The Secret of the Indian (The Indian in the Cupboard)

by Lynne Reid Banks

  And of course, his best friends had to include his blood brother, Little Bear, and his family.

  Little Bear arrived in full regalia—his headdress, his cloak, and all his finery. He had had them on for a celebration of a victory—not a final one, no doubt, but still a victory.

  In the two weeks since he had been back in his village, a great deal had happened, which he related to them during the wedding-eve feast. The Algonquins, having regrouped after the previous battle (which Omri had witnessed) had mounted another attack and been repulsed.

  “How did you do it, Little Bear? You lost so many men last time.”

  “Wise chief learn not only from victory. Defeat also teach,” said Little Bear, virtuously but vaguely.

  “It’s strange that when you had the now-guns you couldn’t beat them, but without them you could.”

  “Best use Indian weapons as Omri say.” Little Bear’s tone was now definitely evasive. Omri was not inclined to press him, but Boone, unexpectedly, was.

  “Usin’ only bows and arrows, ya beat ’em hollow, eh, Redskin?” he asked.

  Little Bear inclined his head.

  “Oh, yeah? So ya never even used m’ six-shooter that ya stole off me, huh?”

  Little Bear’s head snapped up. His eyes narrowed to menacing slits.

  “Little Bear not steal white brother weapon!”

  “Well, ya did, ’cause Ah had m’ eyes open a mite and Ah seen ya do it. One o’ them times ya come to look me over when Ah wuz laid thur, helpless,” he went on, while Little Bear became more and more uncomfortable.

  “Little Bear!” exclaimed Omri, shocked. “You didn’t!”

  “Not steal!” shouted Little Bear. “Take, but not steal! Here, I give weapon back!” He pulled the revolver out from under his cloak and thrust it into Boone’s hand.

  “Real good of ya, seein’ y’ ain’t got no more use fer it, now it’s plumb empty. Where’s all the bullets, Injun brother?”

  Little Bear’s earlier discomfiture had evaporated. Now he drew himself up proudly. “One bullet, one enemy!” he boasted.

  “Whut? Ya downed six of ’em?” Boone held up one hand and a thumb. “That’s right good shootin’ fer a beginner.” He tucked his gun away in its holster. “Well, guess Ah’ll have to reckon Ah lent it in a good cause. And you’ll have to reckon on goin’ back t’ th’ old ways next time.”

  Little Bear scowled.

  “Hard go back old ways after new ways,” he muttered.

  Bright Stars, with Tall Bear strapped to her back, was also wearing a beautiful dress, covered with elaborate decoration. She rivaled the bride, until Ruby Lou thought of a way to dress up even more.

  She persuaded Emma to go and buy a model wedding set that included a plastic bride. Emma was not too happy about this.

  “But what are you going to do when I bring her to life? Just rip the dress off her and leave her there in her undies?”

  “Nope. ’Course not! I’m gonna buy it off her.”

  “Buy it? What with?”

  “This!” And she pulled out a minute leather pouch with a drawstring and chinked it against her palm.

  Emma’s eyes popped. “It’s not—gold, is it?”

  “Sure is.” She tipped the bag a little and something winked in her tiny hand. “I reckon a few gold dollars ought to pay fer a weddin’ dress. Jest hope I like it when I see it made real!”

  So it was done. Ruby went into the cupboard after the bride had been brought to life, and emerged triumphant with the dress—a gorgeous thing of white silk and a thousand tiny lace ruffles—over her arm.

  “Don’t tell me she was at the altar when we brought her!” said Emma.

  “Naw! She was jest tryin on. She told me she didn’t like the darn thing much anyhow, made her look fat.”

  “Cain’t all have a figure like yours, Ruby!” said Boone proudly.

  The preacher was none other than Tickle. Bringing him was no easy task. There were several false tries. They first brought to life the parson from Emma’s wedding models, but of course he wasn’t Tickle, he was just a parson, a pallid youth who took one look out through the cupboard door, offered up an anguished prayer, and fainted dead away.

  So in the end they went to the model shop with Ruby and looked at every plastic figure in the place till they found a Western saloon scene with a little man at a piano, and Ruby said, “That’s him!” And it was. So they got the piano, too.

  Tickle was terrified at first. He insisted the whole thing was devil’s work and refused to believe it could be happening. But Ruby and Boone took him aside and persuaded him that it was all part of the Great Design, and what really would be sinful was if he left Ruby and Boone unhitched. After a few pulls from a hip-pocket flask he happened to have on him, he allowed himself to be drawn to his piano, and after practicing a few hymns (which he hadn’t played since the Dead-Eye Gang had burned down his church), he gradually worked himself into a devout mood and agreed to play his part.

  “He ain’t much of a preacher man,” confided Boone to Patrick, tapping his forehead. “He went downhill fast after they burned his church—th’ likker, y’ know. Ain’t everyone’s got a haid fer it like me. But he still got it in him t’ do whut’s right.”

  “You ought to help rebuild the church, Boone,” prompted Emma.

  “Who, me?” exclaimed Boone, but Ruby gave him a nudge, and he said, “Uh—yup. Good idee. Mebbe.”

  The wedding was held in Omri’s room. It was rather dark because the hole in the roof was still covered with a big roofers’ canvas. There wasn’t any furniture except the built-in bunk. But they spread a sheet over the floor and lit a circle of candles and set everything up the way they wanted it. There was a tiny altar made of a piece of decorative stone, with a single daisy on it, a stained-glass window made of scraps of colored tissue paper with a candle shining through it, and of course a feast of food, including a miniature wedding cake that Emma had found in a rather posh baker’s. It was still as big as a table to the bride and groom, but Little Bear would help cut it with his knife. They had lots of crisps crushed fine, and hundreds-and-thousands in dishes made of tiny shells from a necklace of Emma’s. There was 7-Up for champagne.

  The cupboard was nearby, a little to one side. Its door was symbolically ajar and the recovered key was in the lock. Emma, who had a feeling for these things, had made a little triumphal arch of flowers and a Lego step leading up to the bottom rim. No one mentioned it, but they all knew the little people were going home through it as soon as the wedding party ended.

  Patrick, Emma, and Omri had had a long, fraught discussion about the whole business.

  “This has got to be the end of it.” It was Omri who said it. Patrick knew it too, but he couldn’t come right out with it. It was Emma who didn’t accept it, who put up a fight.

  “It’s all right for you two!” she raged. She was nearly in tears. “You’ve had it for ages. Last year … And you’ve time-traveled. It’s not fair, it’s just not fair!”

  “We’ve got to, Em. It’s too dangerous for them.”

  “We could keep them secret…. We have.”

  “For how long?” asked Patrick quietly. “Before Tamsin finds out? It’s been a pretty near thing once or twice already. Or someone else.”

  Emma was silent. She was struggling with her tears. The boys were uncomfortable. They understood too clearly how she felt, because they felt it too. More than she did.

  “But I love Ruby!” Emma burst out. “I can’t give her up, never see her again! It’s like—telling me I have to say yes to her dying!”

  The boys didn’t look at each other.

  “I’ve been thinking about the wind,” said Omri slowly.

  “What do you mean, the wind?”

  “The cyclone. It—it’s done an awful lot of damage. It ripped down millions of trees. It practically destroyed Kew Gardens and lots of other places.”

  “So what? What’s that got to do with anything? It wasn’t our fault.�
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  “Well, I think it was.”

  The other two looked at him.

  “Look. We—we interfered. We felt bad about the Indians dying, and now we’ve done this. Don’t you understand? Everything that happened—Boone being hurt, the cyclone—even Mr. Johnson’s car—it’s us. It all happened because we found out a magic trick and messed around with time.”

  “Good things happened too,” said Patrick defensively.

  “Like what?”

  “We helped Little Bear defeat his enemies.”

  “Yeah, well, he’d probably have done that anyway, and now we’ve shown him modern weapons and you see what it led to—him borrowing Boone’s revolver because it made killing so much easier!”

  “That’s going to happen anyway,” said Patrick slowly. He, too, had been doing some reading. “White men coming along, interfering if you like to call it that, changing the Indians’ way of life. It’d already well begun in Little Bear’s time. He knew all about guns…. We only gave a little push to what was bound to happen.”

  Omri thought about what he’d read about the way American Indians live now. In reservations, their hunting grounds taken from them, their songs and their gods discredited and lost, many of them alcoholics, beginning only recently to struggle back to their own old ways and traditions and beliefs. After centuries of bad times … horrible times.

  “I don’t want to give that kind of push,” he said. “It’s got to end.”

  The other two were silent. Emma gave a deep sniff. Then she said, “But as long as we’ve got the key, we’ll always be tempted.”

  Omri reviewed the many, many thoughts he had had about that. He had envisioned himself burying the key, but he knew that wouldn’t do. Better to throw it away. Into the Thames, into the sea. He’d tried to imagine himself doing what he knew to be the right thing. But every time, something stopped him. In his imagination he would draw back his hand, the key would be about to fly from it—to sink, to drown, to be lost forever. And he would stop. He could never do it.

  The solution he had arrived at was not perfect, but it was the best he could do. It had been born of the deep, long, strong fear he had suffered, and the pain of knowing that they had meddled where they shouldn’t and had done a lot of harm.

  “I’m going to ask my dad to take it from me and put it in the bank. I’ll make a secret package of it, with the cupboard. He won’t know what it is. He’ll tell them to keep it in a vault and not give it back till I’m dead.”

  Emma and Patrick stared at him, awestruck.

  “Dead!”

  Omri nodded solemnly.

  “But who will they give it back to then?”

  “My children.”

  Emma spoiled the moment by giggling. The idea of Omri having children—! But then his solemn face took her laughter away. She said, “And will they know? Will you tell them—what it is? What it does?”

  “I’ll tell them as a story. I won’t tell them it’s true. I’ll leave it up to them. That way it—it won’t be quite lost. Only to us. We’ve done enough.”

  The Reverend Tickle played the Wedding March as the bride came up the aisle. Matron was at her side, to give her away. Little Bear and Fickits were best men. It needed two, to support Boone. At this last moment he was seized by an attack of nerves.

  “Ah cain’t go through with it! Ah ain’t good enough for her!” he muttered, his face flushed crimson through his bristles. “’Sides, a man cain’t git hitched without a hat—t’ain’t legal! Ah’m gittin’ outa here!”

  And he turned to flee. But Little Bear and Fickits laid strong hands on him and held him firmly until his bride reached him.

  Ruby Lou in a wedding gown, with her blond hair down and a lace veil floating around her like mist, was very different from Ruby Lou in scarlet satin. Boone was so smitten at the sight of her that he was struck dumb and his knees buckled. Luckily Tickle had anticipated this, and as he quickly moved from the piano stool to the altar to begin the service, he discreetly passed his flask to Fickits, who gave Boone a restoring swig.

  “M’ very last!” Boone vowed, but even Ruby, tenderly taking his arm, didn’t look as if she quite believed him.

  Just near the end, Bright Stars’s baby began to cry. Matron tutted and said, “Sh!” But Little Bear and Bright Stars looked at each other and beamed.

  “Good omen!” cried Little Bear, interrupting the “I do’s.”

  “Baby’s voice sign of health, long life! Many hope! Much children!”

  And he let out a marvelous baying cry of pleasure that sent a shiver of excitement and happiness through them all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lynne Reid Banks was born in London in 1929 and spent World War II on the Canadian prairies as a “war guest.” On returning home, she studied drama and acted for five years. She then went into journalism, becoming the first woman TV news reporter in Britain in 1955. In 1960 her first novel, The L-Shaped Room, was published, and it was later filmed. In 1962 she emigrated to Israel, where she married, had three sons, and spent eight years living on a kibbutz and teaching English. She returned to London with her family in 1971 and became a full-time writer. She has written more than forty books, mainly novels for adults and young readers, including the award-winning Indian in the Cupboard series; I, Houdini; The Farthest-Away Mountain; and The Fairy Rebel. Lynne Reid Banks lives in a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Dorset, England, with her husband. She often travels and visits schools at home and abroad.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1989 by Lynne Reid Banks

  Illustrations copyright © 1989 by Ted Lewin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, in 1989.

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  The Secret of the Indian / Banks, Lynne Reid.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In this third book about Omri and his magic cupboard, Omri and his friend Patrick must risk grown-ups’ discovering their secret when they find themselves in need of a friend’s toy plastic doctors to save wounded people from the dangerous world of the Old West which the cupboard enables them to enter.

  [1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Toys—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.]

  I. Lewin, Ted, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.R2737Se 1989

  [Fic]—dc19

  89001272

  Random House Children’s Books supports

  the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75446-2

  v3.0