Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

Five

Miss Hunroe stood alone beside a high, round table in a large, grand room with a very tall triangular ceiling above. Her and her acquaintances’ lavish apartments were all situated in the uppermost parts of the four towers that punctuated the top of the natural history museum. Miss Hunroe’s rooms were in the Art Deco style. The black lacquer chairs had curved solid wooden backs and smart cushions with a leafy garland pattern on them. There were etched mirrored-glass tables, and at the far end of the room was a concertinaed, free-standing pale wood screen with a long-legged leaping dancer inlaid in darker wood on it. Behind this was an oval-shaped double bed. The walls were green and decorated with gold brocade. A high maple cabinet displayed a collection of ancient gold plates and goblets, and on the floor, in front of the thirty-six–paned window, a giant, rare solid-gold vase, taken from the Egyptian department in the British Museum, stood proud, filled with magnificent sunflowers. A gorgeous gilt harp stood to the side of the vase, while above, a massive golden chandelier hung from the apex of the room like a giant honeycomb.

The walls were hung with paintings. One echoed the sunflowers on the floor and was by a world-famous painter, Van Gogh. Miss Hunroe had “borrowed” this from its museum home in Amsterdam. Languidly, she sat down at the harp. The sound of the strings as her fingers plucked them was like the sound of a heavenly waterfall. Then Miss Hunroe pinched one of the strings tightly and slid her pinch from the top of the string downward. This made a screeching, unearthly noise. Smiling, Miss Hunroe abandoned the harp and swiveled around on her stool. Crossing her legs, she pulled a clear crystal out of her pocket and held it up to the light.

“If she’s mastered time travel and time stopping,” she said, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

There was a knock at the door. “Come in.”

Miss Speal and Miss Suzette entered, each looking modestly proud, as though they were about to receive gold stars from the head teacher.

“They’ve gone!” Miss Speal squealed suddenly, unable to control her excitement. She rubbed her hands together. “I just saw them off in a taxi.”

“And zay fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” gushed Miss Suzette. Then she added flatteringly, “Miss Hunroe, you were brilliant—a tour de force! You should receive an Oscar for your performance! I loved the part where you refused to let zem go.” Here Miss Suzette imitated Miss Hunroe’s words. “‘I’m sorry, Molly and Micky, but I’ve acted like a fool, and completely improperly. You’ve said your parents wouldn’t want you to get involved with this risky business, and we cannot ignore that.’ It was inspired, Miss Hunroe. Well done!”

“The girl’s impetuous. And the boy seems to follow her lead. I knew it wouldn’t take much,” Miss Hunroe said, brushing off the praise.

“Expect zay’ll be at de casino in ten minutes,” enthused Miss Suzette.

“They are nearly there,” said Miss Speal with her eyes shut.

“Let’s hope it works,” said Miss Hunroe, plucking three strings of her harp with her long-nailed fingers.

“Oh, play us something please, Miss Hunroe.” Miss Speal sighed. Miss Hunroe cast her eyes to the ceiling, and then she played. Heavenly music drifted about the room and the women fell quiet, in awe. Then Miss Hunroe suddenly stopped. “But, Miss Speal, you should be ashamed of yourself, losing control like you did. I’ve asked you not to rub that piece of stone while we are here. You behaved like an idiot. It was as if you wanted them to know our secret!”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” the thin spinster mumbled, staring at the ground.

Miss Hunroe tutted nastily and then narrowed her eyes and impersonated her. “‘I couldn’t help myself.’ Pathetic.”

An awkward silence filled the room. Miss Suzette broke it, trying to change the subject. “I’m sure de Moon girl is a mind reader,” she said excitedly, bobbing about from foot to foot like some overkeen lapdog so that her frilly clothes started to flap. “Did she mind read you, Miss Hunroe? Did you see de way she looked at us? It was very good we knew how to take precautions and bar her probing mind from our true thoughts.”

Miss Hunroe nodded matter-of-factly and replied sourly, “She was most certainly attempting to read my mind. I felt it. It was as though a window had been opened into my head and a breeze was coming in. It took all my strength to invent the things she should see and keep her out of my real thoughts.”

“Yes, yes! For me it was a tickly feeling all over my forehead!” Miss Suzette declared.

“Do you think she’s a natural morpher? Do you think she can body borrow?”

“You couldn’t learn without that book,” Miss Speal replied. “Unless you had a teacher. For instance, I taught you all to morph into animals, but I originally got my lessons from the book.”

“Where are the cats?” Miss Hunroe asked impatiently. She looked at her watch.

As if on cue, the door opened, and led by a beautiful short-haired, blue-eyed white Burmese cat, the two other female hypnotists, Miss Oakkton and Miss Teriyaki, entered. Miss Oakkton held two cats, a big ginger tom and a gray hairless sphynx cat, while Miss Teriyaki, with a crutch under her right arm, held a fluffy white Persian cat under her left arm. A gray Siamese followed her.

Miss Teriyaki spoke. “Oh, Miss Hunroe, you were so clever to make the story up that my skiing-accident scar was from a trip into the casino! I’m sure those gullible children believed it completely!” Miss Hunroe blinked at Miss Teriyaki, then glared at Miss Oakkton.

“You’re late, Miss Oakkton. Just like you were last week when we were in Black’s Casino. May I remind you that your lack of punctuality then upset our whole plan. If it hadn’t been for you, we would have the book by now. Because of your sloppiness then, we were caught inside the casino. Because of you, the guard you were supposed to deal with was left unhypnotized. But there was a reason, wasn’t there? Ah, now, what was it you were doing? Buying tobacco? So all in all, because of your dirty pipe habit, we have all had to go to these ridiculous lengths to persuade these horrible Moon children to help us.”

“Ze cats ver difficult to round up,” explained Miss Oakkton.

“You always have an excuse,” whined Miss Speal.

“You ought to set your watch five minutes fast, like a child dat is always late.” Miss Suzette laughed patronizingly. “That would teach you!” Miss Oakkton growled at her under her breath.

Miss Teriyaki passed the big-eyed, white, fluffy-haired Persian cat to Miss Suzette and bent down to pick up the gray Siamese.

“Oh, daaaahleeeng!” Miss Suzette exclaimed, pressing her nose up to her pet’s.

Miss Oakkton kept the large, hairy orange cat firmly tucked under her arm, while giving the thin, hairless sphynx to Miss Speal.

“Ready?” Miss Hunroe asked as her white Burmese cat rubbed against her ankles. The women murmured yes. Miss Hunroe frowned irritatedly. “Not you, Miss Speal. I’ve ordered the plane. It takes off at five thirty. You should be in the chamber by eleven tomorrow morning our time.”

Miss Speal dropped her head apologetically. “Thank you for forgiving my stupidity, Miss Hunroe.”

“We will meet you there as soon as our business is finished here,” Miss Hunroe added. Then she turned her attention again to the other three women. They were all now staring at a patterned rug on the floor. “Let us go,” Miss Hunroe decided. In the next second, an astonishing thing happened. She and the women staring at the rug disappeared as instantly as blown-out flames. All that was left was their clothes—a pile of frills of cotton and silk, of wool skirts, trousers, shirts, and jackets, of old-fashioned bras and pants of varying sizes, and of nylon tights. Scattered about under the mounds of material were an odd assortment of shoes, as well as a crutch. Four cats sat on the belongings as though they owned them.

The cats stared at the floor as they adjusted to their insides. For each of them now had two beings inside them—the original cat beings, and the women who had just entered, and who were now taking them over.

The real cat characters shrank back and down like sea anemones reduced from blooming flowers to tiny balls. Miss Hunroe, Miss Teriyaki, Miss Suzette, and Miss Oakkton took control of the cats’ minds as quickly and as thoroughly as an egg cup of black ink might color a small mug of water.

The white Burmese was the most difficult of the feline creatures to take command of. And today, as was often the case, it resisted Miss Hunroe’s control. It fought hard, refusing to let its identity be squashed and replaced by Miss Hunroe’s personality. But it was no use. Miss Hunroe won the tug-of-war, and the blue-eyed cat succumbed to Miss Hunroe.

“Miaaww,” Miss Hunroe mewed. And then, in the language of cat—for once in an animal, it was possible to speak to other animals of the same sort—she asked, “Are you ready?”

Miss Speal, sitting on a stool with her hairless sphynx in her arms, watched as the four cats before her twitched their tails and nodded to the white Burmese. Then she stood up and opened the door for her feline friends.

The cats descended a straight, steep, thirty-step staircase and came to an open fire exit onto the main roof of the museum. Nimbly they leaped out onto the slated tiles there and, in an ordered fashion, trotted along the full length of the roof down to the museum’s central towers. Here, traversing the triangular peak of the roof, they came to the front of the museum, where they negotiated a wrought-iron fire escape that descended until they were at ground-floor level. They each leaped onto a balcony and walked along a thin, granite windowsill before hopping from the head of an ugly stone gargoyle onto the bare branch of a tree in front of the museum. Soon the procession of cats had snaked its way down to the cold pavement of Brompton Road.

A big red double-decker bus stopped at the light, and all four cats sprung on board.

“Oh, my word!” exclaimed the Jamaican bus conductor.

“Ah, look at those sweet cats!” cried an eight-year-old girl on her way home from school.

A wobbly-chinned woman, surrounded by shopping bags, looked up. “How extraordinary!” she said.

“MIAAWW!” screeched Miss Oakkton, the orange cat, swiping at the child with her claws. Miss Teriyaki, the Siamese, hissed and leaped forward aggressively. The girl shrieked and stumbled backward so that her purple-felt school hat fell off.

“Blood clot!” the conductor gasped. “Like a bunch of witches’ cats, I’d say. Are you all right, sweetheart? Best to leave ’em alone.”

And so the bus pulled away. The people on it nervously eyed the feline passengers. The four cats—the white Burmese, the gray Siamese, the fluffy white Persian, and the huge orange cat—sat beside the stairs near the vehicle’s open back. Then, at Knightsbridge, they stood up, raised their noses to the air, and disembarked.

AH2 pulled up his collar as another gust of cold air blew through the street. He’d followed Molly Moon and the boy who looked like her brother out of the natural history museum. He had hailed a cab to tail theirs, but with the heavy late-afternoon traffic, his black taxi had lost them. With his tracking device, however, AH2 could of course deduce exactly where Molly Moon was. And so he had switched it on and made his way through the crowded pavements after her.

It was odd. Molly Moon and her accomplice were inside a smart old building that bore the sign BLACK’S CASINO, ESTABLISHED 1928. What an eleven-year-old girl could need to do inside a casino was beyond AH2. Then again, he considered, digging his hands deep into his pockets, she was really an alien. And the brother was probably an alien, too. Maybe the place was a nest of aliens. As AH2 grew dizzy watching early gamblers entering the casino through its cylindrical rotating door, his imagination took flight. It would be incredible, he thought, if he were to uncover an alien headquarters. AH2 imagined himself interviewed on news programs, his face transmitted to televisions all over the world. He’d be a hero.

“All those years of knowing aliens were here with no one believing you!” he pictured the news journalist saying. “How did you cope?” AH2’s mind spun off into a fantasy.

“I had a very strong gut feeling,” he imagined himself saying. “And coupled with the proof I was collecting, I was confident that I’d be able to prove to the world that aliens had arrived.”

“Well, it’s truly impressive,” the interviewer would reply. “I’m sure everyone watching would like to personally shake you by the hand and thank you.”

AH2 was awakened from his daydream by something gliding past his feet. He looked down to see an extraordinary sight. Four cats—two white, a ginger, and a gray—slipped quietly past him as though following one another. Hiding in the shadows for a moment until the casino doorman had his back turned, they then all leaped toward the tiny alley that ran alongside the casino. One, two, three, and lastly the fourth cat disappeared around the corner of the alley before anyone else noticed them.

AH2’s fantasy that this place was a den of aliens suddenly became concrete.

“Bingo!” he said under his breath.

Twenty minutes earlier, a cab had dropped off Molly and Micky at the end of the street. “There it is, luv,” the Cockney cabby had directed them. “Gambling’s not good for you, though. Don’t spend all yer pocket money!”

Micky and Molly paid him and thanked him. They paused as he drove away, then stood still to watch the casino entrance.

“Here we go,” said Molly. “Remember, Micky, we’re Lily Black’s friends, so behave like a seven-year-old.”

“This is crazy,” Micky replied. “If just being kids doesn’t work, use your hypnotism, will you, Molly?”

Molly looked at her brother. He was licking his lips nervously. “If you don’t want to come in, don’t worry, Micky. You could wait out here, and I’ll go in on my own. It won’t take long, and you’ll be safe here.”

Micky shook his head.

“I’ve read so many adventure stories,” he mulled. “Hundreds, probably. From ones set in medieval times to ones set far in the future. Space adventures, cowboy adventures, war adventures, survival adventures—”

“That’s why you know so much stuff,” Molly interrupted.

Micky nodded. “Suppose now is the time to be in an adventure.”

“Sure?” Molly said, smiling with amusement at her brother’s logic.

“Yes, sure,” Micky answered with his mind made up. “Let’s do it.”

The siblings ascended the casino’s short steps to where one of the guards stood, brushing dandruff off the shoulders of his suit jacket.

“Excuse me,” Molly began. “Is this Lily Black’s, um…house? We’ve come for a playdate.”

Micky interrupted her. “Don’t be silly, Matilda. I told you this can’t be Lily’s house. This isn’t a house, it’s a shop. Oh, Matilda, we’re lost. I want my mum!”

The unsuspecting doorman looked down.

“Hey, little fella, don’t worry, this is Lily’s house. She lives here till her dad takes her home, so if you’ve come for a playdate, you’ve come to the right place. Come in!”

“Oh, fanks!” said Micky, smiling up sweetly at the guard. “Does Lily have sweets here?”

The guard laughed and ushered the kids through. “Should think so, knowing Miss Lily!” He chuckled. He pointed into the casino. “Walk straight over there and around that corner, and her room is the second on the left.”

“Okay, thanks, mister!”

Molly and Micky walked through the revolving door.

“Brilliant, Micky,” Molly said, smiling. “You’ve got talent.”

And so the children padded into the casino. Only seven steps inside, and they felt as though they were in a twilight world—a place of neither day nor night. For the casino was windowless and void of natural light. Instead it glittered with golden lamps and imitation candlelight. The floor’s green carpet was filled with a copper-threaded coin pattern that gave the impression that money had been strewn all over the ground. The walls were a pale green, decorated in the trompe l’oeil fashion: An artist had painted fake columns with plants on top of them and views of a garden behind. These views were executed to look three-dimensional so that it really seemed that the casino was set in a weird paradise.

Gamblers of all nationalities sat concentrating on their card games. And shiny silver balls clattered on spinning roulette wheels before they found resting places. Molly and Micky walked silently by them, along the side passage that ajoined the gambling room.

“Looks fun!” said Micky. “Pity we can’t have a go.”

“Come on, Micky. Cameras are everywhere. We don’t want Mr. Black spotting us.”

She pulled him behind a slot machine. “Some people call these machines one-arm bandits,” she said, discreetly pulling out the casino map Miss Hunroe had given her, “because the handle you pull is like an arm, and like a bandit, the machines steal your money.” She quickly looked at the map. “So we need to go over there.” Molly gestured toward the corner of the casino. “That’s where the vent grille is. Once inside that we can crawl through the vent to his office. She smiled at Micky. “No locks, no guards.”

“What if Black’s already seen us via one of the casino cameras?” Micky whispered, his voice now wobbling slightly with worry.

“If he has, we are in trouble,” said Molly. “So let’s get this thing done quickly.”

The children both took a deep breath and began to cross the casino floor, walking swiftly from slot machine to slot machine toward the corner of the room. However, when they got there, to their horror, another guard, shorter and brawnier than the door guard, stepped from behind a pillar to obstruct their way.

“Hello, you two. Come to see Miss Lily?” he asked.

“Erm, yes,” Micky said. “The man at the door told us her room is round that corner.”

The guard shook his head. “Not exactly. But I will take you to her. First, though, you have to say good afternoon to Mr. Black.”

Molly gulped. Micky’s eyes widened. Molly saw that her hypnotism was needed. She only hoped that Mr. Black hadn’t hypnotized this man so that he was unhypnotizable. She wondered whether the man was suspicious enough of them to put on his anti-hypnotism glasses. She could see them poking out of his jacket’s front pocket.

“And will Mr. Black give us some sweets?” Micky asked, buying Molly time.

Molly looked at the man and considered his frowning forehead, his muscley body, and his officialness. Feeling what it was like to be him, she found it easy to stare up at him and tune into him. Then Molly turned her green eyes on. At once, their hypnotic power shot toward him straight into his eyeballs. His eyes widened. Molly felt him bridle. There was some resistance there. But now she’d started, she couldn’t give up.

Micky watched as Molly’s eyes strained and as the skin between her eyebrows furrowed.

He saw her jaw clench as she bit her teeth together, trying to concentrate.

Molly could feel a slight weakness in the man, as though the instructions that he’d been given, of not to be hypnotized, weren’t 100 percent firm. Black had obviously thought that the quality of his hypnotism would be enough to bar Miss Hunroe or her friends from controlling his guard. But Black hadn’t reckoned on Molly. Perhaps he hadn’t come across a hypnotist with Molly’s power before. She hoped Black’s instructions weren’t locked in.

As far as the guard was concerned, Molly’s green, closely set eyes were like alluring green beacons that he could neither ignore nor resist. Like super magnets, they pulled him in. Their green, throbbing pulse seemed to match the speed of his own heartbeat and fix him to the spot.

Molly felt the fusion feeling warm her body.

“Brilliant. The fusion feeling,” she said under her breath.

“The what?” Micky whispered.

“It’s a feeling I get, a kind of warm tingling feeling all over my body that makes me know that I’ve managed to hypnotize someone. You’ll get it too when you learn. I’m looking forward to teaching you how.”

“So is he hypnotized?”

“Yup. Cooked.”

Whatever this messy-haired girl suggested, the guard had to agree with her. He wanted to treat her like a princess and her friend like a prince.

“Yes, certainly,” he found himself saying. “Lots of sweets. Toffees, truffles, hard candy. I can get them for you now.”

“Don’t worry about the sweets,” Molly said, keeping her eyes firmly on him. “Micky, tell him what we want him to do.”

Micky’s eyes widened, for he hadn’t expected this. “What, like hypnotic instructions?” he asked. Molly nodded.

“Make it quick.”

“Um, okay. Right. Um, so, mister, listen to this. We are going to climb through a ventilator shaft. We want you to take the cover off it, then to stand guard and put it back on when we come back through. And once we are out of your sight, you will forget that you ever saw us here; you will forget that you were hypnotized.”

The man nodded obediently.

“Nice.” Molly smiled encouragingly at Micky. Then, without batting an eye, the guard led Molly and Micky to the wall where their chosen vent was. Soon he was tugging at its cover and pulling off the metal grating. Hurriedly the twins climbed in. The space was only just big enough for them. Micky pulled the vent cover in behind him and placed it on the inside floor of the tiny passage, so that the opening was unobstructed for their return. Outside the vent, the guard resumed his position.

“Don’t kick my face,” Micky said as he crawled with Molly’s sneakers almost hitting his nose. “I can’t believe we’re in here. It smells.” Micky sneezed.

“Shh,” Molly whispered. “Sound travels in these pipes.”

The vent duct was dark now, but ahead was a glow where another grille brought in light from the casino. And so the twins began to crawl toward this. When they reached it, Molly stopped, and since the vent went in two directions, she and Micky were able to sit side by side.

Molly pointed through the vent to a roulette table below, where three rich Chinese people sat. Two smartly dressed businessmen and their velvet-suited lady friend sat on smooth-backed stools with piles of betting chips stacked on the green baize table before them.

“Look! That chip’s worth a thousand pounds!” Molly observed. “And she’s got about fifty of them.”

“And,” Micky noticed, “if the ball lands on a black number, she’ll win quite a few more.”

The croupier, a man in a dark waistcoat and a starched shirt and black trousers, stood calm and official behind the spinning roulette wheel. The little silver ball tittled and tattled, as though gossiping with the numbers on the roulette wheel as it spun. Then it stopped. For a few seconds it was impossible to see what color it had landed on, for the wheel was still a rotating blur.

“Red, fifty-two,” the croupier announced. Without a glimmer of emotion, he swept all the gambling chips off the numbered felt toward a slit in the table’s surface, through which the chips disappeared.

“Black must make a fortune!” Molly whispered.

“Just like a one-armed bandit,” said Micky.

“Yup. He’s an ugly bandit,” Molly agreed. “Come on, let’s get the book.”

The twins followed the vent up a slope and around a corner. Now it was dark again, and to make things worse, a cold breeze was blowing as the casino’s air conditioning blew through the vent. It made the tight passage like an arctic wind tunnel.

Finally they reached the grille. And true to Miss Hunroe’s plans, this vent looked down on Black’s casino office. Molly and Micky peered down. A glass kidney-shaped lamp with a brass stem lit the room, its warm glow making the green leather-topped desk and the paneled walls tinge with gold. A narrow slit window onto an alley outside let in a little more light from the street.

“Empty! Perfect,” Molly exclaimed, and she and Micky began easing off the metal grille.

“Bet I can punch it through,” Micky decided. “You hold it so it doesn’t fall out into the office.” Seconds later the grille had given way and Molly was quietly pulling it into the duct.

“After you,” Micky said.

Maneuvering herself so that her legs went first, Molly dropped into the room. Micky followed, and at once they set to work. Molly quickly began to lift pictures off the walls, peering behind them to see where the safe was.

“Maybe it’s under the carpet,” Micky whispered, lifting the corner of a Persian rug from the floor.

Molly opened the central drawer of the desk. And as though the heat of an oven had just hit her in the face, she stumbled backward.

“What is it?” Micky asked worriedly. Then, looking into the drawer himself, he uttered a sigh. “Wow!”

For there, almost so carelessly deposited that it seemed like it must be a trap, lay the book. Its brown leather cover, heavy with inlaid stones, had golden embossed words that read Hypnotism, Volume Two: The Advanced Arts.

Molly ran her fingers inside the indentation in the top right-hand corner of the leather cover and remembered Miss Speal’s stolen stone.

With a shaking hand, and full of respect for the book, Molly opened it.