Greatest Power

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  “Valuable information!” Angelo had con-firmed.

  “He eats crickets!” Tito had chimed in.

  Now, it’s a well-known fact that all geckos eat crickets. They love crickets. So this piece of information was not only not valuable, it was not helpful in any way.

  Why, then, would Tito make such a comment?

  He was, in a word, simple.

  Slow.

  Or, as Sticky often said, brainy like a burro.

  But the Bandito Brothers did, in fact, know quite a lot about Sticky because Sticky had once lived with the Bandito Brothers. (Ah, the mistakes we make in our youth.)

  At first, living with the Brothers had been fun, but it didn’t take long for the Brothers to use Sticky’s conveniently sticky fingers (and his undeniable attraction to all things glittery, twinkly, or just plain shiny) in their petty criminal escapades. These antics might have gone on much longer than they did had the Bandito Brothers not made a crucial (and predictably greedy) error:

  They kept the spoils to themselves.

  After all, what does a gecko want with shiny earrings?

  Or diamonds?

  Or cash, for that matter?

  Like he could spend it?

  This, then, was the attitude that drove Sticky into the clutches of the devilishly deceptive Damien Black. But the treasure hunter was also not to be trusted, and Sticky soon found himself betrayed and, worse, caged.

  Being a very clever kleptomaniacal lizard, however, Sticky had gotten his revenge. He had escaped not just with his life but also with the ancient Aztec wristband Dave now wore.

  The one that allowed humans to become invisible.

  Or walk on walls.

  The one Damien Black would give anything to get back. (Not that he would give the anything up permanently. Oh, he would pretend to, but in his devious mind, he would devise some diabolical double cross.)

  So Damien had grudgingly allowed the Bandito Brothers to stay, but so far, they had done nothing to help him get the gecko or the powerband back. They had, instead, contributed to his landing in jail and (adding insult to incarceration) had snooped through all his stuff and had eaten him out of house and home while he’d been away.

  So this was it. Damien had had enough.

  Those blasted bumbling banditos were history.

  Yesterday’s headache!

  Tomorrow’s daisies!

  Gone!

  Ah, but enter a flying monkey.

  And what an entry that monkey made! The rhesus came whooshing out of the dragon-vacuum portal at an astounding speed, flailed in a wild, eeky-shrieky manner through the velvet curtain that separated the portal chamber from the adjacent room, flew clear across that adjacent room, and landed in a furry frenzy on top of Tito’s head.

  “Aaaaag!” cried Angelo (and even through the gag, it sounded quite like Aaaaag!). His scarred face contorted into a ghastly shape, and every hair on his arms (and the few he had remaining on his head) shot straight out.

  “Aaaaag!” cried Pablo, his ratty face pinching in fear as his dirty, stinky pores shot BO in all directions.

  “Aaaaag!” cried Tito, his oxlike body knocked nearly flat from the force of the flying monkey. (His head, not surprisingly, was unharmed, as it’s difficult for a monkey to hurt a rock.)

  “Eeeeek!” cried the monkey, for in all his adventures in the vast Himalaya mountains, he had never, I promise you, ever seen beasts so repulsive.

  And while the Bandito Brothers aaaaag!ed in fear and the monkey eeeeek!ed in revulsion, Dave and Sticky (who had landed in the vacuum-portal chamber) peeked through the velvet curtain and, invisible as they were, were able to tippy-toe right past the lot of them.

  “Ay caramba!” Sticky whispered when they were safely outside the room and moving swiftly down a cramped, cobwebby corridor. “Those bobos saguaros are still here? Why didn’t they vámonos while that evil hombre was in jail?”

  But Dave had bigger problems than the Bandito Brothers. He and Sticky had gone the only way possible, had passed by no doors, yet were now at a definite dead end.

  Dave, who’d acquired at least some experience with the bizarre nature of Damien’s mansion, took a deep breath and looked around.

  The corridor had a planky wooden floor, so there were no telltale footprints to follow or stand in.

  The ceiling had no dangling chains or visible escape hatches.

  There were no levers or buttons or hidden whatsits or dosits on the cobwebby walls.

  There wasn’t even a picture (behind which a devious mind might hide levers or buttons or whatsits or dosits).

  But what Dave did eventually notice was the absence of something. And its sheer missing-ness caused a gasp to escape Dave’s lips.

  “Look!” he whispered to Sticky as he pointed to the ceiling by the dead end. “There are no cobwebs up here or here … clear around to here!”

  Sticky looked up, then tapped a little gecko finger to his little gecko chin. “Correcto-mundo …!”

  “There’s a whole half circle with no cobwebs!” Dave whispered.

  “Which means …”

  But before Sticky could finish his thought, Dave pushed hard on the right side of the dead-end wall. And before Dave could peek around and see what they might be getting into, whoosh, the wall spun around, sweeping them out of the cobwebby corridor and through the air, sending them flying into darkness.

  “Holy hurling habañeros!” Sticky cried as they dropped down, down, down through the vast, eerie darkness. But just as Dave began thinking he’d spun through the Doorway of Death, he landed with a great thump-bump-bump on something rubbery-soft and began sliding.

  They had, in fact, not passed through the Doorway of Death (although there were several such doorways in the mansion). Quite the opposite. This passageway, this route, was the one Damien took when he was in a grand mood. (It was also the one he took when he was in a foul mood, in hopes of cheering up.)

  The whooshing doorway swept whoever pushed it out onto a slide. A giant pitch-black inflato slide, with big air-filled bumpers on the sides, and swooshy twists and turns, all cloaked in complete darkness.

  For Damien, the slide through the darkness was always over much too soon.

  For Dave and Sticky, it lasted an eternity.

  (The actual time was thirteen point seven seconds, which just goes to show that time is relative, especially when traveling through the fifth dimension—fear.)

  At precisely thirteen seconds, Dave and Sticky went airborne for a second (well, for seven-tenths of a second, to be precise) and landed with a flooop-bloop-whoop onto small plastic orbs of air.

  “A ball pit?” Dave asked, for he was, in fact, up to his neck in lightweight red plastic balls (although, being in total darkness, the color of the balls was relevant only to the demented mind of Damien Black). Dave waded forward. “Now what?”

  This was a good question. A very good question, indeed. For every direction Dave waded led to a wall.

  A dead end.

  A no-way-out.

  And while Dave waded, Sticky waited.

  He rolled his eyes.

  He shook his head.

  He crossed his arms.

  He sighed in the way only exasperated kleptomaniacal talking gecko lizards can sigh.

  At last, he’d had enough.

  “Señor. Are we going to wade around in a sea of balls all day? Or are you going to use the night-light?” (The night-light was not a little plug-in-the-wall doogoodie, but another one of Sticky’s many words for flashlight.)

  “I didn’t want to give us away!” Dave whispered.

  This was, in fact, a good thing to consider as, although the flashlight itself was invisible in Dave’s hand, the Invisibility ingot had no control over the actual beam of light. (Once again, the whys of Invisibility are not entirely understood. It appears to have something to do with the distance from the powerband and the conveyance of the wearer’s body heat, but no matter. We’ll just deal with the reality, and th
e reality was that the light beam was visible.)

  After wading around in the vast sea of plastic balls for another few minutes, however, Dave decided that using the flashlight might be a good idea after all.

  “Here, hombre,” Sticky said, handing it over.

  Dave shined it around and almost immediately discovered a ladder.

  A tall, narrow ladder that led out of a swimming pool of balls.

  Dave began climbing.

  Up, up, up he climbed.

  Up.

  Up.

  Up.

  The ladder ended, at long last, on a long, bouncy platform.

  “A diving board?” Dave whispered as he inched forward. He shined the light down at the sea of red balls (which looked to him like a sea of blood). He inched another foot forward.

  And another.

  “Not a good idea, señor,” Sticky whispered, for the trip down looked to the little lizard like it would end in one nasty splat.

  “I’m not going to dive!” Dave whispered. “What do you think I am, crazy?”

  “So why are we out here?” Sticky asked, and he was now quivering, as Dave had inched out to the forward end of the diving board.

  “Because there’s got to be a way out of here!” Dave replied.

  Above them, there was, indeed, a way out: a triangular trapeze bar that slid along a wire (by the power of a good push forward) to a seemingly solid platform by a blood-red door. All Dave had to do was boing up to the bar and swing over to the platform.

  And if he missed?

  Into the sea of blood he’d fall.

  “Ready?” Dave whispered after he’d stared at the trapeze bar long enough to develop a kink in his neck.

  “Uh, señor? Why swing like a monkey, or maybe die trying, when you could just switch to Gecko Power and climb the wall?”

  Dave turned to Sticky and blinked.

  Then he stared.

  Then his eyebrows went all rumply.

  Sticky shrugged. “Just a suggestion, señor.”

  “What was I thinking?” Dave muttered, and, lickety-split, he switched ingots and climbed the wall to the doorway platform.

  “See? Easy-sneezy,” Sticky said with a very self-satisfied smirk. “Someday you’ll start thinking like a gecko, señor. Then you’ll really be the Gecko.”

  “I don’t want to be the Gecko!” Dave snapped. “I want to be … I’m still thinking of a name. Invisibility Man, Disappearing Dude … something like that.”

  “Disappearing Dude?” Sticky’s face twisted in disgust. “Why not just call yourself Lame-o Bandito?”

  “Because I’m not a bandit!”

  “But you are lame-o?”

  “No! I just don’t want to be the Gecko!”

  Sticky shrugged. “Too bad, hombre, because that’s what people call you.” He eyed Dave. “And you should be proud. Gecko Power is asombroso!”

  “Yeah?” Dave said as he put away the flashlight. “Well, I’m switching back to Invisibility right now because it’s asombroso’er!”

  After the switch was made, Dave squared his invisible shoulders.

  He took a deep (and, yes, invisible) breath.

  He faced the very visible blood-red door and said (a very audible), “Here goes nothing.”

  Then he boldly twisted the cold black door-knob and entered the mansion.

  Damien Black’s security system was exactly what you might expect from a dangerously demented villain.

  Patched together.

  Complicated.

  A haphazard hodgepodge.

  It was, in fact, a messy web of amplifying, echoing tubes that Damien had woven together bit by bit as the mansion’s size (both aboveground and below) had continued to expand.

  Why echoing tubes and not, say, a regular ringy-dingy alarm?

  Well, having an unfounded (or, if you will, un-grounded) fear of blackouts, Damien did not think it wise to rely on electricity. Instead, he’d rigged up the triggering of different sounds for each en-trance to the mansion. One door activated a tinkly-winkly bell (which then tinkly-winkled throughout the house via the echoing tubes). Another door activated the string of a ukulele (which then ukulele’d through the entire mansion). The door that Dave and Sticky had just tippy-toed through activated a rattle.

  Now, by rattle, I do not mean a baby’s rattle.

  Or the rattle produced by, say, a loose muffler bracket on the underbelly of an old jalopy.

  No, by rattle, I mean snake rattle.

  This particular rattle had been cut from an eight-foot sidewinder (which Damien had stalked and killed while on a snake safari in the Mojave Desert), and the spittery-spattery sound it made was fast and frightening.

  Dave spun around quickly when he heard it, for although he was invisible, he was, in fact, quite solid and knew that snakes rattle when frightened and are masters at detecting odor.

  He was, he feared, within both striking and smelling distance. Sticky, however, pointed to the rattle (which was dangling in front of a flared receiving horn that fed into dozens of echoing tubes) and simply said, “That, señor, means trouble.” It did, indeed, mean trouble. Four rooms (and one convoluted corridor) away, Damien Black was completely absorbed in the counting of stolen cash when the alarm rattled. “… Four thousand six hundred and sixty. Four thousand six hundred and eighty. Four thousand seven hundred. Four thou—huh?” Damien’s dark eyes darted about, a twenty-dollar bill poised mid-count. And since he was immersed in one of his three favorite occupations (tricketeering and gadgeting being the other two), he did not want to believe that he was hearing what he was, indeed, hearing.

  But there it was, sounding like a long, rattly rainstick—the Snake Alarm. “Who the …”

  Through Damien’s mind flashed some hopeful possibilities.

  A wayward bat?

  (It was a distinct possibility.)

  A runaway rat?

  (Again, no stretch there.)

  A menacing mouse?

  (He was grasping for culprits with that one. Nothing so cute dared live anywhere near his nefarious mansion.)

  And then a more serious possibility jumped into Damien’s flashing mind.

  Could the Bandito Brothers have rattled the alarm?

  Had those buffoons managed to escape?

  Impossible!

  Unless …

  Unless they’d been helped?

  The twenty-dollar bill began to quiver in the treasure hunter’s hand, and at last he laid it down with a bone-chilling thought.

  Perhaps he had been followed.

  But… by whom?

  Agents from the bank?

  The police?

  They wouldn’t dare!

  (Or, at least, they had never dared before.)

  Still. Damien Black did not like the idea.

  Not one itsy-bitsy bit.

  And although he still hoped for the possibility of a bat or a rat or a cutesy-wootsy mouse (that he could easily squish with his black-booted foot), in his devilish gut he knew something bigger was afoot.

  Something irksome.

  Troublesome.

  And with the luck he’d been having, difficult to dispose of.

  Why couldn’t he just be left alone to count his robbings?

  But the alarm had, indeed, alarmed him, so Damien scraped back his counting chair, snatched up his long double-edged axe (which had been leaning against a wall), and cautiously exited the counting room.

  He saw nothing in the convoluted corridor (although the fact is, he couldn’t see very far because, being convoluted, the corridor had only short lines of sight).

  Zigzag he went, sneaky-toeing along his own corridor, eyes peeled, axe poised, moving swiftly in the direction of the blood-red door.

  Simultaneously, Dave and Sticky rounded another corner, moving away from the blood-red door, and suddenly the two parties came face to (invisible) faces.

  An interesting thing about being invisible is that you’re never entirely sure that you are. There’s a naggin
g doubt. A fear. A suspicion that something might not be working quite right. After all, you can see others; it’s quite natural to worry that they can also see you.

  Now, imagine for a moment that you’ve broken into someone else’s house and that someone else is coming straight at you. He’s tall, with cold, dark eyes drawn down into taut, tense slits, and his black, twisty mustache is twitching angrily under his long, pointy nose as he comes looking for an intruder.

  You.

  You would, I assure you, run.

  And, I’m quite certain, scream.

  So it was truly amazing that Sticky managed to choke back an Ay caramba!

  And even more astonishing that Dave swiftly and silently sucked up to the wall, his heart ka-boo-boo-booming in his chest.

  All the while Damien Black, a force of evil few would dare cross, bore down on them at a frightening speed.

  Damien Black whooshed toward Dave and Sticky, his long coat pouffed out with air and flapping at his sides. To Dave, he looked like an enormous angry raven swooping in for the kill.

  There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. So Dave held another breath (on top of the one he was already holding) and closed his eyes (as some things are just too terrifying to watch). Then he simply stood there shivering and quivering and quaking in his shoes (because, let’s face it, his nerves were shot).

  In the wink of a deadly eye, Damien was upon them. But he whooshed right by, unaware of their presence.

  Except.

  Except that Damien’s raven-winged coat caught on Dave as he passed him in the corridor.

  Dave imagined that a blanket had been thrown over him (an easy mistake to make, as he was holding two breaths, had closed his eyes, and was shivering in his sneakers).

  Damien said, “What the …,” but then dismissed the snag as being a pocket of particularly pouffy air.

  And so while Dave held both breaths, Damien whooshed down the corridor until he got to the blood-red door.

  He inspected the rattle.

  The rafters.

  The room.

  He found no evidence of bats.

  Or rats.

  Or cutesy-wootsy squishable mice.