by Georgia Byng
Soon the domed entrance hall was empty and Rocky, Molly, and Petula were left alone.
“Phew! It’s so hot,” gasped Molly, taking off her coat. Rocky ripped his off too. “Who was that kid?” Molly said. “I’ve never seen a kid so … so …”
“So bossy?”
“So advanced,” Molly concluded. “She’s a spoiled princess. Do you think those other children are her brothers and sisters?”
Rocky shook his head. “They can’t be,” he said. “They were all so different. One looked Mongolian. The tall girl was black, Molly. Forget them. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know, Rocky. I mean, I’d love it if we could just take the baby back now, back home. I really don’t like it here—it gives me the heebie-jeebies. But if we took him back … well, first of all, they obviously want him for something special and so they’d soon send that man Redhorn to find him. And in the meantime, Redhorn would definitely sort you and me out. Plus, if I take the baby and put him back in his cot, maybe my whole life will change because of it, and yours too. And if that happened, then Lucy and Primo might still be hypnotized by Cornelius!”
Rocky winced as he considered the situation. Molly flicked her tooth with her nail and thought.
“I know what we have to do,” she finally said. “We have to go forward in time to when the baby is the same age as I am now. Then we can start to interfere. I don’t know what we’ll do with that Redhorn man. Urrgh, I can’t believe that Micky and I are related to him!” Suddenly a look of panic crossed her face. “Maybe there are other time travelers too, other hypnotists like Redhorn.”
“Molly, I hope I can be useful on this trip,” Rocky said. “I’m not exactly the world’s best voice hypnotist. I always feel like you’re doing all the work.”
“Don’t say that, Rocky. I couldn’t do this without your help. You know so much and you’re good at thinking things through logically.”
Rocky smiled. “Okay. Anyway, how are the skin scales?”
Molly touched the dry patch behind her ear. It had definitely grown a bit. “It’s fine,” she said. “Anyway, it’s just part of the deal.”
Rocky scrunched Petula’s ears. “Well, let’s go and meet your brother then.”
“Shall we stop on the way and see how he’s growing up?” Molly pondered.
“If we do, we risk being seen.” Rocky rolled up the coat he’d been wearing. “We’ll need to borrow some clothes from those kids so we can blend in.”
“If they live here,” said Molly.
“And we’ll have to keep our eyes open for security cameras, as I bet this place is crawling with them.”
Molly cast her eyes down at her gem and thought hard for it to take them slowly forward to two years farther into the future. Rocky held her arm and gripped the rucksack that Petula was in. Time skittered by. Occasionally Molly slowed them down to a time hover to see how things were turning out. She and Rocky felt like flies on walls as they watched unseen. They saw the princess on the swing—always dressed in outlandishly frilly or sparkling outfits. They saw the bigger children come and go with the stern-looking, beautiful Miss Cribbins, as well as some other very serious adults. Occasionally there were seats in the room—seats that were hidden in the floor and that rose up when they were needed. The princess would sit on one, holding court, entertaining or arguing with smartly suited grown-ups. Molly couldn’t understand it at all—these adults didn’t look like the princess. Molly wondered where her parents were.
And then there were long periods when only servants visited the room. Molly stopped in one of these times. The room was warmer than it had been when they arrived because an even hotter sun was beaming through the windows.
“Phew!” Rocky panted. “It must be scorching out there!”
“Doesn’t seem to be anyone about,” said Molly, listening for signs of people. “Shall we have a look around?” Shivering with trepidation, she lifted Petula out of her rucksack. Petula shook herself and licked her lips. Molly poured some of the water she’d brought with her into Rocky’s cupped hands, and Petula lapped it up. She wondered why her mistress smelled so fearful.
Then quietly they approached the door at the far end of the enormous room. At a slight touch to its yellow control pad it glided open.
Beyond, a honeycomb of silent passages led to the other igloos and other rooms. Straight ahead were some stairs. There didn’t seem to be any cameras spying on them, and so Molly and Rocky tiptoed up. At the top was a giant, curved, bug-eye window with a view of the vast mountain above. On a table beneath the window was a long screen showing live pictures of the surrounding countryside and the lake.
“There must be a rotating camera on the roof of this building,” Rocky decided. “It’s turning three hundred and sixty degrees—that’s how this view shows what is all around.”
Molly and Rocky quickly studied this strange world. They saw aerials and the silver tops of other spherical buildings peeping over the crowning branches of flowering trees. It seemed that other, similar igloo cluster estates were nearby. And, not far away, water glittered in the harsh sunlight, with a few white boats sailing on it.
“Seems there’s a breeze out there,” Rocky observed. “But it’s quiet, isn’t it? Look, there’s no air traffic in the sky here. This place is a ghost town.” In contrast, they saw that up at the top of the mountain it was very busy. Light aircraft buzzed in and out of its cavelike entrances. Molly snapped into action mode.
“Let’s make the most of this,” she said. “Come on!”
They crept along a maze of deserted passages, darting past cameras that were trained on the corridors and quietly opening doors. Petula kept close to them, her claws quietly clipping the smooth, shiny floor. Eventually they found a series of bedrooms. One, with its blinds closed, was a tall room with a curved ceiling. Its bed was quilted in pink and gold with big, flower-shaped pillows to match. Huge stuffed toys lined the walls, and sitting on chairs were sophisticated dolls whose eyes stared accusingly at the intruders.
“Her Ladyship’s room, I suppose,” said Rocky. “Some of her toys aren’t toys at all. Look at that camera thing …”
“And that fancy jewelry,” Molly added. “She must be about eight by now.” She touched a yellow-haired doll. The doll’s eyes opened and it grabbed Molly’s wrist.
“Aaargh!” Molly yelled.
“Aararhah,” the doll snarled.
Rocky pulled the toy’s hand away, and it was still. “Programmed to be nasty,” he said, grimacing.
Molly rubbed her wrist. “Imagine what dolls’ tea parties are like around here.”
Next door was a games room full of crazy-looking futuristic games. Its monitors and computers were all switched off. On a table was a flat black box with the words CAT AND MOUSE on it. Rocky picked up the controls. He couldn’t resist switching it on. Immediately a very realistic hologram of a cat rose up from the box, and then a mouse. Petula growled. Rocky swiveled the joystick on the controls. The mouse began to move toward the cat. At once the cat swiped at it. Quickly Rocky moved the mouse away, but no sooner had he done this than the cat pounced. What followed was revolting. The hologram cat ate the hologram mouse.
“What a horrid game!” said Molly. Petula whined at the odorless cat.
“Yuck,” agreed Rocky and switched it off.
The adjacent room was also full of toys and games.
“At least there’ll be lots for your brother to play with,” Rocky said, loitering at the door. “But come on, Molly—I’m starting to get nervous. This place is suspiciously quiet. I’m getting spooked.”
After a dividing corridor, three more bedrooms with bathrooms attached, and three more spacious living rooms, they came to a wall with a door in it. This led to a small apartment. They found themselves in a sitting room with views of the gardens behind. The furniture was all upholstered in floral material, making inside feel as gardenlike as outside. On a shelf stood a photograph in a silver frame. Unlike a regular photograp
h, this one moved. In it was the nurse, holding up a two-year-old boy. He squeezed her nose as if it was a horn on a bike and she laughed, though there was no sound. The screen went blank. Then another short sequence commenced. This time the boy was at a table, feeding himself. His face was plastered with porridge. He shook his spoon and blew a raspberry, spraying half-chewed porridge at the camera. His hair was fair and curly. His eyes were closely set and the same green as Molly’s.
“He looks so like you,” said Rocky.
Petula sniffed about the carpet and at the paintings of animals on the walls, and then made her way into the next room. This one was simple with colored shapes and mobiles hanging from the ceiling.
“Where is he right now, I wonder?” said Molly, glancing out of the window to the mountain city above.
“Seems like everyone’s there,” said Rocky. “It’s like every so often they move up there.”
“For special occasions,” suggested Molly, “or to avoid this heat? Look how hot it is outside. The heat’s making shimmery lines come off the earth. This palace garden is only green and flowering because it gets watered. I bet the countryside around the lake is dryer than a bone, dryer than a desert dinosaur bone.”
Petula’s ears pricked up, but seeing no bone materialize she went back to sniffing the floor. There was a strange Molly-like smell. It was as if someone like Molly lived in this room.
“Mont Blanc,” said Rocky, “means ‘white mountain.’ White because it used to be covered in snow. Obviously, five hundred years from our time, Molly, this place has heated up. I expect in the winter it probably still gets a bit cold up at the top of the mountain because it’s higher. So in the winter it’s better for people down here because its warmer, but in the summer, when it’s boiling hot—sweltering hot down here—it’s cooler up there.”
Molly was too busy trying to find a disguise for them to wear so she only half listened to Rocky’s theories.
“Wow. Nothing to fit us here. Come on, let’s try another part of the building.”
And so they continued, dodging cameras and exploring. At the other end of the corridor was a bridgelike passage that took them into another igloo. This one housed an apartment for the thin Cribbins woman. They could tell, because in a wardrobe near the bathroom were rows of her distinct, austere outfits. Each was a slightly different shade of gray. On the walls were mahogany-framed display cases full of dull-colored, dusty dead butterflies, pinned and lifeless. The carp et was black, as was the bed, and the room was sparsely furnished, without belongings, as though everything had been hoovered up. All except for a door-sized glass box that stood in the corner.
Inside this was a beautiful silvery-white spiderweb. And on its floor, a black velvet cushion. This was, Molly realized, where Miss Cribbins kept her strange cat-cum-spider pet. Petula sniffed at the cobwebby, feline smell. She didn’t like spiders and she loathed most cats. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. Then she smelled something else. A person was coming who smelled of vinegar and something feathery too. She growled.
“I just heard something,” said Rocky, lingering by the door. “Someone’s coming. Quick!” But it was too late. In the next moment, a cleaner dressed in a strange Little Bo-peep outfit entered. Instead of a crook she carried a feather duster. In her other hand were a cloth and a container of some sort of cleaning fluid. When she saw the two children she stopped dead in her tracks.
“Can I help you?” she said in a monotone.
“Um, we’re friends of, erm … the princess,” Molly lied, thinking quickly. “She said we could come down here and look at the kennel that the spider-cat is kept in. We’re both getting spider-cats ourselves too, you see, um, this Christmas.” The Bo-peep woman narrowed her eyes.
“They are called ‘cat-spiders’ and they are very rare.
Only elderly royal court members are permitted to own them,” she said.
“Ah. Well, that was true,” Molly explained, trying to dig herself out of the hole she’d obviously fallen into. “They changed the rules yesterday!”
“And Christmas?” the woman asked. “Where will you be celebrating that?”
“Oh, up at the palace,” Molly continued. “There’s going to be turkey and everything.” As Molly said this she realized that her lies had not worked one jot. The woman was frowning. “But we must get going now. Nice to meet you.”
“Christmas is not celebrated here. It hasn’t been for hundreds of years,” said Little Bo-peep. Molly nodded. And as she did, she prepared her eyes.
The woman looked as though she was about to sound the alarm. And so Molly let her have it.
In three seconds flat the Bo-peep woman’s eyeballs were twitching in their sockets and she was completely hypnotized.
“Are there any other people in the building today?” Molly asked.
The woman shook her head.
“Good,” said Molly. “Now you will completely forget that you’ve ever seen us. Okay?”
The Bo-peep woman nodded her head of curls. “Please get on with your business, but before you do, I lock these instructions in with the password ‘Petula.’” The lady left.
In the next igloo was a set of rooms inhabited by children—though judging by their belongings they weren’t ordinary children. Their shelves contained old leather-bound books, antiques now, originally from Molly’s time and before, with titles like The New Elements of Geology and Space Programs for the Millennium. On shelves were stacked complicated puzzles and scientific instruments. Large desks with sophisticated computer keyboards built into them stood in every room. The cupboards in these rooms were stuffed full of children’s clothes that were a perfect size for Molly and Rocky. Molly pulled out a stiff white cottonlike jumpsuit covered in zips and pockets. The shoes she found were fabulously sleek and modern looking.
“Sneakers of the future,” Molly said, admiringly. “But too small. I’ll have to stick to mine.” Rocky chose an olive-green suit. It was slightly heavier than Molly’s but of the same design.
“Lucky we don’t have to dress up like poor Miss Bo-peep,” he said.
Soon both were ready, their own clothes and their bits and pieces stuffed into the rucksack with Petula. The big coats they’d taken from the teenage girls at the magnifloat station were now a burden.
“What shall we do with them?”
“Find a bin?” Rocky suggested quietly. “But we don’t want to leave clues for that Redhorn man.”
Molly glanced at the moving photograph of the room’s owner. The boy’s hair was scraped back and slicked with some sort of gel. In another picture the Mongolian girl had a question-mark-shaped hairstyle that was similar to the beehive hairdo of the six-year-old princess on the swing.
Molly pointed to them. “We’ve got to look a hundred percent right.”
Rocky curled his lip. “Do we have to?”
“Yes.”
They went to the bathroom and opened a cabinet. Here there were lots of bottles and jars with perfumes and creams, as well as packets of multicolored pills. There was a section full of hair products. Molly made Rocky sit down and she squirted a large amount of a see-through purple gel into her hand.
“Hold still.” She wiped the gel into Rocky’s curly black hair, adding more until it was saturated; then she scraped it all back with a comb.
“Uurrrghh. Feels cold and slimy, like mashed slugs,” he complained in a whisper. “Thanks. Now your turn.”
Molly’s stringy hair was more difficult to set, but eventually, after using the rest of the gel and a lot of hair-fixing foam too, Rocky managed to get it up on top of her head. Her question mark looked more like an exclamation mark, but it was just about right.
Petula cocked her head and wondered what Rocky and Molly were up to. She hoped they weren’t going to rub the fruity, synthetic-smelling stuff on her. Molly’s pointed pixielike hair reminded Petula of when Molly had lathered up her hair at bath times in Briersville. Thinking of home now made Petula want to go back. She didn’t like this p
lace at all. It had a bad feeling. She whined again, trying to beam her thoughts up to Molly. Please, Molly, can’t we go home?
Molly turned and smiled down at her. “I agree, Petula. It’s a really stupid hairstyle. Smelly and sticky.” Molly stuffed the empty canister into the bag with their clothes. Then silently they checked the bathroom was spotless and went back to the bedroom. “Okay, Rocky, we’re ready. Mind you, there is a problem.”
“I’d say we’ve got a few,” said Rocky, tweaking her hair. “Which one in particular are you thinking of?”
“Well, we want to go forward in time until my brother is the same age as me—so that’s nine and a half years from now.”
Rocky nodded.
“But when he got here as a two-day-old baby it was winter.”
“Yeeees,” said Rocky slowly, seeing what Molly was coming to, “so everyone was down here and not up there in the mountain.”
“Exactly,” said Molly. “Let’s say it was January or something. Well, eleven years on, it’s January, but eleven and a half years on it’s July. So he’ll be up there!” Molly pointed to the city above.
“True. We’ll just have to hitch an elevator up to the mountaintop.”
“At least now we look the part.”
“Um … sort of,” said Rocky, worriedly eyeing Molly’s hair.
Six
Outside the igloo house it was so hot that Petula’s soft paws couldn’t stand on the tarmac. Molly picked her up and with the other hand cupped her gem necklace. Rocky dumped the two coats into a bin beside the flycopter landing pad and then put his hand on Molly’s shoulder.
“Hope no one can see us,” he said, glancing about. With a BOOM they were off, hurtling into the future. Molly counted four years whizzing by and then brought their time travel to a very slow pace. From the protection of a time hover they watched the world about them. Various aircraft landed and took off, and people moved at very high speed as though on a film that had been fast-forwarded. Then Molly spotted the flying machine they had arrived in. They saw Nurse Meekles holding the hand of a curly-haired little boy and leading him toward the flycopter. A servant dressed like Dick Whittington, in puffed-up shorts and over-the-knee boots, was loading cases onboard. The sky was speckled with aircraft, both above them and beside the mountain. It looked like some sort of rush hour. Molly pulled Rocky toward the steps and, invisible to all there, they went aboard.