Villain's Lair Read Online Free

noticed a cheesy little speaker mounted to the ceiling. A ceiling that was made of giant dangling boulders. “It’s just a cheesy little speaker!” he cried, jabbing it with the end of the torch until it quit ha-ha-ha’ing at them.
    Dave searched the bouldery ceiling for other hidden devices. Like surveillance eyes. Or movement sensors. Or laser beam alarms. But hesearched in vain, for you see, Damien Black did not believe in the use of modern technology. He believed in the use of clever, sneaky things: disguises and booby traps and cheesy little speakers; secret rooms and hidden poisons and scary, flappy beasts.
    And, oh yes, he also believed in agonizing deaths in dungeons and torture chambers.
    He was, in short, an old-fashioned, truly demented villain.
    And Dave and Sticky were, in fact, quite stuck in one of his demented little rooms with dangling boulders and knobless doors.
    Dave tried prying at each and every door.
    Tried pushing on each and every door.
    Tried
pounding
on each and every door.
    It wasn’t until Dave lost his temper and
kicked
one that he discovered a way out.
    Whoosh
, the door swept inward, and
clonk
, the top swung down, clobbering him on the head.

    â€œOuch!” Dave cried.
    â€œOuchie-huahua,”
Sticky cried, although he hadn’t actually been hit by the swinging, clonking door.
    Dave scrambled backward as the door creaked on its peg like a giant teeter-totter. No monster came into the room. No voices bwaa-ha-ha’d. Not even a bat fluttered.
    So Dave crept forward, holding the torch well ahead of him so he could see what lay beyond the plank of wagging wood.
    â€œAn elevator?” he whispered.
    â€œFreaky
frijoles
! Are you serious, man?” Sticky pushed forward to get a better look. “He always dashed me up and down stairs. Twisty, curvy, creaky stairs! With no handrails. And all this time he had an
elevator?”
    â€œUh, maybe not,” Dave said, moving in closer. “I think it’s just
painted
like an elevator.”
    He was exactly right. From the buttons on thewall to the floor numbers above the door, the room was painted so meticulously that as Dave entered it, he still didn’t quite believe he was not in an elevator. Except for one small detail:
    There was a giant tongue of a door sticking out at them.
    â€œI don’t get it,” Dave said. He looked up into the vast, dark shaft above them, as there was no ceiling to this strange elevator room either. “Why paint a room like an elevator if it doesn’t move?”
    â€œHmm,” Sticky said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s just what you do when you’re a chimmy-chunga, binga-bunga, loco-berry burrito?”
    â€œNobody’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.”
    â€œAsombrrrrroso!”
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!)
    â€œUh,
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?”
    â€œI’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