The Key to the Indian

by Lynne Reid Banks

  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.

  2

  The 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!

  It might be a bit of a problem, though, leaving Gillon behind.

  He was really getting worked up about the camping trip. He kept calling through the thin dividing wall between their two bedrooms, keeping Omri awake more than ever.

  “I’m going into town tomorrow after school to get a camping mag. They’ll have proper ads in them for gear, and articles to read and stuff.”

  “Mm.”

  “It’s not true that Mum’s the only one who’s camped. Remember Adiel went to the Brecon Beacons with his class?” Omri pretended to be asleep and didn’t answer. “Omri? Remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He said it was grisly,” called Gillon, but with relish, as if ‘grisly’ was good. “Rained the whole time. And he got lost in a bunch of mist and hurt his leg sliding down some rocks and they had to hunt for him for hours. His teacher thought he was dead, for sure! Om?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You still awake? I’ve heard of lots of hikers and climbers getting lost on Dartmoor! One lot died of exposure. We’d better buy some rope and rope ourselves together. We’ll need proper climbing boots, knapsacks, sleeping bags… maps, compasses… a stove…” His voice finally petered out on a lengthy list of prospective purchases.

  Omri was nowhere near sleeping. He was actually sitting up. He’d switched on his pencil torch and was making notes. Maps and compasses… Could you get maps of north-eastern United States back in the eighteenth century? Sleeping bags, knapsacks and a stove certainly sounded as if they’d be useful. If only they could take them!

  He kept imagining himself, and his dad, in the car. They could put all the stuff they’d need in there. If you were touching a sleeping bag that was wrapped round a bunch of other useful stuff, it would all go back. They’d have to really think hard. It would be no use wanting to pop back from Little Bull’s time to get something they’d forgotten.

  Wait.

  The car.

  Omri could see himself and his dad sitting in the front seats of the car, which was parked in some remote spot, with the bundles of stuff they were going to ‘take back’ on their laps, and his dad with the key, the magic key.

  How to lock the car? With the window open, reach through it and stick the key in the door from outside?

  Or put it in the ignition?

  Omri suddenly jumped out of bed and went to where the cupboard was standing in the middle of the new shelf. The key was in the lock. He took it out and looked at it. His heart sank.

  The key was magic, yes. And it was a ‘skeleton’ key, that would fit a lot of locks. But car keys were different. They were a different shape. They weren’t cylindrical, for one thing. They were flat.

  Omri suddenly knew, without any doubt, that no way would the magic key slide into either the door lo
ck or the ignition of their car. This wasn’t going to work.

  Yet there was no doubting the signs. The numberplate, C18 LB, was like a summons. The car was their cupboard, all right. It was just a matter of solving this little key problem.

  This called for a consultation.

  Clutching the key tightly, he tiptoed through Gillon’s room to the head of the stairs at that end of the house. This was a Dorset longhouse – not like an Iroquois one, but a special kind they had in this part of England, one room deep with stairs at each end, no corridors. He crept down the narrow wooden stairway, which opened into the last little sitting room at this end, that his parents had designated as a TV-free zone. As he’d hoped, his dad, who didn’t like TV much, was sitting there reading.

  “Dad!” Omri hissed.

  His father looked up. “Hello, Om. What’s up? Can’t you sleep?”

  “Where’s Mum?”

  “Watching something ghastly about hospitals. Ber-lud everywhere,” he added, quoting Gillon.

  Omri glided over to him. “I’ve thought of something ghastlier. Look at this key. Think of the car.”

  His father took it from him and examined it. “Oh hell,” he said softly.

  “See? It’s not going to fit.”

  “Of course not! Why didn’t I think of that? I was so excited about the numberplate…”

  Omri sat beside him on the mini-sofa. “What’ll we do?”

  They sat silently for a long time, thinking. Omri had time to notice that the book his dad was reading was one of his books about Indians – his dad must have gone into his room earlier and taken it from his ‘library’. It was a huge tome called Stolen Continents that Omri had bought second-hand. Now it slipped to the floor and neither of them picked it up.

  The whole adventure was poised on the edge of being aborted. Before it had even begun.

  “You know, Omri,” his father said at last, “there is an answer. There’s got to be. The trouble for me is, I don’t know enough about the whole business to find the solution. I’ve been thinking. That story of yours, that won the Telecom prize. That was true, wasn’t it – I thought at the time it had an absolute ring of truth. So I know about the first part. But a lot has happened since then – developments. I think what you’d better do is try to tell me everything.”

  “Now?”

  His dad looked at his watch. It was only ten pm. “Are you tired? It’s school tomorrow.”

  “I couldn’t possibly sleep.”

  “Okay, start talking. Keep your voice down.”

  Omri talked for an hour.

  He told about how he’d brought Little Bull back after a year, just to tell him about his winning story, and found he’d been wounded in a raid on his village and left to die. Only Twin Stars going out to find him and lug him somehow on to his pony – and then Matron, who’d proved as good as any surgeon, taking the musket-ball out of his back – had saved him.

  He told Patrick’s adventure, back in nineteenth-century Texas, how he’d met Ruby Lou, a saloon-bar hostess, and how they’d saved Boone, Patrick’s cowboy, from dying alone in the desert. How Omri had brought him back just as a hurricane had hit the cow-town, and the hurricane had come back with him.

  He kept remembering things and wanting to go back, or off at a tangent. His father, who had had a notebook and pencil at his side while reading Stolen Continents, made notes.

  When Omri came to the recent part, about Jessica Charlotte, he was getting really sleepy.

  His dad interrupted. “Listen, why don’t you just give me the Account to read for myself? And you get off to bed.”

  So Omri tiptoed upstairs again and fetched Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. He carried it reverently downstairs and put it in his father’s hands, and stood there while he stroked its old leather cover and ran his forefingers around the brass corner-bindings.

  “It’s fascinating, almost magic just holding it,” he said. “I can’t wait to read this. Go on, bub, get some sleep.” Just as Omri was starting up the stairs, his dad added: “Don’t keep yourself awake, but do Mum’s trick.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mum says that when she’s got a problem, she thinks about it last thing before she drops off. She swears her subconscious works on it while she’s sleeping, and sometimes in the morning the solution just appears.”

  So Omri did ‘Mum’s trick’. As he lay, drifting off to sleep, he thought about the two keys – the cupboard key, and the car key. He laid them side by side in his imagination. They were so different that anyone who didn’t know what a key was, wouldn’t have seen a connection between them. It seemed extraordinary, even to Omri who had always taken the function of keys for granted, that something so small could make the difference between being able to open a door or make a car go, or be completely stymied.

  And in this case, it was the difference between being able to go back into the past, or being stuck here. Between being able to have a great adventure, and not. Being able, maybe, to help Little Bull in his dire trouble, and having to leave him and his tribe to their fate.

  There had to be an answer. There had to be.

  3

  A Surprising Ghost

  Omri woke up early the following morning. Before he’d even opened his eyes, he ‘looked’ at the two keys, still lying side by side in his imagination as they had been in his last, sleepy thoughts the night before. His body stiffened. One of the keys had changed!

  It was the car key.

  He’d often seen it in reality, hanging in a box of little hooks inside the front door of the cottage, where his father and mother always hung it as soon as they came in from driving so it wouldn’t get lost. Last night, when he’d visualised it, it had been the key he knew – a flat metal key with a round, flat top made of some plastic material with an ‘F’ for Ford imprinted on it.

  Now the key, as clearly in his mind as if he could see it in front of his eyes, no longer had the round black plastic bit at the top. It was all metal. It was as if the whole key had been remoulded.

  He sat up sharply in bed. Remould the key!

  How could they? And if they did, what good would it do? Only the magic key could take them back in time.

  Unless…

  He jumped out of bed and barged through into his parents’ bedroom, which adjoined his. The door flew backwards, hitting his father, who was doing the same manoeuvre in reverse, and nearly knocking him flying.

  “Shhhh!” they both hissed, and then stifled laughter. Omri could see his mum’s shape under the duvet, still sound asleep. It was far too early for her to wake up – not much past six o’clock.

  Omri backed into his own room and his dad followed, closing the old-fashioned plank door silently behind them and lowering the latch so it wouldn’t click. Then he turned to face Omri. He looked very tired, but his face was flushed with suppressed excitement.

  “You’ve thought of something!” Omri guessed at once.

  “We’ll have to whisper. Listen.” Omri now noticed he was holding Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. “I read this, all of it, last night. It has got to be the most extraordinary, fascinating, amazing thing I have ever read. Of course I’m crazy about old diaries and stuff from the past. God, when I read something like this – what am I talking about, there IS nothing like this, this is unique, but when I was reading it I got so caught up, wanting to know more and more about the time she lived through, the First World War, and the period before that – it was like having her right in the room, telling me—”

  “Yeah, Dad, I know, I read it, I know just what you mean. But about the key.”

  “Yes! Well! Isn’t it obvious? I mean, Jessica Charlotte made the magic key. She fed her ‘gift’ as she called it, into it without even meaning to. Remember what she said?” He was searching through the yellowing pages, and found the place, marked with a match. “Yes, here! I hardly knew it then – I only knew I was bending all my strength on making the key perfect, and I felt something go out of me, and then the
key grew warm again in my hands as if freshly poured, and I knew it had power in it to do more than open boxes. But I didn’t know what. I only knew my heart had broken and that I would have given anything to have it be yesterday and not today.”

  He looked up. He had a strange expression in his eyes, almost as if he were on the brink of tears. “Poor woman,” he said, his voice full of pity. “You can understand it so well. She’d just seen her beloved little niece Lottie – who was your grandmother, Mum’s mother whom Mum never knew – for the very last time. She must’ve been full of bitterness and sorrow, and anger against her sister for saying – well, implying – that she wasn’t good enough to be with that little girl she loved more than anyone in the world… You know what I figured out, Om? If a person has any sort of magic gift, it gets more powerful the more strongly the person’s feeling. Like her son, Frederick, putting magic into the cupboard because he was so angry about plastic ruining his toy business.”

  “Yeah, Dad. I read it, you know.”

  “Om, please, don’t be impatient. Let me work my way through this. You had days, maybe weeks, to read the Account and digest it. I had it all in one go and it’s fairly knocked me sideways. I didn’t sleep a single wink last night.”

  “Sorry – I didn’t mean—”

  “No, it’s okay, it’s okay. Give me a sec, and I’ll cut to the chase.” But his head was down, he was still turning the pages of the notebook. “It’s just, I’m so utterly gobsmacked about Jessica Charlotte and her story, I’ve half-forgotten about Little Bull…” He looked up at Omri. “But yes, the key. It came to me. Now listen. If we could find a figure, a plastic toy, that might be Jessica Charlotte – I know it’d be difficult, but there can’t be that many figures that look like her – if we could… and if we could bring her forward in time, to us, we might ask her to copy the car key for us. She could make it magic, the way she did the other.”

  Omri stared at him, his brain racing. Of course! A slow, face-filling grin spread over his features, and he saw an answering look of incredulous delight dawn on his father’s face.