Secret of the Indian

Omri bought the plastic figure of an Indian girl and brought her to life as a wife for Little Bull. And shortly after that, it was decided – with deep reluctance by the boys – that having three little people, and their horses, around amid all the dangers that threatened them in the boys’ time and world, was more than they could cope with. It was just too much responsibility. So they ‘sent them back’, for the cupboard and key worked also in reverse, transforming real miniature people back into plastic and returning them to their own time.

Omri hadn’t intended ever to play with this dangerous magic again. It had been too frightening, too full of problems – and too hurtful, at the end, when he had to part with friends he had grown so fond of. But as with so many resolutions, this one got broken.

About a year later, by which time Omri’s and Patrick’s families had both moved house, Omri won first prize in an important competition for a short story. The story he wrote was called The Plastic Indian and was all about – well, it was the truth, but of course no one thought of that; they just thought Omri had made up the most marvellous tale. And he was so excited (the prize was three hundred pounds, he was to receive it at a big party in a London hotel, and even his brothers were very impressed) that he decided to bring Little Bull back to life, just long enough to share this triumph with him since he had been such a vital part of it.

Unfortunately, things were not so simple.

When Omri put Little Bull, Twin Stars and their pony – the plastic figures of them – back in the cupboard, they emerged much changed.

Little Bull lay across the back of his pony with two musket-balls in his back, very near to death. There had been a battle in his village, between his tribe and their enemies, the Algonquins, together with French soldiers. (Omri had already learnt that the French and English had been fighting in America at the time, and Little Bull’s tribe was on the English side.) Little Bull had been wounded. Twin Stars, although on the point of having a baby, had rushed out and heaved Little Bull on to his pony, just as the magic worked, bringing them – tiny as before, but as real as ever, and in desperate trouble – to Omri’s attic bedroom.

And thus it was that Omri was launched into a whole series of new and even more hair-raising and challenging adventures.

Luckily Patrick was nearby and was able to help with some excellent ideas. Boone ‘came back’ too, and they also brought to life a hospital Matron from a much more recent era to help save Little Bull’s life. Later when he demanded to go back to his village, a British Royal Marine corporal, Willy Fickits, and a contingent of Iroquois braves, were brought to life to help take revenge on the Algonquins.

At this point there was a most incredible turn of events.

Boone, the cowboy, suggested that the boys ‘go back’ to Little Bull’s time and witness the battle. Of course they thought it was impossible. How could they fit into the little bathroom cupboard, only about thirty centimetres high? But Boone pointed out that the magic key might fit something larger – the old seaman’s chest that Omri had bought in the market, for instance.

It worked. Each boy climbed in in turn, the other one turned the key, and each separately went back in time to the Iroquois village.

When Omri got back – terribly shaken after witnessing a horrific battle – his hair was singed and he had a burn-blister on the side of his head.

The boys brought the Indian troop back through the magic of the key, discovering to their horror that the modern weapons that they had given Little Bull’s men – Little Bull called them ‘now-guns’ – had proved too much for fighters untrained in their use. Many of them had been accidentally shot by their own side. Matron had to be brought back to treat their wounds, but eight had been killed.

Little Bull was distraught, but Twin Stars comforted him by putting his new son, Tall Bear, in his arms. And Omri and Patrick took the blame. They shouldn’t have sent modern weapons into the past… But these worked very well when, later, three skinheads tried to burgle the house. The boys brought some plastic Marines to life and mounted an artillery assault on them just as they were rifling Omri’s parents’ bedroom, and completely routed them. It was exhilarating while it lasted, but now they were faced with the aftermath: reality, the present, the results of the night’s doings.

4

Dead in the Night

The two boys sat on the floor of Omri’s bedroom and conferred in low voices.

“We’ve got to plan what to do,” said Patrick. “One of us must be up here in your room, on guard, every minute of the rest of the weekend. We’ll have to keep your door locked from inside. Whoever’s not here will have to bring food and stuff, so I’d better stay up here most of the time. It’ll look dead odd if I start nicking stuff from your kitchen. I don’t know what we’re going to do on Monday—”

Omri said heavily, “I do. I’ll have to go to school, and you’ll have to go home.”

“Oh God, yes,” said Patrick, remembering.

Patrick now lived in Kent with his mother. They were only in London for a brief visit to his aunt and girl cousins, Emma and the dreadful Tamsin. They’d have been back in their country home already, had Tamsin not fallen off her bicycle and broken her leg, so that Patrick’s mother had decided to stay on for a day or two to help his aunt.

The boys sat in heavy silence. Omri could hardly bear the thought of being left alone in this increasingly difficult situation. Patrick could hardly bear the thought of leaving it.

“Maybe Tamsin’ll die,” Patrick said darkly. “Then we’ll have to stay on. For the funeral.”

Omri hoped this was only a sick joke. He detested Tamsin but he didn’t wish her dead – not now he’d seen death, not with those eight small bloodstained bodies lying under torn-up scraps of sheet, right here in his room…

“What are we going to do about – the casualties?” he asked.

“You mean the dead ones? We’ll have to bury them.”

“Where?”

“In your garden—”

“But we can’t just… I mean, it’s not like when Boone’s horse died. They’re people, we can’t just – stick them in the earth. What about their families?”

“Their families are – are back there somewhere. We don’t know where they are, or when they are.”

“Maybe we ought to – to send them back through the cupboard, to their own time.”

“Send their dead bodies back? With modern bullets in them?”

“Their people would think they’d been shot by white men. They wouldn’t examine them. They’d go through – you know, whatever special rituals they have, and bury them properly – or – or whatever they do with dead people.”

Abruptly, Omri felt his eyes begin to prick and a hard, hot lump came into his throat. He put his head down on his knees. Patrick must have been feeling the same, because he squeezed Omri’s arm sympathetically.

“It’s no good feeling it too much,” he said after clearing his throat twice. “I know it’s terrible and I know it’s partly our fault. But they lived in very dangerous times, fighting and risking death every day. And they went into the battle quite willingly.”

“They didn’t know what they were up against with the now-guns,” said Omri in a muffled voice.

“Yeah, I know. Still. It doesn’t help to – to be a Boone.”

The weak joke about the cry-baby cowboy made Omri chuckle just a little.

“Where is Boone, by the way?” he asked, sniffing back his tears.

“I told you. I sent him back – he asked me to. Gave him a new horse, and off he went. Look.”

He opened the cupboard. On the shelf was Boone, standing beside his new horse, a tall, alert-looking black one. On the floor of the cupboard, Corporal Fickits and his men were clustered together, with their various weapons. Patrick gathered them all up, put the soldiers back in the biscuit-tin, but kept Fickits and Boone separate. Boone went into his pocket, horse and all. He always kept him there, when he wasn’t real, for luck. He was actually as fond of Boone as Omri was of Little Bull. Omri put Fickits in the back pocket of his jeans.

“The only thing we can do right now is to get some sleep,” Omri said.

Patrick settled down on his floor-cushions while Omri clambered up onto his bunk bed under the skylight. He looked up at the stars through the branches of the old elm tree which his father kept saying should be cut down because it was dead. Skeletal as it was, to Omri it was a friend.

“Let’s bring Boone back tomorrow,” Patrick whispered just before they dropped off. “I don’t seem to be able to face things without Boone, whether he cries or not. Besides, I want to know if he likes his new horse.”

At dawn Omri was woken by a familiar shout.

“Omri wake! Day come! Much need do!”

Omri, feeling sticky-eyed and thick-headed with tiredness, slid backwards down the ladder to the floor. Patrick was still sound asleep. The grey dawn light was only just creeping through the skylight.

“It’s dead early, Little Bull,” he muttered, rubbing his face and stifling a series of yawns.

Little Bull didn’t hear him properly. He caught only his name and the word ‘dead’. He nodded his hard-muscled face once and grunted.

“One more dead in night.”

Omri’s throat closed up with a sick feeling.

“Another? Oh, no… I’m sorry!” He meant sorry-ashamed, not just sorry-regretful. He felt every dead Indian brave was on his own conscience. He should never have made the modern weapons real, never have sent Little Bull and his braves back in time with them. The trouble was, he seemed still not fully to have accepted the fact, which he knew with one part of his brain, that these little people were not just toys come to life. They were flesh and blood, with their own characters, their own lives and destinies. And against his own intentions Omri had been drawn in. He’d found himself acting out his own part in these destinies, which would never have been possible but for the magic of the cupboard… and the key.

The key turned any container into a kind of body-shrinking time-machine. His seaman’s chest had taken him and Patrick back to the eighteenth century, to Little Bull’s time and place… Omri had not had time, so far, even to begin to think about the possibilities of that.

Now he scanned the seed-tray and saw that two of the Indians who had not been injured were carrying another body out of the longhouse and into the little paddock Patrick had made with miniature fencing, for the ponies, and which was now a makeshift morgue. Matron followed the sad procession, her face, rather grim at all times, now grimmer than ever.

“I did my best,” she said shortly. “Bullet lodged in the liver. Couldn’t reach it.”

She watched the two braves lay the dead Indian down beside the others. Suddenly she turned to face Omri.

“I know I did that operation on your friend!” she said. “And I operated last night – emergency ops – three of them – but blow it all, I’m not a surgeon! Stupid of me – conceited to think I could cope. Can’t. Not trained for it. Anyway… too much for any one person.” Her voice cracked upward.

“Matron, it’s not your fault—” began Omri, terrified that this capable, efficient, down-to-earth woman might be about to burst into tears, which would have unmanned him completely.

“Didn’t say it was! My fault indeed!” She glared at him, took her specs off, polished them on a spotless handkerchief from her apron pocket, and put them back on her formidable nose.

“Blessed if I know how I got here, what this is all about – now don’t you go pulling the wool over my eyes, I know when I’m dreaming and when I’m not – this is real. The blood’s real, the pain’s real, the deaths are real. My ops were real, they were the best I could do, but what is also real is my – my – my basic inadequacy.”

She suddenly snatched the handkerchief out of her pocket again and blew her nose on it. She wiped her nose back and forth several times and then gave a great, convulsive sniff.

“What we need here is a properly equipped medical team!”

Omri gaped at her.

“If we don’t get one – and quickly – more of these poor men are going to die.”

After a moment, during which she glared at him expectantly through her spectacles, Omri said slowly, “I’ll tell you the truth about you being here, and – all the rest of it. But you probably won’t believe me.”

“After what I’ve been through in the past forty-eight hours, I’ll believe anything!” she said fervently.

He explained things as well as he could. She listened intently and asked a couple of questions.

“You say any article or figure made of plastic is affected?”

“Yes.”

“And objects which might be concealed on the person – my hypodermic syringe, for example, and other things I brought in my pocket from St Thomas’s—”

“Yes, they’re made real, provided the person had them on him before he was – brought.”

“Well! Why can’t you get hold of some plastic doctors and put them in your allegedly magic cupboard? Only you must make sure they have some equipment – surgical instruments and so forth.”

“But all the shops are shut! How can I—”

Suddenly Omri remembered. Two nights ago, he had gone to see Patrick at his aunt’s house and they had tried to borrow Tamsin’s new box of plastic figures, only she’d caught them at it and grabbed it back. Omri had only just managed to hold onto the figure that turned out to be Matron. But there had been others in the set – including a surgeon at an operating table.

He stretched out his foot and nudged Patrick awake.

“Patrick! Listen. There’s another Indian dead. And Matron says, if we don’t find a proper doctor, more will die.”

Patrick scrambled to his feet, rubbing his hair.

“How can we get any new ones on Sunday?”

“What about the ones Tamsin has?”

“What are you saying? That I should go back to Aunty’s and nick them when Tamsin isn’t looking?”

“It’s only borrowing.”

“Not when the owner doesn’t know or agree! Not when the owner’s my little creep of a cousin! She’d have my guts for garters!”

Omri said, with a note of desperation, “Well, what are we to do, then? This is a real emergency!” Suddenly he had an idea. “Why don’t you try buying them off her?”

“It might work. Have you got any dosh?”

“Not a penny, we spent it all on the Indian braves. Maybe Dad’ll lend me a couple of quid.”

His dad did better than that. He gave him a fiver, and not just till pay-day. “You’ve earned it. Here’s one for Patrick, too.”

So there was no problem about money.

At breakfast, hastily eaten, the boys sneaked some crispy bits of bacon and quite a few Crunchy Nut Cornflakes into their pockets, and Omri astonished his mother by asking for a mug of tea instead of milk. Matron couldn’t cope without her tea.

“I thought you hated tea!”

“I’m coming round to it.”

“You’ll be hitting the Scotch next,” commented his father from behind his Sunday paper.

Patrick nudged Omri. When whisky was mentioned, there was just one person who came to mind. Halfway back up the stairs, Patrick whispered: “Let’s bring Boone back to life right now!”

At that moment, the doorbell rang.

Omri went back down and opened the door. Then he gasped. Outside stood Tamsin. Of all people!

How could it be, she’d broken her leg!

Omri looked again. It wasn’t Tamsin, it was Emma.

Emma was Tamsin’s twin sister. She was the spitting image of Tamsin, and yet she was wholly different. As far as Omri could remember, she was quite a decent sort of girl.

“Hello, Omri,” she said. “Can I see Patrick?”

Patrick dragged himself reluctantly down into the hall. Omri stood aside, waiting. He could feel himself tensing all over for fear there was a car outside waiting to cart Patrick away.

“Hi, Em. How’s it going?” said Patrick carelessly.

“Okay. Tam’s leg’s in a cast and she’s better. They sent me here because Omri’s phone’s busted and your mum couldn’t ring you and you’re to come back with me.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“I – I can’t come now!”

“Why not?”

Patrick dithered helplessly, trying to think of some excuse.

“How are we supposed to get back?”

“On the train of course,” said Emma. “Come on.”

Omri said, “Did you come here on the train?”

“Yes, why?”

“And you walked up the road to here, from the station?”

“Yes.”

Omri thought of the skinheads. It was Sunday – even the few who went to school or had jobs, were free and on the prowl on Sundays. He himself never walked down Hovel Road on Sundays if he could possibly help it.

“Did you meet anyone…?”

She shrugged. “A few boys. Hanging around. Real creeps, gross. I took no notice of them.”

Omri shivered. But then he remembered. There was a pretty good chance he didn’t have to be scared of that gang any more. He put his hand in his jeans pocket, and fingered the little penlight the smallest of the burglars had dropped the night before.

As he touched it, he felt something else. It was the key. A sudden flash of inspiration came to him, stiffening his whole body like a bolt of electricity.

“Emma,” he said in a queer sort of voice, “would you mind if I had a private chat to Patrick before he – er – goes?”

She looked from one of them to the other. “What’s the secret?”

They both flushed.

“Wait here, okay?” Omri gabbled, and pulling Patrick into the living-room he closed the door.

“You’ve got to get out of going home,” Omri said. “I can’t cope without you.”

“What can I do? Break my leg?”

“Well… if you had the bottle for it, you could throw yourself down the stairs… probably do yourself some serious enough injury…”

“Thanks!”

“…But I wasn’t thinking of that. Tell Emma you’ve left something upstairs. We’ll go up to my room and you can get in the chest with Boone’s figure and I can send you back to his time.”

5

Patrick Goes Back

Patrick’s face was blank for a moment, and Omri thought: He’s scared, and who can blame him! But then he saw it wasn’t that at all. Patrick simply hadn’t been able to grasp the idea at first.

When he did grasp it, not just his face but his whole body seemed to light up with excitement.

“Wow,” he said simply.

“You mean you’ll do it?”

“Are you kidding? Go back to real cowboy-time, cowboy-country? See Boone full-size? Lead me to it! Let’s go!”

He bounded out of the living-room and was halfway up the stairs before Omri had gathered his wits to follow. As he came into the hall he noticed Emma standing much closer to the living-room door than she had been before. Patrick had nearly bowled her over as he emerged.

A suspicion struck Omri.

“Were you listening?”

“Yes,” she said at once. “But I didn’t understand what you were talking about.”

“Ah,” said Omri with relief. It crossed his mind that she was a very straightforward girl, at least – Tamsin wouldn’t have admitted eavesdropping like that. Not many people would.

He gave Emma a closer look. She was a year younger than him – which was why he had hardly noticed her at school, somehow you only noticed your contemporaries or people ahead of you. But she’d been more or less around for most of his life. Odd that he’d never really looked at her before. Now he saw that she was quite nice looking in a fair, snubby-faced way. She had freckles and large eyes, and was dressed in sensible jeans and a blue anorak. She had her hands deep in her pockets and was gazing at him expectantly.

“What were you on about in there?”

“Private,” said Omri. He glanced up the stairs. Patrick could already be heard thudding up the last flight, to Omri’s attic bedroom.

“Where’s Patrick gone?”

“Er – up to get his pyjamas and stuff.”

“But he didn’t take any last night, he just dashed out.”

“Oh. Well – anyway he’s – gone up,” said Omri feebly, making a move to follow him.

Emma followed at his heels. He paused on the second stair.

“Can you wait down here?”

“Why?”

“We’ll be – right down.”

“Can’t I see your room? You saw mine,” she said. “Last night, when you came to our house. Mum moved Tam and me out so Patrick could have it.”

“Well…”

From above came Patrick’s impatient voice. “Come ON, Omri! Don’t hang about!”

“You wait in the living-room,” Omri said decisively. He turned away from her and ran upstairs.

In his room he found Patrick already climbing into the seaman’s chest.

“Go on, I’m ready! Send me!”

But Omri, having come up with this amazing idea, was already having second thoughts.

“Listen, how’ll I explain where you’ve gone?”

“Don’t. Get rid of Emma somehow, make her go home, and you can tell your parents I went with her.”

“But what when Emma gets back to her place without you?”

“It’ll be too late then! I’ll just have vanished!” He grinned all over his face with glee.

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