The Boggart and the Monster (12 page)

But now he was inside Sydney; now he had a toy, and he pushed his feelings of responsibility entirely away. For a little while now, he could be a boggart again, and
play
.

When he was bored with merely zooming and somersaulting through the water, he began to pour himself into the devices through which the sturdy little ROV communicated with the research ship: the video camera fitted behind a heavy glass panel in Sydney's bow, and the laser-scan device strapped to Sydney's back. The camera came first; investigating it, the Boggart sniffed disdainfully when he found it could transmit only the pictures that it saw.
That
was something he could put right at once.

“Harold!”
said Jenny nervously, up in the research ship control room.
“Sydney's video screen is doing its own thing again!”

Harold was watching the control screens that were receiving images from the other Remotely Operated
Vehicle, Adelaide, as it coasted down through the water in pursuit of the Monster. He glanced reluctantly across at the screen in front of Jenny, and then blinked.

“What's that?”
he said.

“I think it's a daffodil,”
said Jenny.

“
A daffodil?
”

“Now it's a tulip,”
Jenny said unhappily.
“Five tulips, all in a row. Pink ones.”

Harold got to his feet and stood looking over her shoulder. In quick succession, the little video screen showed them a clump of white narcissus, a close-up of a red anemone, and a bright blue cluster of grape hyacinths. The Boggart, down in the cold depths of the loch, was feeling nostalgic for spring.

“I don't believe this!”
Harold said.

“And it's summer — they aren't even in season,”
said Jenny. She reached up to her shoulder, and began tugging nervously at the end of her black ponytail. The fingers of her other hand darted to and fro over the buttons of the computer keyboard that sent instructions to Sydney, and the computer paid no attention at all.

“What moron has fed a bulb catalog into Sydney's memory?”
said Harold.
“Was it you?”

“Of course not!”
Jenny said crossly. Fingers flying over the keyboard, she began hunting for flower pictures in the computer, but by now the Boggart had grown bored with spring flowers and was wishing he could be with his favorite butt for tricks, William.

“That's a dog!”
said Harold, staring at the screen.

“A golden Lab,”
Jenny said. She gave a slightly
hysterical giggle.
“Maybe now it's the Kennel Club listings. Next we'll get a poodle, and a greyhound, and a cocker spaniel.”

But all they saw, out of the Boggart's memory, was a front view of William, with his big brown eyes and golden eyelashes, and the long red tongue dangling over the white teeth. He looked as though he were laughing at them. Then William vanished, and the screen was abruptly dark.

Down in the loch, the Boggart, hovering deep inside Sydney the ROV, had seen a light approaching him through the water. He forgot instantly what he was doing, and zoomed up to investigate — and as if he were approaching a mirror he saw Adelaide, the twin ROV, coming down toward him. Two headlamps were beaming out from the front of her yellow frame. Delighted, the Boggart moved to meet her, but Adelaide paid him no attention. Her video camera picked him up briefly, and then passed him by. With her lights reaching out into the darkness, she sailed on through the water on the quest for which she had been programmed: the pursuit of the Monster.

“She's right by Sydney!”
said Harold, gazing now at the screen showing him the picture from Adelaide's video camera.
“Let's turn her round and see what's wrong with him.”
He pressed switches and buttons, and the picture swung around to pick up Sydney again.

Jenny and Harold both peered intently at the closeup, as the picture showed every side of the little ROV.

“Looks perfectly normal,”
Harold said.

“I sure don't see any damage.”

“It must just be the —
whoops!
”

Below them, the Boggart, looking out through Sydney's video-eye, watched Adelaide slowly circling, her headlamps illuminating him, her video camera dutifully recording his image and sending it up along her tether-wire to Harold's screen. He chuckled, waiting for her to finish moving around him. Clearly this was some solemn dance performed by ROV vessels while under the water: a kind of ritual communication, suitable for machines. But it was rather dull; it needed a little jazzing up, a touch of boggartry. He watched as Adelaide circled back to the place where she had started. And then he dived at her.

Harold had no time to work out what to do to Adelaide's controls. All he saw was the flashing image of Sydney — controlled of course by the Boggart — crossing and recrossing the screen, and a whirling as Adelaide's camera itself spun crazily about. Not in a hundred years could he have been brought to believe that one of his Remotely Operated Vehicles was dancing with the other, to the tune of an old Scottish reel called
“Highland Mary.”

Inside Sydney, the Boggart whirled happily round and round Adelaide, singing as he went. He was enjoying himself more than he had for weeks.

But by the time he finally grew bored with his dancing, and the picture on the screen in the research vessel slowed out of its frenzy, something else had happened below the surface of the loch that Harold Pindle would
never have predicted. His two roaming ROVs were inextricably tied together, beyond all separating. In the whirling of his dance around Adelaide, the Boggart had bound Sydney's tether tightly to hers in a kind of braid.

Pausing, the Boggart glanced back at the lumpy intertwined line of the two joined cables. He contemplated it, still humming
“Highland Mary,”
and giggled.

Up in the research boat, Chuck came bursting into the control cabin from the deck, dripping raindrops everywhere from his slicker and his wet hair.
“What's happening? Both the tethers have quit paying out — have you told the ROVs to stop? Or have they hit the Monster?”

Harold said despondently,
“We're not telling these two babies anything any more — just look at that!”

In defiance of any other instructions given them, Sydney's video screen was permanently showing a picture of Adelaide, Adelaide's a picture of Sydney. As they watched, the two pictures began to bounce cheerfully. Like a child turning cartwheels, the Boggart was turning the two ROVs over and over in the water; when he moved Sydney now, Adelaide had to follow along.

Jenny said,
“I think their lines have tangled together.”

Chuck glared at her.
“Impossible!”

“I'm not saying it was your fault.”

“I'm in charge of the cables and winches and I tell you it's impossible! Those two lines couldn't get across each other unless there was a diver down there moving them deliberately.”

“Stop!”
said Harold, standing up abruptly, and narrowly avoiding bumping his head on the roof of the
cabin.
“Shut up, both of you! This is hopeless — we'll have to bring them back. Try sending a recall, Jen — and Chuck, go start winching them in. Slowly. Gently.
Carefully
. ”

Chuck snorted disdainfully at this unnecessary last admonition, and stalked out. While Jenny tried hopelessly to send instructions to the computerized minds of Sydney and Adelaide, muffled commands echoed down from the deck. The two winches sending out lifelines to the ROVs came to a stop, then reversed direction and begin drawing the lines in.

And the Boggart, two hundred feet down in the water of the loch, felt the steady gentle pressure and resented it. He was enjoying his new game of playing submarine; it was fun, and he felt he deserved some fun, and was not ready to give it up. As the lines pulled toward the surface, and Sydney and Adelaide began to move, he pulled them back again.

Sydney and Adelaide came to a halt once more. The Boggart chuckled. Then he let out an underwater war whoop, and like two small square torpedoes, Sydney and Adelaide took off in the opposite direction from the boat.

Among the groups of tourists looking down at the loch from the side of the road, waiting hopefully with their cameras in case the Monster might surface again, there were cries of surprise and alarm as Harold Pindle's research ship suddenly shot into motion and whizzed erratically across the water, on a collision course toward his patiently hovering line of small boats.

A
NGUS
C
AMERON HAD BEEN
very busy in the last few hours. By two separate special messengers, arranged at huge cost which he hoped would be reimbursed, he had sent his first pictures of the Monster to the
Glasgow Herald
and his first videotape to Scottish Television, with a careful stipulation that he himself was to keep the world rights of each. Since there had been no time to process either the film or the tape, he had no idea whether his pictures were hopelessly blurred or amazingly clear, but his hopes were high.

And the hopes were justified, for in Glasgow his editors were already composing a front page headed MONSTER! with a large magnificent photograph of Nessie rearing up and showing his teeth, and a byline in big print: SPECIAL EYEWITNESS REPORT BY ANGUS CAMERON. And his video film was to be the lead story of the six o'clock television news, at stations not only in Scotland but in England, Ireland, France, Germany and the U.S.A. As a result, crews from other television and
radio stations were already converging on Loch Ness from assorted parts of the globe, by train and car and plane, not to mention three assorted helicopters that were whirring their way southwest from Inverness.

Angus did not yet know any of this. He was sitting in a field overlooking the loch, still draped in cameras and binoculars under his rain gear. His gaze was fixed alternately on two things: the loch, for any possible further appearance of the Monster, or interesting actions by Harold Pindle's little scientific fleet; and a piece of grassy land just beyond his field, bordering the road, where his son Tommy was standing with the Canadian children Emily and Jessup Volnik, the lawyer Mr. Maconochie and old Miss Urquhart from the heather nursery. Angus had a sense of unease about this group. They had no apparent connection with the Monster, except for having been among the first people to see it, but they aroused his reporter's intuition. He felt, for no good reason, that they were up to something.

He waited and watched, and the rain trickled down his collar inside his parka. But nothing happened — until suddenly, down on the loch, Harold Pindle's boat appeared to go mad.

*  *  *

S
TANDING NOW
in the fine rain, to stretch legs cramped from long sitting in the Rover, Emily, Tommy and Jessup looked out over the water, silently calling Nessie. Miss Urquhart and Mr. Maconochie were back in the car, but
the children knew that they were doing the same thing; they felt a particular closeness, as if all five of them were a small wonderful choir singing the same sequence of notes in perfect unison.

Nessie, where are you? We're here, we'll keep you going, if you'll just get out of that shape and come where it's safe
. . . .

Miss Urquhart opened the car door suddenly, and got out. She called,
“He can hear us! Do you feel it? He's moving, he's closer than he was — I think he's on his way —”

But all at once they heard faint shouts from the loch, and saw Harold's research ship shoot crazily out across the water as if it intended to ram one of the smaller boats around it. They gaped, in an amazed silence. Even in a world where they had encountered boggarts and monsters, they felt that what they were watching now must be impossible.

On the boat, Chuck was battling for control of a helm that refused to answer, and in the control cabin below, Harold and Jenny fought for balance, and clutched at loose pieces of equipment as the boat pitched and tossed to and fro.

“What's pulling us?”

“It's those crazy damn ROVs!”

“Maybe it's the Monster!”

And below them, the Boggart, cackling with laughter, was shooting through the water in Sydney's powerful metal frame, with Adelaide held fast beside it so that the two combined ROV tethers made a wonderfully durable towline, pulling Harold's boat. Like a
thoughtless rider on a roaring jet-ski he caromed through the line of quivering smaller boats, weaving the boat in and out of them slalom-fashion, terrifying every crew but never brushing a single hull.

The loch grew choppy with the boat's zigzagging wake. In his swaying cabin Harold watched boat after boat flash by, inches from his hatchway, and clutched his head and moaned.

*  *  *

D
EEP IN THE LOCH
, where he had been listening to the children's silent calling, where he had almost regained the courage to answer their challenge and change his shape, Nessie lifted his head and sensed what was happening. He could feel the Boggart's joy in mischief, like a once-familiar phrase of music not heard for a very long time. He smiled with pleasure, as faint threads of memory stirred in his boggart mind, and he let his great body drift up closer to the surface of the loch. All his instincts longed to join in whatever it was that was causing his cousin such delight.

But Nessie had changed, since the Boggart first woke him out of his centuries of monster sleep. Now he had a dream, the chance of a life of private gaiety and good company in a quiet place, and his Boggart cousin and his new friends between them had offered him the way to make it come true. Nessie felt, in his creaking sleep-slowed brain, that this dream must not be put at risk, not at any price, not even for a beautiful piece of
boggartry. And the calling of the children made him feel that if he were ever to find the truth of his dream, the time to go was now.

He called through the water, in the Old Speech without words,
“
Cuz! Cuz, where are you?
”

The Boggart was whipping Harold's boat around in a tight starboard turn, just in time to avoid hitting the bank.
“
Over here!
”
he called gleefully.
“
Come!
”

“
No!
”
Nessie said firmly. He drifted closer.
“
No, not now! We have a journey to go, cuz!
”

“
Oh later, later!
”
called the Boggart.
“
Come have fun — even big as you are, come over here, come see!
”
He laughed in delight as a group of boys scrambled up the bank to escape the splashing of the research boat's wake. The boat roared off again across the loch.

Nessie felt a wave of irritation begin to wash through his happy-go-lucky mind. What about the lectures his cousin the Boggart had given him, the admonitions about snapping out of it, giving up a preoccupation, learning to change? Like a nudging parent, like a stern teacher, he had dragged Nessie out of sleep into a sense of responsibility — and now look at him! Look at him! Nessie's tail began to twitch, and above the loch a few people noticed the swirling of the water and thought it the ominous precursor of a squall. They were right, in a way.

For a last time, Nessie called in boggart speech through the water:
“
Cuz! Our friends are waiting! Come with me!
”

“
No!
”
shouted the Boggart. He zoomed gaily past
the bow of the nearest small boat, Sonar Three, spraying Kevin with water, and in the control cabin of the research ship a box fell off a shelf and emptied a dozen tape cassettes on Harold's unhappy head.

Under the surface, Nessie uttered a long growl that grew into a roar, casting fear and dread into every underwater creature that heard it, and with fierce strokes of his flippers and tail he shot after the Boggart, across the loch. When he was close to the whirling course of the two linked ROVs and their invisible controller, he put down his head and lifted his huge back out of the water, and Sydney and Adelaide drove straight into it, and stopped.

The research boat slowed as the tether-towlines relaxed their pull, and lay wallowing in the churned-up water. Harold rolled his eyes at Jenny in relief.
“Thank heavens!”
he said, pulling a cassette out of the collar of his shirt.

Sydney and Adelaide, stranded, perched on the gleaming grey hump that was Nessie's back. To the watchers from the bank, it was as if they had run into a grey island that had suddenly risen out of the loch. Under the water, Nessie curved his long neck around and took their intertwined tethers firmly in his mouth, to prevent any escape.

The Boggart gave a disappointed whine, like a caged puppy.
“
You're spoiling all the fun!
”
he said petulantly.

“
Cuz!
”
Nessie said. He let go of the tethers, but the lake and the air all around them were full of the sense of his reproach.

The Boggart paused. There was a small silence.
“
I'm sorry,
”
he said.
“
I'm sorry, cuz.
”

“
Let's be selkies,
”
Nessie said. He could feel the call from the children's imaginations, up on the bank, so strongly now that he could hardly bear to wait.

“
Selkies!
”
said the Boggart happily, forgetting his game in an instant, and he slipped out of Sydney's yellow metal frame and became a grey seal.

And the island of Nessie's back vanished, and Sydney and Adelaide slid back into the water and hung dangling at the end of their tethers, as the head of a second seal rose through the choppy waves to join the first.

On the deck of the research ship, Chuck and his crew emerged from the various corners where they had been hanging on to rails or spars to keep themselves from being tossed overboard. They restarted the winches, and began hauling Sydney and Adelaide back to the boat.

On the bank of the loch, Mr. Maconochie started the engine of the Range Rover, and the children and Miss Urquhart climbed silently into the car, carefully watching the small moving heads of the two grey seals swimming toward the southern end of the lake. They drove slowly down the road, parallel to the loch and the swimming seals.

And in the field close by, Angus Cameron ran to his van, his cameras banging together around his neck, and climbed in behind the wheel to follow them.