There was nothing to be done. Naught. Zilch. Zipadee-doo-dah. Zero. And when that’s the case, thought Omri in a sudden mood of fatalism, you might as well relax.
“Well,” he said, his voice coming out quite steady, “what do you think?”
She stared at them for a long time, her eyes fixed and unblinking, her freckles standing out on a suddenly very pale face.
“They’re alive,” she said at last, in a doubtful tone, as if he might roar with laughter at her.
“You don’t say,” said Omri, scrambling to his feet. “And not only those. What about these, here?” And he indicated the seed tray behind him.
Emma moved cautiously forward, as if afraid the very floor might waver and give way beneath her feet. He noticed now that she had a mug of tea in her hand, the one he’d saved from breakfast—it must have been the excuse she’d given herself for following him up. It tilted in her nerveless fingers, and he removed it to safety.
As he poured a few drops into a toothpaste cap for Matron, Omri watched Emma as she gazed and gazed. He knew that what his father called a quantum leap had been taken in the situation, the sort of change that means nothing will be quite the same again, and that was scary. But there was no denying a sort of enjoyment in watching someone else seeing, trying to realize, coming to grips with it.
Emma managed this last feat surprisingly quickly.
“I’ve always thought it could happen,” she said abruptly. “It often nearly has, when I’ve been playing with my toy animals. Can they talk? Oh, of course they can, that’s who you were talking to.”
Matron’s voice, little but scratchy as chalk on a blackboard, chirped up. “And pray who might this young person be? I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
Emma turned a suddenly flushed and smiling face on Omri. “Wow! Omri, what fun! How fantastic! I mean, how brill can anything get!”
“Yeah,” said Omri somewhat sourly. “Brill. Except that in that little hut there are some men who are wounded and who could die if we don’t do something. And they’re real, and I’m responsible for them, and Patrick’s P.O.’d—”
“P.O.’d, what’s that?”
“Er—gone. And—”
“Gone? Where?”
Omri took a deep breath. “There’s no time to explain everything now. Listen. You know that set of plastic figures Tamsin got for her birthday?”
Emma was one jump ahead of him. Her face lit up another few watts. “Yes! Yes! I got one too! You mean we can make them all come alive—be real, like these?”
Omri grabbed her arm. “Wait, did you say you got the same set of models as Tamsin?”
She shook off his hand. “Don’t pinch! No, mine was different, mine was a sort of shop with people with trolleys and checkouts and—”
Omri’s heart sank. “Not doctors?”
She shook her head. “No. I wanted the doctors and all that, but Tam wouldn’t swap.”
Omri said, “Would she sell hers?”
“Got the odd hundred quid, have you?” said Emma cynically.
“I’ve got the odd five quid.”
Emma frowned, considering. “She might not be able to resist. She’s saving for a skiing holiday.”
“Patrick’s got another fiver,” said Omri. “I could—” He turned automatically toward the chest. Then stopped.
“Er … listen, Em. I’m prepared to let you in on most of this—well, you are in on it. But there’re a couple of wrinkles I think you might not … exactly feel comfortable about, not just at first. So would you mind going downstairs for a few minutes? Then I’m going back to your place with you, and we’ll negotiate for the models with Tam.”
She hesitated. “And then come back here and—do whatever it is you do to make them come alive?”
Omri looked at her. Now she knew about the little people. But she didn’t yet know about the magic, how to make it happen. She didn’t really know much, when you came right down to it. There wasn’t a lot she could give away. Not that anyone would believe. And that was the nitty-gritty, not her knowing, but her maybe telling. Could he trust her? Could one trust anyone with a secret as exciting as this?
“We’ll have to have a serious talk,” he said. “On the train. Just now I want you to go out. Please, Em.”
They looked at each other. He actually saw her decide to give way, whether to please him or for reasons of her own he wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter anyhow. Just so she went.
The second she was outside he shot the bolt, to make sure. Then he rushed to the cupboard, took the key out, stuck it back in the chest, and turned it.
Patrick lay curled up as Omri had seen him once before, and he remembered his thought that other time: As far away as you can get without being dead. It was tempting to stand there, losing himself in speculation about where the real Patrick was.
But there was no time for such thoughts. Reaching into the chest, Omri fumbled in Patrick’s pocket for the five-pound note. And touched something that made him snatch his hand away with a yelp as if he’d burned it.
There was something alive in Patrick’s pocket!
Omri stood there with his heart in his gullet. It wasn’t a person; it was a tiny animal of some kind. With his fingertips Omri had felt that much. Patrick must have had something plastic in his pocket when he was locked in the chest, and it had come to life!
Cautiously Omri stuck his fingers into the pocket again. Yes, there it was, something small, smooth-coated and bony.
He took hold of it as gently as he could, feeling it struggle and twist. He drew it out.
It was a very distressed black horse, complete with an old Western-style saddle and bridle.
Boone’s horse! His new one, that Patrick had taken from the English soldier. Omri set it down very gently in the paddock on the seed tray, where Little Bear’s pony was tethered with a double-ply nylon thread. It threw up its head as the intruder descended from the heavens, and whinnied anxiously, but as soon as the black pony’s feet were on the ground and it had given itself a good shake, both their heads dropped to graze the turf of real grass Patrick had dug up and laid there.
Omri smiled in relief. Evidently Boone’s pony was all right, though he wished he could take off its bridle and saddle. Boone must have put his old tack on it before Patrick had sent him back—
Suddenly Omri went rigid, his brain fizzing with the shock of the realization that had come to him.
But how could they have been so stupid!
In all the haste and hassle of getting Patrick “sent back,” they’d forgotten! Forgotten the way it worked! Patrick had had the plastic figure of Boone in his hand, not the real, live Boone! That meant—
That meant that Boone, like the horse, would have become real inside the chest!
“Boone!” he called frantically into the depths of the chest. “Boone! Where are you? Are you okay?”
Silence.
Omri grabbed Patrick’s right arm. His hand was tucked under his body. Omri dragged it out from under Patrick’s dead weight. The fingers were closed into a tight fist. Sticking out from the top of it was a tuft of ginger hair.
Grimly, desperately, Omri prised Patrick’s fingers open.
In his hand lay Boone, the real Boone. Limp. Motionless.
Dead?
Crushed?
“Matron!”
Before she knew it, that stalwart lady had been snatched off the seed tray and set down, somewhat short of breath and dignity, on the low table.
“Not another patient! I’ve got more than I can—” Then she saw. Her voice changed. “Oh, dear me,” she said softly. “Oh, dearie, dearie me.”
With a doomful look, she fell to her knees beside the supine figure of Boone and applied her ear to his heart. To his horror, Omri saw her give her head half a shake.
7
Patrick in Boone-Land
PATRICK’S JOURNEY THROUGH time and space was swift and painless. There was a strange sort of whooosh during which he seemed to feel, fo
r a split second, buffeted, as when two heavy trucks pass close by each other traveling at high speed in opposite directions. Then there was heat, silence, and stillness.
He opened his eyes to the glare of a harsh sun and screwed them shut.
He felt around with his hands. There seemed to be nothing directly in front of him. But he felt he was upright and leaning against something blanket-like, but stiffer, rather like a wall covered with flannel.
Then he found that there was something like a wide, thick cord across his middle, holding him against the soft wall. He opened his eyes cautiously. At first he couldn’t see anything but glaring sunlight. But in a few moments he got accustomed to that and found himself staring out across an endless expanse of sand.
“Well,” he said aloud, “it’s Texas, I suppose, so this must be a bit of desert or prairie or something.”
But where was he? Where—in all this sand—was he?
He looked downward. His hands were resting on a thick rope-like thing as thick as his own leg, stretched quite tightly across his waist. Under his feet was something that curved away on either side of him and curled up several yards ahead of him. It was like standing on the brink of a huge, smooth, pale-brown—and empty—riverbed. Behind him it rose up like the bank of the river, but the bank felt soft to his hand, and suddenly he realized what it was.
“It’s—it’s a gigantic hat!” he said aloud. “I’m tied to the crown of it, and this thing must be the hatband, only it’s a huge leather cord!”
He wriggled down until he was free of the cord, into which he seemed to have been stuck quite casually like a feather, or like the flies that fishermen sometimes stick in their hatbands. Suddenly Patrick remembered that Boone had had some kind of a tiny favor—so small one could hardly see it, except that it was blue, like his own jeans and sweatshirt—in the cord around his much-loved cowboy hat.
Patrick crawled rapidly across the width of the brim toward its curled-up edge.
As he did so he noticed for the first time the utter silence around him, and the fact that the hat was perfectly still.
I must be on Boone’s head, he thought. Why isn’t the hat jiggling about as he rides?
He reached the edge of the brim, pulled himself up to it, and peered over, preparing himself to see an immense drop below.
The sand lay no more than four or five times Patrick’s own height beneath him.
He could easily make out the individual grains, which looked to him like the shingle on an English beach, except that some of them were like lumps of yellow glass.
Suddenly he stiffened and gasped. A huge creature, about the size of a Galápagos tortoise, moseyed by on six angled legs. Patrick shrank back behind the rim of the hat; then, realizing that it was merely some kind of beetle and that it couldn’t reach him, he raised himself cautiously and followed its progress off across the endless expanse of sand.
He looked around, as far as he could for the enormous bulk of the hat, which loomed against the sky like a soft-cornered building. There was no sign of anything else alive.
The first thing is to get down from here, he thought. Even if it’s dangerous. There’s no point in staying here.
He considered the problem of getting down to the ground. If the sand below had been his size of sand, he might have risked jumping into it (or then again, he thought, peering down, he might not!). But it would be suicide to jump down onto those big, hard stones. He’d have to lower himself somehow.
Patrick, unlike Omri, was athletic. He really shone in PE, and loved climbing and jumping and swinging. What he needed now was some kind of rope, and of course the first thing he thought of was the hatband.
He followed it around the crown of the hat again until he found the knot. Luckily, it was old; the leather itself was soft, and the knot loosely tied. By forcing one of the ends back upon itself through the knot, twice, he managed to untie it. Then, with great effort, he managed to drag one end around the crown until he had about half of it at his disposal, and he carefully lowered the free end down over the brim.
The immediate danger was that his weight, though relatively slight, would pull the whole thong to the ground when he tried to slide down it, but he had to risk that. Taking a deep breath, he threw his right leg over the stiff brim, embraced the thong with arms and legs as if he were sliding down a tree trunk, and away he went.
He was down almost before he had time to think, and as his feet touched the stones, he felt the rest of the thong fall away from the hat. He just managed to leap aside as it fell, like an immense and heavy snake, onto the ground, missing him by a hair’s breadth.
He took another deep breath and looked around.
The first thing he saw was a huge, impenetrable mass of what looked like fine copper fuse wires.
He touched one. It was very flexible—it certainly wasn’t a wire. It was more like—
Patrick gasped. He suddenly knew what it was. And, knowing that, he knew in a flash that something had gone very wrong.
The mass of wires was Boone’s ginger hair, sticking out from underneath his hat.
Patrick started to run. It was not easy, running on the glassy shingle, but, trying not to stumble too often, he made his way as fast as he could right around to the other side of the huge thing like a promontory—which was actually Boone’s head—jutting out of the desert landscape.
When he got there, he stopped, stared, stepped back, stared again. At last he realized that to get the face in perspective he would have to move back still farther. He turned and ran away from it for about a hundred paces, then turned again.
Yes. Now he could see it was Boone.
He was lying on his side, the bulk of him rising from the flat desert floor like a range of hills. Though his face was turned to the side, the hat was lying horizontally across one ear as if someone had dropped it there, not as if Boone had been wearing it when he toppled to the ground. On his bristly face was an expression that made Patrick very uneasy.
In the distance, behind Boone, loomed a large desert cactus, the top of which—like jack’s beanstalk—was too high for Patrick to see. It looked as if it were growing out of Boone’s shoulder. Patrick narrowed his eyes. He focused on one wicked-looking cactus needle that stuck out against the hard blue of the sky, just above Boone’s uppermost arm.
If he was breathing, even shallowly, the shoulder level would rise and the spike would disappear.
It didn’t.
Patrick caught his own breath and held it until he nearly burst. He had suddenly realized his fatal mistake.
He had taken a plastic Boone back with him. The living Boone had gone back to England, to Omri’s and Patrick’s present, in the same instant that Patrick had come here. They must have crossed. That was the meaning of the whooshing sensation of something passing him as he traveled through time and space.
Patrick sat down abruptly, and as abruptly jumped up again. The glassy stones were very hot. Everything was very hot. He felt dizzy. He tottered back a few yards until he was in Boone’s shadow, and sank down again to think.
He must have done something to Boone, who’d been clutched tightly in his hand when he climbed into the chest.
Maybe he’d killed him!
No maybe about it. Boone, in the instant of transfer, had fallen down here in the desert. Breathless. Lifeless.
A terrible guilt, backed up by an overwhelming sorrow, threatened Patrick. But, being a very practical boy, he shoved them both roughly to the back of his mind and considered instead his own situation.
He was on his own. No Boone to take care of him.
Minute. Helpless. Miles from anywhere. And at the mercy of the sun and the empty desert.
It seemed a fairly safe bet that soon enough he would follow Boone once again: this time into the oblivion of death.
8
A Heart Stops Beating
THE SUSPENSE WAS AWFUL—the worst of Omri’s life.
He watched Matron bending over the still figure in the pla
id shirt and chaps. Boone—so real, so very much of a person, and yet so vulnerable that Patrick’s hand closing on him in the instant of being swung back through time and space could have squeezed the life out of him.
Omri thought what Patrick would feel, when he came back, if he learned that he had killed Boone. Killed him. Crushed him to death. Suddenly Omri knew that it was for Patrick’s sake, more than Boone’s in a way, that Matron had to breathe life back into that tiny body, as she was now trying to do.
“Matron—”
“Sh!”
She had stopped giving Boone the kiss of life and begun giving him artificial resuscitation, hands on his ribs, throwing her weight forward and back, panting from the effort she was making.
“Is he—alive?” whispered Omri.
“Yes,” she said shortly, between pushes. “just about.”
“what’s wrong? Is he—crushed?”
“Crushed? Of course not! He’s been—half suffocated—that’s all!” She put her ear to his chest again.
“Where’s his hat?” said Omri suddenly.
Matron straightened herself with an exclamation.
“His hat?” she said sharply. “what in the world does that matter when his heart’s stopped?”
“His heart’s stopped!” Omri’s own heart nearly did the same. “Then he is dead!”
“Not if we can—Wait! You could do it! He needs a good thump on the chest to get it going again! I just haven’t the strength. Come here, do exactly as I show you! Now watch!”
Peering at her, he saw her do something with her tiny fingers.
“What—”
She gave an exclamation of exasperation. “Are you blind? It’s a flicking movement—flick your finger out from behind your thumb—”
“Oh—like this?”
“Right! Now do it downward—against his chest! No, not so gently—do it hard, thump him, man, thump him!” she cried agitatedly.
Omri flicked his middle finger hard so that his nail struck against Boone’s chest, rocking his body.
The Secret of the Indian (The Indian in the Cupboard) Page 4
