Free The Key to the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks Page A

forgotten I even had it till I looked inside the knapsack.”
    “Was there anything else in there?”
    “Yes, quite a lot. It’s all wrapped up. But I opened this – look.”
    She took some yellowing tissue paper off a tiny statuette of a black elephant about five centimetres high.
    “Ebony,” she said. “With ivory tusks. Isn’t he sweet? Here, you have him.”
    “Thanks, Mum!” Omri took it from her and put it into his pocket, thinking he would stand it on one of the shelves in his room. “Did you know you had all this?”
    “Well, yes and no. I remember some of it. Granny Marie used to let me play with some of these things when I was a little girl. There were more elephants then, they stood in a line on the mantelpiece, biggest first, smallest last. Maybe they’re all here somewhere! I really must go through all thisstuff one day… And this gong-thing hung in the hall and everyone who came to the house wanted to have a go with it. You’d hear it chiming faintly and know that someone who’d slipped out of the room had sneaked into the hall to try it out. Only very old and stuffy people resisted… Granny used to call it her young-in-heart chimes.”
    The weather was quite warm for October, but on Dartmoor it might well be different – you never knew. “Very bleak, Dartmoor,” said their dad. They managed to fit all their extra clothes except wellies and anoraks into the big knapsack. Gillon thought it was revolting and said he’d be ashamed to be seen with it – “If only we’d had time to order some new stuff! Oh well, when we do the real trip, with Ad, we’ll have a decent nylon one. Let’s go somewhere where there’s nobody but us, Dad. They’ll think we’re paupers or something, carrying a lump of old junk like this around!”
    Nevertheless, he put the knapsack on the back seat, which he’d “bagged” because he always fell asleep on car-journeys and, despite his disgust, he wanted to use it to lean against. That suited Omri, who far preferred to sit up front.
    At long last – it was nearly noon by the time they were finally ready – their mother kissed them all through the various windows, and then ran off because she thought she heard the phone ringing from across the lane.
    “Ready, boys? Right. We’re off.”
    And their dad put the key in the ignition and switched on the engine.
    The next moment, Omri wasn’t in the car any more.
    He had the most extraordinary jigging, jumping sensation. He seemed to be being pulled from his head, from his hands – even his feet were being lifted and dropped to a strange rhythm. He was dancing! But not of his own free will. Someone, or something, was making him dance.
    His eyes, which a moment before had been looking through the windscreen of the car into the deeply-shadowed back of the parking bay, were suddenly blinded with bright light so that he screwed them shut. But his body kept up this senseless rhythm, his arms and legs flying, his head bobbing.
    And now he could hear noises. Squawking music like a tinny horn, loud, strange voices, but most clearly of all – a drumbeat, quite close to him. It was drumming out the rhythm he was dancing to.
    He was terribly shocked and frightened. But he had to see what was happening. He opened his squeezed-shut eyes a crack – and then wider.
    An amazing scene met his eyes.
    He was out in the open air – hot air, blazing with sunlight. Before him was a colourful crowd of people, women, men, children, most of them staring at him. They were brown people with black hair. Many of the men wore white turbans and baggy clothes. The women wore—
    The women wore saris .
    Omri knew a sari when he saw one. They brought just one word into his addled aching head: India .
    India. Indians . What had happened? Could the magicmake a mistake like a person – take him back to the wrong Indians ? The notion was so bizarre that if he had’nt been so completely shocked and scared, he would have burst out laughing.
    The