Feeling refreshed, she opened her eyes. She took one of the baguettes out of a shopping bag and ripped off its end. Opening a new ketchup bottle, she knocked some sauce onto it. For a few minutes, Molly munched her favorite snack and looked out over the river.
On the far bank there were fenced-off gardens with terraced cottages behind them. One garden was larger than the others. It seemed to have two cottages behind it. Some dense green hedges, clipped into the shapes of sitting birds and animals, had recently sprung up in this garden. On the top of one hedge, a huge bird with a long tail was shaped out of branches and leaves, and beside it was a crouching box-hedge hare with two distinct ears. On the top of a yew bush sat a big dog with large hollow eyes, looking as if he was guarding the house.
The spring sunshine danced over the shiny foliage of the bush dog. As the light bounced off a glossy twig where his mouth might have been, the creature seemed to smile at Molly.
Molly remembered how exciting it had been when she’d first hypnotized Petula last November. She sighed and popped the last piece of ketchuppy bread into her mouth. It was so difficult keeping her promise not to hypnotize. It was like resisting the urge to walk on your hands once you’d learned, or like stamping on the impulse to jump high when you actually had the power to leapfrog a tree. Molly longed to experience again the warm “fusion feeling” that washed through her whenever she let her eyes reach their hypnotic peak.
Now, as the dog’s leafy eye twinkled at her, Molly was struck by an idea. She had only promised Rocky not to hypnotize any one. She had never promised not to hypnotize things.
The fusion feeling was lovely. It made Molly feel as if a tropical sun flowed in her veins. The voice in her head urged her on.
Go on, give it a try, Molly. It’ll warm you up. Hypnotize the bush dog. What are you afraid of? That it’ll jump over the river and bite you? Molly stared at the bush. Hypnotize a bush? A bush couldn’t be hypnotized.
Exactly, urged her mind. But it will make you feel nice.
So, winding down the window, Molly focused in her special way at the topiary dog. She found the faraway feeling inside herself that made everything apart from the dog-shaped bush look blurred. Then she searched for the feeling of bush in herself, and the more she stared at the bush, the more the leaves of the dog seemed to absorb her and the more the sounds of the town grew muffled.
Molly felt naughty. Rocky wouldn’t be pleased if he knew she was doing this. She’d have to do it quickly before he got back. She waited for the fusion sensation to slowly rise through her body. For a moment nothing happened. Then a hint of the feeling began, as if sparks of electricity were traveling up her backbone into her head, to behind her eyes, where they circled and throbbed. Her mind felt slightly fizzy, and tiny zapping noises seemed to pop just inside her ears.
But somehow, something was different. The sensation flaring up in her was not the familiar fusion feeling. As Molly stared at the dog, her eyes pulsing, the sensation seemed to twist and mutate. Instead of being a warm tingling, it turned into an icy-cold prickling under her skin, giving her goose pimples all over. Molly gasped in shock and immediately snapped out of her trance.
A sharp clip, clip, clipping noise from across the river reached her ears, and Molly noticed a pair of steel shears snapping shut under the beak of the big topiary bird. She couldn’t see the gardener, but whoever he was, he seemed intent upon keeping his bushes trimmed and tidy, keen to control the wild growth of the privet-hedge creatures.
In the side mirror, Molly saw fat Mrs. Trinklebury wrapped in her crocheted coat, lugging bags of wool back toward the car. Molly’s hypnotic experiments would have to wait.
As Mrs. Trinklebury approached, Molly saw that she was looking very flustered.
“Just look at this t-terrible news,” she declared, dropping a newspaper on Molly’s lap.
The paper shouted out its headline.
Child Star Disappears
Underneath, there was a photograph of Davina Nuttel, dressed in an astronaut costume for her role in Stars on Mars.
Davina Nuttel missing from outside her Manhattan home.
Mink glove found at scene.
New York police treating the case as abduction.
Mrs. Trinklebury was beside herself with worry. “The poor girl. Her poor p-parents. Can you imagine it, Molly?”
Molly could easily. She’d had firsthand experience of kidnaping, since her very own Petula had been abducted in New York. But she’d also actually met the famous Davina Nuttel, so the news was extra shocking. Even though Molly hadn’t liked Davina much, she felt genuinely concerned for her now.
“That’s horrible!” she gulped.
“See, life for the famous isn’t all fun,” said Mrs. Trinklebury, and tutting like a chaffinch, she plonked a cakey kiss on Molly’s forehead.
“I’m p-peckish, aren’t you? I hope Mr. N.’s cooking l-lunch. Look, I’ve got a v-video for us all to watch this afternoon. It’s got Gloria Heelheart in it. It’s the one she won her Best Actress award for last year. She’s marvelous. It’ll take our minds off Davina.”
As they drove home, Mrs. Trinklebury sang along to the radio, trying to cheer herself up. She was thrilled that the child pop star Billy Bob Bimble was number one with his hit single “Magpie Man.”
“Don’t let him steal your heart,” she trilled along,
“Steal it,
Steel your heart, oooooooooh,
Don’t let him have your heart,
Guard it from the start, oooooooh,
Steel your heart,
Magpie man, oooooh,
Wants the sun and the stars and you, ooooh,
Magpie man.”
Twenty minutes later they arrived at Happiness House. The front of the building was crisscrossed with scaffolding poles. Half of the building was a pristine white, while the other half was still its old, gray, flaky self.
Petula shot out the front door like a black furry missile. She jumped onto Molly’s lap, wagging her curly, stumpy tail, and dropped a present of a stone. Then she turned around, raced back across the gravel, and came out of the house with a letter between her teeth.
“Thank you, Petula,” said Molly, taking the soggy envelope and peering at it.
Molly’s name had been printed in neat letters in green ink, but they had smudged. And the address had been licked off. Obviously Petula had been looking after the envelope for a while.
“Help me with these bags, could you, Molly?” asked Rocky. “They’re so heavy, they’re cutting into my fingers.”
Molly put the envelope into her pocket and took a bag from him. That was why she didn’t read the letter until later.
Four
All her life, Molly’s home had been a dump. But recently the dump had been given a facelift. Now Happiness House was completely different inside. For instance, the oak-paneled sitting room, which for so long had been a drafty assembly hall, had new rugs on the floor and pictures on the walls. Comfy armchairs and sofas and tables with books on them filled it. A log fire that was always lit in the daytime kept it warm. It smelled of beeswax polish, and today it looked very pretty, with pink apple blossoms in vases, taken from the wild orchard just outside Hardwick village. At one end stood a Ping-Pong table and at the other a trampoline.
After Molly, Rocky, and Mrs. Trinklebury had put away the groceries, it was time for lunch. Mr. Nockman stood in the dining room behind the food counter, with the steam from hot vegetables, sausages, and potatoes wafting up into his face. He looked ten times better than he had when Molly first knew him. His face was much slimmer, with visible cheekbones, and it had a healthy, ruddy complexion. His eyes had whites that were white—not yellow and bloodshot—and his bald pate was shiny and clean.
Today he was wearing a pair of baggy gray flannel trousers and a blue zip-up cardigan with a thick red stripe down the back of it. From his shoulder, his favorite parakeet, Chicken Tikka, whistled merrily, occasionally hopping sideways to give him a friendly peck
on the ear. All in all, the new, retrained Nockman was happier than he had ever been in his life.
He put three perfectly cooked sausages that he had been saving onto Mrs. Trinklebury’s plate.
“Vould you like beans, my dear?” he asked her in his strange German accent—actually an accent that Molly had hypnotized him to have.
“Oh, thank you, Simon,” she said as she folded a napkin for him into the shape of a bird.
After lunch, everyone crowded into the small TV room. Mrs. Trinklebury sat in the armchair, and everyone else found a beanbag or a slice of floor to sit on.
Nockman shook the old video machine to get it working, and Mrs. Trinklebury’s film, The Sighing Summer, began.
Apart from an interval when three of Gerry’s mice escaped from his shirt, everyone was glued to the film for two hours. As the final scene played itself out, with Gloria Heelheart throwing herself off a cliff into the sea, Mrs. Trinklebury wept and Molly reached into her pocket to find her some tissues.
Rediscovering the letter Petula had brought her, Molly slipped out of the room to read it. Petula followed her. They climbed to the top of the stairs, where they both sat down.
Molly ripped open the envelope. Inside was a piece of paper, slightly chewed, with the address:
14 Water Meadows Road
Briersville
Underneath, in green ink, was a message that made Molly’s heart flutter with excitement and at the same time filled her with relief.
Friday
Dear Molly,
Sorry not to be in touch before now, but I’ve been in the hospital, as I had an accident. Don’t worry, I’m all right, although for a while it was touch and go. I’m back home and would like to see you. I’ll tell you all my news, but more importantly, I’m longing to hear about your adventures with hypnotism.
Also, there is something rather important that I would like you to do.
Why don’t you come for tea on Sunday at four?
I’ll see you if I see you…. Hope I do…. Perfectly punctually?!
Best wishes,
Lucy Logan
“Wow—how about that, Petula?” Molly said, giving her a squeeze. She was really pleased. At last she was in touch with Lucy Logan again. Molly couldn’t wait to see her. She wondered what had made her hand in her notice at the library, and she still thought it odd that Lucy hadn’t called her, but perhaps she’d been in the hospital all this time.
Molly remembered how she had drifted like a snowflake into the library in the dead of night on Christmas Eve to return the mysterious Book of Hypnotism as Lucy had hypnotized her to. Lucy had woken her from her hypnotic instruction with the words perfectly punctually. Molly smiled as she read the same words in Lucy’s letter.
Molly wondered what Lucy could want her to do. She wanted to thank Lucy, to tell her about New York, and to talk hypnotism with her. There was one other big reason too.
Keeping her promise not to hypnotize anyone really was driving Molly up the wall. It wasn’t only frustrating. The thought of never being able to use her powers again was beginning to make Molly feel bereaved, as if something in her had died.
Lucy had told Molly that she used hypnotism to do good things for other people. Molly and Rocky had done their own sort of good hypnotism before they’d left New York. They’d made a hypnotic TV commercial called “Check Out the Kids in Your Neighborhood.” They thought it would make people who watched it care more about the children around them. The TV company had promised to show it a lot, and so it had probably done some good. Molly wanted to ask Lucy to tell Rocky that generous, unselfish hypnotism was okay. Then he might agree to break the hypnotizing ban that they’d made. She’d need to explain this all to Lucy without Rocky being there.
For this reason, Molly decided to go to 14 Water Meadows Road alone.
Five
Sunday morning was so bright and shiny that the glossy-leaved trees outside Molly’s window looked wet. Molly breathed in the frosty air and felt really thrilled. Today she was going to Lucy Logan’s for tea.
As two thrushes landed on a prickly, red-berried shrub and began pecking at its fruit, Molly noticed Roger Fibbin’s skinny form scrabbling about in the dead leaves and broken twigs under the oak tree. With his beaky nose and his jerky movements, he looked like a bird pecking around for grubs. He was probably looking for a magical doorway to another world.
Roger had gone a bit mad. He seemed to live in a scary fantasyland where the leaves and stones whispered to him. He roamed the town listening for secret messages, and he made folded-paper darts that had writing inside them. They said things like Send help quick! Aliens have eaten my brain! and Watch out! The brain centipedes are here! and Don’t judge your body by its skin.
These he threw around Briersville—through people’s mailboxes, over garden walls, into cars and shops. Once, he managed to slip in through the exit door of the cinema and throw fifty of his darts into the audience.
Molly wondered whether the peculiar habit he’d developed—of eating from the Briersville garbage cans—had given him some sort of brain infection, but the doctor said that all he needed was rest, good food, and kindness.
Molly undid the window and called out, “Roger, are you all right?”
Roger looked up nervously and then glanced over his shoulder to check that no one was listening. “Yes, they can’t get me today.”
“Do you want to go for a bike ride?”
“Can’t, Molly. Too much to do. Maybe another day.”
“Okay, you just let me know when. It would be good fun.”
She shut the window and wondered whether Roger would ever get better.
The morning tipped into the afternoon.
It was a lovely, fresh, downhill bike ride into Briersville. The roadside was bursting with young green shoots, crocuses and daffodils, and the sky was blue. Blossoming trees nodded in the clear March breeze. Other trees were still cold and bare, but the tips of their branches were tinged with dark pink, where new leaves were nearly ready to break out.
Molly cycled past Hardwick village, down the winding road between fields full of cows, past Briersville Junior School, and into the town. Since it was Sunday, it was very quiet. The Guildhall, with its green pepperpot roof, was closed, and the broad street was deserted.
Water Meadows Road was a narrow, cobbled street, across the bridge and down a turn to the right. Number fourteen was a bay-windowed cottage in a row of very old houses. Molly leaned her bicycle against its front wall and, grasping the lion’s-paw knocker on the door, rapped twice. Unzipping her jacket, she looked down at her T-shirt and noticed some gravy that she’d spilled on it at lunchtime. She was trying to suck this off when the door slowly opened. Molly let the shirt drop from her mouth.
In front of her was a shocking sight: a figure from a horror film, yet wearing the neat, pleated skirt, the white collared shirt, and the plain blue cardigan of Lucy Logan. Its entire head was wrapped in white bandages, except for a patch of hair that was arranged in an elegant bun. Molly could see Lucy Logan’s familiar blue eyes and her mouth, but the rest of her face was covered with some sort of dressing.
Lucy stood leaning on crutches. Her left foot was in a slipper, but the whole of her right leg was in plaster, and her toes, with pink nail polish on them, popped out of the end of the cast.
Molly’s first reaction was to gawp, and for a moment she stood transfixed.
“Oh, Molly, I’m sorry. Of course, this must be an awful shock for you.”
Molly barely recognized Lucy’s voice, but she nodded and managed to say, “Are you all right? What happened?”
Lucy leaned out into the street and nervously looked left and right. Then she pulled Molly inside.
“I’ll tell you all about it, but come in quick—my toes are getting cold.”
Molly found herself standing in a small hall. On a semicircular cherry-wood table, a mantel clock ticked quietly. Opposite it, a tiny hanging grandmother clock swung a pendulum. As Lucy too
k Molly’s jacket and put it over the back of a chair, Molly breathed in a smell of toast and wondered why her host had just behaved so warily.
“Come into the warmth,” Lucy said, maneuvering awkwardly on her crutches and leading Molly past a narrow staircase into a meticulously tidy kitchen. It was so immaculate that Molly looked down at her gravy stain and wished she’d changed her top.
“Sit down,” Lucy said kindly, inviting Molly to sit on a crescent-shaped bench in the bay window. “Do you drink tea?”
“Er, hot orange squash if you’ve got it,” said Molly, not quite daring to ask for a concentrated orange squash, which she would have preferred. She didn’t want Lucy to think she was weird.
“Fine,” said Lucy, and she put a kettle on to boil.
Molly sat on the bench with her hands wedged between her knees, trying not to stare at Lucy’s bandages. What sort of horrible accident had she had? Molly didn’t know what to say, and the palms of her hands began to sweat, as they always did whenever she was nervous. Lucy broke the silence.
“Molly, I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch. You must have thought it was peculiar that I didn’t call you. But two things happened. First, something very serious took over my life and I couldn’t tell anyone about it. And then I had the accident. My car caught fire. My face is badly burned. I still can’t eat much—I have to suck soup from a straw and chew on cookies that dissolve in my mouth. My throat was damaged from all the fumes. My voice has been affected, as you can hear. It’s probably always going to be husky. The doctors say my face will be scarred for life and my hair will never grow back in places. But”—she gave a lopsided smile—“I’m lucky to be alive, and now I don’t take life for granted.”
Molly was shocked into an awkward silence. In the last few months, she had felt annoyed and hurt that Lucy had forgotten her. She had never imagined that something as horrible as this had happened.
“Don’t worry about not getting in touch,” she said quickly. “I mean, I did wonder where you’d gone, but you know I was busy straightening out the orphanage—the redecorations and things. And it’s all thanks to you, Lucy. Everything’s much cozier now. Everyone’s happier. School’s much better too, because Mrs. Toadley left. Well, er, actually she was fired.”