One-Paragraph Version of Treatment

This story is about a man’s search for his brother in the bitterly cold and fatally magical peaks of the Himalaya mountains. Simon Lane overcomes warnings and tragic accidents to trek into the Leopard Sanctuary, where his biologist brother Solomon Lane is conducting scientific research. Simon and his girlfriend Samantha endure a series of mysterious mishaps along the way, and find themselves trapped by female spirits in the small village of Maanstik. Their only chance to move forward into the sanctuary seems to lie with the town’s beautiful but malevolent high priestess, Parvati, who says she can keep the spirits at bay but only if Simon can do her a small favor: Eliminate his brother Solomon from the Sanctuary, by any means necessary, for crimes Solomon has committed against the local people. Simon is aghast. He agrees to the favor, but has no intention of harming his brother. He thinks he has tricked Parvati and her fellow Amazons, and he is allowed to proceed with Samantha into one of the world’s most beautiful places, but when he reaches the Sanctuary and finds his brother he finds himself incapable of believing the evil and the tragedy he sees with his own eyes, and which he must admit has been caused by the greed and lust of his own brother, his childhood pal and confidante, who is now gone amuck in the wild.  

Long Version of Treatment

Simon is a sportscaster with WYNK TV 6 in Manhattan, happy with his job, and just about to do some live-game analysis of football games for NBC. He is engaged to his fiancee, Samantha Keller. They live on the Upper West Side. Simon is under tremendous pressure, but is up to the task of winning the role of commentator, or so he claims. He’s been having bad dreams.

Gerald Baines arrives from a business trip to New Delhi, and tells Simon he wants to talk to him about his twin brother, Solomon. Simon looks forward to the meeting; he hardly knows Baines, but he’s looking forward to talking about his brother.

Solomon is a biologist who specializes in the study of high-altitude mammal life. He has gone to the Himalayas to study the habitat of blue-horned sheep. He has been outside of the U.S. for more than two years, and few people have heard from him, including his sponsoring organization, the National Wildlife Fund, or his University, Harvard. The last time Simon heard from him, Solomon was excited about having seen a snow leopard.

Baines is announced from the lobby, but then never shows up. Simon goes out to see if he can find Baines in the hallway, and finds the elevators are not working. He takes the stairs down 34 flights. He opens the door to the lobby and is shocked to find a swarm of medical technicians and firemen and police officers in the lobby. At the doors of one of the elevators, he sees, a body is being pulled. A bystander who knows Simon says, “The elevator cut him in half.” Simon recognizes Baines to be the victim, and is stunned by the sight of the upper half of the man’s body being dragged out of the shaft. Two police officers drag the body by its outstretched arms, and the head lolling backward shows a face frozen in fear and death. Simon tries to push forward, telling the police he knows the man. But Simon is restrained, and is told to talk to the police afterward.

The police visit Simon in his apartment, assure him they will share any new details about the awful accident. Simon cannot contact either family or mutual acquaintances who might know Baines, and if it weren’t for the patience and concern of his fiancee Samantha he would be overwrought. As it is, he dreams that night of being seduced by a beautiful Asian woman who dances with snakes and long glinting knives. This dream has been bothering him for months, but he hasn’t told his fiancee. The next day he insists that he and Samantha should take a quick break from their work responsibilities and travel to the Himalayas to find his brother Solomon.

Everybody -- from Simon’s boss at the television company to Samantha’s superiors at the hospital -- tries to dissuade the couple from such an impulsive trip. Surely there are ways to get in touch with Solomon? Couldn’t they put off the trip until summer? But the couple is determined to go — partly, they admit, because of the lure of the Himalayas and Shangri-La and the Yaks and the Yetis. They leave for Paris immediately.

In Paris, the couple spend the day walking the sights, and they have a shocking incident in the Marais when a street vendor tries to sell them the paw of a wild cat — a lynx — which has been shaped into an ashtray. Simon responds by beating the man, which leads to a short interrogation and polite warning from the police to act as tourists would and not as heroes might. The couple leaves Paris in an agitated state.

In Kathmandu, the couple is denied a permit into the area in which Solomon is supposedly studying, the Leopard Sanctuary. The couple fight to obtain permission to enter the Sanctuary, but to no avail; government officials firmly claim that nobody — not even a visiting scientist — has been given a permit into the Sanctuary. Simon and Samantha make the rounds of the trekking companies to find somebody who can take them.
 
While watching a funeral procession, Samantha is almost trampled by a rabid bull, and is pulled from its path by a young man who speaks English with an educated American accent. Her rescuer is a Stanford graduate named Vishnu Krishnamurti, who has just returned to his homeland to establish a tourism agency. He tells Simon and Samantha that the Sanctuary is a mysterious place, off the beaten path and totally devoid of any foreigners, and then claims that the incident with the rampaging bull was probably a warning of some kind for the Americans to give up their quest. But Simon is determined to find his brother, and offers two thousand dollars to Vishnu for guidance to the Sanctuary. Vishnu is tempted by the money, and tells the couple to come back the next day.

Simon spends the night vomiting. Samantha asks him if he wants to return to the U.S., but Simon is adamant. He has a feeling his brother is in trouble.

The next day Simon and Samantha are introduced to a dignified elder named Asok Guli, who lives in the city but was raised in the Inner Chomro, the region in which the Sanctuary is located. He tells the couple he can take them to the town of Maanstik, on the edge of the Sanctuary, but that they must promise not to go further. Simon and Samantha agree. At the last minute, Vishnu and two of his employees join Asok and the Americans as they drive and then trek into the Inner Chomro.

As they leave the city by jeep, they come across an accident: a bus has plunged off the road into a river, and only a few people sitting on top of the bus have survived. Samantha uses her medical skills to help the survivors, and one little girl she helps seems to know Asok Guli. The girl is from Maanstik. She and Guli speak a language different from the other people, and she holds onto Samantha’s hand until ambulances arrive. As the group moves forward toward the Inner Chomro, they are overwhelmed by the peace and beauty of the valleys and the smiling people; Asok Guli tells Samantha and Simon that they have ‘protection’ since they’d helped the little girl. But protection from what?

During the four-day walk which follows the jeepride, the group learns that Asok Guli is returning to the Inner Chomro to die. His time has come, he claims, and he is going up to the river where he was born. He will wait on the banks of the river until he is dead. Simon and Samantha are shocked, but Vishnu shrugs at the information. They are going to a place in the world, says Vishnu, in which civilization has only recently arrived.

The group arrives in Maanstik, and Asok Guli bids them adieu. He is anxious to get to the river. Guli introduces them to the ‘mayor’ of the town, an elderly woman who seems to know that Samantha helped one of the village’s little girls. Simon is struck by the villagers’ indifference to his presence; it is as if he is invisible. But Samantha does not notice, since she is charmed by the Mayor and finds herself the object of considerable fuss and grooming. Vishnu and his guides spend the night outside of town, back down the path they’d walked up, and Simon finds himself wandering around the village that night. He does seem invisible. Children sing and the women all seem to be working as the village’s few men sit around fires, drinking and smoking. As he stands on a hill looking over the valley and the river below, Simon looks into the lit window of a house to see a woman bathing. He is struck by her beauty, and then is shocked by her resemblance to the woman in his recent dreams. He tears himself away as a sudden rain drenches the valley.

He tries to read and then sleep in the one-lightbulb room of his hotel, but is restless. When Samantha comes in, later, he notices her hair has been braided and her hands are dyed in a  henna pattern; she looks exotic and enticing, but she seems to be distracted. Simon tries to tell her about his dream, but she seems uninterested, and says they must go to see a Virgin Goddess in the morning. Simon tries to cuddle with his fiancee until he realizes she is asleep. He drifts his hands along her body, and grows excited; just as he is changing his position to undo the local gown she is wearing, he is profoundly frightened by the sight of a girl’s face in the window, angrily staring inside. The girl’s eyes glow silver in the dark, and Simon is speechless. The girl runs away.

Simon and Vishnu and the guides are not allowed to see the Virgin Goddess. They sit around a fire in a lodge filled with men drinking and smoking and gossiping. Vishnu tells Simon he must return to the city, that he has been warned not to stay. He is afraid for his employees. Simon reluctantly says goodbye, and watches Vishnu and the two porters walk down the path toward civilization. Simon tries to talk to some of the other men, but can communicate in only a pidgin English about Michael Jackson the singer and Michael Jordan the athlete. He leaves the lodge, and walks up to the hill of the night before. As he is looking at the house in which the woman was bathing, he hears somebody on the path behind him, and is shocked to see the woman of his dreams. She stares without fear into his eyes and barely smiles when he says hello. He says a few things but knows she cannot speak English. Then he mentions his brother, and leopards, and the Leopard Sanctuary, and he thinks he sees her understand him for a split second, but then there are shouts from the village, and the woman walks toward the house without looking backwards. Simon returns to the village to find Vishnu and the two porters, who have been injured in an avalanche on the trail.

Vishnu’s left hand has been crushed, and the porters have suffered a few scrapes. Samantha is found, and she administers to Vishnu’s wound, which is serious. Samantha thinks he might lose his hand. The porters immediately prepare to take him down the trail, even though it seems to have been blocked by the falling rocks. Samantha has no antibiotics, she realizes, since she used her entire kit at the bus accident site. She is not sure of what she can do, when the lodge falls silent. The village’s doctor has been summoned, and she walks into the hushed room like a queen; the witch doctor is the woman in Simon’s dreams. She puts mud on thw rist of Vishnu, and closes his eyes so he might sleep, but before doing so she asks something of Vishnu, and he turns to Samantha: Parvati the doctor wants to know why he is here, says Vishnu, pointing at Simon. Samantha says that Simon is looking for his brother, in the Leopard Sanctuary, and Vishnu translates. Parvati nods, and seems to be thinking, but then suddenly leaves. Vishnu falls into a deep sleep.

Simon tells Samantha about his troubling dreams, in which a woman rewsembling Parvati dances with knives and snakes while slowly removing her clothes. Samantha is mildly peeved that Simon hasn’t shared the information before, and then begins to tell Simon that the village of Maanstik is a matriarchy, and that the Virgin Goddess is a pubescent girl who the locals think was once a leopard. Simon tells Samantha about the previous night, when he’d tried to fondle her to find himself being watched by the girl with the glowing silver eyes, and the couple agree that they are in a magical place. Samantha remarks that she is interested in seeing what effect the mud will have on Vishnu’s crushed hand, and thinks she might learn something about traditional healing methods if they stay in the town. Simon reminds her about their mission: his brother Solomon is nearby.

 Surprise ending, full of shocks and chase scnes and gruesome bloodiness (as well as sexy Cat People rip-offs) still to come!