Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

by Georgia Byng

  As the hypnotic lasers of her pupils beamed into the old man’s, she said, “I unlock your previous hypnotism with the word ‘Apple,’ and now, I’m sorry, I mean, you are a very nice old man and all that, but until I set you free, you are now completely and utterly under my power.” Like a creature born to obey her, the old man stood obediently in front of Molly.

  “How did you know the password?” Micky asked incredulously. Molly shrugged casually.

  “No, that’s weird, Molly. How did you know?”

  “Intuition,” Molly fibbed. Micky held her gaze and tilted his head as though he found this difficult to believe.

  “Really?” he said.

  Minutes later, Molly, Micky, and Petula were being led by the hypnotized night watchman through the museum in a passage lined with stuffed birds. Ahead, in the musty gloom of the main hall of the museum, they could see the massive skeletal legs of the diplodocus.

  “We’ll see you later, then,” Molly whispered to the old man. “Wait by the side door to let us out.”

  The watchman nodded and smiled.

  “Right…you…are,” he whispered back in a halting tone.

  Molly and Micky paused and surveyed the dark, cathedral-proportioned space with its grand staircase that split into two, curving around to join the first-floor balcony. Petula sniffed the air and tried to read its swarms of smells. The overriding odor was floor polish. Under this was the smell of ancient bones, and old fur, and the smell of that afternoon’s visitors’ footsteps, which had brought in scents from the street. And Petula could detect that onions and garlic had been fried a few hours before and a croissant had been eaten upstairs. The scent of lavender blossom flickered through the hall as though someone wearing it had recently walked by. Sensing that the coast was clear now, though, Petula tapped Molly on her leg with her paw, nodded, and stepped forward.

  “Petula seems to think it’s all right. Glad we brought her.” Molly put her hand under Micky’s elbow, and they both crept forward. Cautious as timid mice, they slipped through the shadows and climbed the staircase. They moved quietly along the upper balcony until they were finally up at the door to the botanical library.

  Turning the doorknob, they went through, tiptoeing down the dark archive room, past its shelves of books and towering filing cabinets, to the column of drawers at the end that hid the secret entrance to Miss Hunroe’s lair. Molly pushed the filing cabinet and the secret door opened and they went through.

  Petula wondered what the twins were looking for. She supposed it was the book. If it was a bottle of lavender perfume, they were heading in the right direction. The scent was drifting through the cracks along the edges of the door in front of them like heat escaping from an igloo.

  Molly gripped the filing-cabinet handle and got ready to push. “Here goes,” she said.

  The door nudged open, revealing another dark room—this time, the library. Nothing had changed. The layout of the furniture was the same. The three sofas stood in a horseshoe configuration with the book-laden coffee table between them. There was the tall window with the stained-glass patterns on it.

  Micky tapped Molly on the shoulder. “Look,” he whispered, “there’s the feathery tree picture. And it’s not a feathery tree, is it? You were right, Molly—it’s a quill.” He turned on his flashlight.

  Molly joined her brother beside the fireplace. “Where there is a quill, there is a way,” she said. “Do you think there’s something behind it?” She reached up to lift the old picture from the wall. Micky helped her as they hauled it down. As they did, they saw that the wall where it had been was plain, without writing on it or a safe embedded in it.

  “It’s heavy!” Molly whispered.

  “Do you think there’s something inside it?” Micky suggested.

  “Crumbs. Bet there is,” Molly agreed.

  The twins turned the picture over and, in the light of Micky’s flashlight, saw that the frame’s wooden back was taped down. Quickly they stripped off the tape and peeled the wood away from the frame, revealing the back of the quill drawing.

  “Nothing here,” Micky decided, disappointed. The dark sky outside seemed to growl, as though warning the children to behave themselves. Micky pulled out the paper. It was simply a drawing. Nothing more. “Maybe it’s got secret writing on it.” He shone his flashlight through different parts of the parchment, to see whether any watermarked writing was hidden there, while Molly picked at the frame itself.

  “Perhaps something’s hidden inside the wood,” she said. “Shall we break it and see? I’ll take the glass out first. I mean, I know it’s not good smashing things up and all that, but this is an exception.”

  Petula watched with interest as Molly put her sneakered foot on the picture frame and broke it in half. Outside, a distant crack of lightning seemed to echo the splintering noise.

  Molly studied the wood. “It’s solid. Not hollow. Nothing in it.” She sat heavily on the sofa. “It was only a hunch, wasn’t it? I mean, there are quills and feathers everywhere. Maybe we should be looking down in the stuffed-bird rooms.”

  Micky sat down beside her and glanced up at the hundreds and hundreds of books.

  “Why would there be a quill picture? It must be to show that this room is special. There’s something in here, there must be.”

  Minutes later Molly and Micky were up on the balcony level of the room, rifling through the library’s shelves for a box that might hold Molly’s crystals or a book that might contain a good clue as to where the Logan Stones were. The books were organized alphabetically. Molly and Micky ran their flashlights along their spines, reading their titles.

  “Ancient Civilization,” Micky read. “The Andes. Annihilation of the World’s Population and Other Extreme Ways Forward.” Micky shook his head in revulsion. “That sounds like a Hunroe sort of book, but not the next one. Apple Picking. The Aztecs. Botany of the Amazon.” Micky frowned while he thought.

  “Damn!” Molly despaired. “This is hopeless. The clue might be in a map or in a poem, or it might be deep in a math book written in a code in numbers!”

  Micky turned around and leaned over the ledge of the balcony, surveying the mess of the picture frame below. They’d never be able to cover their tracks now, for the frame was unfixable.

  At that moment a huge flash of lightning exploded in the sky. Petula froze with fear. And, as though some sort of giant hundred-foot-tall paparazzi photographer had his camera directed at them from outside the window and had detonated its flash, white light blasted in through the window. It flooded the room, and something extraordinary happened.

  Passing through the window’s stained glass, where the strange shapes were, and using the etched lines there, the light and shadows formed a picture and some words on the white wall, where the picture of the quill had been.

  The apparition was on the wall for only a second, but it was enough.

  “WOW!” Micky gasped.

  Eighteen

  Molly and Micky stared at the wall in amazement. Every time a flash of lightning lit up the sky, the light of it shone through the stained-glass windowpane, past the etched lines there, and threw up defined shadows on the wall above the fireplace.

  Quickly they ran down the balcony’s spiral staircase and waited for another burst of light.

  “Come on, come on,” Micky urged. “Don’t let the storm stop now.”

  Rain slapped against the window and thunder rumbled.

  “Here we go,” said Molly. And then there was an enormous crack, as though two monster marbles were smashing into each other in the air above the museum. Petula hid under a sofa. The sky filled with white light. Again and again, white light lit up the Earth, and Molly and Micky were able to read the wall.

  “It’s a map!” Micky declared. “With a sort of picture code. But the question is…is that shape a country or a city or a village or a small area of land?”

  “And what do the pictures inside the shape mean?” Molly asked. “The first thing looks l
ike a cloud. Then…are those trees? Is that supposed to be a wood? Put the two things together, and you get cloud trees or cloud wood. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Cloud forest does, though,” Micky interjected. “There are places called cloud forests very high up in mountainous places where the trees are covered with cloud.”

  “Where?”

  “South America, I think. But we could find out for sure.”

  “And those four tear-shaped things are definitely the Logan Stones,” Molly said. “Then there’s…” Molly waited for a flash of lightning to light up the wall again. When it did, she pointed to a shape. “There’s that. It looks like a spring—like a metal spring. Then there’s the word COCA, with that squiggly line after it. Coca. That must be a place.”

  “No, it’s not a place,” Micky said authoritatively. “It’s a river. The Coca River. I know it’s a river. I remember reading about it when I was six and thinking how it was a river made of chocolate, of cocoa. And that spring shape is exactly that. A spring—you know, as in the origin of a river. A spring. That whole thing means, ‘the spring of the Coca River.’”

  Molly gasped. “Where is the Coca River, Micky?”

  Micky frowned. “Let me think. What are the countries in South America? Um.” He paused and thought hard. Then he stared up at the wall as though for inspiration. Some lightning flashed into the room again, lighting up the wall. “I’ve got it,” he practically shouted. “That shape there is the shape of Ecuador. I know it is. This makes sense. Those books in the bookcase upstairs. Quite a lot of them were about South America, weren’t they?”

  Molly nodded. “The Andes. The Aztecs. Weren’t the Aztecs the people who used to live in South America?”

  Micky shrugged. “I think we’ve nailed it, Moll. Come on. Let’s go up there and see whether there’s anything else that can help us.”

  Quickly the twins hurried back up the staircase to the bookshelves and found an atlas. They turned its pages to find its index. They searched for the word Coca. There was only one entry.

  “The Coca River!” Molly read. Micky flicked back through the atlas’s pages while Molly held the flashlight.

  “Page thirty-three, two C.” His fingers found the page. “This is extreme,” he announced. “It’s in northwest Ecuador.”

  He pointed on the map to an area that was colored gray. “See all that? That area is the Andes Mountains. And see that? That’s a volcano. Look, there’s the Coca River. There’s where it starts. And you can bet that it’s all cloud forests in the high mountains there. So that’s where the Logan Stones are! In a cloud forest place, high in the Andes Mountains, near the spring of the Coca River.”

  “Crikey,” Molly said. She looked outside at the terrible weather. “How are we going to get there?” The light outside again broke the darkness and showed the strange coded map on the wall.

  “It’s amazing,” said Micky. “Somehow Hunroe worked out the clue to here. Then she must have found all of this”—he pointed to the wall—“and got so excited that she made the natural history museum her headquarters.”

  “And our great-great-grandfather Dr. Logan,” Molly added, “must have hidden the clue there in the window glass in the first place.”

  Just then, Petula began to growl. She smelled chocolate cookies, and the lavender smell was getting stronger. She poked her nose out from under the sofa and began to sniff. There was a noise from beyond the library door. Someone was making their way along the central aisle of the filing-cabinet room. They were carrying an umbrella or a walking stick, for their footsteps were accompanied by the tap tap tapping of something else that hit the floor as they walked.

  “Quick!” Micky said.

  “Petula!” Molly whispered.

  Molly and Micky scurried down the balcony stairs and whipped across the downstairs room to the door. If they could slip behind it, they could just sneak out as soon as whoever it was out there entered. But there wasn’t time. The door opened. The light came on. They ducked behind the sofa.

  The room was suddenly lit with the warm glow of its orange lights. Molly stared at Micky and put her hand on Petula. In only a matter of seconds, the person would see the smashed picture frame. They listened to the person putting something down on the far table. They breathed heavily as they moved.

  “Miss Suzette?” Micky mouthed the name to Molly and puffed his cheeks out. “Fat!” Molly smelled lavender in the air and nodded. She hoped so. Miss Suzette was small enough to handle. Molly imagined Miss Suzette eyeing the room and discovering the mess, then seeing the disturbed bookcase upstairs. She hoped Miss Suzette would climb the balcony stairs to inspect. Once she was up there, they could escape. But as she was imagining this, a horrible thing happened.

  Miss Suzette’s large, fat face peered over the top of the sofa. “YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!” she bellowed.

  Like birds set to flight, Molly and Micky moved up and away. Dodging Miss Suzette’s pink-fingernailed grasp, and the swishing of her mother-of-pearl walking stick, they ran.

  “Come on, Petula,” Molly cried as she dashed over the broken frame, the wood crunching under her feet. Micky jumped on the coffee table, smashing a flower-filled porcelain vase and slipping on a pile of magazines. He hurdled the other sofa. It was Petula who got stuck. Miss Suzette reached out and seized her around the waist. She lifted Petula up, tipping her at a very uncomfortable angle, pinching her skin with her pincerlike grip. With a furious bark, Petula sank her teeth through the old woman’s lacy dress sleeves and into her forearm.

  Miss Suzette shrieked like a banshee, “Aaaaah! You ghastly dog!” and dropped her.

  Petula leaped onto the sofa and ran along it to the other end, where Molly caught her. Micky picked up Miss Suzette’s sopping-wet raincoat, bunched it into a ball, and threw it at her so that it hit her in the face like a slop of seaweed.

  “Hah!” Micky laughed. Miss Suzette tottered backward and fell in a heap on the floor, her petticoats puffing up to reveal huge lacy knickers. “Hope that makes you think twice before you hurt an animal again!”

  And not wanting to hang around any longer in case Miss Suzette decided to morph into any of them, Molly, Micky, and Petula were away. They sped down the archive room and raced to the upstairs passageway. They skidded over the polished floors, Petula’s claws skittering as they went. They long-jumped down the main stairs. And then they sprinted down the stuffed-bird corridor that connected the museum to its other side.

  “Hope there aren’t any more of Hunroe’s friends here,” Molly said, panting and breathless, eyeing a stuffed owl.

  The twins and Petula arrived at the side entrance. Behind them, they could hear the far-off echoing sound of Miss Suzette’s clipped footsteps as she puffed her way down the museum stairs after them.

  Molly paused by the night watchman, who stood like a soldier awaiting orders.

  “Thank you!” she said. “After we’re gone, you will no longer remember any of Miss Hunroe’s hypnotic instructions to you. No one will ever be able to hypnotize you again. And you will forget us, and you will be hypnotized no more by me, except you will do something for us. When Miss Suzette, the woman who’s chasing us, arrives, you will stop her from leaving the building. Thanks.” Molly turned to leave, then stopped. “And I seal all of this in with the password…”

  “Frilly Knickers?” Micky suggested.

  “Yes, with the password ‘Frilly Knickers.’”

  With that Molly, Micky, and Petula burst out of the building into the wet night. Rain drenched them so that they climbed into Black’s car dripping.

  “Got what we need?” Black asked.

  As the car screeched away, Molly looked back at the museum’s side door.

  Through the football-sized porthole there, she could just make out the puffy figure of Miss Suzette and the night watchman blocking her path. He had her wrists in his hands and was shaking his head solemnly while she was struggling and shouting as though a demon possessed her.

 
; Nineteen

  “Had a nice little trip, did you?” Lily had finally emerged from her bedroom and stood on its threshold with her arms crossed. She was wearing a red silk bathrobe and red furry slippers. Her pajamas had pictures of roses on them. Her eyes darted angrily to the rattling French window and the balcony outside, where rain smacked down hard.

  “Oh, Lily, we did ask you if you wanted to come too, so please stop being grumpy,” said Black. “Come and hear what Molly and Micky found out.” He gestured to the sofa.

  “Come on,” Molly said. Lily shrugged and came over.

  While Molly told Lily everything that had happened, Malcolm fiddled with the TV controls. Finally he got a signal, and a serious-faced presenter, standing in a studio in front of a large weather map of Europe, appeared. The screen flickered, and her voice crackled.

  “Our satellite pictures show heavy storms over the North Sea,” she said. “And what looks alarmingly like the beginnings of a tornado have been detected in Northern Europe, near the southern coast of Sweden. It’s anyone’s guess how this tornado will grow and where it will go, as the winds are proving unpredictable, but the National Weather Agency’s advice to everyone tonight is stay at home and batten down the hatches. Don’t make trips out unless they are absolutely necessary. And keep watching news and weather reports to see how this storm and tornado are progressing.” The woman gave a stern nod and the cameras switched to another newsperson, a dark-haired man in a suit, and his guest, an elderly man with white hair and a bushy beard.

  “It’s crazy out there, Professor Cramling. In all your years working at Cambridge University, you say you’ve never seen anything like this?” asked the anchorman.

  “No. Never.”

  “And how do you explain it?”

  Professor Cramling scratched his hairy chin. “I can only assume,” he postulated, “that this weather is the unexpected result of global warming. People expected weather to change—but not this suddenly. Every weather professional that I have spoken to is concerned, alarmed, confused.”