Molly Moon & the Monster Music (19 page)

“Well, when I was younger I traveled a fair deal. To the year 10,000. That's eight thousand years from today! Imagine!”

“Wow! What was the world like?” Molly asked.

“I only dropped in for a day. Frankly being too far in the future always scared me. But I was pleased
to see that humans hadn't destroyed the world yet.”

“I went to the year 2500,” said Molly. “The earth had heated up a lot by then.” She passed Dr. Logan a wooden plate of sushi.

“I know.” Her great-great-great-grandfather studied a piece before he ate it. “It's hot in 2500, then it cools down again. The world's population shrinks, too. There is a massive plague sometime around the end of the millennium. Nasty business.” He sat down at the small table and began to eat. “Delicious. Very interesting food. By the year 10,000 the plague was history, of course. There were fewer people about though. Medicine is absolutely brilliant by then! All the fuel technologies are very advanced. Clean fuel—no pollution. Fantastic! People become very fond of growing things again. It's a marvelous time. Oh, and people live longer!”

Molly considered her wrinkly, bent, old great-great-great-grandfather. “Why don't you go there to live?” she asked. Then she realized that perhaps she had sounded a bit blunt. “I mean, I hope you don't mind my saying so, but you seem very old. They could help you live longer.”

The old man smiled. “I have considered it, but, Molly my dear, I would have been lonely. I have my friends in my time, in 1928, you see, and I've had a
good life. So dying is not something I mind doing.” He peered through his spectacles at Molly. “Oh, my lovely great-great-great-granddaughter, I must say what a pleasure it is to meet you. You are the one who inherited the flair, the genius. I'm . . .” Dr. Logan looked sad and worried for a moment. “I'm sorry that I have caused you to lose your hypnotic skills. I watched you trying to hypnotize Mr. Proila. I saw you through my time-travel bubble . . .”

Molly stared up at him. “Have I?” she said. “Have I lost them forever? I knew they'd gone, but I thought . . . without the coin . . . Is it permanent?”

“They may come back, my dear. You might find that your memory for numbers and names isn't so good for a while, too. My powers were diminished by the coin and I did get them back. But I used the coin only for a very short time. I felt how dangerous it was and resisted it. I hid it for a decade and then lost it. I was lucky. The coin sucked so much more from you. The more you took from it, the more it took from you.” He paused. “I expect you made brilliant music.”

Molly perked up. “It was amazing,” she said. “So good that I even want to hear some of it again now! But I know I mustn't. It's not real.” She hesitated. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, my dear.”

“If you knew the coin was bad, why didn't you materialize in my time
before
I got it and stop me ever having it? Or stop Miss Hunroe having it—or whoever had it before her?”

Dr. Logan nodded gravely. “A combination of reasons. First of all, it is impossible for a time traveler actually to take the coin, or even get close to it. As you now know, I tried to warn you, but to no avail. And I tried to intercept it before Miss Hunroe had it, but it kept swerving me off course. Once she was in the grip of its power I could do nothing. On top of this, because I am old, my time-travel skills are weak. I began to realize that I only had so much oomph. When I saw that you had left the apartment in Japan it struck me that the most important thing was to find you. And I found you here. The problem is that, being seventy, I do not have endless energy to chase the coin.”

“The coin sent you swerving off course?”

“Yes. It's like an evil hurricane.”

“It was really nice of you to come all this way to help me.” Molly stroked her grandfather's arm. “But I don't understand why you came here. I haven't got it anymore.”

“I know. But you know where it is. I am hoping
that you and I now, in the same time as the coin's present time, will be able to work out a way to dupe it. Because if there's one last thing I do in my life, it will be destroying that blasted coin.”

At this point, Do came in. Molly introduced him to Dr. Logan. Do didn't even flinch when she explained that this old man had come from the 1920s. Instead, he chuckled.

Soon they were all sitting on rock stools around a stone table outside, Dr. Logan with a bowl of soup. Molly pointed to the red and green gobstopper-sized crystals that hung on a chain around her grandfather's neck. “These are the time-travel crystals that I told you about, Do. The cracks in them are actually shut eyes. If a time traveler sends good feelings, proper good feelings, to them, they will open. And when they do, the time traveler can go really, really fast through time.”

Dr. Logan patted Molly's shoulder fondly. “I must say again, it is a pleasure to meet you, my dear.”

Molly smiled. “And me you. I've often wanted to. So, tell me, how did you make the coin?”

“That is a good question,” he replied, his eyes glazing over as he dug into his memories. “It was a
long time ago, when I was much younger. I was fifty-fi . . . no, fifty-seven. Yes. It was after I wrote the second book.” He chuckled. “You'll never believe what I did. I followed our ancestors back. Yours and mine, Molly. I went further and further back through time. I saw my great-great-great-grandfather. And still I went back. Back past the Romans invading Britain! I saw great hypnotists, truly great women and men who were our ancestors. A few were burned at the stake, I have to tell you. People thought them witches or wizards, which of course they weren't. I followed the ancestors who carried the hypnotic gene.”

“Wow!” Molly gasped. “That must have taken ages!”

“It did. Sometimes the talent seemed to skip a generation and other times it didn't come up so strong. A bit like this nose of ours.” He pointed to Molly's and then to his own potato-shaped nose. “Not everyone in our family has this nose—nor does everyone have the hypnotic power. Anyway, on my journeys I came across a woman of the most superb power. She was the finest hypnotist I have ever met. Her powers were extraordinary. They didn't stop at hypnotism—oh no—she was a brilliant time stopper and time traveler, a genius mind reader, a gifted
morpher. She could do other things, too. She taught me a tremendous amount. And it was from her that I got the coin.”

“Where did she get it?” Do asked.

“She made it. Honestly, she was beyond marvelous. She was—”

“Well,” Molly interrupted, “she's the person we should visit.” Dr. Logan spluttered into his soup. Molly looked at him earnestly. “Can you manage it?”

Her grandfather coughed and dabbed at his mouth with his handkerchief. “I suppose it would be a good idea to visit her. If . . . if I can locate her.”

“Can you try?” said Molly. “We could go now. If you've finished your soup.”

Dr. Logan's eyebrows arched. “Now? Hmmm.” He reached for the green crystal around his neck.

“It's the green one we'll be needing to travel back in time,” Molly explained to Do.

Dr. Logan nodded, then smiled. He stood up. “Are you ready?”

Molly stood up, too, and took his hand.

Her grandfather gazed into the green crystal. All of a sudden the crack on it blinked open and an eye stared out. Dr. Logan spoke slowly and determinedly. “One, two, three . . .”

There was a
BOOM
as the place where Molly and her grandfather had been was suddenly filled with air.

Dr. Logan and Molly were on their way.

Do nodded and shut his eyes.

R
ocky, Gerry, and Toka sat around a wooden table. Petula was curled up on the matted floor beside them asleep. In the next room, student sumo wrestlers were practicing. The noise of slapping, tussling, and thudding perforated the walls.

The boys had a pile of Japanese newspapers. Toka was reading a section where a photograph of Molly's face smiled out at them.

“It says,” Toka explained, “the same stuff as the other ones. She was last seen running through the streets of Tokyo, wet and in green kimono, with face painted like geisha. It says police are looking into sightings of this Molly. There are reports that she took the bullet train to Kyoto.”

“Does this one say the same thing about Proila as the others do?” Rocky asked, pointing at a photograph of Mr. Proila on a stage playing a guitar.

“Yes, it's about the fabulous concert he gave, playing guitar, piano, and harmonica.” Toka shook his head. “Even though he's deaf! Wow! That coin is so powerful!”

“So we're sure then,” Rocky concluded. “Proila now has the coin.” He stroked Petula. “And Molly,
without it, is what?”

“Well, she knows 'is secret, don't she?” said Gerry. “He'll do anythin' to shut 'er up. No wonder she's runnin'. Poor, poor Molly. I feel so sorry for 'er.”

Toka turned the newspaper to study its front page. “Bad news about the whales. Still can't believe that.”

“Are you sure you read it right?” Gerry asked.

Toka nodded and reread the headline. “From today, whale hunting is OK. It new sport and it OK to buy whale meat.”

“Proila definitely had something to do with that,” Gerry observed. “All he needed to do was play music to the prime minister.”

“What other nasty documents did he get signed?” Rocky wondered. “Yesterday dogfighting and cockfights were made legal. Today whale hunting. What's tomorrow?” We've got to find Molly.”

“Before Proila does.”

“Poor Molly,” said Gerry. “Where is she?”

Molly's great-great-great-grandfather cast an invisible lasso around her, to whizz her backward through time. Warm time winds swirled about them as Dr. Logan's special crystal took them both back through
the centuries. The sky above flickered from light to dark as the transporting bubble that they were in reversed through thousands of days and nights. The countryside around them flashed from golden to green to dark brown as the seasons changed and the plants ripened and grew and then died.

Molly looked at her grandfather's kindly face as he concentrated. She watched as he judged the right moment to stop.

“This should do it,” he said, his eyebrows lifting. He smiled at Molly and brought them to a “time hover,” which meant that they were hovering in the time but not yet visible. They looked about them.

“Coast seems clear,” Dr. Logan said. “Ready?”

With a
blip
their bubble popped. They were standing in the countryside in tall grass. It was summer and the meadows were in full bloom. Above was a cornflower blue sky. Instead of the buildings of Kyoto and Do's monastery, tree-filled countryside ran to distant hills.

“We have arrived,” Dr. Logan declared. “This is the time of the marvelous woman I told you about. It's the eleventh century. She doesn't live in Japan though.”

“Oh? Where does she live?”

“Toward Europe, over where Sardinia is going to
be.”

Molly frowned, worried. “Shouldn't we go to the far future to get a super-fast plane to Sardinia?” she suggested. It occurred to her that maybe Dr. Logan, old and tired as he was, had miscalculated. He might not have enough energy to go to the future now and then to Sardinia and then to return Molly back to her own time again. “I mean, in the eleventh century in Japan,” she said, “probably the only way to get about is by horse or donkey or ox cart.”

“Yes, or by boat . . .” Dr. Logan seemed distracted. With his right hand he was digging about in his jacket pocket. “Don't worry, Molly, we shan't use any of those methods.” He found what he was looking for—a white oval stone that he held up for Molly to see. The disc was about as long as his index finger. It was slim as a slice of cucumber, slightly thicker toward its center. It reminded Molly of the dried cuttlefish she'd seen in birdcages for parrots or parakeets to peck at, except it was smooth. Dr. Logan attached the stone to a chain around his neck. “It's a ‘floom'—well, that's what I call it.”

“What does it do?”

“It will get us to Fritha. She's the coin-maker ancestor I told you about. Now, Molly, please be quiet
a moment, as I really have to concentrate to do this. It's frightfully difficult.” He eyed Molly. “You are familiar with meditation, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Good, thought you would be. Meditation is the way. First we will get ourselves into what I call the Space Water. We will find the right super-highwave to ride. Once we're on that, it should only be a few moments before we are on the island that will one day be Sardinia.”

For the second time Molly doubted the old man. She had no idea what he was talking about. “What is a super-highwave?” she asked, skepticism audible in her voice. “And how do we ride one? It sounds like we're about to go surfing.”

“Yes, surfing, that strange sport invented by the Polynesian people way back in the distant past. That is similar to what we are going to be doing now.”

Molly's eyes widened. “Really?”

“So,” her grandfather went on, “we have no time to waste, especially as I'm on a roll, as I think you say. You must shut your eyes. Focus on a word that will take you into a nice quiet place inside yourself.”

“Into a trance?” Molly asked.

“Yes, sort of. I suppose you've done that all your life.” Dr. Logan closed his eyes.

Molly nodded. She shut hers.

“Good,” her grandfather began. “So, we'll go deeper if we can, deep into the quietest places of our minds. Relax.”

Molly did as she was told. She thought of the
aum
word Do had taught her and said it over and over again in her mind. As the sound filled her, she felt herself being propelled deeper into herself. At first she heard the chirping of birds as they flitted about and the sounds of the wind in the grass, but she soon stopped hearing anything. Her grandfather's voice came loud and clear to her as though he were speaking from right inside her mind.