The Golden Paw

by Jason Lethcoe

  Angry tears blurred Andy’s eyes.

  “What have you done to him?” Andy shouted.

  Cedric lifted his mask and looked Andy squarely in the eye. Andy noticed that the small man was smiling and looking very satisfied with himself.

  “I’ve given him a dose of nightshade mixed with tanglethorn. It’s a poison that’s quite deadly under any circumstances, but it has special potency on victims of magical curses like the great Ned Lostmore here.”

  He lectured Andy as if he were in front of one of his classrooms at Cambridge. “In a few minutes, complete paralysis will set in, and then, after a very painful series of spasms, Ned Lostmore will die right here on the table.”

  “How could you?” Andy demanded. “He trusted you!”

  “Yes, yes, he did,” Cedric said. “That was his mistake. I never liked him much, but I played my part well, don’t you think?”

  Cedric cocked his head and gazed down at Ned, as if proud of his handiwork. It was too much for Andy. Even though his Zoomwriter wasn’t charged up yet, he leapt at the foul villain.

  As the two fell to the ground, Andy, who had never been much of a fighter, attacked with all his might. It seemed like every bit of rage he possessed had taken over, and he fought blindly, rolling in the dust while slamming his fists into Cedric over and over again.

  For the first time in his life, Andy was winning a fight. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t even something to be proud of. All he wanted at that moment was for the pain to go away, and to hurt the man who had stolen the most important person in his life from him.

  Cedric managed to twist from Andy’s grip. As he stood, he turned to Andy. With an evil grin he said, “You’re too late, you know. She already has the Key of Fate. Whether you defeat me or not, you’ll all die soon enough!”

  Then Cedric turned and ran toward the group of thugs from the Collective, calling for protection. Andy gave chase, still howling with rage.

  When Cedric reached the crowd where the fighting was thickest, Andy saw him remove a glittering orb from his pocket and raise it high above his head.

  Andy had seen Cedric use his favorite weapon before. He was particularly fond of crafting decorated bombs that resembled Easter eggs. Cedric now held one of these and, seeing what he was about to do, Andy screamed for him to stop.

  It all seemed to happen in slow motion. One second Cedric had the egg above his head and the next he slammed it to the ground.

  A billowing cloud of smoke filled the air where the egg had landed. There was no explosion, and Andy wondered if perhaps, by some stroke of luck, he and his friends had been spared an untimely demise. Perhaps the explosive was a dud. But the smoke that filled the air was so thick, Andy couldn’t see a thing!

  Emerging from the smoke, coughing and haggard, came Abigail. She rushed over to Andy and said, “Are you all right?”

  Andy was relieved to see her. He was pretty sure his nose was bleeding from the fight with Cedric, but he was otherwise okay. He felt like crying, but he did his best to hold back the tears.

  He nodded and then said, in a choked voice, “He killed my grandfather.”

  Abigail didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, looking back toward the clearing smoke, she said, “We should get out of here while we can. Follow me. Let the others finish the fight.”

  But Andy didn’t move. He stared at Abigail and said, “What did you say?”

  “I said, let’s leave! The others can fend for themselves!”

  And then Andy saw the glittering chain around her neck. Abigail didn’t wear jewelry. He knew in a flash who it was that stood in front of him.

  He drew his Zoomwriter and pointed it at Cedric.

  “Nice try,” he said, and pushed down hard on the cap.

  KABOOOOM! A huge atomic pulse slammed into Cedric, sending him backward through the air. Andy watched as the villain’s unconscious body splashed down into a pool of quicksand. As he slowly sank below the surface of the bog, Andy made no move to rescue him.

  The traitor had paid the price for his treachery.

  Andy glanced back down at the Zoomwriter. He didn’t know how it had happened—usually it took a lot longer to recharge. But his grandfather’s gift had been there when he needed it, and now he felt the stinging tears he’d been fighting so hard to hold back come rolling down his cheeks.

  Andy walked over to the table and gazed down at the dying form of his grandfather. He looked so small and frail without his protective window. Andy noted Ned’s bushy white sideburns and wished that his blue eyes, which were nearly always twinkling with suppressed mirth, would open.

  But there was nothing he could do to open them and, Andy realized with a pain deep in his heart, they never would again.

  Andy wiped his eyes and tried to come up with words to express how he was feeling. His grandfather had done so much for him. When Andy had first met him, Ned had seen potential in him that nobody else had ever seen. He’d believed in Andy and said he possessed the “Lostmore Spirit.”

  Andy had wanted nothing more than to live up to his grandfather’s expectations and be just like him. After working hard trying to come up with the right words to say, all he could manage was a whisper.

  “Grandfather, I…” he began, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  Andy stopped, his eyes growing wide as his hand touched something in his pocket. He drew out a frond of purple aloe, the same miraculous plant that had healed Rusty.

  Andy felt like he was in a dream as he moved close to his grandfather and squeezed a tiny bit of the plant’s juice onto his grandfather’s tongue. He stared down at him, wondering if there was still any chance at all.

  Please…

  He was aware of several hands on his shoulders. His friends were nearby. All stared down at Ned Lostmore, their leader, each unable to find a single word to say but all feeling exactly the same.

  A moment passed.

  And then another.

  And then, Ned Lostmore’s eyes fluttered open and the color returned to his cheeks. He smacked his lips and said in a weak but cheery English accent, “I say, is that purple aloe I taste? Egad, haven’t had any of that in years. Makes a wonderful tea, don’t you know. Very restorative!”

  Andy yelped with glee. He gently hugged his grandfather to his chest and realized, as he did so, that it was the first time the two of them had actually had any physical contact.

  Ned’s eyes sparkled as Andy set him back down on the table. “Thank you, Grandson,” he said. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of you.”

  Andy cried again. But this time, they were happy tears, and he didn’t try to hide them.

  Andy sat on the docks next to his grandfather, relaxing beneath the canopy of twinkling stars that blanketed the sky over the Jungle Navigation Company boathouse. Ned Lostmore had been temporarily installed in a windowed cabinet to protect him until Boltonhouse could be rebuilt, and Andy had wheeled him over to a spot where the two of them could talk in private.

  Andy gazed up at the heavens and listened to the gurgle of the river. “Little Brown Jug,” a famous dance tune, played softly on a radio in the background.

  “How’s Jack McGraw feeling?” Andy asked.

  “He’s recovering,” Ned replied. “He’s been through quite a lot.”

  “I owe him an apology for running away,” Andy said.

  “Pish posh,” said Ned. “He’s quite forgotten about that. He saw your loyalty to your friends when you faced off with Cedric and has no doubt about your character.”

  Andy watched a group of fireflies dancing near one of the Navigation Company boats. The vessel was half submerged in the river, but Andy could see its name, Sankuru Sadie, inscribed on the side of the hull. Seeing the broken vessel reminded Andy of his friends and how beaten up they’d been after fighting the Collective.

  Ned seemed to read Andy’s thoughts and said, “Albert is seeing to it that the others receive proper medical attention. They’re safely installed at a very good jungle
hospital nearby, a place where I myself worked at one time.”

  Andy nodded. That was good. But he still felt a bit melancholy. Ned studied Andy, squinting at him through his monocle. “Something bothering you, my boy?”

  “We lost the Golden Paw,” Andy said. “It sank into the quicksand with Cedric.”

  “True,” Ned said. “And I can think of no better place for it. It’s safer there, lost forever, than locked away where someone else can find it.”

  “When the Potentate was disguised as John Bartlemore, she gave me something called the Ghost Box. I was supposed to put the pendant in it and then the box would vanish, keeping it safe,” Andy said.

  Ned chuckled. “A great parlor trick, the Ghost Box. But she knew that you would never find the Golden Paw. It was her way of convincing you that she was on the up and up.”

  Ned bobbed a little on the new string that suspended him in his cabinet. “You can buy those ghost boxes at any magic shop. It’s a fairly simple illusion and wouldn’t have kept something as dangerous as the Golden Paw any more protected than a cereal box.”

  Andy was quiet.

  “Something else?” Ned asked.

  Andy stared off into the shadowy jungle. “Cedric wasn’t able to drag the secrets of the Jungle Explorers’ Society from you, was he?”

  “He tried,” Ned said. “But he wasn’t prepared for a head such as my own. Quite resistant to torture and the extraction of any information I’m unwilling to give, this noggin of mine.” Ned laughed. “I’m always two steps ahead of my enemies, don’t you know?”

  Andy smiled at his grandfather’s little joke, but he still felt anxious. “But, Grandfather, Cedric said that the Potentate has the Key of Fate now. If she gets the page from the Library of Alexandria and activates the Doomsday Device, that will be the end of everything. All that we’ve tried to accomplish, along with our lives, will be lost!”

  He looked up at Ned. “I can’t stand the idea of losing you again, Grandfather.”

  Ned chuckled gently. “Nonsense. Don’t give up yet, my boy. There are still ways that we can stop her. The last thing you need to learn before becoming a full-fledged member of the Jungle Explorers’ Society is that we never give up hope. It’s as much a part of who we are as saying yes to adventure and staying loyal to our friends.”

  Andy sighed. Of all the things he had to learn, perhaps this would be the hardest. It was so easy to think the worst could happen when a terrible situation was staring you in the face. He was a worrier by nature.

  “It just so happens that Nicodemus Crumb, an associate of mine, knows the location of a very special person most people don’t even know exists. He’s older than the oldest trees and incredibly hard to locate. However, I believe that with his help, we still may defeat our enemies.”

  Andy felt a flicker of hope. He knew his grandfather well enough to know that if he said there was still a chance, there really was.

  “When do we leave?” Andy asked.

  “Just as soon as your friends are healed,” Ned replied.

  Andy gazed at the swirling river, noting how the stars reflected in its surface rippled and moved. It was a beautiful sight, and seeing his reflection there, surrounded by stars, reminded him again of his new friends. He would stick by them through the most difficult of times, and he knew, having seen them in action, that they’d do the same for him.

  “Thank you for always being there, Grandfather,” Andy said. “For always believing in me, even when I make mistakes.”

  Ned’s blue eyes twinkled as he gazed at his young grandson. “But of course, dear boy. You’ve got the Lostmore Spirit. And there’s nothing you could do that would keep me from believing the best of you.”

  Andy smiled, and Ned grinned back at him. “Now then, are you ready for your next adventure? It’s bound to be filled with all kinds of danger, excitement, and near-death experiences.”

  “I am a Lostmore,” Andy said proudly. “It’s what we live for, isn’t it?” Then, with a wink, he added the secret word that every Jungle Explorers’ Society member said when setting off for adventures.

  “Kungaloosh!”