Chapter 3: The Bòcan Pavilions

My mother was only mildly surprised that my card had shattered.

“I thought you were ready,” she said the next morning, considering the pieces I had returned to her. We were in the barn together under a single lantern, and my da’ was on the far side of the house, cleaning the fish from Loch Ness. Dawn was close. “This is something I need to think on.”

She patted my hand. “Don’t let it be on your head. Failing still means playing. I’ll sort it out.”

I had not told her about the German caster I’d encountered, though I thought she was right: My failure with the monster wasn’t due to lack of readiness. It was interference. Just the same, it sounded like an excuse to me, and I was not a young man to offer excuses for anything.

“What does Da’—” I started to ask, but she waved one finger at me.

“Your da’ knows about casters, and he knows about me.” She had the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen, and they flashed a warning at me. “But he don’t know about you yet. Agnes and the boys, they never showed a shine for this. Your sister had an imaginary friend when she was a lass, but that’s all it was, imaginary. And your da’ was always grateful for that, I think.”

 I was accustomed to being the youngest, but I bristled at it often just the same, and I did now. “Why? Is being a caster such a bad thing? It seems a gift to me.”

“No, not like that. He just doesn’t understand it.” She faked a smile. “He sees farmers in his kin, not casters.”

I had questions, many of them, but Mam said not now, there would be time again, so I let it be. But beginning that very morning, I found it harder and harder to be around my da’, the way any secret about to burst from you makes you avoid eye contact and makes you speak in single syllables. We squeezed past each other in the kitchen, back to back, without more than a grunt of acknowledgement. When he would read the paper in the evening, I would find myself in the loft, watching out the window while the little duck-like snipes chased each other across the fields, tripping in holes and throwing dirt clods at each other.

I felt more alone than I thought you could be.

On a Sunday not long after the Loch Ness Mess, as I started thinking of it, my brothers came to dinner, and there was laughter in the house for the first time in weeks. Isaac, the oldest brother in our MacCamran clan, brought his wife, and everyone bothered our middle brother, Elijah, for not having a bride yet. I said very little while we ate. My mother touched my arm to encourage me, so I started to listen for an opportunity.

“Say, Da’,” Elijah said during pudding, “I keep meaning to ask you. Do you know why pipers walk while they play?”
My da’ had played a mean bagpipes in his youth, I’d been told, so when he shook his head, and Elijah answered, “To get away from the noise,” everyone let loose in amusement.

I saw a moment.

“You know,” I said suddenly, and all eyes were upon me—I’d said so little that I imagined they’d all forgotten I was there, “while we were up at Loch Ness, I saw this disbeliever out in a little rowboat suddenly get attacked from under the water. His boat flew up in the air, and there was the monster, coming down on him. This atheist shouted out, ‘Oh, dear heavens, save me from this beast!’ Everything froze then, and the heavens opened up, and a great voice spoke. The voice said, ‘My son, I thought you never believed in me.’ And the disbeliever said, ‘Ah, give me a break here. Up until two minutes ago, I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster either.’”

Both of my brothers and Isaac’s wife Beatrice all laughed, but Mam grimaced, and Da’s face fell. I looked at my mother, and her expression told me everything: Now he knows.

I slunk off to bed before the laughter stopped.

***

In late summer, my mother announced we were taking the train to Edinburgh, just the two of us. I was secretly thrilled that my da’ wouldn’t be accompanying us, though of course I said no such thing. I was gracious as all get-out when he pressed a florin into my palm and told me to “get it good while you’re there.”

It was my first experience riding Scottish Railway, and I was generally unimpressed. We had seats (which was better than some riders), but it seemed to me that BR had purchased old, tattered chairs from the stockholders’ grandmothers and bolted them to the floors on their passenger cars. Mam and I sat far enough away from one another that, what with the roar of the engine, we had to raise our voices to be heard.

“I’m taking you to the Bòcan Pavilions,”  she said.

I felt my stomach drop. The thrill of the trip vanished as if it had never been. I’d seen the Bòcan Pavilions advertised in the Inverness Courier—it was a carnival of sorts, the kind respectable people avoided. They pitched it like a house of horrors mixed with an open-air market selling mysterious baubles that would “dazzle the senses,” as the advertisements had claimed. When I had first read about it, I imagined the Bòcan Pavilions to be like the Araby bazaar in Joyce’s short story: a bewildering paradise destined to break the heart and disabuse the notions of a teenage romantic.

 
I was gripped by the fear that my mother was escorting me to Hell.

I could not focus on the glory of Edinburgh Waverley station when we disembarked the train in the afternoon. The sun was ablaze overhead, but all I could think about was the dread of seeing the carnival and its nightmares that would somehow be untouched by sunlight. The fact that my mother carried a bag with her book in it—that book with the card of the terrifying midwife from fifteen years ago at my birth—completed the image I had constructed of madness on the fairgrounds.

We rode a tram across the capital, and Mam urged me to take it all in—the busy streets that bore no resemblance to Queensberry in any way, the automobiles that zipped madly amongst horses and carriages, the fishwives and the schoolchildren and the Castle that dominated the skyline. I smiled and nodded. Smiled and nodded at the strangers on the tram. Smiled and nodded.

“Abraham,” my mother said.

I realized she’d been saying my name, and I was lost. She took my hand and led me off the tram.

The Bòcan Pavilions sprawled across a park on the city’s edge, roughly three blocks wide by three blocks long. It was surrounded by a wire fence that was meant to keep good people out. As we approached the entrance—a tent that broke up the fence with a burly, bearded man who looked more like a barkeeper or door supervisor—I began to dig out the florin my da’ had given me. But my mother shook her head at me and took her book halfway out of her bag.

The bearded man waved us through without a word.

It was a dizzying array of tents and booths that we passed through. Giant carnivalesque banners advertised deformed beings, both human and animal, horrifying mummies and pygmy cannibals, all promising terrors to thrill those who’d led quiet rural lives, for certain. Hawkers barked offers for games of risk, and I paused for only a moment before a gigantic Wheel of Chance before my mother pulled me along again. Music seemed to be everywhere, clashing instruments in different tempos and keys. We passed tents promising elephants and magicians, and the smells were wild and foreign to me. The Bòcan Pavilions were a madhouse of alleys between tents and the scent of breads baking and endless crowds of men who seemed to have forgotten their hats.

 We stopped before the unmarked wooden door of a nondescript canvas tent. It wasn’t an attraction; it was sufficiently off the beaten paths of the rest of the pavilions that it struck me then that my mother knew exactly where we were going. She knocked and stepped back.

The man who answered made the bearded door supervisor look like a child. He had to lower his head to step out, and when he rose to his full height, he towered over us. He had white hair that he wore in a tail that hung from the back of his head, pale skin that suggested he rarely left the darkness, and eyes the light blue of the sky. I had never even heard of albinism.

“Angel,” he said, his voice surprisingly serene. My mother’s name was Angelica.

“Is he here?” she asked. When the giant nodded, she said, “Would you be so good as to announce us?”

***

The inside of the tent was roomy but dark, lit by a small square of sunlight overhead that came down through an open flap in the tent’s roof. Trunks lined two sides of the space; an unmade bunk took up most of the back wall. The enclosure smelled of jasmine.

As the albino retreated, a man stepped into the square of light. He had long black hair that hung across his forehead and into his eyes, and he had a beard but no mustache. He was dressed all in black from head to toe—including gloves—and it was so extensive that I thought it had to be a costume.

“Angel,” he said with no accent whatsoever, his tone flat.

“My boy is a caster, Blake,” Mam said without introductions. “He’s seen cryptids.”

“Three.” I hadn’t meant to speak nor to hold up fingers. Blake’s eyes turned to me.

“How many do you think there are?”

“Ah dinnae ken,” I began, but my mother nudged me, and Blake frowned.

“I mean, I don’t know.” I turned to look at my mother. “What difference does it make if I say it like—?”

Blake said, “Because if another caster can surmise where you’re from, they can take the first step to taking advantage of you. She knows that even if she doesn’t observe it herself.”

My mother rarely looked embarrassed, but she looked away at this as Blake smiled. “I’m sorry. I don’t judge. Has he found a spellbook yet?”

“He can have mine.” She removed her book from her bag and showed it to Blake.

“So, he doesn’t have his own. You’re banking on kinship to have yours work for him?”

“Yes, I already had him use one of my cards to—”

“Excuse me,” I said, loudly enough that I heard the albino stiffen behind me. “I’m standing right here. And fancy this, I can speak. It must be a bloody miracle. So, maybe talk to me about me, eh?”

“I would do that,” Blake said, “but you don’t know yet what you don’t know.”

The albino approached from the shadows and set a book down in the light. It looked enough like the one my mother carried that I knew it was a so-called spellbook. But it was thick and meaty, and its leather looked worn and well-loved, as many a good book’s cover does. Blake turned it toward himself, opened it to a deep page, and then turned it toward me so I could see its contents.

“All right,” he said. “I will talk to you about you now, if you’ll be honest with me in every answer. Agreed?”

I just nodded—I was already drawn to the single card on the right-hand page. There were four cards on the left, but the one on the right was mesmerizing. A heat seemed to rise from it, but that heat was equally cold, the way a fever burns you alive before freezing you out.

The card depicted a horror out of a waking nightmare. It seemed so big that it couldn’t be contained by the borders of the card itself, as if no distance could possibly make it fit and still underscore its mass. Its head was indiscernible; there were eyes, but too near them were tentacles like a squid, redefining what might be a face. I could see bat-like wings in its background, suggesting this revolting thing could be airborne, and the shades of its scales made me think of lizards. Just looking at it made my head hurt.

“What in the heavens is that?” I asked.

Blake tilted his head toward me. “You’ll be honest with me, don’t forget. Do you actually care whether or not you know what it is?”

The fear I’d felt since Mam had told me we were headed to the Bòcan Pavilions was replaced by a starving curiosity. Too much suddenly depended on knowing all about this image, and my voice squeaked “yeah” so softly I didn’t think he’d heard me.

“It took me years and an ocean voyage to map this being,” he said without answering. He pulled the book back, glancing at the image and shuddering before closing the pages again. “You’re not ready to know, but you could be ready. I can teach you.”

This brought me back to myself. I turned to my mother. “Wait. Is this why we came?”

“You need a mentor,” she said. “I can’t do it. I’ll never be good enough. Blake is already better than most casters.”

“No, no. He doesn’t even know me—”

“Arthur,” Blake said. I turned on him.

“No. My name is Abraham.”

“You are Arthur,” he said, “and I am Merlin.”

“No. I am Abraham, and you are daft.”

“Definitely.” Blake spread his hands. “But then, so was Merlin.”

When I turned to leave the tent, the albino stepped out of my way.

***

We did not speak, my mother and I, on the train ride home. In hindsight, I believe she knew what I was thinking—I had not yet gotten over the awkward Sunday supper when I’d been reminded that I was very unlike my brothers. I was thinking of the monster in Loch Ness and what it meant to be a caster. I was thinking, too, about the thickness of Blake’s spellbook and what secrets it might hold.

When we reached home, it was long after dark, but my da’ was still awake. I kissed Mam goodnight and sat down across from him at our main table. His eyes were tired; his head hung low.

“What did she show you there in Edinburgh?” he asked.

I thought about answering nothing, but that would just lead to a back and forth until we got around to the truth, so I said, “Everything.”

He seemed satisfied with that. He took and let out a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.

“I worried about Agnes,” he said. “She had this imaginary friend she talked to, but your mam said it was nothing, just a normal lass thing, so I never thought about it again. Not with her.”

I stayed silent. He seemed far away, as if sorting out his thoughts.

“Then there was Isaac. Ah, gentle but dumb Isaac. I knew he didn’t see no cryptids. I used to wonder if he could even see me.” Da’ laughed at his own humor. “Elijah came along not too long after that, and I got worried all over again. Was he gonna be seeing monsters under the bed? He was a mite brighter than Isaac. But he didn’t, and that was that. So, I thought we’d watch out for Agnes to marry someone who could bring money to the clan, and Isaac and Elijah could expand the oat farming. We were set.”

He sighed. “Then your mam, she was with child another two times. Maybe we was a bit careless, but she lost them both, so we mourned, but we went on. And we got more careful about, you know, the timing of it all.”

He finally looked up at me again. “But then came you. And for the life of me, Abe, I couldn’t see where you fit in. There wasn’t gonna be enough land to divide it up by another parcel. I didn’t have any answers. One day I went out to work the fields, and when I came home, we had another mouth to feed. Your mam said you were the easiest one of them all.”

He swallowed. “But I knew you were the one who was gonna be like her. Your eyes, they saw things even when you were in the cot and couldn’t speak yet. You weren’t like Agnes and the boys. You weren’t like me.”

He got to his feet very slowly, as if he might tumble over if he rose too quickly. He moved like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, boy,” he said, “but you are the least of us.”

He went on down the hall to bed. I stayed at the table.

When I was young, I did not think too hard.

I left for Edinburgh the next morning.

I was in such a hurry to go that I forgot to ask my mother about the midwife that had delivered me, but I still had its image—on a card in the spellbook she left out for me in the middle of the night. I would find out what it was.