Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (29 page)

Molly’s thirst was now almost overwhelming. She put her head down to concentrate on speeding forward even faster. As she did, her clear crystal, the one that Waqt had so roughly pulled, was jangled. The loop that held it on its chain had been snapped, and now this slight movement from Molly caused it to drop. She gasped as she realized that it had fallen somewhere millions of years
back in time. But she couldn’t stop for it now. Molly was filled with sadness—she and that crystal had been through a lot together.

Molly urged the red crystal on. She was nearly finished. All she needed to do now was arrive at the right time—a time after she had taken Waqt, so that he wasn’t there—and rescue her other selves.

She was oblivious of how thin the thread was from which her life hung.

In Benares, under a full moon, the ten-year-old Molly was dragged back to the center of the courtyard and two priests tied her arms. The three-year-old Molly was so scared, she curled up in a ball on the ground. The ten-year-old struggled and tried to scream through the gag, but her shouts were hardly audible above the priests’ chanting. Their incessant drums were reaching a peak of crazy rhythm. She had never felt so petrified. Nothing mattered now except staying alive.

The hooded executioner raised his scythe. It glinted in the moonlight. Like some nightmare golfer, he rested the cold blade on the ten-year-old Molly’s neck. Molly thought she was going to faint. She prepared for her death.

As the eleven-year-old Molly traveled forward through time, a sudden intense feeling, like coarse electricity, jolted under her ribs—a feeling that something bad was about to happen. Was she about to die? She was still a million years back from 1870.

In 1870, the scythe hovered and then came down.

The time-traveling Molly felt a stab of pain in the scar on the side of her neck. At the same time she felt a coldness shoot through her. So this was it. Death was cold.

Then Molly realized what was happening. Someone had stopped time. Stopped time for everyone without crystals. Yet Molly had dropped her clear crystal. Her
red
crystal must be giving her protection from the freeze. She was still moving forward through time.

The executioner was as still as a statue, as was the ten-year-old Molly. The blade of his scythe cut into the skin of her neck. Blood streamed down her neck, but all was frozen. The scene was like a terrible tableau from a classical painting.

Molly was an invisible arrow cutting through the centuries.

Her crystal cleft through the years and days and hours and seconds toward the exact moment when the world had frozen. Finally, Molly knew she should stop. The world materialized. There was the ten-year-old Molly, her neck covered in blood.

All the memories of her younger selves rushed into her, but Molly blocked them. She charged toward the executioner, pushed him, and wrenched the scythe from his grasp. She threw it down.

There was a scrabbling noise behind her. Molly turned to see who had stopped time.

And then she saw one of the greatest, most joyful sights of her life.

Petula was rushing across the stone pavement. The sight seemed unreal. Was it a trick? Was Petula a ghost? A figment of her imagination? Molly couldn’t help herself. She didn’t care if the vision was unreal. She needed to hold Petula again. She crouched down and spread her arms wide.

“Petula!” At once she was struck by something crucial. Petula was
moving,
and everything else in the world was frozen still. Petula had
stopped the world.

“Petula, don’t drop the stone!” she shouted. Molly sprang forward. But Petula was too excited to listen and, at that moment, she opened her mouth to bark hello. The clear crystal she’d been holding in her
mouth bounced out onto the dirt and at the same time the frozen world started to move. The old man Molly had pushed gave a dull yell. The ten-year-old Molly screamed. And Zackya stepped out of the shadows. He saw the crystal on the floor, and he saw Petula running away. He saw Molly running for the crystal. His dim mind took a few seconds to take in what was happening. He worked out that Molly desperately needed that crystal. He stopped and, with a swift spider movement, reached inside his pocket for his own crystal. And stopped dead.

That clear crystal on the ground was
his.
Petula had taken it.

Zackya felt betrayed. He’d risked his life for Petula; he’d loved her, her and her big eyes, and she’d betrayed him. He’d saved Petula from the sword of the guard. He’d hidden her and lied to Waqt that she was dead. He’d fed her peacock suppers, given her a rabbit-fur dog bed, and decorated her with jewels. As Molly dived for the crystal she gave Zackya a filthy glare. Two seconds later, he was hypnotized.

Molly gripped the crystal. Around her the world froze once more. This time even sweet Petula was frozen. Molly went to her, picked her up, and sent warmth into her.

Petula wriggled and jumped in Molly’s arms. She
drank in Molly’s lovely smell. She licked her face as if she wanted to eat it. She’d never been more excited, more happy, more relieved. She
adored
Molly—life without her had been bleak and lonely. Never, never again would she let them be parted. Molly covered Petula in kisses. She fondled her ears and found something hard in one of them. Petula’s left ear had been pierced and a jeweled earring dangled from it. Molly looked into Petula’s eyes and breathed out an enormous sigh of relief. Then she put her down and Petula went still.

Molly surveyed the scene. The purple priests were frozen in the oddest shapes as they hopped and shook their batons at the sky. Zackya stood still, hypnotized. The baby lay on a blanket on the flat, cracked rock, and the three-year-old Molly was lumped on the floor with her arms wrapped around herself.

Molly was soon by her side. She touched her arm and unfroze her. The little Molly’s eyes darted around in a panic.

“I want Trinky!” she began to cry. “And I want Rocky now!” Molly sat down and hypnotized her. Soon the little Molly was smiling.

“Now, hold on to my skirt,” said Molly, “and follow me.”

Molly walked over to her baby self and picked her up.
Then she fetched the baby basket from the side of the courtyard. In it were bottles of milk and water, as well as some muslin cloths and some toweling diapers.

Molly opened the water and glugged it down. Her thirst was finally quenched. And now, holding the baby, with the toddler trailing her, she walked through the cool still world.

Her frozen ten-year-old self held her hand to her neck where she had been cut by the scythe. Still holding the baby, Molly improvised a bandage from the muslin and tied it in place. Then she touched the ten-year-old’s shoulder, releasing her from the freeze. Immediately, she hypnotized her.

“You will feel no pain now,” Molly said softly, removing the gag, “and you will forget everything that you have seen here. You will feel happy. Hold this baby now, taking as much care as if you were carrying yourself. With your left hand, you will hold my right upper arm. Do not lose contact.”

Molly put Petula in the basket. All about, the world felt icy.

The strange cluster of Mollys now approached the wall where Molly had hidden Waqt’s sack. Molly put the basket down on it and instructed the girls to wait. She glanced to her right.

There was Zackya, looking like a frozen rat. Molly
paused. “What,” she thought, “should I do with him?”

She touched his chest and stared deep into his eyes. Zackya’s will became as runny as a pool of melted butter.

“Zackya, I’ve just about had enough of you,” Molly began, as the thin man gazed, jelly-spirited, at her. “You have caused me a lot of trouble. You kidnaped my dog twice. You kidnaped me. You tried to help Waqt to kill me. I know that you did all of this to try to impress your master. But he is now stuck three hundred million years back, and so you won’t be seeing him again, I should think.” She paused for breath. “Zackya, here’s a question for you. What would
you
do with
you
if you were me?”

Zackya’s mouth crumpled as he thought. “I would—throw me—down a—well.”

“Would you really? Wouldn’t you feel any kindness?”

“No, because—that is—what I—deserve.”

“Don’t you think you deserve a second chance?”

“No.”

“You are a very hard man, Zackya. Why is that?”

“Life has—taught me—to be hard—not soft.”

Molly shook her head. Her experiences had taught her that everything that happens to you in life makes you who you are.

If something horrible happens to you, that will change you; if something lovely happens to you, that will change you, too. You might go through something scary—the frightening memories of that will always be inside you. Always somewhere. You might have a fanta-sic experience and that will always be inside you, filling you with confidence. Always.

Molly thought how horrible Zackya’s life must have been if no one had ever been soft with him, and she felt sorry for him.

“Okay,” she announced. “Well, luckily for you, Zackya, I’ve had enough people be good to me in my life to make me realize that I should be kind to you now. It seems to me that you need to learn how not to be the hard old knobbler that you are now. So what we’re going to do is this—” Molly paused and glanced up at the moon for inspiration. “From now on, every time you see a person who needs help doing something—as long as it’s not robbing or stealing or mugging or killing or anything else bad—
whenever you see someone who needs help,
you will feel as soft as a feather pillow and you will help them. And, while you are helping them, you will imagine that you were also once helped in exactly the same way. And so you will start to build up memories of people being nice to you. And the more of these memories you have, the more the
hard bits of you will be rubbed out. Each good deed that you do will rub out your nastiness. How about that?”

“Can I give you an Indian head massage?” Zackya replied, already trying to help. Molly smiled.

“Not now, thank you very much. Now, do you know what Waqt’s passwords are—the ones that have locked the other maharajas into trances?”

Zackya shook his head.

“Never mind,” said Molly. She grasped her red crystal and lifted Zackya slightly out of time for a time-travel lock. “Zackya, I am sealing the instructions I have given you in with a password that you won’t remember. The password is ‘New Leaf’!”

Molly was exhausted.

She gathered up Petula and her younger selves, ready to travel with the bag of crystals, back to the future. Then she focused her mind on her crystals and let the world move. The scene around them steamed into action.

The last thing Molly saw was Zackya darting toward the elderly priest, who lay sprawled on the ground. He was running to help him.

“G
ood girl!” Molly said to Petula, touching her black velvety head. Petula’s ears flapped in the time wind, and she looked up at Molly obediently. Her eyes fell upon the other Mollys, for she sensed who they were, but she found the concept of four Mollys all at once too confusing, so instead she looked out at the months rushing by.

Like docking a spacecraft, Molly maneuvered them into a moment that was very close to the time she had left Rocky and the others on the boat.

She hovered in slow motion. Through the curtain-of-time ether, she waited until she could see an afternoon sun in the sky. She imagined that their boat had docked. As they hovered they could see a blurred world around them. Without quite landing in the time, Molly
led the other Mollys out of the fort gates and through the streets and alleys of Benares. They walked in ghostly floating steps, retracing Molly’s route down to the river’s edge.

Around them people went about their evening business. And Molly found that, because she hadn’t quite materialized in their time, she and the other Mollys could walk straight through them. They even walked through the captain and the cook of their boat, who were off to a local gambling house to play cards.

The boat was tethered to a bollard on the shore. Molly saw that Rocky and Forest were sitting with their backs to each other; Rocky was obviously fuming at Forest for suggesting to Molly that time was like a wheel. At the stern of the boat, she could just see the six-year-old Molly playing with Amrit and the puppy, giving them some flowers she’d picked out of the river.

Rocky’s legs dangled over the side of the boat. Although his features were moving ever so slightly in slow motion backward, Molly could see that in fact he wasn’t angry. He was upset. Through the blur, she could see that his face was wet with tears.

Molly climbed up onto the boat, bringing the other Mollys with her. They were invisible to Rocky because they were still hovering in time.

They walked up behind him. And then, gently, Molly let them appear.

At once the sounds of bells, of cows mooing, of people chanting and praying, of music and of splashing as people bathed in the river filled Molly’s ears.

“Rocky, we’re back,” she said quietly. Rocky started and quickly turned about. He looked at Molly with all the other Mollys, and at Petula, and his eyes widened to the size of Ping-Pong balls. Molly smiled. “Did you think I was stuck in time trillions of years back with nothing to eat but slugs?”