The Indian in the Cupboard (8 page)

“Okay. Come on.”

Going home they broke the law even more, riding on the road
and
with Patrick on the crossbar. They went around the back way by the alley in case anyone happened to be looking out of a window.

Omri said, “He wants a fire. I suppose we can’t make one indoors.”

“You could, on a tin plate, like for indoor fireworks,” said Patrick.

Omri looked at him.

“Let’s collect some twigs.”

Patrick picked up a twig about a foot long. Omri laughed.

“That’s no good! They’ve got to be tiny twigs. Like this.” And he picked some slivers off the privet hedge.

“Does he want the fire to cook on?” asked Patrick slowly.

“Yes.”

“Then that’s no use. A fire made of those would burn out in a couple of seconds.”

Omri hadn’t thought of that.

“What you need,” said Patrick, “is a little ball of tar. That burns for ages. And you could put the twigs on top to look like a real campfire.”

“That’s a brilliant idea!”

“I know where they’ve been tarring a road, too,” said Patrick.

“Come on, let’s go.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe in him yet. I want to see.”

“All right. But first I have to give this stuff to my dad.”

There was a further delay when his father at first insisted on Omri filling the seed tray with compost and planting the seeds in it then and there. But when Omri gave him the corn seed as a present he said, “Well! Thanks. Oh all right, I can see you’re bursting to get away. You can do the planting tomorrow before school.”

Omri and Patrick rushed upstairs. At the top Omri stopped cold. His bedroom door, which he always shut automatically, was wide open. And just inside, crouching side by side with their backs to him, were his brothers.

They were so absolutely still that Omri knew they were watching something. He couldn’t bear it. They had come into his room without his permission, and they had seen his Indian. Now they would tell everybody! His secret, his precious secret, his alone to keep or share, was a secret no more. Something broke inside him and he heard himself scream: “Get out of my room! Get out of my room!”

Both boys spun around.

“Shut up, you’ll frighten him,” said Adiel at once. “Gillon came in to look for his rat and he found it, and then he saw this absolutely fabulous little house you’ve made and he called me in to look at it.”

Omri looked at the floor. The seed tray with the longhouse, now nearly finished, had been moved into the center of the room. It was
that
they had been looking at. A quick
glance all around showed no sign of Indian or horse, but Gillon’s tame white rat was on his shoulder.

“I can’t get over it,” Adiel went on. “How on earth did you do it, without using any glue or anything? It’s all done with tiny little threads, and pegs, and—look, Gillon! It’s all made of real twigs and bark. It’s absolutely
terrific”
he said with such awe-struck admiration in his voice that Omri felt ashamed.

“I didn’t—” he began. But Patrick, who had been gaping at the longhouse in amazement, gave him a heavy nudge that nearly knocked him over.

“Yes,” said Omri. “Well. Would you mind leaving now? And take the rat. You’re not to let him in here! This
is
my room, you know.”

“And this
is
my magnifying glass, you know,” echoed Gillon, but he was obviously too overcome with admiration to be angry with Omri for pinching it. He was using it now to examine the fine details of the building. “I knew you were good at making things,” he said, “but this is uncanny. You must have fingers like a fairy to tie those w
itchy
little knots. What’s that?” he asked suddenly.

They’d all heard it—a high, faint whinny coming from under the bed.

Omri was galvanized into action. At all costs he must prevent their finding out now! He flung himself on his knees and pretended to grope under the bed. “It’s nothing, only that little clockwork dolphin I got in my Christmas stocking,” he burbled. “I must have wound it up and it suddenly started clicking, you know how they do, it’s quite creepy sometimes when they suddenly start—clicking—”

By this time he’d leaped up again and was almost pushing the two older boys out of the room.

“Why are you in such a hurry to get rid of us?” asked Gillon suspiciously.

“Just
go
, you know you have to get out of my room when I ask you—” He could hear the little horse whinnying again and it didn’t sound a bit like the dolphin.

“That sounds just like a pony,” said Adiel.

“Oh
beard
it’s a pony, a tiny witchy pony under my bed!” said Omri mockingly. At last they went, not without glancing back suspiciously several times, and Omri slammed the door, bolted it, and leaned against it with closed eyes.

“Is
it a pony?” whispered Patrick, agog.

Omri nodded. Then he opened his eyes, lay down again, and peered under the bed.

“Give me that flashlight from the chest of drawers.”

Patrick gave it to him and lay beside him. They peered together as the beam probed the darkness.

“Crumbs!” breathed Patrick reverently. “It’s true!”

The horse was standing, seemingly alone, whinnying. When the light hit him he stopped and turned his head. Omri could see a pair of leggings behind him.

“It’s all right, Little Bear, it’s me!” said Omri.

Slowly a crest of feathers, then a pair of eyes appeared over the top of the horse’s back.

“Who others?” he asked.

“My brothers. It’s okay, they didn’t see you.”

“Little Bear hear coming. Take horse, run, hide.”

“Good. Come on out and meet my friend Patrick.”

Little Bear jumped astride the horse and rode proudly out, wearing his new cloak and headdress. He gazed up imperiously at Patrick, who gazed back in wonder.

Then he nodded to Patrick who tried several times to say something, but his voice just came out as a squeak.

“Omri’s friend, Little Bear’s friend,” said Little Bear magnanimously.

Patrick swallowed. His eyes seemed in danger of popping right out of his head.

Little Bear waited politely, but when Patrick didn’t speak he rode over to the seed tray. The brothers had brought it out from behind the crate; they’d been careful, but the ramp had got moved. Omri hurried to put it back, and Little Bear rode the horse up it, dismounted, and tied it by its halter to the post he had driven into the compost. Then he went calmly on with his work on his longhouse.

Patrick licked his lips, swallowed twice more, and croaked out, “He’s real. He’s a real live Indian.”

“I told you.”

“How did it happen?”

“Don’t ask me. Something to do with this cupboard, or maybe it’s the key—it’s very old. You lock plastic people inside, and they come alive.”

Patrick goggled at him. “You mean—it’s not only him? You can do it with any toy?”

“Only plastic ones.”

An incredulous grin spread over Patrick’s face.

“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s bring loads of things to life! Whole armies—”

And he sprang toward the biscuit tins. Omri grabbed him.

“No, wait! It’s not so simple.”

Patrick, his hands already full of soldiers, was making for the cupboard. “Why not?”

“Because they’d all—don’t you see—they’d be
real”

“Real? What do you mean?”

“Little Bear isn’t a toy. He’s a real man. He really lived. Maybe he’s still—I don’t know—he’s in the middle of his life—somewhere in America in seventeen-something-or-other. He’s from the
past.”
Omri struggled to explain as Patrick looked blank.

“I don’t get it.”

“Listen. Little Bear has told me about his life. He’s fought in wars, and scalped people, and grown stuff to eat like marrows
and stuff, and had a wife. She died. He doesn’t know how he got here but he thinks it’s magic and he accepts magic, he believes in it, he thinks I’m some kind of spirit or something. What I mean,” Omri persisted, as Patrick’s eyes strayed longingly to the cupboard, “is that if you put all those men in there, when they came to life they’d be real men with real lives of their own, from their own times and countries, talking their own languages. You couldn’t just—set them up and make them do what you wanted them to. They’d do what
they
wanted to, or they might get terrified and run away or—well, one I tried it with, an old Indian, actually died of—of fright when he saw me. Look, if you don’t believe me!” And Omri opened the cupboard.

There lay the body of the old chief, now made of plastic, but still unmistakably dead, and not dead the way some plastic soldiers are made to look dead but the way real people look—crumpled up, empty.

Patrick picked it up, turning it in his hand. He’d put the soldiers down by now.

“This isn’t the one you bought at lunchtime?”

“Yes.”

“Crumbs.”

“You see?”

“Where’s his headdress?”

“Little Bear took it. He says he’s a chief now. It’s made him even more bossy and—and
difficult
than before,” said Omri, using a word his mother often used when he was insisting on having his own way.

Patrick put the dead Indian down hurriedly and wiped his hand on the seat of his jeans.

“Maybe this isn’t such fun as I thought.”

Omri considered for a moment.

“No,” he agreed soberly, “it’s not
fun.”

They stared at Little Bear. He had finished the shell of the longhouse now. Taking off his headdress he tucked it under his arm, stooped, and entered through the low doorway at one end. After a moment he came out and looked up at Omri.

“Little Bear hungry,” he said. “You get deer? Bear? Moose?”

“No.”

He scowled. “I say get. Why you not get?”

“The shops are shut. Besides,” added Omri, thinking he sounded rather feeble, especially in front of Patrick, “I’m not sure I like the idea of having bears shambling about my room,
or
of having them killed. I’ll give you meat and a fire and you can cook it and that’ll have to do.”

Little Bear looked baffled for a moment. Then he swiftly put on the headdress, and drew himself to his full height of almost three inches (three and a quarter with the feathers). He folded his arms and glared at Omri.

“Little Bear chief now. Chief hunts. Kills own meat. Not take meat others kill. If not hunt, lose skill with bow. For today, you give meat. Tomorrow, go shop, get bear, plasstick. Make real. I hunt. Not here,” he added, looking up scornfully at the distant ceiling. “Out. Under sky. Now fire.”

Patrick, who had been crouching, stood up. He, too, seemed to be under Little Bear’s spell.

“I’ll run and get the tar,” he said.

“No, wait a minute,” said Omri. “I’ve got another idea.”

He ran downstairs. Fortunately the living room was empty. In the coal scuttle beside the open fireplace was a packet of firelighters. He broke a fairly large bit off one and wrapped it in a scrap of newspaper. Then he went to the kitchen. His mother was standing at the sink peeling apples.

Omri hesitated, then went to the refrigerator.

“Don’t eat now, Omri, it’s nearly suppertime.”

“Just a tiny bit,” he said.

There was a lovely chunk of raw meat on a plate. Omri sniffed his fingers, wiped them hard on his sweater to get the stink of the firelighter off them, then took a big carving knife from the drawer, and, with an anxious glance at his mother’s back, began sawing a corner off the meat.

Luckily it was steak and cut easily. Even so he nearly had the whole plate off the shelf and onto the floor before he’d got his corner off.

His mother swung around just as he closed the refrigerator door.

“A tiny bit of what?” she asked. She often reacted late to things he said.

“Nothing,” he said, hiding the raw bit of meat in his hand. “Mum, could I borrow a tin plate?”

“I haven’t got such a thing.”

“Yes you have, the one you bought Adiel to go camping.”

“That’s in Adiel’s room somewhere, I haven’t got it. A tiny bit of
what?”

But Omri was already on his way upstairs. Adiel was in his room (he would be!) doing his homework.

“What do
you
want?” he asked the second Omri crept in.

“That plate—you know—your camping one.”

“Oh that!” said Adiel, going back to his French.

“Well, can I have it?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. It’s over there somewhere.”

Omri found it eventually in an old knapsack, covered with disgusting bits of baked beans, dry and hard as cement. He hurried across to his own room. Whenever he’d been away from it for even a few minutes, he felt his heart beating in panic as he opened the door for fear of what he might find (or not find). The burden of constant worry was beginning to wear him out.

But all was as he had left it this time. Patrick was crouching near the seed tray. Little Bear was directing him to take the tops off several of the jars of poster paint while he himself fashioned something almost too small to see.

“It’s a paintbrush,” whispered Patrick. “He cut a bit off his own hair and he’s tying it to a tiny scrap of wood he found, about the size of a big splinter.”