Free The Boggart and the Monster by Susan Cooper Page A

own feelings. He hates Nessie being lonely.”
    â€œAnd he wants to do something about it,”
Emily said. Their two earnest heads leaned forward from the back seat, into the gap between Jessup and Mr. Maconochie.
    â€œNnnnnnnn,”
said Mr. Maconochie. It was a kind of growling hum, full of uncertainty.
    Jessup looked at him accusingly.
“You don’t believe me!”
    â€œJessup,”
Mr. Maconochie said.
“I believe in your dream and I certainly believe in your Boggart — our Boggart. It just seems to me that the dream must have come from your imagination.”
    â€œMaybe he’ll give you a dream,”
Emily said.
    Tommy shook his head.
“No. Mr. Mac would just think his own imagination was making it up.”
    Mr. Maconochie turned into the little gravel-topped parking area beside the long metallic rectangle of the Kalling-Pindle Project.
“Oh dear,”
he said.
“Boggarts and monsters and messages in dreams. This is a sore test for an elderly member of the legal profession.”
    â€œThe Boggart has to find special ways of talking to us,”
Emily said insistently.
“He always has. He’s very bad at spoken words, he can only manage a few at a time.”
    Jessup had fallen silent. He was looking at Harold Pindle, who was coming down the steps of the research trailer with a stranger, a small man with a lot of white hair.
“What do we do about Harold?”
he said glumly.
“He’s so set on proving Nessie is a plesiosaur. What’s he going to do when he finds it’s not true?”
    *  *  *
    T HE BOGGART WAS SLOWLY circling Nessie’s massive sleeping body, like an invisible coronet of floating weed.
“
Nessie, wake up. Come on now, you’re not really asleep, you’ve had enough sleep for sixteen boggarts, these last few centuries.
”
    Nessie opened one eye and regarded him mournfully
“
They blew up my castle,
”
he said.
“
My family went away.
”
    â€œ
That was three hundred years ago!
”
the Boggart said.
“
And anyway I’m your family.
”
    â€œ
You are. I’m sorry, cuz.
”
Penitent, Nessie raised his long neck and, with a huge effort, tried to shift his shape from solid monster to insubstantial boggart. It took great effort, and he was lamentably out of practice. First he shrank to a thin monster, like a large aquatic giraffe; then a very small one, like a plastic dinosaur from a cereal package. At last he managed to dwindle completely away, reappearing — to the Boggart at least — as the iridescent flicker of energy that was his natural invisible form.
    They turned somersaults around each other in the murky water, and the whirling current made by their somersaults rose to the surface and completely turned around the little boat in which Jenny, wearing a baseball cap, was sculling across the lake. Jenny had rowed in the MIT lightweight women’s crew when she was a student, and liked to keep in practice wherever she was. She rested on her oars and stared in astonishment at the wooded shore of the lake, which she had been approaching but which she now seemed to be leaving behind.
    Nessie and the Boggart, surfacing, watched her with satisfaction, and swam cheerfully away.
    The Boggart turned into a seal, and made a figure-eight dive.
    â€œ
Don’t do that!
”
said Nessie plaintively, as he surfaced again.
“
You make me feel so stupid.
”
    The Boggart turned back into a boggart. He said with longing,
“
We could have such fun, if you’d only learn how again. We could go all the way to Loch Linnhe and Castle Keep — my castle wasn’t blown up. We could live there and tease my family, and play with the seals.
”
    â€œ
I cannae stay boggart-shape long enough,
”
Nessie said.
    â€œ
You could swim all the way there, now. They made a canal to join the lochs a hundred years ago — you can swim from Loch Ness to the