Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

ridiculous lengths to persuade these horrible Moon children to help us.”

“Ze cats ver difficult to round up,” explained Miss Oakkton.

“You always have an excuse,” whined Miss Speal.

“You ought to set your watch five minutes fast, like a child dat is always late.” Miss Suzette laughed patronizingly. “That would teach you!” Miss Oakkton growled at her under her breath.

Miss Teriyaki passed the big-eyed, white, fluffy-haired Persian cat to Miss Suzette and bent down to pick up the gray Siamese.

“Oh, daaaahleeeng!” Miss Suzette exclaimed, pressing her nose up to her pet’s.

Miss Oakkton kept the large, hairy orange cat firmly tucked under her arm, while giving the thin, hairless sphynx to Miss Speal.

“Ready?” Miss Hunroe asked as her white Burmese cat rubbed against her ankles. The women murmured yes. Miss Hunroe frowned irritatedly. “Not you, Miss Speal. I’ve ordered the plane. It takes off at five thirty. You should be in the chamber by eleven tomorrow morning our time.”

Miss Speal dropped her head apologetically. “Thank you for forgiving my stupidity, Miss Hunroe.”

“We will meet you there as soon as our business is finished here,” Miss Hunroe added. Then she turned her attention again to the other three women. They were all now staring at a patterned rug on the floor. “Let us go,” Miss Hunroe decided. In the next second, an astonishing thing happened. She and the women staring at the rug disappeared as instantly as blown-out flames. All that was left was their clothes—a pile of frills of cotton and silk, of wool skirts, trousers, shirts, and jackets, of old-fashioned bras and pants of varying sizes, and of nylon tights. Scattered about under the mounds of material were an odd assortment of shoes, as well as a crutch. Four cats sat on the belongings as though they owned them.

The cats stared at the floor as they adjusted to their insides. For each of them now had two beings inside them—the original cat beings, and the women who had just entered, and who were now taking them over.

The real cat characters shrank back and down like sea anemones reduced from blooming flowers to tiny balls. Miss Hunroe, Miss Teriyaki, Miss Suzette, and Miss Oakkton took control of the cats’ minds as quickly and as thoroughly as an egg cup of black ink might color a small mug of water.

The white Burmese was the most difficult of the feline creatures to take command of. And today, as was often the case, it resisted Miss Hunroe’s control. It fought hard, refusing to let its identity be squashed and replaced by Miss Hunroe’s personality. But it was no use. Miss Hunroe won the tug-of-war, and the blue-eyed cat succumbed to Miss Hunroe.

“Miaaww,” Miss Hunroe mewed. And then, in the language of cat—for once in an animal, it was possible to speak to other animals of the same sort—she asked, “Are you ready?”

Miss Speal, sitting on a stool with her hairless sphynx in her arms, watched as the four cats before her twitched their tails and nodded to the white Burmese. Then she stood up and opened the door for her feline friends.

The cats descended a straight, steep, thirty-step staircase and came to an open fire exit onto the main roof of the museum. Nimbly they leaped out onto the slated tiles there and, in an ordered fashion, trotted along the full length of the roof down to the museum’s central towers. Here, traversing the triangular peak of the roof, they came to the front of the museum, where they negotiated a wrought-iron fire escape that descended until they were at ground-floor level. They each leaped onto a balcony and walked along a thin, granite windowsill before hopping from the head of an ugly stone gargoyle onto the bare branch of a tree in front of the museum. Soon the procession of cats had snaked its way down to the cold pavement of Brompton Road.

A big red double-decker bus stopped at the light, and all four cats sprung on board.

“Oh, my word!” exclaimed the Jamaican bus conductor.

“Ah, look at those sweet cats!” cried an eight-year-old girl on her way home from school.

A wobbly-chinned woman, surrounded by shopping bags, looked up. “How extraordinary!” she said.

“MIAAWW!” screeched Miss Oakkton, the orange cat, swiping at the child with her claws. Miss Teriyaki, the Siamese, hissed and leaped forward aggressively. The girl shrieked and stumbled backward so that her purple-felt school hat fell off.

“Blood clot!” the conductor gasped. “Like a bunch of witches’ cats, I’d say. Are you all right, sweetheart? Best to leave ’em alone.”

And so the bus pulled away. The people on it nervously eyed the feline passengers. The four cats—the white Burmese, the gray Siamese, the fluffy white Persian, and the huge orange cat—sat beside the stairs near the vehicle’s open back. Then, at Knightsbridge, they stood up, raised their noses to the air, and disembarked.

AH2 pulled up his collar as another gust of cold air blew through the street. He’d followed Molly Moon and the boy who looked like her brother out of the natural history museum. He had hailed a cab to tail theirs, but with the heavy late-afternoon traffic, his black taxi had lost them. With his tracking device, however, AH2 could of course deduce exactly where Molly Moon was. And so he had switched it on and made his way through the crowded pavements after her.

It was odd. Molly Moon and her accomplice were inside a smart old building that bore the sign BLACK’S CASINO, ESTABLISHED 1928. What an eleven-year-old girl could need to do inside a casino was beyond AH2. Then again, he considered, digging his hands deep into his pockets, she was really an alien. And the brother was probably an alien, too. Maybe the place was a nest of aliens. As AH2 grew dizzy watching early gamblers entering the casino through its cylindrical rotating door, his imagination took flight. It would be incredible, he thought, if he were to uncover an alien headquarters. AH2 imagined himself interviewed on news programs, his face transmitted to televisions all over the world. He’d be a hero.

“All those years of knowing aliens were here with no one believing you!” he pictured the news journalist saying. “How did you cope?” AH2’s mind spun off into a fantasy.

“I had a very strong gut feeling,” he imagined himself saying. “And coupled with the proof I was collecting, I was confident that I’d be able to prove to the world that aliens had arrived.”

“Well, it’s truly impressive,” the interviewer would reply. “I’m sure everyone watching would like to personally shake you by the hand and thank you.”

AH2 was awakened from his daydream by something gliding past his feet. He looked down to see an extraordinary sight. Four cats—two white, a ginger, and a gray—slipped quietly past him as though following one another. Hiding in the shadows for a moment until the casino doorman had his back turned, they then all leaped toward the tiny alley that ran alongside the casino. One, two, three, and lastly the fourth cat disappeared around the corner of the alley before anyone else noticed them.

AH2’s fantasy that this place was a den of aliens suddenly became concrete.

“Bingo!” he said under his breath.

Twenty minutes earlier, a cab had dropped off Molly and Micky at the end of the street. “There it is, luv,” the Cockney cabby had directed them. “Gambling’s not good for you, though. Don’t spend all yer pocket money!”

Micky and Molly paid him and thanked him. They paused as he drove away, then stood still to watch the casino entrance.

“Here we go,” said Molly. “Remember, Micky, we’re Lily Black’s friends, so behave like a seven-year- old.”

“This is crazy,” Micky replied. “If just being kids doesn’t work, use your hypnotism, will you, Molly?”

Molly looked at her brother. He was licking his lips nervously. “If you don’t want to come in, don’t worry, Micky. You could wait out here, and I’ll go in on my own. It won’t take long, and you’ll be safe here.”

Micky shook his head.

“I’ve read so many adventure stories,” he mulled. “Hundreds, probably. From ones set in medieval times to ones set far in the future. Space adventures, cowboy adventures, war adventures, survival adventures—”

“That’s why you know so much stuff,” Molly interrupted.

Micky nodded. “Suppose now is the time to be in an adventure.”

“Sure?” Molly said, smiling with amusement at her brother’s logic.

“Yes, sure,” Micky answered with his mind made up. “Let’s do it.”

The siblings ascended the casino’s short steps to where one of the guards stood, brushing dandruff off the shoulders of his suit jacket.

“Excuse me,” Molly began. “Is this Lily Black’s, um…house? We’ve come for a playdate.”