The Greatest Power (8 page)

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 nagging 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.

But he did
hear
something.

Something coming from the other side of the blood-red door.

Something … happy-sounding?

To a dark, demented mind, there is nothing more nerve-shattering than the sounds of someone else’s happiness. Birds chirping, people singing, laughter … these are like long fingernails across an old, dusty chalkboard.

And to make matters worse, the sound Damien heard wasn’t simply chirping or singing or laughter.

It wasn’t just happy.

It was, Damien realized,
joyous
.

The treasure hunter cringed.

He quivered.

He covered his ears!

A great shudder moved from the top of his oily head to the tips of his ragged toenails as he gasped, “What is making that
sound
?”

At last, and with great bravery (for he was
truly frightened by the sound), he opened the blood-red door.

The sound became unbearable!

And someone had turned on the floodlight!

He stepped through the door, and what he saw astounded him.

Rendered him speechless.

Gave him a severe case of dropjaw.

In all his dastardly days, he had never, I promise you,
ever
seen such a sight.

Tito Bandito (the one who looked like an ox and had a head full of rocks) was bouncing on the edge of the diving-board platform, squealing with delight. Pablo and Angelo were in line behind him, and there was a monkey
(his
monkey) swinging from here to there, flipping around, eeking and squeaking, and having a golden time.

“GERONIMOOOOOO! WATCH OUT BELOW!” Tito cried, then
boinged
off the diving board and cannonballed into the sea of red balls below.

Not one to remain dropjawed for long, Damien yanked in the trapeze bar and swooped down to the diving-board platform, landing with a great
whoosh-swoosh
of his raven-winged coat.

His eyes were like fiery coals.

His sneer like a razor of ice.

Angelo and Pablo cowered from the demonic sight, feeling both burned and chilled.

Neither had to say “Uh-oh.”

They both knew.

They were in deep, diabolical doo-doo.

“What do you
idiots
think you are doing?” Damien seethed, moving toward the two Brothers.

“Having a little fun?” Angelo tried (for even a man with a scarred face and hairy arms likes to have a little fun—especially after having been tied up for three days).

“How could we resist?” Pablo asked. “It’s the
ultimate playland, Mr. Black!” (And the Bandito Brothers would, in fact, know. They had been run out of many a fast-food playland and had never, trust me,
ever
seen one this remarkably radical.)

“Mr. Black! Mr. Black!” Tito squealed from below. “Jump! Jump! It’ll make you happyyyyyyyy,” he cried, flinging armloads of balls into the air.

“Shut up, you fool!” Damien barked at him. Then he came at Pablo and Angelo. “How did you get away? How did you unlock my monkey?”

“The m-m-monkey unlocked
us,”
Angelo said, inching backward.

“W-w-we thought y-y-you sent him,” Pablo added.

“He’s a
flying
monkey,” Tito shouted from below.

“You’re a flying
idiot,”
Damien shouted down at him. “Now get up here and catch my monkey!”

“Sure thing, Mr. Black, we’ll catch him,” Angelo said.

“We’ll have him in no time!” Pablo agreed.

“Here, monkey-monkey-monkey!” Tito cried, climbing the ladder.

The monkey had, in fact, untied the Brothers. And being no idiot (after all, an idiot could never have unraveled twenty square knots, eleven grannies, five cat’s-paws, nine half hitches, and three hangman’s knots), the monkey now sensed that he was once again in danger of being caught and caged. So, knowing no other way out, he simply dropped from his hiding place under the diving board and scurried out of the ball pit and up the slide, back to the whooshing door.

“After him!” Damien cried, but while the Bandito Brothers fumbled and bumbled after the monkey, Damien himself took a trapdoor shortcut and headed straight for the espresso café. Something, he realized, didn’t make sense.

If the Bandito Brothers hadn’t let the monkey go, how had he gotten free?

Perhaps he had dug a way out?

Maybe he had over-amped on coffee and somehow King Konged the bars?

(Damien did, in fact, know that his monkey consumed too much coffee—
any
was too much at the import prices he’d been paying—but what could he do about it? He didn’t want to have to make his own espresso, so a hyped-up monkey was simply part of having his own café.)

Damien, however, discovered no bent bars, no escape holes, and no sprung locks when he arrived at the café. Everything, it seemed, was perfectly in place.

But then he noticed something in the golden glow of café lighting.

Something sneaky.

Or, really, something
sneakerish
.

There were footprints.

Sneaker-toed footprints.

Everywhere
.

Blood (what little there was) drained from Damien’s face.

His body quivered.

It quaked.

Had an anger seismometer been attached to his temples, the needle would have shot off the scale, for it was at that moment that the great calculating mind of Damien Black finally figured it out.

“The boy!” he cried.

And with a great
whoosh-swoosh
of his black-raven coat, he stormed off to find him.

It was all Damien Black knew about Dave—that he was a boy. He didn’t know who he was, or how old he was, or that he lived with his mother and father and younger sister in a humble walk-up apartment on the poor side of town.

All he knew was that he was a boy.

A confounded, pesky, and maddeningly lucky boy.

Oh, wait.

That is not entirely true.

(The part about what Damien knew, that is.)

He also knew that the boy had a confounded, pesky, maddeningly talkative gecko named Sticky.

And that Sticky had given the boy his prized
magic wristband, along with the Wall-Walker and Invisibility ingots.

But really,
that’s
all he knew. Oh.

Wait again.

He
also
knew that the boy had dark hair. And wore sneakers.

And sunglasses and a ball cap for a disguise. (Which Damien found ludicrous, lazy, and ridiculously lame. He would
¹
have been right, too, except for the inconvenient fact that, being so generic, the disguise was very effective. Lots of boys wear ball caps and, when they’re feeling the need to look cool, shades.)