The Key to the Indian

His dad looked at his watch. It was only ten pm. “Are you tired? It’s school tomorrow.”

“I couldn’t possibly sleep.”

“Okay, start talking. Keep your voice down.”

Omri talked for an hour.

He told about how he’d brought Little Bull back after a year, just to tell him about his winning story, and found he’d been wounded in a raid on his village and left to die. Only Twin Stars going out to find him and lug him somehow on to his pony – and then Matron, who’d proved as good as any surgeon, taking the musket-ball out of his back – had saved him.

He told Patrick’s adventure, back in nineteenth-century Texas, how he’d met Ruby Lou, a saloon-bar hostess, and how they’d saved Boone, Patrick’s cowboy, from dying alone in the desert. How Omri had brought him back just as a hurricane had hit the cow-town, and the hurricane had come back with him.

He kept remembering things and wanting to go back, or off at a tangent. His father, who had had a notebook and pencil at his side while reading Stolen Continents, made notes.

When Omri came to the recent part, about Jessica Charlotte, he was getting really sleepy.

His dad interrupted. “Listen, why don’t you just give me the Account to read for myself? And you get off to bed.”

So Omri tiptoed upstairs again and fetched Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. He carried it reverently downstairs and put it in his father’s hands, and stood there while he stroked its old leather cover and ran his forefingers around the brass corner-bindings.

“It’s fascinating, almost magic just holding it,” he said. “I can’t wait to read this. Go on, bub, get some sleep.” Just as Omri was starting up the stairs, his dad added: “Don’t keep yourself awake, but do Mum’s trick.”

“What’s that?”

“Mum says that when she’s got a problem, she thinks about it last thing before she drops off. She swears her subconscious works on it while she’s sleeping, and sometimes in the morning the solution just appears.”

So Omri did ‘Mum’s trick’. As he lay, drifting off to sleep, he thought about the two keys – the cupboard key, and the car key. He laid them side by side in his imagination. They were so different that anyone who didn’t know what a key was, wouldn’t have seen a connection between them. It seemed extraordinary, even to Omri who had always taken the function of keys for granted, that something so small could make the difference between being able to open a door or make a car go, or be completely stymied.

And in this case, it was the difference between being able to go back into the past, or being stuck here. Between being able to have a great adventure, and not. Being able, maybe, to help Little Bull in his dire trouble, and having to leave him and his tribe to their fate.

There had to be an answer. There had to be.

3A Surprising Ghost (#ulink_5dd80240-1895-57cb-8f80-fb7217dd57ef)

Omri woke up early the following morning. Before he’d even opened his eyes, he ‘looked’ at the two keys, still lying side by side in his imagination as they had been in his last, sleepy thoughts the night before. His body stiffened. One of the keys had changed!

It was the car key.

He’d often seen it in reality, hanging in a box of little hooks inside the front door of the cottage, where his father and mother always hung it as soon as they came in from driving so it wouldn’t get lost. Last night, when he’d visualised it, it had been the key he knew – a flat metal key with a round, flat top made of some plastic material with an ‘F’ for Ford imprinted on it.

Now the key, as clearly in his mind as if he could see it in front of his eyes, no longer had the round black plastic bit at the top. It was all metal. It was as if the whole key had been remoulded.

He sat up sharply in bed. Remould the key!

How could they? And if they did, what good would it do? Only the magic key could take them back in time.

Unless…

He jumped out of bed and barged through into his parents’ bedroom, which adjoined his. The door flew backwards, hitting his father, who was doing the same manoeuvre in reverse, and nearly knocking him flying.

“Shhhh!” they both hissed, and then stifled laughter. Omri could see his mum’s shape under the duvet, still sound asleep. It was far too early for her to wake up – not much past six o’clock.

Omri backed into his own room and his dad followed, closing the old-fashioned plank door silently behind them and lowering the latch so it wouldn’t click. Then he turned to face Omri. He looked very tired, but his face was flushed with suppressed excitement.

“You’ve thought of something!” Omri guessed at once.

“We’ll have to whisper. Listen.” Omri now noticed he was holding Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. “I read this, all of it, last night. It has got to be the most extraordinary, fascinating, amazing thing I have ever read. Of course I’m crazy about old diaries and stuff from the past. God, when I read something like this – what am I talking about, there IS nothing like this, this is unique, but when I was reading it I got so caught up, wanting to know more and more about the time she lived through, the First World War, and the period before that – it was like having her right in the room, telling me—”

“Yeah, Dad, I know, I read it, I know just what you mean. But about the key.”

“Yes! Well! Isn’t it obvious? I mean, Jessica Charlotte made the magic key. She fed her ‘gift’ as she called it, into it without even meaning to. Remember what she said?” He was searching through the yellowing pages, and found the place, marked with a match. “Yes, here! I hardly knew it then – I only knew I was bending all my strength on making the key perfect, and I felt something go out of me, and then the key grew warm again in my hands as if freshly poured, and I knew it had power in it to do more than open boxes. But I didn’t know what. I only knew my heart had broken and that I would have given anything to have it be yesterday and not today.”

He looked up. He had a strange expression in his eyes, almost as if he were on the brink of tears. “Poor woman,” he said, his voice full of pity. “You can understand it so well. She’d just seen her beloved little niece Lottie – who was your grandmother, Mum’s mother whom Mum never knew – for the very last time. She must’ve been full of bitterness and sorrow, and anger against her sister for saying – well, implying – that she wasn’t good enough to be with that little girl she loved more than anyone in the world… You know what I figured out, Om? If a person has any sort of magic gift, it gets more powerful the more strongly the person’s feeling. Like her son, Frederick, putting magic into the cupboard because he was so angry about plastic ruining his toy business.”

“Yeah, Dad. I read it, you know.”

“Om, please, don’t be impatient. Let me work my way through this. You had days, maybe weeks, to read the Account and digest it. I had it all in one go and it’s fairly knocked me sideways. I didn’t sleep a single wink last night.”

“Sorry – I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s okay, it’s okay. Give me a sec, and I’ll cut to the chase.” But his head was down, he was still turning the pages of the notebook. “It’s just, I’m so utterly gobsmacked about Jessica Charlotte and her story, I’ve half-forgotten about Little Bull…” He looked up at Omri. “But yes, the key. It came to me. Now listen. If we could find a figure, a plastic toy, that might be Jessica Charlotte – I know it’d be difficult, but there can’t be that many figures that look like her – if we could… and if we could bring her forward in time, to us, we might ask her to copy the car key for us. She could make it magic, the way she did the other.”

Omri stared at him, his brain racing. Of course! A slow, face-filling grin spread over his features, and he saw an answering look of incredulous delight dawn on his father’s face.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got one!”

“Yes! We’ve already brought her once—”

“What!”

“Shhh! I haven’t had a chance to tell you everything. I was concentrating on Little Bull…”

“You brought her! You’ve met Jessica Charlotte!”

For answer, Omri dived under the bed and got out another of his treasures – an old cashbox, black and silver, the paint wearing off, a blob of red sealing-wax still blocking the slot. He opened it cautiously. His father was so eager he was trembling. Omri carefully took out the little woman-shape in the red dress with the big plumed hat, the size of his finger. His father took it from him as reverently as if it were a holy relic.

“This is her?” he whispered wonderingly.

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?”

“It was in here, in the cashbox that I found with the Account, buried in the old thatched roof. The magic key opened it. She was fast asleep, but later I – well, me and Patrick—”

“Patrick and I—”

“Yeah, well, she woke up, and we decided… I mean it was just before she was going to steal her sister’s earrings, you know, the night she made the key. And I wanted to change her mind and get her not to steal them…”

His father’s face sagged suddenly with horror. “My God, Omri! You didn’t, did you?”