Lynne Banks - The Key to the Indian

And then, two days ago, his father had gone to Omri’s room while Omri had been out, to put up the proper shelves he’d promised him, and had disturbed his arrangements and found the figures . He’d put them all into the cupboard and locked the door. Of course they’d come to life inside, and his dad had put a lot of twos and twos from the past together, and realised . And later he’d seen them, been introduced to them. And accepted it… It took a special kind of grown-up not only to accept magic when he saw it, but to promise and swear that he’d never, ever tell a living soul.

Omri knew his secret was safe. And at last he had someone in the family to share it with.

There was a problem, though.

They’d talked about it, Omri and his dad. They’d gone out for a long walk together by the sea yesterday, and talked about it.

It wasn’t their problem, it was Little Bull’s. Little Bull was an Iroquois Indian from the late eighteenth century. And he was in trouble. Or rather, his whole tribe was, and as Little Bull was a chief, he was deeply concerned. And when he had suddenly been magicked back to Omri’s time, when the key was turned and the cupboard door opened, his first words had been: “This good! I have much need!”

(Well – his very first word had been “Brother!” He and Omri were blood brothers.)

Luckily the problem, though urgent, was not something that had to be dealt with on the spot. It was an on-going problem the tribe was experiencing, which Little Bull had tried to explain – something to do with British treachery, which made Omri puzzled and uncomfortable, though he didn’t really grasp what it was all about. But Little Bull seemed to take it for granted that Omri, whom he had originally assumed to be a Great Spirit with all sorts of magic powers, would come to his help.

“We’ll have to go back,” said Omri as they walked along the cliff-tops with the salty wind blowing off the English Channel into their faces.

“Explain to me. How does one ‘go back’?”

Omri did his best. He himself had only gone back once, to Little Bull’s village when it had been under attack by the Iroquois’ enemies, the Algonquins.

“You have to get into something,” he said. “You remember my wooden chest, the one I got in the Saturday market? The one with the initials L.B. on it?”

“L.B.! The initials on the plaque are L.B.”

Omri nodded hard. The plaque was a stone slab built into their house. It had an inscription engraved on it, signed with the initials L.B. The moment Omri had seen this, when they first came to look at the house their mother had inherited, he had known the house would be lucky for them. Those initials – the same as Little Bull’s – always, wherever he encountered them, had a magic significance. He told his father about this as well as he could.

“This magic of yours seems to crop up in unexpected places,” said his father slowly. “L.B. L.B. It rings a bell somehow – about something else – can’t place it at the moment… Well, tell more about going back.”

“We found out the key fitted the lock on the chest,” Omri said eagerly. “The key fits a lot of different locks. So I got into the chest, and Patrick locked it, and next thing I knew I was in Little Bull’s village in a forest clearing, just at sunset. Long ago… You see, Dad, when you go back, you’re small, just like when they come to us. You have to have something to – to –”

“Inhabit?”

“Yes! To bring to life. They didn’t have plastic toys back then, so I – I mean, my – my spirit or whatever bit of me actually travelled back in time, became part of a painting on the side of an Indian tent.”

“A wigwam.”

“No, a wigwam’s something different. This was a tepee. They have animal designs painted on them. I think I was a beaver… or maybe a porcupine.” Omri had glanced anxiously at his father, half-expecting him to laugh, but his face was entirely serious. “Animals are very important to Indians. Not just to hunt. I’ve read about it. Each clan – d’you know what a clan is?” His father had nodded, frowning. “Each clan has its own clan-animal. Little Bull’s clan-animal must be an elk, he’s named for that kind of bull, they didn’t hunt buffalo. I expect he got it in a dream – dreams are well important to Indians.”

“Yes. I think I knew that.”

“Anyway, I was sort of stuck there on the outside of the tepee and then there was an attack by an enemy tribe. They set the tepee on fire and I was nearly burnt to death,” he concluded, as carelessly as if such an adventure happened to him all the time.

His father stopped in his tracks. “My God! That time we came home and you had a burn on the side of your head! You made up some cock-and-bull story about a bonfire—”

“Right! Luckily Patrick turned the key and brought me back just in time. It hurt like hell,” Omri remembered.

His father stood on the cliff path with the rough grey Channel behind him, staring at Omri. “This is dangerous,” he said with an air of discovery.

“Yes it is. It can be.”

“I thought it was… just the most wonderful fun,” said his father.

“That’s exactly what I thought, at first. It’s not fun. Not always. It’s – I mean, it’s real people.”

“Yes. Of course I realised that when I saw them. I just… I suppose I just—”

“It’s natural, Dad. You have to kind of get into it. But things really happen. You do have to – to think ahead. You can’t just – do things.”

“On impulse.”

“Right.”

“Yes. I see that. Anything could happen. Obviously you mustn’t change anything back there.”

“No,” said Omri with great feeling. He didn’t want to even think about the time he had feared he’d changed something so drastically that he, himself, might never have been born.

They walked on slowly. Then his father said, “But your wooden chest was destroyed in that freak storm. So what could we use?”

Omri thought of telling his dad that the storm, too, had happened because of the key. But he had a strange feeling of wanting to protect him from too much knowledge. He might scare him and then he would back off. Not that his dad was a coward, but you wouldn’t have to be one to be scared of magic that could bring a hurricane all the way from the Texas of a hundred years ago, to rampage over England destroying everything in its path…

So he just said, “Well, it has to be big enough to hold us both. And it has to have a keyhole for the key.”

“But if we were both in it together, who’d turn the key?”

“Yes. That’s the problem we had before. Patrick and I could never go back at the same time.”

They had tramped on for a while in silence, and at last his dad said, “This is very difficult to get your mind around.”

Omri knew it. But Little Bull’s urgent looks and words pressed on his brain.

His dad was frowning. “We need to do some research. Read up on the history. Find out what was happening back then.”

“What is happening.”

“What is happening…” He was furrowing his brows. He looked remarkably like Omri, when he did that. “It seems as if it’s all happening at once. History… time… in layers, kind of. When we ‘go back’, if we find a way to, we’ll just – drop through a number of layers and be back in Little Bull’s time.”

Omri thought that was a good way of putting it.

“But how can we be sure of getting to the right layer?” asked his father.

“That’s easy. We have to either go back with Little Bull, or with something of his, something that belongs to the right time and place. The magic latches on to that.”