The Boggart (8 page)

“Neat legs,” said Emily. “Dad should put you in
Cymbeline
.”

“Your father's not in a great mood,” said the rocket bleakly.

“Emily, you look wonderful!” It was Yung Hee's soft voice, from a floating ghostly form draped in several different shades of yellow, orange and red chiffon. She was Fire Burst, one of the dire fates that could overcome a player in the game of Black Hole. Beside her was Jessup, his head, hands and legs sticking out of a white cube of Styrofoam supposed to represent Ice Death, another hazard. By the time the Gang's Halloween plans had reached the design of Ice Death, their inventiveness had started to run down.

“So what's up with Dad?” said Emily to Jessup.

Two very small ghosts in white sheets came along the street and paused, giggling nervously. One of them saw Chris in his spider costume and darted back to clutch its mother's hand.

“Crazy things happening,” Jessup said. “Tell you later. He's gone to the theater.” He picked up a basket of candy bars and stalked over to the ghosts and their mother.

Yung Hee came close to Emily and spoke into her ear. She said, “You know that carved-out pumpkin you had on the doorstep? Your father came out of the door and it smashed on the ground right in front of him, spattered bits of pumpkin guck all over his jacket. He yelled at Jessup for throwing it at him — but I
saw
, Jessup and I were right here in front of the house. And we saw that pumpkin jump up in the air and smash itself down on the concrete. We did, Em, truly.
It jumped!
”

T
HE
B
OGGART
had woken only; two hours before, on his cotton-ball bed in the vase on Emily's shelf. He stretched, and gave a large happy yawn. He wondered why he felt so cheerful, and then remembered his good deed, the gift of Jessup's peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The cheerfulness was a pleasant surprise, though the good deed had involved so much effort that he didn't especially want to repeat it. He flittered up out of the vase and sat on the edge of the bookshelf.

The daylight was beginning to die, at this time of the year when the sun went down at about four in the afternoon. Outside the window a half-moon hung in the sky, which was tinged a strange pinkish violet after the sunset. A small sudden wind shifted the top shoots of the tall holly bush that grew beside the house — a bush very rare in winter-frigid Toronto, and much cherished by Robert. The Boggart stiffened, as if he were hearing a warning sound, and all at once he realized what day would dawn tomorrow.
Samhain!

The Boggart still clung to the oldest beliefs about the shape of the year, Celtic beliefs that had been in his head for two thousand years and more. For him, Halloween was not All Hallows Eve but the ancient Eve of Samhain, the marker between summer and winter. From that night on, the world was ruled all through the winter by the skinny blue-faced hag, the
Cailleach Bheur
. All summer long the
Cailleach Bheur
had been shut up inside a stone, a grey stone lying under a holly tree. But on the Eve of Samhain she sprang up out of the stone, with her black eyes glittering like cold pebbles in her pinched blue face, and she seized her staff and went about the countryside striking at the earth, to kill all green growth. Her breath frosted the windows and set icicles on branches and the corners of roofs, and when she sang her terrible winter song into the sky, the words froze into snowflakes and whirled down to cover the bare trees and mound deep drifts against houses and barns.

The red-berried holly was one of the few plants to survive unchanged through her icy dominion, and so people would set branches of holly over their doors and windows and mantels, to persuade her to stay out. And on their doorsteps they left harvest offerings of vegetables and fruit, so that she would eat there, instead of storming into their kitchens in a whirl of hail and snow.

The Boggart was alarmed. Now it was the Eve of Samhain once more, and the
Cailleach Bheur
would be out roaming the world, and nobody in this house had done anything to protect it against her wrath. Her wrinkled blue face would be at the window soon, her cold breath blowing down the chimney. In a panic the Boggart flittered downstairs and out through the part-open front door. He quivered as he saw strange creatures standing out there, surely part of the wild retinue of the
Cailleach Bheur;
but then his sense told him that they were only Jessup and his friends.

He saw with relief that they had at least left out a pumpkin on the step, as an offering — but it was not chopped up small as it properly should be, for the winter hag's toothless jaws. He dived down and snatched up the pumpkin, and hastily dropped it on the step, smashing it into small pieces, ignoring the tiresome interruption of Robert Volnik, who chose that moment to come out the front door.

Then he flittered back indoors, to find other ways of defending the house against the rage of the blue-faced
Cailleach Bheur,
and so he missed the sound of Robert's pumpkin-spattered rage, and the arrival of Emily with her vampire teeth.

T
HE CREATURES
of the Black Hole failed to notice the Boggart's comings and goings; they were too busy scaring trick-or-treaters. In theory they — or at any rate Emily and Jessup — were restricted to spending the evening meekly inside the front door, waiting to answer the doorbell and hand out candy to more fortunate, mobile children. But in the absence of his parents Jessup, with the help of the Gang, had no intention of behaving so passively. If he wasn't allowed to go out collecting candy, he was at least going to make sure he didn't have to give any away.

So in the dark street outside the house, Chris the spider patroled the sidewalk, in short scuttling dashes that sent the smallest trick-or-treaters shrieking away to a less alarming front door. For any older and more intrepid visitors who got as far as the front path, Jessup the Ice Death lurched to and fro uttering short awful noises like a kind of mechanical belch; Yung Hee the Fire Burst floated half-visible in the darkness beside the house, moaning softly and heartrendingly as if she were in great pain, and Barry, lurking behind a crab-apple tree, filled his silver rocket with ominous unintelligible words in a deep, booming, truly terrifying voice. Listening to it from behind the front door, Emily felt a prickling sensation at the back of her neck.

Emily was the last defense. If any bold adolescent had the resilience to ring the doorbell, she would open the door very slowly, shining an unseen flashlight to illuminate her fangs, and say softly, “Come in!” And as she smiled, a sharp side tooth would pierce the capsule hidden in her mouth, and fake blood would run over her lips and down her chin. In fact she only once had to go this far, facing a plump pale boy of at least fourteen, who was carrying far more candy than he deserved in a pillowcase. He squeaked at the sight of the blood and backed away, bug-eyed, keeping just enough presence of mind to clutch his pillowcase away from the reaching hands of the Ice Death and the Fire Burst.

The Boggart paused briefly in his invisible activities and looked down at the Gang with approving surprise. He had never seen such subtle and lifelike tricks used by ordinary humans before, in the annual struggle to keep the
Cailleach Bheur
at bay. They were almost worthy of a boggart.

But then he forgot them instantly, and his eyes widened, as he saw approaching in the shadows, dim-lit and terrible, the dark hunched figure of the winter hag herself. There she was, tapping with her stick at trees and bushes, advancing on him. Her blue face glowed pale and ghastly; she drew closer and closer, and he could feel already the icy breath that would clamp the long dead months of winter over the lochs and hills like a shroud. She was on her way to eat up this house, to envelop it in ice. But he was ready for her! They were fortunate, this foolish unprepared family, that they had a boggart to take precautions for them! He dived hastily back toward the house.

And as the stooped figure of the
Cailleach Bheur
turned in from the dark street, all hell broke loose. A chair hurtled from one bedroom window, smashing into pieces on the ground; a bookcase from another, scattering books that did not drop as they should, but seemed to drift down through the air, their pages fluttering like the wings of birds. There was a loud shrieking voice, calling out words in a language nobody could understand, and from both sides of the house great blasts of icy water leaped forward at the blue-faced hag, and she crumpled into a heap of dark clothes on the ground.

The water fell away, and the voice dropped into silence. In the darkness the children moved again, out of a sudden appalled paralysis. Emily came down the path from the front door. She bent down by the figure in the dark witch robe, and pulled off the blue plastic mask that was held over the face by a rubber band.

It was Maggie, blinking up at her in reproach and the beginnings of rage.

     
M
AGGIE
V
OLNICK
was an awesome sight when very angry, even wearing a bathrobe, with her hair wrapped in a towel. She seemed to be even angrier now than she had been a few moments ago, when she stalked inside to pull off her wet clothes. She stood on the stairs, glaring down at them.

“I go to the trouble of dressing up to surprise you, because you aren't allowed out, and what happens? You half drown me! You smash the furniture! And on top of everything else you have to destroy Bob's beloved holly bush! What's the matter with you kids? Have you completely lost your minds?”

Emily said blankly, “The holly bush?”

“Oh for Pete's sake, Emily, who are you kidding? There are holly branches all over the house — every window, every mantelpiece —” Maggie's voice was quivering with rage. “What the hell were you doing, playing Christmas? And that insane booby trap — you could have killed me! I thought you were responsible people, not half-witted two-year-olds!”

In a silent group they gaped up at her, baffled and shaken, all feeling suddenly ridiculous in their Halloween gear. Jessup gave a loud sniff. Barry shifted uneasily, his legs and lower body still encased in the bottom half of the rocket. He said in a low voice, “Mrs. Volnik, I swear, no one had any —”

“And you!” Maggie yelled at him, jabbing a finger through the air. “What do you think you're doing, playing with ten-year-olds at your age? You're sick! Did you dream up this nasty little enterprise, eh? Is this your coked-up idea of being funny?”

“
Stop it!
” Emily shrieked. Her voice was so loud it startled her as much as everyone else. But now she in turn was angry with Maggie, and she wasn't stopping to think. “Barry didn't do a thing, none of us did a thing! You always blame people without knowing what you're talking about! How could we throw furniture out of the windows if we were all right down there on the street? It wasn't us!”

“Then who was it?” Maggie snapped. “Burglars?”

Emily took a deep breath. Several black velvet ribbons from her wig fell across her eyes, and she pulled the wig off impatiently. “Maybe . . . maybe the house is haunted.”

“Ha!” It was half a scornful laugh, half a sneer. Maggie pulled a handful of the same black ribbons from her pocket, and held them up. “Pretty smart ghost, to use
your
ribbons to tie holly branches over my windows.”

I
N HIS PAJAMAS,
Jessup tiptoed across the landing to Emily's door. A floorboard creaked, and he paused, but there was no movement downstairs. He could hear a faint murmur of voices from the sitting room. Robert had come home late and was now no doubt hearing an outraged recital from Maggie.

Jessup opened the door, very carefully. “Em?” he whispered.

Emily switched on the angle lamp beside her bed, and tilted it down so that it gave only a little light. Even so, he could see that she had been crying.

“Shut the door,” she whispered back.

Jessup turned the knob, silently, and came and sat on the edge of her bed. He said softly, “In case you wondered, it wasn't me either.”

“I know,” Emily said. “It wasn't anybody. Not anybody real.”

Jessup wrinkled his nose, in the way he did in math class, when the teacher offered an answer that Jessup knew was inaccurate.

“Listen,” said Emily. “I know you're a genius, I know you understand lots of things I don't, I know you only believe in facts and figures. But you've seen all this impossible stuff happening, right?”

“Right,” said Jessup. He looked unhappily at her swollen eyes. “Are you okay, Em?”

“I'm fine,” Emily said. She gave him a faint, grateful smile. “Listen,” she said again. “I was talking about it at the theater, to Dai Rees and Willie Walker.”

“Ah,” said Jessup with respect. Everyone connected with the Chervil company had a vague but powerful sense that there was something special about Dai and Willie, their two native-born Celts.

“They were different from anyone else,” Emily said. “They believed straight away that we had nothing to do with all this stuff. And they knew about it, they said it comes from a . . . from a sort of invisible creature, that likes playing tricks. Not a ghost. But not human.”

“Not . . . human?”

“No.”

Jessup said hopefully, “An alien?”

“No. From Scotland and Wales and old places like that. Very old. Magic.”

“Magic,” Jessup said slowly, as if he were tasting the word.

“It likes to live with a family, and play jokes, Dai and Willie said. They said it might have come with us from Scotland. It's called a boggart.”

There was a brief, faint rustling sound from Emily's bookshelf. Jessup glanced into the shadows. “What's that?”

“I dunno. A mouse. Jess, we have to go talk to Willie.”

“Yeah,” Jessup said.

The Boggart was dancing on the edge of the bookshelf, delighted. He had been lying in a resentful half sleep, but when Emily had spoken his name he had shot up into the air, wide awake, filled with joy. They had recognized him! Finally, after all this time in this very strange place, they had realized that he was there! For the first time since the MacDevon had died, he could begin living with friends!

Emily was explaining to Jessup, in as much detail as she could remember, everything that Willie and Dai had said about boggarts. “The amazing part was the way they recognized everything I was describing. Willie just said straight away,
It's a boggart
. Like you turn on a faucet, and someone says,
That's water.
”

“There's a lot of questions to ask,” Jessup said. He stood up — then paused suddenly, looking surprised. He touched his cheek.

“What's the matter?” said Emily — and then paused, and put her hand up to her own face. She looked at Jessup with a strange expression that was a mixture of astonishment and total disbelief.

Jessup said, bemused, “It was like someone stroked my cheek. Someone's hand.”

“That's right,” Emily said. “A very small hand.”

They stared at each other.

Somewhere in the room, faint, growing, there was a slow happy sound like the purring of a cat.

“Is Polly in here?” said Jessup.

Emily said shakily, “No.”

A
UNT
J
EN
said brightly, “Well, I'm glad to see you, whatever the circumstances. And it's always nice to have help on Dusting Day.”

Emily said resentfully, “Mom only had to ask us to help — she knew we'd have come. But she has to turn it into this great huge punishment deal.
You will spend Saturday working at the shop!
As if we hadn't been helping at the shop ever since we were little!”

Aunt Jen gave her a comforting hug, and produced a handful of dusting cloths from the pocket of her voluminous jumper. Dusting Day came once a week at Old Stuff. It was a tedious process from which not only every piece of furniture but every small object, from roasting pan to thimble, had to emerge dust free and sparkling to attract the customers.

“Silver cloth for Em, standard for Jess” she said, handing out dusters. “And for Pete's sake don't break anything.”

“Are you kidding?” said Jessup with feeling. “She'd
atomize
us!”

“You've all been having a difficult time,” said Aunt Jen diplomatically. She was always careful not to take sides in Volnik family tussles. “Do a great job, and things'll get better. Maggie will be back soon — she's picking something up from Customs.”

She disappeared into the back of the shop, and Emily and Jessup began their dusting, very carefully indeed. Jessup took six champagne glasses off a shelf, polished the shelf and each glass, and put the last glass back with a sigh of relief. Emily polished a silver coffeepot, cream jug and sugar bowl. “Good thing that boggart's not here,” she said.

“Why holly?” Jessup said.

“What?”

“He put holly branches over all the windows. He must have had a reason.”

“I don't think it has real reasons for anything,” said Emily wearily. “It just likes bothering people. I mean what reason would it have for putting a squishy sandwich on your chair, except playing a silly joke?”

“I don't think he's an
it —
” Jessup began, but the door of the shop opened and their mother came in, carrying a cardboard carton. Emily looked up warily, and saw behind Maggie a tall, dark, grave man whom she felt she had seen before, though she couldn't remember when or where.

“Emily, Jessup,” said Maggie, formal and brisk. “This is Dr. Stigmore.”

“Good morning,” said the man.

“Hi,” said Jessup.

“Hello,” said Emily. She started to polish a box full of silver-plated knives and forks, all set neatly in rows.

Sitting on the open lid of the box, the Boggart looked across at Maggie, resentfully. He had come to the shop, clinging invisibly and uncomfortably to the handlebars of Emily's bicycle, because he wanted to be with his two new friends — not with this woman who had dared to dress up as the
Cailleach Bheur
. Someone had described her costume that night as the Wicked Witch of the West, whatever that might be, but he knew better. The Boggart felt disappointed. He was not good at coping with more than one emotion at once, and the sight of Maggie had brought a shadow over his new-discovered happiness. He made a small self-pitying sound, and it vibrated through the air of the shop like the whimper of a lost puppy.

Emily and Jessup stiffened, and looked nervously at each other.

“What did you say?” Maggie said, pausing.

“Nothing,” said Emily.

“Nothing,” said Jessup.

“We're just dusting,” Emily said. “Very carefully.”

“Good,” said her mother. She gave them a last suspicious glance and beckoned the dark man into the room at the rear of the shop. “It's in here, Dr. Stigmore. The largest piece we brought back . . . too large for you perhaps, but it would go well with your desk . . .”

They disappeared. Jessup said, “It's the creep.”

“So it is,” Emily said. That was why he had looked familiar: he was the bad-tempered man who had bought her rolltop desk. Well, now she had one of her own, so there, and it was nicer than his and had come all the way from the castle.

Emily paused suddenly. Through her mind there floated an image of Ron and Jim the delivery men, struggling to bring the little Scottish desk up the stairs to her room. It had lurched erratically all over the place, and in the end seemed to tip itself onto Jim's foot. “
It's
bewitched!
” Ron had said. . . .

She looked uncertainly around the shop. “I don't think that noise was anything, do you?” she said to Jessup.

“Course not!” said Jessup heartily, hoping he was right.

The Boggart watched with approval as Emily and Jessup dusted and polished. He felt relaxed again now that the three of them were alone.
My friends!
he thought joyously. He was filled with the instinct for happy meaningless mischief which was his normal state of mind, and debated with himself how best to share it with them. What could he do that would make them smile?

Emily finished polishing the silverware, closed the box and reached up to put it back on its shelf. Then she glanced across the shop and stood frozen, staring.

A small rag doll was climbing out of a box of antique toys which stood on a table at the far end of the shop. Another followed it, and then a third. The third had its head missing, but seemed not to mind. The three dolls stood on the table facing Emily, holding hands in a line, and they began to dance, floppily, first in one direction and then back again. One-two-three, hop, one-two-three, hop, one-two-three, hop —

“
Uurgh!
” said Emily, in a strangled, stricken voice, and Jessup looked up swiftly. His eyes widened, and he dropped the glass he was polishing — and instead of falling to the ground the glass floated back to the shelf from which it had come. The dolls danced on, one-two-three, hop, one-two-three, hop, and not far away an antique dressmaker's dummy began to sway to the same rhythm. So did the silk flowers in a vase on the other side of the shop, and the tall dried grasses standing in an empty World War II shell case. So did the group of chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, making a gentle jingling, tinkling sound. On the face of every clock in the shop — and there were more than a dozen — the hands began twirling gaily around and around. Very gently, the shop began to vibrate to the beat of the dolls' slow dance, and Emily and Jessup looked at each other, and began to smile.

“He's doing it for us!” Jessup said, entranced. “He's putting on a show!”

Emily called out softly, into the air, “It's lovely, Boggart!”

An umbrella stand full of umbrellas gave a small drunken lurch, and one by one the umbrellas flew up out of it to the ceiling, and opened, and hung there like bright hovering parachutes, swaying in time. A handsome brocade armchair rose three feet off the ground, slow and stately, and so did an old wooden church pew, creaking. One-two-three, hop, one-two-three, hop . . . Like a final flourish, a round table covered with a set of twelve delicate crystal glasses rose up, and up, and hovered, and Emily laughed in delight, but quivered in terror lest it too begin swaying to the rhythm of the dance.