Molly Moon & the Monster Music (12 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 man
aged 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.

M
any 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.

M
olly 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 varie
gated 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.

I
f Gerry, Rocky, and Petula had thought that Molly was worried about them, they were wrong.

After the success of her TV appearance and her phenomenal live show, her old friends were as insignificant to her as caterpillars to a steamroller. Molly was intent only on her own forward movement. She didn't care what was flattened by her progress. And so, after coming off the stage at the Tokyo Dome, Molly ordered Miss Sny to put the next part of her plan into action.

“I'll need an Internet site for fans, and you have to arrange other venues. But not just in Japan . . .”

Molly wanted to conquer the world. She figured that it would take four tours. Miss Sny, since she saw Molly as practically a goddess, and since she was also a brilliant organizer, was the perfect person to set these up. The first tour would cover Russia and Europe. The second would take her to North and South America. The third would be for Africa and the Middle East. The last would take her to China, the rest of Asia and Australia and New Zealand.

Molly went back to the apartment tired and faintly satisfied. For a while she put up with Choki
chi's and Hiroyuki's fawning and flattery. Then she told them that she wanted to be alone. Eager to please her, they both went off to bed.

Molly sat on the sofa. She swung her legs up and put her arms behind her head. She lay there staring at the ceiling, from which hung a delicately balanced mobile. It bobbed about in the slight breeze that was coming through the apartment window.