The No-Good Nine

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  “AMANUENSIS!” Santa said. “Tell her it won’t work!”

  Amanuensis looked to Santa, then looked to Mummy, dressed as Santa. He shrugged. “She wears the suit.”

  He turned to Mummy.

  “So, what do you want me to do, Santa?”

  44. MUMMY-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP

  Before we end this episode, I have to tell you something—something shocking—that happened before we left Santa’s house.

  Which, to be accurate, had just become Mummy’s house. But never mind that.

  Mummy told Amanuensis to go lock us up. Us being not just the No-Good Nine, but Santa and the Truant Officer, too.

  The Vainglorious didn’t have to come, but he finally saw Mummy for who she really was.

  “You can’t do this to my friends, Mummy!” he said. “If you’re putting them in jail, then you have to put me in jail, too!”

  “Gladly!” Mummy said, and shoved him toward the rest of us.

  The Vainglorious turned out to be a lot more loyal than any of us could’ve imagined. But still not so smart.

  That wasn’t the shocking part, though.

  The shocking part was the Thief.

  “What about me?” she said.

  “What about you?” Mummy said. “You should be thankful I even let you live!”

  “The No-Good Nine may be his friends, but they’re not mine. And they never were,” the Thief said. “I want to stay with you.”

  Now, I don’t mind saying that I was not only shocked, but more than a little hurt. Not friends? Never were? After all we’d been through together? And she wanted to stay with Mummy? After all she’d been through with her?

  “Do you think I forgot about the stunt you pulled?” Mummy said, thumping a finger into the Thief’s chest “Stealing my truck was bad enough. But the silver!”

  “The Brat’s silver?” the Know-It-All said to Mummy. “B-b-b-but she left it for you!”

  Mummy’s face went from furious to puzzled to pleased as she realized something.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “She did not tell you she took the silver, did she? Which means she did not give it back to you!”

  “What,” Goody-Two-Shoes said, “what do you mean?”

  “She means that before I rescued all of you,” the Thief said, “I took the Brat’s chest of silver and put it in a secret hiding place.”

  “I knew it!” the Brat said, his face gone blood red and his mouth spitting. “I knew I was right about you! You are nothing but a dirty rotten thief!”

  “What did you expect?” she said. “My name is the Thief.”

  She turned back to Mummy.

  “If you were me, you would’ve done the same thing.”

  Mummy shrugged. “True.”

  “Listen, if I tell you where I hid the silver, are we square?” the Thief said. “Will you let me back in the family?”

  Mummy smiled. And then put an arm around the Thief.

  “Why of course I will, my dear, dear daughter!”

  And that was it—we wuz betrayed.

  By one of our own!

  And in case you’re thinking things couldn’t get any worse, let me tell you:

  They did.

  There’s only one episode left in our tale. You don’t want to miss it—it’s a DOOZY.

  Episode Seven:

  HERE COMES MUMMY CLAUS

  45. THE NINETY-NINE NIGHTS OF THE NO-GOOD NINE

  With the tip of my spearhead, I made another notch on the wall above where I slept. It was so dark, it was hard to make the marks out, so I had to feel at them with my fingers to count—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9—making tonight 10. So I slashed a line through all the notches, making it the tenth time I had marked a set, which meant it was

  ONE HUNDRED DAYS.

  We had been stuck in here for ONE HUNDRED DAYS!

  “No, we haven’t!” the Know-It-All said. “You c-c-c-counted today two times!”

  “Did not!” I said. “I made a mark for tonight, and then I counted them, and then I . . . oooh, right.”

  Geez, I really did stink at math.

  Let’s try that again.

  We had been stuck here for NINETY-NINE DAYS!

  That’s still a lot.

  If marking off the days on a wall sounds like the kind of thing you do in prison, it’s because we were in prison.

  Elf prison.

  “Will you stop whining?” the Cruel said. “It’s not even a prison! It’s a storeroom. And it’s a lot nicer than the orphanage.”

  How bad was that orphanage?

  And why did everyone have to keep correcting me?

  “I don’t wanna be here anymore,” the Hooligan said, pawing at his lucky rabbit’s foot. His eyes were red. “I hate this place.”

  “What are you so upset about?” the Brat said. “You were going to wind up in prison anyway. Just like your brother.”

  The Hooligan’s face switched from broken-up to wanting to break something, and he shoved the Brat in the chest. “What did you say, bow tie boy?”

  “I said—”

  “Will you all please SHUT UP!” the Rude shouted. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.” He rolled over in his spot on the floor. “And people say I’m rude!”

  “You better all be quiet!” came a squeaky voice from outside the door. It was Hendrick, the night guard elf. “You don’t want Rooster Jack coming by again!”

  “Aw that chump don’t bother me,” the Hooligan said.

  “Well, you bother me,” the Cruel said.

  In case you can’t tell, we were getting on each others’ nerves. That’s what happens when you’re forced into hard labor all day and sent to sleep with no dinner in a dismal, near-windowless prison, or storeroom, or whatever you wanted to call it.

  As for the hard labor part, we were mostly hauling stuff to the factory. And boy oh boy, what a factory.

  A lot had happened in the last hundred days.

  “N-n-ninety-nine days.”

  Whatever. The point is, Mummy had managed to utterly transform Isle X in the last three months, thanks to her new helpers. You can’t believe how these elves could build! It wasn’t just toys they could make—they could lay a brick wall, erect steel girders, and slap on a roof faster than my momma could cook Sunday dinner.

  Then there was the giant distillery with the great big vats they constructed, not to mention an entirely new assembly line.

  This assembly line wasn’t for toys, however. It was for bottling.

  Huge shiploads of sugar and molasses arrived at Isle X to be boiled, fermented, turned into alcohol, and stored in barrels. From them, each bottle had to be filled, corked, and a label stuck on it. The labels read:

  MUMMY’S X-TRA YUMMY

  ELF-MADE RUMMY

  While the elves did the important work, we Ninesters did the grunt work, taking the booze and putting it into the warehouse, loading the booze from the warehouse onto the sleigh, and unloading the shipments so the elves could make more booze. Oh, and that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was having to shovel coal into the furnaces and stoking the fires.

  The only job I didn’t hate was unloading the ship, because that was when I got to talk to Capt. Smudge. I couldn’t help but like the guy, despite what he had done. Or was doing.

  “How can you help Mummy?” I said to him. “Don’t you know she’s the bad guy?”

  His one-word answer:

  “Money.”

  That seemed to be all most adults ever cared about—and the reason the world was such a disaster—but at least it was a reason I could understand. The elves, on the other hand, were helping Mummy for the dumbest reason ever—the suit!

  It was like that big red suit hypnotized them. How could anyone take Mummy seriously wearing that stupid thing? Especial
ly with the beard. But even Lefty followed her every order.

  Us Naughty Listers, on other hand, broke stuff and messed up whenever we could. But as this kind of sabotage would only land us in solitary confinement (which was in—yuck—the old outhouse), we pretty much had begun to toe the line, too. Even the Hooligan, who just loved to break stuff.

  At the end of every night, we wound up like this—all of us arguing and equally angry.

  Actually, that last part’s not true. One person in the lockup was angrier than the rest of us.

  The elf formerly known as Santa Claus.

  All his blame and anger, he took out on us. Like it was because of us that Mummy had come to Isle X!

  “Actually, it was because of us that Mummy came to Isle X,” Goody-Two-Shoes said.

  Oh, right.

  “Yes, it WAS. And I bet you children are very satisfied with yourselves now,” ex-Santa grumbled. “Since all you Naughty Listers ever wanted to do in the first place was RUIN Christmas!”

  “We never meant to ruin nuttin’!” the Hooligan said. “We just wanted a little Christmas for ourselves.”

  “Yeah,” the Rude said. “You should blame yourself! If you treated the worker elves better, maybe they wouldn’t’ve all been so quick to work for Mummy.”

  “You didn’t even pay them in real money,” the Cruel said. “Santa tokens? You were cheating them!”

  “And your factory wouldn’t have even gotten ruined if you had a sprinkler system and a proper fire department!” the Brat said.

  “Now, now, don’t blame Mr. Santa,” the Truant Officer said, just as the elf was rising to defend himself. “It is my fault. I am a trained secret agent, after all. I will never forgive myself for having been taken in by Mrs. Mummy like that.”

  “It’s O.K.,” I said. “We all got snookered by her.” I gave him a pat on the back.

  Sometimes even your archenemy needs a little reassuring.

  “Well, I say—”

  Just as the Vainglorious was about to say something sure to make no sense, he was cut off.

  “You say nothing. Lights out.”

  It was the Thief.

  She was standing in the doorway, right next to Rooster Jack, with Hendrick behind them.

  “Well, if it’s not the traitor, come to wish us nighty-night,” the Cruel said, glowering.

  The Thief gave no response—not to any of us. Rooster Jack said something to her in French, and they left. The Thief slammed the heavy wood door shut behind them

  SLAM!

  and slid the iron bolt into the jamb

  ERRRR!

  locking us in.

  I could only shake my head.

  The Thief—she was the one who really snookered us.

  46. AND ON THE HUNDREDTH DAY

  —BZZT!—Wake up, elves! Wake up, my children! This is your Mummy Claus speaking. Your Mummy ’oo loves you! Your Mummy ’oo only wants the best for you! Now, get OUT of your bunks and get to WORK! My rum doesn’t make itself!!—BZZT!—

  —BZZT!—That means you too, No-Good Nine!!!—BZZT!—

  This was what we woke up to every morning. Lovely, ain’t it?

  Not that it woke all of us up. Some of my fellow Ninesters were still asleep when I heard the ERRRR! of the bolt getting thrown back. It was, as usual, Rooster Jack and the Thief.

  “Sonnez les matines!” Rooster Jack said, and gave a boot to the snoring Rude.

  “Hey!” the Rude said, waking.

  Rooster Jack squatted down next to him and sniffed, then held his nose and stuck out his tongue.

  “Bleh!”

  “You like that? Here, have some more,” the Rude said, flapping his arm like a wing and fanning the smell toward Rooster.

  “You all better get going,” the Thief said. “There’s a new shipment coming in today.”

  Rooster Jack went to kick the Rude again. “All right, all right, ya goon! I’m gettin’ up.”

  I filed out behind the Cruel, who leaned in and gave a shoulder shove to the Thief as she passed her in the doorway.

  “Sorry,” the Cruel said as unapologetically as possible.

  The Cruel was insulting the Thief at every opportunity. Even more than she normally would have.

  The Thief, however, never responded. Which was weird—it wasn’t like the Thief to take nothing from nobody. But as soon as she got around Mummy and the Brothers Jack, she acted totally different. Maybe it was a family thing, but still it made me wonder. Why did she really turn against us?

  The Brat wondered no such thing. I think he was actually glad the Thief wound up being a traitor, since it meant he had been right about her all along.

  (Have you ever noticed how much people like being right?)

  As for her criminal family, it turned out that Black Jack and Rooster Jack were orphans like her—or runaways, anyways—and had had the same rotten luck to wind up with Mummy. She’d even named them, too.

  Since the ship hadn’t arrived yet, I got put on bottle duty. The elf at the end of the assembly line filled up the cases, which it was my job to haul to the storeroom. What I couldn’t get was why these elves just did what they were told. It wasn’t like they were whistling while they worked. They were all miserable! They were only happy on market day, but even then they could hardly buy anything because they got paid peanuts. Worse than peanuts—Santa tokens! It was an outrage. Hadn’t they ever heard of going on strike?

  I was glad when I heard the horn of Capt. Smudge’s ship wailing off in the distance and the loudspeaker crackling for us to go to the docks. While we waited for the ship to pull in, Mummy and the Brothers Jack huddled off to one side.

  “S-s-something’s different,” the Know-It-All said.

  “What’s different?” the Brat said. “We do the same stupid work every day. Look—I have a callus! No member of my family has ever had a callus!”

  “Not that,” the Know-It-All said. “The w-w-whispering. They never w-w-whisper.”

  “Who cares?” the Rude said. “It’s not like we can understand them anyway.”

  Which—when you think about it—only made the whispering more strange.

  But that wound up not being the only different thing. Normally, Capt. Smudge brought molasses and other raw material for making Mummy’s booze. But today we were unloading crates—heavy crates—and they were all marked

  U.S. ARMY SURPLUS

  Mummy also took us into a place to unload them where none of us had ever been before.

  The vault.

  “Wow, lookit all this loot!” The Rude whistled. The room was packed with money, and more. “Hey, Bratty-boy—ain’t that your silver?”

  It was. The Brat’s chest sat right in the middle of the vault, its top open to reveal the gleaming stacks of silver coins sitting inside.

  The Brat’s blood started rushing up. Even his eyes went red this time.

  The Rude was so busy gawking that he bumped into the Vainglorious, who dropped his crate. It smashed open. And there, packed in sawdust, were six machine guns.

  We were carrying weapons!

  “Oopsie,” the Hooligan said, letting his crate drop to the ground. It popped apart, and out bounced sticks of dynamite.

  “Be careful, you idiots!” Mummy said. “You could blow us all up!”

  “What does she n-n-need all this for?” the Know-It-All whispered to me on the way out.

  I shrugged.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  * * *

  • • •

  The best part of every day was lunch. “Best” because it was our one break from work. Definitely not because of the food, even though it was our only meal of the day.

  The problem was that the food was always Mummy’s rock-hard horrible biscuits. We gnawed on them while she and her brood ate great big slop
py sandwiches and chips. It was even worse than with Lumiuk’s father.

  Mummy and the two Jacks were off at their own table while the Thief ate at ours. Whether this was to punish us or her, I’m not sure.

  The Thief stared down at her food as she ate, while the Cruel sneered at her.

  “You,” the Cruel said. “You’re too ashamed to even look at us. I had it right when I decked you!”

  It was actually pretty tame insulting by the Cruel’s standards, and—like I said—the Thief never said anything back.

  Until now.

  The Thief raised her eyes to meet the Cruel’s and leaned across the table.

  “You think you’re so tough? So cruel?” the Thief said, giving a sneer of her own. “Your problem is that you’re not cruel enough.”

  She stood and looked to each of us in turn.

  “It’s the problem with all of you!” she said. “The No-Good Nine. Hah! The Not-So-No-Good Nine is more like it. If any of you knew what it took to survive, you would know that the only person you can trust is yourself.”

  “That is not true!” the Vainglorious said. “We’re a team! One for nine, and nine for one!”

  “Oh, please!” the Thief and the Cruel said in unison.

  * * *

  • • •

  The last task of the day was loading up one of the sleighs with booze.

  The sun was already down and there was a crisp chill in the air. Then it started snowing.

  In May.

  We had to get out of here.

  The deliveries had started weeks ago, as soon as the bottles began coming off the assembly line. Mummy would fly to her old buyers, land on their roofs, and deliver the rum down their chimneys. At first, she delivered only a few cases, but every night it was more.

  While Rooster stayed to keep an eye on Isle X, Black Jack drove the sleigh, a skill he had learned from Driver Elf.

  Not that he had learned too good. It seemed like Black Jack’s only technique was to beat the reindeer with a whip.