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.