Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure #1)

by Lars Guignard

  As I locked eyes with the man, he started for a second, as though he wasn’t expecting to see anyone. That’s when things got strange. The silver goblet actually fell out of the man’s hand, a big splash of whatever red stuff he was drinking going everywhere. But that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was that as the goblet fell, the big drops of red liquid slowed their descent, and then just kind of hung there in midair alongside the goblet. Let me repeat: the goblet hung in midair. The drops hung there too. Then the drops actually reversed course, returning to the goblet, which hung there on its side. Everything flowed right back into it. I’d never seen a glass or cup do that; float in midair, then clean itself up after a spill. It was really weird. When the cup was full again, the guy grabbed it between two fingers, and drank, showing me a big toothy smile. His teeth were yellow and long and pointed and when I looked at them I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. I wasn’t sure what freaked me out more, the fact that the goblet had defied gravity, or those gleaming yellow teeth, but it didn’t matter because in another moment he was gone. The train picked up a little more speed and steamed down the track.

  The street kids crowded around us as I turned to Zak. I was in no mood to talk about how weird what I had just seen was, so I decided to say something normal.

  “We’re buying tickets back to the hotel,” I said.

  “Come on, we’re more than halfway there. Let’s just say hi to this Mukta guy. See what he has to say.”

  “Why do you think he has anything to say at all?”

  “Why else would the butterfly lady ask us to go there?”

  Zak put on a big fake grin and flashed the picture of Mukta. Did Zak really think a smile was all it would take for me to change my mind? The guy in the photo was completely nuts looking. And Zak wanted to go to his house? We had already rummaged around in a stranger’s hotel room and look where that had gotten us. I decided I needed some space. I took a few steps away from Zak and the kids to try to get a handle on the situation. Which was fine for about two seconds. But then I got a funny feeling and raised my arm into the air, spinning on my heel and turning backward as I did. I don’t know how, but I caught the flying money bag in my hand as I turned. Apparently Zak had tossed it to me.

  “Holy crud, Zoe. It’s amazing that you caught that.”

  “Why are you throwing stuff at my head?”

  “You caught it didn’t you?”

  I didn’t put too much thought into how I had caught the bag, or why he had thrown it at me. I guess, he was trying to get it away from the kids, but now he was talking to everybody around him. A crowd had formed.

  “Moon Surrie?” Zak said to no one in particular.

  If Zak’s general weirdness wasn’t bad enough, the street kids were now crowded around me too, jumping for the money bag that I held above my head. I had half a mind to just give it all to them right there. But I knew we had to be careful. We were, after all, on our own now. We needed some way to get back to the hotel. A woman with a cage of parrots approached. I shrank back as the woman did her best to hand me a live parrot by the neck. The woman continued toward me forcing me to back up. I smacked right into the back of some guy. Unable to move any farther backward, I took the money box out of the bag and quickly handed the parrot lady some brightly colored bills. I hadn’t even figured out what they were worth yet, I just wanted out of there. Behind me, the big guy I had smacked into turned around. Great. Was I really this unlucky? The big guy was Rhino Butt, our not-so-good friend from the hotel.

  “Crud,” I said, under my breath. Where did he come from?

  “What do you want?” Rhino Butt said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then watch where you’re going.”

  As Rhino Butt turned back to what he was doing, something seemed to catch his eye. The money box. He had seen the money box. I eased the box back into the bag as Zak approached.

  “I think we'd better go,” I said quietly to Zak.

  Rhino Butt smiled. “I’ve seen you two before,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” Zak said.

  “Probably not,” I concurred.

  “No, I think I have. I have a good memory for faces. The pool at the Grand Palace Hotel maybe?”

  “Nah. No way. We would have remembered.”

  “Funny,” Rhino Butt said. “Because I know I’ve seen that box.”

  “I think we'd better go now,” I said.

  “Six,” Zak whispered.

  Several tracks away, a post marked Platform Six. I wasn’t positive that it was the right platform, but it was a lot better than where we were. The locomotive over there had already begun its slow nudge forward, pulling a dirty, rust-colored train behind it. I looked behind us. There were stairs that led under the tracks to the platform, but there was no time to get to them. Not now that the train was already moving. The fastest way would be to cross the tracks. Zak must have read my mind. He jumped down from the concrete platform we were standing on and onto the track. I looked up at Rhino Butt and then down at Zak. It was filthy down on the track, broken orange clay cups and litter covering the wooden ties. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was a second train which sped toward us from the opposite direction.

  “Zoe!”

  I stood on the concrete platform above Zak, staring into Rhino Butt’s eyes. That’s when Zak took my hand and pulled me down onto the track with him. Rhino Butt stared down at the both of us as though he had us exactly where he wanted.

  “Are you nuts?” I cried out over the clamor of the approaching train.

  The sooty green locomotive was thundering down on us now. I was amazed at how quickly it had built up speed. It blew its piercing whistle. I couldn’t help myself. I stood frozen, the locomotive rushing down on us. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t. My feet felt glued to the track. I felt the hot wind slam in my face as the giant locomotive screeched toward me. Then I noticed that Zak was no longer beside me on the track, but strangely, I didn’t care. I was transfixed. The locomotive grew bigger and bigger until it was all that I could see. I used every last bit of my willpower to urge my feet to move, but they didn’t respond. The locomotive was so close that I felt its hot exhaust in my face. It was as big as a barn and it was coming at me fast: thirty feet, twenty feet, ten feet and closing. I knew what was going to happen next. It would squash me like a bug. I was pretty sure that the giant sooty locomotive would be the last thing I ever saw.

  7

  THE HOWLING HUT

  The locomotive wasn’t the last thing I ever saw, but it was close. At the last possible moment I felt a tug on my arm and my feet suddenly unfroze. I leapt upwards onto the platform, the locomotive barreling through the spot where I had just stood. I took a deep breath, the sooty hot wind from the train blowing through my hair. I felt dirty and drained, but the important thing was that Rhino Butt was now on the other side of the track. But even though the fast-moving train was between us, we still needed to move. Farther on, at Platform Six, the train to Moon Surrie had almost entirely left the station. We ran after it, hopping down over two empty tracks to get to the platform. I was amazed we actually got there. Once on the platform, we sprinted after the train, jumping onto the second-to-last car as it picked up speed.

  Truth be told, I was far from sold on continuing to Moon Surrie, but I knew that we couldn’t stay at the station either. The train to Moon Surrie was our getaway, and I treated it as such. I was pretty sure there would be time to turn around and get back to the hotel once we lost Rhino Butt.

  The train was overcrowded and that was putting it nicely. We made our way forward in search of a place to sit down but couldn’t find anything. Nothing. There were people floor to ceiling. We kept moving forward between the carriages looking for a nook or cranny to sit down but it didn’t take long before we had walked all the way to the front of the train. Then at Zak's insistence, we knocked on the metal door and entered the locomotive. The engineer didn’t want us to stay there, but he didn’t seem to
mind us going outside and climbing out onto the narrow catwalk that ran around the front of the train.

  So much for seat belts and bike helmets and airbags and every other thing that was supposed to make the world a safer place. Apparently in India, you could do what you wanted. From the catwalk on the front of the locomotive, I saw that not only was the inside of the train filled to bursting, but so was the roof. People were sprawled out all over it. I could barely see the carriages for all the people hanging off them. It was like no train I had ever been on. People sat where they could, so now, for better or worse, I sat on the little metal ledge at the front of the locomotive while Zak insisted on standing on the cowcatcher below me. In case you’ve never seen one, the triangular shaped cow-catcher is the metal prow at the very front of some locomotives. It looks kind of like the front of a small, upside-down boat that sits a few inches above the track, the iron rails zipping away below it.

  I knew that my mother wouldn’t approve of me riding outside the train, but my basically sane mother would scarcely approve of anything I had done over the last eighteen hours. Zak, however, was being a little more reckless than he needed to be. Sure, it was probably a blast, standing there on the cow-catcher with your arms out, tracks zipping away below you like you were on the bow of the Titanic or something. But it would really suck to fall. I thought it would do Zak good to consider some of the more dangerous things he did once in a while. It was like he thought he was invincible.

  “Sure you don't want to try it?” Zak screamed into the wind.

  “I’m sure,” I said quietly.

  Besides, I could see dark storm clouds on the horizon. As we wound our way into the mountains I reflected that it was about to get very wet, very soon.

  I was right about the rain. Within minutes we were soaked. The engineer took pity on us and let us ride inside the locomotive to dry off for a while. He even let Zak pull on the whistle. The Thums Up wala came by with some soda and chips which we paid him for. Zak bought more sunflower seeds and a soda and chips for the engineer too. The wala called the chips crisps, but they tasted basically like slightly soggy potato chips to me. The soda tasted like, well, very sweet cola, but I figured that under the circumstances, a little too much sugar was way better than drinking the water which might actually kill us.

  I had been hoping that at some point the train would stop and we could start making our way back to the hotel. Turned out that was a pipe dream. Judging by the fact that it didn’t stop once, the train to Moon Surrie was an express. I wasn’t about to jump off of a moving locomotive so we just kept going. We travelled several more hours until it began to grow dark very quickly, probably because we were much closer to the equator than I was used to. The landscape, lit by the locomotive’s single headlamp, grew more and more lush and dense as we climbed the hillside. It was like we were traveling back in time to a magical, mysterious place. By the time we finally pulled into the tiny station at the end of the line, it was pitch dark. All I could see under the weak lamplight was a sea of umbrellas in the rain.

  The station was little more than a ticket booth. There were no buildings to speak of, nothing but sheer mountain walls rising above the tracks. I reflected that we were in the mountains now and I really hoped that Zak would come to his senses soon. I thought that if we just saw this Mukta guy, Zak would be satisfied, and we could go back. I still felt responsible for Zak, so I didn’t want to leave him, but the thing was, I also recognized that the clock was ticking. At some point very soon we’d have to return.

  Zak waved the picture of Mukta to the people in the crowd. I cringed. Couldn’t he just ask politely like a normal person?

  “Mukta?” Zak said as if reading my mind.

  “Mukta, Mukta,” several men and woman replied from beneath their umbrellas. They all pointed away from the platform and down what looked a lot like a cliff.

  Zak looked at me and shrugged. We walked a few feet away from the station and stared down a steep path to a stone hut barely visible in the mist. There were muffled cries coming out of the hut. Cries that sounded a lot like howling. I stared Zak straight in the eye.

  “For your sake, there'd better not be a pack of ravenous coyotes down there.”

  The rain continued to pelt down. I was getting wet again, no, soaked. My shirt and pants clung to my skin. I just wanted to get out of the rain and I figured getting into that hut was the quickest way to do it. So I stepped off the road and down the path. Half a second later I felt the world slip out from under my feet and I started to scream.

  Crazy thoughts tumbled through my brain as I slid wildly down the muddy hillside. Would I ever stop sliding? Would I be OK when I hit bottom? Had I turned off all the lights in my room back home? Would I ever even see my room again? I slid uncontrollably down the muddy hillside desperately hoping that the answer to all of my questions would be yes. But it didn’t feel like yes. The mud slide felt like a wacky water slide that kept getting more and more twisted until that one final drop before the end where you keep going down and down not knowing if you’ll ever stop. I slid and slid, feeling the roots and stones beneath me. I grabbed at the sticks and vines but kept going despite my best efforts. And then, without warning, I felt nothing at all. It was as if the mud slide had completely disappeared from underneath me.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs and just when I thought my life was over, I slapped down in a giant pool of mud. Cold gooey muck oozed up my shirt and into my shoes. I recovered my breath and tried to wipe the mud away from my eyes with my hands but it did no good, so I shook the mud from my hair and face. The howling was louder down here, but I also heard a gradually growing scream above me. It was an excited whooping wail that couldn’t belong to anyone but Zak. I looked up into the misty darkness and immediately ducked to the side. Zak slapped down with a mighty splash in the muck beside me.

  “Holy India!” he said.

  Staring forward through the mist and rain, the only source of light was the hut with all the howling coming out of it. The hut was made of stone and not much bigger than the tool shed in my grandfather’s backyard in Virginia. The difference was, my grandfather’s shed didn’t howl like it was inhabited by a pack of wild animals. Zak pulled himself out of the mud and offered me a hand up.

  “I’m perfectly fine on my own,” I said.

  “Then follow me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Geez, Zoe. Just go with it for once, why don’t you?”

  Sure. Why not, I thought to myself. I’d just go with it. After all, it wasn’t like anything else could go wrong. Zak walked across the flat rocky yard to the back of the hut. A low light shone from the front of the building so he walked around that way. I was even more uncomfortable now that I was covered in cold mud, but I didn’t complain because I was going with it. The one thing I had to be grateful for was that my camera was waterproof and in its own Ziplock bag in my fanny pack. I had put it in the bag like that before bringing it to the swimming pool at the hotel. I could never have guessed what a good idea that would turn out to be. The smoke rising from the crooked chimney at the top of the hut told me that it would be warm inside. However you looked at it, going inside would be way better than freezing to death in the rain.

  Zak knocked on the door of the hut semi-politely. The weathered door was made of ornately carved old wood and rounded at the top. Almost as soon as Zak knocked, the howling stopped. I looked to Zak. Knocking on stranger’s doors in the middle of the night was not, strictly speaking, something that kids should do. Of course, neither was riding on the front of locomotives. Anyway, it didn’t really matter now. We had already done it. A moment after Zak's hand had left the door, a guy I immediately recognized as Mukta appeared, opening the door just a crack.

  I thought that Mukta looked even crazier than he had in the photograph. He wasn’t terribly tall, but he had wild blue eyes and his gray and black matted hair looked like it hadn’t been washed, well, ever. His matted locks stuck out in every direction and his w
hole body was covered in white ash. The red swirls on his chest and arm obviously represented some sort of design, but none that I could fathom. His teeth, or what he had left of them, were silver and gold, and his expression was grim. He wore a tattered lungi and held what looked like a leash in one hand and a hedge pruner in the other.

  “Buenos Nachos,” Zak said.

  I sighed. I knew Zak didn’t know Hindi, but was he really trying to speak Spanish? This was India, not Mexico. Did he honestly think that one foreign language was as good as another? I noted that Mukta didn’t seem too happy with Zak either.

  “I am cutting my toes off,” Mukta said.

  “Ow!” Zak said.

  Zak looked down. I looked with him but it was dark and hard to see if Mukta still had his toes or not.

  “Is that what the howling is?” I said.

  Mukta opened his lungs and let out a mini howl right then and there.

  “Yes. That is the howling. What do you want?”

  “Nothing really,” Zak said.

  Mukta looked perturbed. “You interrupt my toe cutting for nothing really?” Mukta screamed something at us in Hindi and slammed the door in our faces.