Molly Moon Stops the World

D
avina Nuttel sat in the back of her chauffeur-driven limousine, reading about herself in a celebrity magazine. Her chubby face, surrounded by posters of all the films and shows she’d already starred in, smiled out from the page.

“Child superstar Davina Nuttel,”
she read,
“is back on Broadway in the hit show
Stars on Mars.
After surprise newcomer Molly Moon quit the part and left New York, Miss Nuttel was the obvious choice for the lead.”
Davina fumed. She was sick of Molly Moon’s name being mentioned in the same sentence as hers. She hated that bug-eyed, skinny nobody.

“Stop at the ice-cream parlor on Madison,” she snapped at her driver.

He nodded and negotiated his way across four lanes of noisy New York traffic.

Davina was feeling particularly rattled. She needed a big, sweet ice cream. It had been a bad day at the Broadway theater where she was rehearsing a new
Stars on Mars
song. To begin with, she’d had a sore throat and couldn’t hit the high notes. Then had come the horrible incident that had completely unnerved her. Davina angrily scraped her nail down the cream leather upholstery. She didn’t often need her parents, but tonight she was glad they would be at home for once.

How dare that weird businessman barge, uninvited, into her dressing room? How he’d got past the security guards she didn’t know. And what nerve to suppose that she would want to advertise his ugly line of Fashion House clothes. Didn’t he know he should talk to her agent?

The creepy Mr. Cell had given Davina the shivers, and she couldn’t erase him from her mind. His eyes seemed to have etched themselves behind Davina’s, in the way that staring too long at the sun burns its image into a person’s vision. Every time Davina shut her own eyes, she saw his two mad eyeballs staring at her.

The car stopped outside her favorite ice-cream parlor. Davina fastened her black mink coat and put on the matching gloves. She stepped out into the cold night and waved condescendingly at her chauffeur. She
would walk home. Enjoying the sound of her highheeled boots on the pavement, she swept into the parlor.

Inside, she ordered the house specialty. It was called the Mondae-Tuesdae-Wednesdae-Thursdae-Fridae-Saturdae Sundae. Determined to banish all thoughts of the strange businessman from her mind, she pulled out her gold-plated fountain pen and began practicing her autograph on a paper napkin. Should she stick to her curly writing or change her style?

When her enormous sundae arrived, she ate it all.

Twenty minutes later, she was walking home, feeling sick. She realized that a cold March evening wasn’t really the best time to eat a large, freezing-cold ice cream.

In the distance, her grand apartment building towered over the street. That was odd, Davina thought—normally the outside of it was lit with green lights. Were they broken? The building really did look drab, all dark. She would complain as soon as she saw the doorman. She could see him now, standing by the front door with his taxi-calling light baton.

She crossed the broad avenue. The building entrance was only a hundred yards away—but now it was a dark hundred yards, lit up at only one point, where a
streetlamp cast an oval pool of yellow on the pavement. Davina walked toward it. She liked spotlights.

Something white and rectangular lay on the ground under the light—garbage, Davina suspected—another thing to complain about. However, as Davina approached, she saw that the white rectangle wasn’t garbage. It was an envelope. And when she got nearer, she saw something very strange. The envelope had
her
name on it.

A fan letter! Davina thought with pleasure.

She took off her glove, picked up the envelope, and pulled out the letter. It read:

Suddenly a heavy hand grabbed Davina’s arm. She looked up to see a familiar face smiling down at her. Davina felt petrified with fear. Her body went winter cold. Her ears suddenly seemed to stop working. She could no longer hear the sounds of New York. It was as if the cabs and traffic, sirens and horns no longer existed. All Davina could hear was her own voice—her screams as she found herself being dragged toward a parked car. She looked beseechingly up at the uniformed doorman in the distance.

“Help! Help me!”

But the doorman did nothing. He stood motionless, looking the other way. And desperately kicking and struggling, Davina found herself being pushed into a Rolls-Royce as unceremoniously as a stray dog might be forced into a pound van. She was driven away into the night.

M
olly Moon threw a bumper-size packet of Honey Wheat Pufftas up the supermarket aisle. The box flipped through the air, and the fat cartoon bee on it flew, for the first and last real flight of its life, before it landed with a crunch in the shopping cart.

“Bull’s-eye! Twenty points to me,” Molly said with satisfaction. A shower of Jawdrop bubble gums came raining down into the cart from over the shelves of cereals.

“How can Ruby eat so much gum?” a boy’s voice asked from the other shopping aisle. “She’s only five.”

“She sticks her pictures up with it,” said Molly, pushing the metal cart to the canned-fish corner. “How can Roger eat so many sardines? That’s what I
want to know. Cold, too, straight from the can. Disgusting. You can’t stick pictures up with sardines.”

“Ten points for those gums and double it, Green Eyes, because I got them in from over the other side.” The husky-voiced boy emerged from behind a giant stack of baked beans. His dark-brown face was framed by a white hat with earflaps. He put a large bottle of orange squash concentrate in the cart.

“Thanks, Rocky,” Molly said. Orange squash concentrate was Molly Moon’s favorite drink. She liked to drink it neat.

She disentangled a pen from behind her ear and messy hair and wrote down their chucking scores in a small worn notebook.

   “Okay, wise guy. You win this week. But I’ll be the champ before Easter.”

Then Molly consulted their list. It said:

Happiness House was the orphanage where Molly and Rocky lived. When Molly Moon was a baby, she’d been left on its doorstep in a Moon’s Marshmallows box, which is how she’d got her name. Until recently the children’s home had been called Hardwick House, and as that name might suggest, it had been an extremely difficult place to live in. But just before Christmas, Molly had been dealt a spectacular, life-changing card.
In the library in the nearby town of Briersville, she’d found a faded old leather-bound book,
The Book of Hypnotism,
by Dr. Logan. It had changed Molly’s life. After learning the book’s secrets and discovering that she possessed incredibly powerful hypnotic skills, Molly had left the orphanage and gone to New York, accompanied by the orphanage pug, Petula. There she’d used hypnotism to get the starring role in a Broadway musical called
Stars on Mars.
Molly had fooled and controlled
hundreds
of people, and she’d made lots of money. But a crook called Professor Nockman had discovered her secret. He had kidnaped Petula and blackmailed Molly into robbing a bank for him.

It had been dreadful, until Rocky had showed up and helped her sort Nockman out. Molly had left New York behind, bringing with her the money that she’d earned and a large diamond that had come her way the day of the bank robbery
and
Professor Nockman. Back at Hardwick House, things began to get better at last. Molly had removed the witchy orphanage mistress, the building had been renamed, and the kind—although slightly batty—widow called Mrs. Trinklebury, who had worked at the orphanage before had come to help permanently. Molly had told her that the money she’d brought back from America was from a rich person called the Benefactor who wanted to help the children’s
home. Molly had also hypnotized Nockman and brought him with her to be Mrs. Trinklebury’s assistant. She was hoping that by working with someone as kind as Mrs. Trinklebury, Nockman would soon reform and become a genuinely kind person too. So far the experiment was working well.