![]() “I don’t know,” Dave said, pulling it out of its holder. Sticky emerged from the sweatshirt and asked, “Why is there a torch on the wall of an oozy, stinky cave?” “Did a bat bite you?” Sticky shouted from inside Dave’s sweatshirt. A match that, just before it burned his fingers, cast enough light on the cave wall to reveal a mounted torch. “Bats!” Sticky cried, diving for cover inside Dave’s sweatshirt.ĭave did not like bats either, but he had nowhere to dive. 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… Anytime Sticky would start to answer that question, Dave would say, “Stop! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!”ĭave did not ask again. “You don’t want to know,” Sticky replied. “How’d these get in my backpack?” Dave asked, taking them from him. “Here, hombre,” Sticky said, holding the box of matches up to Dave’s face. And on this particular night, in this particular darkness, Sticky’s bad habit happened to come in quite handy. Which is true geckos have incredibly sticky fingers. “It’s not my fault, hombre,” he would tell Dave. But he was a good gecko with a very bad habit. You see, Sticky was, on the whole, a good gecko. The same way that money or jewelry or, say, grapes would mysteriously appear in Dave’s backpack: Sticky had put them there. So how did matches come to be inside Dave’s backpack without him knowing it? “Hold on, hombre,” Sticky said, then scurried over Dave’s shoulder and into the backpack Dave wore everywhere. “I wish I’d brought a flashlight!” Dave whispered. “Ay-ay-ay!” Sticky said, fanning the air in front of his face. It was, as I have said, a deep, dark cave. A deep, dark cave that held, among other things, all the bats that would have been in the belfry, had there been one. They had stepped from the forest surrounding Damien Black’s night’ marish mansion into a cave beneath his nightmarish mansion. 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. Sticky was, after all, just a gecko lizard, where Dave was a stubborn, all-knowing thirteen-year-old boy. “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.ĭave hated when Sticky tugged his ear, but Sticky knew no other way to get Dave to listen. The pearls, diamonds, and emeralds of kings! Or perhaps these rooms held vast amounts of evilly acquired treasure. ![]() It was hard to imagine what they were used for.ĭastardly plotting-to-take-over-the-world chambers? Others had cables or pulleys or winches, or really, just turning-pulling-cranking thingamajigs. Some of the rooms had ladders mounted on the outside. These rooms had either no windows, or unusually shaped windows, up very high. Rooms that seemed almost suspended in space. What this nightmarish mansion did have (besides pointed spires and shutters hanging from a single hinge) were rooms that jutted out at odd angles. Not that this house had a belfry, but you get the idea. 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… The treasure hunter’s mansion loomed like a monster above them. Had Damien seen them hide the bike and squeeze past his gate? A treasure hunter who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. From the tales Sticky had told him, Damien Black was ruthless. “Not if Damien Black sees you,” Sticky warned.ĭave Sanchez looked at the forest behind them, his heart beating madly. “That’s even worse than out here!” Dave whispered. “Quick, señor, hide in there!” Sticky said, pointing past dangling moss into the deep blackness of a cave. Confusing, Confounding, and Just Plain Creepy Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyesįor the superhero educators in Bakersfield and Lamont,Īnd for the kids there who reach for the power inside.Ħ. Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary
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