“You sound like Winston Churchill,” said Adiel, but there was a trace of admiration in his voice this time. “Don’t make it too show-offy, will you? You’ll only lose marks if your teacher thinks you’ve copied it.”
“I haven’t written that, you jerk,” said Omri, “I’m just remembering what I’ve read in a book.” He was beginning to relish long words, though. Later, he went through his story yet again to make sure he hadn’t used too many. His teacher was forever saying, “Keep it simple. Stick to what you know.” Little would anyone guess how closely he had stuck to the truth this time!
And now … “Imagination and invention” …
He paused on the stairs. Had he cheated? It was supposed to be a made-up story. It said so in the rules. Or had it? “Creative writing” meant that, didn’t it? You couldn’t create something that had really happened …
All you could do was find the best way of writing it down. Of course he had had to make up bits of it; vivid as his memories of Little Bear and Boone were, he couldn’t remember every word they ever spoke. Omri frowned. 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 own room, at the very top of the house.
Chapter 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 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 that he had it all arranged to suit himself, when he forgot about how awful it was living in Hovel Road, when it seemed worth anything 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 were 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 one about a flasher who gets caught in an elevator. 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 Bear, but they appealed to Omri just the same.
His clothes were stored on the landing, so his room wasn’t cluttered up with them. That left quite a lot of space for his beanbag seats, a low table (he’d sawed its legs to half their length 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 £2 after bargaining, and borrowed a cart from a marketman to drag it around the corner to Hovel Road. He’d cleaned it with a scraper and some sandpaper out in the 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 removed the layers of dirt from this plate and read the name for the first time. It was L. Bear. L. Bear … Little Bear! Of course it was pure coincidence, but, as Omri thought, “If I were superstitious—!” He shined the brass every week. Somehow it, too, made him feel closer to Little Bear.
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 lid 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’d first received 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 ax, 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 figures of human beings or animals 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, from their own lives, with their own personalities and needs and demands …
Oh, it hadn’t been all fun and games, as Omri had naively expected at first. Little Bear was no toy, to submit tamely to being played with. He was, for all his tiny stature, a ferocious savage, warlike and domineering.
Omri had soon realized that if any grown-ups found out about the cabinet’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 Bear 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, forever …
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 shamingly softhearted 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 Bear and the wife Omri had found him, Bright Stars, sitting on Little Bear’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 Bear and Bright Stars into the cupboard again and bring them back to life. His curiosity about how they were getting on—that alone tormented him every day. They had lived in da
ngerous 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 Bear’s era, was dangerous too.
And there’d been another little man, Tommy the British medical orderly from the First World War—they’d magicked him to life to help when Little Bear was kicked by his horse, when Boone was 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, he had given his mother the key. She wore it around her neck on a chain (it was quite decorative). People often asked her about it, and she would say, “It’s Omri’s really, but he lends it to me.” That wasn’t the whole truth. Omri had pressed it on her and begged her to keep it safe for him. Safe … not just from getting lost again, but safe from him, from his longing to use it again, to reactivate the magic, to bring back his friends. To bring back the time when he had been—not happiest, but most intensely, dangerously alive himself.
Chapter 4
The Sweet Taste of Triumph
When Omri came back downstairs with the copy of his story, his brothers were both back from school.
Noticing that their parents were fairly gibbering with excitement, they were both pestering loudly to be told what had happened, but, being decent, Omri’s mother and father were refusing to spoil his surprise. However, the moment he entered the room his father turned and pointed to him.
“It’s Omri’s news,” he said. “Ask him to tell you.”
“Well?” said Gillon.
“Go on,” said Adiel. “Don’t drive us mad.”
“It’s just that I’ve won a prize,” said Omri with the utmost carelessness. “Here, Mum.” He handed her the folder, and she rushed out of the room with it clutched to her bosom, saying that she couldn’t wait another minute to read it.
“Prize for what?” asked Adiel cynically.
“For winning a donkey race?” inquired Gillon.
“Nothing much, it was only a story,” said Omri. It was such a long time since he had felt this good, he needed to spin it out.
“What story?” asked Adiel.
“What’s the prize?” asked Gillon at the same time.
“You know, that Telecom competition. There was an ad on TV. You had to write in for a leaflet from the post office.”
“Oh, that,” said Adiel, and went into the kitchen to get himself something to eat.
But Gillon was gazing at him. He paid more attention to ads, and he had remembered a detail that Adiel had forgotten.
“The prizes were money,” he said slowly. “Big money.”
Omri grunted noncommittally, sat down at the table and shifted Kitsa, who was still there, onto his lap.
“How much?” pressed Gillon.
“Hm?”
“How much?—Did you win? You didn’t get first prize?”
“Yeah.”
Gillon got up. “Not—you haven’t won three hundred quid?”
Adiel’s face appeared around the kitchen door, wearing a look of comical amazement.
“WHAT! What did you say?”
“That was the first prize in each category. I thought about entering myself.” Excitement and envy were in Gillon’s voice now, making it wobble up and down the register. He turned back to Omri. “Come on! Tell us.”
“Yeah,” said Omri again.
He felt their eyes on him and a great gleeful laugh rising in him, like the time Boone had done a tiny brilliant drawing during Omri’s art lesson and the teacher had seen it and couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d thought Omri had done it somehow. This time was even more fun, though, because this time he had.
He was sitting watching television some time later, when Adiel came in quietly and sat down beside him.
“I’ve read it,” he said after a while. His tone had changed completely.
“What?—Oh, my Indian story.”
“Yes. Your Indian story.” There was a pause, and then Adiel—his exam-passing brother—said very sincerely, almost humbly, “It’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read.”
Omri turned to look at him. “Do you really like it?” he asked eagerly. Whatever rows he might have with his brothers, and he had them daily, their good opinion mattered. Adiel’s especially.
“You know perfectly well it’s brilliant. How on earth did you dream all that up? Coming from another time and all that? It’s so well worked out, so … I dunno. You actually had me believing in it. And working in all those real parts, about the family. Blimey. I mean it was terrific. I … now don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t quite credit that you made it all up.”
After a pause, Omri said, “What do you mean? That you think I nicked it from a book? Because I didn’t.”
“It’s entirely original?”
Omri glanced at him. “Original? Yes. That’s what it is. It’s original.”
“Well, congratulations, anyway. I think it’s fabulous.” They stared at the screen for a while and then he added, “You’d better go and talk to Mum. She’s sobbing her eyes out.”
Omri reluctantly went in search of his mother, and found her in the conservatory at the back of the house watering her plants. Not with tears—to his great relief she was not crying now, but she gave him a rather misty smile and said, “I read the story, Omri. It’s utterly amazing. No wonder it won. You’re the darkest little horse I ever knew and I love you.” She hugged him. He submitted briefly, then politely extricated himself.
“When’s supper?”
“Usual time.”
He was just turning to go when he stopped and looked at her again. Something was missing from her general appearance. Then he saw what it was, and his heart missed a beat.
“Mum! Where’s the key?”
Her hand went to her neck.
“Oh … I took it off this morning when I washed my hair. It’s in the upstairs bathroom.”
Omri didn’t mean to run, but he couldn’t help it. He had to see the key, to be sure it wasn’t lost. He pelted up the stairs and into his parents’ bathroom. The key was there! He saw it as soon as he went in, lying on the ledge beside the basin with its silver chain coiled around it.
He picked it up. It was the first time he’d held it for a year. It felt colder and lighter than he remembered. Its twisted top and complicated lock part clicked into place in some memory pattern. And something else clicked at the same time, something that had been hovering in his mind, undefined, since he’d read the letter.
His story was original. Adiel had relieved his mind when he’d used that word. Even if you didn’t make a story up, if you had the experience, and you wrote about it, it was original. So he hadn’t cheated. But the story wasn’t only his. It also belonged to the little men—to Little Bear, and Boone, and even to Tommy, the World War I soldier. (It belonged to Patrick, too, but if Patrick had decided to deny it ever happened, then he’d given up his rights in it.)
And suddenly Omri realized, as he looked at the key, that his triumph wouldn’t really be complete until he’d shared it. Not just with his parents and brothers, or with the kids at school. No prize, no party could be as good as what he was thinking about now. This was his reason—his excuse to do what he’d been yearning to do ever since that moment when the cupboard door closed and transformed his friends back into plastic.
Only with Little Bear and Boone could he share the secret behind his story, the most exciting part of all—that it was true.
He turned, went out of the bathroom and up the remaining stairs to his attic room.
Not for long, he was thinking. “I w
on’t bring them back for long. Not long enough to cause problems. Just long enough to have a good talk. To find out how they are.”
Maybe Bright Stars had had a baby by now—a pa-poose! What fun if she brought it with her—though it would be almost too tiny to see. Little Bear had made himself a chief while he was with Omri, but when he returned to his own place, his father might still be alive. Little Bear wouldn’t like being an ordinary brave again! And Boone—the “crying cowboy” with a talent for art, a deep dislike of washing, and a heavy thirst … It made Omri grin to think of him. Writing about the little men and their adventures had made them so clear in his mind that it hardly seemed necessary to do what he was going to do.
Chapter 5
From Dangerous Times
With hands that shook, Omri probed into the depths of the chest till he found the box-within-a-box-within-a-box. He eased it out and closed the lid of the chest and put the boxes on top. Reverently he untied the string on the largest box, opened it, took out the next, and repeated the operation.
In the last box, carefully wrapped in cotton, was the plastic group consisting of a brown pony, an Indian brave, and a young Indian woman in a red dress. The brave’s left hand was upraised in farewell, his other arm circled the woman’s waist and held the rope rein. The woman, her long brown legs hanging on each side of the pony’s withers, had her hands buried in its mane. The pony’s head was alertly raised, its ears almost meeting above its forelock, its feet braced. Omri felt himself quivering all over as he stood the tiny figures on his hand and stared at them.
“You’re coming back,” he whispered—as if plastic could hear. But they wouldn’t be plastic long!
The cupboard was ready. Omri stood the figures not on its shelf but on its metal floor. Then he took a deep, deep breath as if he were going to dive into a cold, uncertain sea. He fitted the key into the lock, closed the door, and turned it.