Molly felt numb. Her head was whirring. And as a servant dressed in a woodcutter’s outfit led her and Petula along a path she began to get the oddest sensation. Everything felt more real than it normally did. The sky seemed bluer, the red stripe on her sneaker was redder, and the grass was fluorescent, it was so green. An insect flying past buzzed extra noisily; the gel in Molly’s hair smelled very, very fruity and the blood that she could taste in her mouth from biting her lip when she’d been on the mind machine tasted richer and supermetallic. It was as if all Molly’s senses were on overdrive. And to heighten the surrealness of it all, she found that things she thought about suddenly appeared. First of all, as she walked, the rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie …” plucked its tune soundlessly in her head. This was odd anyway, as Molly had no reason to be remembering nursery rhymes. But even more curiously, as the refrain ended a mass often or twenty blackbirds flew up over the wall of the palace and away into the blue sky.
This coincidence felt bizarre enough, but to make things even weirder another crazy coincidence followed. The music in Molly’s head now had a xylophone playing the jingle to the chocolate commercial she knew so well.
Choc-o-late!
Choc-o-late!
Every day is a chocolate date!
The words and the tune of the ad sang in her head. Then, through an open window, the same melody, recorded and played by a full orchestra, came drifting out.
The two events shook Molly. They made her feel raw and unstable and extrapeculiar after her ordeal on the mind machine. But before she had time to dwell on them she was taken to a bare room to meet Miss Cribbins.
As she was ushered in, the red-haired, beautiful woman turned and opened some shutters to reveal a spectacular view of the valleys below. Her cat-spider let itself down from the ceiling on a silken thread, so that it dangled five paces in front of Molly. It narrowed its eyes and hissed at her. Petula growled. The woodcutter-costumed servant bowed and left.
“Interesting to see a twenty-first-century person,” Miss Cribbins said, her voice sharp as broken glass. “You, Moon, will have dinner with us tonight.” She scrutinized Molly as if she were a netted butterfly. “And,” she said, stroking the beauty spot on her rouged cheekbone, “you will answer questions that Her Royal Highness and I have for you.”
“And if I don’t want to?” said Molly, wiping her mouth, which itched where the sticky tape had been ripped off.
“Why, you will go hungry.”
Molly was still feeling dizzy from the mind machine and the peculiar coincidences on the path. And now, to make things worse, she began hallucinating. Strange little pictures floated above the Cribbins woman’s head. Pictures of sausages and a jar of what looked like vitamins and a doctor’s syringe. Molly felt really scared. Her hair felt all prickly, as though it was rising up from her scalp. Was her brain falling apart? She rubbed her eyes. She dreaded to think what damage the electric sparks had done to her mind.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“Supper is in an hour in the dining room. What will happen to you tomorrow I haven’t a clue. But count yourself lucky—Her Highness wants to preserve you.”
“I’m not a kipper to be put in a jar,” said Molly.
“No, but you are a juicy specimen for us,” Cribbins replied. “You are interesting. Her Highness wants to keep you, mostly in order to harvest your hypnotic talent. This won’t be possible for a few years, so you are fortunate—you have some time.”
“Time before what?”
“Time to appreciate your whole mind before it is lost to you. For after she has your hypnotic talent Her Highness will take the rest of your thoughts too and you will be left a hollow vessel. Until then I am in charge of your education.” The woman stepped forward and her pet dropped silently onto her shoulder. She paused by the door. “Ah, and by the way, don’t try to escape. The grounds are alarmed and monitored with cameras. You don’t want to be darted.”
“Darted?”
“Shot with a paralyzing dart.”
Molly stared fixedly at the muddy, trailing lace of her sneaker until the woman had gone. Then she knelt on the ground and hugged Petula. “At least we’re still together.”
Petula licked Molly’s face. As she did, the plastic tag with its letters GAN TWIN fell into Molly’s lap.
“Oh, Petula, where did you get this?” Molly fingered the white strip and put it in her pocket. “I can’t believe my brother turned out the way he did. Can you, Petula?” Petula whined. “I mean, what happened to him?”
Molly felt dreadful. Her situation was a living nightmare. She was stuck like a pigeon in a drainpipe. Her predicament was hopeless. Her best friend was hypnotized, all her time-travel gems had been taken, and to cap it all her hypnotic know-how was now completely gone too—as gone as a page of penciled instructions that had been erased. She was now an ordinary girl lodged in the wrong time. And in the meantime (and, Molly thought, it really would be a mean time if that horrid woman had anything to do with it), Miss Cribbins was to be her teacher. But why? What for? Molly couldn’t see the point of lessons if it was all eventually going to be sucked away by the mind machine. She rubbed her forehead and tried to work out what to do.
It seemed clear the royal child would never give up Molly. She seemed convinced that the technology to “harvest” talent would arrive. And what about Micky, her brother? He seemed a dead loss. Micky was a weak, sick, bullied person with no will of his own. Molly wished she’d never come for him. If it wasn’t for him, she and Petula and Rocky would be safe at Briersville Park with all those nice people who cared about them.
“I’m sorry, Petula. You didn’t even ask to come,” she said, staring into Petula’s eyes. Petula stared back, wishing with all her heart that Molly could understand her.
As they looked at each other, Molly’s mind played tricks on her again. Above Petula’s head a sequence of pictures popped up. Molly saw a misty image of the daisy-dotted fields and the hills around Briersville and then a picture of a rabbit hopping across the grass, its tail bobbing. Molly screwed up her eyes and shook her head. But when she looked again the rabbit was nibbling a dandelion. Then the rabbit dissolved to become Petula’s basket and then morphed to become Amrit, the pet elephant at Briersville. Finally Amrit vaporized. Molly’s hair felt as though it had static electricity in it.
She thought of the pictures she’d seen above Miss Cribbins’s head and then of the jellyfish and the thoughts that had floated above it too. And then a strange idea hit her.
“Is that what you’re really thinking, Petula?” Petula tilted her head. She’d felt Molly’s fear and panic when she’d been caught on the chair with the lightning hitting her head, and she’d felt Molly’s anger when Rocky had been hypnotized by the boy—the boy who smelled like Molly. But she couldn’t decipher Molly’s thoughts and she could only comprehend some of Molly’s barks. Petula shut her eyes and nestled up to her mistress. As Molly ruffled her ears, she wished again that they were back home.
Molly tried to work out what she’d been doing when the pictures had materialized. She’d been apologizing to Petula, that was all. But since she’d known that Petula wouldn’t understand the words of her apology, she’d also sent, she supposed, her feelings in a little mind message to her. She’d tried to communicate her apology by thinking it. Had some sort of invisible gate opened up so that Petula’s thoughts were also visible to her? But, Molly considered, she’d often thought things to Petula and this had never happened before. She recalled the images of sausages and pills that had leaped up above Miss Cribbins’s red hair. Then she remembered the way the world had felt super-real when she was on the path and she recollected the coincidences that had occurred. The nursery rhyme that had sung in her head and the blackbirds suddenly flying over her, the chocolate-ad jingle that had trilled through her mind and then been echoed by the same music somewhere in the palace. The logical conclusion was that Molly’s mind had been altered by the machine. Or maybe she was light-headed from being on the mountaintop. Or perhaps the mind machine had scrambled her brain and she was simply going mad. Molly was alarmed by this idea. Quickly she decided to try asking Petula another question.
“What are you thinking, Petula?” Nothing happened—nothing at all. Molly squeezed her eyes tight and concentrated hard. Her scalp began to prickle. What are you thinking, Petula?
Lo and behold, this time when she looked a faint bubble filled with moving images bounced above Petula’s head: the jellyfish, wobbling blue and full of sparks; Rocky, as seen from below, staring straight ahead like a soulless person; and Molly herself, looking scared, with a silver dome on, the skeleton of her face visible through her skin.
Molly’s mouth fell open. The pictures had popped up before Molly had had time to conjure up a single thought. This meant only one thing—something quite incredible and completely spectacular. The fact was, unbelievable as it seemed, Molly was seeing Petula’s thoughts. Molly was amazed.
“Oh, Petula, don’t worry!” Molly hugged her little pug and marveled at the new power in her. How had it come about? The electricity from the mind machine must have triggered it. And why did her hair feel all floating and strange when it happened? Would it work on humans too? Could Micky mind read? What about the princess and Miss Cribbins? Molly doubted it. Maybe this new skill was special to Molly—maybe it had lain dormant inside her ever since she was little, woken by the jellyfish’s sparks scissoring through her brain.
Molly shook her head, ran her hands through her hair, and took a deep breath to calm down. For now she was starting to feel, she had to admit, just a little bit excited. If she could mind read, then being here wasn’t a hundred percent bad. If she could see something of what her horrible hosts were really thinking, perhaps, just perhaps, she might find a way to get her hypnotic skills back off the machine.
Molly spent the time before supper exploring her surroundings. She walked through the gardens near Miss Cribbins’s schoolrooms and looked at the exotic plants growing there. They were unlike the plants from Molly’s time. They were bigger and more colorful. And their perfume was ten times more powerful. There were orange roses that smelled of raspberries and purple lilies with the scent of black currants. Huge, fluffy bees the size of mice buzzed under arches that were heavy with fragrant, rainbow-colored blossoms. A massive dragonfly zipped past Molly’s ear. Her eye followed it to a balcony. She scanned the horizon and saw what looked like a flying cow. Screwing her eyes up, she approached the balcony to get a better look. But here Molly took in a breath of awe, at once forgetting the cow.
The view was incredible. On either side of her were craggy cliffs and the zigzagging profile of the mountain range. Below was a sheer drop. Thousands of feet of air hung between her and the valley below, and the view stretched for hundreds of miles. Molly stepped back, suddenly overcome by vertigo. The palace certainly was in a perfect position. It was comfortably cool with a breeze that was clean and dustless. But down below on the valley floor, beside the giant lake and the large fields, Molly saw that it was quite different. Away from fields and the oasis of green around the waterside igloo mansions, the land was brown and dusty. Molly grabbed a pair of binoculars lying on the table nearby. As she twiddled the knob, people tending and watering crops in the fields came into focus. Molly let the binoculars pass over them to the dusty part of the town. Here there were colored houses. They looked like cottages from a fairy-tale book. Their walls were crooked, their front doors and window shutters were brightly painted, and their roofs were thatched. There were thousands of them, all clustered together in streets that led past lots of big buildings to a fishing village on the shore of the lake.
Between this desert town and the beautiful silver igloo residences was a wide moatlike band of grass. It was as if there were two towns down there, Molly thought. There were the winter homes of the rich and powerful, and the poor town that was lived in all year round. Molly adjusted the dial on the powerful binoculars. What interested her was that the only barrier between the rich and the poor was a strip of grass. There must, she thought, be something that stopped the poor people coming into the rich territory. Maybe there were robot guards with poisonous darts at the ready. Or perhaps the moat of grass was electrified, or it was some sort of futuristic, man-eating grass. But the palace servants all seemed so calm and obliging, as though they accepted their lowly positions. Maybe everyone in the town felt like this about the unfairness. Molly thought of the servant who’d picked up the princess’s shoes and carried them to her. He had done it automatically, as though he’d been brainwashed. Perhaps he’d had his will sucked out by the mind machine. Could all the people of the town have been put on the mind machine?
And then, like an answer in Twenty Questions, the truth of the situation appeared. One very good way to keep people under control was to hypnotize them. Hypnotize them to work without complaining, to live not caring where, to do exactly as they were told. The people in the valley must all be hypnotized. It all became suddenly very clear. So that was why Micky was needed here! He’d been stolen as a baby and brought here to work for the palace to keep the masses hypnotized, but why did he do it for them?
Molly heard a gong behind her. It was time for dinner. She licked her lips in anticipation. Maybe now that she was a mind reader she would be able to deduce exactly how this place worked and outwit the princess.
Molly smiled. She could now see a glimmer of hope.