Molly Moon Stops the World (2 page)

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.”

M
rs. 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 made 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.

Feeling refreshed, she opened her eyes. She took one of the baguettes out of a shopping bag and ripped off its end. Opening a new ketchup bottle, she knocked some sauce onto it. For a few minutes, Molly munched her favorite snack and looked out over the river.

On the far bank there were fenced-off gardens with terraced cottages behind them. One garden was larger than the others. It seemed to have two cottages behind it. Some dense green hedges, clipped into the shapes of sitting birds and animals, had recently sprung up in this garden. On the top of one hedge, a huge bird with a long tail was shaped out of branches and leaves, and beside it was a crouching box-hedge hare with two distinct ears. On the top of a yew bush sat a big dog with large hollow
eyes, looking as if he was guarding the house.

The spring sunshine danced over the shiny foliage of the bush dog. As the light bounced off a glossy twig where his mouth might have been, the creature seemed to smile at Molly.

Molly remembered how exciting it had been when she’d first hypnotized Petula last November. She sighed and popped the last piece of ketchuppy bread into her mouth. It was so difficult keeping her promise not to hypnotize. It was like resisting the urge to walk on your hands once you’d learned, or like stamping on the impulse to jump high when you actually had the power to leapfrog a tree. Molly longed to experience again the warm “fusion feeling” that washed through her whenever she let her eyes reach their hypnotic peak.

Now, as the dog’s leafy eye twinkled at her, Molly was struck by an idea. She had only promised Rocky not to hypnotize any one. She had never promised not to hypnotize
things.

The fusion feeling was lovely. It made Molly feel as if a tropical sun flowed in her veins. The voice in her head urged her on.

Go on, give it a try, Molly. It’ll warm you up. Hypnotize the bush dog. What are you afraid of? That it’ll jump over the river and bite you? Molly stared at
the bush. Hypnotize a bush? A bush couldn’t be hypnotized.

Exactly, urged her mind. But it will make you
feel
nice.

So, winding down the window, Molly focused in her special way at the topiary dog. She found the faraway feeling inside herself that made everything apart from the dog-shaped bush look blurred. Then she searched for the feeling of bush in herself, and the more she stared at the bush, the more the leaves of the dog seemed to absorb her and the more the sounds of the town grew muffled.

Molly felt naughty. Rocky wouldn’t be pleased if he knew she was doing this. She’d have to do it quickly before he got back. She waited for the fusion sensation to slowly rise through her body. For a moment nothing happened. Then a hint of the feeling began, as if sparks of electricity were traveling up her backbone into her head, to behind her eyes, where they circled and throbbed. Her mind felt slightly fizzy, and tiny zapping noises seemed to pop just inside her ears.

But somehow, something was different. The sensation flaring up in her was not the familiar fusion feeling. As Molly stared at the dog, her eyes pulsing, the sensation seemed to twist and mutate. Instead of being a warm
tingling, it turned into an icy-cold prickling under her skin, giving her goose pimples all over. Molly gasped in shock and immediately snapped out of her trance.

A sharp clip, clip, clipping noise from across the river reached her ears, and Molly noticed a pair of steel shears snapping shut under the beak of the big topiary bird. She couldn’t see the gardener, but whoever he was, he seemed intent upon keeping his bushes trimmed and tidy, keen to control the wild growth of the privet-hedge creatures.

In the side mirror, Molly saw fat Mrs. Trinklebury wrapped in her crocheted coat, lugging bags of wool back toward the car. Molly’s hypnotic experiments would have to wait.

As Mrs. Trinklebury approached, Molly saw that she was looking very flustered.

“Just look at this t-terrible news,” she declared, dropping a newspaper on Molly’s lap.

The paper shouted out its headline.

Underneath, there was a photograph of Davina Nuttel, dressed in an astronaut costume for her role in
Stars on Mars.

Mrs. Trinklebury was beside herself with worry. “The poor girl. Her poor p-parents. Can you imagine it, Molly?”

Molly could easily. She’d had firsthand experience of kidnaping, since her very own Petula had been abducted in New York. But she’d also actually met the famous Davina Nuttel, so the news was extra shocking. Even though Molly hadn’t liked Davina much, she felt genuinely concerned for her now.

“That’s horrible!” she gulped.

“See, life for the famous isn’t all fun,” said Mrs. Trinklebury, and tutting like a chaffinch, she plonked a cakey kiss on Molly’s forehead.

“I’m p-peckish, aren’t you? I hope Mr. N.’s cooking l-lunch. Look, I’ve got a v-video for us all to watch this afternoon. It’s got Gloria Heelheart in it. It’s the one she won her Best Actress award for last year. She’s marvelous. It’ll take our minds off Davina.”

As they drove home, Mrs. Trinklebury sang along to the radio, trying to cheer herself up. She was thrilled
that the child pop star Billy Bob Bimble was number one with his hit single “Magpie Man.”

Twenty minutes later they arrived at Happiness House. The front of the building was crisscrossed with scaffolding poles. Half of the building was a pristine white, while the other half was still its old, gray, flaky self.