Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (24 page)

He must lure her. Tempt her. Reel her in. Then the trap would snap shut.

M
olly decided to stop. Were they in March 1870, or had they traveled too far back? The world materialized around them and at once they were surrounded by water. The puppy yelped as a torrent hit her nose, and she burrowed into the material of Rocky’s jacket. Molly had never seen a place so wet. The rain was pelting down and obviously had been for days. The old hotel building was still behind them. But it wasn’t a hotel. Now it was a functioning palace with ornamental gardens. The dry ground where they had been standing was so flooded that the water was up to Amrit’s knees.

The elephant was delighted and immediately began stamping and splashing. She put her trunk in the water, sucked up a trunkful of it, and happily squirted it up in
the air and over her head. It showered down on Ojas’s legs.

“NO. Bad girl!” he shouted angrily, jumping down and picking a large banana leaf, which he held over his head as an umbrella.

“Man, she’s only havin’ some fun!” said Forest from the howdah.

“It won’t be fun if she drenches you.” Ojas sternly retorted, getting back up. “With monsoon rain like this, where will you get dry if she soaks you? Huh?” He was now dripping.

Molly tucked her legs into the howdah. Even under its cover they still got wet. The canopy above them sagged with water. Ojas poked it with the wooden end of his ankush and the water flooded down the back and down Amrit’s bottom.

“Cats and dogs! We will have to push this water out continuously,” he commented, “or the canopy will break.” The puppy barked at the sky.

“I’m cold!” said little Molly, squeezing Rocky’s arm for warmth.

“This isn’t March. Is this December weather?” Rocky asked Ojas.

“Oh no, Rocky. This is July or August. Monsoon time.”

“Sorry,” said Molly. “I misjudged it. This crystal
doesn’t work properly.”

“Are you getting any memories now that we’re near the other you’s, Molly?”

Molly nodded, feeling the strange vibrations emanating from her younger selves. She remembered being ten and being let out of her trance by Waqt.

“He’s blindfolded the ten-year-old me, though, so that I can’t remember seeing where they are. But I can feel them. They’re somewhere over there.” Molly pointed southwest. “Oh, I wish I were picking up memories of Petula!”

“That’s kind of where Udaipur is,” said Forest. “But it’s quite a ways away. After Udaipur, where did the visitors’ book say they were going?”

“On a boat,” said Rocky, “but we don’t know where to or on which river.”

“I do,” shouted the six-year-old Molly, evidently delighted by some thought that had struck her. She slapped her knees and bellowed with laughter. “Guess what sort of river they’re going to. Guess!”

Everyone looked at the small, scruffy girl suddenly laughing from under the howdah canopy in the rain.

“What’s so funny?” asked Forest.

“The name, the name! The name, of course! Guess it!”

Everyone looked blank.

“How do you know the name of the river?” Molly asked.

“I remember!”

“Waqt’s let the three-year-old you remember!” said Rocky. “It’s a clue.”

“The six-year-old remembers the three-year-old Molly’s memories, but you’ve forgotten them,” said Forest.

“Why don’t you just tell us the name?” asked Molly, slightly embarrassed that this younger version of herself was holding everyone to ransom.

“Oh, she wants to play a game,” said Ojas, water dripping down his nose. “So why don’t you give us a clue, little Mollee,” he coaxed.

“Well, it’s what you put on your toast in the mornings,” said the six-year-old, clapping her hands with glee.

“Ketchup,” said Molly.

“Butter,” said Rocky.

“Ghee,” guessed Ojas.

“Turnip paste,” said Forest.

The rain fell down, making their teeth chatter.

“No!” exclaimed the little Molly.

“Okay, we give up. Just tell us,” said Forest.

“No, it’s a secret,” said the six-year-old.

“Marmalade?”

“Marmite?”

“Baked beans?”

“Egg?”

“Mashed-up Molly,” said Molly.

“Cheese?”

“I don’t like cheese on toast,” said little Molly.

“What
do
you like on toast?” asked Rocky slyly.

“Well, mostly ketchup, if I’m allowed, or butter and jam,” admitted the little girl.

“Is the name of the river ‘Jam’?” asked Rocky.

“Yes! Yes! Jam! Isn’t that the funniest name for a river? Just think of being in a boat on a river of Jam!” She laughed as if it were the funniest joke in the world. Rocky laughed to humor the little girl. Then he turned to Ojas and Forest.

“Ever heard of this river?”

“Well,” said Forest, wrinkling his brow, “there is a river called the Yamuna. Some people say Jamuna… like jam. It rises in the Himalaya Mountains and runs down through central India. It passes through Agra. Then it joins the Ganges River. And after that, the
very
important, mystical place that it washes past, that I am
sure
Waqt will be interested in, is Benares—the
City of Light.
Yeah
,
man. That is one off-the-end-of-the-scale place. In our time it’s called Varanasi. That crazy dude will definitely want to go
there.”

“Varanasi must be where Waqt’s going to be in
November,”
said Rocky. “
That’s
where he’s going by boat.”

“Will Waqt have to go back to Agra to get on the Jamuna River?” asked Molly.

“Yeah,” said Forest. “I suppose so.”

“Well,” said Molly, “let’s get to Agra. Then we stand a chance of catching up with him.”

“Agra is to the east, about one hundred and thirty-five miles away,” said Ojas. “I asked the hotel porter. At four miles an hour, and that is a steady pace for an elephant, that will take about hmm.…” Ojas was quiet for a moment.

“Thirty-four hours,” calculated Rocky. “So what’s that? Three days’ walking.” He paused as Ojas poked his ankush up into the canopy and more water emptied out onto Amrit’s bottom. “The way I see it is this: we either go to Agra now, and get there before Waqt does, or we could whiz back and ambush him here in Jaipur, in March, like I said.”

“With this crystal,” said Molly, “I can’t be sure of landing in exactly the right time. This crystal doesn’t work very well, remember. It’s safer to go to Agra.”

“I suppose,” said Ojas, prodding Amrit with his foot. “We should get moving, then. Anyway, those children at the window are looking at us. We’re in their garden.”

And so off they set through this new, watery world.
Amrit waded through the flooded green gardens and under the stone arch to the street. And when they got there, what a sight they beheld!

The road had become a river.

“Everything’s soaked!” said Molly.

“This is normal,” said Ojas. “The monsoon rains last for ten weeks in this part of India. People are grateful for them because it gets very hot in May and June and July. If there is a bad drought, all the crops fail. Then people starve. So when the heavens open up, everyone is very, very happy indeed.”

Ten minutes later the rain stopped. People came out of their houses and got on with their business as if going to school or work by river-road was the most normal thing in the world. Four children splashed happily past, shouting up at Ojas and pointing at the puppy. A tailor ventured out of his premises with a roll of material on his shoulder; a mother pushed two tiny boats, each made out of a halved barrel and containing a small, laughing toddler, down the river-road. A dog paddled past, his tail wagging even as he swam.

Soon they were out in the countryside and on the open road, where the water was shallower. Sun burst through the brooding clouds and, for a while, everyone dried out. They slid down from Amrit and collected their own big umbrella leaves. It wasn’t long before the skies blackened once more. The clouds
descended as though they wanted to smother the earth, and again it began to rain. The fields on either side were submerged in water, and silver raindrops danced off their gray surfaces. The noise of the rain was cacophonous. It thudded into the pool in the canopy above them. Every so often the skies thundered, a deep rumbling as the elements in the air above grumbled and burped.

“Look,” said Ojas. “The rains must be nearly over because those purple flowers are growing. And those yellow ones and those mushrooms. It must be late August.”

Molly thought of Petula.

“Molly,” she said to her six-year-old self, “do you remember a dog, a black dog, being there when you were with the giant when you were little?” The young girl’s face darkened. The eleven-year-old Molly realized that there were probably only a few clear memories in the six-year-old’s head from when she was three and traveling with Waqt. Still, she hoped Petula would be one of them.

The little Molly screwed up her face trying to remember things from her short life. “I remember going to a big place with a top like a cloud meringue.”

“Sounds like Agra,” said Forest.

“And I remember going to a big house in the
middle of a sea and there were lots of purple men all hopping about. And it was raining and the baby got all wet, but there wasn’t a dog.”

“Sounds like the city of Udaipur. The palace is on a lake.”

Suddenly a clever thought struck Molly. If she could remember the ten-year-old’s experiences, and the six-year-old could recall the three-year-old’s memories, then surely the
ten
-year-old would get memories of being six. Her six-year-old self might be able to send a message to her ten-year-old self. It was worth a go. Molly quickly explained her thoughts to the others.

And so they began to teach the six-year-old a rhyme. It wasn’t melodic. In fact, it was quite irritating. But it was the sort of rhyme that a six-year-old will sing over and over and over again. It went:

M
olly and her entourage made their way at an elephant’s pace to the town of Agra and the Jamuna River. As Amrit plodded on they sang the rescue rhyme so that it became well and truly ingrained in the six-year-old Molly’s mind. And Molly put some other memories there, too. One afternoon, when Forest was asleep and she was walking down the puddle-filled road with little Molly, she made her laugh. She did a funky-chicken act, then a constipated camel dance, and finally a Forest impersonation. When she did the whole lot at once, little Molly was in stitches. Molly knew exactly how to make her younger self giggle. And the nice thing was that after they had settled down to walking again, she was filled with a strange, distorted memory of a big girl
called Molly once making her laugh. Some of the details were confused but it was one of her strongest memories and the warm feeling generated by the moment was still intact.

Molly was amazed how that one giggling moment injected so much positive energy into her. She looked at her friends and it struck her how important it was for people to have happy times—for positive feelings of happy times will stay in a person’s heart and mind forever.

Waqt sat in his grand barge, sprawled on lavish, tasseled cushions. A very dark Indian man dressed in white was clipping the hair in his ear, catching the remnants that fell in a gold dish. When the man replaced the maharaja’s feathered turban, Waqt sat up and clapped his hands.

The ten-year-old Molly was brought before him. He nodded to the guards, and they removed her blindfold.

Molly rubbed her eyes as they adjusted to the light. While she’d been cooped up she’d received all sorts of memories from when she’d been about six. Most of all, she remembered a rhyme that she’d sung over and over. She looked at the giant in front of her and wondered whether the big Molly was going to rescue her now.

Servants came scurrying into the room carrying dishes with silver lids. The food inside them smelled irresistibly delicious.

“Eat! This melicious deal is all for you, Lommy!”

The ten-year-old faltered. Why was the maharaja being so nice? Suspiciously, she began to eat.

At the first mouthful Molly realized what torture was being inflicted upon her. The food was fiery hot with chili. She coughed and reached for a napkin to spit the food into.

“I said, EAT IT!” Molly tried again. She had never tasted anything so hot. Her mouth began to feel like a burning inferno.

“I can’t!” she said.

“You will.” Waqt’s face loomed up close. “You will eat it, or you die,” he said, smiling.

So Molly ate. Her mouth went numb. She drank three jugs of water, but still her mouth was a roaring fire.

“Nicey spicy! Spicy nicey!” Waqt taunted. It was torture. And the more she spluttered and drank, the more the cruel giant laughed.

“Do you merember this?” he laughed. “Can you merember this?” was the strange question he kept asking her. Molly didn’t know what he meant.