Villain's Lair

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Not a good idea at all.

  It was, however, also at that very moment that Dave stopped going up and started tumbling down. You see, even in strangely painted catapulting shafts, gravity still rules the day. What goes up will most definitely come down.

  That is, unless something stops it.

  “Aaaah!” Dave cried, looking around madly for something to stop him. “Aaaah!”

  It was at this point that Sticky leapt from Dave’s sleeve, climbed lickety-split up the wall, and slapped the ENTER part of the painted DO NOT ENTER sign.

  Kaffffflank! A plank shot out beneath Dave, and brrrr-ivack-yak-yak-yak-yak, a section of the shaft wall went up like a rolltop desk.

  Sticky scurried down the wall and reunited with Dave, who was futilely scrabbling for his dropped torch as the plank beneath him began to retract, pulling him into the opening in the wall. It was as though the shaft had opened its mouth and stuck out its tongue, much as a frog would catch a fly.

  Moments later, they were inside, not a frog, but a room. A normal room, with four walls, a window, furniture, and a rug.

  And there was no Damien Black in sight.

  “We made it!” Dave whispered, looking out the window at the forest beneath them. “We’re inside the house!”

  They sneaky-toed over to the door, which had a normal doorknob. (It was bent and dented, but it was metal, at least, and not somebody’s head.)

  Dave eeeeeased the door open.

  They peeeeeeked outside.

  And of all the dastardly, dangerous, daggery things that might have been there, you will never, I promise you, never guess what awaited them on the other side of the door.

  Chapter 6

  CONFUSING, CONFOUNDING,

  AND JUST PLAIN CREEPY

  “A burro?” Dave gasped. “In a house!”

  But, of course, this was no ordinary house, and, as it turns out, this was no ordinary burro.

  “Ay caramba!” Sticky gasped. “What is she doing here?”

  “Good question,” Dave replied, not fully grasping the significance of Sticky’s question or the ay caramba!

  You see, there are ay carambas, and then there are ay caRASAbas. In Stickynese, they can mean anything from “oh brother” to “oh wow” to “the world is about to explode!”

  And this particular ay caramba was, without a doubt, an ay caRASAba ay caramba.

  In other words, this burro was very bad news.

  “No, amigol You don’t understand!” Sticky whispered frantically. “That’s Rosie!”

  “You know this burro? Is she mean? Can she talk?”

  “Talk? No! She’s dumb as donkey dung!”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem, señor, is that she belongs to the Bandito Brothers!” He slapped his little gecko forehead. “Ay-ay-ay. I can’t believe they’re here.”

  “Wait. Who are the Bandito Brothers?”

  Sticky looked everywhere but at Dave.

  “Stickyyyyy…”

  “All right, all right.” Sticky puffed out his little gecko chest in an attempt to stand tall. “I used to live with them, okay? Before I joined that back-stabbing treasure hunter.”

  “You lived with banditos? Bandits?”

  “Sí, señor,” Sticky said with a shrug. “What can I say? They accepted me.”

  Dave, who is no fool, put the pieces together lickety-split. “They accepted you because you had sticky fingers and would steal things for them?”

  Again, Sticky gave a little shrug. “Before me, they were poor as dirt. After me? They were loaded.” He looked out at the burro, who was chewing over an enormous pile of thistly, thorny weeds. “Those bobos banditos have teamed up with that ratero Black? I can’t believe it.”

  Dave’s face contorted in the way that only a very unhappy face can contort. “So we’re not dealing with just an evil, demented treasure hunter here? We’re also dealing with bobos banditos? How many?”

  “Well,” said Sticky, counting them off on his fingers, “there’s Tito—he’s big like an ox with a head full of rocks. There’s Pablo—he looks like a rat and stinks like a bat. And then there’s Angelo—he’s scar-faced and scary and ugly and hairy.”

  “I don’t care what they look like! How many are there? Three?”

  “Oh, you care, señor. And sí. Tres.”

  “Are you sure they’re here?”

  Sticky shrugged. “Why else would Rosie be here? She’s their transportation.”

  Dave’s face was now screwed around so far that one eye was almost covered by a cheek, and his mouth was twisted nearly to his ear. “Their transportation? The three of them ride one burro?”

  Again, Sticky shrugged. “It’s a tight fit.”

  “But…how do you know that’s their burro? It could be a different donkey…couldn’t it?”

  At that moment, Rosie stopped feasting from her thistly, thorny mountain of weeds and turned to look at them. Her lips pushed forward, revealing a single, yellowed, bucked front tooth in the middle of her weed-filled mouth.

  “It’s Rosie,” Sticky said, for there was no denying the dental details.

  At that moment, Dave considered turning back, which I’m sure you’ll agree was a prudent thing to consider. After all, he no longer had just the one dangerously demented villain to outwit. He now had three additional foes. And a buck-toothed burro to boot.

  But then Dave envisioned the return route out of the mansion: down the shaft (who knows how), into the knobless room (and who knows how they’d get out of that), through the waterfall of goopy, sloopy snails, down a musty passageway (with no torch to light the way), through the oozy, stinky cave of fluttery bats, and finally out through the dark and dangerous forest to squeeze through the gate.

  In the end, Dave decided that going forward would be safer. After all, Damien Black would not enter his house in such a bizarre manner. Surely there was a door somewhere. A simple door with normal knobs that led away from this maniacal mansion.

  Poor Dave. He still had so much to learn.

  “So now what?” he asked at last.

  “So now we find the dungeon,” Sticky replied.

  Ah, yes. The dungeon. Sticky had told Dave that the dungeon was where the power ingots were kept. Power ingots, which, if you’ll recall, were why these two had endured bats and tunnels and snails and shrunken heads and catapulting shafts in the first place.

  To his credit, Sticky had warned Dave that the dungeon housed a ferocious dragon. Not the fire-breathing sort found in made-up fairy tales. A real dragon, found in real-life stories, such as this one.

  A dragon with dark, scaly skin.

  Big eyes.

  Sprawling legs and sharp claws.

  A three-hundred-pound dragon with a tail as long as his body and a long, yellow, forked tongue.

  A cold-blooded, meat-eating beast.

  One that could kill with a single bite of his disease-ridden, bacteria-breeding mouth.

  Dave had been undaunted. “A Komodo dragon? Those are just oversized lizards!”

  “Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky had murmured, for it was clear that Dave had no idea what he was getting into.

  But whose fault was that?

  He would simply have to pay the price for being an all-knowing thirteen-year-old boy.

  So Dave and his sticky-footed friend stepped through the doorway and entered the room that Rosie was in.

  I use the word “room” loosely here, as this was more a large, six-sided intersection of hallways than an actual room. There were walls (and a ceiling) and an actual door across from the door they’d just come through, but there were also four shadowy passageways leading to (or from) this intersecting room.

  Dave looked around at his choices and whispered, “Which way?”

  “Uh…thataway!” Sticky said, pointing with great conviction to a hallway on the left.

  So Dave went past the bucktoothed burro and sneaky-toed down the hallway that Sticky had pointed to. But after a few minutes
he whispered, “Does any of this look familiar?”

  “Sí, señor,” Sticky lied. “We turn right, right here.”

  They were soon meandering through a dingy, dusty, cobwebby maze of hallways.

  It was a labyrinth of passageways.

  A confounding collection of creepy corridors.

  And after many twists and turns and sneaky-toeing along with Sticky pointing the way, they found themselves face to face with … a buck-toothed burro.

  “No!” Dave cried. He glared at Sticky. “You have no idea where we are, do you?”

  Sticky looked away. “It’s a big house, señor.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?”

  Sticky shrugged. “Try again?”

  So off they went again, through the confounding collection of creepy corridors. Only this time Dave went where he thought they should go.

  And, as you may already have guessed, they wound up face to face with … a bucktoothed burro.

  “No!” Dave cried again.

  This time, however, they heard an evil, hissy voice coming from down a hallway.

  But which hallway?

  “It’s him! It’s him for real! Quick, señor, hide!” Sticky whispered.

  Now, it’s a well-known fact that when panic strikes, the logic receptors in your brain stop working. They just freeze up, leaving logical thoughts out in the cold and forcing you to do whatever comes to mind, regardless of how ridiculous or irrational it is.

  In Dave’s case, panic had most definitely struck, and the only place he could think to hide was in Rosie’s thistly, thorny mountain of weeds. So he dived in and covered himself quickly, then made a peephole through the weeds.

  Sticky did the same.

  They both held their breath.

  They stayed stick-still.

  Then in walked the villain himself.

  The dastardly, demented Damien Black.

  Chapter 7

  THE DASTARDLY, DEMENTED DAMIEN BLACK

  Damien Black was taller than Dave expected. Per-haps that was because he was looking up at him from among thistly, thorny weeds on the ground, but nonetheless, he seemed both taller and oilier than Dave expected.

  By oily I do not mean deep-fried.

  By oily I mean slick.

  Slippery.

  Shifty in a way that only dastardly, demented villains know how to be.

  And although he was talking, it was not to himself, as dastardly, demented villains are prone to do. Oh no. He was talking to the Bandito Brothers. Two of them, that is. The third one, Tito (the one who was big like an ox and had a head full of rocks), was in a cell in the dungeon, tied up and awaiting his fate as dragon dinner should his brothers fail to satisfy Damien’s demands.

  “It must be him,” Damien was saying. “And he’s probably with some fool who thinks he can rob me. That annoying lizard doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut! Yakety-yakety-yak, all the time. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s yakety-yakking.”

  For some reason, this caused the two Bandito Brothers to begin yakking:

  “But that’s a good thing, right, Mr. Black?”

  “How else would you ever find him?”

  “He’s little!”

  “Just a lizard!”

  Through the weeds, Dave watched the two Bandito Brothers trail behind Damien Black. He was now glad Sticky had told him that Pablo looked like a rat and smelled like a bat (not that he could smell him through the musty, thorny, thistly weeds, but he could see that he was small-boned with a pointy nose and a scraggly mustache) and that Angelo was scar-faced and scary and ugly and hairy (although the hair was not so much on his head as it was on his arms—a fact Dave couldn’t ignore, as Angelo was wearing a dingy oversized shirt with the sleeves ripped out).

  What Sticky had neglected to tell him was that the brothers also wore bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossing their chests. And that their boots had spurs. And that their teeth were capped here and there in gold.

  “Shut up, you fools!” Mr. Black commanded. “If that lizard is here on his own, why do I need you?”

  “To catch him?”

  “Yes, Mr. Black. To catch him!”

  “We’re the only other ones who know what he looks like!”

  “And he does not know we are working with you!

  Damien Black stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face them. “You are not working with me. You are doing as I say so your brother doesn’t die a slow, agonizing death!”

  “He’s not really our brother!”

  “And we keep telling you—we would do what you say anyway!”

  “Why do you think we followed you here?”

  “We hate that lousy lizard.”

  “He’s creepy!”

  “He’s sneaky!”

  “He cheated us!”

  “Betrayed us!”

  “Double-crossed us!”

  “Duped us!”

  “So we’re happy to help you, Mr. Black.”

  “Very happy.”

  Hearing this made steam shoot out of Sticky’s ears. (Not that it actually was, it just felt that way to the lizard.) He wanted to push through the weeds and shout, “You rotten rateros! You betrayed me.” But he was so mad, so incredibly mad, that he held stick-still and vowed on his little gecko life that he would strip Damien Black and those bobos banditos of the power ingots. He would get them, and through Dave, he would then get his revenge! Indeed, he would!

  Dave, on the other hand, did not like what he’d heard. Was he being duped? Was Sticky playing him for a fool? Was he risking life and limb for a sneaky, creepy, dirty, double-crossing cheater?

  But Damien Black was moving again. Moving and talking. “My alarm went off. Somebody came up the chute. No one would dare enter unless they knew what I had.”

  “What do you have, Mr. Black?”

  “Yes, Mr. Black. What are we looking for?”

  “A lizard!” Damien shouted. “A lizard and anyone he’s with!” He glared at them. “And if you insist on knowing more, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “Oooh,” they both said, taking a step back. Then Pablo’s face twitched nervously as he asked, “But…after you have what you want, can we have the lizard?”

  Damien’s eyes pinched into devilish slits, but then he thought better of telling the brothers the truth. In other words, he decided to lie. “Yes,” he said. “But not until after I have retrieved the item he stole from me.”

  Now, the alarm to which Damien Black had referred was not a clangy alarm like one might find at a firehouse.

  Or a buzzy alarm like one might hear when entering a secured area.

  Or even a honky alarm that one might hear if a power plant were about to explode.

  No, this was a tinkly alarm. A tinkly-winkly alarm. The sort of alarm one might find on, say, the collar of a cat.

  It was, in short, a bell.

  A single tinkly-winkly bell.

  When Dave and Sticky had entered the house, that single tinkly-winkly bell had been activated, and the sound had tinkly-winkled along echoing tubes throughout the entire house.

  But was it an intruder? Or merely another bat, setting off the alarm? This was something Damien Black did not know. Once inside the next room, however, Damien got his answer.

  An intruder was afoot!

  You see, Damien Black may not have believed in modern technology, but he made full use of dusting powder. Flour, actually. He kept a fine sprinkling of it on the floor by the catapult doorway, and there, before his devilish eye-slits, were footprints.

  Sneaky sneaker footprints.

  Size, oh, maybe ten.

  “To the dungeon!” he shouted, then whooshed back through the oversized intersection, past Rosie and the heaping pile of thistly, thorny weeds (and intruders), and down the hallway.

  “To the dungeon!” Sticky cried the moment the villain and the two Bandito Brothers were gone.

  Dave stood and shook off the weeds.

  He sneaky-peeked dow
n the hallway where Damien Black had gone.

  Then off they went.

  To the dungeon!

  Chapter 8

  THE DUNGEON

  The hard part wasn’t following Damien Black and the Bandito Brothers. The hard part was not being seen.

  “Too bad we don’t have the Invisibility ingot, eh, señor?” Sticky whispered as they ducked back for the third time. “This would be eeeeeasysneezy.”

  “But we don’t, all right? Now shh!”

  “But when we get it, all you do is click it into the wristband, and poof, we’re gone.”

  “We? You’ll disappear, too?”

  “If I’m holding on to you, hombre.” Sticky gave a little gecko snicker. “And believe me, I will be!”

  The thought of this kept Dave going. Invisibiliity would be cooler than cool. It would be, in Stickynese, asombroso.

  And flying. He just had to get his hands on that flying ingot. No more trudging up seven flights to get to the apartment. No more riding his bike or fixing flat tires—he’d just turn invisible and fly everywhere!

  But then he remembered: the powers only worked one at a time.

  Aw, who cared? He’d figure something out. The point was, he’d be able to fly.

  “You didn’t lose the powerband, did you?” Sticky was asking.

  Dave held back while Damien and the Brothers went through a tall, narrow door down the hallway. “Are you kidding?” He could feel it on his arm, heavy and warm. Perhaps it had been a wristband to a powerful Aztec warrior, but on Dave it was an armband. “It’s not going anywhere!”

  “I hope not, señor” Sticky muttered. “Because if you lose it, we’re not going anywhere.”

  “Just get us to the power ingots, all right? Leave the rest to me.”

  So they waited until they thought the coast must be clear, then eased open the tall, narrow door and sneaky-peeked inside.

  No Damien.

  No Brothers.

  No other doorways.

  Just maps.

  Maps everywhere.

  “I know where we are!” Sticky cried. Then, as if sharing a dark and spicy secret, he whispered, “This is the map room!”

  Dave rolled his eyes. “And how do we get through the map room to … to wherever that madman has gone?”