Molly Moon Stops the World Read online

  “Rocky. Rocky, listen.” Molly grabbed his arm and pulled. “Something stranger than anything has just happened to me.”

  “What?” asked Rocky, floating on his back.

  “Well,” Molly faltered, in a scarcely contained whisper, “I think … oh, this is going to sound like I’ve gone crazy …”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “I think I just … I think I made …” Molly hesitated.

  “Made what?”

  “I think I just made the world stand still. I think I stopped time!”

  Georgia Byng

  Molly

  Moon

  Stops the World

  To Tiger,

  for being such a

  brilliant ray of sunshine

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  ALSO BY GEORGIA BYNG

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Davina Nuttel sat in the back of her chauffeurdriven limousine, reading about herself in a celebrity magazine. Her chubby face, surrounded by posters of all the films and shows she’d already starred in, smiled out from the page.

  “Child superstar Davina Nuttel,” she read, “is back on Broadway in the hit show Stars on Mars. After surprise newcomer Molly Moon quit the part and left New York, Miss Nuttel was the obvious choice for the lead.” Davina fumed. She was sick of Molly Moon’s name being mentioned in the same sentence as hers. She hated that bug-eyed, skinny nobody.

  “Stop at the ice-cream parlor on Madison,” she snapped at her driver.

  He nodded and negotiated his way across four lanes of noisy New York traffic.

  Davina was feeling particularly rattled. She needed a big, sweet ice cream. It had been a bad day at the Broadway theater where she was rehearsing a new Stars on Mars song. To begin with, she’d had a sore throat and couldn’t hit the high notes. Then had come the horrible incident that had completely unnerved her. Davina angrily scraped her nail down the cream leather upholstery. She didn’t often need her parents, but tonight she was glad they would be at home for once.

  How dare that weird businessman barge, uninvited, into her dressing room? How he’d got past the security guards she didn’t know. And what nerve to suppose that she would want to advertise his ugly line of Fashion House clothes. Didn’t he know he should talk to her agent?

  The creepy Mr. Cell had given Davina the shivers, and she couldn’t erase him from her mind. His eyes seemed to have etched themselves behind Davina’s, in the way that staring too long at the sun burns its image into a person’s vision. Every time Davina shut her own eyes, she saw his two mad eyeballs staring at her.

  The car stopped outside her favorite ice-cream parlor. Davina fastened her black mink coat and put on the matching gloves. She stepped out into the cold night and waved condescendingly at her chauffeur. She would walk home. Enjoying the sound of her highheeled boots on the pavement, she swept into the parlor.

  Inside, she ordered the house specialty. It was called the Mondae-Tuesdae-Wednesdae-Thursdae-Fridae-Saturdae Sundae. Determined to banish all thoughts of the strange businessman from her mind, she pulled out her gold-plated fountain pen and began practicing her autograph on a paper napkin. Should she stick to her curly writing or change her style?

  When her enormous sundae arrived, she ate it all.

  Twenty minutes later, she was walking home, feeling sick. She realized that a cold March evening wasn’t really the best time to eat a large, freezing-cold ice cream.

  In the distance, her grand apartment building towered over the street. That was odd, Davina thought—normally the outside of it was lit with green lights. Were they broken? The building really did look drab, all dark. She would complain as soon as she saw the doorman. She could see him now, standing by the front door with his taxi-calling light baton.

  She crossed the broad avenue. The building entrance was only a hundred yards away—but now it was a dark hundred yards, lit up at only one point, where a streetlamp cast an oval pool of yellow on the pavement. Davina walked toward it. She liked spotlights.

  Something white and rectangular lay on the ground under the light—garbage, Davina suspected—another thing to complain about. However, as Davina approached, she saw that the white rectangle wasn’t garbage. It was an envelope. And when she got nearer, she saw something very strange. The envelope had her name on it.

  A fan letter! Davina thought with pleasure.

  She took off her glove, picked up the envelope, and pulled out the letter. It read:

  Dear Davina,

  Sorry about this, but you know too much.

  Suddenly a heavy hand grabbed Davina’s arm. She looked up to see a familiar face smiling down at her. Davina felt petrified with fear. Her body went winter cold. Her ears suddenly seemed to stop working. She could no longer hear the sounds of New York. It was as if the cabs and traffic, sirens and horns no longer existed. All Davina could hear was her own voice—her screams as she found herself being dragged toward a parked car. She looked beseechingly up at the uniformed doorman in the distance.

  “Help! Help me!”

  But the doorman did nothing. He stood motionless, looking the other way. And desperately kicking and struggling, Davina found herself being pushed into a Rolls-Royce as unceremoniously as a stray dog might be forced into a pound van. She was driven away into the night.

  Two

  Molly Moon threw a bumper-size packet of Honey Wheat Pufftas up the supermarket aisle. The box flipped through the air, and the fat cartoon bee on it flew, for the first and last real flight of its life, before it landed with a crunch in the shopping cart.

  “Bull’s-eye! Twenty points to me,” Molly said with satisfaction. A shower of Jawdrop bubble gums came raining down into the cart from over the shelves of cereals.

  “How can Ruby eat so much gum?” a boy’s voice asked from the other shopping aisle. “She’s only five.”

  “She sticks her pictures up with it,” said Molly, pushing the metal cart to the canned-fish corner. “How can Roger eat so many sardines? That’s what I want to know. Cold, too, straight from the can. Disgusting. You can’t stick pictures up with sardines.”

  “Ten points for those gums and double it, Green Eyes, because I got them in from over the other side.” The husky-voiced boy emerged from behind a giant stack of baked beans. His dark-brown face was framed by a white hat with earflaps. He put a large bottle of orange squash concentrate in the cart.

  “Thanks, Rocky,” Molly said. Orange squash concentrate was Molly Moon’s favorite drink. She liked to drink it neat.

  She disentangled a pen from behind her ear and messy hair and wr
ote down their chucking scores in a small worn notebook.

  “Okay, wise guy. You win this week. But I’ll be the champ before Easter.”

  Then Molly consulted their list. It said:

  Happiness House was the orphanage where Molly and Rocky lived. When Molly Moon was a baby, she’d been left on its doorstep in a Moon’s Marshmallows box, which is how she’d got her name. Until recently the children’s home had been called Hardwick House, and as that name might suggest, it had been an extremely difficult place to live in. But just before Christmas, Molly had been dealt a spectacular, life-changing card. In the library in the nearby town of Briersville, she’d found a faded old leather-bound book, The Book of Hypnotism, by Dr. Logan. It had changed Molly’s life. After learning the book’s secrets and discovering that she possessed incredibly powerful hypnotic skills, Molly had left the orphanage and gone to New York, accompanied by the orphanage pug, Petula. There she’d used hypnotism to get the starring role in a Broadway musical called Stars on Mars. Molly had fooled and controlled hundreds of people, and she’d made lots of money. But a crook called Professor Nockman had discovered her secret. He had kidnaped Petula and blackmailed Molly into robbing a bank for him.

  It had been dreadful, until Rocky had showed up and helped her sort Nockman out. Molly had left New York behind, bringing with her the money that she’d earned and a large diamond that had come her way the day of the bank robbery and Professor Nockman. Back at Hardwick House, things began to get better at last. Molly had removed the witchy orphanage mistress, the building had been renamed, and the kind—although slightly batty—widow called Mrs. Trinklebury, who had worked at the orphanage before had come to help permanently. Molly had told her that the money she’d brought back from America was from a rich person called the Benefactor who wanted to help the children’s home. Molly had also hypnotized Nockman and brought him with her to be Mrs. Trinklebury’s assistant. She was hoping that by working with someone as kind as Mrs. Trinklebury, Nockman would soon reform and become a genuinely kind person too. So far the experiment was working well.

  Molly checked her list. They had about everything now.

  All the healthy food—the vegetables and fruit that Mrs. Trinklebury had asked for—lay squashed at the bottom of the cart underneath milk and fizzy drinks. On top were the special items—the presents for the six children from the orphanage who were away.

  Gordon Boils and Cynthia Redmon were at an Outward Bound course, where Gordon, wanting to look meaner, had shaved his head. Molly had bought shaving foam and razors for him and chocolates for Cynthia.

  Hazel Hackersly and Craig Redmon, Cynthia’s twin, were at a ballroom-dancing course, so Molly was sending them lip gloss and teeth whitener.

  Jinx and Ruby, the two five-year-olds, were staying at Mrs. Trinklebury’s lovely sister’s pig farm. Molly was mailing them a package of popcorn and bubble gum.

  Molly scratched her head, hoping she hadn’t got lice again. “All that’s left now is something for everyone who’s still at home. Roger needs his nits … I mean his nuts.”

  “Poor Roger. He’s nuts,” said Rocky, lobbing some cashews into the cart. Indeed, Roger Fibbin was. Since Molly had returned, he had grown more and more muddled by the world. He spent most of his time up the orphanage oak tree.

  “Mmm,” agreed Molly. “Got my ketchup and Mr. Nockman’s parakeet food … got Gemma’s sherbet and Gerry’s cheesy biscuits. Just need our candy and Mrs. Trinklebury’s magazines.”

  Molly pushed the heavily laden cart down the last aisle toward the front of the store and scooped up a carton of toffees, a bag of candy sticks, some Heaven Bars, and a giant package of Moon’s Marshmallows.

  Rocky plucked Celebrity Globe and Welcome to My World—At Home with the Stars from the magazine rack.

  KID NUTTEL KIDNAP!, the Briersville Evening Chronicle declared in black print, but Rocky didn’t look at the newspapers. He and Molly piled their purchases onto the checkout conveyor belt. A pretty young woman with thick hair and gentle hands started tapping out prices on her register. Molly looked at her fresh country face and her nylon apron. She could almost belong to a different species from the people on the front of the glossy magazines that lay in front of her.

  OSCARS SPECIAL ISSUE, trumpeted the headline on Celebrity Globe, beside a close-up photo of a woman with tumbling golden hair and a smile so full of teeth that Molly thought she must have had extra ones put in. Her lips were like shiny pink slugs, and her eyes were like a leopard’s. Molly knew her face well. Everyone did.

  “Suky Champagne, Academy Award Nominee, Shows Us Her Shoes,” it said under the picture.

  Mrs. Trinklebury would be pleased. Her favorite time of year was when the Academy Awards came around—the time when Hollywood handed out prizes, the Oscars, to the most talented people in the film business. Mrs. T. usually talked of nothing else for weeks.

  Welcome to My World had a picture of a man who looked more like a god than a human. His skin was as dark as coal and he wore a Tarzan-like outfit. His long dreadlocks were blowing perfectly in the wind as he stood in the sun on a cliff top by the sea.

  “I’d look just like him if you put me in one of those toga things,” said Rocky with a wry smile. “I just need to grow my hair longer.”

  “And a few muscles,” said Molly.

  “Hercules Stone Invites Us into His Malibu Villa,” ran the words beside the star’s glistening stomach.

  For a moment, Molly felt a pang of regret. If she’d continued with her starry career in New York, she might have been beside the sea in California this week and on the cover of Welcome to My World. Her hypnotic talent could have taken her to the very top, but she’d given up her life of fame and wealth to come home and be with her friends and family. Now she was only special in an ordinary way, just like the checkout girl in front of her.

  Molly took her change, breathed out happily, and on the way out of the shop tossed all her loose coins into the cardboard cap of the crazy woman who always sat there talking to herself, wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag.

  “Thank you, my child,” she said with a snagglytoothed smile.

  Molly didn’t like people calling her their child, because she was nobody’s child—she was an orphan. But she felt mean thinking this about the sad woman who slept in the supermarket doorway.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Happy New Yea … erm … Happy March.”

  Three

  Mrs. Trinklebury had parked her rusty olivegreen car in the parking lot by the River Brier. Molly and Rocky pushed the cart down the main street, past the butcher’s, where they often bought Petula tasty scraps to eat, past the camera shop and the baker’s. Soon they had loaded the trunk. Rocky set off to return the cart and to pick up some screws from the hardware store.

  Molly slid into the passenger seat and pulled her denim jacket around her. She began to pick at some of the foam that was bursting through the white vinyl upholstery and thought about what to do over the rest of the weekend.

  She might help Rocky make a go-cart, or go down to the riding stables and ask for a lesson. Perhaps everyone might want to go for a swim at Briersville Pools. None of these ideas really inspired Molly, though, for the truth was that what she really wanted to do, what she’d been dying to do for months, was some hypnotizing. But she couldn’t. She’d promised Rocky she wouldn’t. She and Rocky had agreed that hypnosis was a dangerous tool that would always land them in trouble. Rocky had also learned from Dr. Logan’s book. He could hypnotize people using his voice. Molly hadn’t mastered voice hypnosis properly. But her powerful hypnotic eyes were far superior to Rocky’s voice.

  Hypnotism had changed her life. For the very first time, Molly had known how it felt to be good at something. Molly missed feeling good like this. In fact, she missed it dreadfully. Life just wasn’t as exciting without hypnotism. The promise she’d made was driving her crazy.

  Another thing had been perplexing Molly since Christmas. Lucy Logan, the person who had ma
de sure that Molly had found and taken The Book of Hypnotism, had disappeared. Lucy was the great-granddaughter of the author of the book, and she had worked in the Briersville library. Lucy had hypnotized Molly to find the book in her library and then, after learning its lessons and having some adventures, to return it to her. Molly thought Lucy was a completely brilliant person—and certainly the most special adult she had ever met. She felt she owed Lucy a big thank-you, and she had been looking forward to making friends with her. But now Lucy Logan had vanished. She’d handed in her notice at the library in January and gone.

  The watery March light reflected on the cold surface of the river, where a grubby white duck and drake swam about. Molly watched them, trying to divert her mind from hypnotism and Lucy’s disappearance. And then, without meaning to, Molly found herself wondering for the millionth time who her parents were.

  This question was like a mosquito that sometimes tried to fly into her life. When the question bit her, Molly couldn’t help but itch it.

  If she was in a good mood, she would imagine her parents as interesting, fun people who, for some dreadful reason beyond their control, had lost their baby. When she was in a low mood, she saw her parents as two horrible people who had wanted to drown her like an unwanted kitten. But whatever mood she was in, thinking about them was always frustrating. Because however hard she tried to picture them, Molly knew she would never know who they were.

  Molly shut her eyes and tried to calm her babbling mind.

  She was very good at doing this, as she’d perfected the art of daydreaming when she was very young. Soon she was breathing peacefully and imagining herself drifting upward like a cloud, out of Mrs. Trinklebury’s car and along the course of the River Brier, up into the hills and all the way up to its source in the highest peak. Molly imagined that she was hovering. As she felt the weight of the earth and the ancient quality of the mountains beneath her, she was reminded how huge the world was and how unimportant her worries were compared with it.