Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism

by Georgia Byng

  Molly hated Mrs. Toadley, and she was glad that she looked so repulsive—blubbery faced and half bald, with a belly like a water-filled rubber bag. Her appearance served her right.

  Mrs. Toadley’s sneezing fits were usually good for cheating, but cheating together in today’s spelling test was out of the question, as neither Molly nor Rocky knew the answers. The test was from the land of Gobbledygook. Not only did the class have to spell the words, but they also had to give their meanings. Molly blundered through it, guessing the answers.

  When they had finished, Mrs. Toadley collected the tests and set to work marking them. She started with Molly’s. Within seconds her squealy, high-pitched voice whistled through the classroom, followed by a succession of loud sneezes. Molly’s stomach went tight as yet another telling off began.

  “You got ‘NOTORIOUS’ wrong. Aaa-tishu-ooo … There’s no e in it, and it actually means famous in a bad way, and I must say that’s you all over, isn’t it, Molly? Eh? … Eh? … Eh?”

  Molly’s strength began to crack. After all, a person can take only so much battering. She put on her best anti-tell-off armor and switched off. She had to, to stop Mrs. Toadley’s cruel tongue hurting her. In her mind she floated away from the classroom until Mrs. Toadley’s ghastly tones were tiny and distant, as if coming down a telephone line, and the squirly pattern on her stretchy skirt became a purplish-orange blur.

  “Molly Moon! Will you listen to me for once, you useless girl!”

  Molly snapped back to the classroom. “I am sorry if I have disappointed you, Mrs. Toadley. I’ll try harder next time.”

  Mrs. Toadley snorted and sneezed and sat down.

  Molly gave the morning ten out of ten for dreadfulness. But in the afternoon something much worse happened.

  After lunch Molly’s class changed for the crosscountry race. Molly couldn’t find one of her sneakers, and she and Rocky had to look all over for it. Droplets of rain ran down the locker-room windows as they searched. By the time they’d found it, the others were a long way ahead. And it was pouring rain. Rocky wanted to catch up, but the slippery ground made progress difficult. After running through the sludgy woods, Molly needed a break. So they sat down on a bench under a tree for a little rest. Their sneakers were sodden, and their legs were cold and wet.

  “Come on,” Rocky said. “Let’s start again. Otherwise we’ll be way behind.”

  “Why don’t we just go back?” suggested Molly.

  “Molly,” said Rocky irritatedly, “do you want to get into trouble? You’re crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy, I just don’t like running.”

  “Oh, come on, Molly, let’s keep going.”

  “No, I just don’t … feel like it.”

  Rocky tilted his head and looked searchingly at her. He’d been late to school that morning because of Molly, and now she wanted to get them into even more trouble.

  “Molly,” he said, exasperated. “If you don’t come, they’ll probably make us go around twice. Why don’t you just try?”

  “Because I’m no good at it and I don’t want to.”

  Rocky stared at her. “You could be good at running, you know, if you tried. If you got better at running, you’d like it, but you won’t even try.” Rocky looked up at the rain clouds above him. “It’s the same with lots of things we do. If you’re not good at them, you just give up. And then you’re not good at them more, and so you don’t try more, and then you’re even worse at them, and then …”

  “Oh, shut up, Rocky.” Molly was tired, and the last thing she wanted was a lecture-from her best friend. In fact, she was shocked that Rocky should bother. He was normally so easygoing and tolerant. If anything annoyed him, he’d just ignore it, or wander away from it. “And then,” continued Rocky, “you get into trouble.” He took a big, fed-up breath. “And you know what? I’m sick of you being in trouble. It’s as if you like it. It’s as if you want to get yourself more and more unpopular.”

  Molly’s heart jolted in amazement as his unexpected words stung her. Rocky never criticized her. Molly was furious. “You’re not so popular yourself, Rock Scarlet,” she retorted.

  “That’s because I’m usually with you,” Rocky said matter-of-factly.

  “Maybe actually it’s because no one likes you much either,” Molly snapped. “I mean, you’re not perfect. You’re so dreamy, it’s like you live on a different planet. And you’re not exactly reliable. Sometimes I have to wait hours for you to turn up. Like yesterday, I waited ages for you by the school lockers. And you’re so secretive you’re almost sneaky. I mean, where were you yesterday after school? Recently you’ve been disappearing all the time. People may think I’m weird, but they think you’re just as strange. You’re like a weird wandering minstrel.”

  “Still, they like me more than they like you, that’s for sure,” Rocky muttered.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said,” said Rocky loudly, “they like me more than they like you.”

  Molly stood up, giving Rocky the filthiest look she could.

  “I’m going,” she said, “now that I know you think you’re so much better than me. And you know what, Rocky? You can run on and catch up to the others. Go and make yourself more popular. Don’t let me hold you back.”

  “Oh, don’t get so worked up. I was only trying to help you,” said Rocky, frowning. But Molly was enraged. It was as if something inside her had suddenly broken. She knew she was less popular than Rocky, but she didn’t want to hear it. It was true that everyone bullied her, and no one ever bullied Rocky. He was untouchable, confident, difficult to upset, and happy with himself. Hazel and her gang steered clear of him, and he had plenty of friends at school.

  Molly hated him now for betraying her. She glared at him, and he puffed his cheeks out at her in an oh-you-drive-me-crazy way.

  “Same to you, too. And you look like a stupid blowfish like that. Perhaps some of your new friends will find it clever.” As she stamped away from him, she yelled, “I hate this place, in fact I can’t think of a worse place to be in the world. My life is just HORRIBLE.”

  Three

  Molly blasted her way through the school woods, the wet, ferny undergrowth slapping at her legs. She picked up a stick and thrashed the plants. The first hairy fern she came to was Miss Adderstone. Shwippp! The stick zipped through the air and cut off her head. “Old cow!” Molly muttered.

  A dark-green creeper was Edna. Shwippp! “Filthy old bag!”

  She came to the base of a large yew tree. Poisonous red berries were rotting on the ground around it, and a huge, yellow fungus was growing revoltingly on its trunk. “Ah! Mrs. Toadley!”

  Thwack! Thwack! Molly felt a little better once she had sliced Mrs. Toadley into smelly bits. “Notorious yourself,” she said.

  Sitting down on a tree stump, Molly kicked at a nettle. “Take that, Rocky!” she said. The nettle bounced back and stung her ankle. As Molly found a dock leaf and rubbed it on the nettle sting, she thought that maybe Rocky had been right—a bit—but she still felt cross with him. After all, she never nagged him. Sometimes, if he was singing one of his songs, she had to shake him to get his attention. She didn’t expect him to change his habits. Molly had thought Rocky liked her exactly as she was, so it was a big shock to discover that he disliked even a part of her—a bigger shock to see him side with the others.

  She wondered how often he’d been resentful of her without saying anything. He’d been wandering off a lot lately. Had he been avoiding her? Molly’s mind burned. What was it he had said? That she never tried at anything? But she acted out ads with him brilliantly. She tried at those. Maybe she should find something else to be good at. That would show him.

  Molly strode on through the woods, feeling very sorry for herself. The trees cleared, and she stood in the wind on the bare hillside, looking down at the small town of Briersville. There was the school, and past it the high street, the town hall, and the houses. Everything glistened from the afternoon rain. Cars t
hat looked the size of guinea pigs beetled through its snaking streets. Molly wished that one of those cars were coming to pick her up, to drive her home to a cozy house. She thought how lucky children who had parents were; however bad their day, they always had a friendly home to return to.

  Molly diverted her thoughts to the giant billboard that stood on the edge of the town, displaying a different advertisement every month. Today the message beaming into everyone’s lives was BE COOL, DRINK QUBE. The picture on the huge board was of a man on a beach, wearing sunglasses, drinking a can of Qube. The famous Qube can flashed its gold-and-orange stripes, as if Qube, not the sun, lit up the world. Molly liked the way it was hot looking, and yet had a cool drink inside. Beautiful beach people crowded adoringly round the man who was drinking. They all had wonderful white teeth, but the whitest teeth of all belonged to the guy with the can of Qube.

  Molly loved Qube ads. She felt she’d practically walked on the white, sandy beach where this one was set and knew the glamorous people who played there. She knew they were actors and that the scene was fabricated, but she also trusted that this world of theirs existed. One day she’d escape from the misery of Hardwick House to begin a new life. A fun-filled life like the lives of the people in her favorite ads—but it would be real.

  Molly had tasted Qube once, when Mrs. Trinklebury had brought in a few cans of it. But the cans had been shared, and so she’d had only a few mouthfuls. With its minty, fruity taste, it certainly was different.

  As Molly walked down into the town, she thought how great it would be if simply drinking one can of Qube could make a person popular. She’d love to be popular like the glossy people on the poster. How Molly wished she was rich and beautiful too. As it was, she was poor, weird-looking, and unpopular. A nobody.

  Down the hill Molly walked, toward the town library.

  She was very fond of the old, disorganized library. It was peaceful, and its thick photographic books gave her faraway places to dream about. Both Rocky and Molly loved it there. The librarian was always too busy reading or sorting books to bother them. In fact, it was the one place where Molly wasn’t the butt of a telling off. And she could relax in her secret place.

  She climbed the granite steps and passed the stone lions at the top, going into the foyer. The sweet smell of the wooden-floor polish made her instantly feel ten times calmer. She wiped her feet and padded over to the library bulletin board, where there were messages from the outside world. This week there was somebody trying to sell a water bed and someone else trying to find homes for kittens. There were notices about yoga courses, tango lessons, cooking classes, and sponsored walks. The biggest notice of all was for the Briersville Children’s Talent Competition the following weekend. This reminded her of Rocky, since he was entering with one of the songs he’d written. Molly hoped he’d win, but then, remembering that she was still cross with him, she immediately stopped herself hoping.

  Quietly, she opened the door of the library. The librarian was sitting at her desk, reading a book. She glanced up at Molly and smiled.

  “Ah, hello,” she said, her kind blue eyes twinkling through her glasses. “When I saw your school jacket through the doors, I thought it was your friend. He’s been in here a lot lately. It’s nice to see you again.”

  Molly smiled back. “Thanks,” she said.

  The librarian’s friendliness made her feel funny. Molly wasn’t used to grown-ups being kind to her. Awkwardly she turned away from the woman’s gaze and started to read the pamphlets that were stacked in front of the newspaper table.

  So it was the library where Rocky had been secretly sloping off to. Molly wondered again if it was because he was trying to avoid her. Then she decided to quit worrying and walked toward the rows of bookshelves. She passed along the tall aisles of books. A to C, D to F. The shelves were crammed with books, often two deep. Some books, Molly thought, hadn’t been looked at for decades. She passed the G to I books, then the J to Ls. M to P, Q to S,

  T to W,

  and X to Z.

  Z. Molly’s favorite place. The X to Z section was all the way at the far end of the library, where the room narrowed and there was space for only a short shelf. In between the shelf and the wall was a snug place warmed by an underfloor pipe and lit by its own lightbulb. The carpet was less worn out, as hardly anyone ever went there, because there weren’t many authors or subjects that started with X, Y, or Z. Occasionally people would come to that aisle for Zoology, or books by an author whose name began with Z. But not very often.

  Molly took off her jacket and lay down, her head by Y and her feet by Z. The floor was warm, and the distant, rhythmical thudding of the building’s boiler along with the librarian’s soothing voice on the phone helped Molly to breathe peacefully, and soon she was lying on the floor imagining herself floating in space again. Then she drifted off.

  A rumpus woke her up. Someone—a man with an American accent—was in a terrible temper, and his gruff voice was getting louder and louder by the second.

  “I cannot believe this,” the speaker bellowed. “I mean, this is unbelievable. I made a deal with you a few days ago on the phone. I wired you the money for the book, then I fly over from Chicago to get it. Four thousand miles I’ve come, and you, meanwhile—you go and lose it. I mean, what kind of badly run institution is this?”

  This was a very strange sensation for Molly. Someone else was getting a telling off. The librarian’s wrenlike voice piped up nervously.

  “I’m sorry, Professor Nockman, I really can’t think what could have happened to it. I saw the book with my own eyes last week. I can only assume it’s been taken out by someone … Although it’s always been in the restricted section, so that shouldn’t have … Oh, dear … Let me look in the files.”

  Molly peeped through the shelves to see who was making this fuss. At the main desk the librarian was frantically flicking through a box file, staring beseechingly at the cards, as if begging one of them to explain where the missing book had gone. Molly knew what she felt like.

  “It’s by Logam, you said?” she asked in a worried voice.

  “Logan,” the cross voice corrected her. “And the title begins with H.”

  Molly got onto her knees to peer through a higher shelf to see what this man looked like. There was his middle, a barrellike stomach in a Hawaiian shirt with palm trees and pineapples on it. Molly moved up a level. The shirt was short sleeved, and on his hairy arm the man wore an expensive-looking gold watch. His hands were small and fat, while his fingernails were disgustingly long. He strummed the desk impatiently.

  Molly moved up one more shelf.

  His nose was upturned and his face was round with a double chin. His black greasy hair started halfway back across his head and hung down to his shoulders. His beard was a small, sharp, black triangle just under his bottom lip, and his mustache was clipped and oiled. His eyes were bulbous and his face was sunburned. In all, he looked like a very ugly sea lion, and, Molly thought, very unlike how she imagined a professor should look.

  “So?” he asked belligerently. “Have you found it yet?”

  “Er, well no, I’m terribly sorry, Professor Nockman, it seems that it hasn’t been lent out. Oh, my goodness. Oh, this really is very embarrassing.” The librarian started to scrabble around in her drawer. “Professor Nockman, perhaps for now you ought to take your check back.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO TAKE MY CHECK BACK!” boomed the ugly man. “WHAT SORT OF LOUSY LIBRARIAN ARE YOU, LOSING BOOKS!”

  He stormed over to the G-to-I aisle. “Some idiot probably put it away in the wrong place.”

  The man waddled through the aisles, huffing and sweating. Now he was just on the other side of her bookshelf, so close that Molly could have touched him. He smelled of old hamburger and tobacco. Around his fat neck, on a gold chain, hung a scorpion medallion. The scorpion had a diamond for an eye, which caught the light and winked at Molly. The professor’s pudgy, taloned finger ran menacingly along the top of the T-to-
W books.

  “Okay,” he suddenly announced. “Okay. It’s obviously not here, so what we’re gonna do is this. You,” he said, marching back to the librarian’s desk, pointing aggressively so that his fingernail almost poked her between the eyes, “you are going to check with your colleagues and find out what happened to my book. As soon as you know, you’ll call me.” He pulled a snakeskin wallet from his back pocket, and out of that a business card.

  “I’m staying at the Briersville Hotel. You will telephone me and keep me updated. And you will get the book back as a matter of priority. I need this book for very important scientific research. My museum will be horrified to hear how it has been mislaid. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes, professor.”

  The professor then picked up a sheepskin coat and, grunting angrily, left the library.

  The librarian bit her lip and then started adjusting the pins in her bun. Molly sat on the floor. In front of her a big Y denoted the beginning of the Y shelves. Y … Y. Why?

  Why was that ugly man so keen to get that book? It must be a very interesting book. More interesting, Molly supposed, than Yachting or Yodeling or Ypnotism. Ypnotism? Molly looked at the book in front of her. Its cover had been ripped, so the first letter of the title had been removed. In a blinding flash Molly realized that the missing letter had been an H. Gould this be the missing book?

  Quickly she pulled the heavy, leather-bound book from the shelf and, checking furtively that no one was watching, she opened the cover.

  There in old-fashioned type were the words:

  Molly didn’t need to look any further. She quietly shut the book, wrapped it in her jacket, and left the library too.

  And that was the beginning of the change in Molly Moon’s luck.

  Four

  With growing excitement, Molly walked back through the streets of Briersville and across the fields to the orphanage. It was only teatime, but already the gray November light was fading. Pheasants chirruped loudly in the woods as they settled to roost, and rabbits darted for cover as Molly walked by.