Molly Moon Stops the World (17 page)

Molly and Rocky darted along the hall to Cell’s wing of the house. They passed the pictures of rabbits beings stunned in the glare of lights. They came to the blue neon sign that flashed A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE, and then, tremulously, they stepped up the green marble stairs that led to Primo Cell’s nerve center. They were gambling that Cell would be entertaining his guests downstairs, but the thought that they might come faceto-face with him was like a menacing black cloud in
their minds. Molly’s ears thumped as her heart pumped hard and sent blood throbbing through her head.

But when they got to the top of the stairs, the coast was clear. They slipped quickly into Cell’s limesmelling study.

Just as they did so, they heard two deep voices echoing in the hallway. The voices were coming their way.

M
olly’s wits went on strike, and she didn’t know what to do. She found herself looking in the fire’s log basket to see whether she could hide there. Luckily, Rocky kept his head and tugged her toward the open curtains. They each took a side of material and pulled the dark-green velvet about them, letting it settle so that the drop of the curtains looked natural. Molly concentrated on quieting her breathing. As she looked up inside the green tube of material around her, she felt like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

The door clicked open and then shut as the two people entered. Molly immediately recognized Primo Cell’s liquid-velvet voice.

“So here’s where I make it all happen,” he was saying.
“My home study. This is where I think and relax. Oh—and where I write checks.”

Molly heard Primo, agonizingly near to her hiding place, turning a key and opening a drawer in his desk. She swallowed—inside her head it sounded like water sluicing down a drain.

“Ah yes, my charity checkbook. Here it is.”

“This really is very kind of you, Mr. Cell,” said another man’s voice.

“Not at all, General. It really is my pleasure. Please, call me Primo.”

Molly’s chest tightened. As far as she could remember, general was the highest rank in the army.

“Thank you, and you must call me Donald.”

“Donald, it’s nothing. My own mother was a widow, so I myself never grew up with a father. I know firsthand how much it will help these families if they get help from your charity. Please sit down.”

Molly heard a leather chair give way under the general’s bottom, and then a creak as Primo Cell sat too.

“Who should I make the check out to?” asked Cell.

“The U.S. Army Widows’ Fund,” came the reply.

“Will ten million dollars be sufficient for now?”

The general gave an audible gulp.

“Er, absolutely. More than enough. I’m stunned by your generosity.”

For a moment Molly wondered whether she, Rocky, and Lucy Logan had Primo figured all wrong. Perhaps he was using his hypnotism to do good.

There was silence, and Molly pricked up her ears. The sound of a nib on paper scratched the air. There was a long pause, and then she heard a noise that sounded something like this:

“Bdeughhhh.”

It came from the general.

Molly knew at once what was happening.
Now
they were going to find out how Primo Cell locked his hypnotism in.

“Good,” said Cell as if he was talking to a child. “Now you, Donald, are totally under my power. You will forget that I promised your charity a gift. You won’t remember our meeting here. Instead, you will remember a wonderful lunch party at my house. In a minute, you will return to the other guests, thinking that you have merely been to the bathroom. From this moment on, you will do my bidding. And your obedience will be firm and unmovable. You will stay under my power, always … always … always.”

Behind the curtain, Molly shivered. A chill as cold as a breeze from the heart of a glacier rose through her, and her diamond suddenly froze.

She let the icy feeling wash through her but not seize her. And as time stopped, she realized two things. The first was the startling fact that Primo Cell could stop time, and the second was that
this
was how he locked in his hypnosis. He stopped the world
while his victims were hypnotized,
and somehow that sealed his power.

In his chair opposite the general, Primo Cell sat up as if someone had given him an electric shock. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled as he sensed resistance. Someone alert and breathing was here in this very room. He rose and with three powerful steps crossed to the window. He snatched the velvet aside. Molly would have screamed, but terror had seized her throat.

For a second, Primo Cell looked shocked. Amazed even. He rarely came across people who could keep moving in a time stop.

“You?” he barked. “Molly Moon. I should have guessed.”

Recovering, Molly focused her eyes on him.

He began to laugh.

“Oh, you disappoint me,” he said. “I had thought you might be pupil material, but I can see from your face that this is not the case. And no doubt your accomplice is here too.” Cell whisked Rocky’s curtain roughly aside. “Ha. But still as a statue. Not as accomplished as
you, I see.” Cell grabbed Molly’s arm. “You two are going to wish you’d stayed at home today,” he hissed.

He hauled Molly toward the frozen general. Then, putting his hand on the man’s shoulder, he did an astounding thing. Molly felt Primo Cell send a wave of cold fusion feeling out of himself into the general, so that the man stirred, and suddenly the general could move again.

“Pick up the boy,” Primo Cell ordered him. “But at no point let my hand lose touch with you.” This, Molly realized, was so the man didn’t freeze again. The general obediently rose and picked up Rocky, who bent like a rag doll under his left arm.

“Now, hold the girl. Don’t let her go.” The general’s massive right hand clenched Molly’s puny biceps. “Good. Now we must hurry.”

With his free hand Primo Cell reached for a button inside the top drawer of his desk. A bookshelf in the room sprang open to reveal a door.

“We may look ridiculous like this,” said Cell as he maneuvered himself behind Molly and the general, “but looks can be deceiving, especially in Hollywood. Take me, for instance.” He pushed them toward the secret door. “People think I’m a marvelous person. A benefactor. Someone they can look up to. But I’m not
any of those things. I’m selfish and greedy.”

Molly suddenly found her wits as she saw a stairwell below her. Was this where Cell had brought Davina? She pulled away from the general’s hand and began to shout.

“Help! Somebody HELP ME!”

But of course no one could hear her. In the grand sitting room, politicians stood like sculptures, champagne glasses in their hands and rigid expressions of enthrallment on their faces as they spoke to celebrities. If the world
had
been moving, the hubbub of conversations would have drowned Molly’s cries. As it was, the air was still as a picture, with sound suspended, so Molly’s distant screams, as Primo propelled her down the stairs, were audible in the hall.

One person did hear the shouting. One person had casually walked away from the frozen lunch party and was cleaning his nails with a toothpick. As he placed the used toothpick into the outstretched hand of Stephanie Goulash, Sinclair Cell’s phone went off. He pressed its answer button.

“I’m on my way,” he said lazily.

“Sinclair, get here right now,” came his father’s impatient reply. Sinclair looked into his phone’s screen at Cell’s stern face.

“As you can hear, I’m having a bit of trouble.” Cell turned his phone to transmit a picture of Molly yelling and the general with a frozen Rocky under his arm. “Come here and help me.”

“Okay. Coming up. Trouble is, I was talking to Mrs. Grozztucke when you stopped the clock. She’ll wonder how I suddenly disappeared when things start moving again.”

“Forget her. The woman drinks too much anyway. She’ll just think she’s having a hallucination.”

“Okay.”

Molly was pushed roughly down the stone staircase. It went farther and farther down, as if it was spiraling to hell itself. Her arm felt sore in the general’s iron grip.

She was starting to feel exhausted. It was very tiring resisting the freeze while shouting at the same time.

“Get off me,” she yelled again and again. But her efforts were useless. Twisting, Molly turned her eyes on Cell.

Her smoldering look rolled off him like water off wax.

“You’ve got a nerve! Little girls shouldn’t play with fire, you know. Or ice, for that matter.” Primo Cell suddenly brought his strange party to a halt. “Take off the crystal.”

Molly wondered how on earth Cell knew she was wearing a diamond.

“No. I won’t,” she said. “It’s mine.”

“Take it off or I’ll take it off for you,” Primo said grimly.

Molly was amazed. Primo Cell had to be one of the richest people in the world, and at a moment like this he had his mind on diamonds. He was completely materialistic. Molly supposed it was her payment, her punishment.

“You’re a mean, greedy, ugly man,” she shot back. “You’re worse—you’re
scum.
You don’t need this. But I do.” Molly thought of the orphanage children, of the unpaid bill back at the hotel, of the dwindling money at Happiness House, of nothing much to eat, of difficult times ahead. “You
can’t
have it.”

“You won’t be needing it where you’re going,” Cell stated coldly. “Give it to me right now.”

Molly heard the threatening tone of his voice and quailed. She was so tired. She had no more strength to resist. She reached for the catch on her necklace’s chain. The diamond had absorbed the cold from her body and felt like ice against her skin. She undid the catch but still clutched the diamond.

“I suppose you’ll let Gloria Heelheart borrow it, and won’t she be thrilled?” she whispered. “But you know
what? If she knew what you were really like, she’d
hate
you. All your hypnotized people would.”

“Oh, my, so you have no idea of your crystal’s true power,” said Cell dryly. “Hmmmm.” He reached out and took the jewel from Molly’s hand.

And although Molly didn’t know it, she froze.

T
he general now carried two still children down the stone stairwell. They had descended below ground level, and as they wound farther down, light came up from below. The stone wall was replaced by thick glass. And the staircase descended like a tube of ice into a vast, white, cathedral-sized space. They reached the bottom and stopped.

This room was massive and modern, like a very big art gallery, although there was no art on its walls. Instead, in its center was what looked like a strange sculpture. It was a large steel tower. From its top a long pole stretched parallel to the ceiling and, in the distance, something large and heavy was fixed to the end of it. At the foot of the tower was a steel bench.

Sinclair Cell sat on it, looking at his reflection in a pocket mirror.

“Sinclair, you could have come and helped me, you lazy toad,” said Primo. “Help me now. Tie their arms behind their backs.”

Cell instructed the general to put Molly and Rocky on the ground. The immobile pair lay there like dead fish, and Sinclair came over and tied them up.

Then Cell let the world come out of its freeze. Immediately Molly and Rocky’s time started again. Both were shocked to find how they’d been moved. As far as Rocky was concerned, he had just been behind the curtain, while Molly’s time had stopped when Primo had snatched the diamond from her. A few seconds later she gasped as she realized what had happened.

“So the
diamond
is connected to time stopping!”

Primo paid no attention to her. He was standing by a small metal box and turning dials inside it.

Molly and Rocky struggled to sit up. Both their eyes were drawn like magnets to the pole at the top of the tower and the heavy object on the end of it. Something solid and menacing—all black and white. At the same time, Primo Cell pulled a handle. The black-and-white thing began to tumble. Then it was swooping downward, and in the next second, a huge metal
magpie, with wings outstretched in full flight, was plummeting toward them.

It flew past, a heavy, deadly bird of prey, its thick, swordlike beak and weighty body hurtling low over the steel bench. If Sinclair had still been sitting there, the bird would have slammed right into him. Molly followed its flight. On its long pole it was guided up to the other side of the gallery ceiling, where it hovered as its weight shifted. Then, as gravity pulled it down again, it began its backward descent, targeting the seat. Its guillotine-sharp tail cut through the air with a
whoooomph
noise, sending a breeze through Molly’s hair.

“I’m glad you’re not superstitious,” Rocky said to Molly, “because one magpie’s supposed to mean bad luck.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Cell as if showing them a priceless treasure. “It’s my magpie pendulum. It can even keep time. It can swing backward and forward all day long, and there’s a clock on the wall up there. Do you see?” Looking proudly up at his monster, Cell pushed a button and, with a mechanical, birdlike screech, the magpie stopped high in the air. Cell walked over toward the bench and lightly patted its metal seat.

“Here, Molly, you sit here.” Molly shook her head in horror. Sitting in the line of the killer magpie was the
last place in the world that she wanted to be.

“Bring her over,” Cell ordered the general, who, like a hypnotized retrieving dog, lifted Molly over to the bench. Sinclair kept a firm hand on Rocky. As soon as Molly’s feet were under the seat, two metal clamps seized her ankles.

“NO,” Molly angrily. “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME SIT HERE. YOU’RE COMPLETELY INSANE!” She struggled wildly with the metal bonds, but Cell was as unperturbed as if he was waiting for the kettle to boil. He watched Sinclair shove Rocky, kicking and shouting, onto the bench beside Molly. Sinclair checked that both sets of ankle locks were tightly fastened.

Activated by a remote-control device in Cell’s hand, metal belts slid like evil snakes from behind the prisoners and snapped shut about their waists.

“Now, time for a bit of fun,” said Cell with a laugh. Molly raised her eyes to the horrible death bird above her. She and Rocky were directly in its path.