The Key to the Indian

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got one!”

  “Yes! We’ve already brought her once—”

  “What!”

  “Shhh! I haven’t had a chance to tell you everything. I was concentrating on Little Bull…”

  “You brought her! You’ve met Jessica Charlotte!”

  For answer, Omri dived under the bed and got out another of his treasures – an old cashbox, black and silver, the paint wearing off, a blob of red sealing-wax still blocking the slot. He opened it cautiously. His father was so eager he was trembling. Omri carefully took out the little woman-shape in the red dress with the big plumed hat, the size of his finger. His father took it from him as reverently as if it were a holy relic.

  “This is her?” he whispered wonderingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “It was in here, in the cashbox that I found with the Account, buried in the old thatched roof. The magic key opened it. She was fast asleep, but later I – well, me and Patrick—”

  “Patrick and I—”

  “Yeah, well, she woke up, and we decided… I mean it was just before she was going to steal her sister’s earrings, you know, the night she made the key. And I wanted to change her mind and get her not to steal them…”

  His father’s face sagged suddenly with horror. “My God, Omri! You didn’t, did you?”

  “No. Patrick said not to. Because if I had, it would have changed history. Everything that came from stealing the earrings – things linked to other things, like a chain – wouldn’t have happened, and I – I might never have been born.”

  His father swallowed hard. His face had gone very pale. “I wonder if we ought to be meddling with this,” he said at last. “I wonder if we ought not to just – just put the key, and the cupboard, and the cashbox, and the Account, the plastic figures and everything else, safely away somewhere and – and just forget it.”

  “No, Dad! It’s no use. I tried that. I did try – you know I did – I put the cupboard and key in the bank and I swore I wouldn’t take them out and mess about with the magic any more, but – but you can’t not, somehow. I couldn’t, anyway. It – when I read the Account, I – I just felt the magic calling me.”

  His father was gazing at him with a very strange, troubled expression. “Omri. You don’t suppose—”

  “What?”

  “Well… don’t be scared. But Frederick obviously inherited some part of Jessie’s ‘gift’, or he couldn’t have put magic into the cupboard he made. I just wondered if that – magic power – if… After all, they were your blood relatives. Perhaps it’s something that can be – passed on.”

  There was a long silence. They stared into each other’s eyes.

  “Wouldn’t…” Omri found he had to clear his throat. “Wouldn’t – Mum have had some of it?”

  His father frowned and went to the window. It was framed by deep eaves of thatch. The sun was just coming up over the hill on the horizon, the one that had on its top a strange little circle of trees, like a peacock’s crown.

  “I suppose Mum never told you about the time she saw a ghost.”

  Omri jumped. “A ghost!”

  “Yes. She told me about it ages ago. I didn’t believe her. Of course. I didn’t believe in anything unprovable in those days.”

  “Whose ghost did she see?”

  “Well, that’s one of the things I was thinking about, lying awake last night.” He looked down at the little woman-shape in his hand. “I only have her description to go on, and I only heard the story once. Years ago, before we were married. She told it to me when I was saying I didn’t believe in anything supernatural, including an afterlife. And she disagreed, and we were sort of quarrelling. She told me this story, to prove me wrong. And I…” He paused, and swallowed, “I laughed.”

  “Tell me!”

  “She said she was visiting her mother’s grave – Lottie, who’d died in the bombing of London, when your mum was still a baby. Lottie was buried in the same grave as her father, Matthew, in Clapham Cemetery, near where she was born, where her mother still lived. Jessica Charlotte’s sister.”

  “Maria.”

  His father nodded. “Yes. Maria, who brought your mother up. She was an old lady by then, in her eighties, but she went every week to the cemetery to put flowers on Lottie’s grave. Mum didn’t often go because she was busy with her own life by then, she was a student, but that day Maria wasn’t well and Mum felt she had to drive her to Clapham instead of letting her go by herself on the bus. Mum said she felt guilty about not taking her gran more often but you know, if you don’t even remember the dead person, it’s hard to visit the graveyard regularly.

  “Anyway, they got there, and bought some flowers at the gates, and the old lady filled a plastic bottle with water from a tap. Mum carried the things and held her gran’s arm, and they walked to the grave. And then Mum gave the flowers to her gran, who knelt down by the grave. She was – you know – taking out last week’s flowers and arranging the new ones in the vase with the fresh water, and suddenly Mum saw someone standing beside her.”

  Omri sat rigid. He felt as if ice-water were trickling down his spine. He could see it in his mind’s eye. He saw the whole scene as if it were being enacted in front of him. He even saw who his mum had seen, before his father went on:

  “She could see her clearly. A woman in an old-fashioned long dress with her hair piled up on her head. There was a strong breeze blowing, but the woman’s hair didn’t stir. She was looking straight at Mum.”

  Omri wanted to ask his dad to go on, but he felt frozen, frozen in the scene. He hardly needed to ask. He saw.

  The woman was Jessica Charlotte.

  She took a step forward, nearer to the grave, looking all the time at the young girl standing on the other side of it. She put her hand – wearing a long black glove – on the shoulder of the bent old woman, busy with the flowers, who didn’t seem notice. She patted her gently. She smiled a sad, sad smile at the young girl who was going to be Omri’s mother. And she nodded tenderly down at the old lady, as if to say, “See how old she is. You must take care of her now.” Maybe she even did say it. And then suddenly she wasn’t there any more.

  Omri’s father was talking. He was describing the scene just as Omri saw it in his head. Which came first – what Omri saw, or what his dad said?

  When his dad finished, there was a silence, and then Omri said in a choked voice, “Mum must have felt awful.”

  “About seeing the ghost?”

  “No! About all the times she hadn’t taken her gran to the cemetery. About the ghost needing to come and – and remind her to take care of Maria.”

  “Do you think the ghost – was Jessica Charlotte?”

  “Of course it was,” said Omri simply.

  “You sound sure.”

  “I am.”

  “Omri – how can you know that?”

  “Well it’s not because I’m magic. It’s just – I’ve got a very good imagination, and sometimes it just tells me things.”

  His father looked at him, and Omri heard what he had just said, heard it as his father must have, as proof that Omri had a bit of Jessica Charlotte’s gift.

  They talked it all over very carefully before anyone else in the house woke up. The sun was well clear of ‘Peacock Hill’ and streaming into the room before they first heard the others beginning to stir, and had to stop.

  Omri, though of course he wanted to see Jessica Charlotte again, and thought it very probable that she would have the ability to make them another magic key, one that would work in the car, was very doubtful just the same about his dad’s plan.

  There was nothing in the Account about her making a second time-journey. The first one – when she visited Omri and Patrick and sang them a music-hall song – was hinted at in her diary, but nothing after that. Surely if she had been brought a second time, and asked to make another key, she would have remembered it, especially so close after the first time.r />
  Omri’s father was very interested in the time question. “Does it work the same at both ends?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s to say, if a week has passed here, a week has passed for the people in the past?”

  “That’s right. I know because when Little Bull came this last time, his baby was about a year old, and it was a year here since he was born. Anyway, I knew it before.”

  “Okay, so let’s work it out. How many days is it since Jessica Charlotte came?”

  Omri thought about it. A week had passed between seeing her, and the day his dad had found the figures and discovered the secret, and three days more had passed since then.

  “Ten days.”

  “Ten days…” His dad was looking at the notebook. “So. Right after she came here – no, it wasn’t. Let me see. She made the key. That was the day of the victory parade, the day she said goodbye to Lottie, Armistice Day – November the eleventh, nineteen-eighteen. The next day she went back to Maria’s to ‘say goodbye’, pretending she was going abroad. And that was the day she stole the earrings. So that’s one day.

  “Then, she writes, a week went by. And at the end of that week, she got the news that little Lottie had been accused of stealing the earrings, and had run out of the house, and her father, Matthew, ran after her and got run over and killed. And that’s where her part of the Account ends.”

  “Well, there is a bit more…”

  “Not that you can read. When she got to writing that part, all those years later when she was on her deathbed…” he looked up, and looked around. “Maybe in this very room, Omri!”

  “No, it was Gillon’s room.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just—” He stopped suddenly. He was beginning to feel creepy about this. He did ‘just know’, he was certain. But how?

  His father took a deep breath, and went on. “Okay. Anyway, when she was trying to write the last of the Account, she became too ill and weak, and had to call in her son Frederick to finish it. This last page of her writing…” He pointed to faded, scrawly words that you could hardly make out. “… indicate to me that she was not only very ill by the time she came to write it, but that she was writing about a time when she was almost crazy. She felt Matthew had died because of her, that Lottie had been falsely accused, that more terrible things were going to happen because of what she’d done.

  “Now, Omri, if you’ve got a bit of her ‘gift’, use it. Imagine her as she was – is – at this moment. Ten days after the theft of the earrings. Three days after she found out about Matthew’s death.”

  Omri didn’t have to imagine very hard. He’d been through this already, when he had read this part of the Account. He had almost seemed to be suffering with Jessica Charlotte in this awful crisis in her life. He had felt her guilt, her horror, her remorse. He didn’t want to experience that again, or even a shadow of it. It was a terrible thought that, down through the layers of time, she might still be going through that; that if they brought her, they would have to see her going through it.

  “She’s right in the middle of it, Dad. Her – her – awful time.” A new, appalling throught struck him. He took the notebook away from his father and peered closely at the semi-legible words. “Alone… wandering… despair… river… coward… never…” He suddenly and shockingly understood the meaning behind the word ‘river’ and the word that followed it.

  “Dad! She – she tried to drown herself!”

  “What!”

  “I’m sure of it! Why didn’t I notice before? I was so disappointed that the Account had stopped, thinking I’d never learn the secret of the magic now, I didn’t read into it like I did the rest. ‘Alone – wandering – river – coward’. Don’t you see? She was in such a state she wanted to throw herself into the Thames, and maybe she couldn’t because she was too afraid. Or maybe she was too much of a coward to go on living… And that’s what’s going on right now, back in her time! Oh, Dad!” he exclaimed, forgetting to be quiet, staring at his father across the notebook. “We’re not going to bring her now are we?”

  “If we want her to make us a key, to go back and help Little Bull,” said his father slowly, “we’ll have to.”

  4

  “River… Coward… Never.”

  It was a school day. Omri whispered to his father as the house woke up that he might pretend to be ill so he could stay home and they could talk more. But his dad said no way.

  So there was a normal breakfast and Gillon and Omri set off for school on their bikes. Adiel was having a long weekend exeat from his boarding school. Omri envied him. But no, that was absurd. If he, Omri, were incarcerated in a boarding school, there’d be no question of any adventure.

  Actually it turned out that having to be in school was a good thing. It gave his mind a sort of rest. When school was finished, and he went back to thinking about it on the bike ride home, he came to it fresh, and at once an interesting thought occurred to him.

  Bringing Jessica Charlotte might be a kind of relief to her. She’d enjoyed being with him and Patrick, it had lifted her out of her sorrow about Lottie. Perhaps it would be like that again. However terrible she was feeling, she might feel a little less terrible if she were taken out of her own life and into theirs.

  No one was at home when he and Gillon arrived. The door of the cottage was never locked (what a difference from London!), so they let themselves in and made peanut butter sandwiches and milk (their mother had banned fizzy drinks from the house since she went on her health kick). Gillon drifted TV-wards and Omri, seeing him putting down roots at the other end of the house, felt safe in shooting upstairs and fastening the brand-new bolt on the inside of his bedroom door.

  He looked at the cupboard.

  The mirror in its door reflected his own face back to him. You’d never think it was anything special. Just a little white-painted metal bathroom cabinet, the sort you put medicines and tooth things in. It looked a little smarter since he’d repaired and repainted it, but it was old and essentially commonplace. No one would guess! No one who didn’t know, would ever guess!

  He lifted it on to the floor and opened it. The key was inside. So were the figures of Little Bull, Twin Stars and her baby, the pony, Matron and Sergeant Fickits. He took them all out and wondered where he could hide them now that the bricks of his makeshift bookshelves had gone. Eventually he found a pretty good place. There was a small, unused, old-fashioned fireplace in one wall. He reached up the chimney and found a sort of little ledge up there. He wrapped the figures individually in Kleenex, put them into a plastic bag, and put this out of sight on the ledge.

  Then he wiped the soot off his hands, took Jessica Charlotte’s figure out of the cashbox and stood her on the shelf of the cupboard. Just to see how she looked there.

  She looked fine, just as he had last seen her, dressed up in her beautiful red dress with the bustle and the big, plumed hat. Her figure was posed in a stagey position, hand on hip, the other hand over her head, waving to them.

  Omri stuck the key in the keyhole. Just for somewhere to put it. He wasn’t going to do anything, of course – not without his dad.

  He closed the cupboard door carefully. There. Now everything was ready. Now he would go and do his homework.

  Instead, he turned the key. His hand did it. He couldn’t stop it.

  It gave him a shock when it happened. He really did try to restrain his hand, but his fingers acted, there was the familiar click, and it was too late.

  Galvanised, he turned the key back again and threw the door open.

  There she was. But no longer strutting, actress-like, brazen and bold. Now she was lying very still on her face. Her hat was gone. She was in a different dress. It looked strange, somehow. So did her hair. Omri reached in and lightly touched her with the tip of one finger.

  She was soaking wet.

  All the muscles in Omri’s face went slack. He picked her limp wet body up and laid her face up on the palm of his hand. Her
face was grey. Her hair and dress streamed with water.

  He realised then why his fingers had turned the key when he hadn’t meant them to. His fingers knew what they had to do. They had to bring Jessica Charlotte, now. Right now. They had to recall her from the river.

  For a split second, looking at her putty-coloured face, her closed eyes, her streaming hair, he thought she was drowned. But he knew she couldn’t be – she had the rest of her life to live. Still, he had to help her, and there was only one way.

  He laid her carefully on his bed, rushed to the fireplace, fished the bag he’d just put away out of the chimney, and frantically unwrapped the figures till he came to Matron. He thrust her into the cupboard and locked her in.

  When he re-opened the door, she was standing with her arms akimbo, looking extremely severe.

  “My dear young man,” she said. “This cannot, I repeat cannot, keep occurring. You are going to get me the sack. I had a great deal of explaining to do, the last time. Don’t you realise there’s a war on? These little excursions are all very fine, but we are rushed off our feet. Do you understand? I am on duty!”

  “Matron! Please! I’m sorry. I need you.”

  “And the unhappy victims of the Luftwaffe do not?”

  “Just for five minutes! You must!”

  He didn’t give her a chance to argue, but picked her up by the waist and airlifted her to the bed where Jessica Charlotte was lying, a watermark spreading over the quilt. Matron bent over her for only a moment.

  “Put her on something firm,” she ordered.

  Omri transferred them both to his desk.

  “Turn her on her stomach.”

  Omri obeyed. Matron knelt beside the prone figure and began artificial respiration, her hands on either side of Jessica Charlotte’s ribcage, rocking to and fro with a strong, purposeful rhythm. After a short time that seemed long to Omri, he heard a sound like a tiny cough, then a choking, then some gasps and groans. Matron sat back on her heels.