Lynne Banks - Secret of the Indian

The two boys sat on the floor of Omri’s bedroom and conferred in low voices.

“We’ve got to plan what to do,” said Patrick. “One of us must be up here in your room, on guard, every minute of the rest of the weekend. We’ll have to keep your door locked from inside. Whoever’s not here will have to bring food and stuff, so I’d better stay up here most of the time. It’ll look dead odd if I start nicking stuff from your kitchen. I don’t know what we’re going to do on Monday—”

Omri said heavily, “I do. I’ll have to go to school, and you’ll have to go home.”

“Oh God, yes,” said Patrick, remembering.

Patrick now lived in Kent with his mother. They were only in London for a brief visit to his aunt and girl cousins, Emma and the dreadful Tamsin. They’d have been back in their country home already, had Tamsin not fallen off her bicycle and broken her leg, so that Patrick’s mother had decided to stay on for a day or two to help his aunt.

The boys sat in heavy silence. Omri could hardly bear the thought of being left alone in this increasingly difficult situation. Patrick could hardly bear the thought of leaving it.

“Maybe Tamsin’ll die,” Patrick said darkly. “Then we’ll have to stay on. For the funeral.”

Omri hoped this was only a sick joke. He detested Tamsin but he didn’t wish her dead – not now he’d seen death, not with those eight small bloodstained bodies lying under torn-up scraps of sheet, right here in his room…

“What are we going to do about – the casualties?” he asked.

“You mean the dead ones? We’ll have to bury them.”

“Where?”

“In your garden—”

“But we can’t just… I mean, it’s not like when Boone’s horse died. They’re people, we can’t just – stick them in the earth. What about their families?”

“Their families are – are back there somewhere. We don’t know where they are, or when they are.”

“Maybe we ought to – to send them back through the cupboard, to their own time.”

“Send their dead bodies back? With modern bullets in them?”

“Their people would think they’d been shot by white men. They wouldn’t examine them. They’d go through – you know, whatever special rituals they have, and bury them properly – or – or whatever they do with dead people.”

Abruptly, Omri felt his eyes begin to prick and a hard, hot lump came into his throat. He put his head down on his knees. Patrick must have been feeling the same, because he squeezed Omri’s arm sympathetically.

“It’s no good feeling it too much,” he said after clearing his throat twice. “I know it’s terrible and I know it’s partly our fault. But they lived in very dangerous times, fighting and risking death every day. And they went into the battle quite willingly.”

“They didn’t know what they were up against with the now-guns,” said Omri in a muffled voice.

“Yeah, I know. Still. It doesn’t help to – to be a Boone.”

The weak joke about the cry-baby cowboy made Omri chuckle just a little.

“Where is Boone, by the way?” he asked, sniffing back his tears.

“I told you. I sent him back – he asked me to. Gave him a new horse, and off he went. Look.”

He opened the cupboard. On the shelf was Boone, standing beside his new horse, a tall, alert-looking black one. On the floor of the cupboard, Corporal Fickits and his men were clustered together, with their various weapons. Patrick gathered them all up, put the soldiers back in the biscuit-tin, but kept Fickits and Boone separate. Boone went into his pocket, horse and all. He always kept him there, when he wasn’t real, for luck. He was actually as fond of Boone as Omri was of Little Bull. Omri put Fickits in the back pocket of his jeans.

“The only thing we can do right now is to get some sleep,” Omri said.

Patrick settled down on his floor-cushions while Omri clambered up onto his bunk bed under the skylight. He looked up at the stars through the branches of the old elm tree which his father kept saying should be cut down because it was dead. Skeletal as it was, to Omri it was a friend.

“Let’s bring Boone back tomorrow,” Patrick whispered just before they dropped off. “I don’t seem to be able to face things without Boone, whether he cries or not. Besides, I want to know if he likes his new horse.”

At dawn Omri was woken by a familiar shout.

“Omri wake! Day come! Much need do!”

Omri, feeling sticky-eyed and thick-headed with tiredness, slid backwards down the ladder to the floor. Patrick was still sound asleep. The grey dawn light was only just creeping through the skylight.

“It’s dead early, Little Bull,” he muttered, rubbing his face and stifling a series of yawns.

Little Bull didn’t hear him properly. He caught only his name and the word ‘dead’. He nodded his hard-muscled face once and grunted.

“One more dead in night.”

Omri’s throat closed up with a sick feeling.

“Another? Oh, no… I’m sorry!” He meant sorry-ashamed, not just sorry-regretful. He felt every dead Indian brave was on his own conscience. He should never have made the modern weapons real, never have sent Little Bull and his braves back in time with them. The trouble was, he seemed still not fully to have accepted the fact, which he knew with one part of his brain, that these little people were not just toys come to life. They were flesh and blood, with their own characters, their own lives and destinies. And against his own intentions Omri had been drawn in. He’d found himself acting out his own part in these destinies, which would never have been possible but for the magic of the cupboard… and the key.

The key turned any container into a kind of body-shrinking time-machine. His seaman’s chest had taken him and Patrick back to the eighteenth century, to Little Bull’s time and place… Omri had not had time, so far, even to begin to think about the possibilities of that.

Now he scanned the seed-tray and saw that two of the Indians who had not been injured were carrying another body out of the longhouse and into the little paddock Patrick had made with miniature fencing, for the ponies, and which was now a makeshift morgue. Matron followed the sad procession, her face, rather grim at all times, now grimmer than ever.

“I did my best,” she said shortly. “Bullet lodged in the liver. Couldn’t reach it.”

She watched the two braves lay the dead Indian down beside the others. Suddenly she turned to face Omri.

“I know I did that operation on your friend!” she said. “And I operated last night – emergency ops – three of them – but blow it all, I’m not a surgeon! Stupid of me – conceited to think I could cope. Can’t. Not trained for it. Anyway… too much for any one person.” Her voice cracked upward.

“Matron, it’s not your fault—” began Omri, terrified that this capable, efficient, down-to-earth woman might be about to burst into tears, which would have unmanned him completely.

“Didn’t say it was! My fault indeed!” She glared at him, took her specs off, polished them on a spotless handkerchief from her apron pocket, and put them back on her formidable nose.

“Blessed if I know how I got here, what this is all about – now don’t you go pulling the wool over my eyes, I know when I’m dreaming and when I’m not – this is real . The blood’s real, the pain’s real, the deaths are real. My ops were real, they were the best I could do, but what is also real is my – my – my basic inadequacy .”

She suddenly snatched the handkerchief out of her pocket again and blew her nose on it. She wiped her nose back and forth several times and then gave a great, convulsive sniff.