Patrick licked his lips, swallowed twice more, and croaked out, “He’s real. He’s a real live Indian.”
“I told you.”
“How did it happen?”
“Don’t ask me. Something to do with this cupboard, or maybe it’s the key – it’s very old. You lock plastic people inside, and they come alive.”
Patrick goggled at him. “You mean – it’s not only him? You can do it with any toy?”
“Only plastic ones.”
An incredulous grin spread over Patrick’s face.
“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s bring loads of things to life! Whole armies—”
And he sprang towards the biscuit tins. Omri grabbed him.
“No, wait! It’s not so simple.”
Patrick, his hands already full of soldiers, was making for the cupboard. “Why not?”
“Because they’d all – don’t you see – they’d be real.”
“Real? What do you mean?”
“Little Bull isn’t a toy. He’s a real man. He really lived. Maybe he’s still – I don’t know – he’s in the middle of his life – somewhere in America in seventeen-something-or-other. He’s from the past,” Omri struggled to explain as Patrick looked blank.
“I don’t get it.”
“Listen. Little Bull has told me about his life. He’s fought in wars, and scalped people, and grown stuff to eat like marrows and stuff, and had a wife. She died. He doesn’t know how he got here but he thinks it’s magic and he accepts magic, he believes in it, he thinks I’m some kind of spirit or something. What I mean,” Omri persisted, as Patrick’s eyes strayed longingly to the cupboard, “is that if you put all those men in there, when they came to life they’d be real men with real lives of their own, from their own times and countries, talking their own languages. You couldn’t just – set them up and make them do what you wanted them to. They’d do what they wanted to, or they might get terrified and run away or – well, one I tried it with, an old Indian, actually died of – of fright. When he saw me. Look, if you don’t believe me!” And Omri opened the cupboard.
There lay the body of the old Chief, now made of plastic, but still unmistakably dead, and not dead the way some plastic soldiers are made to look dead but the way real people look – crumpled up, empty.
Patrick picked it up, turning it in his hand. He’d put the soldiers down by now.
“This isn’t the one you bought at lunchtime?”
“Yes.”
“Crumbs.”
“You see?”
“Where’s his headdress?”
“Little Bull took it. He says he’s a Chief now. It’s made him even more bossy and – difficult than before,” said Omri, using a word his mother often used when he was insisting on having his own way.
Patrick put the dead Indian down hurriedly and wiped his hand on the seat of his jeans.
“Maybe this isn’t such fun as I thought.”
Omri considered for a moment.
“No,” he agreed soberly. “It’s not fun.”
They stared at Little Bull. He had finished the shell of the longhouse now. Taking off his headdress he tucked it under his arm, stooped, and entered through the low doorway at one end. After a moment he came out and looked up at Omri.
“Little Bull hungry,” he said. “You get deer? Bear? Moose?”
“No.”
He scowled. “I say get. Why you not get?”
“The shops are shut. Besides,” added Omri, thinking he sounded rather feeble, especially in front of Patrick, “I’m not sure I like the idea of having bears shambling about my room, or of having them killed. I’ll give you meat and a fire and you can cook it and that’ll have to do.”
Little Bull looked baffled for a moment. Then he swiftly put on the headdress, and drew himself to his full height of seven centimetres (nearly eight with the feathers). He folded his arms and glared at Omri.
“Little Bull Chief now. Chief hunts. Kills own meat. Not take meat others kill. If not hunt, lose skill with bow. For today, you give meat. Tomorrow, go shop, get bear, plass-tick. Make real. I hunt. Not here,” he added, looking up scornfully at the distant ceiling. “Out. Under sky. Now fire.”
Patrick, who had been crouching, stood up. He, too, seemed to be under Little Bull’s spell.
“I’ll go and get the tar,” he said.
“No wait a minute,” said Omri. “I’ve got another idea.”
He ran downstairs. Fortunately the living-room was empty. In the coal-scuttle beside the open fireplace was a packet of firelighters. He broke a fairly large bit off one and wrapped it in a scrap of newspaper. Then he went to the kitchen. His mother was standing at the sink peeling apples.
Omri hesitated, then went to the fridge.
“Don’t eat now, Omri, it’s nearly suppertime.”
“Just a tiny bit,” he said.
There was a lovely chunk of raw meat on a plate. Omri sniffed his fingers, wiped them hard on his sweater to get the stink of the firelighter off them, then took a big carving-knife from the drawer and, with an anxious glance at his mother’s back, began sawing a corner off the meat.
Luckily it was steak and cut easily. Even so he nearly had the whole plate off the fridge shelf and onto the floor before he’d cut his corner off.
His mother swung round just as he closed the fridge door.
“A tiny bit of what?” she asked. She often reacted late to things he said.
“Nothing,” he said, hiding the raw bit of meat in his hand. “Mum, could I borrow a tin plate?”
“I haven’t got such a thing.”
“Yes you have, the one you bought Adiel to go camping.”
“That’s in Adiel’s room somewhere, I haven’t got it. A tiny bit of what?”
But Omri was already on his way upstairs. Adiel was in his room (he would be) doing his homework.
“What do you want?” he asked the second Omri crept in.
“That plate – you know – your camping one.”
“Oh, that!” said Adiel, going back to his French.
“Well, can I have it?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. It’s over there somewhere.”
Omri found it eventually in an old knapsack, covered with disgusting bits of baked beans, dry and hard as cement. He hurried across to his own room. Whenever he’d been away from it for even a few minutes, he felt his heart beating in panic as he opened the door for fear of what he might find (or not find). The burden of constant worry was beginning to wear him out.
But all was as he had left it this time. Patrick was crouching near the seed-tray. Little Bull was directing him to take the tops off several of the jars of poster paint while he himself fashioned something almost