Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1 A Shocking Homecoming

2 Modest Heroes

3 How It All Started

4 Dead in the Night

5 Patrick Goes Back

6 A New Insider

7 Patrick in Boone-land

8 A Heart Stops Beating

9 Tasmin Drives a Bargain

10 A Rough Ride

11 Ruby Lou

12 Caught Red-Handed

13 Mr Johnson Smells a Rat

14 A Strange Yellow Sky

15 Interrogation

16 Panic

17 The Big Blow

18 Red Satin

Epilogue at a Wedding

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

For Sheila Watson – sine qua non

1
A Shocking Homecoming

When Omri’s parents drove home from their party, his mother got out in front of the house while his father drove round the side to put the car away. The front-door key was on the same key ring with the car key, so his mother came up the steps and rang the bell. She expected the baby-sitter to answer.

There was a lengthy pause and then the door opened and there was Omri, with Patrick just behind him. The light was behind him too, so she didn’t see him clearly at first.

“Good heavens, are you boys still up? You should have been in bed hours ag—”

Then she stopped. Her mouth fell open and her face drained of colour.

“Omri! What – what – what’s happened to your face?”

She could hardly speak properly, and that was when Omri realized that he wasn’t going to get away with it so easily this time. This time he was either going to have to lie like mad or he was going to have to tell far more than he had ever intended about the Indian, the key, the cupboard and all the rest of it.

He and Patrick had talked about it, frantically, before his parents returned.

“How are you going to explain the burn on your head?” Patrick asked.

“I don’t know. That’s the one thing I can’t explain.”

“No it’s not. What about all the little bullet-holes and stuff in your parents’ bedroom?”

Omri’s face was furrowed, even though every time he frowned, it hurt his burn.

“Maybe they won’t notice. They both need glasses. Do you think we should clear everything up in there?”

Patrick had said, “No, better leave it. After all, they’ve got to know about the burglars. Maybe in all the fuss about that, they won’t notice your face and a few other things.”

“How shall we explain how we got rid of them – the burglars I mean?”

“We could just say we burst in through the bathroom and scared them away.”

Omri had grinned lopsidedly. “That makes us out to be heroes.”

“So what’s so bad about that? Anyway it’s better than telling about them.” Patrick, who had once been quite keen to tell ‘about them’, now realized perfectly clearly that this was about the worst thing that could happen.

“But where is the wretched baby-sitter? Why didn’t she come? How dare she not turn up when she promised?”

Omri’s father was stamping up and down the living-room in a fury. His mother, meanwhile, was holding Omri round the shoulders. He could feel her hand cold and shaking right through his shirt. After her first shocked outburst when she’d come home and seen him, she’d said very little. His father, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to stop talking.

“You can’t depend on anyone! Where the hell are the police, I called them hours ago!” (It was five minutes, in fact.) “One would think we lived on some remote island instead of in the biggest city in the world! You pay their damned salaries and when you need the police, they’re never there, never!”

He paused in his pacing and gazed round wildly. The boys had put the television back and there wasn’t much disorder to see in this room. Upstairs, they knew, chaos and endless unanswerable questions waited.

“Tell me again what happened.”

“There were burglars, Dad,” Omri said patiently. (This part was safe enough.) “Three of them. They came in through that window—”

“How many times have I said we ought to have locks fitted? Idiot that I am! – for the sake of a few lousy pounds – go on, go on…”

“Well, I was asleep in here—”

“In the living-room? Why?”

“I – er – I just was. And I woke up, and saw them, but they didn’t see me. So I nipped upstairs, and—”

His father, desperate to hear the story, was still too agitated to listen to more than a sentence of it without interrupting.

“And where were you, Patrick?”

Patrick glanced at Omri for guidance. Omri shrugged very slightly with his eyebrows. He didn’t know himself how much to say and what to keep quiet about.

“I was – in Omri’s room. Asleep.”

“All right, all right! Then what?”

“Er – well, Omri came up, and woke me, and said there were burglars in the house, and that we ought to… er…” He stopped.

“Well?” barked Omri’s father impatiently.

“Well… stop them.”

Omri’s father turned back to Omri. “Stop them? Three grown men? How could you stop them? You should have locked your bedroom door and let them get on with it!”

“They were nicking our TV and stuff!”

“So what? Don’t you know the sort of people they are? They could have hurt you seriously!”

“They did hurt him seriously!” interrupted Omri’s mother in a shrill voice. “Look at him! Never mind the interrogation now, Lionel. I wish you’d go and phone Basia and find out why she didn’t come, and let me take Omri upstairs and look after him.”

So Omri’s father returned to the hall to phone the baby-sitter while his mother led Omri upstairs. But when she switched the bathroom light on and looked at him properly, she let out a gasp.

“But that’s a burn, Omri! How – how did they do that to you?”

And Omri had to say, “They didn’t do it, Mum. Not that. That was something else.”

She stared at him in horror, and then controlled herself and said as calmly as she could, “All right, never mind now. Just sit down on the edge of the bath and let me deal with it.”

And while she was putting on the ointment with her cold, shaky hands, his father came stamping up the stairs to say there was no reply from their baby-sitter’s number.

“How could she not come? How could she leave you boys alone here? Of all the criminally irresponsible – wait till I get hold of her—”

“What about us?” asked Omri’s mother very quietly, winding a bandage round Omri’s head.

“Us?”

“Us. Going out to our party before she got here.”

“Well – well – but we trusted her! Thought she was just a few minutes late—” But his voice petered out, and he stopped stamping about and went into their bedroom to take off his coat.

Omri heard the light being switched on, and bit his lips in suspense.

“Am I hurting, darling?”

He had no time to shake his head before his father burst back.

“What in God’s sweet name has been going on in our bedroom?”

Patrick, who was hanging about in the doorway to the bathroom, exchanged a grim look with Omri.

“Well, Dad – that’s – that’s where the battle – I mean, that’s where they were, when we – caught them.”

“Battle! That’s just what it looks like, a battlefield! Jane, come in here and look—”

Omri’s mother left him sitting on the bath and went through into the bedroom. Omri and Patrick, numb and speechless with suspense, could hear them exchanging gasps and exclamations of amazement and dismay.

Then both his parents reappeared. Their faces had changed.

“Omri. Patrick… I think we’d better hear the whole story before the police arrive. Come in here.”

With extreme reluctance, the boys went through the dividing door between bathroom and bedroom for the second time that evening.

The place looked terrible. All the dressing-table drawers, and those of the chest of drawers, were pulled out, their contents strewn about. The double bed had been knocked askew. A chair had gone flying, the wardrobe door was swinging open. Omri had set his mother’s little jewel-cupboard back on its feet but its door, too, was open.

But, with the lights full on, the thing the boys were most painfully aware of was the holes. Little pin-holes made by the tiny bullets, and not so little ones made by the miniature mortars and hand-grenades which had missed their targets and hit the wall and the head and foot of the bed. It seemed ludicrous to Omri now, looking at them, that he’d had even a faint hope his parents might not notice them. They might be a bit short-sighted, but after all, they weren’t blind. The room looked pock-marked.

And indeed his father was already running his fingers over the white wall above the bed-head.

“What’s been going on here, boys?” he asked in a new tone of voice.

Patrick and Omri glanced at each other, opened their mouths, and closed them again.

“Well?”

It wasn’t a bark this time, it was just a question, a question filled with curiosity. After all, from a grown-up’s point of view, what could make those tiny marks?

At that moment, there was a loud, policemanly ring and double knock on the door.

Omri’s father gave the boys a look which said, “This is only a short postponement”, and left the room. They heard him running downstairs, and they all trailed after him. Halfway down, he paused.

“Good Lord, did you see this, Jane? I didn’t notice as we came up! One of the banisters has been broken!”

Eager to explain something that could be explained, Omri volunteered the information that one of the burglars had fallen downstairs in his hurry to get out.

His father looked up at him.

“You boys must have thrown a real scare into them.”

“Lionel,” said Omri’s mother suddenly.

“What?”

“Shouldn’t we – hear what the boys have to say, before the police talk to them?”

He hesitated. The bell rang again, commandingly.

“Too late now,” he said, and hurried to open the door to the police.

2
Modest Heroes

As the two uniformed policemen were shown into the living-room, and Omri’s mother hurried down to them, Omri and Patrick had a welcome moment to themselves at the top of the stairs.

“You look like a Sikh in that bandage,” said Patrick. “Well, half a Sikh.”

“Never mind what I look like. What are we going to do?”

Patrick said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Make something up, I suppose. What else can we do?”

“All right. But what? What, that anyone’d believe for two seconds?”

“We might try saying that the skinheads did the damage to the wall. We could say they had – I don’t know – spiked tools, gimlets or chisels or whatever, and just stuck them into everything for a laugh.”

“Or, we could say we don’t know how they did it. We burst in, they ran, that’s it. Leave the cops to figure it out.”

“If they really look, they’ll find minute bullets in the bottoms of the holes.”

“They won’t. Why should they think to?”

“Boys! Come down here, will you?”

It was Omri’s dad calling, peremptorily. They started to walk as slowly as they dared down the stairs.

“And your burn?” whispered Patrick.

“Maybe – we might say we’d had a bonfire in the garden and that you cracked me over the head with a lighted branch.”

“Oh, great! Try saying that and I really will crack you!”

So that was it. They didn’t try to explain the little holes, and the police assumed that the skinheads had been vandals as well as burglars and didn’t examine them too closely. They went over everything else for fingerprints but said that although there were quite a few, the chances were against them catching the thieves who – technically speaking – weren’t thieves after all, because they hadn’t actually got away with anything.

Omri told the bonfire story without bringing Patrick into it. He just said – the inspiration of the moment – that they’d used a whole can of lighter-fluid to get the fire going and that he, Omri, had struck the match while his face was over the wood. His parents, who had been positively bursting with pride at the way the boys had rid the house of intruders, abruptly changed their views about Omri’s brilliance.

“How could you be so unutterably DAFT as to light a fire like that, you little HALF-WIT!” his father expostulated. “How many times have I told you—”

A cough from one of the policemen interrupted him.

“Excuse me, sir. Were these two lads alone in the house?”

“Er—”

“Because as you no doubt know, sir, it is severely frowned on to leave any young person under the age of fourteen alone in a house at night.”

“Of course I know that, Sergeant, and we never, never do it. We always have a baby-sitter. Very punctual and reliable. She was due at seven tonight, and when we went out we assumed she was a couple of minutes late… She’s never let us down before.”

“And where is this person, sir?”

“She never showed up, Sergeant,” said Omri’s father shame-facedly. “Yes, I know what you’re going to say, and you’re perfectly right, we are to blame and I shall never forgive myself.”

“I dare say you will, sir,” said the sergeant levelly, “in time. But it would have been much harder to forgive yourself, if worse had befallen.” Both Omri’s parents hung their heads miserably and Omri moved closer to his mother who looked as if she might burst into tears.

“This is not exactly what you might call a – salubrious neighbourhood, especially after dark,” went on the policeman. “Only this evening, a lady was mugged at the end of your street – pulled right off her bicycle, she was—”

“Her bicycle!”

This from Omri’s mother, whose head had come up sharply.

“Yes, madam…?”

“Who was she – this – lady who was mugged?”

The sergeant glanced at his companion.

“Do you remember the name, George?”

He shrugged. “Some Polish-sounding name…”

Omri’s mother and father exchanged horrified looks. “Not – was it Mrs Brankovsky?”

“Something like that.”

“But that’s her! Our baby-sitter!” cried Omri’s mother. “Oh, heavens – poor Basia—”

“‘Basha’?” inquired the younger policeman. “Is that her name, or what happened to her?” And he suppressed a snigger. But the sergeant gave him a stern look and he subsided.

“There’s nothing humorous about it, George.”

“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
How It All Started

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.

Luckily Patrick was nearby and was able to help with some excellent ideas. Boone ‘came back’ too, and they also brought to life a hospital Matron from a much more recent era to help save Little Bull’s life. Later when he demanded to go back to his village, a British Royal Marine corporal, Willy Fickits, and a contingent of Iroquois braves, were brought to life to help take revenge on the Algonquins.

At this point there was a most incredible turn of events.

Boone, the cowboy, suggested that the boys ‘go back’ to Little Bull’s time and witness the battle. Of course they thought it was impossible. How could they fit into the little bathroom cupboard, only about thirty centimetres high? But Boone pointed out that the magic key might fit something larger – the old seaman’s chest that Omri had bought in the market, for instance.

It worked. Each boy climbed in in turn, the other one turned the key, and each separately went back in time to the Iroquois village.

When Omri got back – terribly shaken after witnessing a horrific battle – his hair was singed and he had a burn-blister on the side of his head.

The boys brought the Indian troop back through the magic of the key, discovering to their horror that the modern weapons that they had given Little Bull’s men – Little Bull called them ‘now-guns’ – had proved too much for fighters untrained in their use. Many of them had been accidentally shot by their own side. Matron had to be brought back to treat their wounds, but eight had been killed.

Little Bull was distraught, but Twin Stars comforted him by putting his new son, Tall Bear, in his arms. And Omri and Patrick took the blame. They shouldn’t have sent modern weapons into the past… But these worked very well when, later, three skinheads tried to burgle the house. The boys brought some plastic Marines to life and mounted an artillery assault on them just as they were rifling Omri’s parents’ bedroom, and completely routed them. It was exhilarating while it lasted, but now they were faced with the aftermath: reality, the present, the results of the night’s doings.

4
Dead in the Night

The two boys sat on the floor of Omri’s bedroom and conferred in low voices.

“We’ve got to plan what to do,” said Patrick. “One of us must be up here in your room, on guard, every minute of the rest of the weekend. We’ll have to keep your door locked from inside. Whoever’s not here will have to bring food and stuff, so I’d better stay up here most of the time. It’ll look dead odd if I start nicking stuff from your kitchen. I don’t know what we’re going to do on Monday—”

Omri said heavily, “I do. I’ll have to go to school, and you’ll have to go home.”

“Oh God, yes,” said Patrick, remembering.

Patrick now lived in Kent with his mother. They were only in London for a brief visit to his aunt and girl cousins, Emma and the dreadful Tamsin. They’d have been back in their country home already, had Tamsin not fallen off her bicycle and broken her leg, so that Patrick’s mother had decided to stay on for a day or two to help his aunt.

The boys sat in heavy silence. Omri could hardly bear the thought of being left alone in this increasingly difficult situation. Patrick could hardly bear the thought of leaving it.

“Maybe Tamsin’ll die,” Patrick said darkly. “Then we’ll have to stay on. For the funeral.”

Omri hoped this was only a sick joke. He detested Tamsin but he didn’t wish her dead – not now he’d seen death, not with those eight small bloodstained bodies lying under torn-up scraps of sheet, right here in his room…

“What are we going to do about – the casualties?” he asked.

“You mean the dead ones? We’ll have to bury them.”

“Where?”

“In your garden—”

“But we can’t just… I mean, it’s not like when Boone’s horse died. They’re people, we can’t just – stick them in the earth. What about their families?”

“Their families are – are back there somewhere. We don’t know where they are, or when they are.”

“Maybe we ought to – to send them back through the cupboard, to their own time.”

“Send their dead bodies back? With modern bullets in them?”

“Their people would think they’d been shot by white men. They wouldn’t examine them. They’d go through – you know, whatever special rituals they have, and bury them properly – or – or whatever they do with dead people.”

Abruptly, Omri felt his eyes begin to prick and a hard, hot lump came into his throat. He put his head down on his knees. Patrick must have been feeling the same, because he squeezed Omri’s arm sympathetically.

“It’s no good feeling it too much,” he said after clearing his throat twice. “I know it’s terrible and I know it’s partly our fault. But they lived in very dangerous times, fighting and risking death every day. And they went into the battle quite willingly.”

“They didn’t know what they were up against with the now-guns,” said Omri in a muffled voice.

“Yeah, I know. Still. It doesn’t help to – to be a Boone.”

The weak joke about the cry-baby cowboy made Omri chuckle just a little.

“Where is Boone, by the way?” he asked, sniffing back his tears.

“I told you. I sent him back – he asked me to. Gave him a new horse, and off he went. Look.”

He opened the cupboard. On the shelf was Boone, standing beside his new horse, a tall, alert-looking black one. On the floor of the cupboard, Corporal Fickits and his men were clustered together, with their various weapons. Patrick gathered them all up, put the soldiers back in the biscuit-tin, but kept Fickits and Boone separate. Boone went into his pocket, horse and all. He always kept him there, when he wasn’t real, for luck. He was actually as fond of Boone as Omri was of Little Bull. Omri put Fickits in the back pocket of his jeans.

“The only thing we can do right now is to get some sleep,” Omri said.

Patrick settled down on his floor-cushions while Omri clambered up onto his bunk bed under the skylight. He looked up at the stars through the branches of the old elm tree which his father kept saying should be cut down because it was dead. Skeletal as it was, to Omri it was a friend.

“Let’s bring Boone back tomorrow,” Patrick whispered just before they dropped off. “I don’t seem to be able to face things without Boone, whether he cries or not. Besides, I want to know if he likes his new horse.”

At dawn Omri was woken by a familiar shout.

“Omri wake! Day come! Much need do!”

Omri, feeling sticky-eyed and thick-headed with tiredness, slid backwards down the ladder to the floor. Patrick was still sound asleep. The grey dawn light was only just creeping through the skylight.

“It’s dead early, Little Bull,” he muttered, rubbing his face and stifling a series of yawns.

Little Bull didn’t hear him properly. He caught only his name and the word ‘dead’. He nodded his hard-muscled face once and grunted.

“One more dead in night.”

Omri’s throat closed up with a sick feeling.

“Another? Oh, no… I’m sorry!” He meant sorry-ashamed, not just sorry-regretful. He felt every dead Indian brave was on his own conscience. He should never have made the modern weapons real, never have sent Little Bull and his braves back in time with them. The trouble was, he seemed still not fully to have accepted the fact, which he knew with one part of his brain, that these little people were not just toys come to life. They were flesh and blood, with their own characters, their own lives and destinies. And against his own intentions Omri had been drawn in. He’d found himself acting out his own part in these destinies, which would never have been possible but for the magic of the cupboard… and the key.

The key turned any container into a kind of body-shrinking time-machine. His seaman’s chest had taken him and Patrick back to the eighteenth century, to Little Bull’s time and place… Omri had not had time, so far, even to begin to think about the possibilities of that.

Now he scanned the seed-tray and saw that two of the Indians who had not been injured were carrying another body out of the longhouse and into the little paddock Patrick had made with miniature fencing, for the ponies, and which was now a makeshift morgue. Matron followed the sad procession, her face, rather grim at all times, now grimmer than ever.

“I did my best,” she said shortly. “Bullet lodged in the liver. Couldn’t reach it.”

She watched the two braves lay the dead Indian down beside the others. Suddenly she turned to face Omri.

“I know I did that operation on your friend!” she said. “And I operated last night – emergency ops – three of them – but blow it all, I’m not a surgeon! Stupid of me – conceited to think I could cope. Can’t. Not trained for it. Anyway… too much for any one person.” Her voice cracked upward.

“Matron, it’s not your fault—” began Omri, terrified that this capable, efficient, down-to-earth woman might be about to burst into tears, which would have unmanned him completely.

“Didn’t say it was! My fault indeed!” She glared at him, took her specs off, polished them on a spotless handkerchief from her apron pocket, and put them back on her formidable nose.

“Blessed if I know how I got here, what this is all about – now don’t you go pulling the wool over my eyes, I know when I’m dreaming and when I’m not – this is real. The blood’s real, the pain’s real, the deaths are real. My ops were real, they were the best I could do, but what is also real is my – my – my basic inadequacy.”

She suddenly snatched the handkerchief out of her pocket again and blew her nose on it. She wiped her nose back and forth several times and then gave a great, convulsive sniff.

“What we need here is a properly equipped medical team!”

Omri gaped at her.

“If we don’t get one – and quickly – more of these poor men are going to die.”

After a moment, during which she glared at him expectantly through her spectacles, Omri said slowly, “I’ll tell you the truth about you being here, and – all the rest of it. But you probably won’t believe me.”

“After what I’ve been through in the past forty-eight hours, I’ll believe anything!” she said fervently.

He explained things as well as he could. She listened intently and asked a couple of questions.

“You say any article or figure made of plastic is affected?”

“Yes.”

“And objects which might be concealed on the person – my hypodermic syringe, for example, and other things I brought in my pocket from St Thomas’s—”

“Yes, they’re made real, provided the person had them on him before he was – brought.”

“Well! Why can’t you get hold of some plastic doctors and put them in your allegedly magic cupboard? Only you must make sure they have some equipment – surgical instruments and so forth.”

“But all the shops are shut! How can I—”

Suddenly Omri remembered. Two nights ago, he had gone to see Patrick at his aunt’s house and they had tried to borrow Tamsin’s new box of plastic figures, only she’d caught them at it and grabbed it back. Omri had only just managed to hold onto the figure that turned out to be Matron. But there had been others in the set – including a surgeon at an operating table.

He stretched out his foot and nudged Patrick awake.

“Patrick! Listen. There’s another Indian dead. And Matron says, if we don’t find a proper doctor, more will die.”

Patrick scrambled to his feet, rubbing his hair.

“How can we get any new ones on Sunday?”

“What about the ones Tamsin has?”

“What are you saying? That I should go back to Aunty’s and nick them when Tamsin isn’t looking?”

“It’s only borrowing.”

“Not when the owner doesn’t know or agree! Not when the owner’s my little creep of a cousin! She’d have my guts for garters!”

Omri said, with a note of desperation, “Well, what are we to do, then? This is a real emergency!” Suddenly he had an idea. “Why don’t you try buying them off her?”

“It might work. Have you got any dosh?”

“Not a penny, we spent it all on the Indian braves. Maybe Dad’ll lend me a couple of quid.”

His dad did better than that. He gave him a fiver, and not just till pay-day. “You’ve earned it. Here’s one for Patrick, too.”

So there was no problem about money.

At breakfast, hastily eaten, the boys sneaked some crispy bits of bacon and quite a few Crunchy Nut Cornflakes into their pockets, and Omri astonished his mother by asking for a mug of tea instead of milk. Matron couldn’t cope without her tea.

“I thought you hated tea!”

“I’m coming round to it.”

“You’ll be hitting the Scotch next,” commented his father from behind his Sunday paper.

Patrick nudged Omri. When whisky was mentioned, there was just one person who came to mind. Halfway back up the stairs, Patrick whispered: “Let’s bring Boone back to life right now!”

At that moment, the doorbell rang.

Omri went back down and opened the door. Then he gasped. Outside stood Tamsin. Of all people!

How could it be, she’d broken her leg!

Omri looked again. It wasn’t Tamsin, it was Emma.

Emma was Tamsin’s twin sister. She was the spitting image of Tamsin, and yet she was wholly different. As far as Omri could remember, she was quite a decent sort of girl.

“Hello, Omri,” she said. “Can I see Patrick?”

Patrick dragged himself reluctantly down into the hall. Omri stood aside, waiting. He could feel himself tensing all over for fear there was a car outside waiting to cart Patrick away.

“Hi, Em. How’s it going?” said Patrick carelessly.

“Okay. Tam’s leg’s in a cast and she’s better. They sent me here because Omri’s phone’s busted and your mum couldn’t ring you and you’re to come back with me.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“I – I can’t come now!”

“Why not?”

Patrick dithered helplessly, trying to think of some excuse.

“How are we supposed to get back?”

“On the train of course,” said Emma. “Come on.”

Omri said, “Did you come here on the train?”

“Yes, why?”

“And you walked up the road to here, from the station?”

“Yes.”

Omri thought of the skinheads. It was Sunday – even the few who went to school or had jobs, were free and on the prowl on Sundays. He himself never walked down Hovel Road on Sundays if he could possibly help it.

“Did you meet anyone…?”

She shrugged. “A few boys. Hanging around. Real creeps, gross. I took no notice of them.”

Omri shivered. But then he remembered. There was a pretty good chance he didn’t have to be scared of that gang any more. He put his hand in his jeans pocket, and fingered the little penlight the smallest of the burglars had dropped the night before.

As he touched it, he felt something else. It was the key. A sudden flash of inspiration came to him, stiffening his whole body like a bolt of electricity.

“Emma,” he said in a queer sort of voice, “would you mind if I had a private chat to Patrick before he – er – goes?”

She looked from one of them to the other. “What’s the secret?”

They both flushed.

“Wait here, okay?” Omri gabbled, and pulling Patrick into the living-room he closed the door.

“You’ve got to get out of going home,” Omri said. “I can’t cope without you.”

“What can I do? Break my leg?”

“Well… if you had the bottle for it, you could throw yourself down the stairs… probably do yourself some serious enough injury…”

“Thanks!”

“…But I wasn’t thinking of that. Tell Emma you’ve left something upstairs. We’ll go up to my room and you can get in the chest with Boone’s figure and I can send you back to his time.”

5
Patrick Goes Back

Patrick’s face was blank for a moment, and Omri thought: He’s scared, and who can blame him! But then he saw it wasn’t that at all. Patrick simply hadn’t been able to grasp the idea at first.

When he did grasp it, not just his face but his whole body seemed to light up with excitement.

“Wow,” he said simply.

“You mean you’ll do it?”

“Are you kidding? Go back to real cowboy-time, cowboy-country? See Boone full-size? Lead me to it! Let’s go!”

He bounded out of the living-room and was halfway up the stairs before Omri had gathered his wits to follow. As he came into the hall he noticed Emma standing much closer to the living-room door than she had been before. Patrick had nearly bowled her over as he emerged.

A suspicion struck Omri.

“Were you listening?”

“Yes,” she said at once. “But I didn’t understand what you were talking about.”

“Ah,” said Omri with relief. It crossed his mind that she was a very straightforward girl, at least – Tamsin wouldn’t have admitted eavesdropping like that. Not many people would.

He gave Emma a closer look. She was a year younger than him – which was why he had hardly noticed her at school, somehow you only noticed your contemporaries or people ahead of you. But she’d been more or less around for most of his life. Odd that he’d never really looked at her before. Now he saw that she was quite nice looking in a fair, snubby-faced way. She had freckles and large eyes, and was dressed in sensible jeans and a blue anorak. She had her hands deep in her pockets and was gazing at him expectantly.

“What were you on about in there?”

“Private,” said Omri. He glanced up the stairs. Patrick could already be heard thudding up the last flight, to Omri’s attic bedroom.

“Where’s Patrick gone?”

“Er – up to get his pyjamas and stuff.”

“But he didn’t take any last night, he just dashed out.”

“Oh. Well – anyway he’s – gone up,” said Omri feebly, making a move to follow him.

Emma followed at his heels. He paused on the second stair.

“Can you wait down here?”

“Why?”

“We’ll be – right down.”

“Can’t I see your room? You saw mine,” she said. “Last night, when you came to our house. Mum moved Tam and me out so Patrick could have it.”

“Well…”

From above came Patrick’s impatient voice. “Come ON, Omri! Don’t hang about!”

“You wait in the living-room,” Omri said decisively. He turned away from her and ran upstairs.

In his room he found Patrick already climbing into the seaman’s chest.

“Go on, I’m ready! Send me!”

But Omri, having come up with this amazing idea, was already having second thoughts.

“Listen, how’ll I explain where you’ve gone?”

“Don’t. Get rid of Emma somehow, make her go home, and you can tell your parents I went with her.”

“But what when Emma gets back to her place without you?”

“It’ll be too late then! I’ll just have vanished!” He grinned all over his face with glee.

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