Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure #1)

by Lars Guignard

  “Me who's going to whoop your butt,” I said, though not very convincingly.

  The bhagwan tilted me upwards with the power of his mind so that he could look me in the eye. I felt a flood of memories rush over me. He was doing it again. The memory trick, except without the plants. I saw myself as a baby, then as a toddler, then in first grade, then second grade, and then the memories slowed to a trickle until I saw only one image in my mind’s eye. I was looking at myself as a little girl again. I was being kicked by the older girls in the school playground. I was afraid. More afraid than I can ever remember being. More afraid than even now.

  “You’re afraid of what you are, Zoe Guire,” the bhagwan said.

  “Really? What am I?”

  “A weak little girl who wants to possess the Leopard, just as I do.”

  “I came to protect it,” I said.

  “You came to take its picture.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I?”

  The bhagwan laughed and in that moment, I hated him. I hated him for what he had done to us. I hated him for what he had done to Mukta and Amala. I hated him for being a bully and I hated all bullies everywhere. It didn’t change anything though. I was still stuck, frozen in midair.

  “You’ll never defeat me,” the bhagwan said. “You’ll never defeat me because you’ll always be afraid of what you are.”

  The bhagwan whirled as a flash of fur leapt from the train top to the icy rocks above. It dashed in, then out of view. The bhagwan must have thought the Leopard was more interesting than me because he sniffed the cold breeze and left me hanging there, over the chasm.

  The blizzard blew, twilight lighting the sky, but I was stuck. Sky stuck. I didn’t know how long it had been, two or three minutes, but not only could I not move as I hung there in midair, I could barely breathe. It felt like I had a terrible weight on my chest, like I had to push that weight up with every breath. And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that I wasn’t alone. The monkeys had come out. They had started to climb out the windows of the train one by one, but now they were everywhere, covering the roof of the train. Their reddish-brown fur stood on end in the blowing snow, their needle-like teeth glistening in the moonlight. I tried to ignore it when the first monkey reached across the gap, clawing at my boot, but I couldn’t ignore it for long. A second monkey jumped on top of me. It stood on my knee and lowered its head. I hoped for a moment that since I couldn’t move, I might also be numb, but no such luck. I felt a sharp pain as the monkey nipped my leg with its pointed teeth. I screamed out to no one in particular as a third monkey jumped on top of me.

  It was the fourth monkey that really got to me. When the fourth monkey jumped onto the back of the third one, I realized that there would be no stopping them. That was when I started to get very, very scared. I didn’t like where this was going, because the monkeys didn’t seem to care if they were all piled up on top of each other or not. I didn’t want to be gnawed to death by a bunch of frozen furballs. I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to move my body. But I was still stuck there, suspended in midair. I couldn’t move my arms and I couldn’t move my legs. It was more than feeling like I was stuck in molasses, it felt like I was stuck in ice. I felt a sharp pain and opened my eyes again to see that a fifth monkey had jumped on top of me. This one was pushing the others forward, closer to my chest. I opened my mouth to scream, but stopped because I thought I saw a butterfly. When I looked again, I knew I had definitely seen something through the spindly legs of the reddish-brown monkeys. Amala.

  She stood on the roof of the train, monkeys swarming right through her, leaving their nasty little glowing footprints everywhere they walked. If I didn’t think Amala was a ghost before, it was obvious now. It was like she wasn’t even there.

  “Concentrate on the train, Zoe,” Amala said.

  “I’m trying!”

  “Move the wheels of the train.”

  A sixth monkey jumped on top of me. You know that saying, three is crowd? Well, six just sucks. They kept moving farther up my body toward my face. I didn’t know how many more monkeys I could hold before I fell out of the sky. I didn’t know how long it would be before the monkeys grew tired of just nipping and poking me. Would they decide to feed all at once like a school of piranha? The thought terrified me. I closed my eyes and focused. I thought of the big gold-banded wheels of the train. I thought of them turning round and round on the icy track. But nothing happened. I opened my eyes and nothing had changed except another monkey had hopped on top of me. The new monkey shrieked and I screamed.

  “I can’t do this! I could never do this!”

  “Why are you here, Zoe?” Amala’s calm voice asked me.

  “To protect the Leopard.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really believe it?”

  I felt another monkey bite at my leg. The pain was really sharp this time. I was sure it had drawn blood.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then what are you doing lying around?”

  Amala was right. What was I doing lying around? Feeling sorry for myself? I closed my eyes and then opened them again, staring at the birthmark on my hand. I didn’t know why I had my birthmark, but I did. That was all that mattered. Just like it didn’t matter that I had been adopted, my mom was my mom. I needed to focus on what was, not what might have been. So I tried again. I closed my eyes and imagined the cold steel wheels of the locomotive. I imagined the ice on the track. I imagined those cold steel wheels revolving over the ice on the track. The thought hurt my head at first. It hurt really badly. It felt like an enormous weight in my mind. It felt like my brain was being crushed by that weight. But, little by little, the more I concentrated, the lighter that weight became. As I focused my thoughts on the wheels of the train, I didn’t even feel the monkeys clawing at me anymore. All I felt was the weight gradually being lifted.

  The weight in my mind got lighter and lighter. Finally, when the train felt as light as a feather, I opened my eyes. The spots on my hand glowed. I heard a low groan. I wasn’t certain, but it looked like the train was moving. It was moving past me. I tried to see Amala, except she wasn’t there anymore. But the monkeys were jumping off me. They were jumping back onto the roof of the train as it picked up speed. It moved past me, more quickly now, the last of the monkeys jumping onto the roof. But the train had nowhere to go. There were no more tracks and there was no more mountain. So instead of going forward, it went down. The train left its track and tumbled off the cliff. The cherry-red locomotive went first, followed by each of the cars until the caboose finally flew off the mountaintop.

  I was still hanging in midair, but something was different. I felt the bhagwan's grasp loosening more and more, and then, without warning, I plunged down. Had I made a serious mistake? I extended a hand outward as I fell, desperately grasping at the cliffside. I missed the edge of the cliff. I missed the ice below it. But I was just able to grab a narrow rock ledge sticking out from the mountainside. I grappled the icy rock with both arms and held myself there, fifty feet below the mountaintop. As I dangled there in the cold wind, I heard the first echoing crash as the bhagwan's locomotive hit the valley below. Shooting flames lit up the mountaintops beneath me as I began the slow climb back up.

  23

  THE MONKEY MAN'S LAST STAND

  The sky danced with fire and flame. The full moon was still visible, but it was lower in the sky. It would be daylight soon enough and the Leopard would become a ghost once again. But the sun wasn’t up yet. The Leopard was still in danger. I made it back up to the top of the plateau and then into the rock maze. More snow had fallen and I was able to follow the bhagwan's claw-like footprints through the thick powder. I found him there, hunched over a boulder with his long bow drawn tight, ready to shoot. The Leopard’s silhouette was visible just above him on the other side of a deep crevasse. The Leopard stood between two rocks, its tail held high. Its silhouette was
all black, but it was a perfect shot. The bhagwan took a breath and held it, about to gently release the taut bow string. In that moment, time seemed to almost stop. The Leopard remained absolutely still. And I leapt like a coiled spring onto the bhagwan. I grappled his hairy back, all ninety-five pounds of me wrestling him down.

  The arrow went wild, the Leopard leaping away. I guess I’d made the bhagwan even madder than he was because he went wild, tearing me off him with his claws. I turned to run, but I wasn’t fast enough. The bhagwan's tail snaked out and took me by the ankle. The tail picked me up and hurled me across the crevasse. I hit the wall with my shoulder, narrowly avoiding a sharp outcropping. But I didn’t fall because instead of letting me drop, he pinned me there, camera dangling from my neck, an enormous knife-shaped boulder overhead. Then the bhagwan retracted his tail, holding me against the mountain wall with the magnetic power of his mind.

  “You know you're going to die, Zoe Guire.”

  “I know something you never will,” I said, my voice cracking in spite of myself.

  The bhagwan concentrated his fiery gaze on the icy boulder perched above me. The huge rock rattled to his will.

  “Fear?” the bhagwan said.

  I craned my neck upwards to see the boulder separating from the slope. I tried to break free from the bhagwan's grasp, but he was too strong. Struggling for breath in the face of the inevitable, I remembered Mukta's words.

  “Mind is matter,” I heard Mukta say inside my head.

  I controlled my breath and found that inner place within myself. I calmed as I watched Mukta smiling beatifically in my mind's eye.

  “Matter is mind,” I said. “This…”

  The knife-like boulder plunged straight for me.

  “…is not this.”

  I looked up as the boulder sliced through the air at me. The bhagwan continued to hold me against the vertical mountain wall, my birthmark glowing faintly. Then the boulder hit me and I felt time slow. I think I saw the bhagwan turn away from me. Then I felt something, kind of like when you get peanut butter stuck in your throat and you swallow a glass of water to make it go down. Except, this time, the peanut butter was the boulder slicing through my body. The giant boulder just fell right through me. I guess it left me completely untouched, because when the bhagwan turned back to look at me, he looked even angrier than he had before. I smiled back at him, unable to believe my good fortune, my spotted birthmark glowing brightly. Then gravity took over and I began to plunge down after the boulder.

  “Whoa!” I cried.

  The bhagwan smiled and turned away again, but this time I was able to cross my arms as I fell, slowing my descent. The bhagwan scanned the mountaintop for the Leopard, his back turned to me.

  “Hey, Mr. Bhagwan, want me to take your picture?” I asked, holding up my camera.

  The bhagwan turned to see me at eye level, my legs crossed. I didn’t know how I had done it, but I had. I was levitating over the chasm.

  “No,” he said. “I want you to die.”

  The bhagwan leapt across the chasm for me, clawing at me in a fit of monkey rage. But he was unable to grab on because instead of leaping onto me, he leapt right through me. Then he groaned. It was a horrible sound, like a dog yelping mixed with the air being let out of an old balloon. I turned to see that he had stuck himself on a sharp rock. The end of the rock jutted straight out of his hairy back. I turned away. Then I slowly descended from my levitation and stepped onto solid ground. A flash of fur flitted through the rocks.

  “…Zoe.”

  I heard my name again and I knew it was Zak calling. I’d almost forgotten about him. I hoped he was OK as I charged through the maze of rocks. It didn’t take me long to find him. Rhino Butt’s monkey goons held him pinned against the ice, Rhino Butt himself prodding Zak with his crossbow. I was able to hang back behind the rocks, but it wasn’t much of a hiding spot. Whatever I was going to do, I’d have to do it soon.

  “You know what really makes me mad?” Rhino Butt said.

  “The fact that you’re a big dork?” Zak said.

  “The fact that you really didn’t need to be here. You chose to meddle where you didn’t belong.”

  “What’s so wrong with that?” Zak said.

  “Nothing really. Except now I have to end it.”

  Zak gulped. I could see the lump in his throat from thirty feet away.

  “Namaste,” I said, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  Both the goons and Rhino Butt turned. Great. Now I really had to do something. But Zak was ahead of me on that one. He must have been thinking about what to do all along. All he needed was the distraction, which I had just given him. He took the moment to rip the elephant-poop necklace from his neck, open the bag, and smash the dung into both goons’ faces. It worked. The old mahout who had given it to him must have known what he was doing because both the goons tore at their faces like they’d just been blinded. Zak backed away from Rhino Butt. If only he had Stryker. Why wasn’t he using his whip? Then I saw why: Stryker sat on another boulder. They must have taken it away from him. Rhino Butt turned back to Zak.

  “That monkey magic won’t work on me,” Rhino Butt said.

  I saw Zak eye his whip.

  “How about an elephant tear?”

  “You can try.”

  I could tell Zak was scared. Maybe more scared than he’d ever been in his life. The goons were still clawing at their faces. I watched Zak’s whip as the silver tip turned into a cobra’s head. But it was still too far away for him to reach.

  “Sorry, kid.”

  Rhino Butt pointed his crossbow at Zak. I knew I needed to get Zak his whip, but it wasn’t like I could do it on command. I focused and focused, but nothing happened. I don’t know if I was wiped out from having that giant rock slice through me or what. It didn’t really matter. I couldn’t move the whip with my mind. Oh, well. There was more than one way to skin a cat. The problem was that other way required doing something that I really, really didn’t want to do. It didn’t matter. It was for Zak.

  I ran forward past Rhino Butt. I didn’t care if he saw me. It wasn’t him I was after. It was the snake. The cobra hissed at me. I knew what I had to do. Rhino Butt locked eyes with me as I grabbed the cobra by its cold, scaly, bejeweled tail. Rhino Butt turned the crossbow from Zak to me. At that moment all I wanted to do was get the squirming snake out of my hand. I tossed it to Zak.

  That’s when Rhino Butt released the bow string. The arrow came flying at me. I saw it coming. I also saw Zak kick Rhino Butt right in the knee cap. Rhino Butt stumbled back and the arrow hit. Not me, but close to me. It kind of bounced off a rock. Rhino Butt must have watched his arrow fall, because he took out another one, but he wasn’t fast enough. Zak held the snake by its tail and cracked it like a whip.

  The cobra snapped through the air latching onto Rhino Butt’s nose with its fangs. After that I heard the loudest scream I had ever heard. Rhino Butt fought to rip the cobra from his nose, but soon crumpled, dropping his crossbow. Like that, the cobra knocked him right out with its venom. Then the snake transformed back into Zak’s trusty whip. He coiled it up.

  “Thanks,” Zak said.

  Breathing hard, I pulled myself up from the snow. I thought it was over. I prayed it was over. I thought I deserved it to be over. But I’d also seen enough old scary movies to know that it’s never over when you think it is, especially when you have that tingling feeling in your gut that just won’t go away. What I hadn’t seen was the furry tail snaking through the rocks behind us. It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. The muscular tail quietly grasped Rhino Butt’s crossbow, wrapping itself around it and pulling back on the bow string. Rhino Butt opened his eyes and stared up at us. That’s when I finally saw the tail. I rushed Zak, tackling him to the ground. The furry tail squeezed the crossbow’s trigger, the arrow piercing the air over our heads.

  I ignored the arrow, focusing my energy on the bhagwan. I didn’t have to think about it this
time, I just did it. Ripples of power shot out in ever-widening circles as I felt my energy collect and focus. It was like when you throw a stone in a lake. Once the stone has left your hand, everything else happens all by itself. The ever-widening ripples of power even looked the same, like water ripples, but in the air. The bhagwan held his wound, bracing for the attack, but he couldn’t stop it. I don’t want to sound egotistical or anything, but I blew him back with some serious power. The bhagwan flew through the air and across the gorge into a rock wall.

  I held the bhagwan against the cliff with my mind, staring him down for a long moment. It was easy for me this time, all the color draining from the bhagwan's face. He was a mean guy and a bully and for a second it felt good to finally have him where I wanted him, but I tried not to think of it like that. I didn’t want to be a bully too.

  “I’m not afraid anymore,” I said.

  He didn’t answer me. He just let out a blood curdling wail as his tail grew shorter and his fur turned back to skin. But this time it wasn’t just any skin, it was very, very old skin. I don’t know if he just couldn’t take the abuse anymore or if the disappointment of missing the Leopard was too much, but the bhagwan was reduced to a frail old man with long white hair. He shriveled before us like a dried apple and then, I’m not sure how, burst into flame. He was actually on fire. I let go of him with my mind. I didn’t want to think of him or see him anymore. I wanted it to really be over. A piercing screech wailed out as he plunged down through the air. It was followed by a dull thud and then nothing at all. Silence. Zak and I peered over the cliff as the fire and smoke slowly cleared from the sky.

  The world lightened around us as we descended the ridge. We left Rhino Butt and his goons up there. I don’t know what happened to them, but the blizzard had stopped blowing. The sun was close to rising, an orange glow on the horizon.

  “That was some kind of Yogination. We’re talking awesome,” Zak said.