Sinister Substitute (11 page)

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.

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.”

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 (pillowless) 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.

And although they might well have gone over the bridge or explored the foil hose, Tito discovered something that kept them on the right path. He picked up a small grassy chunk from the cobblestone pathway and murmured, “More Rosie
poo-poos
?” (placing emphasis on the second
oo
like a fancy Frenchman).

And yes, that’s exactly what Tito had discovered.

Dave, you see, had been walking around with Rosie’s intestinally processed weeds (and arugula) caught in the deep tread of his sneakers. And as he had sneaky-toed through the mansion, he had unwittingly dropped little stink nuggets.

Tito had spotted two of these nuggets at the rim of the Bottomless Pit (which, as we have learned, wasn’t bottomless at all). And now, after a quick analysis (known, I’m afraid, as the sniff
test), Tito scratched his head and wondered, What are Rosie
poo-poos
doing here?

And then, in a sudden (and uncharacteristic) moment of clarity, he understood.

“This way!” he cried to Angelo and Pablo. “Follow the
poo-poos
!”

“What?” the Brothers asked (each giving Tito a feather-faced squint). But as Tito disappeared up the steps, they (for once) tagged along without a fight.

And so it was that by following this trail of nuggets (or, if you prefer,
poo-poos
), the Brothers managed to track Dave to the skybox just as Dave sneaky-toed inside.

So! Let’s take inventory, shall we?

There’s a devilishly demented villain wrapping duct tape around the scalpel-happy hands of a conked-out (and securely blindfolded) science teacher.

(Check, and check.)

There’s a boy and his klepto-gecko hanging from the ceiling of the skybox.

(Check, and check again.)

There are three men wearing bandoliers of (useless) ammunition—two of them covered in fluffy-wuffy feathers, the other holding a collection of donkey doo.

(Check, check, and stinky-winky check!)

Which brings us to the point where the
poo-poos
hit the fan.

“There he is!” Pablo cried, muscling his way past Angelo and Tito into the skybox.

Damien’s head snapped around at the sound of Pablo’s voice, his eyes burning like dark coals of anger. But as he rose to unleash his fury upon them, he saw that Pablo and Angelo were … tarred and feathered?

And that Tito was holding … donkey doo?

“Look out, boss!” Pablo cried, pointing at the ceiling above him.

But as Damien looked up, Dave let loose and did a flying twist, bombing the demented villain with a body slam that knocked him off his feet and into the open coffin.

“You fools!” the treasure hunter screeched from inside the coffin. And although his voice was muffled, it still carried such venomous anger that (for a moment) the Brothers recoiled.

Dave, however, was on adrenaline overload and couldn’t let a little thing like a venomous voice from inside a coffin stop him. He shoved Damien’s flailing legs into the coffin, slammed down the lid, and fastened one of the latches. Pablo was almost upon him now, so, lickety-split, Dave escaped by zippy-toeing up the wall and across the ceiling, dropping down beside Ms. Veronica Krockle (who was slumped in the chair with a roll of duct tape dangling from her wrists).