The Boggart (13 page)

Willie shook his shaggy head mournfully. “I wish your boggart were more talkative.”

Hearing his name spoken in the warm Scottish accent, the Boggart came flittering out of the kitchen, interested, wiping a smear of applesauce from his face. But the door had closed; Willie was gone.

Emily said desperately, “Now what do we do?”

“I'm not going to budge from the computer,” Jessup said. “It's the only way he's ever talked to us — I think he'll do it again.”

“In Gaelic? We shan't know what he's saying.”

“I don't care if it's in Martian, so long as it's
something
,” Jessup said. “Anyway he obviously understands English, even if he isn't speaking it.” He headed for the stairs.

The Boggart flittered after him. He fancied a nap on Emily's bookshelf, after his applesauce snack.

O
UTSIDE
the house a car was parked at the edge of the street, with its engine running, and a woman sitting in the driver's seat. She spoke to Willie through the open window as he came by.

“Excuse me, Mr. Volnik — I'm from Eastern Television —”

“Go away,” Willie said. He kept walking.

The car edged along beside him. “You're not Mr. Volnik, though, are you — you're one of the actors. William Walker — that's it! Mr. Walker, I'm Mary Brogan of ‘Beyond Belief' —”

Willie paused, and gave her a beatific smile. “Far, far beyond,” he said. “Good afternoon.” And he slipped behind her car, crossed the road and disappeared down an alley too narrow for automobiles.

Mary Brogan snorted disdainfully backed her car up and sat looking greedily at the Volniks' house.

J
ESSUP SAT
at the computer keyboard, typing.

B
oggart,
come talk to us.

Boggart, where are you?

Boggart, it's your turn.

He took his hands from the keyboard and held them out, palms up, appealing.

Emily stood behind him anxiously, leaning on her crutches. “He wants to go back to Scotland. He said he did. We should be thinking of ways to get him there.”

“That comes next. First we have to talk to him.”

“Couldn't he go back the way he came? He must have been inside one of the crates, with my desk or your table. There was no sign of him till after they arrived.”

“Em!” Jessup said. “We can't do anything till we can reach him. You think you can open a little box and say,
Okay Boggart, jump in!
— and then just drop it in the mail?”

Emily said without conviction, “Well, maybe.”

“Do me a favor!” Jessup said. He began playing with the keyboard again.

Emily sighed. “I'll go make us some lunch. Peanut butter and jelly?”

“I've gone off it,” Jessup said. “Tuna fish.”

T
HE
B
OGGART
flittered past the landing window on his way to Emily's room, and paused, staring out. Very faintly he could hear a sound that caught at his heart, carrying him instantly back to the grey waters and the rocky shore of Loch Linnhe. And then he saw them, out in the sky, high over the snowy treetops: sea gulls, wheeling, drifting, calling their plaintive familiar cry. These were not the sea gulls of the Hebrides; they were the gulls of Lake Ontario, who lived as much on Toronto garbage as on fish, and they were not even the same kind of gull that flies over Scotland. But the Boggart did not know that. They were sea gulls; their voices were calling him home.

Yet again he flittered into Emily's room and gazed longingly at the pictures of the seals on their rocks, the misty islands, and bleak, lonely Castle Keep. The MacDevon was not there any more; he was dead. Here in this curious, exciting new world, his new friends Emily and Jessup were alive. But this was not home for an Old Thing, nor ever would be. The Boggart knew what he must do.

He looked at Emily's bulletin board, at the photograph of Emily and Jessup throwing snow at each other, and he reached out the long fingers of his insubstantial hand and gently touched each laughing face. Then he turned away. With his keen ageless ears, he listened for the faint hum of the computer, and he flittered out of Emily's room and in through Jessup's door.

E
MILY WAS
halfway down the stairs, swinging between the crutches, when she heard Jessup's yell. With some difficulty she turned around and hopped upstairs again as fast as she could. Her ribs were beginning to ache.

Jessup was staring at the computer screen, his fingers motionless on the keyboard. He said huskily, “Look!”

Emily looked. She saw the starry sky that was the usual background for the Gang of Five's computer game Black Hole; it was patterned with constellations, striped by the bright path of the Milky Way. Black Hole was a game of space exploration; though she had never learned its details, she knew they involved traveling in a spaceship to other planets, other galaxies. The players explored new worlds, fought off hostile aliens, but their greatest aim was to solve the mystery of the black holes, those sinks of gravity into which all nearby matter would be sucked and utterly transformed. And their greatest danger was that a black hole itself would suck them in, before they could solve its mystery.

She saw the usual tiny spaceship which Jessup was controlling on the screen, moving steadily through space, and she wondered what she was supposed to be looking at, that he found so remarkable. Then she saw it. Something moved across the screen, more rapidly than the little ship. It was intensely bright, brighter than anything she had ever seen on a computer screen before, and it looked for all the world like an arrow of blue flame. Uncannily like the blue flames that had danced along the streetcar wires, or around the traffic lights, when the Boggart had gone on his downtown Toronto rampage.

“It's blue!” she said, entranced. “I didn't know you could do color.”

“I can't,” Jessup said. “This is a black-and-white monitor, it's not possible for it to show blue.” His eyes were wide and startled, fixed on the bright blue flame running just ahead of his spaceship icon into the depths of computer-simulated space. He said, “I went on asking the Boggart to come use the computer again, to talk to me. But there were no words, he didn't type in anything. He wasn't here. So I thought I'd give up for a while, and I pulled up the game instead. And suddenly there was
this
.”

“I love it,” Emily said. “You mean he's playing your game with you, only you're using a spaceship and he's using a blue flame.”

“No,” Jessup said unhappily. “I mean he's
inside
my game.
That blue flame is the Boggart
.”

“He's inside your computer game?” Emily said, incredulous. “That's impossible.”

“Of course it is. Everything about the Boggart is impossible.” Jessup was watching the blue flame, tracking it on the screen. “But if you think about it, a computer is all electrical impulses and I suppose the Boggart is too. He's not solid, you can't see him or hear him or feel him.”

“We've heard him, once or twice. Noises. And we felt his hand.”

“Yes, we did. But that was because he wanted us to.” Jessup was quiet for a moment, remembering. Then he tensed, and on the screen Emily saw the blue flame approaching the nubbly moving shape of a small asteroid.

“What's that?”

“Asteroid. It could blast him to pieces.”

“Jess!”

“Well, but he's real — I don't see how it — well, let's fix that.” Jessup pressed buttons, and out of his spaceship icon, near the blue flame on the screen, a small rocket rushed at the asteroid. Both it and the asteroid disappeared. The blue flame bounced gaily up and down, as if it were dancing a jig.

“This is a very tough game,” Jessup said unhappily. “I don't think he's taking it seriously. And he doesn't know the rules. He's heading on a course that's going to get awfully close to a black hole.”

“Can't you show him?” Emily gazed anxiously at the screen, wishing she knew more about computers.

“I can't talk to him. I can only try to nudge him away from dangerous things, so long as my spaceship's magnetic field's stronger than his. That's something we built in, we call it the buddy rule.” Jessup sent his spaceship diagonally across the screen, to head off the arrow of blue flame in a different direction. But the spaceship seemed to bounce against an invisible barrier, falling back and tumbling through space, and the blue flame danced its joyful little jig once more. Even as a blip on a computer screen, the Boggart was still delighting in mischief.

Jessup groaned. “Oh Boggart,
stop!
” he said. He rescued the tumbling spaceship icon and aimed it again at the speeding blue flame — and again and again the spaceship fell away, spinning helplessly, and the flame ran on across the screen.

Emily said, “What about those Black Hole characters you used at Halloween? Ice Death, Fire Burst. Can't you use them to head him off somehow?”

“No way,” Jessup said. “They live on one of the other planets. And he's out traveling through deep space.”

“Oh,” said Emily. She stood propped on her crutches, looking nervously over his shoulder.

Jessup became very silent and intent. He sat hunched over the keyboard, working furiously. But the moving flame could not be stopped; it sped on, faster and faster, driven by some huge determination of its own. Watching, Emily saw that the stars prickling in the black sky of the screen were beginning strangely to quiver, as if they were vibrating in some intense wave of sound. Gradually they seemed to blur, and grow faint, and all the time the blue arrow of flame raced deeper into space.

Suddenly Jessup sat back in his chair, his face pale. His hand dropped limp beside the keyboard. He said in an anguished whisper, “It's the black hole — he's going into it! I can't stop him!”

And all at once the screen was filled by a dark, glimmering, pulsating whirlpool, a hole of ferocious energy pulling every thread of light into its dead black heart, and the blue flame dived into its center and disappeared.

     
E
MILY AND
J
ESSUP
stared at the computer screen in horror. The dark whirlpool filled it, throbbing, like a living picture of death. Jessup jabbed frantically at different combinations of keys on the keyboard, but nothing changed. The black hole hung there, dreadful, unchanging, empty.

“Get him back! Jess, get him back!”

“I can't!” Jessup said, desperate. “We didn't program recovery into the game! If you fell into the black hole you were gone, wiped out. That was it.”

“I thought this game was supposed to be all about discovering what black holes are?”

“It is, but we haven't got that far yet. They still eat everything before we can figure out how they work.”

“It
can
't have eaten the Boggart! He's not part of the game! Where is he?”

“I don't know!”

They stared at each other, distraught. Tears prickled in Emily's eyes. She was desperate to see the Boggart again; she couldn't bear to think of his being harmed. Whatever he had done to their lives, she loved his sense of mischief, his liveliness, his communication of delight. He was a nuisance, but he was their friend.

She turned on Jessup. “I hate your stupid computer and its games!” she shrieked.

Jessup's lip quivered; suddenly he was only an anxious small boy. “It was the only way he could talk to us. . . .”

Downstairs, a door slammed, and Robert's voice shouted cheerfully, “Hi kids! How're you feeling? My meeting was cancelled — I'll make you Volnik salad for lunch.”

T
HE DAY
became an endless suspended nightmare. Robert had brought home a briefcase full of papers so that he could work at home instead of at the theater. Moved by his children's ailments, he was determined to be a good devoted father — hence the Volnik salad, which was a family favorite seldom prepared because it involved so many finely chopped vegetables. Emily drooped over her crutches in the kitchen, keeping him company while he chopped away gaily on the cutting-board. She thought of Jessup upstairs, supposedly lying in the grip of the symptoms of flu, but in fact trying desperately to invent some way of combating the black hole.

Robert reached for a stalk of celery. “Is Jess asleep?”

“I think so.”

“Poor kid. He sounded knocked out. There's a miserable flu bug going around.”

Emily shifted casually on her crutches until she was standing between Robert and the telephone. She had noticed a small red light flashing on the phone: the sign that someone was using an extension elsewhere in the house. It wouldn't do for a knocked-out flu victim to be found frantically making complex technical telephone calls to his computer friends.

But none of Jessup's telephone calls — made at nerve-racking intervals during the afternoon, whenever Robert was occupied somewhere out of reach of a phone — brought him any help. Yung Hee, reached when she came home from a school orchestra rehearsal, called back with several suggestions, including one from her Korean grandmother about the casting of a spell, but became discouraged the third time Robert answered the phone and told her Jessup was not taking calls. Chris, reached later still after a hockey practice, could not understand Jessup's concern about anything consumed by a black hole, since he hadn't been told about the Boggart and Jessup hadn't the heart to start explaining the story now. Barry's telephone did not answer. The technician at the local computer store had no ideas because, as he reasonably pointed out to Jessup, the rules of a private computer game were known only to those who had devised the game in the first place.

And Jessup and his friends had not thought to invent rules covering the behavior of an invading Boggart in their Black Hole game.

Jessup lay in bed that evening, staring across the room at his computer screen. His mother was home now, full of tales about furniture deals in Quebec. She had brought him his supper, and expressed satisfaction that he had no fever. Then she approached the computer, which now showed the constantly moving squiggles and twirls of a screen-saver program, devised to keep the screen from burning out when the computer was left switched on for long periods of time. The instant Jessup's fingers were back on the keyboard, these twirls would vanish and the screen would fill once more with the shadowy depths of the black hole.

Maggie reached a hand to the computer and glanced at Jessup. “Why don't I turn this off?”

“No!” Jessup flung back the bedclothes and was across the room in an instant, like some fierce maternal creature protecting her young. He grabbed Maggie's wrist.

His startled mother looked down at him. “Jess, are you crazy? Go back to bed! I get the message, I won't turn it off.”

“Swear!” said Jessup.

“I swear. Good grief.”

“Especially when I'm asleep. Swear you won't turn it off while I'm asleep.”

“
Go back to bed!
” said Maggie, her voice rising ominously.

Jessup climbed back into bed. He said tremulously, “There's something very important I don't want to lose.”

“Don't worry,” said his mother more gently. She stroked his hair. “I won't touch it. Just go to sleep, love.”

But Jessup didn't sleep. He lay there for hours, staring at the glimmering screen, thinking about the Boggart, trying to imagine where in his computer the Boggart could possibly be. Again and again he went through, in his head, the rules and pattern they had devised for the game of Black Hole. He longed to be able to talk to Barry, who had all along been his chief collaborator in the making of the game. Barry had more experience and understanding of computers than anyone in the Gang of Five; he was more likely than any of them to come up with some original and offbeat idea. But Barry had been out all day, and perhaps he was away. It was far too late to wake up anyone's household now. Jessup thought wistfully of the night when he had lain awake and been able to telephone Tommy Cameron, because of the five-hour time difference. In Barry's house, unfortunately, it was just as late as it was in his own.

But then he remembered the shape of Barry's house. It was a Victorian mansion with many rooms, including two separate and enormous studies, for Barry's father, a world-famous management consultant, and Barry's mother, who had a belligerently different surname and was vice president of a bank. Attached to the mansion was a carriage house. Its ground floor housed the present-day carriages, the mother's Mercedes and the father's Jaguar, and above them was a studio. This studio was Barry's bedroom, and in it he had his own telephone. . . .

Jessup crept downstairs to the kitchen, stroked the cat, closed the door and dialed Barry's number. There was a great deal of ringing and then a very blurry voice. “H'lo?”

“Barry? It's Jessup.”

“For Pete's sake — it's three in the morning!”

“I know it is,” Jessup said, and to his horror he suddenly found his voice full of tears. “I know it is. I'm sorry. Oh Barry, I've lost the Boggart.”

“
Lost
him?”

Jessup told him the story, and all the while he was fighting to keep his voice from shamefully breaking, for like Emily, he had discovered he was fiercely attached to their invisible, tiresome, uninvited friend. Being himself a good friend, Barry was aware of this, and when Jessup had finished he said simply, “I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks,” Jessup said gratefully.

“You got an alarm system?”

“They don't put it on when we're home.”

“I'll tap at your kitchen door.”

Quietly and carefully Jessup made two mugs of hot chocolate. He gave a splash of milk to Polly the cat, who could hardly believe her luck and purred so loudly he was afraid she would wake his parents up. In a little while he heard a strange scuffling outside the door, and opened it to find Barry, red-faced, shaking thick snow from his jacket and cap.

“More snow!” said Jessup, in a wondering whisper.

“It's been snowing for three hours, they haven't ploughed yet. I came on skis.”

“On
skis?
”

“My car's blown its muffler — makes a noise like a garbage truck. I didn't think your mom would appreciate that, in the middle of the night.” Barry gulped his hot chocolate with enthusiasm, but his mind, as usual, was focused on computers. He said, “I was wondering — you have an automatic save program, right?”

“Sure. Ten-minute intervals.”

Barry reached down and began unlacing his boots. “Let's get to that computer and try something. . . .”

They crept upstairs, Jessup directing Barry to avoid the fourth stair from the top, which contained an abominable creak. Past his parents' bedroom, from which he heard reassuring sounds of regular breathing; up the last stairs, past Emily's almost-closed door. From Jessup's room came the faint husky hum of his computer.

Jessup carefully closed his door, and Barry sat down at the desk like a pianist facing the start of a concerto. He took a deep deliberate breath. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

For more than two hours he worked at the computer, delving back into the process by which they had constructed the game of Black Hole; trying to reach the area into which the Boggart had disappeared. To some extent he was trying to deal with the same problem that is faced by anyone who has ever lost a piece of information in a computer: the important letter, the term report, the vital record that vanished from the screen because you pressed the wrong button, and refuses to reappear no matter how many other buttons you hopefully press.

But Barry was hunting for more than words or figures; his quarry was alive. And it was not simply lost — it might also be deliberately eluding him. He and Jessup both knew there was a strong chance that the Boggart, always a creature of mischief, might be playing a terrible game of his own, not understanding that there were perils in the world of a computer from which even he might not be able to escape. If he was playing hide and seek with them, he might at any moment doom himself to go on playing it forever.

Barry sat with his long frame hunched over the keyboard, sometimes typing furiously, sometimes brooding, staring at the screen. Now and then Jessup took over, to try an idea of his own, but most of the things Barry was doing were so complex and obscure that it was impossible to help him. Again and again they tried to reconstruct the game in which, somewhere, the Boggart was hiding or trapped. But every time they failed.

The door opened, and Jessup swung around, alarmed. It was Emily, in her bathrobe, blinking sleepily.

“Barry!” she said in a startled whisper. “What are you doing here?”

“Shut the door!” Jessup whispered. “We're trying to find the Boggart!”

Barry stood up and stretched, touching the ceiling. He said gloomily, “And it may be impossible.”

“Oh!” Emily said wretchedly. She sat down on Jessup's bed.

“Well, we've been trying for two hours.” Barry looked at his watch. “No, three. “He seated himself at the computer again. “Jess — I think there's only one thing left to do.”

Jessup said nervously, “What's that?”

“Reverse the final info loop on the game and just see what happens.” He looked across at Emily. “Roughly speaking, that means we go down the black hole too.”

“Down
the black hole?”

“But that's a major conflicting instruction!” Jessup said, lapsing into computalk.

“Right. Megamajor.”

“The computer will crash!”

“Maybe. On the other hand, we might find ourselves face to face with the Boggart.”

Emily said fearfully, “What are you guys talking about? What does it mean if the computer crashes?”

“You have to restart it, and you lose what you've been working on. In our case, this Black Hole game — and the Boggart inside it.”

“You lose it
forever?
”

“Yup,” Barry said.

“Don't do it!” said Emily in panic.

Barry said, persistent, “We've lost the Boggart anyway — nothing we've tried has been able to reach him. This is the only thing left. I think we have to try it. Take the risk.”

“So do I,” Jessup said.

Emily looked doubtfully at Barry: at the lanky sixteen-year-old frame, and the face that didn't quite seem to know yet what shape it was going to be. Barry's long dark hair lay greasily over his shoulders, and his upper lip looked vaguely dirty because it needed a shave. He had a major acne pimple on his chin. He looked the image of the dubious layabout that Maggie Volnik thought him to be. But on that point Emily had always felt her mother was wrong.

Barry said gently, “Em, I wouldn't do you dirt. Jess is just about my best friend, whatever your mom may feel about that. I really think this is what we have to do.”

“Mom doesn't mean any harm,” Emily said.

“She's all right,” Barry said. “I like her. At least she cares what her kids do with their lives.”