The Boggart and the Monster by Susan Cooper Page A

image appeared at the top of the screen, obscured by a thick brown fog.
    Emily peered over his shoulder.
“It looks like the bottom of a boat.”
    â€œThat’s just what it is,”
said Harold.
    Jessup said,
“That’s the straight visual image, right?”
    â€œRight. This is from a video camera mounted on Sydney’s bow, with lights of course. Cousteau stuff, just like on the box. But in here we have the sonar — stage two.”
Harold bounced up again and into the next cavelike space in the wire-draped trailer, and Jessup, Emily and Mr. Maconochie dutifully followed, ducking cautiously.
    The Boggart was bored. Screens and computer terminals had lost most of their charm for him once he had learned how to play tricks with them, and these days he seldom even bothered to send Disney cartoons invading Mr. Maconochie’s favorite BBC television dramas. He flittered out of the trailer, back into the daylight; across the asphalt of the parking lot and over the litter bin into which Tommy had scornfully dropped his Loch Ness Monster leaflets.
    Glancing down, he saw on the front of a discarded leaflet the fuzzy, fake, world-famous picture of the Monster: the plesiosaur form rearing out of the water, with its massive body long neck and tiny head. The Boggart paused, and all his yearnings of the long melancholy night came flooding back. He looked across theroad to the loch, wide and silent and grey under the clouded sky, and he launched himself toward the water with all his ancient senses alert.
    â€œ
Cuz!
”
he cried.
“
Cuz, where are you? It’s me!
”
    Seven hundred feet down in the frigid dark water, the echo of the Boggart’s voice crept into Nessie’s sleeping brain. He shook his head a little, preparing to go deeper down into sleep, but the voice would not go away. It rang in his brain, louder, clearer, and Nessie gave a small grumbling grunt and raised his head. A layer of mud ten years thick rose with it, and wafted out into the water, which had been unclouded since the last time Nessie had floated lazily to the surface, peered out at a startled tourist, drifted down again before any camera could click, and gone back to sleep.
    â€œ
Nessie! Where are you? It’s your cuz, it’s me!
”
    Suddenly Nessie’s senses leaped into life, fighting their way to wakefulness through his long habit of sleep. He knew that voice. He had known it well, oh very well indeed, years and centuries ago. A great excitement came flooding through him. He lifted his long neck and shook his enormous body free of the mud, and with a beat of his powerful tail he was on his way up to the surface, calling as he went even though hundreds of feet of water kept his voice from being heard.
    â€œ
Cuz! It’s me, it’s Nessie! I’m coming! Wait for me!
”
    *  *  *
    U P IN THE TRAILER , Harold had shown them his sonar screens, and now he had reached the third set ofequipment, in the last little cave at the very back. Here there were banks of dials and computer keyboards, and three small screens in a row, each a blank dark green. There was so little space that Emily, Jessup and Mr. Maconochie had to take turns to peek inside, and even Harold had to stand squeezed at the back while Chuck, morose and silent in his Mean Man T-shirt, sat at the ROV remote controls that only he could fully understand.
    â€œThis laser scan is quite amazing,”
Harold said happily.
“Nobody’s had it before. We can send Sydney off through that deep dark water with no lights, and no sound waves for sonar, and if he meets anything we can get a picture of it as clear as if he was shooting with a video camera in daylight. Chuck, is Jenny out there with Sydney?”
    Chuck looked at them all disapprovingly, clearly wishing they would go away.
“She’s in the other boat, making it ready for Adelaide,”
he said.
    â€œWell, tell her to move to Sydney’s boat