The Key to the Indian

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “Fumes,” said their mother shortly.

  “What?” they all asked.

  “Fumes. Exhaust fumes. It must’ve been. That’s the only possible explanation. There’s a leak of some kind, you were all breathing carbon monoxide and you all passed out and had delirious dreams. And if the car had been in a closed garage, or maybe even if I hadn’t come out when I did, you’d probably all have died. And that car had its service two weeks ago. Just wait till I get it back to that garage!”

  Omri was hugely relieved that she hadn’t believed a single word of Gillon’s story. Gillon didn’t believe it himself. The only thing that seriously bothered their mother was how Gillon got his head injury. That was one of those little mysteries that was destined never to be solved.

  13

  The Key-Turner

  Omri was surprised his mother didn’t notice, in the days that followed, that he and his father spent so much private time together. But she was completely fixated on Gillon. After his two recent mishaps, she decided he had become accident-prone and she was afraid to let him out of her sight. So that although in Omri’s opinion Gillon had now competely recovered, he was still home from school, being spoilt absolutely rotten and loving it. However, as he kept boring his mother (and anyone else who would listen) by recounting his ‘dream’ over and over again, with embellishments, it seemed probable that her indulgence would soon come to an end.

  Meanwhile, it was quite useful to have her mind on other things. It left Omri and his dad with time and privacy to plan.

  They’d already decided when they would make the trip. There was some kind of teachers’ in-training day coming up at the end of October which would close schools on the Monday. So Omri and his dad talked openly at meals about a short camping trip together. There was no question of Gillon going; he didn’t even want to. He couldn’t explain this, but Omri understood. Even though Gillon thought the India trip had been a dream, nevertheless he’d had his fill of adventure for the moment.

  Early on, the idea of Dartmoor was privately abandoned. They decided to go instead to a place nearer home. Omri’s dad took to going for long, exploratory walks and drives. At the end of one of them, he was so excited he came to meet Omri on his way home from school.

  “Peacock Hill!” Omri’s dad said breathlessly. Omri had told him his private name for the hill he could see from his bedroom. “It’s perfect! Only two miles away, and once you’re up at the top in that little circle of trees, you can’t be seen.”

  “Can you drive up there?”

  “Yes, on a cart track. I’d have to back down again which wouldn’t be funny, but it can be done.”

  “If there’s a track, other people must go there.”

  “Maybe they did once. It’s pretty overgrown. I think just the occasional walker goes there now.”

  But that still left the main problem unsolved. They discussed it endlessly. Who would send them to Little Bull’s time? Who would be around to turn the key in the ignition, and bring them safely back?

  “It must be someone we can trust. Someone who won’t ask questions, who’ll just walk up there and do it at the time we arrange.”

  “But there’s no one like that! You’d need a robot. Imagine finding two people unconscious in the car – who wouldn’t ask questions?”

  “What we really need is someone who already knows.”

  And then, of course, the solution – blindingly obvious, why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? – flashed upon Omri.

  “Patrick!”

  “Omri,” said his dad after a moment, “you are a genius. Write to him immediately, and I’ll write to his mother.”

  Omri didn’t stop to think it out. He just rushed upstairs and dashed off a letter to Patrick (who, maddeningly, was not on the phone) at his home in Kent. He wrote “Private and Confidential” on the envelope, and at the start of the letter, he wrote: BURN THIS WHEN READ.

  Dear Patrick,

  My dad has found out. I didn’t tell him, of course. He found out by accident. Don’t worry, he won’t tell.

  This is to ask you to stay with us like you did before, on the long weekend. You must talk your mum into it. Then we’re going to a place my dad’s found. We’ll pretend we’re going camping, the three of us. Only we’re not really. We’re going back to help Little Bull. He’s in trouble. We’ve found a way. It does work, we’ve proved it. I’ll tell you everything when I see you. Say you’ll come. Omri.

  Reading this, Omri’s dad frowned. “You don’t think you ought to tell him a few more details – such as that he won’t be coming with us?”

  “Couldn’t him and me go first – do part of it together?”

  “He and I,” grated his dad, as usual. (He was a pronoun-freak.) “I don’t know about that. All I know is that he can’t do the main part with us.”

  “So, basically, we’re inviting him to be a sort of gopher.”

  “No. A key-turner.”

  “What’s the difference, Dad?”

  “Not much,” his dad admitted. “From what I know of Patrick, we’re going to have to handle this rather tactfully.”

  “You mean I am,” said Omri glumly. He lost every bit of good feeling he’d had about the coming adventure in bad feeling about exploiting Patrick.

  Patrick rang from a pay phone twenty-four hours later to say that he wouldn’t miss it for anything on earth.

  He arrived by train, unaccompanied, as he had before.

  “Mum’d told the conductor to look after me,” he said. “Can you believe she’d do that? Humiliation time! He kept coming round asking if I was all right! I mean, grotesque or what?”

  After that he talked about nothing but going back. He thought it was terrific that Omri’s dad knew all about it.

  “It’s really too scary on your own,” he said. “I can’t wait, I haven’t slept since I got your letter…”

  Omri and his dad said very little. But Patrick was too excited to notice.

  When they got to the cottage and hellos had been said, Patrick dragged Omri to the wild end of the garden for a private conference.

  “Look what I brought!” he exclaimed, bringing his closed hand out of his pocket.

  Omri guessed what he would see, before Patrick’s opening fingers revealed the figures of Boone, the cowboy, and his wife Ruby Lou. They were sitting on Boone’s black horse, Boone in front, Ruby sitting sideways behind him still in her wedding dress – which, when real, was of silk and lace ruffles – her veil thrown back, her red leather boots sticking out incongruously under the white frill. Boone was bare-headed. They were both smiling their post-wedding smiles of happiness. Boone held the reins in one hand and something white in the other – a chunk of wedding cake, halfway to his grinning mouth.

  “You’re not planning to take Boone and Ruby Lou back!” said Omri.

  “Why not? They belong in the Wild West. They could help. We could send him back first, with one of the others, in the plastic tepee, like before. He could be waiting for us.”

  “I think that’s a crazy idea. What would the Indians make of him – a white guy not even from their time, suddenly appearing, on a horse which they’d want, with a woman all got up in a wedding dress—”

  “They might think she was a goddess!”

  “Goddess! Don’t be daft. They’d kill Boone and carry her off. That’s what they did with white women in those days, they carried them off and made them part of the tribe.”

  Patrick snorted. “I wouldn’t like to be the Indian who tried to carry Ruby off!”

  “We can’t take risks like that.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” said Patrick. “I am definitely going to bring them through the cupboard. I have to know how they are. Just for a visit, Omri, come on! You brought yours.”

  “My dad brought them.”

  “Yeah. Wow. I have to hear all about that.”

  So they sat under a tree and Omri began to tell him. Oddly enough, it was the stuff about Jessica Charlotte that P
atrick was most excited about.

  “The magic pulled her out of the river! But that’s weird. How come it happened at just the right moment?”

  “I know what my dad thinks,” said Omri soberly. “He thinks I’ve got a bit of magic in me, from Jessica Charlotte, because I’m her posterity.”

  “Post-what?”

  “Descendent then. Her relative. Dad thinks it can be passed on, like her gift is in her genes.”

  “She didn’t wear jeans!” And Patrick collapsed with laughter and rolled on his back.

  Omri, feeling the old irritation with Patrick, sat still, frowning. There had always been this side to him. He was a good mate and often had brilliant insights into the magic, but he could be a complete idiot sometimes. Vaguely rude jokes about Jessica Charlotte struck Omri as being completely out of order, especially when he remembered the terrible ordeal she was going through, back in her time, which he couldn’t even help with.

  “If it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t be able to go at all,” he said stiffly.

  Patrick glanced at him, saw at once he’d gone too far, and sat up again. “Sorry,” he said. “I was really laughing at the idea of you having magic powers. I wouldn’t laugh at her.” After a moment’s thought, he said, “But if you did have some of Jessica Charlotte’s gift, wouldn’t your mum have it, too?”

  Omri grunted. He didn’t want to tell Patrick about his mother seeing Jessica Charlotte’s ghost when she was young. He thought he just might laugh again. He told about the key and the car. Patrick was absolutely riveted.

  “Have you tried it?”

  “Yes. We’ve all been back. Gillon and I went to India, of about eighty years ago, I think.”

  Patrick’s jaw dropped. “Gillon knows?”

  Omri shook his head and told Patrick about his being dropped on his head and thinking he’d dreamt the whole thing. “I’m a bit worried that when he really gets his head back together, he’ll realise that dreams just aren’t like that,” he said. “For the moment he hasn’t even thought it might have been real. Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “I would,” said Patrick. “I’d know it wasn’t a dream! Well, go on, tell what happened! India! Blimey! Did you meet a snake-charmer?” Patrick did a shimmy with his head and arms.

  “As a matter of fact—” began Omri, but just then his mother called them for tea and they had to go back into the house. They didn’t get a chance to talk again until they were in bed in Omri’s room that night. And that didn’t happen until late because they’d had to pack the gear to give the trip the appearance of a genuine camping trip.

  Omri tried to tell Patrick about India but they were both too tired. Besides, Omri was feeling uneasy and guilty about The Plan.

  “Patrick,” he mumbled as they were both on the brink of sleep.

  “Mmm.”

  “You do realise you can’t go back with Dad and me.”

  There was a longish silence and Omri thought Patrick was asleep. But he sat up abruptly as the penny dropped.

  “What do you mean, I can’t go back?”

  “I mean, for the – the long part of the trip.”

  “You mean, for the main part! The good part!”

  Omri was silent.

  Patrick got up off his makeshift bed on the floor and switched on the light. His face wore an expression Omri had seen there before, when they’d been younger. It was not an expression that filled him with confidence that Patrick was going to co-operate.

  “Let me get this straight. You’ve brought me all the way here so I can send you and your dad back to Little Bull’s time while I—” He stopped. “While I – what, exactly?”

  Omri told him The Plan – how Patrick would send them, and then walk down the hill and make an excuse to Omri’s mum. “You can say you don’t feel well, or that we’ve had a row.”

  Even as he said it, he heard how terrible it sounded.

  “I see,” said Patrick in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “And then I spend two days here with your mother and then do a ten-mile hike back up the hill—”

  “Two miles,” mumbled Omri.

  “Oh, thanks. So sorry. Two miles. And turn the key at the right time. And bring you guys back, dead or alive, after you’ve had the adventure of your lives. And then, if I’ve been very good, I get to hear all about it. Have I got this right?”

  “Er… sort of. But…”

  But Patrick wasn’t listening. He was too mad.

  “So I’m just here to be useful. I’m not going back at all. Is that what you think?”

  “Oh, of course you’re going back! You’ll go back with me, first, before me and Dad go for the – the main part.”

  “For five minutes, till your dad gets fed up and turns the key.”

  “Er – no – we thought about two hours—”

  “Bloody well think again,” said Patrick shortly. He switched off the light and Omri heard a thud as he flung himself down, and then a sharp jerk as he pulled up the covers.

  Omri’s dad’s instructions to him, last thing, to “get a good night’s sleep” necessarily went out of the window.

  14

  Patrick’s U-Turn

  Next day, however, it seemed as if it was Patrick who had thought again.

  Omri woke from a shallow, dream-fractured sleep expecting a major row with him. But it didn’t happen. They got dressed, Patrick avoiding Omri’s eyes, and went down to an early breakfast without anything further being said.

  After breakfast they loaded up the Cortina. Gillon helped. He seemed to be having some regrets, now, about not coming, but his mother said he wasn’t fit enough. She meanwhile was busy in the kitchen preparing enough food to withstand a siege.

  “Will we be able to take some of that back with us, Dad?” Omri whispered as they bumped shoulders at the back of the car, loading the tent and the cold-box into the hatchback.

  “I presume so, if we’re touching it,” whispered his dad. “I’m more concerned about taking useful things like this.” He held up a Swiss army knife with a lot of different blades.

  “I wish we had a gun,” said Omri. “We might need it.”

  His father, who was deeply opposed to guns, gave him a look. “Don’t be silly. We couldn’t even shoot a fly with it, there.”

  “Oh! Of course.” Omri shivered slightly.

  “Patrick seems very quiet this morning. Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “He – he didn’t seem too pleased.”

  “I’m not surprised. But he agreed?”

  Omri shrugged. He was bewildered by the change in Patrick this morning. Now he was approaching across the lane, laden with sleeping bags and a small stove.

  “Where do you want to stow all this?” he asked flatly.

  Omri’s dad took it from him and loaded it carefully. “Go on, boys, go and get the rest,” he said.

  Omri and Patrick walked back to the house together. Omri was dying to speak, to ask, but he didn’t know how. This silence between them, after last night, was as suspenseful as a held breath, but Patrick seemed determined not to break it. They made several more journeys to the car with food, blankets and clothes.

  Then, at the last minute, Omri had to dash up to his room because he’d forgotten to pack his pyjamas, which of all useless items his mother insisted he take. While he was up there he paused to look at the cupboard.

  Perhaps he ought to bring Little Bull back, just for a moment, to warn him they were coming. Make sure the dolls were ready for them. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  He hastily took the plastic bag from its hiding place and extracted Little Bull, shut him in the cupboard and swiftly turned the key. Just as he did so, he became aware of somebody behind him. He swung round, his heart nearly flying out of his mouth. It was Patrick.

  “What are you doing?” Patrick asked quietly.

  Omri explained quickly. Patrick narrowed his eyes and came closer.

  “Go on then
. Open the door.”

  Omri did, and there was Little Bull standing on the shelf. He looked angry, and, ignoring Patrick, burst straight into a stern speech.

  “Many days pass! I think like other English you forget you gave word!”

  “No! We couldn’t come just like that, Little Bull. We had to arrange things. We’re coming soon, today.”

  “Our need is great. You come,” he said, and it was an order. “More time and it become too late.”

  “Are the – the toys ready?”

  “Ready many days!”

  “How many are there?”

  Little Bull held up two fingers.

  “What about one for me?” It was Patrick’s quiet voice.

  “Ah, Pat-Rick. You come with Om-Ri and father?”

  “Maybe,” said Patrick steadily.

  “No toy ready. Two is enough,” said Little Bull, folding his arms.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Right,” said Patrick. He reached across Omri, and before Omri could say or do anything, he had slammed the door shut and turned the key. Then, while Omri was still standing there staring, he turned the key again, opened the door, took out Little Bull’s figure, and put the double figure of Boone and Ruby Lou on the horse in instead.

  “Wait, what are you doing!” Omri exclaimed anxiously.

  “Just showing you what’s going to happen while you’re gone,” Patrick remarked calmly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Patrick turned and squared up to Omri. “Now get this straight,” he said between his teeth. “I’ve decided I’m going to do what you want. I think it’s lousy of you to expect it, but I’ll do it. But remember, I’m in control. And in the meantime, I’m not just going to sit back here pretending to be ill or whatever. I’m going to be having some fun of my own.”

  “Well, I’m going to take the key, so you—”

  “No, Om. You’re not going to take the key so I – anything. I’m going to take the key, and then we’re going ‘camping’.”

  With that, he took the key out of the lock, and slipped it in his pocket.