Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (30 page)

Rocky pressed his lips together solemnly and nodded, looking as if he was about to burst into tears.

“Well, I’m not.” Molly paused. “Waqt is eating slugs and I’m BACK! And I’ve got this bag of crystals.” She placed the sack on the deck and rushed forward to give her lifelong friend a huge hug—a hug that nearly knocked him overboard.

“HELL, Molly,” Rocky said when they had both recovered, “don’t you EVER go taking risks like that again.” Then he added, “But, hang on, does that mean you’ve been to… to…?”

“Yup, I passed GO. I went around it. I did, Rocky—can you believe that? I passed through the beginning of time to the end! It was very hot!”

Rocky started to laugh, and he hugged Petula, whose tail was wagging so hard, it looked as if it might drop off.

“Very hot?! Molly, you passed through molten stuff so hot that the universe has never been as hot since.
You’re lucky you’re not a piece of charcoal! And your skin… look, it’s better! You even look a bit younger!”

“I know. I should start a beauty parlor back at the beginning of time!”

Molly and Rocky laughed so much that they roused Forest from his meditation and Ojas from his evening nap. The little Molly was too absorbed in her game with Amrit to notice, but the puppy came lolloping over and Petula sniffed at her curiously, trying to work out why this puppy reminded her of herself.

“And how did you bring Petula back from the dead?” asked Rocky.

“She never died in the first place,” said Molly.

“You? Is it really you, Mollee?” said Ojas, rubbing his eyes.

“Man,” Forest exclaimed, “so you did it. Does that mean…?”

“Yes, time’s like a wheel,” said Molly, jumping up and hugging him. “You are one cool hippie, Forest!”

“Well,” said Forest, “it was stupid of me to suggest something based on the beliefs of a couple of religions and a bunch of scientists. And once you were gone, man, we all thought you were
solid
gone. Ojas and Rocky were real mad at me. And they were right. I was a mangy old goat to suggest it. A real reject. I’m sorry, Rocky, man.” Rocky tilted his head to one side, as if to admit
that as things had worked out so well, all was forgiven. Forest broke into a smile. “Hey, Molly, but your skin’s better.” Molly nodded. “And ain’t you gonna introduce me to these dudes?”

“Not now,” said Molly, smiling. “Anyway, as you can see, they are well and truly hypnotized. Right now, I just want to get us back to the twenty-first century and get all these me’s back where I ought to be. And put the puppy Petula back. But first I really should hypnotize the six-year-old me before she sees herself times four and freaks out.”

Ojas walked Amrit out onto the lower
ghats
of the shore. He had a feeling that, if he went with Molly back to her future now, he might not come back to his time for a long while, if ever.

He held Amrit steady while everyone else climbed aboard, then caught Molly’s arm before she got up. “Mollee,” he said, “if I don’t like it in your time, will you bring me back to the 1870s?”

Molly beamed a smile at him. “Of course, I will!” she said. “Remember, Ojas, I know, better than anyone, what it’s like to be stuck in the wrong time. But I have a feeling that you’re going to like it. Oh, and I haven’t forgotten about your rupees.” She pulled on the rope around Amrit’s neck, clambered up, and hid
the sack of crystals safely in a pocket on the howdah.

“The twenty-first century!” Ojas sighed and, very quietly, he whispered, “Mama, Papa, wherever you are, wish me well on my travels!”

A crowd was gathering.

“This is going to be something they’ll always remember!” said Molly.

“You bet,” said Rocky. “It isn’t every day that you see an elephant vanish into thin air.”

The crowd in front began to part, to let Amrit up the steep
ghat
and through, but of course it didn’t need to, because in a few seconds there was an enormous BOOM, and in the puff of a moment, they were gone.

I
f you have ever felt what it is like to come back home after a long trip away, imagine that now and multiply it by a hundred. For that is how Molly, Rocky, Petula, and Forest felt as they sped away from the 1870s, forward toward their own time.

Molly was as confident of her scarred red crystal as a pilot might be of a high-tech, state-of-the-art jet, so the journey was perfect. Sometimes she slowed their traveling speed down so that they could enjoy the sight of the Ganges River rising and falling. The sky above flashed like a supersonic chameleon changing the color of its skin, and the moon streaked repeatedly across blackness like a comet. Time purred as minutes and hours and years flicked by.

“Where are we now?” Rocky asked.

“I think we’re in the 1950s,” said Molly calmly. She accelerated their travel. “Now it feels… a little bit more… hmm… not quite… now we’re nearly there.” The world around them became more visible, but it was still hazy. Molly chose a time when the sky above them was a golden evening, because she knew everyone would want to sleep fairly soon. She waited until there were only a few people on the
ghat
where Amrit stood, and then she let the world appear.

It was a hot evening in mid-January.

A woman washing her saucepans in the water of the river shrieked, dropped the copper pot she was holding, gathered up her sari, scrambled to her feet, and ran up the
ghats,
screaming.

“Are we back?” asked Forest.

“Sure as tofued turnips is tofued turnips,” laughed Molly.

“Wow and wow again.”

Ojas nudged Amrit behind her ears, and the sweet-natured elephant stepped forward. Molly saw that the alleys ahead would be far too tight for her, and so they walked along the dirty
ghats,
past water buffalo and tourists and Indians who were in the sacred city of Varanasi on pilgrimages. The river was glazed amber in the evening light.

Later that evening they found transportation to the
city’s airport and Molly arranged, through hypnosis, for a doctor to come and put some stitches in the wound in the ten-year-old Molly’s neck. She also organized for a giant plane that could carry Amrit to be taken out of its hangar and brought to Varanasi. At one o’clock in the morning they took off for Europe.

Ten hours later they landed. It was six in the morning, Briersville time.

Molly, Rocky, Forest, Ojas, and the hypnotized young Mollys bundled into a giant rented truck, with Amrit in the back and both Petulas on Molly’s lap, and soon Forest was driving them down the frost-covered highway, heading for Briersville. Everyone wore airplane blankets as cloaks over the new clothes that they’d bought at the airport. Ojas sat shivering in his new sneakers. His eyes were glued to the window.

“Pukka!” he exclaimed at every fast car that whizzed past.

Molly turned the heater up and thought how brand-new everything looked, compared to India. She thought of the trucks in Delhi, painted with pictures of flowers and elephants. Ojas gazed at twenty-first-century transportation shooting past. Sports cars, estate cars, pod cars, trucks, vans, and motorbikes. The world had never seemed so fast, and he clung to the edge of his
seat as if he were in a rocket.

Finally the turn off to Briersville appeared. Then they were on the icy lane that led up to Happiness House—once the Hardwick House Orphanage.

Molly knew that the building was empty, as all its occupants were in Los Angeles. But she wasn’t planning on visiting the place right now. She had to take a little trip down memory lane.

“Good luck,” Rocky said as the truck groaned its way up the final part of the slope and turned onto the gravel drive.

“Thanks.” Molly climbed down. “I’ll take the baby first.”

The baby wriggled and looked about, alert and interested in the world as she was passed from Ojas to Molly.

Once in Molly’s arms, the baby seized Molly’s hand and pulled it toward her mouth. She began sucking on Molly’s finger.

Molly suddenly felt very sad. Sad for the small baby that was herself. She looked at the newly painted building in front of her, knowing how horrible life there would be for the little girl. She felt bad knowing that she had to put this baby in it when it had been a cold, uncomfortable, undecorated place.

A part of her wanted to keep the baby and bring it
up in happier surroundings, but a glance up at Rocky in the truck told her that this was impossible—for if she did, she would change the past. She
must
put herself back. She knew the child’s future would be full of trials and difficulties, but she also knew that the baby Rocky was in the past, and that Mrs. Trinklebury, the one kind person at the orphanage, was there to love her.

So, winking at Rocky, and trying to appear braver than she felt, Molly stepped toward the front door.

M
olly grasped her green crystal and bid the eye on it open. Immediately its swirling pool, all glassy and green, spiraled and shone. Molly willed it to lift her and the baby Molly in her arms backward in time. The world around shimmered and became a blur. They shot backward. The years peeled away like layers of wallpaper depicting pictures of her past. Molly could feel various holes in her life where her other selves were missing and needed to be put back. Then she slowed down and began to feel for the gap in her baby life. She could sense a time when her baby self wasn’t there—she calculated that so far, this period had lasted only about a week and a half.

Molly could put the baby back either an hour after Waqt took her or, more accurately, a week and a half
later. She decided to put her back at the correct time—a time that allowed for the period the baby had spent in India.

Molly knew she would have to be very careful. For Waqt had also traveled back in time to
fetch
the baby. She didn’t want him to be aware of Molly now, or that might change the whole course of the week and a half. She focused her mind on the gap that she felt in her past and zoned in.

She let herself slow down until she was hovering in the world, and then she stopped. As she did, she was aware of a curious sensation—of joining the place that the baby’s life continued from.

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon on a September day. Hardwick House stood decrepit and crumbling. Molly tried the front door. It opened.

Inside, the familiar institutional smells of the orphanage, of disinfectant and of boiled cabbage, filled Molly’s nose and made her feel extremely uncomfortable. It was all in her past, but visiting it made her homesick for her future comfort and sad that this hollow, chilly environment was where her baby self would have to grow up.

She gently squeezed the child. Then suddenly she heard a familiar voice.

“What are you doing, lazing about in here, you stupid
woman? You’re paid to work, not drink tea.”

“M-m-miss Adderstone, I was just t-t-taking a br-brief br-break.… I j-j-just spent thr-thr-three hours scrubbin’ the kitchen fl-fl-floor.”

“Get upstairs and do something else useful, then. And if you’re going to keep
sniveling
about that baby you
lost,
bring your own tissues to work!”

At this, Mrs. Trinklebury made the most awful sobbing sound, and Molly heard her move toward the door. Molly quietly nipped upstairs and along the corridor to the nursery room. It was just the same as she remembered it from when she was little.

The curtains were shut, and pink light filtered in over a cot where an angelic, dark-skinned baby boy slept. Molly touched the baby Rocky’s head. She laid her baby self down beside him. The baby Molly looked slightly out of place, dressed as she was in a finely embroidered white silk dress. Molly tickled her chin, making her giggle.

Then she sat on a chair in the shadows at the back of the room.

She heard a miserable Mrs. Trinklebury come shuffling along the corridor, into the room and up to the cot, where she immediately saw the baby Molly.

“Oh, my lordy lordy!” she exclaimed with a small cry. Then she added, “Oh, my lordy, are you real?”
And then she broke down into floods of the most heartfelt, thankful tears that Molly had ever seen. The kind, old, stuttering lady wept and laughed and hugged the baby in her arms, and the baby gave tiny shrieks of joy to be back with her again.

Deep down in Molly’s memory she felt this joy. She stepped out of the shadows quietly toward Mrs. Trinklebury and tapped her on the shoulder. As the chubby woman turned about, Molly stared into her pink, puffy eyes. At once she was hypnotized. Molly put a hand on Mrs. Trinklebury’s head and said, “You will no longer think that this child went missing. You will forget the event. If ever anyone asks you about it, you won’t know what they are talking about. As far as you are concerned, it never happened. Is that clear?” Mrs. Trinklebury nodded.

“And from now on, you won’t take Adderstone’s rudeness to heart. In fact, you will think she is just a sad old trout. When I have gone, you will come out of this trance and you will forget you ever saw me.” Molly leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Remember, Mrs. Trinklebury, that Rocky and Molly, and all the other children, too, absolutely love you.” Molly took Mrs. Trinklebury into a time hover. “And I lock this instruction in with the words ‘Fairy Cakes.rsquo;”

Then, having deposited them both back in the
correct time, Molly left the room. Behind her she heard Mrs. Trinklebury chuckling.

“Oooh, you sweet thing,” she was saying. “You make me go all soft. Look, I’m crying! I don’t know why, but I am!”

Molly walked down the front stairs to the hall. She heard Adderstone in the kitchen below, talking loudly. She opened the swing doors and ventured down the kitchen stairs. A nauseating smell of eel stew became stronger the closer she got.

“How can a child just disappear?—that’s what I want to know,” came Adderstone’s slurred voice.

“Maybe she’s not as stupid as she looks,” said someone else, talking with her mouth full. Molly recognized the voice as Edna’s. Edna, the mammoth, bad-tempered orphanage cook. “I still think she sold that brat. Wonder how much she got for it. She’ll probably sell the chocolate boy next.”