Sinister Substitute

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  “Gecko Power is asombrrrrroso!” Sticky cried as they scurried down the wall of the shaft.

  Above them, the Bandito Brothers were beside themselves with wonder.

  They were blinking and bug-eyeing and sputtering at the mouth.

  Their eyebrows were knitting and crossing and flying around all over their foreheads.

  They were, in short, freaking out.

  “Did you see that?” they all asked each other. “How did he do that?”

  Now, they had, in fact, seen Dave scale walls before, but it had always been in an upward direction. In an it-could-have-been-a-rock-climber fashion. Mere mortals have, after all, scaled tall buildings armed with nothing more than their fingers and toes (and, okay, a hearty dose of insanity).

  But going headfirst down a wall?

  Even Tito recognized that this was an impossible feat.

  “Maybe the lizard and the boy are switched!” Angelo said, his eyes growing wide. “Maybe the boy’s in the lizard’s body and the lizard’s in the boy’s body.”

  This seemed to snap Pablo out of his trance. His squinty eyes pinched down as he looked at Angelo. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s probably just suction cups.”

  “Suction cups?” Angelo shot back. “Did you see suction cups? No? Well, see? That makes you the stupidest thing ever!”

  “Oh yeah? Well, you’re even stupider than—”

  “Uh … they’re getting away?” Tito said, scratching the side of his big, round head as he looked down the shaft.

  Angelo and Pablo locked eyes and the exact same thought double-crossed both their minds:

  Whoever caught the boy would surely become Damien’s right-hand man!

  Not thinking beyond that, they both lunged for (and wrapped themselves around) the rope (and each other).

  Of course, the rope didn’t thump-wump-BUMP for them either. And after going nowhere for a full minute, they began screeching at Tito (who was preoccupied with two little chunks of grassy dirt that he’d found near the edge). “What are you doing, you idiot!” they cried. “Quit playing with dirt and help us!”

  So Tito dropped the dirt and squatted at the edge of the Bottomless Shaft. “Why’d you get on the rope?” he asked, stretching out to reel them in. “Sticky’s friend couldn’t make it work.”

  Pablo stared at him for a moment, then snapped, “We thought he wasn’t heavy enough, okay, stupid? Now stretch! Help us off of here!”

  So Tito (simple soul that he was) leaned out farther.

  And farther.

  And farther.

  Until he simply tumbled over the edge and fell headlong into the vast darkness below.

  Chapter 18

  BOTTOM OF THE BOTTOMLESS SHAFT

  There was, of course, a bottom to the Bottomless Shaft. And it wasn’t a hard cement pad or a plot of bone-crushing dirt.

  It was feathers.

  Floufy, poufy, soft and woufy feathers.

  The kind that float forever in the air if you blow on them.

  The kind that you can smash way down, then watch flouf way up.

  The kind that feel like a cloud when you fall into them.

  Now, these floufy, poufy, soft and woufy feathers were in an enormous chicken-wire container (which was either filled to the poufy-woufy top or only about half full, depending on whether something like, say, a large boulder-brained Bandito Brother had just landed).

  But why the feathers?

  Or, more curiously (considering the skyrocketing price of down on the international market), how had Damien managed to obtain such an enormous supply?

  The answer is quite simple:

  Damien owned geese.

  Lots and lots of honking, squonking, angry-beaked geese.

  And why did Damien own these honking, squonking, angry-beaked geese?

  Because they were what Damien fed his dragon.

  His sharp-clawed, hinged-jawed, ravenous Komodo dragon.

  (Picture, if you will, a ten-foot, two-hundred-pound carnivorous lizard with deadly claws, serrated teeth, a monstrous appetite, and hot, beastly breath. That picture is as close as you should ever get to Damien’s prized and pampered pet. The real thing could tear you to shreds in three-point-four seconds flat.)

  But let’s get back to the geese, shall we?

  Geese eat things like weeds and snails, and they molt every six weeks when they’re growing.

  Every six weeks!

  Can you imagine all the shedding feathers? Can you just see feathers floufing around all over the place?

  And since Damien had lots and lots of geese, and the geese were always growing (as they rarely made it to full size before being fed to the dragon), the goose cave had been a constant blizzard of feathers.

  Until, that is, Damien built the feather cage and got busy with a leaf blower.

  Not only did it tidy things up dramatically, but Damien also found that wielding the blower was amazingly therapeutic. The rev of the motor, the blast of air, the power to drive things in a direction he determined … it made him feel happy.

  In control.

  Satisfied.

  (It was, perhaps, as close to gardening as he would ever come.)

  Now, although the ten-foot cage of feathers was not a safety necessity when riding the knotted rope down the shaft, it was a billowy bonus, and Damien would often let go of the rope and land with an arm-flung “Aaaaaaah!” simply for the soul-soothing softness of it all.

  This time, however, Damien’s trip down the shaft was entirely business. Toward the end of the knotty rope ride, Damien shoved down a long lever on the wall, which lowered a landing platform that had an attached slide. Once he’d landed, he secured the rope (as he was aware that the Brothers might, once again, try to defy his orders), then slid with his conked-out prisoner to the ground below, bypassing the feather pit altogether.

  At the bottom of the slide, Damien pressed another lever to retract the landing platform. Then he whooshed through his gaggle of geese (which is what a group of honking, squonking geese is called, whether they’re molting or not) and began muttering to himself as he ascended the five steep stone steps that led up to a cobblestone walkway. “It’ll be over in no time,” he hissed, but his normally quick and determined steps seemed to be dragging. “She’s out cold,” he muttered. “She’ll never know what bit her.”

  Meanwhile, Dave and Sticky were nearing the bottom of the shaft when Tito came hurtling past them like a bandoliered boulder, crying, “Wheeeeeeeeee-hee-hee-hee-hee! Wheeeeeeeeee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”

  (Obviously he didn’t understand the severity of the situation, and that he might very well have ended his days with a wicked, boulder-cracking splat.)

  But (as you already know) Tito did not land with a wicked splat. He landed with a WOOOOUF, POOOOOOOOOOOOOUF! as the feathers beneath him compressed and those to the sides went billowing into the air.

  Dave and Sticky had just reached the bottom of the shaft when Tito landed. “Puffy-huffy plumas!” Sticky cried, swatting feathers from the air in front of his face. “What will that loco lobo think of next?”

  “What’s with all the geese?” Dave said, as he could now clearly see (and hear) the molting birds.

  “Dragon dinner,” Sticky said with a shudder.

  Dave shuddered, too, as he had once witnessed the feeding of the Komodo dragon, but his shudder was cut short by an echoing “AAAAAAA-AAHHHHHHHHH!” hurtling down the shaft along with the hair-raised body of Angelo.

  Angelo landed with a (somewhat smaller) WOOOOUF, POOOOOOOOOOOOOUF next to Tito and immediately began flailing in the feathers. “Am I dead? What is this?”

  “It’s a pillow!” came Tito’s muffled voice. “Let’s have a pillow fight!”

  “You idiot!” Angelo screamed, feathers tickling his nose. “How do we get—AAAAAAAAH-CHOOOOOOOO! AAAAAH-CHOO OOOO! AAAAAAH-CHOOOOOOOO!—out of here?”

  “Ándale, hombre,” Sticky whispered in Dave’s ear. “Before they see us.”

&nbs
p; So Dave skirted around the feather cage and soon found himself in an enormous cave, being honked at by the gaggle of geese. Through the geese was a rickety wooden bridge leading across a marshy area to an island. And on the other side of the island, shining through the bars of a large wrought-iron gate, was a warm, welcoming pool of sunshine.

  Dave realized this was an exit.

  An escape hatch.

  A way out of the mansion’s madness.

  Yet he also knew he had a job to finish. So he moved on, trying to determine which way Damien might have taken Ms. Krockle.

  Ahead of them was the open mouth of a three-foot tube that stuck out of the cave wall by a few feet like a gigantic, compressed, foil-covered Slinky.

  “What is that?” Dave asked.

  “Beats me, señor,” Sticky replied. “I’ve never been here before.” He cocked an eye at Dave. “But I don’t like the looks of it.”

  Dave nodded. The tube gave him the heebie-jeebies, too, although he couldn’t say why. “So that way, you think?” Dave said, pointing to some steep steps and a cobblestone pathway.

  Sticky gave a somber nod. “Sí, señor.”

  And so Dave took a deep breath and followed the cobblestones, knowing full well that he was moving deeper and deeper into the twisted darkness of Damien’s lair.

  Chapter 19

  VARANUS KOMODOENSIS

  Whenever he fed his prized Komodo a special treat (be it hog or, say, human), Damien Black introduced the meal into the dragon pit via trap-door, or wicker cage, or slippery slide, or catapult (to mention a few). This gave him the opportunity to activate the release of the meal himself and enjoy a live-action showdown from the comfort of a skybox.

  Yes, I said “skybox.”

  However, by “skybox,” I do not mean a large, glass-faced room for bird’s-eye viewing by dozens of spectators. By “skybox,” I mean a large, glass-faced room for bird’s-eye viewing by one.

  You see, Damien’s skybox had but a single chair. It was a high-back executive swivel chair (black, of course), with padded armrests, adjustable lumbar support, pneumatic seat adjustments, and a locking tilt control.

  Damien had found it to be perfect except that the casters were crunchy and slow across the cement floor of his skybox. So (rather than install carpeting) he removed the stock casters and installed four-inch rubberized (and deeply treaded) replacements (which he, of course, made himself). These new wheels gave him speed, traction, and the bonus of extra height for superior viewing across the control console.

  Ah, yes. The control console. This was a shiny black surface that was neatly contoured to the curve of the viewing window and had all the buttons and levers and gizmos that controlled (among other things) the trapdoors, wicker cages, slippery slides, and catapults. (It also contained a small mix board for the room’s surround sound, as Damien liked to boost the bass and add a little reverb once the action got under way—squeals and screams being so much more intense with a little audio processing thrown in.)

  Like a traditional skybox, Damien’s did have a wet bar, although (quite untraditionally) it held no booze. Instead, there were bottles of deeply chilled sparkling Armenian pomegranate juice (Damien’s favorite thirst-quenching beverage).

  The skybox was one of Damien’s favorite rooms. In it, he felt a grand sense of power and control.

  It was like his own private balcony at Carnage-y Hall.

  Now, it was Damien’s intention to load the cat-scratch teacher into the catapult (or maybe the slide?) and then dash up to his skybox to start the show. But (despite all the muttering he’d done to himself) there was one pesky thing giving him pause.

  His prisoner was a woman.

  A very … attractive woman.

  One whose eyes had shown no fear.

  Not even a trace.

  Damien couldn’t make sense of this.

  Couldn’t reconcile it.

  Weren’t women blithering, blubbering bundles of nerves?

  Didn’t they faint at the mere sight of a mouse?

  Screech at the fluttery flap of a bat?

  And yet back in the Zulu corridor he had given her his best nerve-shattering stare for a full minute and she hadn’t flinched.

  Hadn’t even blinked.

  “Quit it, you fool!” he muttered to himself. “It has to be done!” And right then and there, he decided to use the catapult.

  It would be quick.

  Absolute.

  And irreversible.

  Unfortunately for Damien, at the exact moment of his newfound resolve, Ms. Veronica Krockle stirred.

  “Drat!” he muttered, as this could only mean one thing:

  She was coming to.

  Now, in his skybox, Damien kept another non-traditional skybox provision:

  A coffin.

  It was a simple wooden model (made, of course, by Damien himself). But this particular coffin was not intended (as you might expect) for the storage of bodies. Instead, it stored emergency supplies: rope and handcuffs and blindfolds and blowtorches—that sort of thing.

  So when Ms. Veronica Krockle began to come to, Damien made the questionable decision to haul her up to the skybox so he could first bind her and blindfold her and then catapult her.

  (It was, he reasoned, not much of a delay, but you and I might suspect that his trigger finger had developed a really strange cramp. Perhaps even paralysis.)

  Regardless, once in the skybox, Damien plopped his prisoner in his custom-castered chair and began ransacking the coffin for rope and a blindfold.

  Veronica Krockle was, however, more conscious than he knew. And after slyly viewing his backside for a few moments, she happened to notice the dragon in the pit below. “Oh!” she gasped, leaning closer to the window. “Varanus komodoensis.” She swiveled to face Damien. “He’s magnificent!”

  Damien stared at her, stunned.

  She knew the genus and species of his Komodo dragon?

  And she thought he was magnificent?

  And that look on her face … what did that mean?

  Poor Damien. This was all simply too much for him to process.

  And so he did the only thing he could think to do:

  He conked her on the head again (with his pygmy hippo club, of course).

  Meanwhile, Sticky and Dave had been following the cobblestone pathway, coming to fork after fork in the road, going deeper and deeper into Damien’s subterranean lair.

  But as they approached the next fork and Dave was about to say, “We are totally lost!” Sticky whispered, “Señor! I know where we are!”

  “You do?” Dave asked.

  Sticky pointed to one blood-red cobblestone on the path to the right. “Thataway to the skybox!”

  “He’s got a skybox?”

  “Sí, señor. It’s his control center. It’s how he gets… ay-ay, how do you say … food into the pit.” He shuddered. “The sounds are horroroso.”

  The whisper of Sticky’s voice caused a shiver to shinny up Dave’s spine. And in his heart of hearts he knew it was time to turn around.

  Time to go home.

  Time to skedaddle!

  And yet in his heart of heart of hearts he knew he could not.

  He was not a chicken.

  Or, for that matter, a cooked goose.

  Yet.

  He was a superhero.

  Of sorts.

  And (regardless of how lame he thought his power was) he’d come to understand that with the power came responsibility.

  Even if that responsibility was the decidedly distasteful duty of saving his science teacher’s life.

  And so, rather than turning tail and running, Dave gave a quiet command:

  “Take me to the skybox.”

  Chapter 20

  PIT OF PLUMES

  Before I tell you what happened in the skybox, I really must backtrack and let you know what became of the Bandito Brothers.

  You may recall that Tito was having a flapping good time in goose feathers and wanted to have a (p
illowless) pillow fight with Angelo. Angelo, however, was in no mood for fun of any kind. He was furious with Pablo for kicking him off the rope (although he had tried to do the same to Pablo), and he now had fluffy feathers sticking to him all over his head, shoulders, and hands.

  This was not a simple matter of static electricity holding the fine downy parts of the feathers to Angelo’s hairy body.

  Oh no.

  This was a simple matter of being tarred and feathered. (The “tar,” in this case, being the pour-on-pancakes variety that Pablo had glubbed all over Angelo.)

  Angelo now looked like a big, fluffy-wuffy (and furiously clucky) bandoliered chicken.

  Of course, when Pablo came plummeting into the Pit of Plumes moments later (having lost his footing and then his grip), he, too, became coated in feathers. Tickly-wickly feathers that stuck to his chest, his shoulders, and (most annoyingly of all) his face.

  “Pthwwwthhh!” Pablo spat, trying to defeather his lips. “Pthwwwthhh!” But the more he pthwwwthhhed (or swiped, or rubbed, for that matter), the worse it seemed to get.

  So, in the tradition of brothers everywhere (whether of common blood or not), Pablo gave up on solving the problem and began pounding on Angelo.

  Angelo (keeping with tradition) began pounding back, and Tito got into the action by squealing, “Wheeeee! Wheeeee!” and throwing feathers over them.

  In no time at all, the place was an enormous fluff bowl. And, as things continued to fluffify, the Brothers sank deeper and deeper into the plumes until all at once all three seemed to realize they were in danger of dying by fluffy-wuffy suffocation.

  So, just like that, the fight was over.

  Just like that, the three of them swam through feathers over to the chicken-wire shore and, using the wooden cross-supports, climbed out of the Pit of Plumes.

  Just like that, they got back to tracking down Dave.

  “Which way do we go?” Angelo asked as they took in the rickety bridge to Goose Island, the gated tunnel that went toward daylight, the oversized foil hose sticking out of the cave wall, and the cobblestone pathway.