Molly Moon Stops the World (6 page)

“Does that mean we’re going?” asked Gerry, not sure what had been agreed.

“Sure does,” said Rocky.

“Whoooooooooo!” shouted Gerry. “Whoooooo!” And not knowing what to do with all his excitement, he started jumping up and down like a coffee-drinking kangaroo. “L.A., L.A., L.A., L.A.!” he shouted, running up the hall and back again. For a moment he stopped.

“Where is L.A.?” he asked.

“L.A. stands for Los Angeles,” said Rocky. “It’s in California, in America.”

“Whoa. America? Wow!” After that Gerry was unstoppable. He bounced down the stairs and around the hall and up the stairs again and down again and up again, shouting, “No more school! NO MORE SCHOOOOOOL!”

Gemma thanked Molly and Rocky ten times and then rushed into her bedroom to pack.

“It’s the right decision,” said Molly. “Because if we didn’t take them and something bad happened to us there, then they’d
never
get a vacation.”

“What might happen to us?” asked Rocky, raising an eyebrow.

“The same thing as Davina? I don’t know. But this Mr. Cell is a power-crazed maniac. And a brilliant hypnotist. Jeepers, Rocky, what are we letting ourselves in for?”

“Trouble,” said Rocky matter-of-factly.

“Yes, ten tons of trouble,” agreed Molly.

O
ver the next three days, Molly watched Happiness House erupt with anticipation. Mrs. Trinklebury was so delighted about the idea of a vacation that she threw her apron on the fire to celebrate. She was very excited about going to Los Angeles and Hollywood, the movie capital of the world, home of the stars she adored. She harbored hopes that she would meet some of them.

Nockman wasn’t entirely pleased to be going back to America. That was where he had, until recently, spent his whole life, and he didn’t want to be reminded of his unwholesome past and the crimes he had committed. He worried that he might be tempted to do something bad again, but Mrs. Trinklebury, who was helping him reform, said that it would be good for
him. So he carefully constructed a traveling box for his twenty parakeets. Molly had told him that the Benefactor was managing the flight arrangements for all the pets. Nockman automatically believed her. He always respected what Molly said, although he wasn’t exactly sure why. He was glad the birds could come, because he wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

Two matters had to be dealt with by hypnotism. One by Rocky, the other by Molly.

Rocky’s challenge was to find hotel rooms for them. Their trip to Los Angeles coincided with its busiest week of the year. The night of the Academy Awards, when the best actors, actresses, directors, producers, and film people would win the coveted golden Oscar statuettes for their work, was in a week’s time. Every single room in every hotel had been booked months in advance.

“I hate to do this,” said Rocky as he picked up the phone. “Because of us, some people are going to lose their rooms.”

“Aren’t you nervous that you’ve forgotten how to do long-distance hypnosis?” Molly asked. But Rocky shook his head.

“Hypnotizing people is like riding a bicycle, don’t you think? Once you’ve learned, you never forget.” Molly was amazed by Rocky’s confidence and very
impressed when, ten minutes later, he came out of the TV room with the news that they now had two bungalows and a room reserved at a hotel called the Château Marmont.

“All I needed was a bit of time,” said Rocky. “As long as they listen to me, they melt like butter in my hands.”

Molly, however, was incredibly nervous about her hypnotic challenge. She had to visit their headmaster and hypnotize him into giving his permission—for her, Rocky, Gemma, Roger, and Gerry to go to Los Angeles, and for the rest of the orphanage children to stay on Mrs. Trinklebury’s sister’s farm. Molly was worried that she might have lost her hypnotic skills, especially since she’d had that ice-cold fusion feeling when she’d tried to hypnotize the bush.

In the headmaster’s office, Molly started by explaining that the trip to California was educational. They’d been learning about earthquakes and the desert and the American Congress, she said, so the trip would be very informative.

“The other children have been asked to stay on a pig farm, where they will learn about pigs…. You know—pigs and slop and manure and, erm, agriculture. This will also be very educational.”

Mr. Struttfield seemed to think the idea splendid, because he said, “I’m very impressed that you have
come to ask my permission yourself, Molly. I like children with initiative. A good golf player has initiative. A sense of—if you want that ball to go in a certain direction, learn how to hit it. Don’t wait for someone else to hit it for you—eh, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you ask me, farms ought to turn their land over to golf courses. Don’t you think?”

Molly said nothing.

“So you’re all off to Los Angeles and farms. Well, I hope you have a very educational time and, if you can, play a bit of golf for me, eh?”

“Thank you, sir. Yes, sir.”

With that, his phone rang and, picking it up, Mr. Struttfield nodded to Molly that she could go.

Molly couldn’t believe it. She’d actually persuaded him to let them all off school without hypnosis! She didn’t know exactly how Mr. Struttfield had been so easy to win over, but feeling very pleased with herself, she went back to the classroom.

And so it was that, a few days later, a small minibus was loaded and thirty-eight passengers (five children, two adults, twenty parakeets, ten mice, and one pug), took their places on board. Even Roger was eager to
come, happy, he said, to be getting away from the voices he was hearing.

Molly, at last, and for the first time in months, had to test her hypnotic powers. She thought her skills might have grown rusty. But they hadn’t. She easily hypnotized the airline attendants. One bolting glare from her green eyes was all it took. The warm fusion feeling blasted through her, and she knew they were under her power. The animals were allowed through, and soon they were all settled on the plane.

The flight wasn’t anything like Molly’s solitary one to New York before Christmas. This flight was chaotic as well as noisy. When the jumbo took off, Mrs. Trinklebury started a shouting-out-her-prayers thing that lasted off and on for most of the flight.

Halfway across the Atlantic, Gerry lost a mouse. Victor, his prize buck, broke loose and made his way up to the plane toilets, where he got locked in with a hairy backpacker. When she burst out of the cubicle, shouting that she’d seen a squirrel, Victor quietly made his way back to Gerry’s seat.

“Madam, it’s impossible that a squirrel could get on board,” the flight attendant assured the backpacker. “It’s a long flight. Perhaps you should drink some
water and do some of the calming exercises that we recommend.”

Molly would normally have wanted to get off a flight like this, with Mrs. Trinklebury being so embarrassing, but as it was, she wished that it would go on and on—then she wouldn’t have to investigate the danger that was Primo Cell.

She told this to Rocky. “If you’re scared,” he replied, “think how terrified Davina must be, wherever she is. If she
is
alive and if Cell has taken her, she needs you to rescue her.”

“She’s the only reason I’m going,” said Molly. “I wouldn’t risk my life just to check out those stars. Anyway, I suppose I owe Davina. I did steal her part in
Stars on Mars
before Christmas.”

Molly leaned down to put a slice of salami in Petula’s basket. Petula was very well-behaved on planes.

After eleven hours, the plane wheeled above the bright lights of Los Angeles. Molly stared out at the enormous city below. It seemed to stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions. She couldn’t help wondering where Primo Cell was right now, among those millions of buildings.

Then the tires hit the tarmac and they were safely down. Everyone put their watches back eight hours. It
was seven o’clock in the evening.

Soon they were all standing in baggage claim, half asleep, waiting for their suitcases. The only people with any energy left were Gerry and Gemma, who were giving rides on the baggage carousel to Gerry’s toy superheroes.

Molly watched a small red case trundling around on the conveyor belt. Exhausted as she was, she let her eyes linger on it, absorbing its rough-textured surface and the color of its tarnished buckles. For a moment the airport seemed very far away, and it was as if she and the suitcase were the only things that existed. A moment later Molly felt as if the suitcase was
inside
her mind. It was a strange feeling, but not a completely new one. It reminded Molly of the sensation she got whenever she was hypnotizing a person. A slipping sensation that happened just before her subject went into a trance, when she could feel their personality weakening and starting to belong to her. Molly thought how odd it was to be feeling this with a suitcase, and then, as she sleepily gazed, the familiar, warm fusion feeling started to spread through her body. But a second later, the feeling turned icy cold. It was exactly the same thing that had happened with the topiary dog. Shocked, Molly snapped her attention away from the case.

It was very peculiar. This obviously had something to do with staring at objects. What would happen, Molly wondered, if she let the freezing feeling continue? Would she find that she’d hypnotized the object she was looking at? That was ridiculous. How could a suitcase be hypnotized? Next time, she decided, she would experiment and see what the cold fusion feeling grew into.

Everyone gathered their bags and cases and hauled them onto luggage carts. Dazed and weary, they made their way to the taxi stand. No one noticed a luggage porter approaching them.

“Hey, ‘scuse me,” he said, his face beaming with recognition, “but ain’t you the girl and the boy on the ‘Check Out the Kids in Your Neighborhood’ commercial?”

M
olly was stunned. It had never crossed her mind that the hypnotic charity TV ad she and Rocky had made in New York could have been watched by people in Los Angeles. How many more people in the airport had recognized her?

“Um, yeah … yeah, that was us,” she told him reluctantly.

“Great work,” said the smiling porter. “Let me give you folks some assistance!” He took Molly’s cart and led them straight to the front of the taxi line. Here he loaded their bags into a waiting minibus and waved them off.

“So much for Lucy saying that because we’re children, we won’t be suspected,” whispered Rocky as they sank into their seats. “Primo Cell probably saw the ad and
has been looking for two kid hypnotists ever since.” Molly was too shaken by the incident to say anything.

Soon the minibus was heading out from underneath concrete columns toward the city of Los Angeles. Molly sat with Petula on her knee, wishing that they hadn’t come. She tried to let the new surroundings distract her from thoughts of Primo Cell. But it was an impossible task. Once the bus had left the airport, they headed out on a road dotted with huge billboards. On either side, ads showed Shlick Shlack knives, nutritious Navy Girl soup, and Sumpshus toilet paper, in which the boxer King Moose was pictured having a fight with a giant toilet paper roll. Cell’s companies. His influence was everywhere. Another poster that kept being repeated was of a politician in a cowboy hat. Underneath his red, white, and blue jacket, it said in bold letters,
GANDOLLI FOR PRESIDENT THIS NOVEMBER
. At least, Molly thought, there wasn’t one advertising Cell for president.

The minibus turned onto the highway. Brown, scrubby hills stretched into the distance, and on them stood oil-drilling pumps, each the size of a small house. They looked like monster birds with metal legs and beak-shaped ends that seesawed, pecking at the ground.

As Molly looked at the nodding oil pumps, she couldn’t help thinking that Primo Cell might already have hit men pecking around the country, trying to find the two children who had made the hypnotic commercial. He probably wanted to do away with them, as he had maybe done away with Davina Nuttel. The great, heartless iron birds made her courage falter.

Soon small houses began to pop up beside the road, and then larger ones. Then they were driving up a long shopping street, full of secondhand-car showrooms and bars, and on to another with clothes boutiques and restaurants. A giant poster had Hercules Stone’s smiling face on it. It was advertising the film
Blood of a Stranger.
Big letters proclaimed
NOMINATED FOR THREE ACADEMY AWARDS: BEST FILM, BEST ACTRESS—LEADING ROLE, BEST SCREENPLAY
. Molly watched a jogger passing a fast-food shop called Emergency Donuts. OPEN 24 HOURS, DON’T PANIC. Petula pricked her ears at a pack of five dogs that were being walked by a woman on roller skates.

“The suburbs are very big here,” Molly said to the driver.

“The suburbs?” said the driver. “This ain’t the suburbs. This is Los Angeles city itself. This is the City of Angels, angel.”

“But where are the skyscrapers?” asked Molly, sure that he must be wrong.

“Oh, there are
some
downtown, but this ain’t a skyscraper city, doll. This is a city of gardens, nice an’ green, and
low-rise
buildings, which is best ‘cause we gets earthquakes here, bein’ on the San Andreas Fault line an’ all that. In fact, we’re nearly at your hotel, and your hotel is smack in the center of Los Angeles. Mos’ places, this is as high as the buildings get.”

“But in the center of most cities,” Molly said, “the buildings are packed closely together.”

“Yeah, that’s ‘cause mos’ cities are old and ain’t got space. This is a young city, an’ there’s always been loadsa space.”

At the end of the wide street was a giant bottleshaped billboard advertising the drink Qube. Behind the billboard were hills with buildings on them receding steeply away.

“Up there,” said their driver, “are the San Gabriel Mountains, an’ over there”—he pointed behind him—“is Death Valley. But you don’t wanna go there—it’s so hot, you can fry an egg on the hood of your car.”

The minibus found a gap in the oncoming traffic and dived up a steep drive on the other side of the road. Molly saw a small sign half hidden by leaves. The
Château Marmont. Molly looked up at a fairy-tale building with turrets and towers. Windows rose for ten floors, with small balconies in front of them. The entrance was in a cavelike garage under the hotel, where three men who looked more like movie stars than porters were waiting to unpack the minibus.