Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure Read online

  Molly stared at her mother’s plate. The two of them sat staring at Lucy’s scrambled eggs.

  Then, thankfully, Molly’s senses snapped to.

  Molly knew from experience that the more a person thought a certain way, the more that way of thinking would become a habit.

  Molly wouldn’t be dragged down by her mother’s blackness like this.

  “Lucy, you’ve got to pull yourself together,” she said suddenly, feeling more like a mother than a daughter. “What are you going to do—be miserable for the rest of your life? And I’m sorry to bring this up, but you’re not exactly much fun for me and Petula. I mean, Petula now avoids you because you always do a sort of sad moan when you stroke her… and I… well, I just can’t handle it. You should be feeling good. Primo is coming tomorrow. He knows exactly how you feel. I mean, Cornelius took years of his life away, too, so you can talk to him about it. And Forest’s coming, remember. He’ll help you feel better.”

  Molly watched as her mother took a sip of tea and dribbled it down her chin. How, she thought, could a person do that? Then she noticed ketchup smeared all down the front of her own sweatshirt. But dribbling tea was a bit different. It was as if the shock of being woken up from the hypnotic trance had made her mother faulty. It was as if her batteries weren’t working properly.

  Then Molly felt bad. Her mother wasn’t a machine. What was she doing relating her to a machine? Her mother was a living, breathing, broken person. It was too much to bear.

  Molly got up. She must get some air and get away for a bit. This fog of Lucy’s was suffocating. She couldn’t wait for Rocky to arrive. He’d help her feel better.

  “I’m just going outside to talk to the new gardener,” she said awkwardly. “I’ll see you later.”

  Upstairs, Molly went to the porch and opened the front door. Petula stood on the other side of the graveled drive next to the turbaned gardener who was stroking her. Molly smiled because it was a relief to see someone normal, someone who liked animals, doing something friendly.

  But then a very peculiar and frightening thing happened. There was a loud BOOM, and Petula and the man vanished into thin air.

  Three

  “So let’s go over this one more time.” Primo Cell stood to the side of the library and fidgeted with the cuffs of his tailored blue shirt, trying to be business-like but finding his usual powers of deduction flummoxed. “Petula was on the drive and…” He twisted around, his leather-soled shoe pirouetting on the Persian rug. “You’re certain it was Petula? I mean, it might have been another dog.”

  “Yeah, man, that’s right,” enthused Forest, shaking his shag of gray dreadlocks. Forest was an aging Los Angelean hippie who’d traveled the world. He’d lived with Eskimos and bushmen, Chinese monks and Indian sadhus. Now he lived in Los Angeles, where he grew vegetables, kept chickens, and ate a lot of tofu and turnips. “Sometimes our memories play tricks on us,” he said, adjusting his bottle-glass spectacles. “It might have been a different hound or even the guy’s backpack.” Forest had odd habits and sometimes he talked rubbish. Molly listened to him now. “Or maybe it was a big bag of dog biscuits with a picture of a pug on the front.”

  “No.” Molly stabbed at the fire with a poker as she remembered the horrible moment. “It was definitely Petula. She looked me right in the eye and wagged her tail just before he took her. If only she wasn’t so friendly.… If only she’d run away from him or bitten him.…”

  “Why don’t we telephone the gardening company and find out who the gardener was?” suggested Forest.

  “I already have,” said Molly. “None of their workers were in yesterday. That man was a fraud. Oh, I hope Petula’s all right.” Rocky, Molly’s best friend, stood beside her. He gently patted her shoulder.

  Rocky Scarlet had grown up in the orphanage with Molly—he’d shared a crib with her when they were babies and he knew her better than anyone. He was also an accomplished hypnotist, though nowhere near as good as Molly. His skill was “voice-only hypnosis.” He had a lovely voice.

  “We’ll find her, Molly. It’ll just take time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a blackmail call. Whoever he is probably just wants something. He’s just a low-down dirty dognaper, I expect.”

  Molly looked at Rocky’s face. It was a rich, deep black because he’d spent so much time in the Los Angeles sunshine. And his smiling eyes were always reassuring, even though this time, Molly wasn’t put at ease.

  Rocky went over to the desk and sat down. He picked up a pen and, humming, began doodling on the back of his hand. He drew Petula and a clock. As far as he could see, they just had to wait. He was calm, patient, and logical and was sure that Petula’s disappearance would be explained.

  Molly slapped her jeans, slumped back in the sofa, and hugged her knobbly knees.

  “I don’t see how it could have happened. How does a person just disappear like that? I would have felt it if the man made the world stop.”

  “Yeah, you would have got that chill vibe,” agreed Forest from his cross-legged yoga position on the armchair. “You were wearin’ your time-stop crystal, weren’t you?”

  Molly pulled her crystal on its chain out from under her shirt.

  Forest poked at the hole in the toe of his orange socks for inspiration. “What do you think, Primo? Rocky and me here, well, we ain’t hypnotic world-stopping experts like you and Molly. Do you think the guy in the turban made the world stand still without Molly feelin’ it? I mean, she could have been lookin’ up that path with Petula waggin’ her tail and, BAM, suddenly he could have stopped time and frozen Molly stiff as an icicle. An’ then whoever that dude was, he just picked up Petula and walked away. Once he was far away, he started the world again. Well, of course, to Molly, because she was frozen, she wouldn’t have seen how he took Petula; it would have looked as if they’d gone in a puff of smoke.”

  Primo shook his head and picked up a china elephant from the mantel.

  “I don’t like it,” he said, as if speaking to the small sculpture. “I don’t like it at all. Theoretically it shouldn’t happen. If one hypnotist hypnotizes the world to stand still, other hypnotists wearing their crystals feel it and should be able to resist the freeze. And what was the BOOM sound that Molly heard?”

  “Maybe.” Forest sighed, lying on the floor and putting his ankles around his ears. “Maybe the gardener was standing on a lea line or something. I mean, you got those way-out druid stone circles in this country, and energy lines are awesome here… hmmm…” Forest drifted off into his thoughts.

  Rocky ignored Forest and instead approached Molly to study her crystal.

  “This is the original crystal, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, look—it’s got that icy-looking bit. And I wear it all the time. Even if someone wanted to swap it while I was asleep, they couldn’t. I’d wake up. Especially recently. I haven’t been able to sleep very well.” Molly dropped her voice. “Rocky, it’s been like a tomb here, and Lucy’s been walking around like a… like a mummy.” Molly couldn’t help smiling. Rocky laughed. After all, Lucy was a mummy—Molly’s.

  Primo wandered over to the window and looked out at a thin, fair-haired man who was kicking his legs up and running around the lawn leaping over croquet hoops.

  “I’d better go out and rescue Lucy before Cornelius starts bleating at her. And in case you’re wondering, Lucy’s got nothing to do with Petula’s disappearance. I know it. I’ve talked to her. Lucy is only half here, it seems, but she’s not under anyone’s spell, or hypnotized. She’s just wretched and traumatized from what’s happened. Poor Lucy. I think I can help her climb out of her misery.” Primo watched Cornelius on his hands and knees nibbling the grass. “It’s amazing how that lamb man out there was once so powerful. I can still hardly believe that he once hypnotized me to want to be president of America for him. And I would have been, too, if you, Molly, hadn’t saved me.”

  Primo smiled at his daughter.

  Primo and Molly had decided to start by p
retending that they weren’t father and daughter. After all, if you haven’t belonged to a father ever and suddenly one turns up, you don’t really want to keep jumping up and hugging him, shouting, “Daddy.” You want to get to know him first. So Molly called him Primo. She liked him. He was positive.

  “I’m going to go out and have a walk with Lucy,” he said, rubbing his hands together, trying to look as though everything was under control and he was looking forward to it. “See you later. We’ll sort out all these problems. It’ll be fine, don’t you worry.” He winked and, making the sort of giddyup, encouraging noise that people make to horses, left the room.

  “Just zoning into the Here and Now,” said Forest, shutting his eyes and beginning to meditate.

  Molly and Rocky walked along the upstairs passage to the stairwell of clocks. The domed ceiling echoed with their tickings.

  “I don’t like the idea that there’s someone out there who can pull the wool over our eyes like this,” Molly said as they descended.

  “You’d better watch out, Molly,” Rocky said, and pursed his lips. “Be on your guard.”

  Rocky never exaggerated. He was also hard to panic. So getting a warning like this from him made Molly shudder. She gripped his arm.

  “Let’s stick together.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to wait for me here; I’m going to the bathroom.”

  “But how long are you going to be?”

  “Oh, three hours?”

  “Ro-cky…”

  The cloakroom door creaked shut. A huge black spider scuttled across the floor.

  Molly stood in the front hall picking the dried ketchup off her T-shirt. It was a strange place. The walls were covered with animal trophies. Their glassy eyes stared down at her. And mixed among the heads were antique garden shears—another collection of the mad Cornelius Logan’s. A man obsessed with control—controlling people through hypnotism—he’d also created the topiary animal bushes all over his estate.

  As she waited for Rocky, Molly walked around the hall table some, inspecting iridescent peacock feathers that stood in a vase. At every corner of the table a different group of animals glared down at her as if she were responsible for their deaths. In a horrible skip, Molly’s mind suddenly imagined Petula’s head stuffed and staring down, stiff with rigor mortis. She felt faint.

  Molly remembered some old wives’ tale that peacock feathers in a house brought bad luck. So, seizing the whole bunch, she pulled them out of their pot and marched for the front door and flung it open.

  Cold air flooded inside. Molly stepped out into the morning sunshine and down the front steps of the house.

  A distant lawn mower droned as it dealt with the winter grass. Light bounced off the place where Molly had last seen Petula, and then, as she walked across the circle of gravel, past the bush sculpture of a flying magpie, a cloud cast a giant shadow over the grounds of Briersville Park.

  Something blue flickered in the periphery of Molly’s vision. She turned quickly, but there was nothing there. It must have been a bird, or the shadow of a bird. Or maybe it was that turbaned dognaper. Molly quickly twisted around. If he was loitering nearby, she’d catch him creeping up on her. The white columns on the front portico of the house stood like guards and the windows were like watchmen, but Molly knew that out here she was as vulnerable as Petula had been.

  Again a blue shadow flickered to her left. Molly didn’t turn this time. She tried to see what it was without moving. It hovered, then disappeared. Thirty seconds later it appeared to her right. Was it a ghost? A poltergeist was a ghost that was able to move things. Had a poltergeist moved Petula? Molly was determined to find out. Although she was filthy scared, she let the shadow flicker to the left, then again to the right. She stood stock-still. Once more it was there—closer, and then again on the right of her, closer still. Nearer and nearer it got. Right… left… right… There it was to the left… the right… the left. Left, right, left. Her eyes swung from side to side. Molly was so intent upon winkling out the truth that she didn’t feel herself falling. Falling into a hypnotic trap.

  When the purple-turbaned man was finally standing in front of her, she just gazed straight into his dark eyes. She didn’t question his attire: The indigo outfit he had on, tied at the waist with a silken cummerbund and flaring down dresslike to below his knees, the tight white leggings that he wore underneath or the scooped and pointed red moccasins on his feet. She simply drank in his appearance, as calmly as if looking at a picture in a book. She registered the handlebar mustache that swooped up on either side of his dry, wrinkled face, all whiskery below his ears. She noted his crooked orange teeth, and that he was chewing something. She observed the golden chain that hung around his neck with three crystals hanging there: a clear, a green, and a red crystal.

  Then she heard his rusty voice. “You, Miss Moon, are now in a light trance. You will do as I say and come with me. Molly relaxed completely, dropped her peacock feathers, and stood still and silent in a hypnotic daze.

  The next thing she knew, the elderly man took her by the arm, there was a distant BOOM and the world around her became a complete blur. Colors rushed past her, then all around her. Even the colors under her feet changed from ochers to browns to yellows to greens to sparkling blues. It was like traveling through a kaleidoscope of color and, as they moved through it, a cool wind brushed Molly’s skin and the noise of the lawn mower was replaced by a different sort of humming, a constant noise but of varying volumes and qualities. One moment it sounded like a thunderstorm, the next second like pattering rain and bird-song. And then, all of a sudden, the blurred world became solid again. The ground beneath Molly’s feet was a firm green and the sky above, hyacinth blue. The world stopped spinning.

  Molly’s mind took a few moments to settle. Although she was still in a hypnotic daze, she could understand that the world about her had changed. They weren’t in new surroundings; Briersville Park was still there, in all its majesty. But the season was different. Instead of winter, as it had been moments before, it was summer. There were huge flower beds to the left and right of her, blooming with roses. There were no topiary bush animals to be seen. What was more, instead of a car parked in the driveway, there was a carriage, with a dappled horse harnessed to it and an old-fashioned groom standing beside the horse. A gardener in woolen shirt and trousers and a brown leather apron was on his hands and knees with a trowel in his hand. A large pile of weeds lay on the ground beside him and the remains of a half-eaten pork pie.

  “Damn, wrong time again,” muttered Molly’s stony-faced escort, looking at a slim silver gadget in his hand. In her hypnotized state, Molly supposed that this device was designed to help him time travel, for time travel, she saw, was exactly what they had just done.

  “Excuse me, can I help you?” said the gardener. He frowned and lurched to his feet, straightening his cap.

  The turbaned man took Molly by the arm and began striding toward a small arbor of trees, where a burst of laughter rang out.

  “Oi!” shouted the gardener, but the mustached man ignored him. “You can’t just walk in ’ere. This is private property.”

  Molly’s companion’s pace quickened and he pulled her along. The gardener threw down his hoe and began to run after them.

  “We’ll never get away from that long-legged gardener,” Molly found herself calmly thinking. And then, just as they passed the first tree, the turbaned man consulted his silver device. He turned a dial and flicked a switch. Then he pressed his foot on Molly’s and clasped the green crystal around his neck.

  In a moment the world transformed into a blur of color. When the world became solid again, Molly could see beyond the tree that the gardener was no longer chasing them. He was once more on his knees hoeing his weeds. But only a few weeds lay beside him. What was more, the pork pie sat untouched, wrapped in a piece of yellow waxed paper. Molly’s escort had taken them back in time.

  “Wha—ar—wa—haaa?” Molly tried with all her will t
o ask why the man had taken her. But her tongue refused to work properly. The man ignored her.

  Behind the trees was a grass clearing, and there, on a rug, was a very strange sight. Children dressed in Victorian clothes were playing and laughing. Two girls in pink petticoated dresses sat beside a porcelain tea set, and two boys in tweed breeches and waistcoats were hitting a hoop backward and forward to each other with sticks. In the girls’ baby carriage sat a doll in a frilly bonnet. And then Molly noticed that it wasn’t a doll at all. As if in some ridiculous dream, Petula, dressed in a frock and with a silly hat on her head, sat panting under the canopy of the carriage.

  Four

  As soon as Petula smelled Molly she tried to jump out of the carriage and, irritated by whoever the new, distracting arrival was, the young girls turned around. One of them appeared horrified by the apparition of Molly and the turbaned man. The other looked delighted.

  “What funny clothes you have on! Have you come from a fancy-dress party?”

  The two boys were now staring, too.

  Molly knew that it was her jeans and T-shirt with a silhouette of a dancing mouse on it that must look odd to them. In the way that a person completely accepts strange things that happen in dreams, she had already unflinchingly accepted that she was standing in a time different from her own. She was breathing in nineteenth-century air.