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 Omri who had always taken the function of keys for granted, that something so small could make the difference between being able to open a door or make a car go, or be completely stymied.
And in this case, it was the difference between being able to go back into the past, or being stuck here. Between being able to have a great adventure, and not. Being able, maybe, to help Little Bull in his dire trouble, and having to leave him and his tribe to their fate.
There had to be an answer. There had to be.
Omri woke up early the following morning. Before he’d even opened his eyes, he ‘looked’ at the two keys, still lying side by side in his imagination as they had been in his last, sleepy thoughts the night before. His body stiffened. One of the keys had changed!
It was the car key.
He’d often seen it in reality, hanging in a box of little hooks inside the front door of the cottage, where his father and mother always hung it as soon as they came in from driving so it wouldn’t get lost. Last night, when he’d visualised it, it had been the key he knew – a flat metal key with a round, flat top made of some plastic material with an ‘F’ for Ford imprinted on it.
Now the key, as clearly in his mind as if he could see it in front of his eyes, no longer had the round black plastic bit at the top. It was all metal. It was as if the whole key had been remoulded.
He sat up sharply in bed. Remould the key!
How could they? And if they did, what good would it do? Only the magic key could take them back in time.
Unless…
He jumped out of bed and barged through into his parents’ bedroom, which adjoined his. The door flew backwards, hitting his father, who was doing the same manoeuvre in reverse, and nearly knocking him flying.
“Shhhh!” they both hissed, and then stifled laughter. Omri could see his mum’s shape under the duvet, still sound asleep. It was far too early for her to wake up – not much past six o’clock.
Omri backed into his own room and his dad followed, closing the old-fashioned plank door silently behind them and lowering the latch so it wouldn’t click. Then he turned to face Omri. He looked very tired, but his face was flushed with suppressed excitement.
“You’ve thought of something!” Omri guessed at once.
“We’ll have to whisper. Listen.” Omri now noticed he was holding Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. “I read this, all of it, last night. It has got to be the most extraordinary, fascinating, amazing thing I have ever read. Of course I’m crazy about old diaries and stuff from the past. God, when I read something like this – what am I talking about, there IS nothing like this, this is unique, but when I was reading it I got so caught up, wanting to know more and more about the time she lived through, the First World War, and the period before that – it was like having her right in the room, telling me—”
“Yeah, Dad, I know, I read it, I know just what you mean. But about the key.”
“Yes! Well! Isn’t it obvious? I mean, Jessica Charlotte made the magic key. She fed her ‘gift’ as she called it, into it without even meaning to. Remember what she said?” He was searching through the yellowing pages, and found the place, marked with a match. “Yes, here! I hardly knew it then – I only knew I was bending all my strength on making the key perfect, and I felt something go out of me, and then the key grew warm again in my hands as if freshly poured, and I knew it had power in it to do more than open boxes. But I didn’t know what. I only knew my heart had broken and that I would have given anything to have it be yesterday and not today.”
He