Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page B

tired, too. Time travel was tiring.
    “I’m on my own in India with Petula and this complete stranger,” she thought. “Why?”
    Molly shut her eyes. She urged herself to not be imprisoned by this hypnotism, but it was impossible. Her mind simply couldn’t break through the shield that surrounded it. She was reminded of nightmares she’d had of crossing a road, of a big bus coming, but of not being able to move. Of her feet being stuck and her body being paralyzed. Her mind felt paralyzed now.
    When she opened her eyes again, they had stopped outside what seemed to be a tourist site. It was a magnificent red fort, crumbling in parts, with tourist shops at its entrance and a taxi stand by its gate.
    “Out,” the turbaned man said rudely. Molly opened the car door. Petula sniffed about inquisitively and the man picked her up. Again he took out his silver time-traveling device and began fiddling with it. Satisfied that it was programmed correctly, he squeezed Molly’s arm.
    “Here we go again,” Molly thought. “Where is he taking me this time?”
    With Petula hooked under his right armpit, the turbaned man felt for his green crystal. The veins in his neck stood out as he concentrated. There was a BOOM,and the world flashed with color. The noise was almost deafening as they shot back in time. A cool wind rushed around them, playing with the ends of Molly’s hair and ruffling the man’s mustache. The silver box flashed. They stopped.
    A painted festival elephant stood beside them. The man growled and stamped his foot crossly. He pressed a button on his silver time gauge and clasped his red stone. With another BOOM and a hot whirl of windy color they moved forward in time. This time when they stopped, it was raining—pouring.
    “Aaaahhhhh!” roared the man, now in a terrible rage and soaked. “Why can’t I ever get it right? These time winds will send me early to my grave!” He clasped the green crystal.
    Molly realized that he obviously wanted to be at the gates on a particular day, at a precise time, and he was finding it extremely difficult. As they lurched forward and backward through time it was as if he was trying to dock a time-travel ship in a particularly tricky spaceport. Molly didn’t find it amusing. She didn’t find it scary, either. She didn’t feel much, but her curiosity was still active.
    “Plas—tal—may—wha—wa—ar—gawing,” she tried again.
    The silver box flashed. They stopped. It was a morning.Another fiercely hot sun blazed down.
    A look of grateful relief washed over her captor’s face. Now ten palm trees were growing by the red fort’s walls, and near its entrance, instead of the tourist shops, stood two forbidding, sword-bearing guards. Molly’s escort indicated that she should wait. Brushing rain water from his shoulders, he walked over to a large parasol and, from the iron-hard ground, picked up another one of his strange purple pills. Handing a wet Petula to a servant, he took a few moments to straighten his clothes. A bowl of water and a towel were brought for him to wash and dry his face. A servant produced a small pot of something and a mirror in which he checked his appearance very carefully. He rubbed some ointment on the dry skin on his cheek, exclaiming, “Worse, it’s worse. I’ll rot before I’m young again!”
    Then the servant brought him a tray of small green candies. Molly’s escort spat on the ground, leaving a gob of red spit there, and he popped one of the candies into his mouth. “Ah! Paan! At least there is
something
good in this world,” he muttered. Then, chewing, he gathered up Petula, came back, and tugged at Molly to follow him.
    The whiskered guards bowed low as they passed. When they walked through the high arched gates otherservants bowed even lower. Molly’s escort was, she realized, quite important.
    “Not important enough to be
completely
at ease in this fine palace, though,” she thought. For as they walked down the cool marble