Her fenced-in feeling was what started the cat’s obsession with Sticky, and his taunting just added fuel to the feline’s fire. She watched for him day in and day out, biding her ill-tempered time, pacing away the hours, hoping that someday, someway, she could escape her glass prison and catch him.
Now, had Topaz simply sat in the window, none of what I’m about to tell you might have happened. But Topaz didn’t just sit. Topaz hissed and paced and pawed and clawed, futilely reaching her long hooked nails through the opening in the window.
Sticky, as you might imagine, could feel the hate.
And feeling all that hate gave him a very naughty idea.
One he mistook for an asombroso idea.
One that got him up and running lickety-split into the Sanchezes’ kitchen, where he scraped together a nice little ball of leftovers from the bowl Mrs. Sanchez had used to mix up tuna for Evie’s and Dave’s lunchtime sandwiches.
One that involved fetching the hidden bottle of Moongaze potion and dripping two careful drops of it onto the tuna ball.
One that had Sticky scurrying over to the Espinozas’ flower box with the tuna on a white plastic spoon.
An idea that would, I’m afraid, show him just how potent and dangerous the pilfered potion could be.
Chapter 9
OPENING THE POWER GATES
Topaz went into a rage when she saw Sticky on her flower box. Her long white fur shot straight up, then she swiped and hissed and scratched and (in short) went ballistic.
Until, that is, she caught a whiff of the tuna.
“Atta crazy gata,” Sticky said, coaxing Topaz along. He had the plastic spoon under the window and was jiggling it to get the ferocious feline’s attention. “It’s yummy to the tummy—come on….”
Topaz’s fur slowly descended.
Her nose twitched over the fish.
Her whiskers quivered.
And then, forgetting all about the maddening fat-tailed lizard outside, she quickly devoured the potion-laced fish that was inside.
Sticky watched.
And waited.
But the potion seemed to have absolutely no effect.
“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky grumbled. “It’s a dud.” He frowned. “Or maybe it just doesn’t work on ugly cats.”
Topaz, too, seemed disappointed. After all, the tuna was gone.
Now, a stable cat might have mewed for more.
A stable cat might have remembered who’d brought the tasty treat.
A stable cat might have repaid the gift giver by showing him a little kindness. (Or, at least, aloof indifference.)
But Topaz was not a stable cat.
She was an angry cat.
One whose appetite for meaty morsels had just been whetted and was now focused on the mouthwatering morsel taunting her from just outside her glass prison.
One who, at that moment, clawed through the opening with an angry hiss and, to her surprise, felt the window edge upward.
Now, for all the times Topaz had reached for Sticky, the window had never (believe me, ever) budged. Feeling it move now gave the frustrated feline hope, and after a short disbelieving moment she pushed farther.
To her delight, the window, once again, edged upward.
She really put her shoulder into it now, and the window edged upward some more!
Flashing through Sticky’s mind was one simple thought:
“Uh-oh!”
And before he had even zippy-toed over to the Sanchezes’ flower box, Topaz had strong-armed the window up and was charging after him.
“Ay caramba!” Sticky cried as he scurried under the Sanchezes’ window.
Ay caramba, indeed!
The potion, you see, had not changed Topaz’s appearance (or disposition) in any way, but it had, in fact, given the cat an unfamiliar strength.
Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of incidents in which a mother somehow lifts a car to save the life of her child. Well, let me assure you that these stories are not tall tales or urban legends or (to put it less delicately) lies.
They are actual, factual (and impartially documented) events.
(Incredible, perhaps, but still, actual and factual.)
You see, scientists speculate that within the body (be it human, cat, or lizard), there are inhibitors that prevent you from exerting yourself to your full physiological potential. (In other words, there’s always “superhuman” strength inside your body, but gates at the power source block it.) A crisis (such as a child pinned by a boulder or a car or a runaway Ferris wheel) triggers the gates to open, providing the body with an unfamiliar (and seemingly superhuman) strength.
So! Although the Moongaze potion was slightly sparkly and surprisingly stretchy, it was not some magic concoction or hocus-pocus potion.
Please.
It was a complex cocktail of rare and exotic ingredients (collected by gypsies in a remote region of eastern Romania), and it simply opened the body’s natural power gates, supplying a seemingly superhuman strength.
Unfortunately for Sticky, Topaz immediately realized that she was now more tiger than cat.
More fierceness than fur.
More power than purr.
And she was, as they say, lovin’ it.
“Reeeeeerrrrrr!” she roared as she ripped open the Sanchezes’ window and pounced inside the apartment. “REEEEEERRRRRR!”
“Holy guaca-tacarole!” Sticky cried, turbo-toeing out of the kitchen.
And so the chase began.
Topaz tore through the apartment like a wild-whiskered twister. Out of one room, into another, under furniture, over furniture, through plants, and across the TV she flew, knocking things over left and right. And even when she realized she had lost track of the lizard, Topaz continued tearing the place apart, upturning chairs, ripping through cupboards, tossing aside cushions like a fur-faced tornado.
It was, I assure you, a frightening sight. And although Sticky had escaped the hissing hurricane for a moment, Topaz now spotted him on the family room ceiling.
“RRRRREEEEEEERRRR!” she cried, charging up the wall, leaving scratch marks in her wake. And when she couldn’t reach Sticky that way, she launched herself skyward from furniture backs, clawing and hissing at her target as she sailed through the air.
Try as she might (and she did, in fact, try mightily), she could not reach Sticky. (Although she did, at one point, manage to sink her claws into the ceiling a mere two feet from him and hang there for a solid minute before dropping to the floor.)
And then, all at once, the power gates slammed shut.
Topaz was back to being Topaz—an average, ill-tempered, squooshy-faced cat.
Poor kitty-kitty.
She was, of course, confused.
After mewing pitifully from the floor beneath Sticky for almost an hour, she at last grew weary (and, undoubtedly, thirsty and hungry) and skulked out of the ravaged apartment, hopping flower boxes to return home.
This was a great relief for Sticky. However, before he could scurry back to the kitchen to collect the Moongaze potion, a sound from outside stopped him in his tracks.
“Ay caramba, no!” Sticky gasped. “Not him!”
But it was, in fact, just who Sticky feared.
Chapter 10
A QUICK BACKTRACK
Since Sticky has stopped in his tracks, perhaps this would be a good time for us to do the same. After all, I’m sure you’re wondering what happened to the monkey.
And the Bandito Brothers.
And, for that matter, Damien Black.
Yes, of course you are.
You’re probably also wondering if Damien Black was already trying to launch some deadly, diabolical plan with Dave’s substitute potion.
These are, after all, perfectly legitimate things to be wondering.
So let’s start with the monkey, shall we?
Getting away from the bumbling Bandito Brothers was really quite easy for the rascally rhesus. The forest surrounding Damien’s mansion was dark, and dense, a
nd (without question) dangerous. (Also, once inside, it was difficult to navigate, especially for the directionally impaired.)
Monkeys, however, are right at home in forests, and (despite years in Damien’s captivity) this little monkey was very comfortable scampering and swinging from tree to tree with his satchel of stolen coffee. He simply led the Brothers deeper and deeper into the dark and dangerous forest, screeching, “Eeeeek! Reeeeeeek!” as he scurried from branch to branch above them.
“There he goes!” Pablo cried (over and over again) as they tracked the monkey. “Get him!”
“How am I supposed to get him?” Angelo snapped (over and over again) as he struggled to keep up. “He’s in a tree!”
“Here, monkey-monkey-monkey!” Tito called, holding out an apple he’d had in his pocket.
Now, while Tito (simpleminded as he was) was happy to be tracking a fuzzy-wuzzy monkey through the forest, Angelo and Pablo knew that returning to the mansion without the rhesus (or, at least, the coffee) would be a bad move.
A very bad move.
Damien, you see, was prone to bad moods, and bad moves (such as failing to catch a runaway rhesus) usually resulted in a lot of shouting and routing and accusations of flouting, and (after Damien had worked himself into a spitting, sputtering rage) threats of horrifying torture and death.
And so the Brothers chased the monkey deeper and deeper into the dark and dangerous forest, until at last the monkey grew weary of the little game.
“Eeeeeek! Rrrrreeeek!” he screeched from the branches of a gnarly pine tree. “Eeeeeeeek! Rrrrrrreeeeek!” Then he began pelting the Brothers with sharp, sticky (and extremely sappy) pinecones.
“Ow!” Pablo cried, trying to duck away from the monkey’s deadly aim.
“Yow!” Angelo yelped as he got pummeled.
“Play with me,” Tito laughed, throwing his apple at the rhesus.
“Eeeek?” the monkey said, catching the apple and rifling it back, landing a painful bonk on Tito’s head.
The monkey then scurried off, and after a few minutes of Brotherly fighting (which sounds very much like the fighting of real brothers), Angelo, Pablo, and (even) Tito came to the frightening revelation that they were lost without water or food or (even more urgent) toilet paper in a dark and dense (and obviously dangerous) forest.
The solution to this was, of course, to resume fighting.
Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Damien Black was wasting no time in trying out the potion. “Bwaa-ha-ha!” he laughed (for he knew full well what the potion would do). “Bwaa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
He entered his great room with a whoosh-swoosh of his long black coat and settled into a large throne of a chair that had deep, dusty cushions and great carved gargoyles perched on the backrest. “Ah!” he said with a contented shudder. “Bwaa-ha-ha-haaaaah.”
Damien then spritzed open a bottle of chilled Armenian pomegranate juice (his favorite thirst-quenching beverage) and placed it at the ready on an ornately carved end table.
Then, with great flourish, he stuck out his long (and, for the record, unusually pointy) tongue and dripped onto it one…two…(what the heck) three drops of the potion.
Saliva swirled with the potion in his mouth as Damien tried to analyze it with his taste buds.
It was rather pungent (but with a hint of mint).
Oddly bubbly.
Strangely…sticky.
Yes, he decided with a shiver, it was a bit icky-sticky, but that was to be expected, right?
This was, after all, a powerful potion, not some swishy champagne!
And so he swallowed it and chased the now foamy potion down with a satisfying swig of pomegranate juice.
Then he waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Now, although Dave had poured the Moongaze potion out of the amber bottle, he had not rinsed the bottle. And since the real Moongaze potion was quite viscous (or, if you prefer, ooey-gooey), an ample sample had, in fact, clung to the walls of the amber bottle and, over the course of the thumpity-bumpity bike ride up to Raven Ridge, had mixed in with the soap and the Scope (and the generous glub of glue).
And so, as Damien waited, the watered-down (or, really, soaped-up) potion did work.
A little.
Damien lifted the side table, and although it was considerably easier than it would otherwise have been, it was nothing to bwaa-ha-ha about.
After a few more impatient minutes of waiting for something big to happen, Damien once again stuck out his pointy tongue and dripped onto it one…two…three…four more drops.
Again, he waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And again, the change in him was disappointing.
His glinting black eyes grew angry, and this time he doused his tongue with the potion.
He waited again, then did it again.
And again!
“That miserable charlatan!” he hissed after the potion still failed to give him superhuman strength. “He gypped me!!”
Unfortunately for Damien, the substitute potion was having an effect on his system. Soap, you see, is a surfactant. It works by lowering the interfacial tension between liquids. (In other words, it breaks down the forces that attract molecules to each other. Like, say, someone with awful onion breath joining a conversation. Only at the molecular level. And with liquids.)
Now, the effect of soap on the human intestinal system varies in degree from person to person, but it acts, by and large, as a laxative.
It loosens your stools.
Gurgles your guts.
And (let’s just be frank, shall we?) makes you go poo-poos.
And so it was that Damien Black wound up trading his gargoyled throne in the great room for a porcelain one in the bathroom.
And while his guts gurgled and sputtered and rattled inside him, he began plotting ways to pay back that swindling gypsy.
He wouldn’t take this sitting down! (Although he was, at the moment, doing just that.)
He would get his revenge!
Somehow, he would!
Bwaa-ha-(gurgle-gurgle)-ha!
Chapter 11
SUCKEROOED
There was nothing swift or sharp about Damien’s revenge.
He was, after all, hampered by sudden bouts with his bowels that demanded frequent (and frantic) trips to the loo.
Ah, but skip-to-my-loo’ing aside, Damien was even more hampered by superstition.
You see, Damien Black was afraid of gypsies.
(He wasn’t afraid of much, but gypsies? Oh my.)
They gave him the heebie-jeebies.
The snaky-spined creepies.
The not-so-nilly willies.
(This, for the record, was a direct result of having once been on gem safari in Bulgaria, where he’d planned to do a diabolical double cross and steal the legendary Romany ruby but had, instead, been cursed and conned and run out of town by gypsies.)
Yes, the simple truth is, a fear of gypsies was what had prevented him from going down to Moongaze Court to pick up the potion himself. A fear of gypsies was what had caused him to spend so much time on his custom-built funkydoodle phone, pinching an inordinate amount of broadband as he tracked down a courier service to pick up the package for him.
Now, by “pinching,” I do not mean that he squeezed it between his long, pointy fingers.
Oh no.
By “pinching,” I mean that Damien did not pay for his phone service.
He had simply run lines from his house to the nearest phone-company box and cleverly (and quite surreptitiously) wired his way into the system. He did not piggyback onto someone else’s service either. Instead, he wired directly into the phone cable trunk, creating a line on which he could call out but (as there was no actual number) no one could call in—something that suited Damien just fine.
(A word of caution: Should you ever check the caller ID on your ringing phone and discover that the display shows nothing at all, beware. It could w
ell be Damien Black on his funkydoodle phone, calling with a list of diabolical demands.)
And what, exactly, is a funkydoodle phone?
It is, in short, a typical Damien Black contraption. Rather than spend twenty bucks on a perfectly functional drugstore model (because it would clash with the mansion’s dark and foreboding décor), Damien had constructed his own. The handset was an interlocking ancient ivory ear horn and taxidermied eagle’s claw (which held a cheesy speaker in place). The base had a rotary dial that was made out of ten fossilized shark vertebrae. (The phone also had a duplex coil and a frequency generator for functionality, but no matter—it was, without doubt, one funkydoodle phone.)
So you see, Damien Black had gone to great lengths to avoid Moongaze Court. His one trip there to arrange for the potion had left him battered and weak, and had given him nightmares for weeks. (I’m sure you’ll agree that being cornered and rammed up a tree by a six-horned goat would give anyone baaaaad dreams.)
But there was also the curse that he was sure he’d heard a little gypsy girl mutter as he’d fled the nightmarish maze. It played again and again in his head:
Ravens and witches and demons of yore,
Banish this heathen from our door!
Lest he should enter our gates o’ernight,
Toss him and turn him through wick’s dying light!
This, Damien believed, was the real reason he couldn’t sleep.
He’d been cursed.
Again.
The Bulgarian curse still haunted him, and now this?
He would not, could not, return to Moongaze Maze.
And yet…what about his revenge?
He had a score to settle!
A wrong to right!
He’d been duped!
Swindled!
Suckerooed!
(And of all the deceitful, duplicitous, double-dealing things someone could do to him, suckerooing was by far the worst.)
And so (between great gurgling bouts in the bathroom) he consulted large, scrolled maps of the city, more large, scrolled maps of the underlying sewer system, and dusty, crumbling texts from the massive oak bookcases in his great room.
His dark, diabolical mind stewed and brewed and chewed until at last it produced a wickedly delicious plan.