Return of the Indian. Lynne Banks Reid

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       3 The Way it Began

      Omri was rather a private person. At least he needed to be alone quite a bit of the time. So his room, which was right up under the eaves of the house, was perfect for him.

      In the old house, his bedroom had been just one of several opening off the upstairs landing, and at certain times of the day had been like a railway station. His new room was right off the beaten track. No one (in his opinion) had any reason to come up here, or even pass the door. There were times, now he had got it all arranged to suit himself, when he forgot about how awful it was living in Hovel Road, when it seemed worth everything to have a room like this.

      It wasn’t a very large room, so his father had built a shelf high up under the skylight for him to sleep on. This was great, because he could look up at the night sky. Under this bed-shelf was his desk, and more shelves for his collections of old bottles, key-rings and wooden animals. The wall opposite the window was covered with his posters – a mixture of old and new, from Snoopy and an early Beatles, to the Police and a funny, rude one about a flasher who gets caught in a lift. In pride of place were two large photographs of Iroquois chieftains that he’d found in magazines. Neither of these Indians looked remotely like Little Bull, but they appealed to Omri just the same.

      His clothes were stored on the landing, so his room wasn’t cluttered up with those. That left quite a lot of space for his beanbag seats, a low table (he’d sawed its legs half off after seeing a photo of a Japanese room), his cassette radio, and his most recent acquisition – an old chest.

      He’d found this in the local market, coated with dirt and grease, bought it for two pounds after bargaining, and borrowed a marketeer’s barrow to drag it round the corner to Hovel Road. He’d cleaned it with a scraper and some sandpaper in the back garden, before hauling it up to his room.

      It had ‘come up a treat’, just as the man in the market had promised. The wood was oak, the hinges iron, and it had a brass plate on it with the name of its first owner. Omri had hardly been able to believe it when he had cleaned the layers of dirt off this plate and read the name for the first time. It was L. Buller. L. Buller… Little Bull! Of course it was pure coincidence, but, as Omri thought, If I were superstitious… He rubbed up the brass every week. Somehow it, too, made him feel closer to Little Bull.

      The chest was not only interesting and beautiful, but useful. Omri used it for storage. There was only one thing wrong with it. It had a lock, but no key. So he piled cushions and other objects on it and pretended it was a bench. That way nobody who happened to be prying about in his room (it still happened occasionally, mothers cleaning and brothers poking about ‘borrowing’) would realize that it contained a number of interesting and private objects.

      Omri knelt by the chest now and shifted to the floor a pile of cassettes, a bullworker (he was bent on developing his muscles), some cushions and three copies of Mad magazine, among other bits of junk. Then he opened the top of the chest. It, too, was untidy, but Omri knew where to burrow. On their way down the left-hand side in search of the folder containing his prize-winning story, Omri’s fingers touched metal, and paused. Then, carefully, he moved some other things which were in the way, and eased this metal object out.

      It was a small white cabinet with a mirror in its door and a keyhole – an old-fashioned bathroom medicine cupboard, in fact. He stood it on the Japanese table. The door swung open. Apart from a single shelf, it was quite empty – as empty as it had been when he was first given it, a rather odd birthday present from Gillon, just over a year ago.

      Omri sat back on his heels staring at it.

      How clearly it all came back. The cupboard. The strange little key which had been his great-grandmother’s, and which had mysteriously fitted the commonplace lock and turned this ordinary little metal box into a time-machine with a difference. Put any plastic object – an axe, an Indian tepee, a quiver of arrows – into it, close the door, turn the key – and those things became real. Miniature, but real. Real leather, real cloth, real steel. Put the plastic figure of a human being or an animal inside, and, in the time it took to lock them in, they, too, became real. Real and alive. And not just ‘living toys’, but people from another time, with their own lives, their own personalities, needs and demands…

      Oh, it hadn’t been all fun and games, as Omri had naively expected at first. Little Bull was no toy, to submit tamely to being played with. He was, for all his tiny stature, a ferocious savage, war-like and domineering.

      Omri had soon realized that if any grown-ups found out about the cupboard’s magic properties they would take it, and the Indian, СКАЧАТЬ