Molly Moon Stops the World (16 page)

“It’ll be seven in the morning there now. I don’t think I should wake her up like I did last time. I’ll call her tomorrow.” Rocky knew that Molly was putting the moment off, but he didn’t comment.

Molly put a marshmallow in her mouth and let it dissolve. She wanted to forget Cell and think about something nice, but she couldn’t. It was impossible to get him out of her mind.

“If you were him,” she said, giving up, “what would you be planning?”

“I wouldn’t stop,” said Rocky, drawing squirly, hypnotized eyes on the faces of people in the newspaper in front of him. “I’d want to control the whole of America, so that everyone did as I said. I’d want to become president.”

“Why stop there? What about world domination?” said Molly. “Lucy thinks he’s planning that. What’s for sure, he certainly isn’t going to just skip off into the sunset. I bet he wants it all.”

Molly looked at the familiar Moon’s Marshmallows bag in her hand. The moon on it was a round white marshmallow. The earth below it was drawn like a blue marble. When Molly was little, she’d thought the moon was made of marshmallow and that all the
marshmallows in a bag of Moon’s Marshmallows came from the moon. She’d also thought that babies turned up all over the world in cardboard boxes or baby carriages, like she and Rocky had. She’d thought they zoomed in from outer space in flying cardboard boxes and baby carriages.

“Do you think we’re the only people in the world who know what Cell’s up to?” she asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Rocky. He stopped drawing and began to tune his guitar.

Molly cupped the package of marshmallows so that the little planet earth was nestled in her hands.

“Imagine if we don’t do anything about him, Rocky. Imagine if he starts to do really, really bad things.”

“We could always see what happens. We can sort things out later if we need to.”

“Later will be too late,” said Molly.

Molly felt most peculiar. The more she looked at the small globe on the bag, the more she felt herself part of the problem of Primo Cell. If she was the only person who could do something about him, but she did nothing, then she would, in effect, be helping him. She would be behaving as if she
wanted
him to succeed. And she didn’t want this. She thought of all the billions of people living in the world, all the freethinking people Primo would like to control. The
small blue planet in her hands seemed to tug at Molly’s heart. She couldn’t let Primo win. It was totally out of the question.

“It’s now or never,” she said to Rocky. “We
have
to try to help Davina. We
have
to find the secret of how Cell makes his hypnotism permanent. If we knew that, we could release his victims. Then his power would start to crumble. That’s what we must do. We’ll never forgive ourselves if we don’t at least
try
to stop him.”

Rocky looked longingly at his guitar and groaned.

“I suppose we’ll have to go back to the house. When?”

“Tomorrow,” said Molly. “Before we completely lose our nerve. You know what they say about falling off a horse? You’re supposed to get right back on before you lose your nerve.”

“My nerve is already the size of a pea,” said Rocky.

“Mine’s the size of a lentil.”

T
he next morning, Molly and Rocky woke to banging on their doors. For a moment both panicked, thinking that Primo Cell had come to get them. Then they heard Gerry’s voice begging to let him in.

“Come on, you two. Wake up,” he shouted. “We’re goin’ to Knott’s Berry Farm.”

Blearily, Molly opened her door. Warm morning sunshine poured in, along with a bouncing Gerry.

“It’s an amusement park. They’ve got the Perilous Plunge. Gemma says it’s the wettest roller coaster in the world.
And
there’s the Boomerang ride and another one called the Jaguar. Mr. Nockman’s takin’ us all an’ even Roger’s comin’, but we gotta go soon or there’ll be big lines.”

“What time is it?”

“Ten or somethin’, I think, so get your clothes, ‘cause we gotta go now.”

Molly shook her head.

“We can’t, Gerry. We’ve got to do something for the Benefactor.”

“Again? Oh, that’s so stupid, Molly. This is going to be brilliant fun.”

Molly sighed. “I know, don’t rub it in. Believe me, we’d love to come with you, but we can’t. But look, we will another time.”

“Okay,” said Gerry disappointedly.

“Have a great time. Don’t eat too much cotton candy or you’ll go all buzzy like a fly—remember last time? And don’t take your mice. They’ll fall out of your pockets in the rides and get hurt.”

“Okay,” sang Gerry over his shoulder, already halfway down the path.

Molly and Rocky tried to cheer themselves up by having a nice breakfast outside on their patio, but it was difficult when the Knott’s Berry Farm roller coasters beckoned them and the Primo Cell business squatted, unmovable, in front of them like an ugly fat monster.

Molly finished her omelette and poured herself a concentrated grenadine syrup. Rocky opened the papers
and began to study the sports pages. All at once, Molly felt slightly peculiar. She looked at her plate and hoped that she hadn’t just eaten a bad egg, but in that very second, an icy chill swept through her. It wasn’t nausea, it was—something else. Instinctively, Molly resisted it, and in amazement she watched as around her the world stopped still. Rocky froze as he scratched his head.

For a moment, Molly thought she must be dreaming. But she wasn’t. This was real. Molly looked fearfully toward the hills. Whoever had caused this time stop was somewhere over there. Quite far away, but not far away enough.

Molly scooped a still wasp from the air and sat forward and listened.

The world was so quiet. Apart from her anxious breathing, there was no noise. No traffic, no music, no vacuum cleaners, no lawnmowers. Just silence. For this moment, the whole world was silent. No one was laughing or crying or shouting or singing. The winds and the seas were quiet.

Then, suddenly, as if the pause button on the world’s video player had been released, everything started again. The wasp in Molly’s hand began buzzing. Molly let it go.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” said Rocky. “Want to get stung?”

Then, because Molly had her green-frog-sittingunder-a-rock look, he asked, “Are you okay?”

Molly leaned toward him, anxious in case the world stopped again. She told Rocky what had happened.

It was hard for Rocky to believe her.

“Perhaps time stopping happens naturally, like an earthquake,” he suggested. “This is the place for earthquakes—maybe it’s like a timequake. Maybe the earth did it by itself.”

Both considered this geological possibility. Molly didn’t know what to think.

“And another thing,” Molly added, very perplexed. “Feel my diamond.”

Rocky touched it. “It’s freezing.”

“It’s not normal for diamonds to go all cold like that, is it?” she asked. “I mean, everything around the diamond is warm. My skin’s warm. Shouldn’t the diamond be the same temperature?”

“Maybe the diamond gets charged up with cold when you get the cold fusion feeling. Maybe it holds the cold like, you know, metal holds heat when it comes out of the oven.”

After breakfast Molly and Rocky dressed themselves in jeans and T-shirts. Molly couldn’t stop thinking about the strange time stop. She decided that this time
it would be best if Petula stayed behind.

Reluctantly they set off. Their plan was a daring one. They intended to hide in Cell’s private rooms. It was the only way they could discover how his hypnotism worked and, they hoped, what had happened to Davina.

They took a cab and were soon cruising down Sunset Strip. Molly looked out of the window at people in their cars doing safe things like going to work or to the shops. She thought how lucky they all were. Once or twice, Gandolli, the smiling politician, grinned down at them from red-white-and-blue election posters. Molly thought that he wouldn’t stand a chance of winning if Primo Cell was after the presidency.

The previous night, on their way out of Primo’s mansion, Molly had hypnotized the gatekeeper to let her and Rocky pass whenever they wanted. Now they slipped into the grounds with ease.

However, making their way to the front door was extremely difficult. It was as if the night before had not ended. Constant traffic motored up the gravel drive. Chauffeur-driven stretch limousines with darkened windows drove by. Molly and Rocky had to dart behind bushes and hide every half minute. What should have
taken ten minutes took forty.

“Looks like he’s having another party,” said Molly, peering at the front door over the shell of a giant tortoise that was munching at the rosebush they were hiding behind. They watched as lots of importantlooking men and women in suits arrived, accompanied by bodyguards.

Molly scrutinized the arriving guests. “Those people look like politicians, don’t they?”

“Yup,” whispered Rocky. “In fact, that’s the governor of California. I’ve seen his picture in the paper. What
is
Cell up to?”

Getting into the house through the front door was impossible. So Molly and Rocky commando-crawled along the top rose garden—Molly unfortunately through a pile of peacock droppings. They sneaked past the sculptures and the Chinese carp pond until they were at the far end of the gray mansion. Here they found a small, low window that was ajar. Going first, Molly squeezed through. She felt one foot land somewhere wet. As she wiggled the rest of her body inside, she found that she’d trodden in a large sink of water. She was in a flower-arranging room. Vases, baskets, and pruning shears stood on the counters, and buckets of exotic flowers lined the floor. With one foot dripping,
she quietly jumped down to the linoleum floor and warned Rocky to watch his step. She wiped the peacock muck off her jeans with a cloth.

“Birds’ turds are s’posed to be lucky,” whispered Rocky.

“Only if they land on you from above. Anyhow, I’m not superstitious,” said Molly.

They could hear what sounded like household staff talking outside the room. There was nowhere to hide among the flowers, so Molly crept to the door, ready for instant hypnosis if it should be needed. But the voices passed by, and after a moment, she peeped out into a short hallway. At the end of it was what looked like a service staircase. As quiet as cats, and glad that the walls were blue and that their denim clothes helped to camouflage them, they made a break for it and slipped upstairs.

They were at the opposite end of the house from where they had been the night before, and they could just hear the rumbling hum of talk and laughter from the main reception rooms. Furtively, they slipped up the next flight of stairs and came to a landing with a purple carpet. They followed it to the left.

There were doors on either side of this corridor. When Molly and Rocky heard footsteps coming, they
dived through the nearest one and hid behind a fourposter bed.

They found themselves in a luxurious suite, with a sitting room and bathroom attached to the bedroom. It was decorated in pinks and whites, and fluffy cushions were scattered all over the chairs and bed. Small tables with lace cloths on them displayed vases of pink lilies and tiny porcelain ornaments of dogs. The guest staying in it seemed to have really made herself at home. On the dressing table was a little silver tree hung with diamond rings. In an open box beside it were three diamond necklaces. When they saw Gloria Heelheart’s face smiling out of a framed photograph, with several white dogs cuddling up to her, they realized that they must be in the star’s bedroom. A second later they heard a growl.

Molly looked again at the bed. Its cover, which she had mistaken for a fur counterpane, was in fact a mass of live fur, still attached to its living owners. Gloria Heelheart’s ten white Pekingeses were snuggled up to one another, enjoying a midday snooze. The one in the middle had woken up.

Molly and Rocky felt as if they were the matches that were about to set off a box of very noisy fireworks. As silently as snakes, they slipped out.

They discovered that all the suites along the passage had stars staying in them. Every room was lived in, and even had its own style, as if it had been customized for its owner.

On one desktop in a man’s room, Molly found a bank statement with Hercules Stone’s name at the top of it. Underneath was printed an address: Magpie Manor, North Crescent Drive, West Hollywood.

“He’s well and truly settled if this is where his bank stuff is sent,” said Rocky. “I wonder how long he’s staying here for.” Then, as he read the statement, he added, “Wow, he doesn’t have to worry about money. Thirty-four million dollars! He’s rolling in it.”

Molly found an aerosol can of something called Bye-Bye-Bald. She sprayed some onto her hand, and immediately her palm looked as if a patch of black hair had grown out of it.

“His hair’s obviously falling out,” she said. She looked at two ruby cufflinks on the bedside table and a photograph of Hercules Stone hugging Primo Cell.

“Cell keeps them here like prize possessions. Like caged birds. I suppose they entertain him. He must have them to stay for weeks at a time.”

“Amazing entertainment,” said Rocky. “Imagine having any star you wanted staying with you.”

“We still haven’t found any clues to Davina,” said Molly. “But if today is business as usual for Cell, it probably means hypnotizing people, which means, if we want to know how he works, we’ve got to get to his rooms quickly, Rocky. Let’s not hang about here.”

They left Hercules Stone’s bedroom and went toward the landing above the huge oak staircase. Voices greeting each other echoed up from the marble hall. From where they were, they had a bird’s-eye view of heads: bald ones, half-bald ones, and others that looked like well-groomed hairy animals.

“Politicians, army swells,
and
celebrities,” said Molly. “I see his game. He gets government and army people here by promising that they’ll meet the stars. He knows that even politicians get starstruck. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cell plans to get a few politicians under his thumb before the end of today.”