Villain's Lair (5 page)

“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.

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 down the hallway where Damien Black had gone.

Then off they went.

To 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?”

“Thataway!” Sticky said, pointing to the floor.

Sure enough, beneath the rug was a trapdoor.
A trapdoor that, Dave discovered, led to steep, crooked, spiraling steps that led, well, down.

No, not just down.

Down, down,
down.

As they descended into the deep darkness, they could hear Damien's voice echoing through the…down-ness.

Dave whispered, “Does this take us to the dungeon?”

“Sí, señor!”
Then he asked, “Can't you
see, señor!”
You're stumbling around like you're blind!”

“It's dark in here!”

For a gecko like Sticky, there was plenty of light to see by. He yanked on Dave's ear and said, “Theeees way! You're going to fall off if you don't watch it!”

“Fall off?”

“Sí!”
He kept tugging. “Come over this way. Hug the wall. And watch out for rats! They're as big as cats and they're everywhere!”