Dr. Critchlore's School for Minions Read online

  “Mumble, mumble … Dogsbody Higgins!” Uncle Ludwig peered down his nose and through his glasses at me. He had a habit of mumbling his thoughts out loud, like he was talking to an invisible person standing next to him. He looked to the side. “The Ice Shelves of Dorn, of course.” Then he looked back at me. “Have you been assigned to me again? I need help reshelving books.”

  Before I became a student two years ago, I was an all-around helper at the school. They called me “Dogsbody,” probably because of my werewolf-ness. I’d worked in the kitchens, cleaned labs, swept out animal stalls, and done just about any other grunt work you can think of. I knew every living thing, every dark hallway, and every brick of the castle. I’d also spent a lot of time reshelving books for Uncle Ludwig.

  “No, Uncle Ludwig. I’m a student now.” I pointed to my jacket.

  “Of course, of course,” he said, turning around and snapping his fingers for me to follow. “The books are over here … Or the Etarne Cliffs, mumble, mumble.”

  I chased after him, my friends following. “I’m not here to reshelve books. I was wondering if I could use a computer.”

  “Good luck with that.” He sat down behind a desk piled so high with papers and books that he nearly disappeared behind it. “The network’s been sabotaged three times this week. Can’t get any online research done. Not that it matters. As soon as I find a useful site, the EO Council takes it down. Hmmph.” He picked up a stack of papers. “Maybe Wickerly’s Half Domes. Why didn’t I think of them before?”

  “Is it okay if my friends come too?”

  He looked up at me and ran a hand through his tangled brown hair. “Hagritano, maybe. Hmm? Yes, you can all reshelve books.”

  “Uncle Ludwig,” I said, looking him in the eye, “my friends and I want to use the computer.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “You’ll help me reshelve books before dinner, then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Fine.” He shooed me away. “What are you bothering me for? Honestly. How I get any work done is a mystery. Mumble, mumble.”

  I waved my friends inside. Frankie had the computer up and going in no time. He found the MonsterTube video site, one of the few sites not blocked by the Evil Overlord Council. Darthin and I stood behind him as he searched for “Critchlore ogres” and scrolled through the list.

  “There it is,” Frankie said. “ ‘Epic Minion Fail.’ ”

  Oh no! It had gone viral. Suddenly it felt like I had a thousand bats flitting around in my stomach. Frankie clicked on “Play.”

  Trees framed the opening shot: a group of minions standing at the edge of a cliff in a defensive position. From the camera’s point of view, we could only see the minions. Whatever they were facing was out of sight, behind the cameraman, who was hiding at the forest’s edge. We could hear his frantic breathing as the camera shook in his unsteady hand.

  “Look, there’s Reggie Clobberman,” Darthin said. He reached over Frankie to point. Reggie had graduated last year. He and the rest of the minions were ogre-men, which meant they were huge, cruel, and hideous, like ogres, but smart, like humans. It was an excellent mix of traits for a minion.

  Those ogre-men were everything we strove to be: fearsome, powerful, and vicious. But on-screen they were cowering, frightened, and feeble.

  “What’s attacking them?” Darthin asked.

  “Some kind of monster, I bet,” Frankie said, still fiddling with the bolt in his neck. “Something huge.”

  “Or a pack of werewolves,” I said.

  As the video played, the minions held up swords and clubs, swinging them at the air. Some glanced behind, looking for an escape. They were terrified, and my heart thumped in frantic sympathy. One ogre-man threw down his club and begged for mercy.

  Suddenly the band of minions jumped in fright. The ones in the front accidentally shoved the ones in back off the cliff. We heard screams, and the video shook as the cameraman moved to a safer location.

  Five ogre-men remained. Their heads swiveled as they looked down at their fallen comrades, back at their attacker, then back down. At last, they jumped, preferring a painful, deadly plunge to fighting whatever stalked them.

  I bit my lip and blinked fast. Those poor guys.

  Frankie sighed. “That was pitiful.”

  “What could do that?” Darthin asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Frankie said. “It could have been a battalion of vampires riding armored dragons, followed by a pack of werewolves. There’s no excuse for cowardice.”

  That was true. Last year we’d taken a class called There’s No Excuse for Cowardice.

  “Don’t remind me,” Darthin said. He’d failed the class. Darthin could find lots of excuses for cowardice.

  “Look,” Frankie said, pointing back to the screen.

  The attackers had come into view. It had been a pack, all right. The video stabilized as they entered the field of vision, moving forward as one, right to the edge of the cliff. They wore matching uniforms: brown shorts, vests covered with small round badges, berets perched jauntily over ponytails.

  They were Girl Explorers—little human girls who did crafts projects, sold cookies, and manufactured explosives.

  They threw cookies at the fallen minions, and I heard faint screams. I was so relieved the ogre-men weren’t dead that it took me a moment to realize what this video meant.

  A minion school depended on its reputation more than anything. Those ogre-men were last year’s graduates—and they’d just been scared to death (or, rather, scared to injury) by a group of girls in kneesocks. This could ruin the school, no doubt. The guys were quiet, too shocked to breathe.

  “It’s got to be some sort of trick,” I said. “A video mash-up or something.”

  I looked at Darthin, who knew more about this stuff than any of us. And by “this stuff” I meant “everything.” Darthin’s hobby was curiosity. He started nearly every sentence with “I wonder …” And then he’d find out.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It looks real.”

  “I can’t wait to see what Critchlore does about this,” Frankie said. He giggled. “Somebody’s gonna pay, and pay big.”

  Darthin nodded. “Nobody embarrasses Dr. Critchlore and lives to laugh about it.”

  “True,” I said. “He once flooded an entire town when someone there said his banshees wailed too quietly.” The evil overlords who ruled the countries around Stull had nothing on Dr. Critchlore.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I’ve got to see Miss Merrybench.”

  “After reshelving!” Uncle Ludwig called.

  “Okay, Uncle Ludwig.” I turned back to my friends. “You guys go to dinner. I’ll catch up later.”

  I walked over to Uncle Ludwig’s desk. He didn’t look up, just pointed to the reshelving carts. There were six of them, stuffed full of books. Flea dip, what had I agreed to?

  It took me ages to reshelve two carts, and in that time Uncle Ludwig filled two more.

  “I’ve gotta go to dinner,” I said. “I’ll finish the rest later.”

  “Right, right,” he said.

  My stomach rumbled with hunger, or maybe it was worry. Put in the wrong dorm, and now this horrible video. My third year at Dr. Critchlore’s School for Minions had gotten off to a terrible start. I told myself it could only get better from here.

  I love my Critchlore Flying Monkeys!

  —THE WICKED WITCH OF WEST CHAMBOR, IN AN ADVERTISING TESTIMONIAL

  After dinner and more reshelving, it had been too late to catch Miss Merrybench and fix my dorm assignment, so I headed to her office first thing in the morning.

  Honestly, I’d rather collect bat dookie in the Caves of Doom than visit our school secretary on the first day of school. Miss Merrybench was a thin woman who wore flowery blouses and a scowl that could make an angry ogre jump back in fear. (I’d seen it happen. Twice.) It only took one glance at her desk to know she was as tough as they came. Perched on the corner was the trophy she’d won in the Ir
on Woman Triathlon. That’s the race where contestants swim through shark-infested water, run from hungry devil hounds, and cycle through the Primeval Forest while imps shout rude things about their bike shorts.

  I approached her door, bracing myself for a blast of Merrybench anger. I took a deep breath, just like I had during that cave job, and opened it.

  She looked up at me, her famous scowl turned to maximum power. I’d heard that, once, long ago, she’d eaten a piece of face-freezing curse candy that tasted like ogre breath. I wasn’t sure if that was true, but she always looked annoyed, so who knew?

  Plus it helped to think that maybe she was smiling on the inside.

  “Mr. Higgins,” she said. Then she made a little puffy sound, sort of a cross between a sigh and a grunt. A quick exhale that told me This had better be good. It also told me that she probably wasn’t smiling on the inside.

  I was about to launch into my plea when a buzz sounded from her desk. She held up a finger for me to wait. “Dr. Critchlore’s School for Minions,” she said into her headset.

  She made shooing motions at me, but I pretended not to notice. I sat down in one of the chairs along the wall, next to an imp named Spanky. The little green guy’s hands were bound, which wasn’t surprising. Imps had long fingers that itched to steal things.

  He nodded at Merrybench’s Iron Woman trophy. “Know why the devil hounds don’t catch ’em?” I shook my head. “ ’Cause they can’t stop laughing at them ridiculous bike shorts.” He snorted with laughter and I shushed him. I did not want to get on Miss Merrybench’s bad side this morning.

  “What’cha in for?” he asked.

  “They put me in the D-Hum,” I whispered. He eyed me up and down, and I knew what he was thinking: I looked like a scrawny human boy. But there was a powerful werewolf inside me. Once, when I was seven, a giant swamp creature broke into our house, screaming and smashing furniture. In that moment of terror, I’d morphed into a werewolf and scared him off. So, yeah, I was fierce.

  But it hadn’t happened since, and even though my foster mother, Cook, kept telling me I needed to wait until puberty, I knew that if I was with my kind in the Momido, I’d morph again. I just had to wait for Miss Merrybench to finish on the phone so she could move me there.

  “I told you before,” Miss Merrybench said into her headset. “Dr. Critchlore has no comment. That video is a fake.” She disconnected and hit the next button on her console. “Good morning, Dr. Critchlore’s office.” There were four more blinking buttons. Dog whistles! This is gonna take forever.

  I picked up a brochure from the table next to me. Dr. Critchlore’s face filled the cover, along with the words: “In a world run by evil overlords, you’re either a minion or you’re nothing. Train with the best at Dr. Critchlore’s School for Minions!”

  Inside were pictures of powerful minions and a map of the Porvian Continent, separated into the seven Greater Realms, the thirteen Lesser Realms, the Dismantled Realm, and the Island Realms. There was no mention of the Forgotten Realm. Red dots indicated where Critchlore minions had been placed. “This could be you!” was written next to an arrow pointing to the capital of Lower Worb, realm of the superpowerful Wexmir Smarvy.

  I’d never seen a recruitment brochure before. We were always bursting with minions.

  “I’m from Bluetorch,” Spanky said, pointing to a country south of Stull, where our school was located. “I miss the food, but not the daily calls to admiration.”

  “The what?”

  “Every hour a gong rings and we have to say something nice about our EO, Dark Victor. ‘Dark Victor is so handsome,’ ‘Dark Victor is so smart,’ ‘Dark Victor makes the best cheese soufflé.’ ”

  I was glad, yet again, that the Neutral Region of Stull was not ruled by an evil overlord. The United Nations of Overlords was located here, and the EOs had an agreement not to attack our country. We lived in an oasis of peace in a warring world.

  “… Yes, Your Supremacy,” Miss Merrybench said. “He’s well aware of your concerns. I assure you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the minions you recruited last spring. That video is a fake. Our minions have been, and always will be, top-notch.”

  I looked at Dr. Critchlore’s open office door, and a thought popped into my brain—he could switch my dorm assignment. Why not? Hadn’t he just selected me for the Junior Henchman Training Program, the most exclusive training the school offered? He’d want me in the right dorm.

  “Go for it,” Spanky said, as if reading my thoughts.

  I looked down and saw him unwrapping a piece of my explosive gum. I hadn’t even felt him reaching into my pocket. I grabbed it back, then nodded toward Miss Merrybench. She didn’t have fangs or claws, but she held a ruler, and I had a feeling she knew how to use it.

  Spanky shrugged. “You probably wouldn’t want to, anyway. Critchlore scares the fur off my fingers.”

  Most kids thought he was scary. Most monsters thought he was scary. But Dr. Critchlore was like a father to me. I’d known him as long as I could remember.

  “General Nix, you’ve recruited minions from us before; you know they are first-rate,” Miss Merrybench said. “Don’t believe that video. Why, if you look at the brochure, the customer testimonials …” She spun around in her chair and opened a file cabinet.

  This was my chance. I sped past her desk and slipped into Dr. Critchlore’s office, stopping as soon as I was out of her view.

  I loved Dr. Critchlore’s office, with its dark floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls, its fireplace in the alcove, and the rare works kept under glass, like in a museum. A huge desk sat in front of a bay window that looked toward Mount Curiosity. His office had everything an office should have.

  Everything except Dr. Critchlore. He was gone.

  They call him the Minion Whisperer. It’s said he can train any species, even mermaids, who are known to be breathtakingly stupid.

  —ARTICLE ON DR. CRITCHLORE IN MINIONS TODAY

  I heard music coming from the alcove, and when I peeked around the corner I saw him sitting in a wingback chair by the fireplace. He was watching a television that sat in a hidden compartment in the bookshelves.

  I gasped. I had never seen Dr. Critchlore looking so … so casual. Usually he was as evil overlord-y as they came—tailored suit, pinkie ring, slickly gelled hair, goatee trimmed to a point, and a stare that could melt steel. He wasn’t quite so intimidating wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.

  Even worse, he was crying, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief.

  I tried to back away, but he spotted me before I made it to the door.

  “Oh, Handley,” he said, reaching out to me.

  When I said he was like a father to me, I meant the sort of father who was busy and distant. The kind who couldn’t remember his kids’ names.

  “What have I done with my life?” he said. “What have I accomplished? Look at me, past my prime, with no children of my own.”

  The TV commercial showed a father tenderly dabbing cream on his smiling daughter’s cheek. The voice-over said, “WartGrow, because people trust a witch with warts.”

  This wasn’t the Dr. Critchlore I knew. Just last year he taught us about exploiting an enemy’s weakness without mercy. He’d invented tactics such as Shock and Maul, the Monster Wave Attack, and the Hammer and Mace. He was a steel-hearted genius who ran the school with an iron fist, because it prepared us to work for an evil overlord.

  He beckoned me over, and I carefully sidestepped the trapdoor in the floor. It was hidden, of course, but I knew exactly where it was. You don’t watch someone disappear screaming without it leaving an impression. Dr. Critchlore told me he’d installed it because sometimes people bored him and it was too much effort to call Miss Merrybench to come in and take them away.

  “Hickenlooper, my boy.” He patted my hand, looking up at me like an eager-to-please puppy. “I have this overwhelming desire to buy a new dragon.”

  “A dragon, sir?”

 
“A really mean one. Powerful. It’s what the kids are riding these days, right?”

  “Well, I have a Domvoy.”

  He dropped my hand, a look of confusion on his face. “What’s that, a griffin? A pegasus?”

  “Um, no, it’s a bike.”

  “Hmm. Lacks pizzazz, Hollins, if I’m honest. What are you, nine?”

  I shrugged, because I didn’t know how old I was. Closer to eleven or twelve, though. I thought I’d better change the subject so I could get out of there. I really wanted to get out of there. “Dr. Critchlore? I’ve been put in the wrong dorm again, and I was wondering, since I’m a junior henchman trainee now, if you could change—”

  But I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because at that moment a new commercial came on the television—an advertisement for the Pravus Minion Academy.

  Dr. Thiago Pravus strolled through his ultramodern campus wearing a black suit and a bright teal tie. He looked like the kind of action hero who wears a tuxedo at night but can kill you twenty different ways with his bare hands. Word had it that he’d personally trained Wexmir Smarvy’s dragon militia.

  The commercial cut from one impressive building to the next, showing what seemed like thousands of minions in various stages of training. The school looked humongous, and everything in it was so new and shiny—the buildings, the weapons, even the dragon’s teeth. (I’d been on dragon tooth-cleaning duty before, and let me tell you, it’s not easy. And getting them to floss? Forget about it.)

  “Gone are the days when an evil overlord could make do with a posse of weak, servile, untrained minions,” Dr. Pravus said. “Today’s evil overlord must have the very best: Pravus minions.”

  I glanced sideways at my bathrobe-wearing headmaster, who was turning the color of cayenne pepper.

  “I despise that man,” Dr. Critchlore said.

  “And unlike other minion schools we could name”—Pravus winked at the camera, like he was looking right at Dr. Critchlore—“we guarantee our graduates won’t become the embarrassment of the entire minion community.”