Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism (7 page)

He had particular reasons of his own for needing the secrets contained in it, and they had nothing to do with museum research.

Professor Nockman knew a great deal about the life of the famous hypnotist. He had read how Logan had grown up in Briersville and traveled to America, where he had become rich and famous with his hypnotism show. Nockman had studied yellowing old press cuttings describing the amazing feats of hypnotism performed by the doctor in the show that had made him one of the greatest celebrities of his time. He had visited Hypnos Hall, the palatial mansion that Logan had built with money made from his career as a showman.

But he had become especially fascinated when he learned about a book that Dr. Logan had written, which, it seemed, contained everything he knew about hypnotism. Very few copies of this book had been printed,
and it was extremely rare. But, Professor Nockman had discovered, one of the only surviving copies of it was owned by the library at Briersville. From that moment he’d been absolutely determined to acquire that book for himself. He’d almost got it, too, until that stupid librarian had lost it.

Thinking of that librarian now made Nockman quake with rage. He imagined throttling her skinny neck, and blood rushed to his head. Puce in the face, he reached for the phone.

“Room service,” he said angrily, “bring me a pot of librarian … I mean coffee.”

He was desperate for that book. He had never wanted anything as much. Nothing in his dishonest life had been quite as attractive, and he had big plans that depended on his finding it.
Nobody
was going to stop him having it, and he wouldn’t return to America until he had that book safely in his fat, oily hands.

E
dna and Molly arrived back at the orphanage in a swirl of flying gravel. The place was empty, since Miss Adderstone was still out and the other children had not yet returned from their walk. Petula went to explore the garden, and Molly returned to the attic room, feeling very pleased with herself. She sat down on the bed to think about the extraordinary thing she had just done. Hypnotizing Edna seemed almost as though it had been a dream. Opera music from the kitchen radio drifted faintly up the stairs as Molly marveled at her new power. Her eyes felt tired. Something odd had definitely happened to them when she’d hypnotized Edna. They’d felt as if they’d been glowing, and now they felt dull and heavy.

Molly flicked through the hypnotism book to see if
there was anything about glowing or tired eyes. In the “How to Hypnotize a Crowd” chapter, there was a part that read, “It’s All in the Eyes.”

The book had diagrams of an eye. An eye looking left. An eye looking right. An eye looking at objects close and far. Then Molly came to something called “The Looking Glass Exercise.”

So had Molly hypnotized Edna using just her eyes? She was sure she’d used the spoon, like a pendulum, and her voice, too. She went to the mirror and stared at herself. There was her pink, blotchy face and her potato nose. She stared at her closely set eyes. Her eyes glared back, green and intense. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, she stared. Her eyes quivered and then seemed to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
The music downstairs sounded very distant. Molly concentrated on her eyes and tried not to blink, trying to make her eyes feel as if they were glowing again. Then, suddenly, something peculiar happened. Molly lost her own face entirely, and a
different
face began to grow where Molly’s real face had been. Molly’s hair turned orange and spiky. A big safety pin grew out of the side of her nose, and her eyelids were covered with blue-and-white makeup. She was staring at herself as a punk. Molly’s legs felt all tingly, and her eyes felt as though they were throbbing, glowing and throbbing, switching on and off like the beam of a lighthouse. And this, the book said, was the eye trick for hypnotizing crowds.

Molly blinked hard. She was relieved to see her normal face in the mirror.
That
had been very strange. Had the looking glass exercise made her hypnotize herself? Perhaps the book would explain what had happened.

Molly scanned the section entitled “The Looking Glass Exercise.” There was a paragraph called “Hypnotizing Yourself.”

Molly sat back feeling puzzled. She hadn’t imagined herself as a punk, yet that was the face that had appeared in the mirror. It was as if her unconscious mind had wanted her to be like a punk and had—through hypnosis—shown her a different identity. Who were punks? She had always thought of them as rebellious people. Molly certainly wanted to rebel. Yes, it seemed that her unconscious mind was one step ahead of her, showing her how, deep down, she wanted to be.

Sliding the hypnotism book safely under her mattress, she sat down to wonder what
other
Mollys could be conjured up. Then, still wondering, she took a pencil and began to bore a hole through a bar of soap from the basin. She unraveled a piece of cord from the bed-cover’s fringe, snapped it off, and threaded it through the soap. She made a knot at the bottom. Now she had a home-made pendulum. It wasn’t a very good one, but it would have to do, and though she was tired, there was time to try it out on Edna before everyone else came back.

On the way downstairs she passed Petula, who trotted happily after her. As she came to the checkered stone floor of the hall, she heard, to her surprise, Hazel Hackersly’s whiny singing voice. Hazel must have somehow evaded the Saturday morning walk.

Molly peeped through the TV-room doorway. She
saw Hazel dressed in a cat outfit, wearing a white leotard, white tights, white tap shoes, and white fluffy ears on a band. It was her talent competition outfit. In her hand she swung a white tail, and while she danced, she sang.

Molly watched Hazel tap dancing round the room, opening her eyes very wide, fluttering her eyelids, and looking really stupid. Molly wished she had a camera. Then she had another idea. When Hazel was curtsying, Molly took a deep breath and went in.

“Oh, not
you,
Drono …
and
you’re with smelly Petula. Not
better,
are you?” moaned Hazel. Petula growled at her.

“Yes, a bit better, thank you,” said Molly, taking the soap pendulum out of her pocket. She sat down in front of Hazel and began to swing the soap pendulum as if she were just playing with it.

“What’s that?” said Hazel. “Soap you have to carry around because your hands sweat so much?”

Molly held the pendulum in front of her face and swung it rhythmically from side to side.

“What are you doing?”

“Just re-lax-ing,” said Molly.

“No you’re not. You’re trying to hypnotize me,” snapped Hazel. “Typical of a weirdo like you to think that hypnotism is something real.”

Molly stopped swinging the soap. “No I’m not,” she said quickly.

“You’re so weird,” sneered Hazel, and Molly realized that she had approached Hazel too clumsily. Her previous successes had made her overconfident. Hazel was now too alert for Molly to hypnotize.

“I wasn’t trying to hypnotize you. This isn’t a pendulum, it’s a … soap-on-a-string, so that I won’t lose it in the bath.”

“I hope you’re not planning to have a
bath,”
said Hazel nastily, rewinding her cassette, “because Adderstone would not be pleased to hear you’d ignored her punishment. If you’re covered in sick, you’ll just have to stay that way. No bath for
three
weeks, wasn’t it?”

“Yup,” said Molly. “I’m preparing myself.” She got up to go. There was no point in staying just to be insulted.

Hazel looked at Molly in disgust. “Prize weirdo,” she said. Then, as Molly was leaving the room, Hazel said slyly, “By the way, have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Rocky’s found a family.”

The words walloped Molly. It was as if a cascade of icy water had drenched her from head to foot. She found it hard to speak. “Wh … when?”

Hazel smiled spitefully. “That American couple that came yesterday. Amazingly, they liked him….
Weird
couple. Anyway, he left last night. Didn’t say good-bye to you, did he? That’s because, well, he told me he’s gone right off you. Said it was like eating too much of something. He said he’s kind of overdosed on you…. Said he’d drop you a line.”

“You’re joking,” said Molly.

“No, no, not joking, although I s’pose it is funny,” Hazel said.

Molly stared at Hazel’s mean face. “Liar,” she said, leaving the room. But inside, fierce emotions scorched her.

Rocky leaving? The idea was horrific. Molly couldn’t believe it. The thought of losing Rocky was devastating, like losing your arm or your leg or your whole family all at once, because he was all the family Molly had. Hazel must be lying. Rocky would
never
have left without saying good-bye to Molly. In fact, he wouldn’t leave unless she was adopted
with
him. That had always been their pact. If they went, they’d go together. Hazel’s bullying had simply reached a new level.

Yet a dreadful suspicion filled Molly—that Hazel
wasn’t lying. On the landing, the light coming from the boys’ bedroom doorway lit the passage, familiar and friendly. Seeing this, Molly knew Rocky’s possessions would wink at her as soon as she entered his room. She would feel a fool for falling for Hazel’s story. But with every step she took, she became more numb. The ghastly truth hit her as undeniably as a thump in the face.

Rocky’s bed was stripped of its sheets, its threadbare blanket was folded into a neat rectangle, and its pillow was without a cover. His bedside table stood bare of comics. The wardrobe was open and his clothes were gone.

Molly could hardly breathe. An invisible terror seemed to have gripped her chest so that she couldn’t use her lungs. She fell against the doorjamb, staring at the anonymous corner and the ownerless bed.

“How could you?” she whispered. Molly slopped across the room and sat on Rocky’s old mattress. It was a little while before she could breathe normally and think logically again. In her heart she felt sure that Rocky wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye unless he had a very good reason. They’d had an argument, but it wasn’t
that
serious, and although Rocky had been extra secretive lately, Molly didn’t believe that he was sick of her. That part was Hazel’s vicious imagination.
But why
hadn’t he
said good-bye? He had always been unreliable and a bit of a wanderer, but Molly didn’t think that his faults could actually make
him forget
to say good-bye to her. They were like brother and sister. He couldn’t have been
that
vague. It was all too strange.

With Rocky gone, Molly had no one. No one except Petula. The younger kids were okay, but they were too young to be her friends. Living here without Rocky was inconceivable. She must find out where he was.

In a daze, Molly dragged herself upstairs to her attic room. She turned the basin tap on to wash her face. She felt very muddled. She glanced at herself in the mirror. There were her closely set eyes, burning with tears. She stared intently at her reflection, remembering what had happened when she’d practiced the looking glass exercise before. Perhaps if she imagined herself feeling good now, she could hypnotize herself into happiness.

As she stared, her features disappeared. The meowing music for Hazel’s tap dance floated upstairs, and Molly imagined that she didn’t feel so bad. In a moment her face changed. Her cheeks became rounder and rosier, her hair softer and blonder. Ribbons grew in it. She looked pretty! Like a child star. It was incredible! Molly started to feel a tingling sensation, like the fusion feeling, creeping up her body again. Her depression peeled away from her like a crusty old cocoon and
optimism took its place. And just then the idea hit her. A huge, stunning, colossal idea.

She had this eye trick under her belt. And the eye trick was the hypnotism trick used on
crowds
. There would be an audience—a
crowd
of watching people—at the children’s talent competition tomorrow.
Somebody
had to win that competition, with its huge cash prize. Why shouldn’t that somebody be Molly?

Molly blinked—and was herself again. But now she was feeling hopeful. She refused to believe that Rocky hated her, even if he had gone.

She made up her mind on the spot. She’d discover where he was, and she’d work out a way to leave Hardwick House and join him. It might be difficult, but Molly promised herself she’d use every ounce of her energy and talent to find Rocky, and she wouldn’t give up until they were together again.

B
y Saturday evening Molly was up and about. Although she felt better than before, she missed Rocky. All through evening assembly, as other children whispered excitedly about his adoption, Molly felt sad. She missed him—his black, shiny hair with its tight curls, his smooth, black skin, his soft, dark eyes. She missed his patchy jeans, which every week had new holes in them, and his hands that were more often than not covered with doodles. But most of all she missed his reassuring smile.

Miss Adderstone’s announcement shook Molly out of her misery. “Tomorrow is the Briersville Children’s Talent Competition. I believe some of you will be entering. You will walk from school to the town Guildhall to arrive for the competition by one o’clock. The
prize money is, as you know, a ridiculous three thousand pounds, and if any of you win, you are expected to donate your winnings to the orphanage funds. Is that clear?”