Molly Moon Stops the World

by Georgia Byng

“Just you try, Moose—I’ll sue,” said Hercules, flexing his biceps.

  “If we’re talking food, Moose,” said Tony Wam, the karate star, “how would ya like to taste one of my Koofoo chops?”

  “Primo, please stop them. I hate it when they argue,” whined Suky.

  “Enough!” said Primo Cell. And at once all the stars in the room hung their heads obediently. Sinclair Cell arrived and apologized for being late.

  “Another fight?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t too bad tonight,” said Cell.

  After dinner, everyone retired downstairs to the movie theater. The big cinema screen had been dismantled, and in the space behind it was a curtained stage. On it, a man in white tie and tails sat at a grand piano.

  They all sat down, knowing exactly what entertainment to expect. It was one show about which they never spoke.

  Cell settled in his armchair. This was his favorite part of the day. He clapped his hands and the lights dimmed to two white spotlights that shone on the pianist, who launched into the tune of Cell’s favorite song. And then the star came on.

  Davina Nuttel stepped out of the wings. She looked thinner and more tired than the Davina of the magazine photo shoots. A guard stood beside her, still as a tin soldier.

  She glared out into the dark auditorium.

  “I won’t sing,” she said defiantly.

  Cell looked at her and exhaled thoughtfully. He wondered for the hundredth time what it was about Davina that challenged his hypnotic power. When he had tried to hypnotize her, she had twisted away from his magnetism like a lizard avoiding a net. But although this perplexed Cell, he didn’t let it worry him, because there was a part of Davina that filled him with awe. He’d found that her singing made him feel better than anything else could. Why, he didn’t know. Her voice had become a calming drug to him, and now he couldn’t do without it.

  “Oh, dear, Davina,” Cell’s silky voice replied. “Do you think you can really put up with another day of raw sea urchins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? You know how much you hate them. Think of what else could be on the menu. We’ve got a wonderful new chef who makes the most delicious chocolate cake and homemade butterscotch doughnuts.”

  For a moment Davina’s lower lip quivered. Then she stamped her foot.

  “I’m not a caged nightingale, Cell. I won’t just sing when you feel like it. People pay me to sing. I don’t do it for free. And I especially won’t do it for you. I HATE YOU.”

  “Now, now, Davina. One song is all I ask. Then you can live like a princess again. You can have a lovely bath in all those exotic oils. You can wash your hair.” Davina stared out into the dark auditorium, her eyes gray and ringed. She shook her head angrily. But she knew she was beaten.

  “All right, all right, I’ll sing.”

  With that, the piano replayed the refrain.

  Cell leaned back. The song that Davina was about to sing was the only thing that ever made him feel any emotion. Perhaps, he thought, his mother had sung it to him as a baby. He wasn’t sure why it produced tender feelings in him, but it did. Feelings of regret and longing. And when it was sung by this child, for some reason it became ten times more powerful. Davina wasn’t a pleasant girl, but that didn’t matter. She reminded Cell of something he had lost. His childhood, perhaps.

  Davina’s pure voice cut through the air like a fresh spring breeze.

  “Sitting on an island in the ocean

  May seem kinda free.

  Lying on a beach of golden sand

  May sound as life should be.

  Sounds like heaven,

  But it ain’t heaven,

  No siree.

  A billion waves of sea, you see,

  Divide you from me.

  Only you can make my world

  Heavenly.”

  Cell sighed. And Davina sang on in the heavenly white light.

  Thirty

  The light was white as the light of heaven. Molly opened her eyes, and as she looked around, she shook with shock. She was in a completely different place from where she’d been seconds before. And, she instantly knew, she felt thoroughly different.

  Molly didn’t feel exhausted, frozen, desperate, and terrified to die. She felt rested, warm, and calm, as if she’d left the stresses and strains of life far behind. She felt as if she was in paradise.

  She was no longer trapped on the steel bench with the killer magpie a foot away from her. Instead, she sat on an old chair in a dry wooden hut through which blew a soft breeze, warmed by the sun. She could see a peeling, white-painted bench outside. Beyond that, a jetty and the blue of an ocean.

  Rocky sat on a chair beside her looking out to sea too. For a moment, they both sat motionless, listening to the distant slap of small waves and the cries of gulls.

  “Rocky,” Molly said. “We’re dead. We’re in heaven.”

  She looked at the white room. There were two beds, each with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow. To her right was a small kitchen, and to the left a doorway to a tiny bathroom. A guitar hung on the wall.

  “I don’t remember the bird hitting us,” said Rocky. “Wouldn’t we remember that split second as it hit us? A second of pain?”

  “Maybe we died before the message of pain got to our brains.”

  Molly stared at two chairs by the opposite wall. Some clothes lay on them. Faded, ragged clothes. Underneath one chair sat her sneakers. They were different—they were worn out. And her T-shirt had a rip in it. Molly stood up and, feeling very unreal, as if she was walking on air, went and picked up her jeans. They had been cut short to knee length and were frayed. Was heaven a place where you kept the clothes that you died in?

  “Crikey, Molly, you’re so brown,” said Rocky. “Look at the color of your legs.”

  Molly looked. Instead of being spammy, her legs were golden.

  Rocky contemplated his, too. “I’ve never been this dark before.”

  “We must have been de—” Molly found it difficult to say the word. “… for quite a while.” She picked up Rocky’s shirt. There were no signs of death, of blood, on it. It was now a pale shade of orange, and its sleeves had been cut off.

  Rocky walked to the open door of the hut. Outside was a creaky wooden balcony with a fence around it. Steps led down to a sun-bleached jetty. Fifteen feet away, it stopped. Then there was nothing but sea, its waves like egg cartons, and a far horizon with the sun shining above it. Molly joined Rocky and picked up a large mother-of-pearl shell from the balcony.

  “It all looks so familiar,” she said. She licked her lips and tasted the salty air.

  “Like we’ve been here before,” agreed Rocky. At that moment, Petula came around the corner of the hut.

  “Oh, Petula!” Molly knelt down and hugged Petula to her, burying her face in her fur. Moments ago, she’d thought she’d never see Petula again. Petula wagged her tail and gave Molly’s face a friendly lick.

  “Petula must have died too.” Molly paused. “But hang on a minute. I don’t feel dead at all. I just feel as if we’ve been here for …”

  “For ages and ages,” Rocky finished.

  “Because I know that jetty. I know exactly where to dive off it,” said Molly, frowning.

  “And that shell you’re holding,” said Rocky. “I think I found it, but I can’t remember how.” Rocky and Molly looked at each other.

  Their hut seemed to be set at the bottom of a sheer cliff. There was a cave, but there was no visible access by land. The cliff face continued for miles. They could be anywhere in the world, Molly thought. There were absolutely no clues to tell them where, except that the temperature was balmy.

  “We’ve been here for ages without realizing it,” said Molly. “It feels like some sort of time hurricane has swirled us up and carried us here.”

  “I think,” said Rocky, “we’ve been hypnotized.”

  A gull let out a harsh cry above them. At the same time a noise came from the side of the hut. Turning, Molly and Rocky saw a blond man in a blue
tracksuit walking toward them. He held two full glasses in his hands. It was Sinclair Cell.

  “A Qube for you,” he said to Rocky. “And for you, Molly, a grenadine concentrate on the rocks.”

  Molly felt as if her feelings were in a washing machine. First she’d thought she was dead, then she’d felt relief that she wasn’t, then amazement had taken over, and now she was very scared. This man wanted her dead. He must have come to kill her. She backed away, wondering if they could escape by jumping into the sea. She looked at the drinks in his hands. Did he want to poison her and Rocky this time?

  Then her shocked brain seemed to shift as she realized that he hadn’t killed her before—the magpie hadn’t speared them. And a fierce anger rose in Molly as she concluded that Sinclair had been their hypnotist. Outrage gripped her. Like a chameleon changing color, Molly’s mood was transformed from fear to fury.

  “So you’ve been nosing about in our brains, have you?” she spat at him. “Kept us like rabbits in a hutch and made us tell you everything you wanted to know about our lives. How long have we been your little hypnotized guinea pigs? Two weeks? Three?”

  Sinclair put the drinks down on a driftwood table.

  “Oh, dear, I thought you might react like this,” he said kindly. “Molly, I saved your lives.”

  But Molly was raging.

  “Even if you save someone’s life, it doesn’t give you the right to go rummaging round in their minds.”

  Sinclair shook his head. “I didn’t.”

  “Do you think we believe that?” Molly looked scornfully at him. “Well, I know what you did do. You switched our lives off, didn’t you?”

  Sinclair looked at his feet.

  “How many weeks?” Molly demanded.

  Sinclair nudged a shell with the toe of his shoe. He’d been dreading this moment.

  “Seven and a half months,” he said quietly.

  Molly was dumbstruck. She counted the months in her head. That meant that she and Rocky had been living without their identities for half of March, April, May, June, July, August, September, and October.

  “What date is it?” she whispered.

  Sinclair told her. “It’s the third of November.”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Rocky.

  “But what about the others?” cried Molly. “Mrs. Trinklebury, Gemma, Gerry, and everybody else, too—back at the orphanage? Where are they?”

  “They’re fine. They’re all living in Malibu. The others have flown over from Briersville. I rented a big house for them on the coast. They’re fine, I promise.”

  This was when Molly blew up.

  “You promise? Who are you to promise anything to us? Do you think we’d trust you after you blanked out seven and a half months of our lives? Do you think you’re God or something? You’re crazy. Come on, Rocky. Let’s go. There must be some way out of here.” She strode round the corner of the hut in the direction Sinclair had appeared from. Rocky shook his head in disgust and followed.

  A burly, seven-foot bouncer stepped out from the side veranda and blocked their way.

  “I’m sorry, Molly and Rocky,” Sinclair apologized, “but you have to listen to me. First of all, though, I’ll give you your memories back.” Sinclair clapped his hands and said firmly, “Remember.”

  It was as if flood barriers in Molly’s and Rocky’s minds were swept away. Months and months full of summer memories poured through their brains, tickling their synapses with sights and sounds and smells and feelings of days spent living by the sea.

  Memories of catching fish and cooking them over an open fire, of Rocky playing the guitar, of reading scores of books, collecting shells, swimming, snorkeling, surfing. Of Rocky losing a toenail, of kite flying, painting, writing, throwing sticks for Petula, sitting around the campfire at night, singing songs, of learning to speak a new language.

  “Hemos aprendido a hablar Espãnol? Have we learned to speak Spanish?” asked Rocky.

  “Sí,” said the big guy, whose name was Earl.

  “I thought you might as well learn a language,” explained Sinclair.

  Molly discovered many lovely memories of Sinclair throughout the summer—not the lazy, vain, murderous son of Primo Cell, but Sinclair as a friend. She looked at his familiar face, his shoulder-length hair, and his sympathetic blue eyes, and felt confused.

  “But why?” she asked. “Why did you keep us hypnotized?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have stayed,” said Sinclair.

  “So maybe we wouldn’t have stayed,” began Molly. “But it’s up to us what we do with our lives. Not you. So even if we did have an amazing summer, it wasn’t our choice. That’s the point, Sinclair. You should have let us choose for ourselves.”

  “I couldn’t risk it.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. One, I worried that you wouldn’t give up on beating Primo. The next time he caught you, he’d make sure you died. Two, there was the problem of my own safety. Primo would kill me if he knew that I’d betrayed him by saving you.”

  “So how did you save us?” Molly asked quietly, taking a sip of her grenadine. She was beginning to feel she could trust Sinclair.

  “From the top of the stairs, I watched you holding the world still,” he said. “I couldn’t deprogram the bird, because only Primo has the combination code. I waited as you got more and more tired—until you had almost given up, and just before you did, I took over and stopped the world too.”

  “So there were two of us, you and me, freezing the world?”

  “Yes. Anyway, you fainted, and froze, and of course Rocky froze with you,” Sinclair explained. “When you blacked out, time didn’t start again because I was holding it still. The magpie never hit you because I was holding it back. Then I immediately released you, and Earl and I”—he pointed to his bodyguard—“we carried you away. We came straight here, to the hut.”

  “Weren’t you scared Cell would catch you?”

  “A little. But he thought I was clearing up all the mess. Hosing all the blood down the drains and getting rid of the bodies.”

  “Does he kill everyone who’s a threat to him?” asked Rocky.

  “No,” answered Sinclair. “Everyone just disappears. Primo wipes away their identities, making sure they don’t know who they are ever again. He turns them into lost souls who hear voices in their heads. Then he dumps them in faraway places.”

  “Like garbage.”

  “Yes. Nobody will ever know who they are, least of all themselves.” Sinclair shifted uncomfortably, obviously not enjoying the conversation. But Molly was too full of questions to let him be.

  “Didn’t you ever try to save them?”

  “Yes, but Primo never involved me in the identity wiping, and so it was difficult to help. If I’m honest, there were some who I might have been able to help, but I was scared. I hate myself for that. But you see, I’m not a hero. I’m weak.”

  “You saved us,” said Molly. “That was brave. But why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “Molly, Primo controls the L.A. police. He controls practically the whole of the American police force. You have no idea how powerful he is. The same goes for the newspapers. Most of the editors are under his thumb. If I went to reporters and told them everything, Primo would know about it immediately. Then he’d get me.”

  “Couldn’t you dehypnotize some of his victims?” suggested Rocky. “You can stop the world, too. We know Cell makes his hypnosis permanent by stopping time. You could stop it again and dehypnotize them.”

  “Sounds easy,” said Sinclair. “What you don’t know is that Primo uses special secret passwords. It’s what completely locks in his hypnosis.”

  “Passwords?” said Molly.

  “Yes. They are the real keys. Without his passwords, his victims can’t be released. I don’t know what Primo’s passwords are.”

  “So why did you finally wake us up?” asked Molly.

  “Because I need your help. Since your ordeal in the magpie chamber, som
ething else has happened. Primo has become much more dangerous. Time is running out.”

  “It’s about E Day, isn’t it?” said Rocky. “It must be getting closer.”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Molly.

  “You don’t know?” “No,” they said in unison.

  “E Day,” said Sinclair, “is Election Day.” Sinclair looked at Molly and Rocky’s quizzical expressions. “Primo intends to become the next president of the United States.”

  “But he can’t,” said Molly incredulously. “To become president, you have to have hundreds of supporters, you have to be in charge of a whole political party, you have to have been a politician for years.”

  “That’s not true. Anyone can become president,” said Sinclair, “as long as they were born in America and are thirty-five years or older. It’s November the third now and Primo began his campaign in June—really late, but he’s done it brilliantly.”

  Sinclair proceeded to tell them about the summer’s “Cell for President” campaign. Cell had pumped millions and millions of dollars into it, running as an independent, meaning that he didn’t belong to any political party. The campaign had stretched the length and breadth of America and been so intense and lavish that every citizen of the country couldn’t fail to know about him. “Cell for President” posters had adorned thousands of walls. “Cell for President” hot-air balloons had floated over cities and towns. He’d been to every state and rented stadiums where the public had been treated to the spectacle of their favorite celebrities making speeches. Cell’s hypnotized stars had talked about how much better life would be with him as president, and why they’d be voting for Cell. At each venue, Cell had given a speech, his face projected so that it was a hundred feet high on screens. Everyone who looked at the screen was, of course, hypnotized by him.

  The splendor and power of his campaign had completely overshadowed Gandolli’s and the other candidates’.

  The desire for Cell as president had spread like a wildly contagious disease. “American Souls and American Cells—Need America’s Cell.” That was his slogan.

  “You’re talking as if Election Day already happened,” Rocky observed. Sinclair shuffled and looked at his feet.