Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (15 page)

“No problem.” Ojas laughed. “We ride on top.”

Molly looked at him. “On top of the train?”

“Most absolutely certainly, Mollee. On top is closer to the gods.”

“We could always go to the future and catch a
jet
train, or whatever they’ll have then,” Rocky reminded Molly. Then he shook his head. “But you know, Molly, on top sounds good.”

W
aqt’s train was super-luxurious. He kept his own special coaches at Delhi station. Whenever he needed to go anywhere, all he had to do was have a pulling engine taken from another train, which is what he’d done today.

Waqt lay back on a bolster and thought how entertaining the angry, stuffy people at Delhi station had been.

It was lovely and cool. This was because in the center of the carriage was a large box with a huge lump of ice in it. A “punkah boy” sat on the floor in the corner operating a rope that swung a fan over this icebox, producing a cool breeze that wafted over Waqt and his fellow passengers.

Opposite him, the ten-year-old Molly sat with
the puppy Petula on her lap. The six-year-old and the three-year-old sat beside her, and the baby Molly lay in a crib gurgling. All except the puppy were hypnotized.

The door of the compartment opened and three servants walked in. They quietly threw a white linen cloth over a table and began laying out plates of Indian food. A plate of tandoori chicken tikka and another of
seekh
kebabs. There were lentil
papad
wafers and
raita
(whipped yogurt with herbs) to dip the
papad
into. There were delicate puddings flavored with saffron.

Smelling the food, the puppy Petula opened her eyes. She jumped off the ten-year-old Molly’s lap and began barking at the table. The maharaja threw a cushion at her.

“SHUT UP, YOU THILFYAMINAL!” he shouted. Tersely, he ordered the punkah boy to play with the puppy.

The skinny boy jumped to his feet and pulled the puppy over to him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stone that he threw a short way across the floor for her. She retrieved it and, happy to be occupied, began sucking the stone.

Waqt cast his bloodshot eyes over his hypnotized guests. His gaze came to rest on the three-year-old Molly.

“Hmm. Testing you on this journey will pass the time.” He pulled a pair of chopsticks out of his pocket. Then, heaving himself upright, he crawled (because he was too big to walk in the train) toward the young Molly and clicked his fingers in front of her eyes.

The three-year-old Molly was at once present. For the previous few hours she’d been hypnotized, of course, but all that time she had watched the maharaja. She’d come to the conclusion that the giant was very like a tortoise she’d once seen on television. Now, able to speak, she said, “You’re gonna have to get a very,
very,
VERY big box to get into when you hivernate.”

The maharaja looked perplexed. He decided he wasn’t in the mood for a three-year-old today. He clicked his fingers, and the child was again in a trance. He turned to the six-year-old and, clapping sharply, released her.

The six-year-old Molly at once came to. The last time she’d been let out of her trance had been in the swing-bed chamber, and she’d cried her eyes puffy. Now she was more composed. The giant man didn’t seem as frightening as he had before. “Who are you? Have you ’dopted me? ‘Cos I don’t want to be ’dopted by you. Can you take me back to Briersville? I don’t want to live in Africa.”

“I see your logic,” said Waqt. “Don’t worry, I haven’t adopted you. I’m just borrowing you to see how talented you are.”

Molly looked at the hypnotized Mollys, struck by how like her they looked.

“Why are they all half asleep? You woke the big one up before, an’ she’s called Molly, too, isn’t she?”

“Observant, I see,” said Waqt, pointing the chopsticks at her. “Now, are you hungry? Because you are going to show me how dextrous you are. These are stopchicks. Everyone eats with them in China.”

“Are we in China?”

“No, but I spent fifteen years in China learning how to trime tavel.”

“Fifteen years! Weren’t you very good at it?” Molly asked innocently.

Waqt bristled. “Let’s see how good
you
are with these. You use them like so.” He crawled to the table and demonstrated how to pick up a piece of chicken tikka. “Now you can eat all you want, but only if you use the stopchicks.”

The little Molly took the chopsticks and looked at the food-laden table. She wrinkled her nose. “Got any ketchup?”

“No ketchup.”

“Are we in Africa?”

“Use the stopchicks.”

“Australia?”

“Use the stopchicks.”

“Never heard of a country called Usethestopchicks,” grumbled Molly under her breath. She frowned up at the tall man above her and said slowly, “An’—I—don’t—like—that—food,
so I won’t use the chopsticks!”
She turned and walked back to the velvet cushion by the wall, picking up the black puppy as she went. “Didn’t even say please,” she muttered.

Waqt was shocked. He wasn’t used to people disobeying him. He wasn’t used to the company of children.

“Don’t you dare…” Then it struck him that he wanted the baby Molly to grow up bold. “Good,” he finished. “Stubbornness is good. Now the next thing you are going to show me is whether you have an aptitude for languages. Repeat after me:
‘Elvaleah maleleia ey nuli.’”

The young Molly held the puppy to her chest and shut her eyes. They did French at school and she wasn’t very good at it. Just like she wasn’t good at sums or writing. She didn’t like being tested, and this man was starting to frighten her again.

“Good puppy,” she whispered in its ear. The puppy helped her feel safer. It reminded her of Rocky and
Mrs. Trinklebury, the cleaner at the orphanage.

“Come on, repeat after me,
‘Elvaleah maleleia ey nuli,’”
ordered Waqt. The small girl looked up at him.

“I won’t do your silly talking. An’ I want to go home,” she said.

Waqt growled and clicked his fingers. “Oh, go back into your trance.” He glanced down at the sleeping baby.

“Not a great beauty, are you?” he said to it. “A potato nose, closely set eyes, and it doesn’t look as if you’re going to be a child genius, either. Nor an artist, musician, dancer, or mathematician.” Waqt’s mouth puckered as he saw that the baby he’d hoped to rear wasn’t going to be brilliant in every department. Then his lips parted in a grimacelike smile.

“But your talent at hypnosis will make up for your defects. Little Waqta, ugly as you are, you will be a genius hypnotist. Now. I will take you to Jaipur and begin the moon ceremonies to inaugurate you into my world—the crystal-fountain ceremonies! I have a feeling, my little Waqta, that you are going to be a huge magnet for the crystals.” The baby Molly gurgled.

The crystal fountains. How Waqt loved them. Few hypnotists knew of the sources of the crystals, but he did; he’d been initiated into the world of the crystal fountains in China. It never ceased to amaze him that
they existed. For all over the world could be found very special, ordinary-looking cracked rocks, from which, on certain full-moon nights, the clear, red, and green crystals would emerge. Master hypnotists could draw them from the earth. Waqt was sure and very excited to think that this small baby would. “Does that sound good, Waqta?” he said, tickling the child’s chin. “Of course, it does.”

The puppy Petula watched the giant. She didn’t like the look or the smell of the huge man, and her instinct told her that it wasn’t good that he was breathing all over the baby. She walked over and sat down beside the tiny Molly and barked protectively.

“Not yours,” her small bark meant.

Miles behind Waqt’s train, and with Petula under her arm, the eleven-year-old Molly clambered up the iron stepladder at the very back of the
Delhi Rocket.
She faltered as new memories filled her head, but she brushed them away, determined not to dwell on them. She took Ojas’s hand and he hauled her up. The train’s sides dropped away like sheer cliffs, but there was a section in the middle with more iron bars to hold on to. Already people were sitting here. As they walked past them Petula sniffed at a chicken that was tucked under a boy’s arm and a goat that was sitting very quietly
beside its owner. Petula could sense that these animals knew something about the journey ahead. With her canine reckoning, she deduced that up here the journey was going to be ten times as windy as when she’d ever stuck her head out of a car window while driving along. She licked her lips and began to snuffle her way under Molly’s veil.

As she did, a nervous scent that she recognized caught the very edges of her smelling vision. It conjured up pictures of the turbaned man. He was getting closer by the second. Petula barked at Molly to warn her.

“We won’t fall off, Petula. I’ll hold you tight,” Molly said.

They found some space on the third carriage of the train and settled down. The engine at the front let out a whistle and covered them in steam. An Indian girl beside them let out a shriek of laughter, but Molly suddenly became apprehensive.

“Don’t worry,” Ojas assured them all. “Hold on and duck whenever we go under bridges. You’ll be fine.” He shut his eyes, put his hands together, and began mumbling prayers.

On the platform the Stationmaster blew his whistle, and the engine made its much louder reply with a piercing screech. Then an arduous
chuff-chuffing
began. The long metal coupling rods that moved the wheels
started to slowly turn, and the train began to move.

They edged out of the station and Molly surveyed the scene behind them. For a moment she thought she saw Zackya arriving in a wheel-less, stretcherlike litter carried by four servants, but the train was accelerating fast now and as it turned a corner she lost sight of him. She wondered whether fear had made her imagine it.

Soon the journey blew Zackya from her mind. She watched the landscape about her turn golden as they moved southwest toward Jaipur. Molly thought of Waqt up the track ahead of them. She hadn’t the foggiest clue what he was planning. She only hoped that his plans didn’t include killing any of the Mollys he had taken traveling with him. Molly’s fingers involuntarily shot to her mouth and she bit them as she questioned what would happen to her now if he
did
kill one of her former selves. As the veil on her head flapped in the wind, her imagination began to whirl. If Waqt chopped a finger off the six-year-old, she wondered, would she now suddenly have a long-healed stump? She touched the scar on her neck. What had caused it? It was obviously from a cut that had originally been fairly deep. Why had her memories disappeared when she’d traveled forward to the next century, but this scar had appeared? Where were the memories that went with the scar?

And, as the hours passed, a new question germinated in Molly’s mind. Why was Waqt so keen to keep the baby Molly as a child for himself? Why wouldn’t the three-year-old, the six-year-old, or even the ten-year-old do? Maybe it was because the baby would have absolutely no memories of her life at Hardwick House. But the suspicion that ate at her was that the reason he didn’t want to adopt the older Mollys was that there was something
wrong
with them. Ever since Lucy Logan had been so unenthusiastic about being reunited with her long-lost daughter, Molly had begun to feel that it must be because she, Molly, wasn’t good enough. And now Waqt was sending her the same message—that Molly wasn’t the sort of person you’d want to discover was your daughter or, in Waqt’s case, adopt. This made Molly feel bad.

As the sun shone down in her face, furnace hot, Molly was comforted by new memories of her trip to Jaipur as a ten-year-old. So she knew that, at least so far, Waqt was treating her other selves reasonably well.

The train snaked across the dry Indian landscape. Smoke from the locomotive trailed above their heads. The wind threatened to blow everyone off, and Petula’s ears flapped like wings. Forest’s dreadlocks thudded against his cheeks. He smiled, looking out through his
lashes at the beautiful, sun-baked hilly countryside around them.

They saw wild boar scrabbling among bushes. They even caught a glimpse of a leopard as it streaked across a hillside for cover. Ojas had to shout over the wind for his voice to be heard.

“If you look carefully, you may see a tiger! Or a rhinoceros! And look at that herd of elephants at that watering hole! I told you this was the best way to ride.”

The countryside was teeming with animals. Herds of deer took off in fright as the train roared past. A bear nodded at them from a hilltop, his forelegs against a tree where a bees’ nest hung.

The train came to a small rural station and stopped, its mission to pick up parcels and sacks. On the platform were people waiting to sell food to whoever could pay. Molly could smell curries and warm bread. Ojas took some of their money and jumped down to fetch them a meal and fresh water.

Petula shook her head and wiped a paw across her dusty muzzle. She watched Ojas picking a path across the platform toward the stall that smelled of onions and bread. She deduced that the train was going to be stopped for a while and saw an opportunity to stretch her legs.

She stood up, shook herself off, and yawned. Then she headed up the train.

She walked by a cage full of chickens that panicked and clucked. Petula gave one of them a hypnotic stare. As she went past the passengers squashed together on the roof, hands shot out to stroke her. One old lady gave her a succulent piece of lamb. Petula nodded and took it gratefully. A small boy offered her a slice of mango. Petula declined, but barked a thank-you.

At the end of the train, Petula took a quick look at the top of the engine and sniffed. She could just make out the driver’s packed lunch. He seemed to be having something with cheese.

Then she made her way back down the train. People were just as friendly as they had been on the way up. The people here were wonderful, Petula thought. If it wasn’t for the giant and his helper, this would really be one of the nicest places she’d ever visited. She could see Molly now, standing up, looking for her. She barked and Molly saw her.