lit it again. As she exhaled, a cloud of smelly smoke filling the shop alcove, a teenager drove his motorbike and sidecar into a parking space in front of her. Miss Oakkton stepped toward him.
“Excuse me, young man,” she began. The biker pulled his keys from the ignition slot and looked up. Immediately Miss Oakkton’s large eyes had a hold on him. He couldn’t look away, and for some reason, he felt he ought to do whatever this big muscley woman said. So, when she asked, he passed his motorbike keys to her.
“Now get off zat bike,” she said. The teenager did as he was told. Miss Oakkton put her two baskets, one with a cat in it, into the sidecar, and climbed onto the motorbike. It sank down under her weight. She started the engine. Then, laughing like a woman fresh out of the madhouse, she revved up the engine and drove away.
Flying along a London street on a blustery winter’s night as a ladybug is difficult, as the tiny Molly and Micky were discovering. Huge double-decker buses driving past them made cyclonelike swirls of air that buffeted and knocked them. Then one gust blew to their advantage. It caught them up and cast them forward, inches from Black. With a few sturdy flaps of their bug wings, the twins had soon landed on his right shoulder and were standing knee-deep in the fuzz of his camel-hair coat.
Underneath them, Black’s giant body parted the night air with ease. His massive feet thudded on the pavement.
Around, the streets were heavy with light. Beautifully designed shop windows, with dummies dressed in the latest fashions and photographs of glamorous people having fun in the same clothes behind, shone out into the night. Late-night shoppers passed Black, their arms laden with bags, some brushing shoulders with him, so that Molly and Micky had to grip the camel-hair strands with all their might.
Cafes glittered invitingly; cars with white headlights and red brake lights beamed brightly. Red, amber, and green traffic signals blinked. And everywhere the noise of engines hummed—buses, trucks, cars, motorbikes accompanied by the sound of bike bells.
“The human being certainly dominates the world!” Micky observed.
“I know. It’s frightening when you’re only four millimeters high, isn’t it?” Molly replied, wiggling her antennas.
As they settled down again, a mountainous building loomed up. Its stucco walls and pillars rose into the sky to a lofty gray slate roof. Dozens of windows punctuated each floor. They looked like eyes, and hanging underneath them were their balconies that looked like wrought-iron mouths. On the wall, in shiny gold, was the sign THE GLITZ RESTAURANT. Two torches with flames in their sockets burned on either side of it. A large window followed the corner of the building around so that the restaurant faced both the hat shop on one corner and a bus stop on the other.
Black paused before entering. He swung his bag off his left shoulder, tugged his coat from his arms, and seeing two ladybugs on his lapel, brushed them off with his hand. And then he entered the Glitz.
Molly felt like she had been charged at by an elephant. She tumbled through the air as light as a lentil and as helpless as a frog in a flood. She tried to flap her wings and regain her balance, but instead she flipped around and around so that the world was a blur. Then, finally, she hit the wall of the entrance. With crumpled wings, she fell to the ground and bounced from her back to her front legs. Dizzy and stunned, she lay still.
A few minutes passed as Molly’s senses slowly came back to her. She shook out her wings, then packed them into her shell-like outer layer, and she checked her body for injury. Surprisingly, she was fine—a bit shaken, but not hurt. Now she looked worriedly about for Micky.
Micky had landed closer to the pavement, where dangerous feet trod past, and he was spinning around on his back. Molly scuttled toward him and, with her face under his wings, heaved him over.
“I don’t like being a—” Micky didn’t finish his sentence, for a massive feathered monster was standing over them. A scruffy, mangy pigeon stared down at Molly and Micky, cocking its head as it contemplated the two tasty morsels.
With a sudden, vicious movement, it lunged. Its beak hit the paving stone between the two ladybugs, grazing Molly’s left wing.
“Oh, no!” Micky was speechless.
“Hide!” Molly screamed.
Micky and Molly dived for cover where a small broken piece of masonry had left a tiny hole in the wall. But even in the crack they weren’t safe, for the pigeon was hungry. It began to peck relentlessly at the stone, determined to oust its supper.
“I don’t want to be eaten by a
“Just—just control yourself, Micky,” Molly said, squishing into the hole as far as she could. Then another beak began to peck at their hiding place, too.
“Two of them! Jeepers!” Micky screeched. “You know birds are related to dinosaurs! T. rexes, velociraptors, allosauruses!”
“Calm down, Micky,” Molly pleaded, starting to feel desperate herself.
“What do you mean, calm down? Those beaks are like car-sized pick axes.”
Molly’s insides lurched with fear.
Calm. Calm. Molly tried to find some amid the terror of the moment.
“I know!” she gasped. “We should just morph
“What?”
“Morph, you ningbat. Like before.”
“But…but we have to find a pattern—there isn’t one.”
“Yes, there is.” Molly gulped. “Look at the wall.”
Micky raised his eyes. It was true. The stone was covered with green mildew.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he stuttered. “Okay. I’ll try and turn into the scruffy one.”
Molly and Micky grew quiet and focused, for they knew their lives depended upon it. Both stared at the green algae, ignoring the horrible pecking that threatened to snap them up. Molly saw a picture first. The strange pattern of algae began to look like a dog. Immediately holding this image to the side of her mind, she thought of what it was to be a pigeon. She looked at the beady, cold eyes of the bird that pecked so intently. She considered its feathers and wings.
And, amazingly, she found it quite easy to find the essence of pigeon.
Good-bye, and thank you! she managed to think to the ladybug.
For a millimoment, she was nothing. Then she got the watery tipping feeling as her mind and her spirit washed into the pigeon. The creature stopped pecking. Like a gadget suddenly without batteries, it stood stock still. Its pea-brained mind registered Molly’s arrival. For a moment, it attempted to push her out. But its efforts were a futile grapple. In the next second, Molly eclipsed its personality and took charge of its body. She flexed her new, scrawny bird legs with claws on the end and stretched out her muscley wings. She peered out of its beady black eyes over her new pale, dirty beak. Below her, the ladybug whose body she’d borrowed stood stunned as it recovered.
Molly shook her feathery self and observed the inside of the pigeon’s mind. She saw rooftops and streets as though from a bird’s-eye view. She saw a great white sculpture of a woman with no arms, on which the pigeon liked to sit on sunny days.
Then she noticed that the other pigeon was still pecking at the ladybugs and knew that Micky hadn’t managed the morph yet. Quickly Molly gave the scruffy pigeon a sharp jab in the neck. For a moment she thought the creature would peck her back, since he was bigger than her. But instead it went very quiet.
“Is that you, Micky?” Molly asked.
“Just made it,” the scruffy pigeon replied, his voice a coarse trill. “Let’s fly up to that corner balcony before we get into any more trouble.” With the ladybug flying lessons under their belts, the twins flapped up to a balcony.
“Scary being a ladybug, wasn’t it?” said Micky as they landed. “Suppose it’s fine if you’re on a rosebush in the summer, eating aphids.”
“Yes,” Molly agreed, folding her wings. “And then, scary to be an aphid.”
Below, the traffic flowed past, a river of machinery.
“You know we’re in trouble, Molly, don’t you?” Micky suddenly said. “We can morph from animal to animal,
