by Georgia Byng
The problem was a guard who was standing beside the door. Gerry took a calculated risk. Using a nearby broom, he used it to push a pile of crates a little way away from their hiding place off balance. When the crates came clattering down, the guard on the door went to investigate. Gerry and Rocky ducked through the door and found themselves in another icy chamber.
Quickly they dived behind a forklift truck. Catching their breath, they looked about. More people came in, each one looking furtively about. Rocky saw that Gerry was right. Some sort of underhanded business was going on in this room, and he agreed that if it was bluefin dealing, then it had to be stopped.
An elderly man in a dark blue smock and black rubber boots stepped up onto a platform at the front of the room where there was a lectern. He seemed to be the person everyone was waiting for, because a hush fell when they saw him. He put on a pair of spectacles and took a small hammer out of his pocket. A woman stepped up and, with a dramatic flourish, stripped some black canopies away, revealing one huge slab of meat. Gerry and Rocky realized instantly that it was whale.
Gerry was suddenly frightened. His eyes flitted about the room. This was far more serious than killing bluefin tuna. Whales were the greatest creatures of the ocean. It was completely horrific to kill and eat whales. Gerry put Petula down, put his camera up to his eye, and began nervously to take pictures.
Bidding began and soon became heated. As the auction went on, Gerry became more and more furious. He felt like running onto the dais and shouting a stream of abuse at everyone there, but his more sensible side held him back.
“We need to find out who’s hunting the whales,” he said quietly to Rocky.
Rocky, who could hardly believe what they were witnessing, nodded.
Gerry picked Petula up again and the boys made a beeline for the door through which more whale meat was being carried. They slipped through easily because all eyes were on the frenzied auction on the stage.
Beyond the doors was an empty street where a truck was parked with its rear doors open. Inside the truck were a few sheets of black plastic identical to those covering the whale meat inside. Gerry clutched Petula tight and the boys ran across the yard and scrambled into the back of the truck. “They must bring the meat here in this truck,” Gerry started to say when, suddenly, there was a juddering and rattling as the doors closed. Gerry, Rocky, and Petula were plunged into darkness.
“I’m not sure this was a good idea,” Rocky said.
“Don’t worry,” Gerry whispered. “They’ll drive back to wherever they caught the whales, then they’ll open the back to load more inside and we’ll sort them out.”
Rocky wasn’t so confident, but he said nothing. There was a rumble as the engine started.
“Jeepers, we’re off!” Gerry exclaimed.
Sixteen
Molly felt for her coin. It was still safely tucked into her pajama pocket, nestled there like an egg being incubated. She opened her eyes and blinked as a shaft of morning sun cut across her face. Sitting up in bed she took the coin out and stroked it. It made her feel fantastic. All her other hypnotic powers paled in comparison to the buzz the coin gave her.
She couldn’t think what had possessed her when she’d called Rocky the other day. Had he arrived in Tokyo? she wondered. She must make sure she played him some music to stop him interfering.
Molly had no need of friends now. What could friendship offer her when she had the coin? All that she wanted was for everyone, from presidents to princesses, from film stars to the ordinary person on the street, to adore her. She wanted to be rich and powerful. She wanted to be able to go anywhere, have access to the best of everything—from palaces to private islands. There was nothing wrong with this, she thought. After all, she was Molly Moon, the world’s best hypnotist, best time stopper, best time traveler, best mind reader, best morpher, and now the best musician.
She knew she would master every instrument she tried. It was so easy! Eye hypnotism required far more effort than musical hypnotism. And time traveling felt irrelevant now; Molly felt no need to travel to another time—there was so much to see and do, and above all have, in this time. Her old talents were too much like hard work.
Hiroyuki and Chokichi were eating their breakfast. As Molly approached, the boys looked up and smiled at her, infatuated, still smitten by her performance the night before. A maid came out of the kitchen and curtsied to Molly, saying something in Japanese.
“She’s asking what you’d like for breakfast,” Hiroyuki explained.
Molly took a look at the boys’ tofu and cold fish. She didn’t fancy that. Before she had owned the coin, she would have asked politely for ketchup sandwiches and concentrated orange squash, but today, the mere idea of this food made her feel sick.
“Just coffee and toast,” she told the maid.
Hiroyuki translated, adding a please.
“You were brilliant last night. Everyone who saw you was blown away. Oh, and Rocky arrived. He’s still asleep upstairs.” Molly nodded. She would have a few hours before he woke up as he would definitely be jet-lagged. Hiroyuki pointed to some Japanese newspapers on the table. Two had Molly’s picture at the bottom of the front page.
“Look at that! They write about you in detail on page four,” said Chokichi.
Molly shrugged. She’d be getting the whole front page soon. “What’s Mr. Proila’s number?” she asked.
Hiroyuki and Chokichi opened their eyes wide. “Man, you’re so cool!” Hiroyuki said. “You’re not even fazed by being famous.”
“I’ve been expecting it,” said Molly. “And this is nothing.”
“Wow!” Chokichi said.
“Mr. Proila’s number?” Molly asked again.
An hour later Molly was sitting in Mr. Proila’s apartment on the top floor of the Pea-pod Building.
The place had a safari theme to it. The floors were covered with zebra skins, and beside the main door was an umbrella container made from a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. Dead animal heads—tigers, cheetahs, rhinos, and even a hippo’s—were arranged on the wall. The sofas and armchairs were bloodred velvet, some with the skins of more dead animals flung over them.
The low tables in the sitting area were black lacquer, shiny as polished glass. They were covered with a collection of little statuettes and ornaments, all of the same man in an old-fashioned army uniform. Molly sat down on the sofa and looked at them. The man wore high boots and breeches and a smart army uniform with a cape. None of the statuettes were more than forty centimeters high. Molly picked one up. She was turning it over in her hand when Mr. Proila came in.
“Ah,” he said, clapping his little hands together, “I see you’ve found my collection of Napoleons. I admire Napoleon. He was short, but he didn’t let his height prevent him from being great—a great general of France. He died in 1821. He conquered Italy, Spain, and other European countries and would have conquered Russia too if it had not been for the ice and cold conditions. World dominance was what he was after. I wonder why?”
He looked at Molly as though this question was also applicable to her. Molly wasn’t sure what he was getting at. She decided to exercise her mind-reading muscles again.
She summoned a bubble above Mr. Proila’s head. Oddly it took a little extra effort today. When finally the bubble came, and she got her secret insight into Mr. Proila’s head, the pictures were faint and Molly had to concentrate doubly hard. It was the coffee she’d drunk, Molly guessed. She should avoid coffee; it obviously didn’t agree with her.
In the bubble, she saw camera flashes going off. She saw herself, signing autographs all around the world. Then suddenly the images became fuzzy again. Molly pressed her mind to make the pictures come back into focus, but it was impossible. She gave up and let the bubble pop. “What are you thinking?” she asked Mr. Proila.
“Oh, nothing much,” he said. “I’m waiting for your answer, that’s all. Why do you think Napoleon wanted world power?”
Molly smiled. She let
the bubble pop. Then she answered, “Napoleon obviously knew how talented he was,” she said. “He knew that he was far cleverer than everyone else and that he should be in charge.”
“Maybe he was just an egotistical control freak,” Mr. Proila pointed out.
Molly paused. “I’m going to take over the world,” she said.
Mr. Proila laughed. “I know you’re ambitious,” he said, chuckling, lighting a fat cigar.
“Ambitious is an understatement,” said Molly. “And, Mr. Proila, I’ve got a lot of countries to cover so I want to start now. Today.” Without waiting for a reply, she went on. “I need a TV interview this lunchtime, on a top Japanese show. Put the boys on with me. Let me play the guitar. That’ll turn the viewers on to me. Say I’m playing a free concert tonight at the Tokyo Dome. That’ll get forty thousand hooked straightaway.”
Mr. Proila looked unconvinced. “You must be joking.”
Molly shook her head. There was no time to dawdle. She decided to hypnotize Mr. Proila. She switched her eyes on. But strangely, they felt weak. Like a car with a flat battery, her hypnotic engine just wouldn’t fire up. Finally, with enormous effort, her pupils dilated and she felt the purr of their power. It wasn’t the faultless purr of just a few days before, but it would do. Making a mental note to practice a bit more hypnotism, Molly directed some of it into Mr. Proila’s eyes before what she had managed to muster spluttered and died.
He looked at her quizzically. “Never noticed how green your eyes were before,” he said.
Molly had only a slight tingling fusion feeling. Mr. Proila wasn’t fully under her control at all. He was more charmed than hypnotized. Molly knew that weak hypnotism like this wouldn’t stick for a long time but it should be enough to persuade Mr. Proila to give her her own way. So without wasting a moment she dived straight in,
“Come on, Proila. You know I can do it,” she coaxed.
Mr. Proila rubbed his hands together. “Good thinking,” he said, now mesmerized by Molly’s idea. “I’ll get on it right away: an interview and the Tokyo Dome tonight.”
Molly smiled. “You’ve got it, Mr. Proila.”
By the time Molly had finished playing guitar to the interviewer on Tokyo Talking, Japan’s top-rated TV show, he was totally besotted with her, and of course his huge audience was mesmerized by her, too.
Molly felt fantastic.
Mr. Proila sat in his office waiting for Miss Sny’s Skype call to report on Molly’s performance. When his assistant’s face appeared on the screen, she was glowing. He read her lips. The Tokyo Dome ticket office had run out of tickets, demand had been so high.
“OK, Sny. Make sure that the CD she records has a good picture of her. That’ll be difficult. She’s got a kinda ratty look.” A twisted smile contorted his face. The tills were going to be ringing their bells tonight, he thought. They’d be popping their cash drawers open and shut at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings.
Seventeen
Many miles away, Gerry, Rocky, and Petula were asleep in the back of the cold, smelly fish truck. They’d been stuck there in the dark, putrid space for seven hours. Their journey had been terrible and eventually they’d all dozed off. And the boys had wondered again and again how they had become trapped inside the truck.
Eventually they were woken by it stopping.
Gerry and Rocky jumped up and began banging on the door.
“Help! Let us OUT!”
They pushed and kicked against the door but it stayed sealed. Gerry sat on a plastic crate and put his head in his hands.
“What have I done?” he sobbed. “This is like a coffin! We might die in ’ere and maybe no one will even know.” He let out a frightened wail. “Maybe they only use this truck once a week, or once a month. I’m so stupid. Just to find out who’s been killing whales we’re going to die.” Then he added bitterly, “An’ Molly won’t bother lookin’ for us. She probably ’asn’t even noticed we’re gone. Or if she has, she’s glad. What’s ’appened to her, Rocky?”
Petula recognized Molly’s name and guessed what Gerry was crying about. She hopped onto his knees to comfort him. Rocky put a hand on Gerry’s shoulder.
“From what you’ve told me, she’s in trouble, Gerry. More trouble than we are. It sounds as though she’s under the control of something. We’ll get out of here, whereas Molly might be trapped forever.” Rocky wasn’t sure they’d get out, but he wanted to make Gerry feel better.
“You really think so?”
Rocky nodded. “I wish I’d got hold of Lucy and Primo before I left. I set off in such a rush, nobody knows where I’ve gone.”
“But we’ll be out soon and you can call them then.”
“Hmm.” Rocky nodded and smiled as brightly as he could.
Suddenly a loud CLUNK CLUNK jolted the truck.
Gerry and Rocky leaped up and began to bang their fists on the doors again.
“HELP! HELP! WE’RE IN HERE! LET US OUT!”
There was a loud KERKLUNK of bolts being drawn, and then the metal doors opened a crack. Morning light poured in. The boys peeped out, squinting as their eyes adjusted to the brightness.
The truck had parked on a dock. In front of them was a small crane, and in the harbor water a small, rusty ship. Something huge glistened on its deck. It was a dead whale.
Eighteen
Molly was dressed in a green-and-red jumpsuit. Her hair had been dyed black and gelled and waxed into spikes. The high collar of her outfit was encrusted with large fake emeralds. The pants were straight-legged. Her shoes were pointed green brogues.
She felt hip and cool. When she looked in the mirror she hardly recognized her made-up face, or her eyes that had been defined to look Egyptian. Tonight was the night. The Tokyo Dome stadium had been booked. And Molly planned to strike down every last person there with her music.
Molly picked up the ebony forked guitar that Chokichi had lent her. She took the coin from her chest pocket and rubbed it. She winked at herself in the mirror. For a second she saw her reflection, as though she were a human-shaped coin, with variegated edges. The imaginary human-shaped coin in the mirror winked back at her. Molly knew that her mind was playing tricks on her because she was so excited.
There was a knock at the door. Miss Sny poked her head in and nodded respectfully. “Excuse me, Miss Moon, you are due on the stage in three minutes.”
Cool as ice, Molly left her dressing room. She stepped through blue and white lights that lit her way to the microphone at the front of the stage and drank in the stadium’s atmosphere. The applause from the hordes who had come to see her was tinglingly thrilling. Smiling, Molly hitched her guitar strap over her shoulder and took the neck of the guitar in her left hand.
Teasingly, Molly plucked her guitar’s top string. A high note tinged out into the night. Molly, of course, had no idea what note it was. Nor did she care. She was already anticipating what a thousand notes from her guitar would do to this audience. She stepped up to the microphone.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, I’m going to play”—Molly raised her right arm high in the air—“tonight, I’m going to play . . . ROCK ’N’ ROLL.”
Molly brought her hand down hard and smacked the guitar’s strings with her fingers. She was brilliant. The audience went wild. Each sequence of perfectly executed notes was like a web spun by a master spider. The more the crowd listened, the more they became caught—trapped like flies. Molly drank up the applause. And, she had to agree, the music she was producing was genius.
And then she moved toward a drum kit that had been set up onstage. People could not believe it. This girl’s skills were nothing short of miraculous.
Molly thrashed the drums, rolled them, beat the bass, tapped the snares, and crashed the cymbals. And then, she was finished.
The audience went crazy—so crazy that one of the usherettes who was selling Molly’s CD worried that the building might collapse from all the excitement.
Molly was calm. Everything was
going according to plan.
Gerry, Rocky, and Petula saw the helicopter, a tiny dot in the sky, getting larger and larger. And now they shielded their eyes from the wind of its rotors as it landed on a cleared space on the dock.
After being found, the friends had been forced to sit in the smelly truck to wait to meet the boss of the whale-meat operations. Time had passed to the horrid noise behind them of the chainsaw whining as it cut up the dead whale.
They were so exhausted when they were manhandled out of the truck that they felt nothing but numbness.
And then they saw Mr. Proila. Dressed in a black suit and a long black coat, he stepped out of the helicopter and began walking across the dock toward them.
“So,” he said, sneering at Gerry, “I should have guessed that the little eco-warrior would try to spoil my fun.” He pulled Gerry’s camera from his neck and lobbed it into the deep harbor basin. “You idiot brats!”
Gerry stared at the monster in front of him and, to his surprise, instead of saying something furious, he found himself saying, “I feel sorry for you, Mr. Proila. You don’t have a single scrap of goodness in your heart, do you? I wonder why. Maybe it’s because no one ever loved you when you were a little boy. That is really sad.”
Mr. Proila hadn’t expected this. He looked as though Gerry had slapped him. For a moment, he was speechless. Then he snapped, “Put them in the cell. Let’s give them a nice long time to think about their little let’s-save-the-world moment and whether it was worth it.”
And without another word, he turned on his Cuban heels.