The No-Good Nine

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  Instead of taking a diagonal path across the snowy interior like we had, she headed straight to the coast and then turned north. A couple of times Mummy thought she had caught our trail, only to find out the sled tracks were from Inuit hunters.

  Meanwhile, my nemesis kept at his journal.

  I will be happy for one thing when this is over: never again having to listen to this child!

  Glorious does nothing but complain about how cold he is all the time. I tell him that this is summer compared to Siberia, but he is just another weak American child.

  Mummy and her two sons, on the other hand, are not weak at all. They know how to mush the dogs, although I can’t say they treat them well.

  We have been traveling north along the coast for days when Mummy suddenly stops the sled. I ask her why, and she points to the dogs sniffing. She releases them from the harness and they race to a spot near the sea.

  When we get there, the snow is red from blood. Lying on the ice is the carcass of some sort of large animal.

  Mrs. Mummy goes to the body and sticks her hand inside its rib cage.

  “It’s still warm,” she says.

  Uh-oh.

  PART TWO

  Adventures in Santaland

  Have you ever seen our first film, The No-Good Nine Meets Zorro? If you did, I’m sorry, and no you can’t have your money back.

  But do you remember the part where the bad guys figure out Zorro’s secret identity and they go to his hacienda and discover us hiding in the stables and there’s this great big shoot-out? (Yeah, I know it looked fake, but it’s a movie!)

  Anyway, it was kind of like that when the Truant Officer, the Vainglorious, Mummy, and the two Jacks arrived at Black Tickle. Only with a lot more snow.

  They had been mushing full-speed ever since they found the walrus carcass, and knocked on the lighthouse door just a day after we arrived.

  Mr. and Mrs. Keeper, god bless ’em, told them that they hadn’t seen any kids, and shut the door right in their noses.

  I wish I could’ve seen the look on my nemesis’s face! He must’ve been totally crushed.

  Mummy, unfortunately, knew they were lying. In fact, she was sure we were there.

  I ask why she is so positive, and Mrs. Mummy points to footprints in the snow. They are of different shapes and sizes, and they are fresh.

  A clue I should not have missed!

  We explore the area surrounding the lighthouse, which sits on a cliff overlooking the sea. Noises are coming from an outbuilding. Someone—or some children!—are inside.

  Quietly we approach the building. After a silent count of three, I thrust open the door to discover . . .

  DOGS!

  These must be the sled dogs of the American children. The No-Good Nine were here—and maybe still are!

  A further search of the premises, however, turns up no evidence of them.

  Until, that is, we find a message painted on the cliff overlooking the dock.

  WE KAME, WE SAW,

  WE KROSST THE LINE.

  NOW IT’S AU REVOIR

  TO THE NO-GOOD NINE!

  I had no idea which of us was writing the graffiti, but it sure was a swell goodbye note.

  We might’ve left, but Mummy was determined to find out where we had gone.

  As to how she would get this bit of information, she told my archenemy that she would go have a talk with Mrs. Keeper.

  “Mother to mother.”

  When she confronted her, Mrs. Keeper refused to say where we had gone. Until Mummy did something really wicked.

  Do you want to know how bad—how truly evil—Mummy was?

  She threatened to shoot the dogs.

  All of them!

  Miraculously, Mrs. Mummy’s mother-to-mother appeal worked.

  MUMMY: “I just begged ’er to ’ave mercy on a poor parent. I threw myself on my knees in tears and kind Mrs. Keeper took pity on me and told me where the children ’ad gone.”

  As it turns out, the No-Good Nine left on a mail boat, bound for a mysterious place called Isle X.

  Before we get to what we were doing on that ship, however, let’s go back to the night before, when me and Goody-Two-Shoes were sitting on the front step of the lighthouse. Because I was just dying to know: What wasn’t Mrs. Keeper being honest about?

  EPISODE FIVE:

  ISLE X

  30. THE GREAT AND AMAZING ADVENTURE

  When she said there was more to the story, Mrs. Keeper wasn’t kidding.

  (Of course, if there hadn’t been more to the story, this would’ve been an awfully short book.)

  “I shouldn’t be tellin’ ye this,” Mrs. Keeper said. “I really shouldn’t!”

  But she did.

  “Santy don’t live at the North Pole—that’s just a way of throwin’ ye outsider folk off,” Mrs. Keeper said. “All the people of the north know he and his worker elves are situated on an island up in Baffin Bay—an island that don’t appear on any map.” She leaned in and whispered its name:

  “Isle X.”

  Isle X. What a swell name!

  “Can you really get there by magic narwhal?” Goody-Two-Shoes asked.

  “Ye can get there, but it don’t have nudd’n’ to do with narwhals,” Mrs. Keeper said. “There’s a boat.”

  The boat, it wound up, was a steamer that ran a course up and down the coast of Labrador, bringing supplies and mail to the lighthouses, including Black Tickle.

  “And when it’s done, it makes one final, secret stop.”

  Mrs. Keeper said that she might be able to convince the captain of the boat to take us to the island. “But that don’t mean ye should want to go. Things are not the same up at the workshop as when I was your age. Ye hear stories . . .”

  “What stories?” we asked, but she just shook her head with a pucker of her pickled lips and wouldn’t tell us any more.

  The biggest stroke of luck was that the supply ship was due the very next morning. We didn’t know how big a stroke of luck—we missed Mummy and the others by just a couple of hours.

  The saddest thing was saying goodbye to the dogs. I’d miss Mayhem and Monster, Fluffy and Buster—all of them.

  Goody-Two-Shoes cried. Again.

  Captain Smudge wound up being a crusty old sailor who was not thrilled to take eight kids aboard his steamer. Still, he agreed to do it as a favor to Mrs. Keeper.

  Even once we were on his ship, though, he kept trying to talk us out of going to Isle X.

  “You’ll be disappointed,” he said. But he wouldn’t ever explain why.

  * * *

  • • •

  Now is the time to tell you about all the great and amazing adventures we had aboard the Sinbad. How pirates attacked the ship and we only escaped by racing through a pod of whales, and about the iceberg that almost smashed into us. In the years since these events happened, I have told these tales to many such as yourself. But I was always lying.

  To be honest—which I do hate being—the whole trip was pretty boring. Again! A surprising amount of adventuring is boring. That’s why you have to make so much stuff up.

  The secret to making up stuff is to give your stories a hint of truth. Capt. Smudge—salty dog that he was—told us all kinds of tales of his life on the high seas, including that one about the pirates and the pod of whales. And we did see a whale.

  (Well, I think we saw a whale. It was dark. And it was far away.)

  And not only had his ship almost been sunk by icebergs, but the Sinbad had been the first boat on the scene when the Titanic went down, and Capt. Smudge had personally rescued hundreds of passengers!

  It was only when he told us about the time a giant squid swiped him off the deck of the Sinbad and he only escaped its clutches because a German U-boat torpedoed the monster that it occurred to me that maybe�
�just maybe—the captain wasn’t being entirely truthful himself.

  Which made me like him even more.

  Because I did like him, and he liked us. Until.

  Until he saw the graffiti on the deck of the Sinbad.

  IF YOU READ THIS NOTE,

  DON’T FRET OR FEAR.

  IT ONLY MEANS

  THE NO-GOOD 9 WUZ HERE!

  His face went all twitchy, and I thought his pipe was going to blow out of his mouth.

  “I think it looks kinda nice,” I said.

  Wrong thing to say.

  Capt. Smudge was so furious, he threatened to leave all of us on an ice floe. “And I will if you don’t make that disappear!”

  As we scrubbed off the paint, we tried to figure out who kept doing the graffiti.

  “O.K., I admit it,” I said. “It was me.”

  But no one believed me. In fact, my copping to it just made them all sure I hadn’t done it.

  The Rude seemed like the obvious culprit, but he swore it wasn’t him, and he was probably the most honest of us all.

  The other natural suspect was the Hooligan, because of the way WUZ was spelled.

  “But you think he knows how to spell means?” the Cruel said.

  “Oh, that’s what that word is!” the Hooligan said.

  So if not them, who was doing it?

  We didn’t have time to figure it out, however, because from the fore of the ship we heard

  “Island ho!”

  So yes, I lied in the title. This chapter was not a great and amazing adventure. The great and amazing adventure was about to begin.

  31. ARRIVAL ON ISLE X

  “Island ho!” the first mate yelled again. But where the ho was the island?

  All I could see was a black cloud on the horizon.

  “That’s it,” Capt. Smudge said. “Inside the black cloud.”

  Which wasn’t a cloud. It was smog, coming out of the giant smokestacks that rose up all across the island. Isle X looked just like

  “Home,” the Hooligan said. “It looks like Pittsburgh.”

  “We came all this way just to go to another Pittsburgh?” the Rude said.

  “Except they don’t make steel here,” the Brat said. “They make toys. Now let’s get to hiding.”

  This was our plan: to hide inside the boxes and sacks of supplies bound for Isle X. After getting off-loaded and stored in the warehouse where Capt. Smudge told us the cargo went, we would sneak out and find Santa’s workshop. Then we would play with the toys, tell off Santa, and get back on board the Sinbad the next time it came. In a month.

  Reading it now, it sounds like another horrible plan. But when we were talking about it on the ship, it sounded swell.

  A deafening steam whistle sounded, and we hurried to get into our hiding places. I wanted to get inside the crate marked pillows, but the Rude beat me to it, so I wound up hiding in a sack of coffee instead.

  The biggest problem—other than the smell of the beans—was that the moment after I got picked up, I got dropped.

  “OOF, this one is heavy!” I heard someone—some elf?—say.

  Inside the sack, I had to bite my lip not to yell

  OUCH!

  Then, two people—more elves?—picked up the burlap sack, and it was all I could do not to bust out laughing because I was getting grabbed by the ribs and knees and armpits and all those little elf hands tickled like heck.

  Then I got pitched through the air, which—for a second—felt great, like I was flying!

  And then

  SLAM!

  I landed in a mountain of other coffee sacks.

  Now it was all I could do not to moan, but the sound of other voices and stuff getting moved around kept me scared enough that I was able to stay quiet, and then there was quiet, until I head a voice say

  “One for nine?”

  And we all said

  “Nine for one!”

  and got out of our hiding places.

  The Hooligan was white as a ghost.

  The barrel of flour was probably not the best place to hide.

  We found ourselves standing in the middle of a giant, dark warehouse. It was set up like a kind of store, with each product laid out on shelves or the floor and marked with a number. Or was it a price?

  As we tried to figure out exactly what kind of place this was, a sudden BOOMING voice exploded into the room! I would’ve jumped out of my skin if it wasn’t so well connected to my body.

  —BZZT!—Fellow elves! The supply ship has arrived! Please come to the market at eighteen hundred hours. Santa tokens and only Santa tokens are redeemable. Elves more than twenty tokens in debt will be allowed no credit!—BZZT!—

  It was coming from a loudspeaker attached to the ceiling, and we realized that we were in the market—and it was about to get invaded by all of Santa’s elves. We had to make like a tree and leave!

  Opening the back door carefully, we snuck out of the gloomy warehouse. The world outside, however, was even more gloomy than the one inside.

  A thick fog of coal smoke swallowed us up, and I had to hold back a cough. Streetlamps were blurry through the haze, and it was tough to see anything but shapes. It was spooky! Afraid of getting cut off from the group, I grabbed onto the shirt of the Ninester in front of me.

  “If you want to keep your hands, I suggest you get them off of me!”

  Oops—the shirt I grabbed should not have been the Cruel’s.

  Even if you could see where you were going, it would’ve been easy to get lost. The place was a maze of tall brick walls, all of the buildings identical.

  Eventually, we came out into an open square.

  “This looks nothin’ like you told us it would,” the Rude said to the Know-It-All. “Where are the gingerbread houses? Where’s the winter wonderland?”

  “Forget the stupid gingerbread houses,” the Brat said. “Where are the toys?”

  “Uh, I think maybe they’re in there,” the Hooligan said. He was pointing to a red neon sign across the smoggy plaza that read

  TOY FACTORY

  with a large blinking arrow pointing down.

  32. THE TOY FACTORY

  It all sounds too easy, but there was one problem. The Toy Factory was teeming with worker elves, which we could see through the windows.

  But then it wasn’t a problem, because a steam whistle

  BLEW

  our eardrums apart and out of the factory poured a flood of elves!

  They weren’t dressed like you’d expect an elf to dress, with pointy shoes and bright red-and-green hats and stuff. Instead, they had on plain blue overalls, like a factory worker anywhere would wear.

  If we could see them, they could see us. But not a one of them turned in our direction. They all just wanted to get to that market.

  “I can’t wait to get some oranges!” one said.

  “And the newest issue of Black Mask!” another said.

  Once the last elf left, we just had to figure out how to break in.

  The Hooligan wanted to smash a window, but the sound might blow our cover. The Thief spotted an open window, but it was high off the ground. While the Brat and the Cruel argued over the best way to climb up to it, Goody-Two-Shoes tried the front door.

  It was unlocked.

  “I guess there ain’t much crime in Santaland,” the Rude said.

  “Well, there’s about to be!” the Thief said.

  Inside, the factory was huge.

  At the entrance was a wall of punch cards beside a time clock and a changing area with work smocks and gloves. Stretching out beyond was a factory floor like you see in the newsreels, with assembly lines and massive steam-powered machines.

  But where were the toys?

  The only ones we could find were lying on the wor
kbenches half-made.

  “This can’t be it,” the Rude said. “Can it?”

  As we tried to figure out what to do next, we heard “Humans!”

  We weren’t alone!

  “Human children!”

  Where was the voice coming from?

  “What are you doing here?”

  However scared we might’ve been, this quivering mystery person sounded downright terrified.

  “It’s comin’ from under there,” the Rude said, pointing below a worktable.

  A pair of very frightened elf eyes peered out from the shadows below.

  “You can’t be here!” the half-hidden elf said. “Oh no, oh dear!”

  “Who are you?” Goody asked, bending down to talk to him.

  “Who am I? Who am I?” the elf said. “Who are you, is the question!”

  Goody went to answer, but he cut her off.

  “I’m an elf, is who I am. I belong here! I make toys!”

  “But why are you still h-h-here?” the Know-It-All said. “All the other elves left for the m-m-market.”

  “And why are you under that workbench?” the Thief said.

  Embarrassed, the elf came out.

  “Even if I went to the market, I couldn’t buy anything,” he said. “I haven’t been paid in weeks because I’m always behind on my work. That’s why I’m here—to finish these toy airplanes. But look at them all!” He held out his hands to his workbench, full of little airplane parts. “It drives me crazy, trying to put these things together. There are always parts left over and parts I can’t find. That’s why they call me Lefty—because I’m so terrible at assembling this stuff, it’s like I have two left hands.”

  “I’m left-handed, too,” I said.

  “But I’m not!” he said.

  And neither was I.

  “I didn’t know an elf could be terrible at toy making,” the Rude said.

  “Who said that?” Lefty said, offended. “I was excellent at toy making back when we made them by hand. Why, I could carve a wooden toy in no time at all. It’s this factory toy making that I’m no good at!”