Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism (15 page)

A
ll over town, people were gossiping about Molly Moon, speculating about who she was and where she’d come from. Her mysteriousness made her more and more interesting, and everyone wanted to see pictures of her in the papers. One paper nicknamed her “The Cuckoo,” because she had stolen Davina Nuttel’s part, and TV shows sent camera crews to try to interview her, without success.

Davina Nuttel went on television and complained about how badly she’d been treated.

Charlie Chat called the Barry Bragg Agency, again and again, to beg for an exclusive interview with this Molly Moon on his Chat show. Barry Bragg said it might be possible if the money was right.

As Nockman’s mind spiraled away in his van, a red rash broke out on his neck and face. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Molly. But it was proving very difficult to get close to her at all.

There were always people wherever she went—bodyguards, journalists, photographers. It was exasperating. All he could do was watch and wait for an opportunity. Maybe after the opening night Molly would start giving interviews and he could pose as a journalist. Nockman tried to relax but was impatient by nature, and the situation was driving him crazy. He worried that someone else would discover Molly’s secret. He sat in his white van smoking, eating cheesy potato chips, and looking suspiciously at other parked cars. The van was full of garbage. The discarded packaging, from all the junk meals he’d eaten, smelled disgusting. And Nockman smelled worse than ever. Now, on top of the smell of burgers and tobacco was the reek of cheap aftershave, to cover up the smell of old sweat.

He had mixed feelings for Molly. He was jealous of her, because she had found the hypnotism book first, and she had learned the tricks of hypnotism, but also because she was living the life of a star, while he was slumming it in this stuffy van. At the same time, he was in awe of her and her talents, and since he saw her as his property, he also savored her rise to fame.
To keep himself sane, he’d stroke the golden scorpion that hung around his neck and say a mantra over and over that went,

As for her dog, he hated her dog. That pug, it was so smug; a smug, ugly pug, trotting around behind her. Nockman thought jealously about Petula’s luxurious bed and her fine dinners. Why, that dog was Molly Moon’s partner, and her best friend. She would probably do anything for that dog…. And then, as Nockman thought about Petula, he began to have a brilliant idea. His manipulative nature began to ooze with pleasure, oiling his thought and helping the idea grow. Why hadn’t he seen the value of the dog before? Why, that dog was the key to Molly’s heart! Nockman smiled and stroked his double chin. He picked at a scabby rash on his neck, flicking a piece of it onto the dashboard of the car. Then, thinking of Molly, he smudged the flaky skin across the plastic and his mind hatched a nasty plan. At last he could see a way forward.

N
ovember rolled into December, and temperatures in New York dropped as winter sank its teeth into the city. Molly hadn’t had time to think about Rocky, since when she wasn’t working hard on the show, she was busy enjoying her fame and fortune. She’d been very busy about town, always with a bodyguard who kept journalists away from her. She had spent happy hours shopping, going to the movies, and seeing the sights. She’d been to an exclusive salon and had her hair cut properly, so that she no longer looked like an orphanage kid, and she’d made ten visits to a beautician, where she’d been steamed and pampered until her skin shone. Although her hands still sweated, they now looked much better after expensive manicures. Her nails were shaped into perfect, polished crescents.

Molly loved her new life. She loved the attention she was getting and the way people treated her with reverence. She couldn’t see, now, how anyone could live life in any other way. It was so much easier when everyone adored you. And the more Molly lived this life, the more she reckoned she deserved it. What was more, she began to feel that it wasn’t just because she’d hypnotized people that they admired her. She suspected that, actually, she did have “star quality.” Everyone at Hardwick House had simply been too uncultured to notice it.

After three weeks of concentrated rehearsals, the opening night of the new production of
Stars on Mars
arrived. The pink neon sign on the front of the theater now read:

Behind the scenes Molly sat in her cluttered dressing room, with Petula on her lap, feeling very nervous. Both were dressed in space suits. Molly’s face was thick with stage makeup, so that her face wouldn’t look
washed out under the strong theater lights. Her eyes were defined with black eyeliner, so that they stood out, and her cheeks were sprinkled with glitter. Petula had been groomed, and both she and Molly had sparkly powder combed through their hair. Their other costumes, space wet suits and their sequined space dance outfits, hung on a steel rail. Vases of flowers covered every available surface, sent by everyone who loved Molly. Rixey knocked at the door and popped her face around.

“Curtain up in twenty minutes, Molly. How do you feel?”

“Fine, fine,” Molly lied.

“Well, break a leg, although you don’t need it. You’re a star, Molly, a sparkling star, and everyone will see it tonight. New York’s gonna
love
you.”

“Thanks,” Molly said, her stomach heaving. Rixey disappeared.

“Oh crikey, Petula, what have I done?” Molly moaned. Now the idea of making her fortune by being in a Broadway musical didn’t seem like fun at all. Her nerves were a thousand times worse than they had been before the talent show in Briersville. The thought of the audience tonight was truly terrifying. An audience made up of cosmopolitan New Yorkers, hard to please and ready to be dismissive. She knew the audience out
there would be skeptical, critical, aggressive, and very, very difficult to excite … but worse than that, difficult to hypnotize. Molly remembered how Davina had been such a challenge to win over. Maybe there’d be well-practiced hypnotists in the audience. Like the sort of professional hypnotherapists who help people to give up smoking.

Molly tried to pull herself together. What was she thinking of? Of course she’d be much better than they were. She only hoped the new scene she had written into the beginning of the show, with the new props, would make things easier.

“Fifteen minutes to curtain up,” the P.A. announced.

Molly reached into her pocket for her pendulum and stared into its black spiral. “I will do it, I will do it,” she said to herself, over and over again, and then she kissed the pendulum for luck and put it back in her jumpsuit.

Molly and Petula made their way down the corridor and up the stairs to the side of the stage. Through the curtain Molly could hear the hum of the massive audience. Her hands began to sweat and her heart began to pound. “Break a leg, break a leg,” she heard people saying. She took her position in the cockpit of a silver spacecraft on the stage, ready for takeoff. “Ten minutes
to go,” someone whispered to her. Molly’s stomach writhed. It was difficult to concentrate.

The orchestra began to play the overture: little pieces of music from different songs in the musical. The audience went quiet. Molly lowered her head, which felt full of cotton wool. “Come on, Molly, you can do it,” she said in a low, quaky voice.

Then the overture finished, and however hard Molly wished for time to stand still, the show started. With a clash of drums, the curtain swished upward.

The audience sat with bated breath and feasted their eyes on Molly Moon. The Cuckoo. At last, there she sat, the new star of the show, in the cockpit of a huge spacecraft, with Petula the pug on the seat beside her.

A deep voice crackled over the loudspeaker, “Ground control to Major Wilbur, do you read me? We are ready for liftoff, over.”

Major (Molly Moon) Wilbur, with her eyes shut, replied, “Ready.”

Then, slowly, a huge glass window began to lower itself down in front of the rocket.

This was the new part of the show, which Molly had added. Because this glass window was no ordinary glass window—it was an enormous, powerful magnifying glass, which the theater had ordered especially, at great expense, from NASA. And as it slowly dropped in
front of Molly, it magnified her so much that she became a giant behind it. The center of the magnifying glass was the strongest part, and when Molly leaned toward it, her shut eyes became eighty times as big.

This looked good, and murmurs of approval filled the theater. The New York audience liked this spectacle, and they relaxed to watch the whole stage grow dark, except for a spotlight shining on Molly’s shut eyes.

“Ten,” the controller’s voice boomed out over the loudspeaker.

“Nine … eight …”

“Engines set,” said Major Wilbur.

“Seven … six … five,” said ground control.

“We have ignition,” said Major Wilbur.

“Four … three … two … one … and we have liftoff.”

The roar of rocket engines filled the theater. Orange lights flashed around the cockpit like fire from the rocket’s engine, and then Molly’s eyes, as huge as the hugest of TV sets, opened. Molly was composed at last, and her magnified eyes swept over the audience like lasers. From the front rows to the standing-room section people were sucked into the hypnotic whirlpool of Molly’s gaze.

Molly felt a surge of something like electricity in the air, which made her tingle from head to toe. It was that
fusion feeling, but on a massive scale. Molly stretched her gaze to the back of the theater and then dropped it to the front. Molly felt hugely powerful, she felt sure that everyone had been “hit,” and she knew that the theater doormen were under instruction not to let anyone in. She was safe.

“Just—look—at—me,” she said, in case there was anyone out there who hadn’t looked up yet. “Just—loooook—at—me,” she repeated slowly, her voice like a vocal magnet.

Molly had woven her hypnotic instructions into a song she had composed. She sang it now with no instrumental accompaniment, a plain, haunting tune.

Molly clicked her fingers, and the roar of the rocket launchers filled the air.

“Yes,” said Molly, her whole face now in the center of the magnifying glass, “we have LIFTOFF.” The magnifying glass pulled up and away and the real show began.

For two hours the audience was in raptures of pleasure, marveling at Molly’s dancing and singing. She could do ballet, tap dancing, jazz dancing, and break dancing. She leaped effortlessly into the air. She glided! And when she sang, she made her audience go all goose pimply and hair stand up on the back of their necks. She was entrancing.

In reality Molly’s dancing was clumsy and uncoordinated. Her tap dancing was a mess and her jazz dancing heavy-footed and out of time. But Molly was having a lovely time dancing, and she got really involved with the Martians’ battle scene. Her voice was flat and out of tune, but no one cared. The other actors were great and helped her out whenever she forgot her lines, although it didn’t matter whether she forgot her lines or not; the audience loved her whatever she did. And they thought Petula was wonderful too, even when she simply lay on the stage, chewing a stone and looking bored.

Chocolates melted into people’s hands as they forgot to eat them.

When the show ended, the theater erupted with applause, and when Molly came forward to take her bow, the whole audience stood up to cheer and whistle and clap. Anything nice that people had on them they threw at her: money, watches, jewelry, fancy scarves…. It was
a show of appreciation that was unlike anything that had ever been seen in New York before. The curtain opened and closed and opened and closed forty times. The audience clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped until their hands were red. And then the curtain came down for the last time.

Molly felt on top of the world, confident that everyone had seen what she had wanted them to see.

One person alone slipped through her net. One small boy in the audience had not been hypnotized, simply because he had not been watching or listening. He had been reading a comic with a flashlight and was too absorbed in Superman to look up at Molly’s eyes. So later, when he put down his comic, he was the only one who saw Molly’s true talent.

“Mom, she wasn’t that good,” he said as they left the theater. “I mean, we got kids at
school better
than her.”

But his mother had been smitten. “
How
can you say that, Bobby? She was
fabulous
. Beautiful. And you, Bobby, will remember this night for the rest of your life. Tonight you saw a
star
being born.”

Bobby and his mother argued about the show all the way home, and finally she came to the sad conclusion that her son needed either a hearing aid and glasses or a trip to see an analyst.

Nockman had avoided the show. He hadn’t wanted to
risk being inside the theater, in case he was forced to take off his antihypnotism glasses. And anyway, for his plan to work he needed to be outside the stage door when the show ended.

It had begun to rain. Nockman stood in his sheepskin coat, hidden in the shadow of a wall, a few feet from the stage door. His bald pate and greasy mane of hair were splashed with the shower. Raindrops trickled down his neck and off the end of his nose.

Just after ten thirty, hordes of people began to crowd around the stage door hoping for autographs. Twenty minutes later the doors opened, and there stood Molly Moon smiling and waving, with a burly bodyguard on each side of her.

The shouts and cheers from her fans perfectly distracted Molly.

Petula stepped out in the rain and away from the crowd to get a breath-of fresh air. She sniffed at a lamppost and had a welcome pee. Then an interesting sheepskin smell hit her nose. She trotted toward it to investigate. And as soon as she’d stepped out of the light, a strong, gloved hand picked her up and covered her in a cloth, while another hand clamped her mouth shut. Petula found herself under the arm of a small, fat, smelly man who was walking briskly away down a side street. She wriggled and struggled, but she couldn’t escape his grip. Poor Petula was terrified as she heard,
felt, and smelled Molly getting farther and farther away.

Nockman opened the back of his white van and bundled Petula into a cage inside. Before she’d had time to get her bearings, he’d shut the cage door and the van door, too. Then he jumped into the front seat, started the engine, and was away.