Villain's Lair

1.
The Oozy, Stinky Cave

2.
Perhaps You're Wondering

3.
Dave Freaks Out

4.
Crunchy, Slooooopy, Gross, and Goopy

5.
The One Way Out

6.
Confusing, Confounding, and Just Plain Creepy

7.
The Dastardly, Demented Damien Black

8.
The Dungeon

9.
The Pit of Doom

10.
Doomed!

11.
Crouching Dragon, Lying Boy

12.
Enter the Cat

13.
Meanwhile, Back at the Mansion

14.
Delivery Boy

15.
The Disguise

16.
Mariachi Spies

17.
Over the Edge

18.
Extreme Gravity

19.
A Take-Ten-Paces-and-Shoot Situation

20.
The Capped Crusader

A Guide to Spanish and Stickynese Terms

“Quick,
señor
, hide in there!” Sticky said, pointing past dangling moss into the deep blackness of a cave.

“That's even worse than out here!” Dave whispered.

“Not if Damien Black sees you,” Sticky warned.

Dave Sanchez looked at the forest behind them, his heart beating madly. From the tales Sticky had told him, Damien Black was ruthless. Evil. A treasure hunter who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

But had the noise in the night been him?

Had Damien seen them hide the bike and squeeze past his gate?

The treasure hunter's mansion loomed like a monster above them. Even washed in moonlight it looked dark. Eerie. The sort of spooky house you see only in your very worst nightmares: pointed spires, shutters hanging from a single hinge, bats fluttering around the belfry…

Not that this house
had
a belfry, but you get the idea.

What this nightmarish mansion
did
have (besides pointed spires and shutters hanging from a single hinge) were rooms that jutted out at odd angles. Rooms that seemed almost suspended in space.

These rooms had either no windows, or unusually shaped windows, up very high.

Some of the rooms had ladders mounted on the outside.

Ladders that seemed to lead nowhere.

Others had cables or pulleys or winches, or really, just turning-pulling-cranking thingamajigs. It was hard to imagine what they were used for.

Were they torture chambers?

Dastardly plotting-to-take-over-the-world chambers?

Or perhaps these rooms held vast amounts of evilly acquired treasure.

Chests of gold!

Maps to riches!

The pearls, diamonds, and emeralds of kings!

Anyone would agree it was odd.

Very odd indeed.

“Señor
, in there!” Sticky said again, and this time he tugged Dave's ear with one hand as he pointed into the cave with the other.

Dave hated when Sticky tugged his ear, but Sticky knew no other way to get Dave to listen. Sticky was, after all, just a gecko lizard, where Dave was a stubborn, all-knowing thirteen-year-old boy.

Something crunched through the darkness of the forest, and this time Dave followed the tug on his ear until he was safe inside the mossy cave.

Safe! Now, that's a laugh. They had stepped from the forest surrounding Damien Black's night' marish mansion into a cave
beneath
his nightmarish mansion. A deep, dark cave that held, among other things, all the bats that would have been in the belfry, had there been one.

Not that Dave could see the bats yet. It was, as I have said, a deep,
dark
cave. And, as it turns out, smelly, too.

“Ay-ay-ay!” Sticky said, fanning the air in front of his face.

“I wish I'd brought a flashlight!” Dave whispered.

“How about matches?” Sticky asked.

“Matches? Where am I gonna get matches?”

“Hold on,
hombre,”
Sticky said, then scurried over Dave's shoulder and into the backpack Dave wore everywhere.

So how
did
matches come to be inside Dave's backpack without him knowing it?

The same way that money or jewelry or, say,
grapes
would mysteriously appear in Dave's backpack: Sticky had put them there.

You see, Sticky was, on the whole, a good gecko. But he was a good gecko with a very bad habit.

He stole things.

Lifted them.

Snagged them!

He had, if you will, sticky fingers.

“It's not my fault,
hombre,”
he would tell Dave. “I was born this way!”

Which is true; geckos have incredibly sticky fingers. And on this particular night, in this particular darkness, Sticky's bad habit happened to come in quite handy.

“Here,
hombre,”
Sticky said, holding the box of matches up to Dave's face.

“How'd these get in my backpack?” Dave asked, taking them from him.

“You don't want to know,” Sticky replied.

This was also true. Anytime Sticky would start to answer that question, Dave would say, “Stop! Don't tell me! I don't want to know!”

Dave did not ask again. Instead, he struck a match. But as the match flared to life, the boy and the gecko saw that they had entered a foul and fiendish cave that had oozing walls and…

“Bats!” Sticky cried, diving for cover inside Dave's sweatshirt.

Dave did not like bats either, but he had nowhere to dive. He did, however, have a match. A match that, just before it burned his fingers, cast enough light on the cave wall to reveal a mounted torch.

“Ouch!” Dave said, waving out the match.

“Did a bat bite you?” Sticky shouted from inside Dave's sweatshirt.

“No.” Dave struck another match. “The
match
bit me.”

Sticky emerged from the sweatshirt and asked, “Why is there a torch on the wall of an oozy, stinky cave?”

“I don't know,” Dave said, pulling it out of its holder. He lit the torch with the match, and as he moved deeper into the cave, he wondered the exact same thing that Sticky had asked.

Why
was
there a torch on the wall of an oozy, stinky cave?

It's a well-known fact that bats are not comfortable with light
or
smoke, and since the torch was giving off a great deal of both, they were really coming to life now, fluttering about in the spooky, choppy way that bats do.

“I don't think bats eat geckos,” Dave said, aware of the way Sticky was cowering inside his sweatshirt again.

“You don't
think, señor?”
Sticky asked.

But Dave did not answer. He was too busy noticing that this oozy, stinky cave had a passageway.

A passageway that led away from the stench and the dangling moss and the fluttery bats.

A passageway that led, Dave would soon learn, to somewhere much, much worse.

Perhaps you're wondering what Dave and Sticky were doing, creeping through a frightening forest and an oozy, stinky cave toward the underbelly of a nightmarish mansion.

Or perhaps you're wondering in what make-believe world a kleptomaniacal talking gecko lizard exists.

These are, I admit, perfectly understandable things to wonder.

Unfortunately, the explanation is not an easy one. You see, this story does not take place in a make-believe world, with make-believe villains and make-believe lizards.

This story is quite real.

Quite
true.

And perhaps your reaction to this is, Impossible! Lizards can't talk!

That, too, would be a perfectly understandable reaction, and it happens to be the exact reaction Dave had when Sticky spoke to
him
for the first time.

Not that Sticky had spoken to him right away. Even though Dave had saved him from the clutches of a neighbor's cat, and had proclaimed him “the coolest lizard ever!” this was not enough to begin a conversation.

Nor was the fact that Dave let him roam freely through the humble apartment that Dave shared with his parents and little sister. Or that Dave took him everywhere. After all, geckos are known to bring good luck, so why not?

No, Sticky was more than just cautious.

He was afraid for his life.

Why?

Because he was hiding from more than just the neighbor's sharp-clawed cat.

He was hiding from a diabolical man named Damien Black.

It should have been enough to escape this evil treasure hunter's clutches with his life, but Sticky had managed to escape with something more, and Damien Black wanted it back.

Badly.

It should also have been enough for Sticky to hide in the safety of Dave's apartment for the rest of his life, but Damien Black still had something that
Sticky
wanted.

Maybe just as badly.

Sticky didn't want it for himself. He more wanted to get it away from Damien Black. After all,
he
was the one who had discovered the treasure,
he
was the one who had risked his life,
he
was the one who had brought it out of the realm of legend, back into the hands of man.