by Georgia Byng
As she did, a nervous scent that she recognized caught the very edges of her smelling vision. It conjured up pictures of the turbaned man. He was getting closer by the second. Petula barked at Molly to warn her.
“We won’t fall off, Petula. I’ll hold you tight,” Molly said.
They found some space on the third carriage of the train and settled down. The engine at the front let out a whistle and covered them in steam. An Indian girl beside them let out a shriek of laughter, but Molly suddenly became apprehensive.
“Don’t worry,” Ojas assured them all. “Hold on and duck whenever we go under bridges. You’ll be fine.” He shut his eyes, put his hands together, and began mumbling prayers.
On the platform the Stationmaster blew his whistle, and the engine made its much louder reply with a piercing screech. Then an arduous chuff-chuffing began. The long metal coupling rods that moved the wheels started to slowly turn, and the train began to move.
They edged out of the station and Molly surveyed the scene behind them. For a moment she thought she saw Zackya arriving in a wheel-less, stretcherlike litter carried by four servants, but the train was accelerating fast now and as it turned a corner she lost sight of him. She wondered whether fear had made her imagine it.
Soon the journey blew Zackya from her mind. She watched the landscape about her turn golden as they moved southwest toward Jaipur. Molly thought of Waqt up the track ahead of them. She hadn’t the foggiest clue what he was planning. She only hoped that his plans didn’t include killing any of the Mollys he had taken traveling with him. Molly’s fingers involuntarily shot to her mouth and she bit them as she questioned what would happen to her now if he did kill one of her former selves. As the veil on her head flapped in the wind, her imagination began to whirl. If Waqt chopped a finger off the six-year-old, she wondered, would she now suddenly have a long-healed stump? She touched the scar on her neck. What had caused it? It was obviously from a cut that had originally been fairly deep. Why had her memories disappeared when she’d traveled forward to the next century, but this scar had appeared? Where were the memories that went with the scar?
And, as the hours passed, a new question germinated in Molly’s mind. Why was Waqt so keen to keep the baby Molly as a child for himself? Why wouldn’t the three-year-old, the six-year-old, or even the ten-year-old do? Maybe it was because the baby would have absolutely no memories of her life at Hardwick House. But the suspicion that ate at her was that the reason he didn’t want to adopt the older Mollys was that there was something wrong with them. Ever since Lucy Logan had been so unenthusiastic about being reunited with her long-lost daughter, Molly had begun to feel that it must be because she, Molly, wasn’t good enough. And now Waqt was sending her the same message—that Molly wasn’t the sort of person you’d want to discover was your daughter or, in Waqt’s case, adopt. This made Molly feel bad.
As the sun shone down in her face, furnace hot, Molly was comforted by new memories of her trip to Jaipur as a ten-year-old. So she knew that, at least so far, Waqt was treating her other selves reasonably well.
The train snaked across the dry Indian landscape. Smoke from the locomotive trailed above their heads. The wind threatened to blow everyone off, and Petula’s ears flapped like wings. Forest’s dreadlocks thudded against his cheeks. He smiled, looking out through his lashes at the beautiful, sun-baked hilly countryside around them.
They saw wild boar scrabbling among bushes. They even caught a glimpse of a leopard as it streaked across a hillside for cover. Ojas had to shout over the wind for his voice to be heard.
“If you look carefully, you may see a tiger! Or a rhinoceros! And look at that herd of elephants at that watering hole! I told you this was the best way to ride.”
The countryside was teeming with animals. Herds of deer took off in fright as the train roared past. A bear nodded at them from a hilltop, his forelegs against a tree where a bees’ nest hung.
The train came to a small rural station and stopped, its mission to pick up parcels and sacks. On the platform were people waiting to sell food to whoever could pay. Molly could smell curries and warm bread. Ojas took some of their money and jumped down to fetch them a meal and fresh water.
Petula shook her head and wiped a paw across her dusty muzzle. She watched Ojas picking a path across the platform toward the stall that smelled of onions and bread. She deduced that the train was going to be stopped for a while and saw an opportunity to stretch her legs.
She stood up, shook herself off, and yawned. Then she headed up the train.
She walked by a cage full of chickens that panicked and clucked. Petula gave one of them a hypnotic stare. As she went past the passengers squashed together on the roof, hands shot out to stroke her. One old lady gave her a succulent piece of lamb. Petula nodded and took it gratefully. A small boy offered her a slice of mango. Petula declined, but barked a thank-you.
At the end of the train, Petula took a quick look at the top of the engine and sniffed. She could just make out the driver’s packed lunch. He seemed to be having something with cheese.
Then she made her way back down the train. People were just as friendly as they had been on the way up. The people here were wonderful, Petula thought. If it wasn’t for the giant and his helper, this would really be one of the nicest places she’d ever visited. She could see Molly now, standing up, looking for her. She barked and Molly saw her.
Just then a sudden strong smell hit Petula’s nose. It was a dreadful stink. Petula recognized who it came from. It was the nervous, impatient odor of their kidnaper—but with the smell of bad eggs on top. It was coming from the carriage directly below Molly.
Petula began to run. She must warn Molly.
Molly looked for Petula and spotted her heading off up the train. Just then, it dawned on her that her memories had changed.
Forest and Rocky both glanced at her.
“Hey, man,” said Forest. “Have you just had your mind rearranged? I just remembered that old Zackya got on this train, too.”
“So did I,” said Rocky.
“And me,” agreed Molly. “I remember seeing him get into the carriage below us. And we all ducked so he wouldn’t see us. As we left Delhi I thought I saw him arrive at the station. He obviously missed the train…”
“… and he has orders to catch up with Waqt…” added Rocky.
“… so he went back in time to jump on this train before it left. And that’s why we are suddenly seeing him in our memories. He’s changed our past as well as his own.”
“That’s amazing, man. My brain does a loop-the-loop just thinkin’ about it.” Forest went cross-eyed as he tried to understand.
“Luckily Zackya doesn’t know that Ojas is our friend.” Molly put her hand on her stomach as she remembered Zackya’s purple metal capsule. “I hope his tracker can find only the time that a person is in, not the place. Otherwise, if he switches it on, he’ll realize we’re right above him.”
Molly watched Petula running along the train roof toward her.
“Slow down, Petula,” she said under her breath. “You don’t want to fall off.”
Petula arrived, panting, and at once began pawing the train.
“Ojas is getting some water,” Molly said. “And food.”
Petula sighed. She stared down at the metal roof and wished she could see through it.
In the carriage below them, Zackya was lying flat out on the train banquette, asleep. The powder that the tea lady had sprinkled in his chai had already begun to work, and his stomach bubbled. In his pocket his slim, futuristic gadget lay switched off. He had given up on it as it seemed to have overheated. Two red-faced women in crinolines sat opposite, looking extremely cross and cooling themselves with ivory fans. They were disgusted both by this man’s rudeness and at their husbands’ timid behavior. Their waistcoated husbands stood at the door smiling stupidly, looking as though they’d been hypnotized, which of course they had.
“I must say,” one woman manage
d to say from under her netted hat, “you have the manners of a wild boar.”
As if in agreement, Zackya farted, gave a snort, and then continued snoring. An absolutely rotten pong filled the air.
“This is too much!” The ladies held handkerchiefs to their noses and, coughing, they left.
Ojas came back with water, some roti breads, and a simple mixed-vegetable curry. They ate quickly, as eating on top of the moving train would definitely be a see-if-you-can-eat-in-the-wind experiment. And then, with a whistle, the train started again.
From the top of the train they saw avenues of trees and distant compounds of bungalows where the British lived, and simple Indian villages. They saw grand palaces belonging to rich Indians and ancient Hindu temples that looked like those sandcastles that are made by dripping watery sand onto one spot in a lumpy pile. They saw Indian soldiers dressed in Victorian uniforms, and occasionally British officers and cavalrymen on horseback. They passed colorful crowds performing religious puja ceremonies outside temples and they went by hundreds of fields where Indian farming families worked. Finally, after seven long, hot hours, they arrived in Jaipur.
Molly and her friends sat still as everyone else disembarked. Their ears were still ringing from the wind, and their faces were sunburned, as well as dry and dirty from dust and engine smoke. Molly watched carefully until finally she saw Zackya emerge into the crowd. He was walking in an odd way—as if he had something wrong with his trousers. Indeed he did. While he’d been asleep, the tea lady’s powder had caused an unfortunate explosion from his rear end. The crowd parted as he passed and Molly noticed three Indian children holding their noses and pointing at him, giggling. Zackya wove his way to a taxi stand and barged to the front of the long line. Two smart British officials and their overdressed wives objected loudly, but were soon quelled by a dose of hypnotism. Zackya climbed into a carriage and pointed in the direction he wanted to go.
However, before his man-drawn carriage set off, three teenage boys approached it. They raised their hands and threw what looked like packets of flour at Zackya. These exploded on impact, drenching him in colored dye—crimson, orange, and blue. The teenagers hopped around laughing as Zackya stood up and swore at them.
“What was that all about?” asked Rocky as the carriage left.
Ojas laughed. “In March India celebrates the festival of Holi. A lot of colored ink is thrown about. How do you think my tunic that I was wearing before was stained so bright? In Delhi, the celebrations are nearly over, but it seems that here they are still having fun.”
Finally, wet with blue, red, and yellow dyes that had been thrown at them while they were waiting in the line for a carriage, everyone piled into a buffalo-pulled wagon. Ojas had discovered that Zackya was headed in the direction of a place called the Amber Palace, so he instructed the old farmer driving them to follow him there.
As they left the station they saw the Holi festival in full swing. Dancing girls entertained a crowd. Others sang happy Holi songs. People chased and spattered one another, or fired colored dye through odd nineteenth-century water pistols. They were all whooping and laughing.
The wagon rolled out of the town to where the roads were banked with plumed grass and the fields were full of sugarcane. They passed through groves of trees where big fat pods hung from branches and tethered goats grazed. Forest pointed out mango trees and pistachio-nut trees and a snake that no one else saw, then dropped into silence. Everyone was exhausted—partly from the long train journey but mostly, for Molly, Rocky, and Forest, because time traveling was in itself very tiring. So they made themselves comfortable on the farmer’s jute sacks and soon, with the rocking motion of the wagon and the distant chanting from a temple, they were asleep.
When Molly woke, the sun was very low in the sky. Rocky was already up. He smiled at her. The cart was trundling along a rough road that dropped on its left to an arid valley floor. Up ahead was a vast gray palace. A winding, walled road climbed from a small village at the bottom of the hill to its hilltop entrance.
Molly found that while she’d been asleep her head had filled with new memories from her hypnotized ten-year-old self. She remembered that Waqt took them up by elephant to this hilltop palace and that he left them in a chamber decorated with shells and took the baby Molly outside.
Rocky winced when she told him.
“This is so freaky,” he said.
“It’s horrible. My life now depends on Waqt’s whims. If he has a fit of temper and decides to finish me off, I’m dead. Me here now? Well, I’d just disappear. And you know, if that happens, if he kills me as a toddler, so that I never grew up at the orphanage, all your past will change, too. We wouldn’t have been friends, you wouldn’t have had to stick up for me all those years, we would never have gone to New York or Los Angeles together. Who knows where you’d be now?”
“On the run in America,” said Rocky. “I would have been adopted by that family and run away.”
“I wish we could work out a way to get Waqt.” Molly frowned. “Just chasing him feels so out of control.” Petula licked her hand and pricked up her ears as she tried to sense why Molly was so tense.
“You’re going to have to think about it like this,” reasoned Rocky. “If he does kill you as a toddler, you won’t feel it. You’ll just suddenly not be here.”
Molly’s eyes opened as if she’d seen a monster.
“Even if it hurts, you won’t feel it now. Because it will be in your past. You would have the memory of him being about to kill you, I suppose—which would a horrid memory—and then you’d be dead. At that point, you and I and Petula and Forest won’t be here in India, because the past will have taken you out of the picture. Everything will adjust to you having died as a toddler and none of us will have the remotest idea of what might have been. That is what would happen. So you mustn’t worry, Molly. There’s no point in worrying.”
“But look at this, Rocky.” Molly showed him the scar on her neck.
“When did that happen?”
“When we went to the future.”
“But didn’t it come with a memory of how it got there?”
“No.”
“Odd.”
“I know. Rocky, you know if he does kill the younger me, before I found the hypnotism book, well, then Cornelius would have done everything that Waqt wanted. And that’s very bad for the people of the world. So there is a bigger reason for stopping Waqt killing the younger me’s. But, anyway, I don’t want to die. I’ve still got so much to do. I wanted to start that hypnotic hospital, not chase this horrid man around India. That was my plan.”
Rocky grinned. “Maybe he’ll be your first patient.”
“And you, Rocky, can write a song about all of this when it’s over.” Molly felt better. She woke up Ojas and asked him to tell the wrinkly driver to look in her eyes so that she could hypnotize him.
The old man’s cataract-covered eyes soon glazed over, and Ojas gave him instructions to drive up to the palace and say that he had to collect some rugs for mending.
Molly, Rocky, Forest, and Petula hid under the mass of jute sacks in the back of the wagon and Ojas sat beside the driver. He’d taken his fancy new jacket off, so that his chest was bare, and he wore his old trousers. The wagon began its journey up the stone-slabbed road, up to the Amber Palace.
Nineteen
Zackya was pacing up and down his private chamber. He’d rid himself of his dirty trousers and now, fresh from his bath, smelled of cloves and orange oil. Never before had he had an accident like that. He poured himself a honey and chamomile draft in the hope that it would calm his jangling nerves. But that was impossible, because in the courtyard below his private rooms he could see Waqt in a long cloak, gesticulating and noisily instructing a circle of elderly male priests who huddled around him.
They were standing beside the Amber Palace’s crystal fountain. It didn’t look like much—it was an ordinary rock with a long crack in it—but its worth was tremendous. For like all cr
ystal fountains, this cracked rock produced crystals once every few years. Zackya had visited hundreds of crystal fountains. For in China Waqt had become the owner of an ancient map of the world that located crystal fountains and predicted when they would bloom. And so Waqt had traveled like a maniac, from one fountain to the next, arriving in time to harvest the precious gems.
The Jaipur palace crystal fountain produced gems every March full moon. Waqt’s hypnotic presence helped to draw them from the earth. Zackya was never invited to join him during these ceremonies, as Waqt didn’t consider Zackya a good enough hypnotist to magnetize the crystals. Zackya scoffed. He watched as his master explained to the priests how the ceremony was to proceed. He knew that the maharaja was particularly excited about tonight, for he calculated that with the four Mollys present, especially the baby Molly, the crystals would come pouring out of the earth as never before. He was obsessed with that baby, Zackya thought.
“It will all end in tears,” he predicted, glancing out of the window and watching as Waqt took a handful of crystals from his special bag and spread them out on the rock. Zackya always steered clear of his master’s strange ceremonies. During their fifteen years in China he’d seen his master cobbling together his own homemade religion—one that revolved around the crystals. He’d observed as Waqt had taken a slice of one religion, a pinch of another, a spoonful of a third, and mixed them together.
What chilled Zackya now was the prospect that he was going to have to spoil his master’s special ceremonial day by telling him that the eleven-year-old Molly was missing. This might be the last straw. Today might be the day that Waqt finally hypnotized Zackya. He twitched. Being hypnotized by Waqt was his deepest fear. He didn’t want to end up a hypnotized zombie. Zackya despised Molly Moon for escaping. He hated her for causing this situation. Zackya shook as he sipped his honey drink and prepared to go down to the courtyard.
