thought he was dead, for sure! Om?”
“Mmm.”
“You still awake? I’ve heard of lots of hikers and climbers getting lost on Dartmoor! One lot died of exposure. We’d better buy some rope and rope ourselves together. We’ll need proper climbing boots, knapsacks, sleeping bags… maps, compasses… a stove…” His voice finally petered out on a lengthy list of prospective purchases.
Omri was nowhere near sleeping. He was actually sitting up. He’d switched on his pencil torch and was making notes. Maps and compasses… Could you get maps of north-eastern United States back in the eighteenth century? Sleeping bags, knapsacks and a stove certainly sounded as if they’d be useful. If only they could take them!
He kept imagining himself, and his dad, in the car. They could put all the stuff they’d need in there. If you were touching a sleeping bag that was wrapped round a bunch of other useful stuff, it would all go back. They’d have to really think hard. It would be no use wanting to pop back from Little Bull’s time to get something they’d forgotten.
Wait.
The car.
Omri could see himself and his dad sitting in the front seats of the car, which was parked in some remote spot, with the bundles of stuff they were going to ‘take back’ on their laps, and his dad with the key, the magic key.
How to lock the car? With the window open, reach through it and stick the key in the door from outside?
Or put it in the ignition?
Omri suddenly jumped out of bed and went to where the cupboard was standing in the middle of the new shelf. The key was in the lock. He took it out and looked at it. His heart sank.
The key was magic, yes. And it was a ‘skeleton’ key, that would fit a lot of locks. But car keys were different. They were a different shape. They weren’t cylindrical, for one thing. They were flat.
Omri suddenly knew, without any doubt, that no way would the magic key slide into either the door lock or the ignition of their car. This wasn’t going to work.
Yet there was no doubting the signs. The numberplate, C18 LB, was like a summons. The car was their cupboard, all right. It was just a matter of solving this little key problem.
This called for a consultation.
Clutching the key tightly, he tiptoed through Gillon’s room to the head of the stairs at that end of the house. This was a Dorset longhouse – not like an Iroquois one, but a special kind they had in this part of England, one room deep with stairs at each end, no corridors. He crept down the narrow wooden stairway, which opened into the last little sitting room at this end, that his parents had designated as a TV-free zone. As he’d hoped, his dad, who didn’t like TV much, was sitting there reading.
“Dad!” Omri hissed.
His father looked up. “Hello, Om. What’s up? Can’t you sleep?”
“Where’s Mum?”
“Watching something ghastly about hospitals. Ber-lud everywhere,” he added, quoting Gillon.
Omri glided over to him. “I’ve thought of something ghastlier. Look at this key. Think of the car.”
His father took it from him and examined it. “Oh hell,” he said softly.
“See? It’s not going to fit.”
“Of course not! Why didn’t I think of that? I was so excited about the numberplate…”
Omri sat beside him on the mini-sofa. “What’ll we do?”
They sat silently for a long time, thinking. Omri had time to notice that the book his dad was reading was one of his books about Indians – his dad must have gone into his room earlier and taken it from his ‘library’. It was a huge tome called Stolen Continents that Omri had bought second-hand. Now it slipped to the floor and neither of them picked it up.
The whole adventure was poised on the edge of being aborted. Before it had even begun.
“You know, Omri,” his father said at last, “there is an answer. There’s got to be. The trouble for me is, I don’t know enough about the whole business to find the solution. I’ve been thinking. That story of yours, that won the Telecom prize. That was true, wasn’t it – I thought at the time it had an absolute ring of truth. So I know about the first part. But a lot has happened since then – developments. I think what you’d better do is try to tell me everything.”
“Now?”
His dad looked at his watch. It was only ten pm. “Are you tired? It’s school tomorrow.”
“I couldn’t possibly sleep.”
“Okay, start talking. Keep your voice down.”
Omri talked for an hour.
He told about how he’d brought Little Bull back after a year, just to tell him about his winning story, and found he’d been wounded in a raid on his village and left to die. Only Twin Stars going out to find him and lug him somehow on to his pony – and then Matron, who’d proved as good as any surgeon, taking the musket-ball out of his back – had saved him.
He told Patrick’s adventure, back in nineteenth-century Texas, how he’d met Ruby Lou, a saloon-bar hostess, and how they’d saved Boone, Patrick’s cowboy, from dying alone in the desert. How Omri had brought him back just as a hurricane had hit the cow-town, and the hurricane had come back with him.
He kept remembering things and wanting to go back, or off at a tangent. His father, who had had a notebook and pencil at his side while reading Stolen Continents, made notes.
When Omri came to the recent part, about Jessica Charlotte, he was getting really sleepy.
His dad interrupted. “Listen, why don’t you just give me the Account to read for myself? And you get off to bed.”
So Omri tiptoed upstairs again and fetched Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. He carried it reverently downstairs and put it in his father’s hands, and stood there while he stroked its old leather cover and ran his forefingers around the brass corner-bindings.
“It’s fascinating, almost magic just holding it,” he said. “I can’t wait to read this. Go on, bub, get some sleep.” Just as Omri was starting up the stairs, his dad added: “Don’t keep yourself awake, but do Mum’s trick.”
“What’s that?”
“Mum says that when she’s got a problem, she thinks about it last thing before she drops off. She swears her subconscious works on it while she’s sleeping, and sometimes in the morning the solution just appears.”
So Omri did ‘Mum’s trick’. As he lay, drifting off to sleep, he thought about the two keys – the cupboard key, and the car key. He laid them side by side in his imagination. They were so different that anyone who didn’t know what a key was, wouldn’t have seen a connection between them. It seemed extraordinary, even to
