by Georgia Byng
“I wish I could help,” Forest sympathized. He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Maybe I can help.”
Molly shook her head. She doubted it.
For a while they listened to the sounds of Benares.
The hollow chimes of copper temple bells drifted over the water, and wooden bells on cows made a CLOCK-CLOCK noise as the animals wandered the ghats. Pilgrims chanted, somewhere someone chopped wood, washerwomen chattered, and oars splashed in the river.
“You know, this time traveling has got me thinkin’,” Forest said. “Thinkin’ about the years I spent with Buddhist monks. There’s this word they have—kalachakra. It means ‘wheel of time.’ A Hindu priest once told me that the Hindu word for ’time’ is kaal. Hindus also believe that time turns like a wheel and there are scientists who think time goes around in a wheel, too. Interesting, eh?” Everyone watched the shoreline, as if no one was paying attention to Forest. But Molly listened. She wiped her eyes.
“A wheel of time?” she said slowly. “If time is a wheel, then that would mean that the end joins the beginning.”
“Yeah, but in, like, a big, spacey weird way.”
Molly tilted her head as if letting a strange new idea pour into her ear. And then her eyes began to light up.
“So if time is like a wheel, and the end of time is joined to the beginning of time, then if I go back in time far enough, back to the beginning of time, and keep going, then I’ll automatically travel through to the end of time. You’re saying all I’d have to do is go backward through time from there. Eventually, I’d go past the year 3000, then 2000, and keep going backward in time until I got to November 1870 and arrived at where Waqt is now—”
“That’s crazy, Molly,” Rocky interrupted, turning around. “You don’t know that the beginning of time joins on to the end of time. It’s a harebrained theory. What if it doesn’t? There might not be a beginning of time. And then you’ll just be stuck somewhere horrible, trillions of years ago. Don’t be stupid, Molly.”
“I don’t know,” said Forest. “No one believed that the world was round. It sounds real dumb that the world might be round, like we should all fall off, like bugs fallin’ off a ball. Maybe time is like a wheel.”
Rocky suddenly shouted, “Forest, stop it! It’s really irresponsible of you to tell Molly that time is like a wheel. No one knows what’s at the beginning of time. And you certainly don’t!”
“Man, sorry. I was just trying to help.”
“I’ve got a feeling,” Molly said suddenly, “that time is like a wheel.”
Rocky’s face darkened. “Molly, don’t be stupid. You’re not stupid. Don’t go by a hunch. We’ll wait for the future to come in a normal, human way. Then you get better time-travel crystals. You don’t need to time travel backward to get to the future. And, anyway, who knows how that sort of time travel would affect your skin? It might scale up your insides as well as your outsides, Molly. It might age you so much that you die!”
“Rocky,” said Molly slowly, “I have to try to find a way of chasing Waqt to the future to catch him out before he kills the younger me’s.”
Molly saw that the boat was almost at the edge of the water and that the captain was set to dock. On shore, a crowd was gathering. Quietly, she reached into her pocket for her muddy green stone.
Rocky saw her hand moving.
“Don’t do it, Molly!”
“I’ll see you soon,” Molly said and, shutting her eyes, she vanished from his time.
Thirty-one
As soon as Molly was reversing through time she realized what a crazy decision she’d made. Her task felt as hopeless and impossible as an attempt to fly across a huge ocean in a tiny microlight with a lawnmower engine. For the green crystal made her time travel jerky and it didn’t always respond to her. She demanded that it take her backward through time as fast as possible. She squeezed it and concentrated on moving into top gear because she knew that to get to the beginning of time she had a giant distance to travel. But traveling with this crystal felt as if she were in a rusty old vehicle with a jammed transmission and a broken accelerator.
She reckoned that she had gone back three hundred years. And then a ghastly mathematical thought occurred to her: At this rate, she’d be an old lady before she reached the beginning of time. Molly felt the years flash past and decided she was probably now in about the eleventh century. But this was as fast as she was going to move with this crystal.
She realized that she’d made a dreadful misjudgment. Numb from the news of Petula’s death, she hadn’t been thinking properly. She felt as if she was traveling at about a hundred years a minute, six thousand years in an hour. In twelve hours she would have gone back… Molly did some math in her head… seventy-two thousand years—that was all. And she would need to sleep and eat and drink. She hadn’t considered that problem. What should she do? Stop and sleep?
Molly couldn’t believe what a horrifically stupid mistake she’d made. As she shut her eyes a lesson from long ago wriggled up from the bottom of her mind. She remembered her bad-tempered teacher Mrs. Toadley making the class recite a rhyme about time. The rhyme rang in her head like a horrible teasing song.
Three hundred and fifty thousand years ago,
Humans were first on show,
Sixty-five million years ago, I think,
Dinosaurs became extinct,
Two hundred million years before today,
The dinosaurs first came to play,
Three and a half billion years back,
One-celled life popped out of the sack,
Four and a half billion years ago, it’s charted,
The world started,
Fourteen billion years ago, it’s said,
Time went “BANG” and started her thread.
Molly gulped as she did more sums. Her calculations took a while. At the rate she was traveling, if she did stop to sleep, she’d be lucky to travel ninety-six thousand years a day. It would take her a whole year to travel thirty-five million years back in time. In ten years she’d go back three hundred and fifty million years. That was nowhere near fourteen billion years. Molly started to panic and her hands grew very clammy. The world whizzed past her. She had no idea where in time she was now. She squeezed the crystal and implored, “You MUST go faster. You must. You have to or we’ll never get to the beginning of time. Please. Please.”
Molly understood that she was doomed, and her eyes filled with tears. She knew now that she was going to die somewhere thousands of years away from everyone and everything she loved. She would have to stop, and where she stopped was where she would have to live, forever, until she grew old and died. She realized then that if it was impossible to go to the beginning of time, she should of course stop, as soon as she could, and so she slowly brought herself to a hovering position until she could see that the Ganges River was below her and the shore a yard away.
She stopped and at the same time jumped so that she landed in the mud on the banks of the river. When she looked up she saw there was a man close by. He held a begging bowl and was sitting cross-legged in front of her. He was old and blind. One of his eyes was shut; the other was white with cataracts. As she landed he raised his head. Molly glanced about. Benares was smaller and more primitive. Maybe she was in the first or second century.
Molly collapsed in the mud.
“I can’t live here!” she sobbed out loud. “What have I done?” She looked down at the crystal in her hand and turned it over.
“You stupid, lame lump of muck!” she spat at it. Then she glanced out at the river, where the sun’s first rays of the day were spreading out like fire on the water. She saw a glimmering reflection of herself and instinctively reached up to feel her face. The scales now almost covered her nose, and they were thickening beside her mouth. Her whole face felt tight and dry. She looked at her hands. The skin on them was like a lizard’s. Molly felt numb, too numb to care about being a reptile person.
She held the crystal out
, ready to throw it in the river, but she couldn’t do it. The unbearable thought of never again seeing the people she loved overwhelmed her. They were hundreds of years ahead of her, stuck in 1870, and she was stuck here. Tears brimmed in Molly’s eyes until they were splashing down her cheeks and dripping off her chin. Racking sobs that she had no control over came coughing up from her chest. All Molly wanted was to see the people she loved. She couldn’t bear losing them and Petula.
For a while Molly sat in the mud crying. She cried until she felt she didn’t have any tears left. Then she remembered the blind man who’d been sitting quietly on the riverbank, and now, slightly embarrassed, she glanced back at him. He was staring at the sky with his open blind eye. She noticed a small smile on his lips. And then, she noticed something else.
He was stroking the lid of his closed right eye with his finger. Molly watched. It was as if he was comforting his eye. Then she noticed that this shut eye was boomerang-shaped. It reminded her of the shape of the scar across the green crystal in her hand. She studied the scar on her crystal. Now it looked like a shut eye.
Eyes always reminded Molly of hypnotism. And at once she saw a glimmer of hope. If she could hypnotize the crystal, perhaps, just perhaps, she could make it travel faster.
Molly cradled the crystal in her palm and, taking a deep breath, began to focus her mind. She sent all her concentration toward it. Nothing happened. She dropped the crystal in despair. She was devastated. She stared down at the scarred crystal and touched it.
“Please let me hypnotize you,” she whispered. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Please,” she sobbed. The hypnotic beam from her eye distorted as it made its way through the prism of her tears. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t see them again. I love them, you see. And the world of my own time. I love it. Oh, please.” Inside her, Molly’s love was silently screaming.
This time, something extraordinary happened. As Molly drove her hypnotic power into the crystal, the scar split open. It opened like a flower unfurling very quickly in dawn light. And in between the scar lines was a deep green swirl that seemed to spiral down like water rushing down a drain. Molly gasped and at once lifted herself to a hovering position in time. For a moment she wondered whether she was imagining the open eye, but then she felt its power and knew it was real. Now the crystal felt at least as powerful as both the time gems she’d used before. She gripped it tightly. As she prepared to pull full-throttle, Molly looked up to see a red bird flying above. Her mind stretched out in a lassoing way and, as she pushed on the time-travel accelerator to move off, she saw the bird, trapped by her power and traveling with her. Shocked, she stopped. The bird flew away. Molly was amazed. Taking the bird with her had been so easy. Now she had high hopes for what else this crystal could do.
Using her most concentrated hypnotic force and harnessing the full power of her mind, Molly willed the crystal to move as fast as it could. Immediately, the bumpy, jerky movements of before were replaced by what felt like supersonic speed. The centuries whipped past so quickly that Molly found it difficult to gauge how fast she was traveling. To test the crystal she slowed to a hover and stopped. The world materialized. Molly gasped. There were huge footprints in the mud beside her. Dinosaur footprints? Molly’s hands were equally shocking. The skin on them was as crusty as the top of a loaf of bread. Repulsed, she immediately took off again. She remembered the rhyme about time.
Sixty-five million years ago, I think,
Dinosaurs became extinct,
Two hundred million years before today,
The dinosaurs first came to play.…
So she’d traveled sixty-five million years at least! Was that possible? The millennia purred past as easily as the pages of a book being flipped. Molly stared at the crystal and urged it on. Now she loved this crystal. It was the best crystal. The best. In her mind she apologized to it for calling it a lump of muck.
Every so often Molly let herself slow down to see where she was. First she felt she was underwater and then she was in rock, the rock that had been there before the Ganges River and the primeval rains had worn it away. And it was black. She didn’t stop, as she thought she might die if she let herself arrive inside rock. But at least while the rock was there, she knew the world existed, too. Molly wondered where she would be before planet earth formed—five billion years ago, for instance. She willed the crystal on. The cool time winds whipped about her. Molly felt herself in the black rock for a long time, and then everything suddenly went orange and red. White orange with heat. Molly shut her eyes tight. She knew she mustn’t stop now or she would be shriveled up. She thought that she was perhaps at the beginning of planet earth. She could feel the heat, smell a sulfurous, bad-egg smell, and hear explosions, but she was safe within her traveling time capsule. It hugged her and carried her back. Farther and farther back in time.
Now the heat died down for a moment. Millions of years sped by. Molly opened her eyes and saw black space all about, black space lit with an orange spray and thousands of fiery balls. It was as if space was one huge explosion. And then the heat increased, and everything went flame orange.
Molly felt an ancient feeling in her bones. She could actually sense that she was nearly at the very beginning of time. And now she wondered whether the scarred crystal could actually do what she wanted it to—take her over the threshold of the beginning of time to the end of time.… If that was the way things worked—if Forest had been right about the wheel of time. She looked deep into the crystal’s green swirl and felt the strangest sensation—that the stone was hypnotizing her as she hypnotized it. It was as if they were both helping each other to do this impossible thing.
And then the black space filled with noise. Even though Molly was protected, the noise almost broke through. A crashing, banging thunder shook her, and the white light of the noise blinded her. She shut her eyes, she shielded them, but still the light broke through. And the heat was almost unbearable. The cool time wind was now like hot oven air. Molly’s body poured with sweat. She was really frightened. She gripped the crystal and urged it on even faster.
Hotter and hotter it became and brighter and brighter and louder and louder and Molly felt as though she was shrinking. Her senses were being bombarded. Terrified, she zoned into the crystal and imagined it as a green horse that she was riding. She pictured them galloping through a long, molten tunnel. She urged her steed on. Tighter and smaller and even tinier she felt as the space about her compressed. It was as if she was being squashed and pulled as fine as a piece of thread. Her head felt thinner than wire. She urged the crystal back to the very first moment of time, the moment smaller than a nanosecond. Molly felt as if she had shrunk to the size of a micro-atom, and then she thought she didn’t exist at all. Everything was still and quiet and empty.
She let herself slow down to hovering speed and she dared to open her eyes.
She seemed to be floating in the middle of a giant oval-ended sieve with millions and millions of holes in it. The holes near her were visible, but the oval sieve structure vanished into the distance, the holes becoming smaller and smaller until they disappeared, too. White light poured through the holes and drenched Molly with bright rays. She hovered and looked about, wondering where Waqt’s precious Bubble was—the place where he thought the special youth-giving light shone. But she couldn’t see it. Molly lingered and found herself turning, floating, somersaulting. She was a tiny, tumbling dot in a vast chasm.
She urged her crystal to continue back in time and plunged into the blackness that the other holes disappeared into—and beyond.
At dizzying speed, Molly shot like an arrow through the dazzling light of the sieve. And as she whizzed through the empty nothingness all sorts of thoughts rushed through her head. She thought about the people she loved. Rocky, Forest, Ojas, Mrs. Trinklebury, Primo Cell, the other children from the orphanage. She thought of the places she loved. She thought about Petula, and Amrit, too. She thought about Lucy Logan. She thought of her plans fo
r a hypnotic hospital, and her plans felt small and unreal. Then another wall of holes approached and in a moment Molly’s body seemed to vaporize into a streak of smoke and pass through one of these. As it did, she was blinded. She couldn’t breathe. And then, she felt like she was expanding again. It was molten hot. There was a tumultuous thunder about her and then everything went quiet. Now Molly sensed that she had passed into the end of time. The universe felt late, spent, and dying.
There was nothing beneath her for a long time. And then, suddenly, earth appeared beneath her feet. Molly focused on her crystal and willed it on. She was still traveling fast. She didn’t dare stop to see what would happen on the earth in the future. Her sole aim was to get back to find Waqt.
Molly willed the crystal to take her to November 1870. She felt the electricity of her own grown-up life as she passed through the twenty-first century and then she could feel her abducted selves as she approached the 1870s.
Finally, she landed on the riverbank. It was night and a full moon hung in the starry sky. Molly sank to the ground. She’d made it. Her mouth was parched. As she breathed a sigh of relief she noticed her cheeks no longer felt dry and taut. She reached up to touch her face and looked into the flat moonlit water. Her reflection peered back. Her skin was clear. The scales had disappeared.
Thirty-two
Molly gathered up her salwar kameez and began to run. She leaped up the stone steps of the ghats toward the candlelit alleys ahead. All the time she scanned her brain for memories, for clues to the whereabouts of her other selves.
As Molly ran, she thought.
So Waqt was right about his light at the beginning of time. It did cure scaly skin. It made a person look young again. But he was wrong about it only being in a special bubble. And he was wrong that you needed thousands of crystals to get to the light.