Villain's Lair (4 page)

“Hmm,” Sticky said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe that's just what you do when you're a chimmy-chunga, binga-bunga, loco-berry burrito?”

“Nobody's
this
crazy,” Dave murmured. He looked around at the teeter-totter door, the long shaft up, the elevator walls, the dangling boulders outside…Then suddenly he put them all together in his mind and cried, “It's a catapult!”

Sticky dived for the safety of Dave's sweatshirt. “Acat-a-who?Where?”

Dave stepped onto the door like one might step onto the end of a teeter-totter. “Not a cat, a catapult! It shoots you into the air.”

“Asombrrrrroso!”
Sticky said, scrambling out from inside Dave's sweatshirt. But then it struck his little gecko brain that perhaps this was not so awesome after all.

Perhaps this was dangerous.

(Perhaps, indeed!)

“Uh,
señor?”
Sticky asked. “How does it shoot us? Where do we go? Will we get smashed like pimply papayas?”

Dave turned to face him. “Like pimply papayas?”

“I'm really just talking about you,
señor
, not me.” Sticky shrugged. “I don't have pimples. And I could just crawl up.”

Dave shook his head. “Thanks a lot.” He went back to searching for a lever. Or a switch. Or a hoist. Or some thingamajig that would shoot them up the shaft.

All he could find, though, was a painted button that said UP, and who in his right mind pushes a painted button and expects it to
do
anything?

“Why don't you push the UP button,
señor?”

Dave's head snapped to face Sticky, for into his mind had popped the same question that has undoubtedly popped into yours: “You can
read?”
He squinted at the gecko. “Who taught you to read?”

Sticky shrugged. “You pick things up in life,
señor.
Now push it. See what happens.”

“Nothing's gonna happen. It's paint!”

“Whatever you say,” Sticky said, and then lickety-split, he scurried across Dave's shoulders and down his arm, spun in the air, and slammed the UP button with his tail.

It was fortunate that Sticky's little kung-fu maneuver landed him back on Dave's sleeve, because outside, a boulder came crashing down, instantly catapulting them skyward.

“Hurling
habañeroooooos!”
Sticky cried, his voice echoing off the walls of the shaft as they flew up, up, up.

The shaft was painted the whole way up. They blasted by the image of an eerie night sky with a giant moon, bats, and wispy clouds. They flew past
screaming ghosts, and ghouls from the grave. And then, just as they were losing momentum, they found themselves approaching the most frightening sight of all.

A man with black hair.

Pale skin.

A twisty mustache, devilish smile, and glinting black eyes.

His coat was long and black and flowing behind him.

His boots were black, too, with bent and tarnished silver buckles. And the axe he carried was as tall as he was, and at least as fiendish. It had cracks and nicks in the edges of its double blade, yet it glistened evilly. Like it, too, had a dastardly past.

“Creeping creosote!” Sticky gasped. “It's him!”

As real as it looked, it was merely a painting of Damien Black standing on the edge of a cliff alongside a jagged wooden sign that read:

DANGER

DO NOT

ENTER

Dave knew the man on the wall was just paint, but it crossed his mind that painted objects in this shaft were sometimes more than merely paint. What might happen if he touched him?

At that very moment, he came face to face with Damien Black's glinting painted eyes and decided that touching him was not a good idea.

Not a good idea at all.

It was, however, also at that very moment that Dave stopped going up and started tumbling down. You see, even in strangely painted catapulting shafts, gravity still rules the day. What goes up will most definitely come down.

That is, unless something stops it.

“Aaaah!” Dave cried, looking around madly for something to stop him. “Aaaah!”

It was at this point that Sticky leapt from
Dave's sleeve, climbed lickety-split up the wall, and slapped the ENTER part of the painted DO NOT ENTER sign.

Kaffffflank! A
plank shot out beneath Dave, and
brrrr-ivack-yak-yak-yak-yak
, a section of the shaft wall went up like a rolltop desk.

Sticky scurried down the wall and reunited with Dave, who was futilely scrabbling for his dropped torch as the plank beneath him began to retract, pulling him into the opening in the wall. It was as though the shaft had opened its mouth and stuck out its tongue, much as a frog would catch a fly.

Moments later, they were inside, not a frog, but a room. A
normal
room, with four walls, a window, furniture, and a rug.

And there was no Damien Black in sight.

“We made it!” Dave whispered, looking out the window at the forest beneath them. “We're inside the house!”

They sneaky-toed over to the door, which had
a normal doorknob. (It was bent and dented, but it was metal, at least, and not somebody's head.)

Dave eeeeeased the door open.

They peeeeeeked outside.

And of all the dastardly, dangerous, daggery things that might have been there, you will never, I promise you,
never
guess what awaited them on the other side of the door.

“A burro?” Dave gasped. “In a
house!”

But, of course, this was no ordinary house, and, as it turns out, this was no ordinary burro.

“A
y caramba!
” Sticky gasped. “What is she doing here?”

“Good question,” Dave replied, not fully grasping the significance of Sticky's question
or
the
ay caramba!

You see, there are
ay carambas
, and then there are
ay caRASAbas.
In Stickynese, they can mean anything from “oh brother” to “oh wow” to “the world is about to explode!”

And this particular
ay caramba
was, without a doubt, an
ay caRASAba ay caramba.

In other words, this burro was very bad news.

“No,
amigol
You don't understand!” Sticky whispered frantically. “That's Rosie!”

“You know this burro? Is she mean? Can she talk?”

“Talk? No! She's dumb as donkey dung!”

“So what's the problem?”

“The problem,
señor
, is that she belongs to the Bandito Brothers!” He slapped his little gecko forehead. “Ay-ay-ay. I can't believe they're here.”

“Wait. Who are the Bandito Brothers?”

Sticky looked everywhere but at Dave.

“Stickyyyyy…”

“All right, all right.” Sticky puffed out his little gecko chest in an attempt to stand tall. “I used to live with them, okay? Before I joined that back-stabbing treasure hunter.”

“You lived with banditos?
Bandits?”

“Sí, señor,”
Sticky said with a shrug. “What can I say? They accepted me.”

Dave, who is no fool, put the pieces together lickety-split. “They accepted you because you had sticky fingers and would steal things for them?”

Again, Sticky gave a little shrug. “Before me, they were poor as dirt. After me? They were loaded.” He looked out at the burro, who was chewing over an enormous pile of thistly, thorny weeds. “Those
bobos
banditos have teamed up with that
ratero
Black? I can't believe it.”

Dave's face contorted in the way that only a very unhappy face can contort. “So we're not dealing with just an evil, demented treasure hunter here? We're also dealing with
bobos
banditos? How many?”

“Well,” said Sticky, counting them off on his fingers, “there's Tito—he's big like an ox with a head full of rocks. There's Pablo—he looks like a rat and stinks like a bat. And then there's Angelo—he's scar-faced and scary and ugly and hairy.”

“I don't care what they look like! How many are there? Three?”

“Oh, you care,
señor.
And
sí. Tres.”

“Are you sure they're here?”

Sticky shrugged. “Why else would Rosie be here? She's their transportation.”

Dave's face was now screwed around so far that one eye was almost covered by a cheek, and his mouth was twisted nearly to his ear. “Their transportation? The three of them ride one burro?”

Again, Sticky shrugged. “It's a tight fit.”

“But…how do you know that's
their
burro? It could be a different donkey…couldn't it?”

At that moment, Rosie stopped feasting from her thistly, thorny mountain of weeds and turned to look at them. Her lips pushed forward, revealing a single, yellowed, bucked front tooth in the middle of her weed-filled mouth.

“It's Rosie,” Sticky said, for there was no denying the dental details.

At that moment, Dave considered turning back, which I'm sure you'll agree was a prudent thing to consider. After all, he no longer had just the one dangerously demented villain to outwit. He now had three additional foes. And a buck-toothed burro to boot.

But then Dave envisioned the return route out of the mansion: down the shaft (who knows how), into the knobless room (and who knows how they'd get out of
that)
, through the waterfall of goopy, sloopy snails, down a musty passageway (with no torch to light the way), through the oozy, stinky cave of fluttery bats, and finally out through the dark and dangerous forest to squeeze through the gate.

In the end, Dave decided that going forward would be safer. After all, Damien Black would not enter his house in such a bizarre manner. Surely there was a door somewhere. A simple door with normal knobs that led away from this maniacal mansion.

Poor Dave. He still had so much to learn.

“So now what?” he asked at last.

“So now we find the dungeon,” Sticky replied.

Ah, yes. The dungeon. Sticky had told Dave that the dungeon was where the power ingots were kept. Power ingots, which, if you'll recall, were why these two had endured bats and tunnels and snails and shrunken heads and catapulting shafts in the first place.

To his credit, Sticky had warned Dave that the dungeon housed a ferocious dragon. Not the fire-breathing sort found in made-up fairy tales. A
real
dragon, found in real-life stories, such as this one.

A dragon with dark, scaly skin.

Big eyes.

Sprawling legs and sharp claws.

A three-hundred-pound dragon with a tail as long as his body and a long, yellow, forked tongue.

A cold-blooded, meat-eating beast.

One that could kill with a single bite of his disease-ridden, bacteria-breeding mouth.

Dave had been undaunted. “A Komodo dragon? Those are just oversized lizards!”

“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky had murmured, for it was clear that Dave had no idea what he was getting into.

But whose fault was that?

He would simply have to pay the price for being an all-knowing thirteen-year-old boy.

So Dave and his sticky-footed friend stepped through the doorway and entered the room that Rosie was in.

I use the word “room” loosely here, as this was more a large, six-sided intersection of hallways than an actual room. There were walls (and a ceiling) and an actual door across from the door they'd just come through, but there were also four shadowy passageways leading to (or from) this intersecting room.

Dave looked around at his choices and whispered, “Which way?”

“Uh…thataway!” Sticky said, pointing with great conviction to a hallway on the left.

So Dave went past the bucktoothed burro and sneaky-toed down the hallway that Sticky had pointed to. But after a few minutes he whispered, “Does any of this look familiar?”