Secret of the Indian

“No, sergeant. Sorry.”

“You’ll be glad to hear she’s not badly hurt, madam. But she had to go to hospital, just for a check-up, like. The muggers got her bag, though.”

“Oh, this is terrible! What kind of district have we come to live in?”

Ah, thought Omri. Now maybe you’ll realize what I’vebeen going through, walking along Hovel Road! They’d never accepted before that it was a horrible area and that he’d been scared.

The policemen took all the details and descriptions of the skinheads.

“Could you identify them if you saw them again?” asked the sergeant.

“No,” said Patrick.

Omri said nothing. He knew he would see them again, like on Monday morning on the way to school. Whether he would decide to shop them, or not, he had yet to decide.

Adiel and Gillon came home from their film just as the police were leaving.

“And who are these young gentlemen?” asked the sergeant.

“They’re Omri’s older brothers.”

“What’s going on?” asked Adiel.

“We’ve had burglars,” said Omri quickly.

“WHA-AT!” yelled Gillon. “They didn’t get my stereo! – Did they?”

“They didn’t get a thing,” said their father proudly. “Omri and Patrick chased them off.”

The older boys gaped at each other.

“Them and what army?” asked Gillon.

Patrick stifled a sudden nervous giggle. “Only a little one,” he murmured. Omri nearly felled him with a heavy nudge.

There was a lot more talking to do – Adiel and Gillon had to hear the whole story (except that of course it was nothing like the whole story) all over again. They were absolutely agog, and even Gillon could find nothing sarcastic to say about the way Omri and Patrick had dealt with the situation.

“You’re a pair of nutters,” was the worst he could think of. “Those thugs could’ve flattened you. How did you know they didn’t have knives?” But there was more than a hint of admiration in his reproof.

Adiel, the eldest, said, “Right couple of heroes if you ask me. We could’ve been cleaned out.” And he gazed lovingly, not at his little brother, but at the television set.

It was nearly one o’clock in the morning by the time they’d drained the last of their hot chocolate and been gently shooed off to bed by Omri’s mother. She gave Omri a special hug, being careful of his head, and hugged Patrick too.

“You’re fantastic kids,” she said.

Omri and Patrick looked uncomfortable. It simply didn’t seem right to either of them that they were getting all the credit for driving off the intruders single- (or double-) handed, when in fact they’d had a great deal of help.

As soon as they got up to Omri’s bedroom in the attic, they locked the door and made for the desk.

They’d had to make a hasty decision, before the return of the parents, to leave things as they were, not to send anybody else back after they’d dispatched Corporal Willy Fickits and his men. As Patrick pointed out, “We don’t know how the wounded would stand the journey. Besides, we can’t send the Indians back to their time without Matron, we can’t send her back to hers, without them – and we certainly can’t send them all anywhere together!”

And Omri agreed. But they’d both been on tenterhooks all the time the police had been in the house for fear they’d demand to see Omri’s room. The boys had been very careful to say the burglars hadn’t got beyond the first floor of the house.

Now the boys bent over the desk. They’d left Omri’s bedside light on in case Matron had had to tend to one of the wounded Indians in the night. She herself now sat, upright but clearly dozing, at a small circular table (made of the screwtop of a Timotei shampoo bottle, a good shape because it had a rim she could get her knees under). On it lay a tiny clipboard that she had brought with her from St Thomas’s Hospital. She’d been making up her notes and temperature charts.

On either side of her on the floor of the longhouse stretched a double row of pallet beds. Each bed was occupied by a wounded Indian. Matron’s ministrations had been so efficient that all were resting peacefully. She had earned her little nap, though she would probably deny hotly, later, that she had nodded off while ‘on duty’.

Outside the longhouse, beside the burnt-out candle, a blanket was spread on the soil in Omri’s father’s seed-tray. Curled up asleep on the blanket were Little Bull and Twin Stars, his wife. Between them, in the crook of Twin Stars’ arm, lay their newborn baby, Tall Bear.

All these people, when they were standing up, were no more than seven centimetres tall.

3 (#ulink_6ec688e1-e3c5-5b29-88e5-1dc54533820a)

How It All Started (#ulink_6ec688e1-e3c5-5b29-88e5-1dc54533820a)

It had all started over a year before, with an old tin medicine-cabinet Gillon had found, a key which fitted it, which had belonged to Omri’s great-grandmother, and the little plastic figure of an American Indian which Patrick had given Omri (second-hand) for his birthday.

On that fateful night, Omri had put the Indian into the small metal cupboard and locked it with the fancy key. There was no particular point to this, really. Thinking back later, Omri didn’t know why he’d done it. He’d had a thing at the time about secret cupboards, drawers, rooms; hiding-places, kept safe from prying eyes, where he could secrete his favourite things and be sure they’d stay exactly as he’d left them, undisturbed by rummaging brothers or anyone else.

But the Indian didn’t stay as he’d left it. Some combination of key and cupboard, plus the stuff the Indian was made of – plastic – had worked the wonder of bringing the little man to life.

At first, when this happened, Omri – once past the first shock of astonishment – had thought he was in for the fun-trip of all time. A little, live man of his very own to play with! But it hadn’t turned out like that.

The Indian, Little Bull, was no mere toy. Omri soon found out that he was a real person, somehow magicked into present-day London, England, from the America of nearly two hundred years ago. The son of a chief of the Iroquois tribe, a fighter, a hunter, with his own history and his own culture. His own beliefs and morals. His own brand of courage.

Little Bull regarded Omri as a magic being, a giant from the world of spirits, and was, at first, terrified of him. Omri could see he was afraid, but the Indian was incredibly brave and controlled and Omri soon began to admire him. He realized he couldn’t treat him just as a toy – he was a person to be respected, despite his tiny size and relative helplessness.

And it soon turned out that he was by no means the easiest person in the world to get along with, or satisfy. He had demands, and he made them freely, assuming Omri to be all-powerful.

He demanded his own kind of food. A longhouse, such as the Iroquois used to sleep in. A horse, although previously he had never ridden. Weapons, and animals to hunt, and a fire to cook on and dance around. Eventually he even demanded that Omri provide him with a wife!

In addition, Omri had to hide him and protect him. It needed only a little imagination to realize what would happen if any grown-up should find out about the cupboard, the key and their magic properties. Because Omri soon found out that not just Little Bull but any plastic figure or object would become alive or real by being locked in the cupboard.

But he couldn’t keep the secret entirely to himself. His best friend, Patrick, eventually found out about it, and lost no time in putting his own little plastic man into the cupboard. And so ‘Boo-Hoo’ Boone, the crying Texas cowboy, had come into their lives, complicating things still more. For of course, cowboy and Indian were enemies, and had to be kept apart until a number of adventures, and their common plight – being tiny in a giants’ world – brought them together and made them friends and even blood-brothers.

Omri bought the plastic figure of an Indian girl and brought her to life as a wife for Little Bull. And shortly after that, it was decided – with deep reluctance by the boys – that having three little people, and their horses, around amid all the dangers that threatened them in the boys’ time and world, was more than they could cope with. It was just too much responsibility. So they ‘sent them back’, for the cupboard and key worked also in reverse, transforming real miniature people back into plastic and returning them to their own time.

Omri hadn’t intended ever to play with this dangerous magic again. It had been too frightening, too full of problems – and too hurtful, at the end, when he had to part with friends he had grown so fond of. But as with so many resolutions, this one got broken.

About a year later, by which time Omri’s and Patrick’s families had both moved house, Omri won first prize in an important competition for a short story. The story he wrote was called The Plastic Indian and was all about – well, it was the truth, but of course no one thought of that; they just thought Omri had made up the most marvellous tale. And he was so excited (the prize was three hundred pounds, he was to receive it at a big party in a London hotel, and even his brothers were very impressed) that he decided to bring Little Bull back to life, just long enough to share this triumph with him since he had been such a vital part of it.

Unfortunately, things were not so simple.

When Omri put Little Bull, Twin Stars and their pony – the plastic figures of them – back in the cupboard, they emerged much changed.

Little Bull lay across the back of his pony with two musket-balls in his back, very near to death. There had been a battle in his village, between his tribe and their enemies, the Algonquins, together with French soldiers. (Omri had already learnt that the French and English had been fighting in America at the time, and Little Bull’s tribe was on the English side.) Little Bull had been wounded. Twin Stars, although on the point of having a baby, had rushed out and heaved Little Bull on to his pony, just as the magic worked, bringing them – tiny as before, but as real as ever, and in desperate trouble – to Omri’s attic bedroom.

And thus it was that Omri was launched into a whole series of new and even more hair-raising and challenging adventures.