Molly Moon Stops the World (21 page)

“Adopted?” Molly and Rocky said in surprised unison.

“You got it,” said Sinclair, handing Rocky a bottle of water. “Sally and I aren’t real brother and sister.”

Molly and Rocky were fascinated. Being orphans themselves, the subject of adoption was very close to their hearts. What was more, neither had ever before met a person outside the orphanage who’d been adopted, so both listened intently to Sinclair as he told them his life story.

It turned out that he and Sally had first been adopted
at the ages of four and five by a ringmaster and his wife, who had owned a circus. It was, Sinclair said, as if a huge family had taken them in. He and Sally had been extremely happy. The ringmaster was also a performing hypnotist. Unfortunately, he was such a good one that when he came to Primo Cell’s attention, Cell thought he was a threat and so got rid of him. He hypnotized the circus couple. They were now gardeners at Magpie Manor.

The young Sinclair and Sally came to live with Cell. He seduced them with a new glamorous lifestyle, giving them everything they wanted—miniature cars to drive, fantastic bedrooms, a home with a movie theater and a pool, a country house with horses to ride and vacations by the sea where there were always big boats, Jet Skis, and all the toys they wanted. He got them a home tutor. One day, he said, they’d run his empire. When they were ten and eleven, he began to train them as hypnotists.

“But,” said Sinclair, his voice bitter, “from the day he took away my circus parents’ freedom, I hated him. I saw he had no heart. I vowed that I would do everything I could to stop him ever needing to hypnotize me. I played my part. I pretended I loved him like a son loves a father. But underneath, I didn’t. I hated him. Sally made mistakes. She disagreed with him once too
often. Primo hypnotized her. But he’s never hypnotized me. He likes to think that there’s at least one person out there who likes him not just because they’ve been hypnotized to. But, as I told you, I don’t like him at all. I loathe him.”

Molly looked out at the sea and the millions of tiny ripples on the water. She didn’t know how to react to Sinclair’s life history. At this moment, she just felt bowled over by all the day’s surprises. Molly knew she had other questions to ask Sinclair, but she couldn’t remember what they were. Instead, overcome by the vibrations of the car and the hum of the engine, she fell asleep. And Petula snuggled up to her, very relieved that the real Molly was back at last.

S
inclair lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills. The car growled in low gear as it negotiated the steep tree-lined road. On either side, snug buildings hugged the slopes.

“All these houses are seismically safe—that means they’re built to withstand earthquakes,” said Sinclair. “Mine too.”

He turned into a drive. His house was a modern blocky building supported on columns.

They climbed out in a parking court underneath it, where the pillars were covered with tropical ivy and bougainvillea. Sinclair led them toward an elevator door.

“I can see you don’t like stairs much,” said Molly as they swept upward.

Then, “Wow!” both she and Rocky exclaimed as they stepped into Sinclair’s living room.

A panoramic window gave spectacular views of Los Angeles. And the famous Hollywood sign, looking like a giant geography-book label, was stuck on the hillside only a mile or so away. In the window was a long, curved window seat. Petula jumped up and made herself comfortable. Molly looked out. A narrow aqueduct, supported on towers and filled with water, snaked away from the house over trees and the hill and a road. Then it looped back again and entered the building below a gap in the glass window. It curled round the back of the room, where it rejoined its tail before it set off again on its route back toward the trees, hill, and road.

“That’s my lap pool,” said Sinclair. “I love it. Some days I swim once around—away from the house and back—other days I swim ten loops.”

“It’s so cool,” said Rocky.

“I’d love to have a swim in it,” said Molly.

“You can. Let me show you round the rest of the place,” invited Sinclair.

His bedroom was circular, and so was the bed in the middle of it.

“Ever slept on a water bed?”

Molly and Rocky tried it out.

“Weird,” said Molly. “It must be like sleeping on jelly.”

“It’s really comfortable,” said Sinclair, activating a switch. The water in the bed began to vibrate. “It’s very relaxing,” he told them, but the wobbling water bed just made Molly and Rocky giggle.

Sinclair lived in style. He had it all.

He showed them his screening room, where he could watch the latest films, his computer room, and his darkroom. Newly developed photographs clipped onto a wire trellis showed what Sinclair had been taking pictures of recently. There were Molly and Rocky rowing a boat, with Petula perched between them. Rocky playing his guitar. Molly holding a conch shell up to her ear, listening to the sea. There were also some photographs of Petula. She was being kissed by Gloria Heelheart.

“I completely forgot!” cried Sinclair. “While you were, um … away, Petula starred in a film. It’s directed by Gino Pucci. See, that’s him in this picture.”

“Petula starred in a film?” Molly stared at the photograph. “How come?”

“Gino met her at the Academy Awards. Apparently, so did Gloria Heelheart,” Sinclair said.

“Ah yes,” admitted Molly. “Petula and I—er—met her in the ladies’ room.”

“Gloria adored her and so did Gino. He tracked Petula down. Mrs. Trinklebury gave him permission to hire her. The film’s called
Thunder Roll,
and it’s out in ten days.”

“What a pug!” Molly beamed. She felt really proud. “Petula, you’re a star! And so clever, to organize it all yourself.”

“She got paid a nice fat fee, too,” said Sinclair. “She’ll be able to eat steak as often as she wants.”

Molly gave Petula an extra-specially tight hug. Petula wondered what all the fuss was about. Then Molly noticed a picture of a crystal.

“Where’s my crystal?” she asked.

“I had to give it to Primo,” said Sinclair. “He wanted me to take it off you once you were dead.”

“Great,” said Molly.

“I’ve still got mine.” Sinclair pulled his crystal from under his shirt. “You can borrow it if you need it.”

“Thanks.” Molly felt really annoyed that Primo Cell had her crystal as well as his own.

“Look,” said Sinclair, “if ever we get Primo under control, I can get all the crystals back from him, and then you can have two, or three.”

“Why, how many has he got?”

“Eighteen, including yours. They’ve all come from other hypnotists. He sits on them like an old magpie.”

“What I want to know,” said Rocky, examining the photograph, “is how come so many hypnotists have these? I mean, how did they all know the power that the crystals would give them? Molly didn’t know. She just found hers by accident.”

“The truth,” said Sinclair, “is very mysterious. I don’t think that those other hypnotists knew they needed crystals either. I think the crystals found their owners for themselves. It’s as if they have minds of their own. They don’t, of course, but I believe they are drawn, in a magnetic way, toward hypnotists.”

“Do they move by themselves?” asked Molly, aghast.

“No. But it seems that they cause urges in humans to move them. They can manipulate people to put them nearer and nearer to where they want to be.”

“Which is where?”

“Near hypnotists.”

“But why?”

“So they can be used for their true purpose, maybe. I don’t know. It’s completely mysterious. They’ve got a homing instinct—like eels.”

“What do eels do?”

“Every year, eels swim out of the rivers of Europe all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the Sargasso Sea, where they breed. Then the eels’ larvae return to the European seas, where they turn into elvers and swim
up exactly the same rivers that their parents came from, even though they never met their parents. Then, after about ten years, when those elvers have grown into big eels, they swim to the Sargasso Sea to breed. No one tells the baby elvers what their parents did. They just know to do it. Of course, these crystals aren’t alive, but they seem to have some built-in instinct—just like animals. It makes them attracted to hypnotists. I thought scientists might explain the mystery. I’ve hypnotized some of them. No one has been able to work out how these crystals and hypnotists and stopping the world are connected.”

“So Primo has a collection of crystals,” said Rocky. “Like his collection of hypnotism books.”

“Just like that.”

“Horrible,” said Molly. “At least he hasn’t got his thieving hands on Lucy Logan’s copy of the hypnotism book.” Her voice leaped. “Lucy Logan! I said I’d call her, and I haven’t been in touch for
months.
She must think I’m dead.”

Sinclair frowned. It was then that Molly learned some terrible news. Sinclair told her that soon after the magpie episode, he’d overheard Primo Cell talking to someone called Lucy on the phone. After the conversation, Sinclair had traced the call and discovered that the number was in Briersville. At that time he
hadn’t known about Lucy Logan, so he thought nothing of it. But a few days later, when the hypnotized Molly had talked about Lucy, he’d realized who this telephone caller must be. Sinclair had come to a distressing conclusion. After Molly had disappeared, Lucy must have decided to call Cell to try and hypnotize him over the phone. Not realizing how masterful a long-distance hypnotist Cell was,
she
had been hypnotized instead. She was, Sinclair said, one of the enemy now.

Molly put her head in her hands as she contemplated this dreadful news.

“At least,” she said, “at least I suppose she isn’t in any more danger. At least being on Cell’s side means she won’t have any more car accidents.” Then the reality of Lucy’s being brainwashed by Cell hit Molly. “This is so depressing. Poor Lucy. She knew about Cell, and she hated him.” Molly thought about the afternoon she’d spent sitting in Lucy’s basement room looking at her videos. “So, Sinclair, was Lucy right about Davina? Did Cell kidnap her?”

“She was completely right,” said Sinclair. “Cell was in New York, and he had problems hypnotizing her. I don’t know why. Anyway, Davina then suspected what he was up to. Cell felt she had to be removed. He used his crystal and stopped time so no one saw her being taken. Davina’s been living at Magpie Manor all year.
He keeps her like a caged bird in very beautiful quarters there. She is given everything she wants, as long as she sings for him. He guards her like a hawk. She’s impossible to get near to. It’s very strange.”

“Poor Davina! And as for Lucy, I can’t bear it. I felt lovely down on the beach today, with no worries. Now I’m full of them again.”

“Molly, I know how you must feel,” said Sinclair, “but you’ve got to rise above your feelings. We’ve all got to, because now the most important thing to do is to stop Cell being sworn in as president. To do this, we’ve got to break his pyramid of power. You’ve got a job to do, Molly. You’ve got to do something I’ve never been able to do. You’ve to figure out how to find out Primo’s passwords so you can dehypnotize everyone.”

“But how can I find out his passwords? They’re in his head!” hissed Molly.

“Molly, you have an extraordinary gift when it comes to hypnosis. I think it’s an instinct in you—you know, like the eels. This instinct might show you how to extract the passwords from Primo.”

“I’m not going near him,” said Molly, her hackles up.

“You don’t have to go near him,” said Sinclair. “The person I wanted you to meet is a friend who is going to teach you something so that maybe you can get into
Cell’s head without being remotely near him.”

Molly looked alarmed. Had Sinclair gone absolutely bananas?

“I’ve tried enough,” she declared. “Look what’s happened to Lucy. I told you, Sinclair, I’m not magic.”

“You’re stressed out,” said Rocky.

“The time has come,” said Sinclair, “for you to meet Forest.”

“Forest? What’s that? A country walk under trees?”

“No.” Sinclair laughed. “Forest is my yogic meditation teacher.”

S
inclair went to the window and wolf whistled. A few minutes later, in came a tall, very thin guy with gray hair in dreadlocks that fell to his waist and bottle-thick glasses. He wore baggy white sweatpants and a zipper top, with socks and flip-flops on his feet.

“Hi, nice to meet you both, Molly, Rocky. I’ve heard so much about you.”

Forest, it turned out, had been a yogic meditation teacher for ten years. Before that, he’d traveled the world. He’d lived as a hermit in a cave in France for three years, contemplating the meaning of life, eating nothing but nuts and berries, insects and canned soup. Later he’d traveled to the depths of the Amazon jungle with a group of monks who didn’t believe in cutting their hair. He’d stayed with a hardy bunch of
Inuits and learned to build igloos. He’d spent eleven months in a tree house in Sri Lanka, hitchhiked across India, and caravaned on a camel across the Kalahari Desert.

Now he lived in L.A., where he was Sinclair’s personal yoga teacher. His small apartment was downstairs. He had a yard where he kept chickens and a glass-blowing workshop. He was responsible for all the beautiful mirrored sculptures on the coffee table. Molly wondered whether Sinclair had hypnotized him to stay put.

“What is yogic meditation?” she asked as Forest sat down cross-legged on the floor.

“Well,” began Forest in a deep voice that reminded Molly of a rock-filled mountain river, “yogic meditation is making your body comfortable so that you can tune in and pick up the positive vibes of the universe.”

Forest suddenly lay back and swung both his feet up to his head, where he hooked them around his neck. His head poked out between his calves, and his arms lay flat on the floor where his legs should have been. He looked like a human knot.

“Mmmmn, so comfortable,” he sighed, shutting his eyes. “Now, I concentrate on nothing, and the more I see nothing, the more the light of nothing fills me up until I’m …”