The Power Potion (9 page)

Meanwhile, the other Brothers had also arrived, and Damien wasted no time in tearing into them. “You block-headed bozos! You knuckleheaded ninnies! You idiotic, incompetent imbeciles! Where have you been?”

“Trapped in the forest, boss!” Pablo said. “We barely escaped with our lives!”

“You’re telling me you don’t have the monkey
or
the coffee?”

Angelo and Pablo shook their sorry heads.

“You dim-witted dummies!” Damien shouted. “You slug-brained sloths! You…you chowder-headed chumps!”

With each insult, Damien’s usually pallid face grew redder. The ends of his twisty mustache quivered and shivered. Steam seemed to shoot from his ears. And just as it appeared that Damien
Black would be the thing exploding, he suddenly took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and said, “You…
owe
…me.”

“Anything, boss. We’ll do anything!” Pablo said in his jumpy, ratty way.

Damien’s left eye cocked open. His other eye stayed slitty and sly.

Slowly, a sneer arched up his face and he began twisting his mustache. “Yessss,” he hissed. “I would say you will.”

Another diabolical deal had just been sealed.

It took Sticky all day to get up to Raven Ridge.

It is, after all, quite a distance (with a lot of uphill).

Not that he walked.

Oh no.

He stowed away, zippy-toeing from one vehicle to another, zigging and zagging his way through the city. It was, as I’m sure you might imagine, a very inefficient way to get someplace. Still, it was better than walking, and with a little persistence, he (at last) found himself on a car that zoomed him up the road to Raven Ridge.

(Of course, he had to dive into a bush when the car crested the ridge, because nobody stops
there unless they have to, but this wasn’t the first time Sticky had launched himself like a little gecko rocket, and he landed just fine.)

Now, as you may have already figured out, Sticky’s mission in going to the mansion was to get his hands on the remaining powerband ingots.

Or, at least, as many as he could escape with.

Specifically Flying.

How could Dave still be mad at him if he delivered the Flying ingot?

How could Dave not want to be the Gecko again?

And so it was that Sticky risked life and limb to get up to Raven Ridge, traverse the fearsome forest, enter the maniacal mansion, and work his way down, down, down to the deep, dark (and frightfully stinky) depths of Damien’s dungeon. A dungeon that housed, among other torturous terrors, the deadly Komodo dragon that protected
Damien’s vast treasure trove of ill-gotten gold and jewels and priceless artwork.

Or, at least, it used to.

To Sticky’s dismay, all that remained in the dragon’s den was…the dragon.

“
Ay caramba
, no!” he moaned.

Now, Damien Black may be despicable and demented, dastardly and deadly, but anyone would agree: He’s no dummy.

And knowing (as he did) that he’d been infiltrated by Dave and Sticky once, and thinking (as he did) that they might call the cops on him (or worse, the IRS), he knew he had to find a new place to store his treasures. He could not, how ever, see hauling things up the way he’d brought them down—via long, dark flights of steep, narrow steps. That may have been fine for taking pieces in one by one, over time, but now he wanted to get them out all at once, and quickly.

And so it was that after some complex calculations, Damien had punctured the floor of a littleused west-wing room and, with an auger, bored a shaft that went down, down, down into soil, grit, and granite (and an elaborate network of gopher tunnels), until it broke through the top of the dragon’s den.

Then, bucket by bucket, he’d simply (or, in the case of two life-sized statues, not so simply) hoisted the treasures up, up, up and stashed them in various secure and secluded (and, at times, sinister) places around the mansion.

Now, of all the priceless artifacts and precious jewelry and pricey Ming pottery, Damien’s most treasured possessions were the four remaining power ingots.

Strength, Speed, Invisibility, and Flying.

(He didn’t give two beans about Wall-Walker. The one small comfort he found in the whole
powerband situation was that at least the pintsized punk who had it couldn’t do much with it.)

And so, because the remaining power ingots were the most prized of all his possessions, he had hidden them around the mansion in locations so sneaky and creepy that no pesky little thief, no rotten little robber, no brazen little boy would even dare approach them!

Unfortunately for Damien, Sticky had been his prisoner and knew how Damien’s dastardly (and decidedly demented) mind worked.

Sticky had also witnessed Damien’s use of one of these four spots for concealing a pilfered 1728 Spanish gold doubloon (which, although not worth as much as one might think, was treasured by Damien because it made him feel so…piratey).

So, as fate would have it, of all the sneaky, creepy, not-supposed-to-peeky places in the whole
monstrous mansion, this was, in fact, the
first
place Sticky thought to look.

It was also the very last place he would ever want to be.

But he was on a mission.

A mission to restore Dave’s faith in him.

A mission to bring the Gecko back.

And so it was that Sticky steeled himself against the fear of what he was about to face and started up the shaft that would take him to the west wing of the mansion.

It was, you see, where Damien kept the tarantula tank.

It’s a well-known fact that tarantulas are both hairy and scary. What you may not know, however, is that tarantulas range in size from only about one inch to over ten.

Oh.

And that they are carnivorous.

Now, what sort of meat do you suppose a ten-inch spider eats?

Let me give you a little hint.

The ten-inch species of tarantulas may be known among scientists as
Theraphosa blondi
, but explorers who first discovered it in the rain forests of South America named it the Goliath bird eater.

That’s right.

It’s a spider that eats birds.

But…how in the world does a spider
catch
a bird?

Not with a sumo-sized web.

Oh no.

Unlike other spiders, tarantulas do not spin webs.

They hunt.

At night.

Like eight-legged, furry-fanged cats.

Yes, a tarantula stalks its prey, slowly creeps up on it, and then pounces, grasping tight with its retractable claws. Then (unlike a cat) it sinks its furry fangs into its victim, pumps it with venom, and (through a process involving regurgitation) turns the prey’s innards into a slurpy stew.

(Yum, huh?)

Tarantulas, for the record, are also cannibalistic.

Now, in case there’s any confusion, “cannibalistic” does not mean that they like to do cannonballs into rivers or streams (or, for that matter, their water dish, should they be in captivity).

They actually (and factually) hate water (except, that is, for drinking).

No, by “cannibalistic,” I mean that they will eat their own kind.

Soupify their hairy, scary neighbor.

Feast on the fangy fiend confined to the same cage.

Yes, disturbing as it may be, it is, in fact, a spider-slurp-spider world, something Damien Black learned the hard way, losing several dozen Goliath bird eaters before figuring it out.

Not one to concede defeat, Damien switched to an aggressive, burrowing species, velvety brown in color and about the size of an adult hand. They were easier to maintain, and he solved (for the
most part) the cannibalism problem by automating the spiders’ food supply, introducing grasshoppers once a week via a hopper that fed in through the fifty-gallon terrarium’s mesh lid.

Now, because Damien Black is demented and dastardly (and dare I say…different?), he outfitted his tarantula terrarium like a desert island. And although the three feet of subsoil was suitable for burrowing, the top layer was sand.

With (real) driftwood.

And (little fake) palm trees.

And (little fake) seagulls.

And a (little fake) Jolly Roger flag.

And a (little fake) ocean (which doubled as a water dish).

And buried beneath the sand (in a very sly location) was a (little fake) pirate chest.

It was inside this pirate chest that Damien kept his (very real) 1728 Spanish gold doubloon.
And
, Sticky suspected, the powerband’s other ingots.

It just made sense.

(In a decidedly demented Damien Black sort of way.)

And so it was that Sticky went up the dragon den shaft and into the mansion’s west wing and zippy-toed through cobwebbed corridors, past the bone room, past the spear room, past the creepy candelabra room, along the wall of a booby-trapped set of stairs, and down a final dark and dingy corridor, until at last he reached the spider room.

The tarantula terrarium was located near a bookcase. There were, in fact, a lot of books in the room, and if it hadn’t been for the storage of odd-sized cages and terrariums (and the grasshopper hopper coming down through the ceiling), the room would have seemed more like a study than a spider room.

Inside the terrarium, three velvety spiders were visible, resting beneath broad pieces of driftwood
in far corners of the enclosure, but there were, in fact, many (
many
) more that had retreated into the cool darkness of their burrows.

Sticky’s little heart started racing.

These tarantulas, you see, while not bird killers, did enjoy a variety of food. Grasshoppers (obviously), but also crickets and frogs and, yes, lizards.

And Damien had, at one wicked point in his control over Sticky, placed him in the tarantula tank.

Not to feed his hairy, scary monsters.

Oh no.

He had done it to make Sticky talk.

You see, after Sticky discovered that Damien was nothing more than a dirty double-crosser, he’d simply stopped speaking to him (a tactic you yourself have probably employed at least once).

To counteract this, Damien did not try reasoning with the gecko.

Nor did he put him in time-out (as Sticky was already confined to a cage, which is, in essence, a permanent time-out).

He also didn’t implore him to just grow up.

No, he simply tossed him in the tank.

And after being stalked and chased by an army of hungry tarantulas, after scaling the walls to escape only to be swatted down again and again by Damien, after holding out for as long as lizardly possible, Sticky finally cried, “All right, all right! I’ll talk!”

A smug, sinister smile had crossed Damien’s face as he’d snatched the poor gecko up to safety and promptly re-caged him.

So! It’s no wonder Sticky’s heart was
ka-pow-pow-pow
ing in his chest as he climbed up the terrarium.

It’s no wonder he was shaky-toed and lightheaded as he stood on the mesh lid of the terrarium and peered down at the fierce, furry monsters below.

It’s also no wonder that he thought (for more than a moment) that he was
loco
-berry burritos and should forget the whole idea.

But Sticky really is a good and (despite evidence to the contrary) honorable gecko, and in the end he decided it was worth the risk.

He took a deep, steadying breath.

He verrrrry carefully opened the mesh window in the terrarium’s top.

And then the gutsy gecko, summoning every ounce of his courage, stepped inside.

Tarantulas (like many spiders) have eight eyes, but their eyesight is weak. Instead, they rely on sensory hairs that can feel even the slightest vibrations on the ground or in the air.

It was, therefore, futile for Sticky to sneaky-toe down to the (fake) desert island, but charging down would also have been a mistake, as sudden movements make tarantulas feel threatened, and a tarantula that feels threatened defends itself by shooting off venomous body hairs.

Having had some experience with this the last time he was in the tank, Sticky decided to err on the side of caution, and moved along the inside rim of the enclosure as smoothly and silently as possible.

Still. Perhaps it was the vibrations he caused as he walked along the glass.

Or perhaps it was the manic beating of his heart.

Or the fact that the grasshopper hopper hadn’t dropped anything to eat in over a week.

Regardless, by the time Sticky was above a small grove of (little fake) palm trees, spiders were beginning to emerge from their burrows.

“Ay caramba!”
Sticky gasped (causing more vibrations to move through the air).

He clung to the glass a moment, watching as hairy legs emerged from underground. Then, realizing that the situation was not improving over time, he made a mad dash for the mound of sand in front of the (little fake) palm trees and began digging furiously.

As he dug, spiders approached.