Although this year was fruitful for evil, not
all was sweet success for the society, because its members are always divided
and the chasm between the two main factions is wider every day.
On one side of the dungeon sat the traditional
villains. They know that goodness exists and their purpose in life is to put an
end to it. These members of the society call themselves The Consecrated, because they consider their devotion to evil a
sort of priesthood.They not only behave badly. They dress badly, doing their
very worst to look dreadful, and they even smell bad too.
At odds with the traditional bad guys is the
other faction, whose followers do not believe in the existence of good. They
hold that only evil exists and that it is something so natural that there is no
reason to either hide or exhibit it. Therefore, they do not dress the role.
They prefer to wear the latest, coolest fashions. The traditional villains call
their opposition The Shameless Ones.
These last call the others The Dorks With
a Goon Complex. It goes without saying they hate each others’ guts.
Because it is rather lax and less demanding,
the number of those who defend the second tendency increases daily. And to
avoid becoming a minority when it is time to vote and make decisions, the
traditional bad guys have had to visit the unemployment offices to hire petty
delinquents whom they have infiltrated in their society with a view to gaining
votes.
One such very, very petty delinquent was
Knick-knack Nimbus di Lembo, the anti-hero of this year’s Christmas story.
Nimbus did not have a very good opinion of himself. He thought that in these
times one had to be a bit of an idiot to be a thief and unemployed at the same
time. He had often been accused of being lazy and wary of work by greater
rascals. But that was not his problem, as we shall later see.
The society’s assembly room is even more
uninviting than the castle’s dungeons. It is not easy to find seats as hard and
as dirty as those that have been nailed to the ground there, so the members
will not throw them at each other. Fleas and lice and ticks move all over
them.The room is illuminated only by chochinobakes, Japanese lanterns inhabited
by ghosts that leap at your face when you light them, trying to give you the
worst fright they can. The modern faction was much disgusted with the state the
room was in, and more than one of the Shameless Ones would have brought an
interior decorator to the castle to modernize the place, but the Goon Dorks
would not allow it.
To enter the castle one had to be cloaked,
hooded and masked, covered from head to toe. This was so that there would be no
quarrels among the members within the castle, for if one member recognized
another he had a grievance against it was sure to be a difficult matter for the
first not jump at the second’s throat. Members of each of the two factions
however were recognizable in that the Goon Dorks were wrapped in black and the
Shameless Ones in yellow.
Little Knick-knack Nimbus arrived a little late
and slipped into the assembly while the Lord of the Shameless Ones was giving a
speech in which he analyzed the grade of achievement of the society’s goals.
“Blah, blah,” he went. “We are effectively
turning the planet into a desert. Despite the existence of protected areas, in
short time we will have sent most of those bumpkins who insist on caterwauling
pastorally in the green to the place where they belong in this millennium,
which is their local city dump.We shall not rest until we see them hopping and
skipping through tons of garbage trying to find something to eat.We once more
congratulate all those who have again this year contributed to making allergy
to pollen pandemic.We hope this leads to the total disapperance of vegetation
any place held to be habitable.
As for education, once again we find ourselves
acclaiming the Wizard Freston for his zeal in making books disappear.We hope
his plan to charge for lending library books prospers. We are also aware that
he has quite a flair for making intellectuals look like whackos. But now he not
only makes them look like ridiculous lunatics.He has achieved far more and
thanks to him, in the minds of most ignorant citizens, the image of a man
quietly reading a book by himself is immediately associated to that of a
potential mass murderer. You only have to listen to how the news always insists
on the above average intelligence of heartless perpetrators of crime, blah,
blah, blah...”
The Lord of the Shameless Ones raved on for a
while longer on many a topic, ignoring how the audience was calling out for him
to abbreviate. Finally he got to what
was to be the end of his speech.
“Last but not least, I have to take off my hat
– of course, I’m not wearing it, but I would if I were – yes, I have to take my
hat off and ask for a huge ovation for the crook who swiped the blank check
signed by the Magi. Whoever you are, you have given us a lesson in evildoing.”
Ah, then
the ovation was huge! Even the nailed down seats shook and creaked and the
Japanese ghosts all jumped out of their lanterns and flew about the room adding
their booing to the enormous din. Little Nimbus began to tremble. He
tranquilized himself recalling that there would be no voting that night and he
would not be missed if he slipped out of the meeting as surreptitiously as he
had entered it. He reminded himself that someone was waiting for him at home
and that decided him to leave, which is what he did.
Nimbus had a gift for silence and could move so
slowly his movements were almost unperceptible. Soon he was in the underground
passageway through which he had entered the castle. It was lined with lockers
where the cloaks and hoods and masks worn by members were stored. As he kept
his, he thought to himself that he’d better leave before someone swiped the
dough he had been paid for having assisted. He really needed the money, for
Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if he had to work that night stealing dinner.
And then he detected some whispering.
“Hmm! There are two moles here,” thought Nimbus,
pretending not to look at two dark shapes that were lying low among the
shadows.
“These blackguards have no idea who took the
check,” whispered the mole Swithin to his fellow spy.
“Nor do we. Let’s leave. We’re wasting our time
here,” answered the mole Rupert.
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