The Secret of the Indian (The Indian in the Cupboard) Read online

  “Who?” croaked Omri.

  “… As Shakespeare says. I saw what I saw. They were real. They—are—real. That is the truth. Is it not?”

  Omri stood dumb. He shut his mouth on lies and truth alike, just stood there, silent.

  Mr. Johnson was thinking. A year ago, on the day in question, he had browbeaten Patrick into showing him the little people by means of a threat: to telephone Patrick’s father. It had worked then. Perhaps it would work now.

  “Omri, if you will not tell me what I wish to know, I shall have to get your parents’ cooperation.”

  Omri’s eyes leaped to the telephone. His mind, numb before, suddenly burst into activity. He had not locked his bedroom door because he couldn’t—it only bolted from the inside. The cupboard was there. Boone was there. Matron was there, and so were a number of Indians. unprotected and alone … not to mention Patrick, in a deep coma inside the chest. If Mr. Johnson phoned home, his mother or his father would answer, and the first thing they would do was go up to his room. If they believed it.

  But they wouldn’t. How could they?

  Looking at Mr. Johnson, Omri saw the same thought come into his mind. Mr. Johnson was not a man who enjoyed looking a fool.

  “Go ahead and phone them,” said Omri.

  The trap shifted. It was not Omri who was caught in it now. Mr. Johnson drummed with his fingers on the desk, looking at the phone, inwardly rehearsing the conversation…. No. He must get the boy to admit the truth first. But how?

  Just at that critical moment fate intervened. The phone they were both staring at began to ring.

  They jumped. Mr. Johnson, recovering himself, answered.

  “Hello? Yes, the headmaster here …” He listened, and his face changed. His eyes flashed to Omri, and his eyebrows went up. “Yes. Yes, he is. He’s with me now, as it happens….” He covered the phone with his hand and said grimly, “It’s your mother.”

  “Wh-what does she want?”

  He didn’t answer, just handed the receiver to Omri.

  “Mum?”

  “Omri? Where’s Patrick?”

  Omri’s heart plummeted to new depths in his chest.

  “Patrick—?”

  “Yes, darling, where is he? I’ve got his mother here, frantic. Emma’s with her and she’s been no help at all. Now come on, out with it, where is he?”

  “I—I’m not sure,” stammered Omri. Which wasn’t precisely a lie.

  There was a silence from the other end. Then:

  “Omri, let me speak to Mr. Johnson.”

  Dumbly, Omri handed the phone back, and listened as well as he could with the blood still pounding in his ears.

  “Yes? Johnson here … Yes … I see … Yes, I remember Patrick very well.” His eyes were narrowed with suspicion as he looked at Omri. “You want Omri to come home? … No, no problem about that,” he said smoothly. “In fact I’ll bring him myself.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Omri before he could restrain himself.

  “Oh, but oh, yes,” said Mr. Johnson. He hung up the phone deliberately and rose to his feet. “Come along, my boy, my—ahem!—Porsche is outside. You can direct me.”

  Omri directed him to his house. What else could he do? His mind was racing ahead. Patrick’s mother—his own mother—probably his father—and now Mr. Johnson. They would all be there, all going at him, going at Emma, breaking down their resistance. All he could think of by way of consolation was, Thank goodness I sent Little Bear, Bright Stars, and the baby safely back! The figures were still in his pocket.

  Mr. Johnson parked his nice new Porsche (part of an inheritance, it was rumored) outside the house under the big old elm that had died in the Dutch elm disease epidemic some years before but hadn’t yet been cut down. It was a good climbing tree, and Omri, in his imagination, shinnied straight up to the top of it in a trice. If only he could be there, on that branch just above his attic bedroom skylight, he might manage to climb in, bolt the door, get all the little people safely in the cupboard, restore Patrick, all before anyone could get there by the usual route….

  If only! If only! But Mr. Johnson’s hand was back like a steel vise on his shoulder, the front door was opening even before they reached it, and there they all were, waiting. Waiting for Omri to explain!

  16

  Panic

  OKAY, OMRI, WHERE HAVE you hidden Patrick?”

  “Where is he, darling?”

  “Where’s my son? Just wait till I lay my hands on him!” Emma’s face was actually the one Omri’s eyes fastened on. She looked really pathetic. When she saw him looking at her, she gave her head a little shake, which he instantly understood to mean, “I haven’t told them anything.” But they’d obviously been giving her a rough time, and Omri felt terrible about that.

  The mothers both looked as if they were about to pounce on him; his father simply looked baffled. So naturally it was his father he made for.

  “Dad, can I speak to you alone?”

  “In my opinion, that would be most unwise,” said Mr. Johnson.

  They all turned to look at him, and Omri saw his father’s face tighten. He turned back to Omri.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen.”

  “Can I come?” asked Emma in a small voice, as if she thought they would all start up with her again the moment Omri was out of sight.

  “Yes,” said Omri. “Come on, Em.” He really felt sorry for her. She actually seemed to be trembling, and as they entered the kitchen, she dropped something that clattered on the tiled floor.

  They both bent simultaneously, but Omri got there first. What she’d dropped was a plastic figure of a girl in red. He thought for a moment it was Bright Stars’s figure, but it was just an ordinary girl. Before he could return it to her, his father got between him and Emma, so Omri slipped it into his pocket.

  “Now, Omri, you’d better tell me at once where Patrick is.”

  When the brain is pushed to its limits, something always emerges. Even if it’s the worst possible thing, in this case the truth.

  “He’s in my room, Dad.”

  “No, he’s not,” said his father promptly. “We looked.” Omri closed his eyes and waited, but there was no more. Presumably they simply hadn’t noticed, or the little people had frozen into stillness. He opened his eyes again. His father was gazing at him expectantly.

  “He’s—hiding.”

  “Hiding? What for? Where?”

  Omri glanced at Emma.

  “In—in the chest.”

  His father looked incredulous. “Are you having me on, Omri? He can’t have been there all this time!”

  “I—I don’t know. He was there when I left for school.”

  “But why? What was the idea?”

  “He—he didn’t want to go home. Yet.”

  And then his father said the most wonderful thing.

  “Well! You’d better run up and fetch him.”

  Omri’s heart bounded with incredulous relief. Galvanized, he rushed to the door, and Emma followed close.

  “And I think I’ll come too,” remarked his father.

  Omri and Emma stopped dead.

  “No, Dad.”

  “No?”

  “No. I—we’ll go by ourselves.” Omri turned and fastened his eyes on his father’s. “Please.” His father hesitated.

  “This is all very mysterious,” he said, not at all lightly. “I hope there’s nothing going on that you ought to be ashamed of, Omri.”

  “No, Dad!”

  “Okay. Go on. But remember, we’re down here, waiting, all of us, and if you’re not back—with Patrick—P.D.Q., I’ll be up there after you.”

  They raced, past the little knot of adults in the hall, up the stairs two at a time, all the way up to the attic.

  Omri’s chief fear now was that, after more than twenty-four hours, Patrick would have come to some harm, wherever he was. What if, when they brought him back, he was hurt, or even—But it was useless to speculate. The vital thing was to get him b
ack, but first Omri had to hide every bit of evidence of the magic.

  The second they got into the room, he bolted the door and made for the seed tray.

  “Give her back.”

  He turned. Emma was standing by the cupboard.

  “What—”

  “I’ll put her in myself.”

  “Put who in? What are you talking about?” panted Omri.

  “It’s the end, isn’t it? You’re sending them all back now, and you won’t do any of it again because the grown-ups are near to finding out, and it’s got too dangerous.”

  Omri looked at her. Her face froze him. She was Patrick’s cousin, and now he saw a likeness—she had the same look Omri had seen on Patrick’s face so many times, when he had made up his mind to do something outrageous.

  “What are you on about?” he asked sharply.

  “I picked out that girl. From my model set. I’m going to make her real, and I’m going to keep her forever.”

  Omri almost pushed her out of his way. “You’re mad,” he said shortly. He was still breathless from his run, and from stifled panic—his brain wasn’t working well, and he couldn’t cope with this new threat.

  He bent to the entrance of the longhouse. “Matron!”

  She emerged. Her headdress was all bent, which happened only when she was thoroughly flustered.

  “My dear!” she cried, her hand on her thin bosom as if to restrain her heart from leaping out of it. “I thought you and Patrick were giants, but some people came into the room who were even bigger than you! I think they were looking for something. I ducked back into the longhouse the second I saw them, and ordered all my patients to keep absolutely silent. Luckily the giants only glanced around once and then went out again, but oh, dear me, it was a bad moment!”

  “You did the right thing, Matron. Now I have to send you back.”

  “Not a moment too soon! And I think I can fairly say I’m leaving all my patients well on the road to recovery. How will you send them back—the nonambulatory cases?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve thought about that.” When the chest was empty, he would just put the whole seed tray, complete with longhouse and occupants, into it; that way he wouldn’t have to move the injured Indians individually. But he thought he had better send Matron back through the cupboard in case she wound up in the wrong place.

  Matron stepped gingerly onto Omri’s hand and knelt down to keep her balance as he airlifted her to the cupboard. She was looking at him closely.

  “My boy?”

  “Yes?”

  “You look worried. Am I wrong in thinking that something has happened to—change the situation radically?”

  “You’re not wrong, Matron. You—I’m afraid I won’t be bringing you back again.”

  She stepped off his hand into the cupboard. She cleared her throat loudly.

  “I can see there is no time for prolonged farewells.” She straightened her uniform skirt and checked her pockets to make sure she had all her bits and pieces. Her hand strayed once to her cap, and Omri thought he saw her furtively wipe her eyes with the tail end of one of the floating ribbons attached to it. He knew he would have felt tearful himself if it were not for his desperate preoccupations.

  “You’ve been absolutely wonderful. I’ll miss you,” he said sincerely.

  “Oh, pish, tush, and likewise—” But she choked on the last word and simply put out her hand to touch the tip of his finger, which he extended to her.

  “You’d better hurry!” said Emma. “Here, let me do it!” And before Omri knew what was happening, she had shut the door with a thump and turned the key. Omri stood silent, his heart beating, feeling the pressure of time, of all the grown-ups waiting downstairs, and realized he was putting off the moment when he would open the chest.

  Then he was aware that Emma was standing there with the key clutched in her hand.

  “Now I want my red girl,” she said.

  “You’re not going to bring anything to life now,” Omri retorted. “I can’t let you. If you can’t see why not, then—then I just wish I’d never let you in on it.”

  Emma’s hard, almost Tamsin-like look softened. “Please, Omri. Just give her to me. All right, I won’t do anything. Just let me have her.”

  Omri reached into his pocket. “Right. Give me the key.”

  There was a moment—a bad moment—when he thought she was going to refuse. God, this was scary! The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing for a little person of their own! It was worse than the way people behaved over gold. If Emma could frighten him like this, what would happen if the grown-ups ever—

  Suddenly an awful thought struck him, and he stiffened with horror.

  Mr. Johnson! Mr. Johnson knew. He was downstairs now, and there was absolutely nothing to stop him from blowing the whole secret wide open! That was what he had come for, and that was what he would do!

  No sooner had this thought surfaced than he heard something.

  Emma heard it too. Both their heads snapped around to face the door.

  “They’re coming up here! All of them!” she breathed.

  “Oh, God,” whispered Omri, closing his eyes in despair. “He’s told them!”

  17

  The Big Blow

  QUICK! GIVE ME the key!” She didn’t hesitate now, but thrust the key at him, snatching the red girl at the same time from his other hand. Omri stumbled across to the chest.

  “Bring the seed tray—hurry—” he gasped as the thudding of feet on the lower stairway got louder. He could hear their voices, querulous, anxious, Mr. Johnson’s the loudest, dominating their questions.

  “—No room for further doubt—biological phenomenon—saw with my own eyes—”

  Wait, wait! No time for two operations—do it all at once—Omri opened the chest, grabbed the seed tray out of Emma’s hands, and put it in the bottom next to Patrick’s feet—he was aware of Emma, leaning closely over him—and slammed down the lid. His hand was so unsteady—they were nearly at the door—that it took two or three stabs before he could thrust the key into the lock. Then he turned it.

  What happened next was something he could never afterward remember clearly, and yet would never, ever forget.

  The main memory, later, was of a stupendous noise, a deafening roar that filled the room to bursting. But the pressure of the sound was not what threw him and Emma right across the room and slammed them backward against the wall.

  The chest … He was to remember seeing the end of his chest. It simply lifted into the air as the lid blasted open, and then it disintegrated. It simply blew outward into fragments. One bit of it hit him in the stomach and knocked the breath out of him. At the same time something large and heavy was hurled and tumbled across the floor and struck Emma’s legs.

  Then Omri witnessed, in a few traumatic, incredible seconds, the total destruction of his room.

  The skylight above his bed vanished first, though he was too stunned to see it go—the glass erupting in a puff of sparkling dust as the violent charge that had come out of the chest roared upward through the hole in the roof. But the hole wasn’t large enough, nothing like large enough to channel that black tower of pure force that detonated from bottom to top of the little room.

  The edges of the square hole bent outward like rubber for a split second, and then with a tearing, wrenching, screeching sound that could be heard distinctly through the original roaring, the whole slope of the roof disappeared.

  At that, everything in the room that could possibly move—all the bedding, the Japanese table, the floor cushions, books, Omri’s collections, the clock radio, and half a hundred other objects—whirled, in a blinding, terrifying tenth of a second, out into the sky as if sucked by an inhalation from the heavens.

  That was it. That was all, inside the room. But the noise had not stopped; it had simply gone out of the house. They could still hear it outside. A wind to end winds, the most ferocious, destructive blast to hit England for
two hundred years, was beginning a career that would make news all over the world.

  The first of several million trees it was destined to uproot was the old elm outside Omri’s house that should have come down years ago, and now did so, with a demolishing crash, right on top of Mr. Johnson’s new Porsche.

  The wind then proceeded at high speed down Hovel Road, blowing off roofs, knocking down trees, and wrecking the happy haunts of skinheads—a maverick Texas cyclone, which the weathermen had not predicted and could never explain, on its way to cause unprecedented havoc to southeast England.

  Omri and Emma found themselves lying on the floor on the very edge of consciousness. Omri was clutching the thing that had hit him, something sharp that dug into his hands. Emma was clutching something, too. What she was clutching was Patrick.

  He alone did not seem to be much fazed or hurt. As the deafening noise began to fade into the distance, he sat up, rubbed his hands over his face and head, and said, “Blimey! Just in time!”

  The other two stared at him glassily. He stood up, shook himself, turned—and stopped.

  “Crumbs,” he breathed, gazing around the shell of Omri’s room.

  He looked upward into open sky, an angry sky still full of whirling leaves and odd fragments. The broken-off joists of the roof stuck out in silhouette. It was like looking out through the wide-open mouth of a gigantic shark.

  “You know what,” he said slowly, “I think I must’ve brought the twister back with me.”

  “Twister … ?” Omri’s voice came out thickly, and he found his throat was choked with dust. The air was full of it.

  “Yeah. A cyclone … We saw it coming up the street, whirling like a black funnel, throwing huge things into the air. It was just about onto us when—”

  His hand flew to his mouth. He turned slowly back to where Omri and Emma were lying.

  “Where’s Boone?” he asked hollowly. “Where’s Ruby Lou?”