“Black must make a fortune!” Molly whispered.
“Just like a one-armed bandit,” said Micky.
“Yup. He’s an ugly bandit,” Molly agreed. “Come on, let’s get the book.”
The twins followed the vent up a slope and around a corner. Now it was dark again, and to make things worse, a cold breeze was blowing as the casino’s air conditioning blew through the vent. It made the tight passage like an arctic wind tunnel.
Finally they reached the grille. And true to Miss Hunroe’s plans, this vent looked down on Black’s casino office. Molly and Micky peered down. A glass kidney-shaped lamp with a brass stem lit the room, its warm glow making the green leather-topped desk and the paneled walls tinge with gold. A narrow slit window onto an alley outside let in a little more light from the street.
“Empty! Perfect,” Molly exclaimed, and she and Micky began easing off the metal grille.
“Bet I can punch it through,” Micky decided. “You hold it so it doesn’t fall out into the office.” Seconds later the grille had given way and Molly was quietly pulling it into the duct.
“After you,” Micky said.
Maneuvering herself so that her legs went first, Molly dropped into the room. Micky followed, and at once they set to work. Molly quickly began to lift pictures off the walls, peering behind them to see where the safe was.
“Maybe it’s under the carpet,” Micky whispered, lifting the corner of a Persian rug from the floor.
Molly opened the central drawer of the desk. And as though the heat of an oven had just hit her in the face, she stumbled backward.
“What is it?” Micky asked worriedly. Then, looking into the drawer himself, he uttered a sigh. “Wow!”
For there, almost so carelessly deposited that it seemed like it must be a trap, lay the book. Its brown leather cover, heavy with inlaid stones, had golden embossed words that read
Molly ran her fingers inside the indentation in the top right-hand corner of the leather cover and remembered Miss Speal’s stolen stone.
With a shaking hand, and full of respect for the book, Molly opened it.
Six
Molly glanced around the room suspiciously. “Can’t believe he left it in such an obvious place. Do you think it’s a trap? Or maybe the book’s a fake.” Something buzzed past her nose. “What was
“A ladybug, Molly. You’re just jumpy because you’re nervous,” Micky said, jittering himself. “They’re crawling all over that plant.”
Molly pulled the heavy book from the drawer and opened it up. “Let’s check if it’s the real McCoy.”
The pages inside the book were yellow from age. Molly found the title page,
“By Dr. Logan, Published by Arkwright and Sons, 1910…I can hardly believe that our great-great-grandfather wrote this,” Molly whispered. “Can you? The first book was written in 1908. So he wrote this one two years after he wrote the first book.”
“It’s very fancy looking, with those stones stuck on the front,” Micky observed.
“Yes, much fancier than the first volume,” Molly agreed.
“Don’t expect there are many copies exactly like it,” Micky said. “Maybe it’s unique.”
“Let’s hope so,” Molly replied, running her fingers along the headings. “Do you think Black has photocopied it? “‘Chapter One,’” she quietly read, “‘Recapping Hypnotism. Chapter Two, Time Stopping. Chapter Three, Time Traveling…’ Ah, now this is more interesting. Look. ‘Chapter Four, Morphing—Animals. Chapter Five, Morphing— Humans. Chapter Six, Mind Reading. Chapter Seven, Hypno-Dreaming.’ Wonder what that is. ‘Chapter Eight, The Logan Stones. Chapter Nine, Possibilities.’ Wow.” Hurriedly, Molly flicked to the first page on morphing.
Unable to control their curiosity, the twins began to read the book’s instructions.
“‘MORPHING or body borrowing,’” read Micky,
“like hypnotism, is best learned in two steps. Just as I encouraged you to master the art of hypnotizing animals before humans when you learned to hypnotize, with body borrowing, you must learn to morph into an animal before you will be able to morph into a human. It is very important that you choose your morphee carefully, for if you choose an animal or person that knows about morphing, or one that has a very strong character, when you change into the animal, it will resist your presence in its body and swallow you up entirely. Animals are usually easy subjects. It is people that you must choose very carefully. Be respectful to the creature you are morphing into, for remember! You are borrowing its body. You are a body borrower. And it is imperative that you read right to the end of this chapter before you begin morphing at all!”
“Imperative? What does that mean?” Molly asked.
“Don’t know. But I like the idea of being a body borrower.” Dr. Logan’s words ran before the twins’ hungry eyes and Micky read on.
“‘Bring yourself into a semitrance.’ How do you do that?”
“It’s just like going all daydreamy and letting the world drop away from you.”
“Oh, okay.” Micky read on.
“Find a pattern. This may be in a wallpaper design, in some upholstery furnishings, in material, or even in flooring. Clouds can also be useful for this exercise. Stare at the pattern or shape. Let it take over your visual fields until it begins to move and change. You will begin to see other forms in the pattern. Two leaves, for instance, in a plant motif may begin to look like a teapot. It is of no significance what the new picture that you see is, so long as it is there. At this point, consider the animal you would like to morph into. You must be able to see it. With the image of, let us say, this leaf-made teapot, held in your mind, focus on your animal and enter its being.”
“He makes it sound so easy,” said Molly with a chuckle of amazement.
The eager twins read on, completely oblivious to two eyes that were upon them.
Lily Black crouched in a cupboard in the office, peering out through the crack where its two doors met. Her heart was thumping against her rib cage and in the confined space her breath sounded to her like a steam train as she tried to quiet it. Her expensive white wool dress itched horribly, she was so hot.
She could make out two children in her father’s office, and she could hear them.
“‘Morphing to humans is much more difficult to accomplish,’” the boy was reading out in a low voice.
“It requires a controlled but also a playful mind. Follow the steps for morphing to animals. In the same way, find a trancelike state, and then with intense observation of a pattern, find a picture in it. However, because you are morphing to a human, you need to do something different. If that human is an adult, you must imagine the person as a child; if the human is a child, imagine the child as a baby; if the human is a baby, imagine it as an egg. It is very difficult to hold in your mind both the picture of (let us say again) the teapot and also to imagine an adult as a child. Do not underestimate how difficult this might be for you. Once you are seeing both images at once, the teapot and the child’s face, then you can morph into the human subject. May luck be with you!”
Lily was in two minds as to what to do about the intruders in her father’s office. She wanted to blow the whistle on them, but she couldn’t because she wasn’t supposed to be there either. Moments before they’d arrived, Lily herself had been reading the hypnotism book. That morning she’d found the spare key to her father’s forbidden room. It had been hidden under a china soap dish in his bathroom. After school, she’d come to the casino and waited near the corridor outside the office until the guard there had needed to go to the loo. Then she’d unlocked the door, slipped inside, and locked the door behind her. She’d found the book and skimmed through it. Then she’d heard noise coming from the vent above the office, and that had scared her stiff. Faster than she’d known she could move, she’d bolted to the cupboard and hidden there.
If her father found out what she’d done, he’d go berserk. And Lily would be in such trouble that she didn’t dare think of it. But there was another reason, a more important reason. This reason was that Lily had high suspicions that the children were hypnotists like her father. Lily had no talent for hypnotism herself, but she knew all about it. She didn’t want to step out into a firing line without armor. She wasn’t a brave person at all, and she
