Omri frowned and went on up the stairs. He didn’t feel entirely easy in his mind, but on the other hand… Nobody had helped him. The way he’d written the story was all his own. Maybe it was okay. There wasn’t much he could do about it, anyhow.
He continued more slowly up the stairs to his room, at the very top of the house.
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, and everything else, away. So Omri had had to keep it secret, and look after, feed and protect his Indian as best he could. And when Patrick had found out the secret, and sneaked a Texas cowboy into the cupboard so that he, too, could have a ‘little person’, the trouble really started.
Little Bull and Boone were natural enemies. They came close to killing each other several times. Even their respective ponies had caused endless difficulties. And then Adiel had taken the cupboard one day, the key had fallen out of the lock and been lost, and Omri, Patrick and the two little men had been faced with the dire possibility that the magic was dead, that these minute and helpless people would have to remain in Omri’s time, his ‘giant’ world, and in his care, for ever…
It was this, the terrible fright they had all had from this notion, that had finally proved to Omri that he would have to give up his Indian friend (for friends they were by then, of a sort), and send the little people ‘back’ – back to their own time, through the magic of the cupboard. When the key was found, that’s what they all agreed on. But it was so hard to part, that Boone (who was shamefully soft-hearted for a cowboy) had cried openly, and even the boys’ eyes were wet… Omri seldom let himself think of those last moments, they upset him so much.
When they’d reopened the cupboard door, there were the two groups: Little Bull and the wife Omri had found him, Twin Stars, sitting on Little Bull’s pony, and ‘Boo-Hoo’ Boone on his white horse – only now they were plastic again. Patrick had taken Boone and put him in his pocket. And Omri had kept the Indians. He had them still. He had packed them in a little wooden box which he kept safely at the very bottom of the chest. Actually it was a box-within-a-box-within-a-box. Each was tied tightly with string. There was a reason for all this. Omri had wanted to make them difficult to get at.
He had always known that he would be tempted to put Little Bull and Twin Stars in the cupboard again and bring them back to life. He was curious about how they were getting on – that alone tormented him every day. They had lived in dangerous times, times of war between tribes, wars aided and encouraged by Frenchmen and Englishmen who were fighting on American soil in those far-off days. Boone’s time, the time of the pioneering of Texas, a hundred years after Little Bull’s era, was dangerous, too.
And there’d been another little man, Tommy, the medical orderly, from the trenches of France in the First World War. They’d magicked him to life to help when Little Bull was kicked by his horse, when Boone was apparently dying of an arrow-wound… Tommy might, just might still be alive in Omri’s world, but he would be terribly old, about ninety by now.
By putting their plastic figures into the magic cupboard, by turning the magic key, Omri had the power to recall them to life – to youth. He could snatch them from the past. The whole business nearly blew Omri’s mind every time he thought at all deeply about it. So he tried not to think about it too much. And to prevent his yielding to temptation,