“I’m going to ask for that map one more time, “ Zak said to the big monkey.
The big monkey hissed at us and dropped the map into the pond.
“Now you don't want it?”
The map floated on the surface of the pond. Zak stretched to reach it, but it was too far out. Air bubbled to the surface in the center of the pond giving rise to a slowly swirling whirlpool. Zak stared up at the heads of the huge monkey statues. Live monkeys peered down at us as the whirlpool built in intensity.
“I wish they’d stop looking at us,” Zak said.
“They like you,” a silky smooth voice said.
I turned. I didn’t like strange voices in the dark, especially when they belonged to the bhagwan. The bhagwan stood at the base of one of the carved monkey columns. If that wasn’t enough, Rhino Butt stood a littler farther behind him with his two goons. Both goons carried bows and arrows strung over their shoulders. Rhino Butt held a crossbow.
“How did you get here?” Zak said.
“Train for most of the way,” the bhagwan said. “I got in my chair when I tired of blasting tunnels through the rock.”
“The monkeys took the map,” Zak said.
“I know,” the bhagwan said. “I asked them to.”
The water in the swirling whirlpool swelled, soaking our feet. The bhagwan smiled at the monkeys who now surrounded us, blocking our escape. The monkey’s mouths were wide open revealing their needle-like teeth.
“From the looks of them, they haven’t eaten for many days.”
“They should try the samosas,” I said. “I hear they’re really good.”
“Yogi time,” Zak whispered to me.
“You’re the one with the whip,” I replied under my breath.
I watched as the bhagwan stared at the map in the whirlpool. The map responded to his magnetic glare. At first it just inched forward, but then the map left the water entirely and flew through the air toward him, settling between the bhagwan's open fingers like a frisbee.
“I thank you for the delivery, but your time is through,” the bhagwan said.
This was bad. Really bad. We needed the map. More than that, I was pretty sure that I shouldn’t let the bhagwan have it. That would be a real disaster. But what was I supposed to do? I felt the whirlpool tugging at my ankles. The dark black water had turned a frothy white. It was an effort just to stay standing in place, and we couldn’t get out of the water because of the monkeys. The monkeys hissed at us from the bank.
“Stryker,” I said. “Use Stryker.”
Zak took Stryker in hand. He aimed it at the bhagwan. But he saw something and stopped before cracking it.
“It is all right, Zak. You may put Stryker down.”
It was Mukta. He showed himself from behind a stone monkey column. Zak lowered Stryker. I could see the anger in the bhagwan's eyes. Red flames danced around his pupils.
“Now to business,” Mukta said. “I will not allow you to harm them, Frightening One.”
“I’ve searched for too long to allow you to stop me,” the bhagwan said.
“Oh yes, I know. That is why I must.”
The gentle lapping sound of the whirlpool had now grown to a roar. Mukta and the bhagwan stood on opposite sides of the raging water. I had no idea what they had planned for each other, but as it turned out, that wasn’t our problem. Our problem was the two monkeys that sprang into the air. One headed for Zak, the other went for me. I managed to dive out of the way, but the first monkey landed on Zak's head. It wrapped itself around him, screeching and clawing. Zak wrestled the monkey.
“Get the guy with the map,” Zak wheezed.
I struggled to pull the monkey off Zak's head. The whirlpool began to grow, rising into a terrible water spout. It grew higher and higher as it swirled, its base widening, the water level growing above our knees. I struggled to maintain my balance as I clutched at Zak's monkey. I recognized it. It was the same big one that had taken the map. I took hold of the monkey under its arms. I felt the monkey loosening its hold. I almost had it. I pulled harder, but felt my feet losing their grip on the slippery rocks.
“Ah!” Zak screamed.
The whirlpool rose above Zak's waist. Between the water and the monkey he couldn’t fight it anymore. The water spout drew him in. The waterspout carried him up and up until he was so high he was swirling over the heads of the towering stone monkey columns. It looked like Zak was in a giant washing machine as he went around and around, getting closer to the middle, and I have to tell you, it really freaked me out, because A — I’ve never been one of those people who wanted to take a ride in a washing machine, and B — because I felt myself getting pulled in too. I caught sight of the monkey letting go of Zak's head and just as it did, I lost my footing and was yanked into the water spout with them.
I felt myself getting dizzy as I rose higher and higher until I could see over the tops of the stone monkey columns. I grabbed a gulp of air occasionally as I stuck my head outside the wall of twisting water, but the thing was, I couldn’t see Zak. He had just disappeared. It was only as I got pulled nearer to the center of the water spout that I saw what had happened. Zak had been pulled back down.
The eye of the waterspout had a hole at the center of it, maybe the size of an inner tube. I couldn’t see down the hole, it was just too dark and too far, but I could see that wherever it went, it was far below the surface of the pond. There was nothing I could do about it as I began to fall down the center of the spout. The only good thing about it was that it wasn’t like falling exactly. I didn’t drop like a stone, it was more like I was being sucked down into a new world. The swirling water grabbed ahold of me, pulling me farther and farther down, until the air hole at the eye of the waterspout was gone. Still, the whirlpool kept sucking me in. All I could do was hold my breath for what seemed like forever, the frothy whirlpool getting darker and darker until finally, I felt like I just couldn’t hold my breath any longer.
Just when I felt like my lungs were about to burst, the whirlpool released its grasp and dropped me twenty feet through the air, spitting me out in the shallow water next to a sandy shore. I dragged myself to dry land and opened my eyes to the ceiling above. I could see the dark gaping hole that I had just fallen from, water raining down from it. Looking around, I saw that I was in an underground cavern filled with enormous glowing stalactites. Stalactites are the spiky cave rocks that grow down from the ceiling of a cave, not to be confused with stalagmites, the ones that grow up from the cave floor. When a stalagmite and stalactite meet at the middle and grow together, they’re called a column. I know this stuff because I’ve always been a bit of a science geek. But there was no stalactite I’d ever heard of that glowed the way these ones did. They threw enough light to reveal Zak lying there, ten feet away from me. My heart skipped a beat when I saw that Zak was lying perfectly still. He was so hyper, I’d never seen him not moving since I’d known him. I started to worry that he wasn’t breathing.
“Zak?” I called his name, but he didn’t move an inch. “Zak, are you, OK?”
He just lay there. I pulled myself up. We’d come too far at this point for some stupid waterspout to get him. I ran over to Zak and turned him over, shaking him. His eyes were closed and there was sand on his face. I knew I had to do get him breathing again. That would mean mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I had learned how to do it in swimming lessons at school. I placed my arm under Zak’s neck to make sure his airway was open and pinched his nose. The next step was to breathe into his mouth. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it, but it didn’t matter. I had to. Zak was white as a ghost. Even now, I thought I might be too late. I took a deep breath and lowered my mouth toward his, getting ready to breath into his mouth. Then, I thought I saw Zak’s face twitch. I blinked and some him twitch again.
“Sucker,” Zak said.
I whipped my head back to see the big grin on Zak’s face. His eyes were open now and he was laughing at me. He rolled over on the sand and started pounding on i
t like the fact that I had just tried to save his life was totally hilarious. I couldn’t believe him.
“I had you. I totally had you,” Zak cackled.
“Doofus!” I punched him hard in the arm.
“Ow! No fair. I owed you for the time you played dead back in the temple.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“Timing. We weren’t being chased by a crazoid bhagwan man then.”
Zak seemed to think about it. “I guess that’s true,” he said. “But it sure was hilarious!”
“Yeah, really funny.” I looked around. “Laugh while you can. I don’t like this place.”
The more I looked around the cavern, the less I liked it. Farther away from the pool, torches lit the cave walls. Monkey statues were carved into every surface of the cave. Even the huge stalactites had stone moneys carved into them, climbing them like tree trunks. A bat flew above our heads.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked Zak. “For real?”
I looked at Zak a little more closely. The color had returned to his cheeks. He had a few scratches here and there from the monkey on his head, but other than that, he looked OK.
“I don’t need mouth-to-mouth, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Good. Then let’s get out of here.”
Zak and I walked forward through the mass of glowing stalactites. Our pajamas were soaking wet and clung to our skin. But it wasn’t cold in the cave. In fact, it was surprisingly warm. Another sciencey cave fact: caves tend to maintain a constant temperature. I appreciated the fact that the cave wasn’t as cool as the air outside. I took a wooden torch down from the wall and used it to look at one of the glowing stalactites. The stalactite itself looked like a giant icicle dripping down from the cave’s ceiling. But it was what was inside of the stalactite that surprised me. Little bugs or mites floated around inside the stalactite’s fluid core.
“They’re tiny little miniature monkeys,” I said.
“In an icicle?”
“It’s not an icicle. It’s a stalactite, and I can see their little tails. See that?”
“Wow. You’re right,” Zak said. “I can even see their tiny pointy teeth. What are they doing in there?”
“Maybe they’re babies.”
“What kind of monkey baby lives in an icicle?”
“I told you, they’re not icicles,” I said. “And they’re not normal monkeys either.”
“Very weird,” Zak said.
I pointed the torch forward. Farther on, the stalactites and stalagmites had actually grown together into columns reaching all the way from the cave’s ceiling to the cave’s floor. It was just like I’d read about in my textbook, except the thing was, I already knew there was nothing ordinary about the cave we were in. I doubted there was anything ordinary about the columns either. Two more steps confirmed my thought. My torch lit up some writing at the base of one of the translucent columns. As I moved the torch upwards, what I saw took my breath away.
It was a face. A face peered out at me from inside the translucent column.
“I think I want to go home now.”
The translucent column was home to a frozen mummy. Not like an Egyptian mummy in bandages, but an old dried-out body with leathery skin preserved in what looked like ice. The smoke from my torch marred the stalactite with black soot, but the face still peered back at me. The mummy’s cheeks were drawn and there were only holes where the eyeballs had been, but the mummy had once been a woman, anyone could see that. The mummy carried a jeweled dagger and wore a suit of silver chain mail armor.
I waved the torch and six feet away there was another column with another mummy frozen inside. This mummy wore a rope tied to an iron anchor around its neck. I swung the torch around in a slow wide arc. There were nine more translucent columns. Inside were more mummies. There was a mummy wearing a sailor’s cap, and another carrying a pair of scissors, and another with a ball and chain around its ankle, and another, and another. They were everywhere, and each mummy had something written below it in strange letters. I guessed that the letters were Sanskrit, the ancient language that people used to use in India. I looked to Zak. He wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact his whole expression had changed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was starting to get scared.
“Three, four, eight, that’s eleven of the dead guys,” Zak said.
“I think they're girls.”
“Even the soldier and the sailor?”
“Yup,” I said. “Really frozen, really old girls. Give me your whip.”
“Why?”
“Just give it here.”
Zak handed me Stryker. I took hold of the elephant-tear diamond.
“This comes out right?”
“I don’t know. It went in. What are you trying to do?”
I ignored Zak and twisted the diamond. It popped out of the handle with a soft click. I held the diamond in my hand, the pointy end out, and began to scratch it over the stalactite containing the first mummy.
“Whoa! You’re going to wreck it.”
“Diamond is the hardest thing there is. I’m not going to wreck anything.”
I continued to score the stalactite. It looked like I was actually cutting it. A moment later, I had scored a near perfect circle in the rock. I hit it with the heel of my hand. A perfectly cut hole opened into the hollowed-out stalactite.
“Soldier. Sailor. Tailor. Prisoner,” I said, pointing out the mummies.
I reached inside the hole in the first tomb. It was frosty cold in there. My fingers wrapped around the jeweled dagger in the soldier mummy’s hand. What happened next was a little off the wall, even for me, so I’ll come out right now, and say, I’m not sure exactly what happened. All I’m sure of, is what I saw.
As I grabbed the dagger there was a flash of light. The columns themselves melted away before me. The mummies weren’t dead anymore. They were young and alive. And they weren’t just random mummies. They were Amala. Each of the mummies was Amala in a different set of clothes.
Zak backed away, but I just stood there watching the mummies come to life around me. The Amala dressed in chain mail armor was struck by a silver dagger. The Amala wearing a blue sailor’s cap had a rope tightened around her neck. The Amala in a tailor’s suit was stabbed by a pair of scissors. The Amala in a prisoner’s tattered clothes was struck by yellow claws. You get the idea. Whatever had happened so long ago was happening again, right in front of me. Then I saw the Ghost Leopard’s shadow moving between the columns. I’d never actually seen the Ghost Leopard before, but it’s hard to mistake the shadow of a giant cat. And when I say giant, I’m talking saber-toothed tiger giant. The Ghost Leopard’s shadow was here then there, but never in one place long enough for me to get a grip on it. A moment passed and the whoosh of an arrow cut through the air. The Ghost Leopard’s shadow disappeared and the mummies were, once again, encased in their columns. I dropped the jewel-encrusted dagger, pulling my freezing hand from the tomb. Everything went back to normal.
“Whoa,” Zak said.
“Did you see that?” I asked, cold sweat beading on my forehead.
“It was Amala.”
“Not just that.”
“What do you mean, not just that?”
“He’s going to shoot the Leopard.”
I noticed that Zak had become distant. One thing was for sure. He definitely wasn’t laughing. In fact, he looked like he’d never laugh again. Zak stared at the two columns furthest from where we stood. The columns were just out of my view and weren’t glowing like the others, so I walked forward with the torch to light them up. But these columns were different from the other ones. For one thing, they were open at the front — you could walk right inside of them. For another, they were empty, iron shackles hanging from the translucent rock walls.
“Did you hear me?” I said. “When the Leopard gets its body back, they’re going to shoot an arrow through it under the full moon.”
“I hea
rd you,” Zak said, “but I think we’ve got bigger problems than that.”
“What are you saying?”
I followed Zak's gaze to the engraving on the bottom of the columns. The writing at the bottom of these tombs was in English, not Sanskrit. It read: Zoe Guire and Zak Merril.
“I think we’re dead too,” Zak said.
I heard what sounded like a splash and looked up to see Rhino Butt’s goons approaching from opposite ends of the cavern. Their mouths hung open, their sharp yellow teeth glistening in the torchlight.
18
WHY IT SUCKS TO BE CHAINED INSIDE AN ICICLE
The first thing I noticed about Rhino Butt’s henchmen was that they weren’t wearing any boots. Their feet were hairy, almost like paws, and nearly silent on the wet cavern floor. I guess it wasn’t enough to have the hairy-footed freaks after us, because Rhino Butt entered right after them. He came from another entrance, his polished wooden crossbow in hand.
“Give me Stryker,” Zak whispered.
I handed Zak his whip.
“Stay back.” Zak looked to Rhino Butt. Then he looked to the goons. The goons were closer so he turned to them. “I said, stay back.”
The goons continued to advance.
“I’m warning you.”
The goons smiled, spit falling from their pointy yellow teeth. The closer they got, the less they looked like regular men. They looked, I don’t know, like something else. It was scary.
“You asked for it.”
Zak cracked Stryker. He held his right arm high and slammed the whip down hard, but nothing happened. No thunder. No lightning. The whip just drooped like a wet noodle. Zak tried again, harder this time, but got the same result. Stryker wouldn’t work. He lowered it down.
“Sorry we left so soon back at the zip-line,” Zak said, grinning hopefully.
“Doesn’t mean we didn't enjoy your company,” I added.
Rhino Butt responded by pulling back the string on his crossbow. I found this frightening but the goons were even scarier, because they didn’t even bother with their bows which hung limply from their shoulders. Instead, they just they bared their yellow teeth, their rough black tongues licking at their lips.
Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure #1) Page 17