Georgia Byng: Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

It was a winter afternoon. Briersville Park was sodden and glistening. Rain pelted down, hitting the vegetable garden path with a vengeance, smacking its green algae surface so that each drop split into a hundred smaller drops that bounced up again. Two frogs hid under the outstretched leg of a stone cupid in the center of a pond, and the orange fish there dived to its murky bottom for shelter.

Water dripped down AH2’s dark face. His black, snug, weatherproof trousers and jacket were covered in mud, since he’d just spent fifteen minutes crawling through three llama fields toward this grand house, Briersville Park. Now he pulled his ski mask back behind his ears so that he could better hear. Children’s voices, whoops, and shouts, and the sound of barks were coming from the other side of a high wall.

There was a heavy door set in the brickwork, but he didn’t dare use that. Instead, taking first a furtive look about to check he wasn’t watched, he put his hands on the leafless branches of an old apple tree that was fastened to the wall. With the ease of a trained soldier, he climbed up to its crest.

There she was. He was certain. The alien girl who went by the name Molly Moon was playing at the edge of a swimming pool with two boys who AH2 guessed were the same age as the Moon girl—about eleven years old. One was the black boy AH2 recognized from an ad that he and Molly Moon had starred in. Beside him was another boy who looked like he was the alien girl’s twin. He had similar light brown curly hair and the same potato-shaped nose and identical strong but closely set green eyes. Was this boy an alien, too? AH2 twitched. Then he got a shock. All of a sudden a large, gray object that he had presumed to be a sunken blowup dinghy emerged from the pool. It was an elephant, and it squirted a few gallons of water at the children, drenching them further and making the small black pug that was with them bark. The children laughed and shouted at the elephant before it tipped its body back toward the deep end for another swim.

AH2 shook his head in nonplussed amazement, then returned to his task. Quickly he unzipped his front jacket pocket and pulled out a small, loaded rifle, resting it on the top of the wall. He peered through its sights. Molly Moon’s head and shoulders came into view. Her wet hair fell to one side, exposing a fairly wide expanse of her neck. AH2 gritted his teeth. If only Molly Moon would stop jumping up and down and if only that look-alike boy would get out of the way. AH2 waited patiently until Molly Moon’s neck was aligned in the red target circle of his rifle’s sights again. He waited for the elephant. His aim was to use the animal as a distraction and to shoot at the same moment as the elephant hosed the children down.

The elephant rose up from the water and fired. At the same time, AH2 pulled the trigger. His dart hit first; the water hit Molly Moon a split second later. Everyone screeched, and in the commotion of the moment Molly Moon’s yelp was lost. She reached up and cupped her neck.

“Ow, Amrit!” she complained. “That water had a stone in it!”

“Bingo!” AH2 murmured. He dropped silently from the garden wall and ran toward the llama fields. Running swiftly and darting behind the animal-shaped bushes there whenever possible, he made his way to the far woods beyond, to where his black car was parked. Slipping into the front seat, he took off his ski mask and his jacket and reached for the brown package on the passenger seat.

Drying his hands, he unpacked the red, radiolike box inside it and pulled out its antenna. Switching on the device, he pointed it in the direction of Briersville Park, to its gardens and its swimming pool. The machine bleeped reassuringly.

“Got you, alien Moon girl,” AH2 said with a satisfied smack of his lips. He picked up his phone and tapped in a message to his superior, AH1.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Molly and Micky Moon were sitting in an emerald green sports car, speeding up the motorway under a heavy gray sky. Molly felt like some sort of pet animal, as she was stuffed in the cramped space behind the two front seats where her twin brother, Micky, and their new tutor, Miss Hunroe, sat at the wheel.

Miss Hunroe was very glamorous looking and not at all like Molly thought a tutor should be. Her hair was peroxide blond and kinked so that it almost formed stairs down the side of her head. Her hazel eyes, which Molly could see in the rearview mirror, watching any approaching cars that might be trying to overtake her, were large and long lashed. And her pale skin had a clean, translucent beauty. Her cheeks were tinged a pretty, wholesome pink. Her clothes were very unteacherly, too.

She wore a smart cream suit with a silk shirt underneath, and on one of her red-nailed fingers, she wore a heavy gold ring with an emerald embedded in it.

She steered the car with her left hand. Her right hand, meanwhile, held a gold coin. As she drove, she flipped it along her fingers so that it turned like a rolling wheel in between her knuckles. Every time another car obstructed the fast lane, she would flip the gold coin, saying, “Heads!” or “Tails!” She’d catch the coin on the back of her right hand. If she won the toss, she’d flash her lights and drive really close to the car in front until the vehicle moved over and let her pass. Then she’d speed off—well over a hundred miles an hour—until the offending car was a long way behind.

Molly gripped the back of Micky’s seat. Miss Hunroe’s driving, along with her rose-scented perfume, was making Molly feel sick. She hoped she wouldn’t be. That would really spoil the day, she thought, if she was sick all over the leather seats of Miss Hunroe’s car.

“Interesting way of driving,” Micky commented dryly, looking up from his crossword puzzle book as, yet again, Miss Hunroe flipped her coin and started to flash at the van in front.

“It keeps me amused,” Miss Hunroe replied. “I like to see the law of odds in action. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that I should or shouldn’t pass, yet somehow this coin always lands on what I’ve guessed it will land on. So I always pass! It’s as if the coin wants to get back to London as quickly as possible!”

And so on they drove, as if in some sort of a race, upsetting the other traffic on the road, causing other drivers to raise fists and blast their horns. Molly stared at the straight road ahead, as she knew that an eye on the horizon would help her carsick feeling. She watched a cat-shaped cloud turn into the shape of a dragon and kept watching the clouds until her stomach felt better. Every so often Micky began a conversation with Miss Hunroe. These went something like, “Butanoic acid. Miss Hunroe, isn’t that the name of the colorless liquid that causes that nasty rancid smell in butter?” or “That word cache . Miss Hunroe, do you spell it like that? Does it mean ‘a secret place where a store of things is kept hidden’?” Then, when Micky had moved on to his special book of riddles, he started to test Miss Hunroe.

“The beginning of Eternity,

The end of time and space,

The beginning of every end,

And the end of every place. What am I?

“Shall I tell you, Miss Hunroe? The answer’s E. The letter E. Clever, eh?”

“Sorry, dear, I can’t talk. I’m driving,” was usually Miss Hunroe’s answer to whatever question or riddle Micky threw at her, and so he went on with his puzzles alone, or he looked out of the window or craned his neck to talk to Molly or consulted his compass to see in what direction they were heading.