, thinking about ice cream. How had the Boggart managed to eat it, without a spoon? With his hand? Did he have hands? If you couldn’t feel or see or hear him, how could he be solid enough to swallow the ice cream? Not to mention all the other things he liked to eat or drink. Where did they go? Did the Boggart have to go to the bathroom? Did he wear clothes? Why was he a he, and not a she? Were there such things as she-boggarts? Did boggarts produce little boggarts, or did they just live forever, so that little boggarts weren’t necessary?

  More important than any of this, where was the Boggart now? Had he gone with Jessup, or was he lurking somewhere in this small square room, with the cream-colored walls, the hanging television sets and the empty, neatly made second bed?

  Emily sighed, tried to turn over, and remembered she couldn’t. Her leg was propped up in a cast, since she had broken an ankle. Her head ached, where she had banged it on the ground; her side ached where she had somehow cracked a rib; her hip and thigh ached where, the doctor said, she was going to have a truly spectacular bruise. She had wakened in the rocking ambulance, to the sound of a siren and the sight of a large efficient paramedic and a wide-eyed, damp-cheeked Jessup. Then there had been a lot of people and questions and prodding, and X rays from assorted angles, and now here she was in the hospital for two days, though she would rather have been at home. Robert and Maggie had hovered over her with tense, worried faces, and raised no objection when the doctor murmured to them about “keeping an eye on her, just in case.”

  There was a soft knock at the door, and a tall, dark-haired man in a white coat came in, with a stethoscope dangling from his neck. Emily squinted at him over the sheet. This wasn’t the doctor she had seen before.

  “How are you, Emily?” he said.

  Emily stiffened, in surprise and dislike. It was the creep.

  “Dr. Stigmore,” he said, smiling at her. She didn’t trust the smile. He pulled the room’s one chair from its corner and sat down beside her bed. “Sorry to hear about your accident. How d’you feel?”

  “I’m okay” Emily said.

  “I was checking a couple of my patients, so I told your mother I’d stop by. Taking good care of you, are they?”

  “Fine.” She yawned, hoping he would go away. But he settled back comfortably in the chair.

  “Well,” he said, “things certainly get pretty active wherever you happen to be, don’t they?”

  “It was just a traffic accident,” Emily said cautiously.

  “And of course you were in the street, so there weren’t any chairs flying around.”

  “No,” Emily said.

  Dr. Stigmore laughed, a little too loudly. “I never saw anything so amazing! Lucky there wasn’t more damage — that shop’s full of breakable goods. I hear you’ve had a bunch of things like that happening at home recently too.”

  “Not really,” Emily said.

  “No?” He leaned forward, less casual now. “The chair flying out the window at Halloween? And a bookcase, and books? And before that, things disappearing, and turning up in the wrong place?”

  Emily tugged the bedclothes around her chin, wishing she could slide down and vanish underneath them. She said vaguely, “Oh well . . . ”

  Dr. Stigmore checked himself, as if he were trying not to sound too eager. He said, “You know, Emily, growing up isn’t easy, not for anyone. Maybe you’ve been having a tough time recently — getting angry at life. Especially at your mother. It’s quite normal, you know, you don’t have to feel guilty about it.”

  “I don’t feel guilty about anything!” said Emily who had hardly ever exchanged a cross word with Maggie until the Boggart arrived.

  He patted her blanket-wrapped shoulder. “Of course not. None of this is your fault. It’s just that all those angry feelings can produce a lot of energy especially if you keep them hidden away. And the energy has to go somewhere, so sometimes it bursts out in ways we don’t expect, and can’t control. Not to worry — it won’t be hard to put things right.”

  Emily lay very still. She was just beginning to realize that she was hearing an explanation for boggart behavior invented by someone who didn’t believe in boggarts.

  “We’ll start having some long talks when you’re up on your feet again,” Dr. Stigmore said. He crinkled his eyes at her reassuringly. “Once we get rid of those feelings of yours, the trouble will go away.”

  Emily gazed at him icily. “You think I’m making the chairs fly about, and all that stuff?”

  He went on smiling his professional smile. “Not to worry,” he said again. “This is a fascinating case — you’re a very important person. And I assure you nobody is blaming you for anything.”

  “I don’t want any long talks,” Emily said.

  “It’ll be much better than feeling angry, Emily,” said Dr. Stigmore. His smile began to fade; a note of irritation was creeping into his voice.

  Under the bedclothes, Emily’s fingers crept toward the little electric signal button that one of the nurses had given her. “Just press this if you need anything, and we’ll be right in.” She pressed the button.

  “You can’t make me talk to you,” she said.

  “You mustn’t let yourself get angry with me too, Emily,” Dr. Stigmore said. “Your parents are very worried, they’ve asked me to take on your case. And I’m going to do that.”

  Emily lay there feeling panic come into her mind like a rising tide. What was he talking about? She wasn’t a case, she was a person, with a problem called Boggart. And so was Jessup.

  “I shall be having some nice chats with your brother too,” said Dr. Stigmore, as if he were reading her thoughts.

  Emily’s favorite nurse came bustling in, a round-faced, motherly woman with an Irish accent. She paused when she saw Dr. Stigmore, and looked at him warily.

  “Good evening, nurse,” he said, with an ingratiating smile. “I’m Dr. Stigmore from the Psychiatric Unit. Emily’s a friend of mine.”

  The nurse looked at Emily.

  “My head hurts, nurse,” Emily said plaintively. “It throbs when anyone makes a noise.”

  The nurse looked back at Dr. Stigmore, with an expression that said more clearly than words, Out!

  He stood up hurriedly. “Well, I must be off. I’ll see you soon, Emily.”

  “Is he really a friend of yours?” said the nurse, plumping Emily’s pillow as the door closed.

  “No,” Emily said.

  “Doctors!” said the nurse witheringly. “You don’t need a shrink, you nee
d a good night’s sleep.”

  JESSUP WAS in bed, but he was not sleeping. He tossed to and fro, his mind jangling. The worry about Emily had grown less, once the doctor had reassured them — several times — that her only injuries were bruises, the broken ankle and the cracked rib. His larger worry, still growing, was the Boggart. Where was he? What would he do next? What would happen if he got into the subway, or an airplane — or a nuclear reactor? Jessup clung desperately to the memory of Willie saying, “He’ll go with you — he’s a family fellow.” But what were they to do, with this creature let loose in a world where all his innocent tricks became disasters?

  Like the irritating buzz of a fly, his mind kept showing him the image of the Boggart’s dish of ice cream that afternoon. A little white mound of vanilla ice cream, gobbled up so fast that it was there one minute, gone the next. He tried to push the picture away — and then suddenly he knew why it was there. His mind was using it to jog him into remembering something else, something further away, back in Scotland. He remembered Tommy Cameron, in the kitchen of Castle Keep, talking about the MacDevon, after Emily had noticed he had no refrigerator, but only a pantry.

  Iguess Mr. MacDevon didn’t buy ice cream.

  He did too, once in a while. . . . He was veryfond of vanilla ice cream, and sowas the dog.

  Only Tommy hadn’t said “the dog” at first, not until after Jessup had jumped on the strange thing he had said instead.

  He was very fond of vanilla ice cream, and so was the Bog —

  The Boggart.

  Tommy Cameron knew about the Boggart.

  Jessup looked at his clock radio. It was two-fifteen in the morning. He had heard the murmur of talk until late, but his parents had been silent and presumably asleep for more than an hour now. He had pretended to be asleep himself the last couple of times they had looked in.

  He lay wakeful and excited now, thinking about how to talk to Tommy Cameron.