“Careful. Don’t frighten the ponies.”
The ponies, however, were getting used to being carried about, and hardly looked up from munching the little piles of grass-cuttings. There was no sign of life from the longhouse.
There followed a timeless period of just sitting there silently, their eyes fixed on Boone’s still figure in the flickering candlelight. Omri began to feel light-headed after a bit: the candle flame went fuzzy and Boone’s body seemed to vibrate as he stared at it. At the very back of his mind, something else was nagging, nagging… He didn’t ask himself what this was, because he had a superstitious feeling that if he let his mind wander from Boone, even for a minute, Boone would slip away into death. It was as if only Omri’s will – and Patrick’s – were keeping that tiny, fragile heart beating.
Suddenly, though, a thought – like a landscape lit up by lightning – flashed to the forefront of Omri’s brain. He sat up, his eyes wide open and his breath held.
“Patrick!”
Patrick jumped. He’d been half asleep.
“What?”
“The key! I know where it is!”
“Where? Where?”
“Right under my feet. It must have dropped through the floorboards when Dad opened them. There’s nowhere else it could be.”
Patrick gazed at him in admiration, but also in dismay.
“How are we going to get it?” he whispered.
“We’ll have to take up the carpet first. Maybe Dad didn’t nail all the boards down.”
Moving very quietly, they managed to lift one corner of Omri’s bed and kick back the edge of carpet from underneath. Another bit was under the bedside table leg, and that was tricky, but they shifted it between them in the end. Carefully they folded the corner of carpet back on itself, exposing the boards. Omri then stuck his fingers down the narrow crack at the ends of the boards, one after another, testing to see if they could be lifted. Only one of them could. The rest were nailed down to the joists underneath.
Making as little noise as possible – he hadn’t heard his parents go to bed yet – Omri prised up the short end of board. A hole, about the size of a man’s foot, gaped in the light of the candle Patrick was holding. Even when he put the candle down the hole, they couldn’t see much.
“We’ll have to risk the bedside light,” Omri said.
They switched it on, and carried it on its flex down to the hole. Kneeling on the floor, they peered into the depths. They could make out the dusty lath-and-plaster several centimetres down – the topside of the ceiling of the room below. The room where Omri’s parents were now sitting…
“We’ll have to be dead quiet or they’ll hear us.”
“Dead quiet doing what?” asked Patrick. “It’s not there. You’d see it if it was.”
“It must be under one of the nailed-down boards,” said Omri despairingly.
At that moment they heard Little Bull calling them, and they stood up.
He was standing outside the longhouse, naked but for his breech-cloth. His hair hung loose, his face and chest and arms were smeared with ashes, his feet were bare.
“Little Bull! What are you doing?” asked Omri, aghast at his appearance.
“Want fire. Want make dance. Call spirits. Make Boone live.”
Omri looked at him for a moment and felt an ache in his throat that reminded him painfully of his babyish days, when he used to cry so much – days he thought he had left behind forever.
“Little Bull, dancing won’t do any good. The spirits won’t help. We need a doctor. To get the doctor we need the key. Would you help find it?”
Little Bull didn’t move a muscle. “I help.”
Gently Omri picked him up. He knelt on the floor and put his hand down in the hole. Patrick held the light. Omri opened his hand and Little Bull stood on it, looking around into the dusty dark tunnel stretching away under the floor.
“I think it’s somewhere down there,” Omri said quietly, “on the other side of that wooden wall. You’ll have to find a way through, a hole or crack or something. We’ll give you all the light we can, but it’s bound to be awfully dark on the other side. Do you think you can do it?”
“I go,” said Little Bull immediately.
“Right. Start looking for a way through.”
Little Bull, a tiny, vulnerable figure, strode off through the dust into the darkness under the floor.
Omri pulled the lampshade off the bedside lamp and thrust the bulb down into the hole. He couldn’t get his head in to watch, and Little Bull went out of sight almost at once.
“Is there a way through?” he whispered down the tunnel.
“Yes,” came Little Bull’s voice. “Big hole. I go through. Omri give light.”
Omri pushed the light down as far as he could, but the base of the lamp made it stick.
“Can you see anything?” he whispered as loudly as he dared.
There was no answer. He and Patrick knelt there for an age. There wasn’t a sound. Then Patrick said suddenly, “Did he take his bow and arrows?”
“No. Why?”
“What if – Omri – what if he meets the rat?”
Omri had totally forgotten about the rat in the excitement of realizing what had happened to the key. Now he felt a strange jerk in his chest, as if his heart had hiccupped.
He bent his head till his face was in the hole. He could smell the dust. The bright bulb was between him and the place where Little Bull had presumably gone through a hole in the joist into the next section of the under-floor space. A hole! What could make a hole right through a joist? What else but a rat, gnawing away all day? A rat at this moment out on his night-prowl, a hungry rat who hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours – a pink-eyed, needle-toothed, omniverous, giant rat?
“Little Bull!” called Omri frantically into the blankness. “Come back! Come back!”
Utter silence. And then he heard something. But it wasn’t Little Bull’s voice. It was the scuttering sound of a rodent’s hard little hairless feet on lath-and-plaster.
“Little Bull!”
“Omri!” It was a voice from the room below. “What are you doing up there?”
It was his mother. Then, quite distinctly, he heard his father’s voice. “I can hear that blasted rat pattering about overhead. It’s probably keeping the boys awake.”
“I’d better go up,” said his mother. A door closed below and they heard her coming up the stairs. Even this dire prospect hardly had power to do more than push Omri’s desperation one stage further. He probably wouldn’t have moved from his place on the floor if Patrick hadn’t acted swiftly.
“Quick! Light off! Into bed!”
He pulled Omri up, snatched the lamp out of his hand and switched it off. The candle was still down the hole. Patrick shoved the floorboard roughly back into position and moved the carpet so that it more or less covered the boards if you didn’t look closely. Then he pushed Omri into his bed, covered him up – the footsteps were nearly at the door – and had just flung himself down on the folding bed when the door opened.
Omri lay there with his eyes squeezed shut thinking, “Don’t put the light on! Don’t put the light on!” Light was coming into the room