The Mystery of the Cupboard (14 page)

“As soon as Dad's ready to take me,” Omri said.

“Can't wait! Where are these little Kitsa-cats then? Oh, I see — I'll just—”

It all happened remarkably quickly. As Patrick (who was bigger than any of the other boys) put his weight along the boards, they gave a short creak and sagged sharply under his weight, and before he could grab hold
of anything, there was a very loud crack and he vanished in a cloud of hay and wood dust.

Omri was to feel pangs of guilt later because his first thought was for Kitsa's nest. But she had made it where the boards rested on a cross rafter, and apart from the end of one of the boards jerking a few inches upward as it broke in the middle, the kittens were undisturbed — though Kitsa instinctively leapt aside.

Patrick, however, was not so lucky.

He landed first on Tony, who was directly underneath. This broke his fall. Nevertheless he lay stunned on the concrete floor.

“He's dead! Is he dead? He's dead!” was Gillon's first reaction.

“Ow! Shoot! My head!” moaned Tony (only he didn't say ‘shoot').

Omri jumped down the ladder and without wasting time looking at Patrick, belted across the yard to his father's studio.

“Dad! Dad! Patrick's fallen, he's hurt!” he yelled.

An hour later Patrick was in a hospital bed after having a broken arm set. He had to stay in for head X-rays. He was awake, but dozy. Not all that dozy, though.

“Don't mind me,” he said to Omri. “Get it. Then come and tell me everything.”

“I'll bring the cashbox here tomorrow,” said Omri.

“No,” said Patrick. “Don't bring it here. Too dangerous.”

“What do you mean, dangerous?”

“Well, haven't you thought? The chest worked just like the cupboard. If the cashbox is the same, and it has got little people in it, when you open it with the magic key, you'll bring them to life.”

On the way home, Omri sat in the back of the car, frowning, full of this new thought. The contents of the cashbox were wrapped. He would have to act quickly or the little people might suffocate when he unlocked the box. If they were there at all.

In the past, Omri had usually been careful to bring to life only one little person at a time, and only when he had great need of them, like Matron, for instance, when Little Bull was injured. There had always been the problem of explaining to them why they were here, why they were small, and so on — no easy task. Some thought they must be drunk, some, dreaming, some — Little Bull, his American Indian, for instance — that Omri was a spirit. Later, they got used to the strange situation.

Well. At least these little people of Jessica Charlotte's had been ‘brought' before. No explanations would be necessary. But they might be anybody, from any time, and there were almost certainly several of them, who, the moment he turned the key, would all come to life at once.

T
he woman at the bank said it would take time to find the parcel and get it to the counter. She asked them to come back later.

“Fine—” began Omri's father, but Omri interrupted.

“If we went away for say, half an hour, and then came back, would you have it ready?” he asked.

“Omri, they're busy, we could easily—”

“I want it today, Dad!”

His father shrugged. The woman smiled and said, “That'll be all right.”

Omri and his dad walked out into the village square.
There was a sort of little house — just a roof on four stone pillars — in the middle, where you could sit. This was nicknamed Georgina after the woman whose memorial it was.

They bought ice creams and went and sat in Georgina. Omri's father was in a thoughtful mood.

“I'm not trying to pry, Omri, you know that's not my style. But… Well. Where did you get to on Sunday, for instance? You never even showed up for lunch.”

“I told you, Dad. I went to talk to the old thatcher.”

“For three hours?”

“Yeah, well. He was very—”

“Interesting. You said so. I think all craftsmen are interesting. They're not necessarily three hours'-worth of interesting, though, unless you're in their line of business.”

Omri said nothing. The Urge was coming over him. His father was very special to him. It was true he didn't pry. Unlike his mother, who, quite frankly, couldn't keep her mouth shut, you could trust him with anything. Almost… It would be so - so wonderful, such a relief, to tell his father everything, and get his advice.

But quite suddenly Omri knew what advice he would give on the present matter.

He could almost hear him saying it. “Leave well alone, Omri. There's absolutely no reason to bring these people to life. Except curiosity. Think of all the problems you've had in the past. Think of the damage you've caused.
People have died because you meddled. Haven't you learnt anything from all that? I know it's a temptation, but… Leave well alone, why don't you?”

Omri bit his lips, clamping back the words that would unstopper the source of the secret and let it all pour out of him.

Perhaps he could just tell about the notebook. He made a lightning review of its contents. No. Hopeless. It gave the whole game away. His father would put two and two together with the time Mr Johnson, just before the Big Storm, brought Omri home from school and announced, to his parents and to Patrick's mother, that he'd once seen two miniature people with his own eyes. Then the roof had literally fallen in and Mr Johnson went a bit barmy after a branch hit him on the head, and obviously nobody thought about the business of the little people again.

But just as Omri's prize-winning story had made Mr Johnson realize that he hadn't been imagining things, so Jessica Charlotte's story might cast a new light on Mr Johnson's. That, and the cupboard, and the key, and all the funny goings-on Omri's father
must
have noticed last year and the year before, and not thought too much about - then. Now he would, it would all make sense, well, a sort of crazy sense. He would begin to believe it, and Omri might just as well forget about secrecy. It would all come out.

Well, and why not? It was all over now.

No, it wasn't.

Because he wasn't going to take the advice his father would certainly have given him if he had told (and if — a big IF — he could have convinced him it was all true). He couldn't. He was going to break his own strict promise to himself and get out the key and the cupboard and start it all up again.

Not with Little Bull, Boone, and the others. Of course not. They'd been through quite enough, thanks to the magic. But just to see what was in the cashbox. Just to - finish the story.

Half an hour seemed to Omri to stretch to eternity. But at last it was time. The woman at the bank raised one of the grilles and handed Omri the big oblong parcel, carefully wrapped in brown paper, flaps stuck down with brown sticky tape and the whole tied tightly with string.

“You certainly didn't mean anyone to have a sly peep, I see,” his father remarked as he signed a receipt.

Omri was holding the paper-swathed cupboard in his arms. Even wrapped, it had a magic feel to it. He couldn't have explained what a huge wave of excitement washed over him as he felt it again in his possession. He wondered fleetingly if people who did drugs felt like this. He felt it wasn't good to be so hung up on something, to get such a charge from it, to be dependent — to be unable to resist what you knew you shouldn't do.

“That's part of the bad part of the magic,” he thought. “Frederick's part. His — his obsession.” But realizing this
didn't stop him feeling the way he felt as they walked out of the bank to the car. That he couldn't wait to be alone with it, to make it work again.

They drove home in silence. Omri held the parcel on his knee. He didn't realize he was tapping impatiently on the top of it with his fingernail, making a muffled metallic clicking, until his father suddenly said, “I know what it is.”

Omri froze.

“I must be stupid,” said his father. “The shape alone — I recognize it. It's that cupboard you wrote the story about. The one Gillon gave you for your birthday two years ago.”

Omri's mouth went dry. He couldn't have spoken even if he'd had anything useful to say.

His father's profile was frowning. Omri could almost hear his brain ticking away, working things out.

That damned story -
The Plastic Indian!
Omri'd written the whole thing for a competition, they'd all read it, he'd received a prize for it. It was the story that had triggered a memory in Mr Johnson's brain and convinced him at last that he had really seen Little Bull and Boone in Patrick's hand that day… Could the fact that Omri had done something as solemn as putting the cupboard (easily recognizable in its wrapping — he could see that now!) into the bank vault tip his father off in the same way, that his prize-winning story was based on the truth?

But no. Even though his father was an artist, he was
basically a rational man who automatically rejected anything his senses didn't tell him was true. He, unlike Mr Johnson, had never seen the little people. Omri saw his father shake himself free of his incredible thought, take a deep breath, and begin to whistle carelessly. He had put it away from him. Omri sighed too, and held the parcel closer.

As soon as they got home, Omri bolted into the house, up to his room (through Gillon's, fortunately empty - he and Tony had gone down to the river), where he blocked the door and tore the wrappings off like a madman. The decent thing would be to wait for Patrick, but he couldn't. He couldn't wait! The excitement was rising to a new pitch inside him.

The cupboard, white and shiny with its new mirror and coat of paint, stood in the wreckage of the brown paper looking somehow like a tiny building rising out of mounds of rubble and earth. Omri opened the door, ran his hand over the shelf, and then reached into the bottom and reverently picked up the envelope in which he had sealed the key.

He tore it open and drew the key out by its twisted and faded bit of red satin ribbon.

He could see now that it was not silver, but lead. It was too heavy to be silver. And lead was soft. The sticking-out bits of the key that actually worked locks were getting a bit worn. As he examined them, it
occurred to Omri that lead was the wrong metal to make a key from. If one used it too often… But on the other hand, perhaps its softness, its flexibility, was why it worked on a lot of different locks. Or, was that just the magic?

Would it work on the cashbox?

Omri fetched it from under his bed. It had got a little dusty. He rubbed it shiny with a stray sock. It was painted black, with gold and red lines, and the red blob of sealing wax in the middle of the lid gave it a bizarre look.

“Now,” thought Omri. He felt breathless with suspense. “I must act quickly. Lid up at once, ignore the earrings, just go for the little people in their wrappings. Who will they be? How will they be?” And a vagrant memory of a line in an old film he'd seen quite recently on TV came back to him:
Buried how long?
It was said to an old, old man in a prison cell. He'd forgotten his answer, but it wasn't thirty years.

Of course they hadn't been ‘buried', they'd been living their lives somewhere else.

But thirty years! It was a long time.

No good thinking any more.
If you're going to do it, do it.

He put the key in the lock and turned it. The lid sprang open.

J
ust as he'd expected, a number of finger-sized parcels lay in the bottom — five of them. The wrappings on all but one were small folded ladies' handkerchiefs that had been white. They were a stained beige now - some air and damp must have got in after all.

Losing no time, Omri swiftly picked up the first parcel. He unrolled it, quickly but carefully. It was like unrolling a tiny rug that had someone in the middle.