Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Julian was chanting, “Mister Cat ! Mister Cat ! Mister Cat !” like a mob cheering at a football game, but I made him stop. Mister Cat was making that creaky-door, mess-with-me-and-die sound, the way he’d done to me in Heathrow, and the boggart was absolutely cowering and crying, “Gi’m off me! Gi’m off me, missus! Boggart niver meant noo harm, boggart was on’y spoortin-like—gi’m off and ye’ll nivver see boggart more, I zwear!”

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. To somebody two feet high, Mister Cat has to look like Bagheera the Black Panther on a bad-hair day. Although the one who seemed to scare him more was the Persian—he wouldn’t even look at her, but kept making funny signs with his fingers, more or less in her direction. Whatever they were supposed to do, they didn’t. The Persian just watched him, licking her left front paw now and then. I wondered if a ghost’s tongue could taste ghost-fur.

Julian was tugging my arm, whispering, “Jenny, don’t believe him, don’t believe him! He didn’t say he wouldn’t bother us, he just said we wouldn’t see him do it.” Julian’s going to be a lawyer— I don’t think I’ve mentioned that.

“Got it,” I said; and then, to the boggart, “Okay, you, shut up and listen. Shut up , or I’ll have my attack cat eat your face.” Mister Cat might lose interest any time now, and I had to move before he strolled off somewhere with his hot date. In my toughest, meanest New York voice I said, “Now. No more bullshit. You tell us right now what we have to do so we don’t have any more aggravation from you. Right now, buddy, or that sweet kisser is lunch meat.” Jake and Marta wouldn’t have stopped laughing for a week.

It did wonders for the boggart, though. He scrunched behind his arms even more, and started babbling so fast I couldn’t understand him at first. “Zpectacles! Zpectacles, it is, so boggart can see past’s nose again. Boggart’s old, he is, boggart’s eyen ben’t what they was—zpectacles, they needs! Laive a pair on t’mat and boggart’ll trouble ye no more.” Mister Cat growled in his throat right at that moment, and the boggart yeeped —can’t find another word for it. “Nivver no more! May kitties coom get me if I lie!”

I looked at Julian. He nodded. “They have to keep their promises. Ellie John told me.”

“Okay, then,” I said, still doing the New York gangster. “One pair of eyeglasses, onna mat tonight. Just remember, duh cats know where youse live.”

I bent down and picked Mister Cat off the boggart. Mister Cat didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue about it. The Persian never moved, and I wasn’t about to touch her, not in my entire life. Again it struck me that the boggart seemed more frightened of her than he was of Mister Cat. He watched her all the time he was getting up and finding his hat, practically groveling if she so much as flicked an ear. I said, “She won’t hurt you,” but the boggart plainly wasn’t buying, and I got the feeling that he had reasons older than I was. He backed slowly away, still hunched and ready to run—then all at once he straightened up, set his hat on his head, and gave us the horse grin one more time.

“For yer ma’s sake, a single word of advice, like. A warning.” He pointed at the Persian, shaking his finger the same way he’d done at me. “Ware t’servant, ware t’mistress—and ware T’Other Oone most of all.” And you could hear the capital letters on T’Other Oone. Believe it.

“The mistress,” I said. “Who’s that? The Other One—I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s the Other One?”

But the boggart laughed like a bathtub drain, and did a sort of weird skip-jig on the kitchen floor. “A single word, a single word, I said, and that ye’ve had. To’morn’s to be zpectacles waiting for boggart on mat—and so farewell, Jenny Glookstein, farewell, Joolian McHugh. Farewell, farewell.”

And he was gone, the way I’d thought only Mister Cat could vanish. Julian insisted he went back under the stove, flattening himself out—“Like a piece of paper, Jenny, didn’t you see?”—and slipping in through the little space there was. Sally and Evan came sloshing in just then, and Tony came down, and we all got busy running around bringing them towels, making tea, putting their Wellingtons and their rain slickers in the bathtub. They were all over mud, even with the slickers, and Evan had a huge bruise on one cheekbone where he’d fallen over something in the dark. But they’d saved the new fruit trees. There wasn’t a thing on the planet more important, right then.

They sat there in the kitchen, laughing and holding hands, looking flushed and scratched up, and really tired, looking like kids—looking the way Julian and I should have been looking, instead of sneaking glances at each other and agreeing without a word that we wouldn’t talk about our night for a bit. The Persian was as gone as the boggart, but Mister Cat was sitting between us, tail curled around his feet, looking utterly bored and sleepy. Julian picked him up and held him tight, practically strangling him, the way he used to hug that gorilla he gave me. Mister Cat usually hates that kind of thing, but hejust purred and purred, while Evan and Sally drank their tea and picked little twigs out of each other’s hair.

The boggart kept his word. After everybody’d finally gone to bed, I sneaked back down and left an old pair of drugstore reading glasses Julian kept trying to start fires with out on the doormat. They were gone in the morning, and the kitchen was tidier than we’d left it.

The nighttime patrols dwindled away pretty fast, once it was obvious that the boggart had gone out of business. Julian and I never said anything—not even to each other, really. Julian more or less decided that he’d dreamed the whole thing, which was just as well. He did spend a lot of time hunting around the Manor for that Persian lady, though, and seriously asking Mister Cat where she was. I still feel guilty about that. I should have told Julian something .

I did tell Meena, one weekend when I was staying at her house and she was teaching me to put on a sari by myself. They’re all six yards long, and there’s a sort of blouse that goes underneath, and people from different parts of India wrap them around themselves differently, and throw the loose end over their shoulders in special ways. I was getting the hang of it pretty quickly, except for the damn pleats, which I still can’t get right, and which Meena can do on herself in two minutes flat. I look like a big pink horse in a sari, but I don’t care, I love them. And Meena always says I look nice.

When I told her what happened with the boggart and the cats, she got very quiet for a while. I said, “Don’t you believe me?” and she said, “Oh, yes, yes, I do, that’s the trouble. That’s what frightens me.”

“Come on,” I said. “What frightens ? You’re the one who grew up with ghosts, poltergeists, all those stories you told me. Weretigers, for God’s sake. What’s so specially scary about a boggart?”

“Nothing much,” Meena said. “In India. India’s so old, Jenny. So many thousands of years, so many things happening to so many people, so much blood and birth—so much death that some things learned not to die, ever. The scary thing would be if India weren’t full of ghosts and spirits and old, old curses. But England’s not like that. I don’t want England to be like India.”

She was upset enough that she actually messed up her own pleats and had to do them over. I said, “Well, for a little baby country, England’s up to here in weirdness. Eight months here, and I’ve heard more ghost stories, more legends, folktales, whatever, than I heard in New York my whole life. I think England’s probably already like India, blood and all. You know about Monmouth’s Rebellion?”