Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (27 page)

This time, something extraordinary happened. As Molly drove her hypnotic power into the crystal, the scar split open. It opened like a flower unfurling very quickly in dawn light. And in between the scar lines was a deep green swirl that seemed to spiral down like water rushing down a drain. Molly gasped and at once lifted herself to a hovering position in time. For a moment she wondered whether she was imagining the open eye, but then she felt its power and knew it was real. Now
the crystal felt at least as powerful as both the time gems she’d used before. She gripped it tightly. As she prepared to pull full-throttle, Molly looked up to see a red bird flying above. Her mind stretched out in a lassoing way and, as she pushed on the time-travel accelerator to move off, she saw the bird, trapped by her power and traveling with her. Shocked, she stopped. The bird flew away. Molly was amazed. Taking the bird with her had been so easy. Now she had high hopes for what else this crystal could do.

Using her most concentrated hypnotic force and harnessing the full power of her mind, Molly willed the crystal to move as fast as it could. Immediately, the bumpy, jerky movements of before were replaced by what felt like supersonic speed. The centuries whipped past so quickly that Molly found it difficult to gauge how fast she was traveling. To test the crystal she slowed to a hover and stopped. The world materialized. Molly gasped. There were huge footprints in the mud beside her. Dinosaur footprints? Molly’s hands were equally shocking. The skin on them was as crusty as the top of a loaf of bread. Repulsed, she immediately took off again. She remembered the rhyme about time.

So she’d traveled sixty-five million years at least! Was that possible? The millennia purred past as easily as the pages of a book being flipped. Molly stared at the crystal and urged it on. Now she loved this crystal. It was the best crystal. The best. In her mind she apologized to it for calling it a lump of muck.

Every so often Molly let herself slow down to see where she was. First she felt she was underwater and then she was in
rock,
the rock that had been there before the Ganges River and the primeval rains had worn it away. And it was black. She didn’t stop, as she thought she might die if she let herself arrive
inside
rock. But at least while the rock was there, she knew the world existed, too. Molly wondered where she would be
before
planet earth formed—five billion years ago, for instance. She willed the crystal on. The cool time winds whipped about her. Molly felt herself in the black rock for a long time, and then everything suddenly went orange and red. White orange with heat. Molly shut her eyes tight. She knew she mustn’t stop now or she would be shriveled up. She thought that she was perhaps at the beginning of planet earth. She could feel the heat, smell a sulfurous, bad-egg smell,
and hear explosions, but she was safe within her traveling time capsule. It hugged her and carried her back. Farther and farther back in time.

Now the heat died down for a moment. Millions of years sped by. Molly opened her eyes and saw black space all about, black space lit with an orange spray and thousands of fiery balls. It was as if space was one huge explosion. And then the heat increased, and everything went flame orange.

Molly felt an ancient feeling in her bones. She could actually sense that she was nearly at the very beginning of time. And now she wondered whether the scarred crystal could actually do what she wanted it to—take her over the threshold of the beginning of time to the end of time.…
If
that was the way things worked—if Forest had been right about the wheel of time. She looked deep into the crystal’s green swirl and felt the strangest sensation—that the stone was hypnotizing her as she hypnotized it. It was as if they were both helping each other to do this impossible thing.

And then the black space filled with noise. Even though Molly was protected, the noise almost broke through. A crashing, banging thunder shook her, and the white light of the noise blinded her. She shut her eyes, she shielded them, but still the light broke through. And the heat was almost unbearable. The
cool time wind was now like hot oven air. Molly’s body poured with sweat. She was really frightened. She gripped the crystal and urged it on even faster.

Hotter and hotter it became and brighter and brighter and louder and louder and Molly felt as though she was shrinking. Her senses were being bombarded. Terrified, she zoned into the crystal and imagined it as a green horse that she was riding. She pictured them galloping through a long, molten tunnel. She urged her steed on. Tighter and smaller and even tinier she felt as the space about her compressed. It was as if she was being squashed and pulled as fine as a piece of thread. Her head felt thinner than wire. She urged the crystal back to the very first moment of time, the moment smaller than a nanosecond. Molly felt as if she had shrunk to the size of a micro-atom, and then she thought she didn’t exist at all. Everything was still and quiet and empty.

She let herself slow down to hovering speed and she dared to open her eyes.

She seemed to be floating in the middle of a giant oval-ended sieve with millions and millions of holes in it. The holes near her were visible, but the oval sieve structure vanished into the distance, the holes becoming smaller and smaller until they disappeared, too. White light poured through the holes and drenched
Molly with bright rays. She hovered and looked about, wondering where Waqt’s precious Bubble was—the place where he thought the special youth-giving light shone. But she couldn’t see it. Molly lingered and found herself turning, floating, somersaulting. She was a tiny, tumbling dot in a vast chasm.

She urged her crystal to continue back in time and plunged into the blackness that the other holes disappeared into—and beyond.

At dizzying speed, Molly shot like an arrow through the dazzling light of the sieve. And as she whizzed through the empty nothingness all sorts of thoughts rushed through her head. She thought about the people she loved. Rocky, Forest, Ojas, Mrs. Trinklebury, Primo Cell, the other children from the orphanage. She thought of the places she loved. She thought about Petula, and Amrit, too. She thought about Lucy Logan. She thought of her plans for a hypnotic hospital, and her plans felt small and unreal. Then another wall of holes approached and in a moment Molly’s body seemed to vaporize into a streak of smoke and pass through one of these. As it did, she was blinded. She couldn’t breathe. And then, she felt like she was expanding again. It was molten hot. There was a tumultuous thunder about her and then everything went quiet. Now Molly sensed that she had
passed into the end of time. The universe felt late, spent, and dying.

There was nothing beneath her for a long time. And then, suddenly, earth appeared beneath her feet. Molly focused on her crystal and willed it on. She was still traveling fast. She didn’t dare stop to see what would happen on the earth in the future. Her sole aim was to get back to find Waqt.

Molly willed the crystal to take her to November 1870. She felt the electricity of her own grown-up life as she passed through the twenty-first century and then she could feel her abducted selves as she approached the 1870s.

Finally, she landed on the riverbank. It was night and a full moon hung in the starry sky. Molly sank to the ground. She’d made it. Her mouth was parched. As she breathed a sigh of relief she noticed her cheeks no longer felt dry and taut. She reached up to touch her face and looked into the flat moonlit water. Her reflection peered back. Her skin was clear. The scales had
disappeared.

M
olly gathered up her
salwar kameez
and began to run. She leaped up the stone steps of the
ghats
toward the candlelit alleys ahead. All the time she scanned her brain for memories, for clues to the whereabouts of her other selves.

As Molly ran, she thought.

So Waqt was right about his light at the beginning of time. It
did
cure scaly skin. It made a person look young again. But he was wrong about it only being in a special bubble. And he was wrong that you needed thousands of crystals to get to the light.

Molly came to a small, ramshackle square lit up by night stalls selling sweets, fruit, and flamboyant, multicolored paper lanterns. People were gathered for Diwali, the November festival of light. The crowd
looked expectantly up at the full moon and the black-and-blue sky. All at once there was an explosive light. Great blossoming, gunpowder fireworks splintered the night. Molly stopped to catch her breath, wondering where she could get a drink of water.

Then memories began to form. Memories from her ten-year-old self. They were in the fort ahead.

Molly cautiously approached the darkest corner of the square.

Here there were piles of rags on the pavement, the rags of poor people huddled together. Molly crept past them up the winding street toward the fort.

Inside the fort the ten-year-old Molly was sitting in a room with the three-year-old. Neither was hypnotized now. Both were wearing blood-red gowns. Molly’s hands were shackled together, but her blindfold was off. Little Molly was clutching the windowsill, looking up at the sky and the fireworks exploding in it. “Day are sooo pretty, aren’t day, Molly?” she said.

The baby, in a fine white dress, lay quiet in a cot. Waqt, dressed in a silver cloak, hovered outside their door like a ghost. His bearded priests surrounded him like a flock of black ravens. Then one of them swept into the room, scooped the baby from its cot, and carried her outside into the courtyard. The child was
placed on a purple cushion on a large, flat, cracked rock. The full moon hung above.

“I don’t fink da baby likes da fireworks,” said the three-year-old Molly, coming to sit by her older self.

Waqt’s final inauguration ceremony commenced.

Two servants brought him the heavy velvet bag holding his collection of crystals. As the sky burst with blue and red and silver light, Waqt ordered the priests to lay the crystals in a circle around the flat rock and the tiny sleeping child.

Molly stole up to the fort gate. A dozy guard leaned against the wall, half asleep. She slid by him through the shadows and made her way past fragrant flower-covered walls toward the second fort gate. The guards here were in a small hut playing dice, too absorbed to notice the girl slinking by.

Finally she could see the glow of torch flames that emanated from the fort’s inner courtyard. She slipped along an arched walkway and made her way toward the light.

Nearby was a platform for mounting elephants. Molly climbed onto this and then struggled farther up until she lay flat on the wall behind. Below her the ceremonial area was lit up like a stage. Hundreds of crystals lay in a ring around a rock that the baby Molly lay on,
and now the priests were chanting. They were marching on the spot, lifting their knees high and bringing their peacock-headed batons down on the ground with heavy thuds. The noise reverberated around the stone courtyard, but the baby slept on peacefully.

The fireworks stopped. Waqt stood, as tall as a lamppost, with his hands raised to the moon. And then, as the chanting reached a peak, and the marching and thudding got faster and faster, the light of the moon suddenly shone directly down on the center of the ring of crystals, onto the cracked rock and the still-sleeping child.

Waqt gave a horrible yell that was echoed by eerie screeches from each of the priests. Frightened by the racket, the baby woke up and began to cry. The priests, like a hollow tunnel, echoed her wail.

Molly wasted no time. Dropping down from the wall into dark shadow, she crept along until she was behind Waqt. He was now collecting his biggest, most precious gems. They seemed to be lodged in the crack of the rock. He picked each one up and, with a ridiculous flourish of his right arm, plopped it into his bag. Around him the priests collected the scores of remaining crystals and brought them to him. Molly inched closer. Her mouth felt as dry as a parrot’s.

Finally the bag was full again. Two servants bore it
away to a stone shelf behind Waqt, close to where Molly was hiding. She watched and waited. Her heart beat like the wings of a powerful butterfly trapped inside her chest. Her ears rang with the adrenaline that rushed through her blood. She was so tense, she could scarcely move. But she had to get to that shelf.

The ten-year-old Molly cowered on a bench at the far side of the courtyard, frightened and lonely. The three-year-old sat on her lap, her face buried in her chest. “Why did day make dat baby cwy?” she asked. “Molly, I don’t like dose old men. Day’re scary.” The words to the rhyme she’d sung when she’d been six swung in the ten-year-old’s head.

She wondered whether the eleven-year-old Molly would ever appear again. In front of her the baby cried and Waqt stood with his hands outstretched.

Then, in the bright flash of a single firework, she saw a girl lying on the ground behind him.

Waqt dropped his hands and began to turn.

The last words of the rhyme rang in ten-year-old Molly’s ears.

“And when we come we need your help.”
At once Molly saw that now was that moment. She jumped up, pushing the small Molly off her knees.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaqt!” she yelled.

Waqt stopped turning and stared at her. Now the ten-year-old shouted the first things that came into her head—it didn’t matter what they were.

“RED ROBES! PURPLE OLD MEN! STUPID OLD MEN! STUPID YOU!” She shouted at the top of her voice.

The eleven-year-old Molly wriggled on her stomach toward the shelf. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the commotion. She knew what was happening—she remembered making all that noise. This was her moment to snatch the bag.