Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (26 page)

“Burning in fire is a very fine way to go,” Ojas went on. “Remember, it is just a body. Dead as a dead insect. It burns and the smoke rises to heaven. A body wrapped in yellow is a man. Women are wrapped in white.”

A small boat with seven white clad men rowed out past them and into deeper water. They had a wrapped and weighted body on board. They pushed it into the river, where it floated for a second before sinking.

“Ah, now that body was the body of a very, very holy saddhu or a priest. Only they are allowed to be dropped into the Ganges like that!” Ojas leaned over, dipped a cup into the green water, and drank from it.

“Yuck,” said Rocky. “How can you do that? Have you stopped to think what kinds of bacteria are in this river?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘bacteria,’” laughed Ojas, “but I do know that you people have very weak systems. My stomach is like iron. I never get sick.”

Then Molly saw something else wrapped in white bandages burning on the water. It was coming toward them, carried on the current.

“And what’s that?” she asked Ojas, realizing that the burning parcel was the size of a dog or cat.

Ojas studied the bobbing object. He looked about and his eyes widened. “There’s no funeral party with it.”

“Are dead pets always burned on the water?” asked Molly.

“This…” Ojas found it difficult to find the words. “This is not normal, Mollee.”

The small burning dolls that they had seen in Agra flashed through Molly’s mind and at once she knew what the burning parcel was.

“It can’t be Petula! It can’t be!” Molly watched the orange flames curl about the white bandages, blackening them. As the bound body drifted closer, six brown letters painted on its bandages leaped out at her. PETULA, they read. Ojas knelt down and began nodding in prayer.

“That’s horrible,” Rocky gasped.

Molly’s head spun and a terrible misery flooded her. Her skin prickled as sadness sprang through her.
Without Petula, she didn’t feel whole. Petula, who’d been by her side, who’d shared her life. To see Petula’s body burning on the water now, it didn’t seem possible. But it was real. A pain that stabbed at the pit of her heart shot through Molly, making her quake. She heard herself shouting, “YOU MURDERER, WAQT. YOU TWISTED, FOUL MURDERER.” Then she crumpled up.

As she lay sobbing, she felt a small wet nose dab at her cheek. It was the puppy Petula and it was as if she were saying, “Don’t worry, Molly. I’m still here.” Molly hugged the puppy, but she didn’t feel better. For she knew that, if ever they got back to the future, this puppy would have to be returned to her correct time. The Petula that Molly knew was dead. Molly buried her face in the puppy’s fur.

The boat ferried them up alongside the Benares riverbank until they were away from the burning
ghats.
Molly had never felt so sad. More than ever, she knew that Waqt was perfectly capable of killing the younger Mollys. She sat up and tried to pull herself together. As she did, she realized with sudden horror that while she’d been crying about Petula, the younger Mollys had moved from this time. What was more, the feeling of them was getting fainter and fainter—like characters on a train leaving a station, they were becoming more and
more distant. But they weren’t on a train. Waqt was carrying her younger selves away, away into the future.

“Waqt’s taking the other me’s forward in time!” she gasped. “They were here, but he’s just taken them
forward.”

“Just
now?”
asked Rocky.

“Yes. It feels like they’re months ahead now. They’ve stopped
months
ahead. And I can’t move
forward
in time. This means that we’ll have to wait here for
months
just to get into the same time zone as them! What’s more, Waqt might move in time
again.
But I don’t care. Nothing matters now that Petula’s dead.” Molly put her head in her hands and massaged her forehead. She was starting to feel really tired, like an exhausted climber stuck on the side of a vast mountain.

“I wish I could help,” Forest sympathized. He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Maybe I can help.”

Molly shook her head. She doubted it.

For a while they listened to the sounds of Benares.

The hollow chimes of copper temple bells drifted over the water, and wooden bells on cows made a
CLOCK-CLOCK
noise as the animals wandered the
ghats.
Pilgrims chanted, somewhere someone chopped wood, washerwomen chattered, and oars splashed in the river.

“You know, this time traveling has got me thinkin’,”
Forest said. “Thinkin’ about the years I spent with Buddhist monks. There’s this word they have—
kalachakra.
It means ‘wheel of time.’ A Hindu priest once told me that the Hindu word for ’time’ is
kaal.
Hindus also believe that time turns like a wheel and there are scientists who think time goes around in a wheel, too. Interesting, eh?” Everyone watched the shoreline, as if no one was paying attention to Forest. But Molly listened. She wiped her eyes.

“A wheel of time?” she said slowly. “If time
is
a wheel, then that would mean that the end joins the beginning.”

“Yeah, but in, like, a big, spacey weird way.”

Molly tilted her head as if letting a strange new idea pour into her ear. And then her eyes began to light up.

“So if time
is
like a wheel, and the end of time is joined to the beginning of time, then if I go back in time far enough, back to the beginning of time, and keep going, then I’ll automatically travel through to the end of time. You’re saying all I’d have to do is go backward through time from there. Eventually, I’d go past the year 3000, then 2000, and keep going backward in time until I got to November 1870 and arrived at where Waqt is
now
—”

“That’s crazy, Molly,” Rocky interrupted, turning around. “You don’t
know
that the beginning of time
joins on to the end of time. It’s a harebrained theory. What if it doesn’t? There might not
be
a beginning of time. And then you’ll just be stuck somewhere horrible, trillions of years ago. Don’t be stupid, Molly.”

“I don’t know,” said Forest. “No one believed that the world was round. It sounds real dumb that the world might be round, like we should all fall off, like bugs fallin’ off a ball. Maybe time
is
like a wheel.”

Rocky suddenly shouted, “Forest, stop it! It’s
really
irresponsible of you to tell Molly that time is like a wheel. No one knows what’s at the beginning of time. And you certainly don’t!”

“Man, sorry. I was just trying to help.”

“I’ve got a feeling,” Molly said suddenly, “that time
is
like a wheel.”

Rocky’s face darkened. “Molly, don’t be stupid. You’re not stupid. Don’t go by a hunch. We’ll wait for the future to come in a normal, human way. Then you get better time-travel crystals. You don’t need to time travel backward to get to the future. And, anyway, who knows how that sort of time travel would affect your skin? It might scale up your insides as well as your outsides, Molly. It might age you so much that you die!”

“Rocky,” said Molly slowly, “I
have
to try to find a way of chasing Waqt to the future to catch him out before he kills the younger me’s.”

Molly saw that the boat was almost at the edge of the water and that the captain was set to dock. On shore, a crowd was gathering. Quietly, she reached into her pocket for her muddy green stone.

Rocky saw her hand moving.

“Don’t do it, Molly!”

“I’ll see you soon,” Molly said and, shutting her eyes, she vanished from his time.

A
s soon as Molly was reversing through time she realized what a crazy decision she’d made. Her task felt as hopeless and impossible as an attempt to fly across a huge ocean in a tiny microlight with a lawnmower engine. For the green crystal made her time travel jerky and it didn’t always respond to her. She demanded that it take her backward through time as fast as possible. She squeezed it and concentrated on moving into top gear because she knew that to get to the
beginning of time
she had a giant distance to travel. But traveling with this crystal felt as if she were in a rusty old vehicle with a jammed transmission and a broken accelerator.

She reckoned that she had gone back three hundred years. And then a ghastly mathematical thought occurred
to her: At this rate, she’d be an old lady before she reached the beginning of time. Molly felt the years flash past and decided she was probably now in about the eleventh century. But this was as fast as she was going to move with this crystal.

She realized that she’d made a dreadful misjudgment. Numb from the news of Petula’s death, she hadn’t been thinking properly. She felt as if she was traveling at about a hundred years a minute, six thousand years in an hour. In twelve hours she would have gone back… Molly did some math in her head… seventy-two thousand years—that was all. And she would need to sleep and eat and drink. She hadn’t considered that problem. What should she do? Stop and sleep?

Molly couldn’t believe what a horrifically stupid mistake she’d made. As she shut her eyes a lesson from long ago wriggled up from the bottom of her mind. She remembered her bad-tempered teacher Mrs. Toadley making the class recite a rhyme about time. The rhyme rang in her head like a horrible teasing song.

Molly gulped as she did more sums. Her calculations took a while. At the rate she was traveling, if she did stop to sleep, she’d be lucky to travel ninety-six thousand years a day. It would take her a whole year to travel thirty-five million years back in time. In ten years she’d go back three hundred and fifty million years. That was nowhere near
fourteen billion
years
.
Molly started to panic and her hands grew very clammy. The world whizzed past her. She had no idea where in time she was now. She squeezed the crystal and implored, “You MUST go faster. You must. You have to or we’ll never get to the beginning of time. Please. Please.”

Molly understood that she was doomed, and her eyes filled with tears. She knew now that she was going to die somewhere thousands of years away from everyone and everything she loved. She would have to stop,
and where she stopped was where she would have to live, forever, until she grew old and died. She realized then that if it was impossible to go to the beginning of time, she should of course stop, as soon as she could, and so she slowly brought herself to a hovering position until she could see that the Ganges River was below her and the shore a yard away.

She stopped and at the same time jumped so that she landed in the mud on the banks of the river. When she looked up she saw there was a man close by. He held a begging bowl and was sitting cross-legged in front of her. He was old and blind. One of his eyes was shut; the other was white with cataracts. As she landed he raised his head. Molly glanced about. Benares was smaller and more primitive. Maybe she was in the first or second century.

Molly collapsed in the mud.

“I can’t live here!” she sobbed out loud. “What have I done?” She looked down at the crystal in her hand and turned it over.

“You stupid, lame lump of muck!” she spat at it. Then she glanced out at the river, where the sun’s first rays of the day were spreading out like fire on the water. She saw a glimmering reflection of herself and instinctively reached up to feel her face. The scales now almost covered her nose, and they were thickening
beside her mouth. Her whole face felt tight and dry. She looked at her hands. The skin on them was like a lizard’s. Molly felt numb, too numb to care about being a reptile person.

She held the crystal out, ready to throw it in the river, but she couldn’t do it. The unbearable thought of never again seeing the people she loved overwhelmed her. They were hundreds of years ahead of her, stuck in 1870, and she was stuck
here.
Tears brimmed in Molly’s eyes until they were splashing down her cheeks and dripping off her chin. Racking sobs that she had no control over came coughing up from her chest. All Molly wanted was to see the people she loved. She couldn’t bear losing them
and
Petula.

For a while Molly sat in the mud crying. She cried until she felt she didn’t have any tears left. Then she remembered the blind man who’d been sitting quietly on the riverbank, and now, slightly embarrassed, she glanced back at him. He was staring at the sky with his open blind eye. She noticed a small smile on his lips. And then, she noticed something else.

He was stroking the lid of his closed right eye with his finger. Molly watched. It was as if he was comforting his eye. Then she noticed that this shut eye was boomerang-shaped. It reminded her of the shape of the scar across the green crystal in her hand. She studied the scar on her
crystal. Now it looked like a shut eye.

Eyes always reminded Molly of hypnotism. And at once she saw a glimmer of hope. If she could hypnotize the crystal, perhaps, just perhaps, she could make it travel faster.

Molly cradled the crystal in her palm and, taking a deep breath, began to focus her mind. She sent all her concentration toward it. Nothing happened. She dropped the crystal in despair. She was devastated. She stared down at the scarred crystal and touched it.

“Please
let me hypnotize you,” she whispered. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Please,” she sobbed. The hypnotic beam from her eye distorted as it made its way through the prism of her tears. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t see them again. I love them, you see. And the world of my own time. I love it. Oh, please.” Inside her, Molly’s love was silently screaming.