by Georgia Byng
The room around Molly and Rocky purred with pale light, bright light, and darkness as they moved backward through four thousand, two hundred and fifteen days and nights. Finally the light settled.
Molly put them into a time hover. By doing this, and not properly landing in the time, Molly and Rocky were able to see their surroundings and yet were invisible to anyone in that time.
In this strange, not-quite-there dimension, they stepped into the passage to check that the coast was clear. Then Molly released the time hover and they properly arrived.
It was eleven and a half years earlier, but the peculiar thing that both Molly and Rocky noticed straight away was that there was a storm outside there too. Rain was pelting down on the skylights above them and a blast of thunder rattled the windows. Molly gulped and shot a puzzled look at Rocky. Then she stroked Petula’s nose and, keeping her grip on Rocky’s arm just in case they had to time travel again suddenly, the two friends ventured down the passage, inspecting the names on the hospital bedroom doors.
Neither Molly nor Rocky said a word. They knew what they were here to do. And Petula sensed that she should be quiet too. She sniffed the air. It was still full of baby smells. Then a whiff of a baby that smelled like Molly hit her nostrils. Petula wrinkled her nose and wondered what was going on.
Molly and Rocky read the doors’ labels. The first read C. YO, the next, M. BURTON, the third, D. A. LOWEY. Then they saw what they wanted—a sign that read L. LOGAN.
The door to this bedroom was open. In her last adventure Molly had met several of her younger selves, but still she felt a quiver of anticipation as she realized that she was about to see herself as a newborn baby. And equally as amazing, she was about to see her twin brother for the first time. Hot with curiosity, Molly tilted her head around the door.
In front of her was a white and yellow room with a metal bed in the center of it. Sitting up under sheets and blankets and in a pink nightdress was a much younger Lucy Logan. She was staring fondly down at a baby in her arms.
A nurse stood with her back to the door giving Lucy advice.
“When you’ve fed her, you can burp her and then she’ll drop off, I’m sure. The lad’s still asleep, but no doubt he’ll wake up soon. Yes, twins are hard work, my dear.”
Outside there was another roll of thunder.
Lucy Logan lifted the baby to rest her head on her shoulder and she began patting its back. She glanced at Molly, standing in the doorway, and smiled, completely unaware that this girl was this same child from the future.
“Have you got a name for her yet?” the nurse asked.
“No name yet,” Lucy said. On the floor Molly noticed a rectangular Moon’s Marshmallows box with bags of pink-and-white marshmallows in it. Three empty packets lay on the bedside table. Molly nudged Rocky and they sidestepped past the room.
“Where do you think my brother is?” whispered Molly.
Just then, double doors farther down opened, and a cot on wheels was pushed out to the passage and into another room.
“I bet there’s a big nursery place where they keep all the babies,” said Rocky. “I’ve seen them in films. Maybe that’s where he is.”
They crept toward the double doors. Through its glass windows they could see four wheeled cots, each with a swaddled baby inside. A dressing-gowned mother came out. She was so tired she didn’t notice Rocky and Molly. When she’d drifted back to her room they stepped inside. Petula whined from inside the rucksack. She could suddenly smell the saltiness of an aggressive man. He was in the building—and coming closer.
“Shh, Petula,” hushed Molly, completely oblivious to her pet’s warning.
The first crib held a dark baby with tight corkscrew curls of black hair. The second held a Chinese baby. In the third and fourth slept two babies, either of which could be Molly’s twin brother.
“Which one do you think he is?” Molly asked. Rocky pointed down at the distinct potato-shaped nose that was very like Molly’s own.
“That’s him, I reckon,” Rocky whispered. “I mean, those noses don’t grow on trees.”
Molly’s mouth fell open. Until this moment it had been hard to truly believe that she had a brother, but now, here was the living, breathing proof. “That is him, isn’t it!” she yelped. “And he looks just like me.”
“Two munchkins,” agreed Rocky.
The baby was wrapped up in a white cotton knitted blanket; his cheeks were soft and pink and his ears the shape of tiny tangerine segments. He sighed peacefully. Molly glanced around the room. There was a cabinet at one end with bottles and diapers on it.
“Let’s hide,” she whispered. “It’s time to find out who took him.”
Rocky nodded and soon they were crouched behind the piece of furniture.
Molly shuffled the gems on their string around in her hand until the red forward-traveling gem was between her finger and thumb. She stared down at the scar on it and, shivering with anticipation, bid it open. At once a red swirl, like the inside of a volcano, spiraled away to its stem.
“This is it, Rocky.”
Molly beamed thoughts at the gem, asking it to lift them into a time hover and then to carry them slowly into the future. Through the time-hover mist, she and Rocky poked their heads over the cabinet and watched as the world reeled forward. People walked swiftly in and out of the nursery, their movements quick and jiggly as though they were in a film that had been fast-forwarded. Nurses and mothers flashed into the room and out again, pushing cots on wheels, holding babies. Molly saw her twin brother’s cot wheeled out and whizzed back in with her own. It was like rush hour. A nurse zoomed around the room, dabbing at the babies, adjusting their blankets, and changing diapers. And then, just after a flash of lightning, a doctor with his hair gelled into a stiff quiff entered. He studied the babies in the cots as though they were interesting specimens and stopped to look at Molly’s brother and then the baby next to him. He tugged at the blankets of both of the babies to look at the bands around their wrists. And finally, with the movement of a heron catching a fish, he plucked the baby boy from his cot and, astonishingly, vanished into thin air.
Molly took them out of the time hover and the mist vanished. The clock on the wall read four.
“Normal doctors don’t disappear like that. Or have hairstyles like that,” she said.
“I know,” Rocky whispered. “He looked like some sort of rock ‘n’ roll pensioner.”
Molly nodded. “He was a time traveler. He just popped out of this time.”
Petula gave a small bark. Another rumble of thunder over the building seemed to reply.
“Rewind?” suggested Rocky. Molly suddenly felt incredibly nervous. The idea that the baby thief was a time traveler and therefore a hypnotist made the situation a lot more complicated and scary than she’d expected. He was obviously powerful and, she now suspected, nasty too. For a moment she wanted to leave the hospital and run back to safe Briersville Park. Then she thought of her defenseless baby brother, and anger eclipsed her fear.
“Rewind,” she agreed. Carefully she concentrated on the green gem and lifted herself and Rocky up and back in time. Again they passed the moment when the doctor entered, although this time his movements were back to front. Then the room was empty, save the line of cots and the babies sleeping peacefully. Molly stopped. The mist cleared. Three minutes to four, the clock said.
“What shall we do? Just wait for him?” asked Rocky.
“I suppose so. And when he vanishes, when he disappears from this time, well, we’ll have to jump too and follow him to exactly where he’s going.”
“Aren’t you going to hypnotize him?”
“No. He must be a good hypnotist himself. Plus, who knows where he comes from? Maybe he has time-traveling friends, other hypnotists. We have to find out where he’s from before we can decide whether we can get away with hypnotizing him.”
“Do you think you can follow him?” asked Rocky doubtfully. “I mean, you don’t even know whether
he was traveling forward or backward in time.”
“I’ll get both gems active, so we can go either way, and I’ll do that lasso thing—remember that trick?” Once before, Molly had found that she could bring someone time traveling with her by sending out a sort of mind lasso that swung around the other person and carried him along too. This was the other way around. She’d never lassoed someone in order to follow him or her. She hoped it would work.
Soon both her gems’ eyes were open. Molly and Rocky knew there were probably mere seconds to go now before the mysterious doctor walked in.
“Keep out of sight,” Molly whispered, her heart beating furiously. “If he sees us, who knows what might happen to my brother’s future … or mine?”
There was a flash of lightning that whitened the hospital room and the door opened. An elderly man entered. His face was wrinkled and his gray hair was styled into a strange quiff that bobbed over his head like a silver duck’s tail. He wore a white doctor’s coat and, underneath it, black shiny trousers. His shoes were muddy. Like an interested baby specialist, he inspected the first three infants before stopping at the cot next to Molly’s brother’s and leaning down to peer at the baby Molly. He prodded at her and read her wristband, and then undid her brother’s blanket to read his hospital band too.
“Ah, so there’re two of you,” he muttered in a deep voice, enunciating his words carefully. “Twins—a girl and a boy. Which is best? The girl? Maybe I’ll take the girl. Or the boy? Hmm. Actually … Yes, I’ll take him.”
Molly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It seemed that she, the baby Molly, had almost been chosen for kidnaping. Outside, the crashing thunder sounded like giant marbles cracking together. Molly and Rocky got ready for the man’s vanishing act. As he bent to gather her brother’s blanket and put his hands about him, she gritted her teeth and sent an instruction to her gems to lasso the snatcher so they could tag him. At once her instructions hung in the air like static electricity. He picked the child up. Then he put his hand to a gem that hung around his neck. In the next second Molly and Rocky felt themselves being tugged. As the stranger sped away through time they found themselves following him.
In the room there was a BOOM as the space (once filled with the man, the baby, Molly, Petula, and Rocky) was replaced with air. Two babies woke up and began to cry.
A minute later the same blue-and-white-uniformed nurse who had talked so kindly to Lucy Logan walked in. She had no questioning look on her face, wondering what the loud noise had been. She was calm, as if nothing odd had happened. She stepped toward the now empty Logan baby boy’s crib and pushed it to the wall. Her next job was to remove the baby’s name from the hospital register and destroy all documents with his name on it.
The nurse wasn’t acting maliciously. She was behaving unknowingly. For already, in her own mind, memories of the baby boy had been wiped out.
Someone had gotten to her. She had been hypnotized. Hypnotized to erase all evidence of Molly’s twin brother. No one even knew that a baby Logan boy had existed.
Three
Molly and Rocky found themselves shooting forward through time at a terrific speed. A warm time wind ruffled their hair. Around them the blurred room flashed with colors. The years flicked by.
Molly and Rocky sat very still so that the child snatcher, whoever he was, wouldn’t see them. As time whisked past him too he was tucking the baby under his coat. Molly was in shock. She’d thought that she and Rocky would be tracking down an ordinary person—a batty old woman who wanted something to love or a dodgy criminal who was taking the baby to sell. She had never expected a time traveler. What did a master hypnotist from another time want with Molly’s twin? And to think that he had almost taken Molly! The thought of that made her shiver.
They were well beyond their own time now. She could feel it. They were a hundred years farther on. And suddenly the time winds stopped.
The room was no longer full of baby cots. Instead there were modern glass display cases containing steel frames and surgical instruments. The walls were hung with photographs of hospital doctors and nurses. The room now seemed to be a hospital museum. The cabinet that Molly and Rocky had been hiding behind had disappeared, but various tables still blocked them from the man’s view. He had already turned to leave. Molly pulled Rocky’s arm and they followed, pausing at the door to open it a chink. The clip of the snatcher’s footsteps receded into the distant passage.
“We—we have to keep up with him, without him seeing us,” Molly stammered, clutching her necklace of time-travel crystals. “My gems are still lassoing him, but we must stay as close as possible so that they don’t lose contact.” Rocky nodded.
They darted past the room where Molly’s mother had been and saw two women inspecting the exhibits. But Molly didn’t have time to stop and see how people from the future looked. It was vital that she and Rocky follow the kidnaper to wherever he was going.
They slowed down to a fast walk, not wanting the sound of their running to attract the man’s attention. Outside the building it was very hot. Molly breathed in and filled her lungs with warm, dry air. They looked about. A palm tree grew in the center of a parking lot full of small podlike vehicles. And the hospital walls were thick with vines and clusters of red grapes.
“Weird.” Molly sighed. “It’s Briersville, but its so much hotter then Briersville should be. We’ll definitely dry out here.”
“Don’t you remember seeing those TV programs about global warming?” said Rocky, removing his sleeveless Puffa jacket. “You know, where scientists warned that people’s pollution and stuff was heating up the atmosphere.”
“The atmosphere?” Molly whispered. She was carefully watching the man as he crossed the car park.
“Yeah. You know, the air that surrounds the world?”
Molly nodded.
Rocky continued, “Well, I guess those scientists were right. People obviously didn’t do enough about pollution … kept their heating on full and kept driving smelly cars and running smelly factories. Phew! It’s hot!”
The man stopped and wiped some sweat from his forehead, running his hand along the side of his gray quiff. Then he pulled a small bottle of water out from a pocket, which, after drinking, he chucked on the tarmac. With difficulty, because he was holding the baby, he loosened his white doctor’s coat and dropped that onto the ground too.
He now stood in a black shiny suit with a reflective white T-shirt underneath it. He tucked the baby under his suit jacket. Behind him Molly recognized the copper-green pepper pot roof of the Briersville guild hall. Beside it were two new buildings, both made of steel and glass.
“He can’t have come from here,” Molly murmured. “His shoes are muddy. There’s no mud here. Where’s he going?” The man stepped toward what looked like a bus stop where a digital sign showing the date and time twinkled:
16.03.2108. 14.30 NEXT FLOAT 38 SECONDS
Molly and Rocky edged as close as they could without being noticed. They weren’t sure whether people would wear jeans and T-shirts a hundred years in the future and they didn’t want to be conspicuous.
“Poor thing,” Molly whispered to Petula in the rucksack on Rocky’s back. She ruffled her ears. “You can get out later, but not yet.”
Petula sniffed the air and was very confused. This place had a base scent that belonged to Briersville. It had the crusty smell of the Briersville earth but the odor was less moist. The building behind no longer emanated its antiseptic quality. And it had lost the lovely scent of new babies and milk. The only baby Petula could smell now was ahead of them. The baby ahead smelled like a very young version of Molly. It was the fresh heart of the lettuce to Molly’s more dark green, outer-leaf smell. The baby snatcher was sweating a little in the heat. His paws emitted a gingery scent mixed with the pepper of impatience. Under that he didn’t seem too healthy. Petula detected the whiff of thickening blood and dry, wrinkly, oilless skin. She hoped that Molly and Rocky knew what they were letting thems
elves in for.
Molly, don’t follow him. He’s dangerous. Go back! she urged, looking up at her mistress.
But Molly was unaware of Petula’s thoughts. Instead she was turning toward a swishing noise. A bullet-shaped, buslike vehicle with HYDROGEN POWER written on its side was pulling toward the sun shelter where the black-suited man stood. Its door slid open and he stepped inside. While he was distracted paying, Molly and Rocky ran around to the back of the bus. On the outside was a small metal ledge with a bar above. They lodged themselves onto the ledge and held on tight.
“How fast do you think this thing goes?” Molly asked.
“We’ll be fine if we hold on,” said Rocky uncertainly. “I read in the paper once about a toddler who climbed onto the back of his mum’s Jeep and she drove all the way to town without realizing he was there. He just clung on.”
“Hold the rucksack tight,” Molly warned, concerned about Petula.
Then the vehicle let out a squeaky puff of air, and at once, smooth as butter, they were off. Within a few moments it was clear that the ride wasn’t going to be a speedy one, and Molly had a moment to absorb the new face of Briersville. There were many buildings that she recognized, although all were much more crumbly looking then when she’d last seen them. Many of the new structures were covered in blue glass.
“Those are solar panels,” said Rocky, “getting electric power from the sun. This bus float is powered by hydrogen, and that’s really amazing, Molly. They are starting to invent hydrogen power in our time, because oil and coal and petrol are beginning to run out. They obviously did it.”
“Why is it amazing?”
“Well, it’s really clean. In our time they’re trying to work out how to make tons of hydrogen gas that they can turn into liquid hydrogen, and then use that liquid instead of petrol. The cool thing is, when you burn hydrogen to run a car, instead of churning out smelly exhaust fumes, it just makes water.” He pointed to the trail of water that was coming out of the back of the float. “Cool, eh?” On the street around them, small vans and pod cars all moved quietly, water squirting out from their exhaust pipes; some were collecting it in little detachable containers.