The Key to the Indian

1Anyone for Camping?

“Okay, you chaps, I’ve got an announcement to make.”

The three boys stopped eating and looked up. Adiel and Gillon exchanged puzzled glances. It was the “you chaps” that did it, together with their father’s hail-fellow-well-met manner. He simply was not the “you-chaps” type. But stranger was to come.

“What would you say to our all going camping?”

Adiel dropped his jaw. Gillon dropped something noisier, his knife and fork onto his plate. A piece of toad-in-the-hole was dislodged and fell to the floor in a small shower of rich brown gravy.

“Oh, Gillon, don’t show off! What a mess!” said their mother, irritated. “Kitsa! Leave it!” – as the cat, lurking hopefully under the table, pounced. Gillon wrested it from her and plonked it triumphantly back on his plate.

“You’re not planning to EAT it now?” His mother snatched it up and left the room with it, returning at once with a wet cloth. “What are you talking about, Lionel, camping?”

“Camping is what I’m talking about. What do you say, boys?”

Adiel said, quite gently, “Are you feeling all right, Dad?”

“Never better.”

“Camping? I mean, are you kidding? Camping? You mean, on our own, without you.”

“No, no, of course not. With me.”

There was a silence. Omri glanced at his mother. She had mopped up the splashes of gravy and was crouching by the table beside Gillon, staring glassily at her husband. The two older boys were staring, too.

Only Omri was not reacting with astonishment. He sat with narrowed eyes, only pausing for a moment before hacking into another batter-encrusted sausage. Camping indeed! That’d be the day when his dad even dreamt of such a hearty outdoor pursuit, especially after the one and only time they’d ever tried it, which had ended in total disaster on the same day it began.

Omri grinned secretly at the memory of the four of them trailing home, not from some wild moorland or forest but from the local common, after they had failed to put up the tent and the skies had opened, drenching everything including the food; this had been left exposed after Gillon nicked a premature sandwich out of the cool-chest and left the lid off. The sunroof on the car had also been left open. Their dad, humiliated by his defeat-by-tent, couldn’t say much except, “That’s it, boys. Home.” Their mother had been very nice, she hadn’t even laughed, at least not much. It was only later Omri had stopped to wonder why there had been a casserole and five baked potatoes in the oven when she had been told they wouldn’t be back for two days.

Now there his dad was, at the head of the table, beaming at them, the very picture of a hearty, extrovert father. He was even tilting his chair back and rubbing his hands. Gillon snorted.

The front legs of their dad’s chair hit the floor. “What, may I ask, is so funny?”

“You, Dad. Camping. You’re not serious, you can’t be.”

“Don’t you want to go, then?”

Gillon considered it. Then he said, “Would it be like last time?”

“Of course not,” said their father haughtily. “That was just play-camping. You’re older now and we’ll do it properly – we can, now we live in the country.”

Adiel said, “But when could we do it?”

“How could you do it?” said their mother. “You’d need a tent big enough for four, a stove, sleeping bags and God knows what.”

“We’ve got sleeping bags from school trips,” said Adiel.

“We could buy lots of new stuff!” said Gillon.

“Anyway, where would you go?”

“From here? There are wonderful camping places in almost every direction! We wouldn’t have to fall back on some suburban common.”

Omri looked out of the window. It was true. All around them stretched the glorious Dorset countryside. Hills, woods, fields, rivers – and the sea, only a few miles away. It might be fun. The only thing was, there was something behind this. Omri knew, somehow, that this wasn’t really about camping. That their father had a hidden agenda.

It had to be to do with the Indian.

Only two days ago, his dad had found out.

When the family had first moved into this old Dorset farmhouse, Omri had made some makeshift shelves in his bedroom out of raw planks standing on loose bricks. In the hollows of two of these bricks, Omri had hidden his most precious possessions – the plastic figures of his friends: Little Bull, his wife Twin Stars, their baby Tall Bear and, separately, Matron and Sergeant Fickits. They were toys now, but they hadn’t always been toys. Through the fantastic magic of an old bathroom cupboard, and a key that had belonged to his great-great-aunt, and then to his mother, they had come to life. They’d turned into real people, people from the past, whom the magic of the cupboard and the key had brought into Omri’s life at various times in the last few years.

How carefully Omri had guarded his secret, and how hard it had been to keep from telling anyone! With the two people who already knew – his best friend Patrick, and Patrick’s cousin Emma – living miles away, there was no one to share it with. He dared not tell his brothers, though there’d been times when it had almost just burst out of him.

Then he’d found the Account, which had changed everything.

The Account was a sort of journal, contained in an old leather-bound notebook left hidden in the roof-thatch by his great-great-aunt Jessica Charlotte. Omri’s mother called her her ‘wicked’ great-aunt, and she had admitted to at least one pretty bad act when she’d stolen her sister’s earrings and been the cause of a tragedy. She had been a singer and actress with psychic gifts, and she’d owned this farmhouse; the Account had been written on her deathbed.

From this wonderful document, Omri had learnt how the key and the cupboard had been made, and how the magic had got into them. Luckily, Patrick had come to spend a half-term with him, in time to share the latest marvel – Jessica Charlotte herself, brought back from the past to sing them a music-hall song and make herself, however briefly, part of their lives.

And then, two days ago, his father had gone to Omri’s room while Omri had been out, to put up the proper shelves he’d promised him, and had disturbed his arrangements and found the figures. He’d put them all into the cupboard and locked the door. Of course they’d come to life inside, and his dad had put a lot of twos and twos from the past together, and realised. And later he’d seen them, been introduced to them. And accepted it… It took a special kind of grown-up not only to accept magic when he saw it, but to promise and swear that he’d never, ever tell a living soul.

Omri knew his secret was safe. And at last he had someone in the family to share it with.

There was a problem, though.

They’d talked about it, Omri and his dad. They’d gone out for a long walk together by the sea yesterday, and talked about it.

It wasn’t their problem, it was Little Bull’s. Little Bull was an Iroquois Indian from the late eighteenth century. And he was in trouble. Or rather, his whole tribe was, and as Little Bull was a chief, he was deeply concerned. And when he had suddenly been magicked back to Omri’s time, when the key was turned and the cupboard door opened, his first words had been: “This good! I have much need!”

(Well – his very first word had been “Brother!” He and Omri were blood brothers.)

Luckily the problem, though urgent, was not something that had to be dealt with on the spot. It was an on-going problem the tribe was experiencing, which Little Bull had tried to explain – something to do with British treachery, which made Omri puzzled and uncomfortable, though he didn’t really grasp what it was all about. But Little Bull seemed to take it for granted that Omri, whom he had originally assumed to be a Great Spirit with all sorts of magic powers, would come to his help.

“We’ll have to go back,” said Omri as they walked along the cliff-tops with the salty wind blowing off the English Channel into their faces.

“Explain to me. How does one ‘go back’?”

Omri did his best. He himself had only gone back once, to Little Bull’s village when it had been under attack by the Iroquois’ enemies, the Algonquins.

“You have to get into something,” he said. “You remember my wooden chest, the one I got in the Saturday market? The one with the initials L.B. on it?”

“L.B.! The initials on the plaque are L.B.”

Omri nodded hard. The plaque was a stone slab built into their house. It had an inscription engraved on it, signed with the initials L.B. The moment Omri had seen this, when they first came to look at the house their mother had inherited, he had known the house would be lucky for them. Those initials – the same as Little Bull’s – always, wherever he encountered them, had a magic significance. He told his father about this as well as he could.

“This magic of yours seems to crop up in unexpected places,” said his father slowly. “L.B. L.B. It rings a bell somehow – about something else – can’t place it at the moment… Well, tell more about going back.”

“We found out the key fitted the lock on the chest,” Omri said eagerly. “The key fits a lot of different locks. So I got into the chest, and Patrick locked it, and next thing I knew I was in Little Bull’s village in a forest clearing, just at sunset. Long ago… You see, Dad, when you go back, you’re small, just like when they come to us. You have to have something to – to –”

“Inhabit?”

“Yes! To bring to life. They didn’t have plastic toys back then, so I – I mean, my – my spirit or whatever bit of me actually travelled back in time, became part of a painting on the side of an Indian tent.”

“A wigwam.”

“No, a wigwam’s something different. This was a tepee. They have animal designs painted on them. I think I was a beaver… or maybe a porcupine.” Omri had glanced anxiously at his father, half-expecting him to laugh, but his face was entirely serious. “Animals are very important to Indians. Not just to hunt. I’ve read about it. Each clan – d’you know what a clan is?” His father had nodded, frowning. “Each clan has its own clan-animal. Little Bull’s clan-animal must be an elk, he’s named for that kind of bull, they didn’t hunt buffalo. I expect he got it in a dream – dreams are well important to Indians.”

“Yes. I think I knew that.”

“Anyway, I was sort of stuck there on the outside of the tepee and then there was an attack by an enemy tribe. They set the tepee on fire and I was nearly burnt to death,” he concluded, as carelessly as if such an adventure happened to him all the time.

His father stopped in his tracks. “My God! That time we came home and you had a burn on the side of your head! You made up some cock-and-bull story about a bonfire—”

“Right! Luckily Patrick turned the key and brought me back just in time. It hurt like hell,” Omri remembered.

His father stood on the cliff path with the rough grey Channel behind him, staring at Omri. “This is dangerous,” he said with an air of discovery.

“Yes it is. It can be.”

“I thought it was… just the most wonderful fun,” said his father.

“That’s exactly what I thought, at first. It’s not fun. Not always. It’s – I mean, it’s real people.”

“Yes. Of course I realised that when I saw them. I just… I suppose I just—”

“It’s natural, Dad. You have to kind of get into it. But things really happen. You do have to – to think ahead. You can’t just – do things.”

“On impulse.”

“Right.”

“Yes. I see that. Anything could happen. Obviously you mustn’t change anything back there.”

“No,” said Omri with great feeling. He didn’t want to even think about the time he had feared he’d changed something so drastically that he, himself, might never have been born.

They walked on slowly. Then his father said, “But your wooden chest was destroyed in that freak storm. So what could we use?”

Omri thought of telling his dad that the storm, too, had happened because of the key. But he had a strange feeling of wanting to protect him from too much knowledge. He might scare him and then he would back off. Not that his dad was a coward, but you wouldn’t have to be one to be scared of magic that could bring a hurricane all the way from the Texas of a hundred years ago, to rampage over England destroying everything in its path…

So he just said, “Well, it has to be big enough to hold us both. And it has to have a keyhole for the key.”

“But if we were both in it together, who’d turn the key?”

“Yes. That’s the problem we had before. Patrick and I could never go back at the same time.”

They had tramped on for a while in silence, and at last his dad said, “This is very difficult to get your mind around.”

Omri knew it. But Little Bull’s urgent looks and words pressed on his brain.

His dad was frowning. “We need to do some research. Read up on the history. Find out what was happening back then.”

“What is happening.”

“What is happening…” He was furrowing his brows. He looked remarkably like Omri, when he did that. “It seems as if it’s all happening at once. History… time… in layers, kind of. When we ‘go back’, if we find a way to, we’ll just – drop through a number of layers and be back in Little Bull’s time.”

Omri thought that was a good way of putting it.

“But how can we be sure of getting to the right layer?” asked his father.

“That’s easy. We have to either go back with Little Bull, or with something of his, something that belongs to the right time and place. The magic latches on to that.”

“Like a kind of ticket to the right destination.”

They had walked on, frowning, thinking.

Little Bull was no longer with them. He, Twin Stars and their baby son, Tall Bear, as well as Matron and Fickits, had all been sent back through the cupboard as soon as they’d had a talk, right after meeting Omri’s father. They’d all been anxious to return to their own time, especially Matron – a superior sort of nurse, who had been in the middle of her rounds at St Thomas’s Hospital in the London of 1941. The bombing of the city in World War Two had begun, and she was frantically busy. Sergeant Fickits had just been preparing for a drilling session with his trainees in his time, which was back in the nineteen-fifties.

As for the Indians, after a short, tense speech by Little Bull (during which Twin Stars allowed Omri to hold the baby, Tall Bear, in the palm of his hand, a sensation so entrancing that Omri had frankly not listened very carefully) they had asked to be sent back, too, but with the proviso that Omri and his father should make every effort to follow them soon.

“I need counsel,” Little Bull had said forcefully. “English change toward Iroquois friends. Many years Iroquois fight at side of English against French. Many warriors die. Now they turn from us. Our people do not understand, need chiefs to tell what best to do.” He shook his head, scowling. “Our need is for English man. Wise man, explain what is in English heads,” he said, staring at Omri’s father challengingly.

Next day on the cliff top, Omri’s father said, “I know something about what the Europeans did to the Indians. It’s not a pretty story… I don’t know what we can do to help, but if our damned ancestors are up to some tricks, which they probably are – were – are, the least we can do is find a way to get in there and give the Indians a hand.”

And now here they all were at the supper table, and Omri’s dad was gassing on about going camping. What was he up to?

Everyone was talking. Their mother was on her feet again collecting plates with a great clatter, saying that if there really was a camping holiday in prospect, they’d better do some serious planning, not go at it half-cocked like last time. Gillon was already leafing through the Yellow Pages looking for suppliers of camping equipment, and Adiel was asking if they could go as far as Dartmoor, where they could really feel they were away from civilisation. Their dad was giving every impression of being absolutely serious about the whole project. Only Omri hadn’t joined in.

“When could we do it?” said Adiel, who seemed quite fired up now.

“Oh, I thought in the half-term holiday,” said their father.

“Great! Let’s go for it!”

“There’s a firm here says they do luxury tents,” said Gillon. “No point spending money on some ratty old tent that’ll drop to pieces or let the rain in.”

“No point spending money on some palatial tent that you’ll only use once, if that,” said their mother. “I’ll believe all you laid-back city types are going camping when I actually see it.”

“Well, you won’t see it, Mum,” said Adiel reasonably. “You’re not coming, are you.”

Their mother stopped in the doorway with a pile of dirty plates and there was a moment’s silence. Then she turned and regarded them all with narrowed eyes.

“Well now. Maybe you’d better not count on that. I happen to be the only one in this entire family who has actually had some camping experience. Oh yes!” she added as they all gawked at her, “I was quite the little happy camper when I was in the Girl Guides.”

“Mum! You weren’t a Girl Guide! You couldn’t have been!” they all – even Omri – yelled.

She drew herself up. “And why not? As a matter of fact I was a platoon leader. I had more badges than anyone else.”

“How many?”

“Eleven and a half. So there.” She turned, walked out, head in air.

“What was the half-badge for?” their dad called after her.

“Making a fire without matches,” she called back. “Only it went out.”

They were all silent for a moment. Then Gillon went back to the Yellow Pages. “Five-man tents, five-man tents,” he muttered.

“I wish I were a cartoonist,” said their father. “I would love to draw your mother smothered with badges, lighting a fire without matches.” He winked at Omri. It was one of his slow winks, a wink that said, You and I know what this is all about. But Omri didn’t. All he knew was that he couldn’t wait to get his dad alone and find out.

2The Wrong Shape

“Of course we’re not really going camping, Dad?”

Omri had managed to get his dad to himself by following him out to his studio across the lane. His father was putting the finishing touches to a large painting of a rooster. He was very into roosters since they moved to the country, but they got weirder and weirder. This latest one looked more like an armful of coloured rags that’d been flung into the air. But Omri liked it somehow. It was like the essence of rooster – all flurry and maleness – rather than the boring, noisy old bird itself.

“Well,” said his dad, tilting his head to one side and standing back with his palette. “I hadn’t planned that we should. I didn’t think the boys would go for it the way they did. Never mind your mother! Really, she is full of surprises…” He stepped up to the easel and put a streak of red near the top of the canvas, like a cock’s comb while the cock is in flight. “… so I’ve changed my plan. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll arrange that Gillon and you and I will go on a preliminary trip, a sort of dummy run, to Dartmoor to pick out a suitable site and so on, while Adiel’s away at school, and then we’ll do it on a weekend when Gillon won’t want to come.”

“Why won’t he?”

“We’ll fix it so he won’t.”

“How?”

“Watch the forecasts. Pick a very wet weekend when there’s something good on the box.”

“And then?”

“And then, my hearty, outdoor lad, you and I will go off together, ignoring the weather, and no one will miss us for two days, and we’ll ‘go back’ and see what the situation is.”

“Ah!” So that was it. A way of getting away from home, just the two of them. “But have you thought about what we’ll use to go back in?”

“Yes. I’ve thought.”

“Well, what? We can hardly carry some wardrobe or chest or something big enough in the back of the car!”

His father put down the palette carefully on his paint-stained table with all its jam jars full of old brushes and its rows of squashed paint tubes. “It came to me today in the square, when I was shopping. I got a load of vegetables and I couldn’t carry them all in one go so the greengrocer said he’d take the other box out for me to the car. He asked me the registration, and I told him, and it burst on me like a blinding light.”

“What, Dad?”

“Go and look at it. The numberplate.”

Omri, frowning, left the studio and crossed the yard to the open bays, in one of which was parked the family car – a third-hand Ford Cortina Estate that his father had recently bought when their old one packed up. His eyes went to the numberplate and he stopped in his tracks.

The next instant he had turned and raced back, bursting into the studio with his face alight.

“Wow, Dad! Wow and treble-wow! You’re brilliant!”

“No, Om. It’s the magic. It couldn’t be coincidence. It means we’re meant to go.”

They went out into the yard together and stood looking marvellingly at the old car.

The registration number was C18 LB.

“C eighteen. That’s for eighteenth century, of course,” said Omri’s dad softly. “It’s a double indicator. I never thought I could believe anything like this. But I know it’s true. That’s our cupboard, Omri. Our time-machine.”

Omri went to bed that night feeling so excited he couldn’t sleep. Another adventure, and with his Indian! The adventure with Jessica Charlotte, his ‘wicked’ great-great-aunt who had actually made the key, had been complicated and thrilling in its way, but it was more like a detective story than a risky adventure, and it had all happened here in his bedroom, under the thatch. A lot of it, most of it, had happened in his head while reading the Account. Now a real, true adventure was in the offing. And his dad would be part of it!