The Boggart and the Monster (11 page)

N
ESSIE REARED UP
over the lake, enormous, terrifying. He was an astonishing sight. His neck and head towered over the nearest of the approaching research boats, taller than a tall tree, and the top of his great body rose out of the water like the side of an ocean liner. For anyone close enough, there was a strong smell of fish and seaweed, like the low-tide stink of a muddy beach.

On the bank, amongst shrieking, pointing tourists and their children, Angus Cameron ecstatically juggled his cameras, taking picture after picture, zooming in on a sight he had never believed it possible for anyone to see. He had switched to his video camera, filling the frame with a wonderful close-up of the huge head and neck, when Nessie opened his mouth, showing rows of alarmingly pointed long teeth, and uttered a shattering bellow like the grunting roar of an angry hippopotamus. While Angus watched and filmed in breathless delight, the Monster moved threateningly toward the
approaching line of research boats, and their pattern changed. The nearest boats broke away, fleeing in panic, tossing on the swells that rolled over the lake from the angry churning of Nessie's massive tail. Only Harold Pindle's bigger research vessel, further away, held its course.

The Boggart, changed back now to his own invisible formless self, flittered agitatedly over the choppy grey water, close to his huge cousin's waving neck. For the moment, there was nothing he could do. Like Nessie he had felt in an instant the overwhelming effect of the car accident, the sudden total loss of the support that had been giving confidence and form to the little swimming grey seal. Like Nessie, he didn't know about the car accident itself. He had only felt Nessie's utter panic, and known the inevitability of the disastrous second in which he switched back again into monster shape, rearing up over the surface of the loch.

He hovered around the dripping hole that was one of Nessie's ears, and hissed at it.
“
Dive!
”
he whispered.
“
Dive, cuz!
”

And Nessie, bewildered and lost as an enormous child, lifted his head with one more anguished, helpless bellow and then bent his neck and dived, with a sweep of his powerful flippers, into the deep cold water of Loch Ness.

The Boggart, reluctantly, dived after him.

Up in his research boat, Harold Pindle was almost speechless with delight, the happiest man in Scotland. He had found his Monster, he had seen it, filmed it, photographed it. He danced a little jig with Jenny; he
shouted into the intercom microphone that linked him with the scattered gaggle of smaller boats.
“Come back here, you chickens! The eighth wonder of the world and you run away from it! Sonar One, Sonar Two, Sonar Three, get back in line!”

Kevin's voice crackled out of the speaker, its Irish accent strengthened by indignation.
“Sonar Three, Sonar Three — it's all very well for you in your great hulking boat! Try being a little feller, tossed about out here and like to be swamped or swallowed!”

Harold snorted unrepentantly.
“Stand by, chickens! We're going after him, I'm launching ROV One! Stand by, Sonar Three, stand by, One and Two — the rest of you keep on going!”
He strode over to a hatchway and yelled out to the deck.
“Chuck! Launch Sydney — now!”

Chuck was standing tense and watchful in the stern, where the gleaming yellow form of Sydney the Remotely Operated Vehicle was rigged and ready, hanging from the arms of a davit over the water. He pressed a lever, and Sydney splashed into the loch and disappeared, while a winch paid out a long flexible wire behind him.

Jenny sat pressing switches and buttons, eagerly. In the bank of screens before her, a green square sprang into life, speckled by blips that were the fleeing fish startled by Sydney's sudden arrival.

“Come on, Sydney!”
said Harold, watching the screen greedily.
“Fetch! Fetch!”

Up on the road, Mr. Maconochie and Bobby King were scribbling on little scraps of paper, exchanging
names and addresses, and whatever other details they felt their insurance companies would demand before agreeing to repair the damage to the two cars. Emily, Jessup, Tommy and Miss Urquhart were paying no attention at all. Escaping the kindly ministrations of helpful passers-by, they slipped away one by one to stand on the grassy roadside bank in sight of the loch, staring out at the water, trying to will Nessie the strength to get out of his monster shape.

But Nessie was far below them, two hundred feet down, on his way to the muddy bottom of the loch. He moved blindly, in instinctive retreat, and the Boggart whirled around him like a small agitated invisible fish, trying without success to attract his attention. Even boggart-speech failed. Nessie was in shock, and for the time being his troubled mind was out of reach.

But at the same time, he was being pursued. Looking up, the Boggart could see the glimmer of Sydney's metallic frame dropping slowly toward them through the dark water. He paused, suspicious, and flittered up through the water to investigate. What was this thing that was following Nessie? How could it see him? In this deep water there was no light at all, and fish and boggarts saw the world around them either by the light of a phosphorescence they generated themselves, or by using senses other than sight. Did Sydney have other senses? What were they?

The Boggart began to glow faintly, from the unusual effort of rational thought — something boggarts are not fond of, under normal circumstances. He turned himself into a treacly liquid, denser than water, and
flowed all over Sydney's frame, investigating it. He had seen the ROV above the water, hanging from the davits of the parent research boat, and he knew it to be not a creature but a machine — but this was clearly no ordinary machine. Flowing over its surface the Boggart could sense a very faint hum, the tiny vibrations of the mini-computer that functioned as Sydney's brain. It reminded him of something he had heard before, a long time ago; something that had intrigued him, that had worked a great change in his life. What was it?

Boggarts have the worst memories of all the creatures in the universe. Hovering there, glowing, the Boggart tried to remember.

*  *  *

U
P IN THE CONTROL ROOM
of his research vessel, Harold Pindle peered over Jenny's shoulder at the little green screen that showed the findings of Sydney's laser line scan. There against the bright green background was the distinct outline of Nessie's monster body, drawn by the invisible laser beams that darted continually out from Sydney's sturdy frame and bounced back again.

“Look at that!”
said Harold reverently.
“There's our Nessie! Good old Axel — what a system! Keep it focused, Jenny — don't lose him!”

Jenny leaned forward suddenly to another screen, and made a small surprised gurgling sound.
“What's that?”
she said.

The screen was white and glowing, with a shifting, indefinable pattern moving through it.

“That's the picture from the video,”
Harold said, puzzled.
“But Sydney's two hundred feet under, it's blacker than the pit down there — how can his video camera be picking up light? Have you turned the strobes on?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“It's fading,”
Jenny said.
“Look. It's going away.”

*  *  *

T
HE BOGGART WAS TIRED
of trying to remember; he gave it up. The glow that had made him visible died away, and he poured himself once more all the way around Sydney's complex frame, curious, investigating. He came to the junction point where the long tether wire from the parent ship made its way into Sydney's computer. And because boggarts are made up of a collection of electrical impulses of many varied kinds, he put himself into the wire.

Once he was there, he was instantly everywhere in Sydney's system: seeing, hearing and understanding every impulse that came in through the instrumentation, and blocking out any instructions that came from Harold's switchboard in the parent ship. In effect, the Boggart became Sydney's brain.

*  *  *

O
N THE CONTROL PANEL
in the research ship, the screen fed by Sydney's video camera was dark again. Jenny
pressed a switch, and wrote down some figures on her clipboard pad.

“Back to normal,”
she said.
“It was just one of those flare aberrations, I guess. Won't affect the regular functions. I'll check out the tube when it comes back in.”

Harold grunted. His eyes were fixed on a different screen, the green square fed by Sydney's laser scan, which was almost filled by an image of the top of Nessie's huge body.
“Have Sydney back off a bit,”
he said.
“He's too close — I want to see the creature's whole outline. How deep is he?”

“Two hundred and fifty feet,”
Jenny said. She turned a dial. The image of Nessie's back spread to fill the whole screen.

“Wrong way,”
Harold said.

“But I'm turning it the right way.”
Jenny frowned, and twiddled the dial.
“Come on, Sydney,”
she said.
“Pay attention.”

The image on the screen bounced a little, as if the scanner were giving a little skip. Then it moved sideways, to the edge of Nessie's back and then away from it, and instead a cluster of large fish appeared on the screen. They stayed there, swimming at a slow, stately pace, as the scanner followed them.

“Salmon at two hundred and fifty feet?”
said Jenny.
“That's amazing!”

“Never mind the salmon,”
Harold said irritably.
“Get the ROV under control. It's not programmed to go off chasing fish.”

Jenny began pressing buttons and turning other dials, but nothing happened. The image started to
bounce again, moving up and down over the stately swimming fish. Harold moaned, and ran his hands through his thinning grey hair, turning it into an even wilder halo than before. He jumped to his feet, crossed the cabin to the hatchway, and yelled to the deck.
“Chuck!”

Several figures were waiting patiently on the deck, swathed in bright orange parkas against the rain. One of them raised an arm.

“Put Adelaide over the side!”
Harold shouted.
“Right now! And watch her winch like a hawk — we've got a communications problem with Sydney!”

Chuck waved his arm, shouted muffled instructions, and from the second set of davits on the deck the second yellow ROV splashed into the loch. It vanished below the surface, leaving a swirl of grey water, and from a turning winch on the deck the thin, tough fiber-optic cable that was its lifeline went after it, down and down.

*  *  *

T
OURISTS STILL LINED
the road along the north side of Loch Ness, peering out from under umbrellas and rain hats at the little flotilla of research boats, watching hungrily for a return of the Monster.

“They say it tipped a boat over!”

“And roared like a lion! I never heard of it roaring before!”

“They say it was huge! Bigger than a dinosaur!”

“What d'you mean, ‘bigger than'? It
was
a dinosaur!”

“They say —”

The collision was forgotten; the only remaining sign of it a little heap of melting Skootchy Bars lying in the gutter. Bobby's ice cream van had limped away, and Mr. Maconochie's Rover showed no wounds worse than some scraped paint and a dent in the right front mud-guard. With the permission and help of an amiable policeman who had stopped to check the accident, Mr. Maconochie had driven the car temporarily up onto the grassy verge of the road where no cars were normally allowed. There they all sat now, he and Miss Urquhart, Emily and Tommy and Jessup, ignoring all traffic and passers-by, thinking of boggarts. Each one sat in silence, waiting, hoping, calling without words to Nessie.

And down on the mud in the loch below, Nessie stirred, hearing them.

But the Boggart was hearing no one. Frolicking through the deep water inside Sydney's small powerful frame, he was having the time of his life. For the first ten minutes, gradually discovering the maneuverability of the little submersible, he played as he did whenever he took on the shape of a seal: diving, looping, speeding through the water, chasing the fish. Up in the research boat, the Kalling-Pindle team was appalled.

“Sydney's computer's gone crazy!”
Jenny said in anguish to Harold, staring at the dials.
“He's roaring about at twenty knots! He's turning somersaults! I didn't know ROVs could do things like that!”

This, however, was only the beginning. The Boggart was suddenly a small child let out of school, released from all discipline, letting off steam. For a boggart, he had been living under great pressure since he had come to Loch Ness. After a lifetime of total self-indulgent freedom, with no relationships but those based on mischief and trickery, he had found himself caught in a state of constant concern about someone other than himself — about Nessie. A sense of responsibility was not something he was used to. It was serious; it was exhausting.