The Key to the Indian (9 page)

At one moment he became aware that he was not alone, that Gillon was moving about near him, but basically Omri was lost in his own, somehow deeply private, experience. It was so intense that he lost all fear, all apprehension of what might result from what he was doing. He forgot who he was. He swayed, and jumped, and twisted his arms and hands and feet into strange, exotic positions. He felt quite
crazy with sheer, physical happiness, as if he had suddenly found he could fly.

And then the music stopped and it was over.

Omri sank down on to the stage, completely exhausted. And things started to hit him.

He came to himself, back to a realisation of where he was and what he was. He was small and surrounded by giants, and they were all throwing things at him! He curled up instinctively and covered his head with his arms.

Then the little boy snatched him up and held him, and hugged and kissed him, and the things that were being thrown bounced off the stage and hit the boy’s legs and he kept stooping to snatch them up and tuck them into his loincloth, because they were coins. Omri, dazed and bewildered, looking down, saw that other things were landing on the stage, rings, bracelets… There was a deafening noise of applause and shouting.

The little girl was kissing Gillon, kissing her brother, kissing Omri. The big merchant had recovered himself. Though dazed and bewildered, he was embracing the two children by the shoulders, smiling and bowing, taking the credit. He handed the chimes to the boy and bent down and started scooping up the money.

At that moment Omri saw Jothi – Matt’s servant – forcing her way to the front of the hysterical crowd.

She was crying and tearing her hair. She reached up and grabbed both the children quite roughly, and shook them, and slapped them both, one with each hand, and then grabbed
them again and hauled them off the stage. The boy dropped some of the coins he’d picked up but he held on to the chimes. Jothi flung the girl over her shoulder, holding the boy by the arm, and dragged them both off at full speed through the throng.

And Omri?

Omri felt himself falling. As the boy was pulled off the stage by his angry mother, he dropped him! In the crush and chaos, nobody seemed to notice, and quick as thought Omri rolled into the merciful darkness under the stage.

If he could have seen what was happening to Gillon, he would have had more than himself to worry about.

Gillon was dangling perilously by one leg from the tiny hand of the little girl, who herself was hanging head-down over her mother’s back. And as the trio pushed through the crowd, the mother delivered a last exasperated slap on the child’s bottom, which loosened her shaky grip on her ‘doll’.

Gillon fell headfirst to the ground.

O
mri scarcely had time to draw one dust-choked breath in the darkness under the platform before he felt a sensation of swift, sudden – transference. Not bodily movement – a kind of spinning, whisking feeling, not even of being spun or whisked through air, but through some other dimension. At the same time – in that same split second – he was conscious of an overwhelming release of tension.

He was going home
. He knew it. It was like no earthly feeling of relief – it was better. He was going back where he belonged, to his own time and his own body.

He lifted his head, opened his eyes and saw a rooster.

He was looking through the windscreen of the car at the dark back of the parking bay. The rooster was perched on a pile of logs… It was all quite familiar, but he was disoriented for a moment. Then he heard a voice, his mother’s voice, almost screaming:

“Lionel!
Lionel
! Wake up, what’s wrong, oh do wake up,
please
!”

He felt something bulky stirring on his right side. He turned. His father was there, behind the steering wheel, lifting his head which had been bowed on his chest. His hands moved, flexed, and for a second his father looked at them as if surprised to see them. He looked up at his face in the driving mirror. An expression of incredulous relief came over it. Then he turned to the window on his side.

Omri saw his mother standing there bent over. Her hand was through the open window. She was holding the car key.

With a sudden jerk, Omri looked over his shoulder.

Gillon was there, in the back seat, leaning against the aged knapsack. He wasn’t waking up. His hair had blood in it. Blood had made a small runnel down his forehead, across his closed eye, and on down his cheek.

What happened right after that was all confusion for Omri. He felt so tired he could hardly move or think, but around him everything was moving and his parents’ voices were echoing and booming through Omri’s head as if they were all underwater.

His father stumbled out of the car, clutched his head in
both hands and fell back against the door for a moment before straightening up. His mother was opening the back door and next minute Gillon was gone, in an upheaval of movement and exclamations. His mother must have handed him to his father, because the next thing Omri knew, his mother had come round to his side of the car, opened the door, and was half-helping, half-lifting him out. She was almost gibbering.

“Darling! Darling, are you all right? My God, what happened? I came out to feed the chickens, thinking you were miles on your way to Dartmoor, and found the car still here, the engine running, all of you unconscious, oh Omri! My darling, I thought – I thought—” She clutched him tightly in her arms and muttered into his hair, “I thought you were all dead!”

It was just as well she was holding him. His legs were giving way under him. She had to help him back across the yard and the lane, up the path and into the house.

There was then a timeless, muddled patch when Omri half-lay in an armchair in the living room, trying to get his head back together, while a doctor was called for Gillon. By the time he arrived, Gillon had come-to. He was lying on a sofa with rugs over him and his mother was washing the blood out of his hair. Omri, as if from far away, heard him moaning and heard his mother urging him not to move, not to try to talk… The doctor examined him and said he seemed all right but he’d have to have a head X-ray and could someone drive him to the hospital.

“I will!” said their mother immediately.

The doctor picked Gillon up in his arms, still wrapped in a rug, and went out of the house. Omri’s mother, following, stopped beside Omri’s chair.

“Omri, will you be okay? Dad’s upstairs. I have to drive Gilly to hospital.”

Omri sat up sharply. “In the car? You’re going to drive him in our car?”

“Yes… “

“Can’t the doctor take him?”

“Why?” Her eyes focused on him. “Omri, is there something wrong with the car?”

“No – no – only…”

“What?”

“Have you got the car key?”

“Yes…”

He clutched her arm. “Please, Mum! Use the spare.”

His mother gave him a funny look, but she went to the little box of hooks by the front door, hung one key up and took the spare key.

“You rest. I’ll be back soon.”

As soon as the door closed behind her, Omri leapt out of the chair, fell back into it again, and rose more slowly. Carefully he climbed the stairs and crept into his parents’ bedroom. His father was lying on the bed with his shoes on, apparently asleep.

Omri put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently, then harder.

“Dad!
DAD!
Wake up!” Omri felt scared to death suddenly. But his father stirred, shook his head, sat up, and put his head down between his bent legs. “Are you okay, Dad?”

“I don’t know…” he said in a hollow voice. “I suppose so. I feel weird… utterly weird…”

Omri sat down on the bed. He waited a moment with his heart pounding, and then he found courage to ask, “Where did
you
go?”

His father raised his head sharply. Omri could see a change in him. He looked suddenly older.

“I went back,” he said. “The key – the key worked after all.”

“Don’t I know it! But where…?”

“The belt. I had the wampum belt in my pocket.”

“You mean – you went back to Little Bull’s time?”

His father nodded.

Omri gazed at him, excitement replacing the fear. Suddenly, he reached over and shook his father by both shoulders.

“Well, don’t just sit there, Dad! Tell me!”

“Tell me about you first. And Gillon. Gillon went somewhere too. And he got hurt.”

“Yeah… that girl – she was holding him upside-down – she must’ve dropped him… Don’t worry, though. Jothi was so tiny… Gilly didn’t have far to fall…”

“Omri! What are you talking about?”

“Dad, I’ll tell you later!
Tell me about you!
”

His father drew a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can describe it.”

“Describe what was around you.”

“I can’t.”

“Just anything! What could you see?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t see anything.”

“What do you mean? Were you blind?”

“Yes. Blind. And I couldn’t speak either. I couldn’t – breathe.”

“
What
?”

He shook his head. His face was white. He swallowed. “I – I kept trying to draw breath in through my nose, through my mouth. I couldn’t.”

“How could you stay – alive – if you couldn’t breathe?”

“Omri, I don’t know! But some air must have been reaching my lungs somehow, maybe through my skin, though I wasn’t breathing. I can’t tell you how terrible it was till I – I realised I wasn’t suffocating. Then I sort of – accepted it. And the panic died down a bit. At least, until—”

“Could you hear?”

“Yes, I could hear. I heard all sorts of sounds. Voices. Loud, they seemed to boom, but no clear words.”

“They were talking Iroquois, of course!”

“And there were lots of other noises – a fire crackling, and insects, whirring, buzzing, whining – and dogs—”

Omri thought he would burst with impatience. “Yes, Dad, yes! But just tell me what
happened
.”

His dad drew a deep, shaky breath. “I’ll try. I was lying down. After the first – horror – of not being able to see or speak, of feeling I couldn’t breathe, I tried to move, and I
found every other part of me – worked. I got up. Of course the first thing I did was put my hands to my face. I got the most ghastly shock. The worst – the worst shock of my life.”

“What, Dad? What?”

His father swallowed again and turned stark eyes on him. “I didn’t have a face.”

Omri sat in silent horror.

“Nothing. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. A smooth face of skin and bone with – no features.”

For Omri, a memory flashed. Stuck to the outside of a tepee, two-dimensional, helpless, dumb… a totem animal of some kind – but able to see and hear, though not move. But this! This was a thousand times worse!

“Go on. What happened?”

“I just stood there. What could I do? I was in a nightmare. Then I felt something pick me up.”

“Was it Little Bull?”

“Yes. Not that I knew it then. I was so afraid! But he held me quite gently and I got some notion of how small I was. There was a pause. I suppose he was looking at me. I put my hands up and pulled them down my – my face. I heard him – give a sort of gasp – an exclamation – like a curse. Then I felt him carry me along. I felt the air of outdoors, and heard a whole new lot of sounds. He stopped, and I felt him sort of shaking me, and heard him talking in that strange language. He sounded very upset and angry. Then I heard a woman’s voice. She sounded – I don’t know. Not exactly apologetic but patiently defending
herself. Then he walked with me again, and began to talk English to me.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked if I could hear him. I nodded. Then he said he was sorry. Twin Stars had made two fine corn-husk dolls for us to come into, but they were Iroquois dolls. He said, ‘Iroquois make doll without face.’”

“Why?”

“He told me some tale. When the first doll was made for a child to play with, it had a face of course, a beautiful face, and then the doll kept looking at itself in the water and was ‘no good for child’. So from then on, all Iroquois dolls are faceless.”

“Maybe it’s part of their religion. Maybe Twin Stars won’t agree to make dolls with faces for us. Dad! I don’t want to go back and have no face!”

“I don’t want to go again at all. It was—”

He broke off and then just sat still for a while.

“We’ve been to India,” Omri mentioned at last. This extraordinary information, he felt, hardly competed with what his dad had been through.

“
What?
”

“Yes.”

“Well? Tell me!”

“Back to my great-grandfather Matt’s time. Gillon went too, because he was leaning against Matt’s old knapsack, and that took him back. And we were puppets. But Gillon was a girl-puppet.”

His father’s mouth twitched. “He must’ve loved that!”

“It seems more – more random when you go back. Because there were no plastic figures then, the magic has to work on whatever there is. Just bung you into
something
.”

“Is Gillon okay?” his father abruptly remembered to ask.

“Mum’s taken him to get an X-ray but I think he was just knocked out.”

“Tell me about – India.”

But Omri said, “It’s too long to tell now, Dad. What we have to do is plan. Did Little Bull say anything else?”

“Just that we should hurry up and come properly, both of us. He seemed very disturbed and anxious. He promised there’d be – well, faces, next time.”

They looked at each other.

“You didn’t mean it, did you, when you said you didn’t want to go back?” Omri asked anxiously. “Because we’ll have to risk it. We must go back and help him. We absolutely must!”

By the time Omri’s mother came back with Gillon, now with a dressing on his head and looking a lot better, they had made a sort of plan. But Gillon was now a major worry.

“We can’t take him. We can’t possibly take the risk. There won’t be a third ‘man-toy’ ready for him.”

“But now he’s been back once…”

“Maybe he won’t remember. Maybe his knock on the head will have made him forget.”

It hadn’t. But what it had done was to make his adventures
in India go rather fuzzy. And as he had had no notion of the magic before it overtook him, he rationalised the whole thing into a dream.

He was full of it. It was he who told the parents the story of the Indian adventure, though in rather garbled form (Omri kept absolutely quiet – it wouldn’t do to admit that his dream had agreed with Gillon’s), but their mother was too busy fussing about what had happened to put them all to sleep in the car, to take it in. His dad, however, listened in wonder and fascination.

“Isn’t that just the weirdest dream you ever heard, Dad!” Gillon said at the end.

“I could tell you a weirder one that I had,” said their father, “but you’d think I’d lost my marbles completely.”

“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.