The Return of the Indian (14 page)

Now the Indians were dipping branches into the big fire to make torches. They were dancing and shouting and leaping. Several of them were running to the few unburnt longhouses. And suddenly Omri knew.

He knew what he had feared. They were going to burn the tepee. And he was part of it!

The tepee was on the edge of the clearing. There were other things to set on fire first. But they would get to him! They were coming closer, their howls fiercer, their torches swirling in clouds of smoke above their half-naked heads.

Omri began screaming silently.

Patrick! Patrick! Do it now! Turn the key, bring me home, save me!

He saw an Indian making straight for him. His face, in the torchlight, was twisted with fury. For a second Omri saw, under the shaven scalp decorated with a single scalp lock, the mindless destructive face of a skinhead just before he lashed out. The torch went back with the man’s right arm, there was a split second’s pause, and then it came hurtling through the air and Struck the panel of hide just beside Omri.

It slithered down to the ground and lay there, its flame chewing the bottom edge. The Algonquin licked his lips, snarling like the dog, and ran back to the central fire.

Omri had not realized he could smell as well as see and hear. Now he smelt the smoke, the stench of burning hide. It was dry and it caught quickly. In helpless horror Omri watched the burnt area growing up beside him like the letter A edged with flame. He hardly noticed another Indian approaching from the other side with another blazing brand until suddenly, out of the daze of fear he had fallen into, Omri heard a loud bang.

The Indian left the ground briefly. His fingers jerked open. The torch fell. Then the man did the same, dropped like a stone, and lay motionless on his back while the branch burnt harmlessly beside him.

All the others stopped dead, their grim faces turned toward the tepee.

The shot had come from below. Omri saw the tip of a revolver barrel poking out of a slit in the hide just under-neath him. And as the whole pack of Algonquin began to run, howling and yelling, toward the tepee, their monstrous
shadows sliding along the ground ahead of them, more shots rang out, and two, then three more Indians fell.

The others hesitated, then scattered. The fire burnt clear in the center, unattended. The fire that was eating the tepee burnt too. Inside, behind him, Omri could hear and even feel Boone frantically beating at the licking flames with something—his hat, perhaps—and cursing. But it was useless. The fire was spreading.

Get out, Boone! Run, Boone, run into the forest, save yourself!

Smoke flowed past the painted animal Omri was in-habiting and blinded him.

From the dark heart of the fear, Omri heard a new sound.

He could see nothing now. But through the snapping of the flames, which were already licking at him, came a sudden deafening rattle.

Then isolated bangs. Nearer and nearer. With no other warning, something exploded almost under him. The tepee crashed to its side. Omri felt it on top of him. The fire noise stopped and so did the smoke, though the smell was still there. The falling tepee had put the flames out. There was a sensation of heaviness, then of threshing, and he could hear Boone’s rieh cursing as he struggled to get out of the crumpled, half-burnt folds of the tent.

In his struggles, he turned the whole thing over. Now Omri was staring up at the night sky. He could see the stars, with smoke drifting close above him, and the reflection of the central bonfire on a few pine tops.

A cowboy boot loomed for a second against the starlight, and came down, narrowly missing Omri. Boone stood above him, astride him, firing into the surrounding darkness once, twice. “Take that, ya flea-bitten coyote!” he yelled. Then a click … Omri found he had been counting. That was the sixth, and last, bullet.

The rattle came again, closer, and Boone flung himself down on the fallen tepee—on Omri. Omri could smell his sweat now, feel how his heart was thundering through his shirt, hear him muttering a mixture of curses and prayers … The machine-gun bullets whizzed overhead. There was the numbing crash of another hand grenade exploding somewhere near the big fire.

Now, to the noise of explosions, were added shrieks and screams of terror, and other shouts, war cries, as Little Bear’s men descended from ambush onto the hapless Al gon quin s. Omri heard the thunder of a single pair of hoofs drumming on the ground beneath him. Boone rolled aside, and at almost the same moment the stars were blotted out as the pony cleared tepee, Boone and all in a wild leap. As it galloped on, Omri caught a glimpse of Little Bear on its back, waving a rifle above his head, riding down three fleeing Algonquins.

The noise of the firing was now continuous and deafening. Omri could see the flash of large and small explosions
in the dark. The tide of the battle swept to and fro chaotically. Twice or three times, small groups of Indians—whether friends or enemies, Omri couldn’t tell—raced across the fallen tent. One tripped over Boone and went flying. His bare foot scraped Omri’s face.

It was the nightmare to end nightmares. Utterly powerless, unable to move or escape or fight back or even close his eyes and ears, Omri had long since stopped hoping that some miracle would save him. He had totally forgotten Patrick, forgotten his other life. He was a helpless witness to the chaos and carnage of war; he was part of it, yet not part of it. It seemed it would go on forever, or until some kind of oblivion engulfed him …

Then, in the tenth part of a second, it ended.

The noise, the smoke, the cries—the terror—the help-lessness. Gone …

Silence.

He lay curled up in darkness on something hard. He could feel his body, his wonderful, three-dimensional body … Light fell on him, and warm air. And he heard Patrick’s voice, with panic in it, calling his name.

He lifted himself slowly. One hand clutched the edge of the chest. The other went to the right side of his face. Patrick was staring at him, aghast, as if he saw a stranger.

“God, Omri! Are you all right?”

Omri didn’t answer. The side of his head felt funny. He took his hand away and some black stuff was on his fingers. Something was odd about his nose, too. He felt
something running out of it. He looked down. There was blood on his sweatshirt.

“What’s happened to you? You look—your nose is bleeding, and your hair—!”

None of that mattered. The blood and the singed and blackened hair meant nothing. They didn’t give him any pain or any fear, at least none that he would call fear now. Stiffly Omri crawled out of the chest, trying to get his mind back together, to clear it and to adjust.

Patrick was babbling something about Omri’s mother.

“She just came in, I couldn’t do anything, she made me go downstairs to the phone, and then she wouldn’t let me go back up again—she kept asking where you were, she delayed me, I was going crazy, she wouldn’t let me go … Omri, I’m sorry, you look terrible, as if you’d nearly been killed or something—what happened? Is it over? Should we bring the others back?”

Omri had a pad of something pressed to his nose. His head, where the fire had licked, was beginning to sting. It was awfully hard to think. He remembered what Boone had said about Little Bear, and kept repeating to himself:
Pore critter’s had a shock. Pore critter
… The “poor creature” was himself.

The others … He turned suddenly.

“Get Boone back!” he shouted. “Not the others, but get Boone! Hurry!”

Patrick snatched up the plastic tepee, and Boone’s figure from under it.

“Don’t forget his hat!” Omri said idiotically. Patrick
scrabbled about in the earth of the seed tray, and almost threw it after the figure and the tent. He slammed down the lid of the chest, turned the key …

“If only he’s not dead …” breathed Omri. His head was beginning to ache piercingly from the burnt side. Patrick threw up the lid again.

They looked down into the belly of the chest. The tepee was a crumpled wreck, twisted and blackened. Boone lay on top of it. He was very still. For one horrible moment, Omri thought a stray bullet or the blast from an explosion must have killed him. But then he raised his red head and looked up at them.

“Is it over?” he called.

“It’s over for us, Boone,” said Omri.

Gendy he lifted him out.

“Wuz you there too? Whur was ya, son?”

“You were lying on me part of the time,” said Omri.

Boone didn’t try to puzzle this out.

“Dang me if’n it wuzn’t the most fearsomest thing Ah ever bin through in mah en-tire life!”

“Me, too,” said Omri soberly.

Patrick was staring at them. “Have I missed it?” he said. “Is it over?”

“I don’t know,” said Omri.

With a sudden movement, Patrick leapt into the chest.

“What are you doing?” cried Omri, although he knew.

“Send me back! I’ve missed everything, and you’ve seen it! Send me back—”

“No.”

“You’ve got to! It’s only fair.”

“Never mind fair. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It was … Never mind that you missed it. You’re lucky.”

“But—”

“It’s no use. I wouldn’t send you now for a million pounds.”

Patrick saw he meant it, and when he looked at Omri’s face, brave as he was he couldn’t really be sorry.

He climbed slowly out again. “Tell me about everything,” he said.

Omri told him, with Boone chipping in. Boone had accounted for three, possibly four Indians before he ran “plumb outa-bullets.”

“You’d better do something about that burn,” Patrick said at the end.

“Yeah … What, though?”

“You’re going to have to let your mum see it sometime.”

“How’ll I explain it? And my nosebleed?”

Patrick said the nosebleed was nothing—“We could have had a fight.” The burn was the problem. Half the hair on that side of his head was gone and there was a big red blister.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about explaining it now,” said Patrick. “They’ve gone out.”

“Who?”

“Your lot, your parents and your brothers.”

“Is the baby-sitter here?”

“Not yet, she’s late. Can you cope till morning?”

Omri didn’t know. He supposed so. He was ashamed to admit how his heart had sunk when Patrick said his mother wasn’t in the house. He suddenly wanted her. He wanted to tell her everything and let her take care of it, and him. Well, he couldn’t, that was all. Just as well, perhaps.

Boone, exhausted, flopped down in the longhouse for a sleep, after flinging back the last of the whiskey. Patrick and Omri slipped down to the next-floor bathroom and found some ointment, which Omri rubbed on his own head. The sight of himself in the mirror scared him silly. His face was white, red and black. He felt he could be doing with some whiskey himself, but he made do with an aspirin.

“What about the others?” asked Patrick.

“I don’t know.”

Omri felt the whole thing had gone well beyond his control. Having seen Boone, Little Bear and Bright Stars full size, he could no longer think of them in the same way. Some part of him—until the battle—had still thought of them as “his,” not toys exacdy, but belonging to him, within his orbit. This illusion was now gone. What was happening back in the village? Whatever it was, he was responsible for it. He couldn’t avoid the realization that he had sent devastating modern weapons back in time and that they had certainly killed people. “Baddies,” of course … But who were baddies? If Patrick, a year ago, had made him a present of some
other plastic Indian, it might just as well have been an Algonquin, and then the Iroquois would have been the baddies. Suddenly Omri felt the nightmare was not there, but here.

“I think we should bring them back,” said Patrick.

“Bring them back if you want to,” said Omri, who suddenly felt tired to death. “I’ve got to sleep.” He started back up the stairs to his room, and stopped. Not up there. He wanted … neutral ground. He turned and went down again.

“Where are you going?” asked Patrick.

“Down to the living room. I’m going to sleep on the sofa.”

“What when the baby-sitter comes?”

“Shove her in the breakfast room.” He stopped, and met Patrick’s eyes. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “I really can’t cope with any more.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” said Patrick.

Omri went on, his feet like lead weights. In the living room he didn’t even put the light on, just threw himself onto the sofa, where in two minutes he was fast asleep.

He slept without dreams for two hours. Then something woke him.

He lifted his head sharply. His mother hadn’t closed the curtains, so a little light came in from the street. He felt strange, but he saw at once where he was and remembered why he was there. He was by no means ready to wake up—so why had he?

Then he saw there was somebody in the room.

Coming in, rather. Through an open window, facing the front garden, which shouldn’t have been open. It was the sound of it opening, and the draught of cold night air, which had awakened him. He was peering over the arm of the sofa, which lay in deep shadow at the farthest end of the living room. He could see the clear Silhouette
of a male figure stealthily putting first one leg and then the other over the sill, and ducking his head under the half-raised window frame. A bare head, which gleamed dully in the diffused lamplight from beyond the high front hedge.

For a second, Omri thought it was an Algonquin. But there was no scalp lock on that shaven skull. It was a skinhead. No—not just one. Once in, the first figure bent and beckoned, and from the shadows outside appeared another, and then another. One by one they climbed silently into Omri’s house.

In a flash he remembered last night (was it only last night?) when he’d come down to fetch Bright Stars something to eat. He’d seen a hairless head go past the kitchen window, and then put it from his mind. They must have been looking the place over, “casing the joint,” making plans for a time when the family would be out …