M olly’s stomach turned and she felt sick. “Please …” she begged the little person up the tree. “Please don’t! Please hide me. I can’t go back—they’ll kill me. I’ll do anything. Please hide me.”
“GO!” Micky now shouted furiously. “In the name of Princess Fang!”
But the small leathery man didn’t move an inch. Instead, he clapped his hands together and two of the oddest-looking people Molly had ever seen appeared from behind the base of the tree.
The first person was a tall, thin, birdlike man. Instead of hair, he had a cockatoo’s crest of white feathers. His pale orange nose was hard and sharp like a beak, and below his small, mean hawk eyes were brown feathered cheeks and a feathered chin. His back was humped and cloaked in brown silk, and he wore a rust-colored waistcoat and orange leggings. His clawed feet were like those of a bird of prey, with talons.
The man beside him was just as strange. He was ancient—he looked at least a hundred and fifty years old. His scalp, face, and neck were grayish green and scaly, his huge eyes looked out from above creased bags of skin, and his nose was wide and flat. His gray hair hung curtainlike down to his chest, while the top of his head was wrinkled and as bald as a nut. He wore a long, flowing olive-green robe with green, pointed cloth shoes. His neck was stooped so that his hunched shoulders were at the same level as his ears, and covering the whole of his back was a giant shiny tortoise shell.
“Mu-mutants!” stammered Micky with a gulp, so softly that only Molly heard him. Then he shouted, “Did you hear what I said? In the name of all that is Yang Yongian, call the palace guards!”
But the strange animal people did nothing. Molly’s instincts told her they were hypnotized but not in the way that Micky obviously expected them to be. Then the wrinkled midget man up the tree spoke—although he seemed to be talking to himself more than to anyone else. His voice was high and childlike.
“So that’s what she was yabbering on about. And old Fake Face. Saw them both on the screen. ’Bring them back, hypnos, and it’ll be cake for tea.’ So that’s what she’s lost.” He leaned over the wooden balcony. “Where did you get them, Schnapps?” The dognake carrying Molly barked. The little person rubbed his hands together and his wild eyes flashed like a tiger’s. “Aha!”
“Please, please don’t hand us in,” Molly blurted out. “We’re running away from the palace—we don’t want to go back there. My brother here has been so scared by your dognakes that he’s talking gibberish. He doesn’t really want to go back.”
“I DO!” Micky bellowed. “In the name of Princess Fang, tie this girl up at once and call the Lakeside guards.”
“He’s frightened out of his wits!” Molly continued.
“I’m NOT!” Micky screamed. “Don’t believe her!”
All this squabbling was far too much for the midget man up the tree. In a high pitch he screeched, “BE QUIET! Or I’ll feed you to the dognakes.” At once both Micky and Molly were silent. “So,” he asked threateningly, pointing a tiny dirty finger at Molly, “who are you and why are you on the run?”
Molly took a deep breath.
“Well, it’s a long story really, but in nutshell it’s this: I’m called Molly … er … Molly Moon. And, you may not believe this, but I come from five hundred years ago. I came here to find my brother. You see, he was taken from the hospital when we were born—we are twins, you see. Well, I traveled here but it’s all gone wrong. The princess up there put me on her mind machine and she took all my hypnotic powers away so now I can’t—”
“You are a hypnotist?”
“Er … yes, but NO.” Molly gulped. “I was, but I’m not now.”
“Bad,” said the midget man darkly.
Molly panicked. “But I come from a different time,” she explained. “This place and all the hypnotism here has got nothing to do with me. Nothing. I’ve come from a time of … of smelly car engines and oil, a time before hydrogen engines, before all the weather changed. In my time Mont Blanc was still covered in snow and this place was called Switzerland and people used to come here to ski. Look at my old-fashioned sneakers,” she gabbled desperately.
But the midget man up the tree wasn’t listening. He was pacing up and down his rickety balcony.
“Tasty,” he was saying. “Well, keep them under lock and key. Have to pack them away before the hypnos start coming in. Snarlers’ pit? Too dangerous. Bearunkeys’ cage? Don’t be stupid. We want to save them for me. Sabrerats? No. No, no. Ah, now there’s an idea. Worm pit. WORM PIT.” Now he leaned down and called out, “Job for you, Wildgust and Tortillus. Take them to the worm pit.”
“Yes—Professor—Selkeem,” the hawk-man, Wildgust, said. Picking Molly up, he tucked her under his arm. Then he reached out for Micky too.
“You can’t do this!” Micky objected, the cord of his now-dirty blue dressing gown dragging on the ground. “I’ll c-catch something. I’m fragile. Princess Fang will …” But his words were ignored. And up in his tree, the midget professor was talking to himself again.
“Nearly opening time. No, I can’t put them in the cooking pot here. She’ll sink her fangs into them if I do.” He glanced up at the mountaintop. “Fank you, Pwincess Fang. I’ll sink my fangs into them instead. Take them now, Wildgust! To the worm pit!”
With that, the small mad professor stepped back into his tree house and shut the door. As he did, the dognakes slithered up the tree trunk into its branches. A plume of nasty green smoke wound its way out of a chimney up into the leaves above and the sky beyond.
The last dognake let go of Petula and she found herself on the ground again. Shaking herself, she saw with horror that Molly and the palace boy were being carried away. At once she set off after them.
Up at the mountaintop palace, Princess Fang was in her nightclothes—a floaty, white chiffon nightie with pink rabbit fur along its hem and mother-of-pearl buttons up the front. She was pacing back and forth in front of a picture window, sucking on a yellow-and-white stick of rock candy. Outside, the shark’s-tooth-shaped mountains quivered in the morning light, and miles and miles below the great lake shimmered. The sky was a cornflower blue.
The six-year-old princess flung her sweet on the floor and stamped on it as though killing a scorpion. Her grasshopper chirped madly from its cage. Miss Cribbins sat silently on a half-invisible purple stool in the corner, dressed in a gray night robe. She stroked her pet cat-spider.
“HOW DID SHE DO DAT?” the princess shouted furiously. She pointed a pudgy finger at Miss Cribbins. “Dat Milly Moon girl turned de camewas off! Minus must have shown her.” She narrowed her eyes accusingly. “He was too weak, Cwibbins. He was easy meat for her! She obviously got de better of him.” She picked up a long-legged doll by its ankles and, venting her fury, beat the ground with it. Then she said darkly, “Dat was a foolish oversight of yours, Cwibbins, not to twain him to be tougher. Foolish! Foolish!” And she began to chant:
“Build a bonfire,
Build a bonfire,
Put de teachers on de top,
Put de schoolbooks in de middle,
And den just BURN DE LOT!”
“There was never a threat,” said Cribbins frostily. “There was no threat until Moon came along.”
Princess Fang snorted. “You do wealize dat if we lose Micky Minus, Cwibbins, all our plans fall down. Dere will be no big empire. We won’t be able to contwol other countwies because we will have lost our little hypnotist.”
Cribbins’s grip on her cat-spider tightened. “Of course I realize that. It’s obvious,” she hissed.
The princess now screamed. “SO WHERE DID DEY GO? Vanished! How? Moon can’t time twavel anymore and Minus can’t either, because he doesn’t even know about time twavel. Anyway, you keep his cwystals. You do have his cwystals?”
Miss Cribbins nodded, pulling two chains with red, green, and clear gems from her pocket. “Old dead Redhorn’s are here too,” she explained. “And you have the Moon ones locked up. There’s no way Minus can time travel or stop time—even if someone could teach him, he’s not got the tools.”
Princess Fang snatched the crystals and hung both strings around her neck.
“So,” she said crossly, taking two chocolate truffles from a black velvet box and stuffing them both in her mouth at once. “So, dat means dey could still be here in de building. Hiding under some toys, or under de trampoline or somefing. I like a game of hide-and-seek. I’ll just get all the servants to look for me.” She chewed her chocolates thoughtfully, wiping her messy mouth on her chiffon sleeve. “Or,” she said, throwing a cursory glance in the direction of the valley bottom, “or dey have somehow hitched an elevator down dere to Lakeside in one of de food planes or somefing.” She picked up a green cigarette and lit it. It smelled of limes.
“They won’t last long,” said Miss Cribbins with a bitter smile, “I assure you. You’ve put out your message on the street screens with Minus’s picture. The hypnotized plebs will do as they’re told. They’ll hound Moon and Minus out. Just say the word, and the whole place can be turned upside down.”
“Mmm. But,” said Fang, blowing a smoke ring and lassoing her finger with it, “when we do catch him, what den? That ugly Milly girl—uurgh, she’s so unattwactive it makes me sick—she will have worked on Minus. He may fink diffwently. He may not be under our influence anymore.”
Miss Cribbins sneered. “If we net them quickly, she won’t have had time to change the way he thinks. He will still be like us. He will still understand that our way is the only way.”
Taramasalata miaowed.
“Huh! And if he doesn’t?”
“Then he’ll have to be destroyed. Just as Moon will have to be destroyed.”
“Destwoy her, yes, but not Minus. In a few years de machine will be able to extwact talent. When it can, we’ll extwact de talent for hypnotism and time twavel fwom Micky Minus, not fwom her. And once it’s ours, why, den we can dispose of him as well. Imagine it, Cwibbins! No more dependency. We’ll be able to hypnotize de people ourselves.”
“I look forward to it.”
“So let’s concentwate now. Dat Milly’s started a game of tag. She wants a game, does she? Well, lovely! I love tag, and I’m vewy good at it. So let’s see who wins!”