---

The Discipline of Small Evil

by Arthur H. Manners

Big evil is cheap, lazy, unimaginative. Release a deadly plague. Steal a continent. Shoot the moon with a giant laser. Everyone pays attention, everyone screams, and the supers come and there’s a showdown and a monologue and sharks.

Blah blah blah.

Where’s the art in that?

Supervillains always fail. They invite heroes to rise, invoke Newton’s Third Law: action, reaction. The trick is to slip unseen through society, widening cracks in the psyche.

Big evil is just a cry for help. Look at me, validate me, for the love of God someone save me.

Real evil is small. It’s turning all the pictures in someone’s home just a little askew. It’s using show bathrooms at hardware stores. It’s pineapple on pizza. Leaving the seat up. Puns.

Real evil is talking in the cinema.

I know what I’m talking about. When I was just a rookie, I took down the king of all supervillains, and we’ve all been better off since. I guess you could sort of say that I saved the world.

---

“Drinks are on me!” I yelled, standing on a rickety table.

The bar was packed to bursting. Everyone cheered and beer sloshed onto the floor.

I took a bow, dropped from the table, and slipped out the door. Before I turned the corner, I peeked in through the window and glimpsed the bartender, aghast, holding out his hands in protest as dozens of people swarmed the beer taps.

“Menkowitz!” the barkeep roared, shaking a fist at the ceiling.

I grinned, shuddering with delight. My own name used as a cry of rage and despair. It was everything a budding villain could want.

Whistling, I thrust my hands into my pockets and wandered downtown. The faint electric tingle of the deed would sustain me for a few hours.

I spent the morning at the mall, holding doors open for people who were too far away, forcing them to speed-walk towards me–letting go before they reached me, of course. By lunchtime I was a mall Santa, insisting to dozens of children that I’d changed Christmas to June. I rounded things off by touring retail stores, sneaking into changing areas to yell ‘FIRE!’.

A standard day’s work, just enough to hone my skills and keep boredom at bay.

I headed out when security started catching on. Rookie villains didn’t challenge private security until the end of their second year.

I’d read all about it in Catsom Mordecai’s So You Want to Be A Villain?, the bible of any would-be evil doer. A couple more years and maybe I could get myself on retainer as a henchman for the Hidden Ministry of Dastardly Deeds. From there, climb the ladder to junior side-villain, through to senior nemesis.

But that was the well-beaten path. The long slog. I planned to start my own firm: Menkowitz and Schemers.

It was all in the good book. Mordecai’s voice was in my head every day, from when I painted rogue apostrophes onto street signs, to when I bought girl scout cookies with counterfeit cash. He was my flaming demon, my gulping darkness.

I headed to the parking lot, trying to recall which stolen car I was driving that day, but found that the lot had been turned into a giant bonfire. A villainy parade was in full swing, with minions waving Mordecai’s banner, and goons harassing onlookers.

“My car!” I groaned.

Well, it wasn’t mine, it was stolen.

But still. My car.

Then I saw him. Tall and chisel-jawed and clad in a pristine purple cloak of finest silk. Catsom Mordecai, the king of evil.

“Run in fear, people!” he cried. “You think your heroes will save you from me? Where was the Mustachioed Knight today when you needed him? Gruyere Gal? Mighty Moose? I’ll tell you: growing fat on your mindless adulation! The only law is chaos.”

A slight variation on the Standard Monologue. The form had been around for decades, but Mordecai had perfected the art of pop-up terror.
Mordecai stepped down from the rubble. A pair of chattering sharp-toothed aides swept his cloak off his shoulders and replaced it with a hoodie. He accepted a cappuccino and a bagel from a gap-toothed gremlin.

For a moment, he stood alone.

I rushed forward, tripping over my own feet. “Mr. Mordecai, sir, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a huge fan of your work.”

He looked down at my proffered hand, then flashed me his winning smile, a blinding barrage of perfect teeth. “Always nice to meet a fan.” He didn’t shake. “I’ll need ten feet, though. Standing too close to me is like standing too close to the sun. You’ll only get burned.”

“Of course. It’s just… my car. I can’t get to my next misdeed without it.”

He waved a hand over his shoulder. “Call my hotline for renumeration.”

The hotline was a famous scam. Thousands of vulnerable people, mostly retirees, succumbed to it every month.

I laughed. “Good one, sir. But really, I get that you’re busy and all, but if you could help me out?”

“What is it you do?”

“My USP is precision evil. Helping old ladies to the wrong side of the street, microwaving fish in every office I can find, mixing the recycling. I know it’s not by the book, but it’s all I have the budget for–for now! I’m working my way up to something, you know, big!”

He glanced at me with his lips drawn into a tight line. “So… no real evil? Nothing significant?”

“Well, its effect is cumulative. We all have to start somewhere, right? Not all of us were born with trust funds. Haha… I mean, no offence–I’ll shut up.”

His lips tightened to a white line. “I have to get back to work. I’m sure you understand, as a fellow… villain.”

He turned back to his aides, barking orders.

I walked home, confused. I stopped at an ice cream parlour to bump into a few kids until they dropped their cones, which usually cheered me up. But today that didn’t cut it.

I didn’t settle until I realized that Mordecai would be operating in the area for a while. That was his MO: drop into a city, ratchet up the tension, then bring the whole place down with a grand finale.

He must have had a bad day. I just had to hang around and catch him in a good mood, get him to notice my potential.

A thrill ran through me. With his help, I could master my craft. And maybe I’d even get to work with Mordecai personally.

All I had to do was get noticed. And I was nothing if not tenacious.

---

I studied hard and upped my rate of misdeeds. I read So You Want to be a Villain? so many times that I could recite it from memory.

Though, I disagreed with the general philosophy in a few places. It was as much a manifesto about big evil as it was a beginner’s guide, and some of it just didn’t sit right. But I was sure that someone as sophisticated as Mordecai would welcome a diversity of opinion.

I didn’t have time to overthink the details. Mordecai’s campaign was heating up across the city.

The mountains to the east cracked like an egg one morning, spewing lava into the lower districts.

A nest of basilisks took over the subway, eating up the commuter trains and lounging in metro stations.

An infectious bug causing hysteria spread through the city, affecting only news presenters and media pundits. During live debates people either became convinced that they were cats or took to running around the studio making airplane noises.

It was delicious mayhem, even if it was large scale. For a while, I was as caught up as anyone in its grandiosity.

On a Friday evening when the fire department was overwhelmed with lava, and hospitals heaved with meowing patients, Mordecai’s face appeared on every screen in the city. He stood on a rooftop rimmed with ornate carved griffin heads.

I abandoned a bank heist before I even got to the vault. I hadn’t been committed anyway. I thought pulling it off would provide the seed money I needed for some big, flashy evil, but the job itself made me cringe.

Mordecai probably had something way better to show off. This was moment I’d been waited for. I pulled up the feed on my phone.

On screen, Mordecai held his arms wide. “Lowlife pretenders and associated scum,” he called. “I address not the citizens of this city, but the cretins who would call themselves fellow villains.”

I froze. “Wha–?”

“The Hidden Ministry of Dastardly Deeds elected me as president this morning. My first act is to dissolve the Ministry in its entirety. All memberships are null and void, all privileges revoked, and all resources are to be returned to me at once. Show’s over, losers!”

He was broadcasting from just a few blocks away. I ran the whole way, dashed up staircases, knocked lower-tier goons flying with my homemade blasters. I burst out onto the roof and skidded to a stop. “Sir, there seems to be some mistake.”

Mordecai turned away from the camera, hitting me with a glare of silent rage so potent that I staggered backward. “You again.”

“Menkowitz. Sir, you can’t do this,” I gasped. “I’ve been working so hard to get a chance to learn from you.”

He appraised me silently, waved the cameras off, then said, “You’ve ruined my broadcast.”

I cursed under my breath.

“How did you get past my guards?”

“I… I used these.” I showed him my blasters, unable to hide the masking tape and uneven solder holding them together.

He laughed. “With those?”

“I practice with them every night for two hours. That’s how I’ve ever got anything done.”

He looked me up and down. “Hmm.”

“Sir, please. I need experience.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “What makes you think I have time to tutor anyone? Study under a minor independent villain. Onion Breath, the Planking Bandit, Passive Aggressive, one of those guys.”

His brow darkened as he looked out over the city. “I never asked for all this pressure. Preserve the family fortune and dignity, become a judge or a doctor or run my own lab. I thought my parents might shut up if I could gentrify villainy. I hired the best PR guys, kidnapped the best engineers, paid the best heroes to take a fall.

“But it’s never enough. So, screw the lot of them. Even if this play doesn’t work out, I’ve got my trust fund.”

“Sir, I don’t… uh,” I stammered.

He adopted a paternal smile and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Look, son. It’s just business. The Hidden Ministry held onto all sorts of collateral to pay for memberships. I’m just taking my dividend… and the rest. I need it for my crowning achievement, the greatest dastardly deed of all time. Then, I’ll retire. It’s only fair, after all I’ve given. What would any of you be without me? At least for a while you got to pretend that you could be somebody.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I’ll work harder than anyone else, I’ll do twice the wrongs.”

“Buzz off, kid.”

“But why?”

He rounded on me, poking his finger into my chest. “Because you need class to make it into the big leagues. I can tell by looking at you that you’ll max out at henchman.” His mouth hitched to one side. “Most people do. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“That’s not what you wrote in your book. I’ve memorized every word.”

“That? Ghost-written.” He hummed to himself. “Never did get a chance to put in those revisions. By the time I remembered, I’d already had the writer thrown to the mecha-wolves. Anyway, that book was for winners. Not people like you.”

“People like me?”

He looked me up and down, and his lip curled. “Small evil.”

He slipped a lump of metal from his cloak, which unfurled into a mean-looking handheld cannon, complete with a barrel hissing blue sparks.

A vortex of blue light punched me in the chest and launched me into space. I tumbled through the air, and barely had time to activate my jet boots. They arrested my momentum just enough to save my ribs from shattering as I careened into a fire escape. The jets stuttered as I dropped eight stories to the ground below.

The impact winded me and my head hit concrete. I lay immobilized, struggling for air. Distantly, I felt minions’ hands going through my pockets.

As I lay in an inch of dirty water, dragging breath back into my lungs, the truth slowly dawned on me. The book had been ghost-written; the person I admired was now part of a shark’s digestive tract. Catsom Mordecai was just a privileged brat. A gatekeeper. And a fraud.

But I wasn’t going to let him get away with this. Evil wasn’t a way to get back at daddy; evil was a vocation. He didn’t get to sully the only thing that gave my life meaning. Forget gizmos, henchmen and working by the (ghost-written) book. If I was doomed to small evil, I’d show Mordecai what small evil could do.

---

With a little cold calling and blackmail–God bless the countless indiscretions of henchmen–I learned that Mordecai’s grand finale was imminent. But first, his cadre needed one last supply run at Harry’s Unlikely McGuffins and Sinful Stuff (the one-stop-shop for all your nasty needs!). I arrived early with a group of street urchins, whom I’d promised to teach pickpocketing in exchange for an hour of their time. I loaded up each of us with the biggest cartload of inexpensive, individually wrapped items I could find.

The dignified silence under the warehouse roof evaporated as Mordecai’s troupe marched in. They seized two-hundred shopping carts and made a lot of noise, but even they didn’t dare break Harry’s rules.

Harry was old school. Cross him and you didn’t get a speech, you just got cut into little pieces and thrown in the river. Not my style, but I was glad for anything that exposed Mordecai for a posturing phony.

I and my assistants arrived at the checkout just before Mordecai. Harry didn’t object as he rang everything through, every poison button and exploding hairpin. Bless his cold, dead heart, he didn’t say anything until he called out the total, and I began counting out pennies from a giant sack.

A muscle jumped in Harry’s chiselled anvil of a chin. “You don’t got nothin’ bigger’n pennies, Menkowitz?” he growled.

I feigned an embarrassed grimace. “Sorry, Harry. I hate to slow things down. But times are hard, you know?”

I glanced pointedly at the crowd behind me.

Harry glowered, and for a moment I worried that I’d miscalculated. Then Harry’s gaze swung around to Mordecai’s horde, searing the air like the Eye of Sauron.

Mordecai stood amongst his underlings with his arms crossed. “Can we hurry this along?”

Harry glanced at me, and something twinkled in his eyes. “You count those pennies right. I’ll know if you drop one.”

When I eventually finished, Mordecai was cursing under his breath as aides swarmed around him, pointing at their watches.

“Sorry!” I trilled, pushing my cart toward the exit.

The first of my street urchins pushed their cart to the cash register. They loaded a similar haul onto the conveyer, then produced a sack of coins. Behind them stood twelve more urchins.

“Oh, come on! These guys are an embarrassment, Harry. Some of us have actual villainy to get to,” Mordecai said. “Throw them out and serve us before I get this place shut down.”

Harry’s brow slowly raised, and he straightened like a time-lapse of a budding plant. “You shut your trash mouth and wait your turn, boy, or I’ll show the meaning of embarrassment.”

Harry gestured for the urchin to start counting pennies.

Mordecai blustered and turned puce but said nothing. In total, he waited forty-three minutes before he gave up. Tearing through the queue, he headed into the parking lot, shooting me a venomous look. “I should have made sure you were dead,” he spat.

Only days ago, I would have wilted. But now I felt only a squirt of joy. I had made God bleed, and I had a taste for it.

---

The following morning, I was in position outside Mordecai’s headquarters. I was tapped into the CCTV feed via an app on my phone–courtesy of Harry.

Minions swarmed through Mordecai’s lair towards the basement garage, toward a fleet of mean-looking motorcycles. The engines roared to life, a cacophony of revving and howls of anticipation. The minions gunned their throttles and immediately they all swerved and pinwheeled and tumbled in great clatters of metal. People yelled as they were thrown from their bikes, while others collided mid-air. None of them noticed that I’d bike-locked every motorcycle to at least two of its neighbours.

Small evil had all kinds of perks, but the biggest was anonymity. None of these slick big evil guys had even seen me canvassing the building for days; all they saw was a night cleaner.

As the garage door opened, I sauntered in and headed for the elevator.

Mordecai’s face appeared on wall-mounted screens in every direction. “Intruder!”

Dazed, the minions wriggled in alarm. I waved as the elevator doors closed, and I ascended into the lair.

---

Mordecai’s plan hadn’t been hard to guess. Blow things up with a giant laser he’d bought on the internet; the third most popular plan in all villainy.

My one advantage was that they thought of themselves as an unstoppable force, and so guarded only against an opposing force of equal magnitude. They could shoot me any moment, but was I really worth the effort?

With the lower-tier minions out of action, I made it to the control room without incident–a hemispherical cavern filled with unwashed techs, computer equipment and obnoxiously large monitors.

“Sir, we can’t get eyes on the intruder. There’s some interference in our camera network,” stammered one of the techs.

I patted the jammer Harry had given me, smiling.

“Never mind that termite. The city will taste the fire of our dastardly canon!” Mordecai barked over the intercom.

A video feed of the roof showed the canon, matching a child’s drawing of a ray gun, only the size of a truck. The techs set the targeting system to city hall. I was no aficionado of superweapons–unless my subscription to Wicked Sneer Magazine counted–but it was obvious that the city had no clever defences against this kind of firepower.

But my stupid defence would do just fine.

Mordecai appeared on the largest monitor, safe in his lair on the topmost floor. He held a metal box housing a giant red button. A standard Naughty Boy’s Doomsday Button from Harry’s, every villain’s dream but expensive as hell. He stabbed the button with a flourish.

Nothing happened.

Mordecai paused, stabbed the button a couple more times, then hissed over his shoulder, “It’s not working. It… yes, I pressed it all the way down. Yes, I–of course I pressed the red one!”

It took them several minutes to figure out that the device’s nuclear battery had been removed. I’d emptied all the doomsday buttons the day we’d been at Harry’s.

In the commotion, I slipped into the command centre and ensconced myself within the rows of server racks at the back of the room.

“No matter! Activate Backup Plan Bravo,” Mordecai blustered at last.

The techs pulled out USB drives and inserted them into their computer terminals.

Mordecai cleared his throat, regaining his composure. “Our first blow will char their spirit to the core, and we will walk over the ashes of their broken hearts to glory!”

I blew a quiet raspberry, which couldn’t be helped. I’d developed an allergy to bullshit soliloquy.

I waited until the Canon was almost charged, then sneaked to the nearest desk and–oh, so delicious–yanked the USB drive without disconnecting it safely.

Red warnings popped up on the monitors as I ran along the desks, yanking each USB drive in turn. Several techs blanched. Someone fainted over by the door.

The techs scurried back, calling for higher-tier, muscle-bound goons. But no goons would be coming–I’d made sure of that.

“No canons today, folks,” I said. “But it looks like you’ve triggered a subroutine. Hmm. Would you look at that.”

Scans of financial records popped up on the monitors.

I whistled. “No money for staff wages after Mordecai moved his funds to offshore accounts. Almost looks like he’s ready to stiff you all, the moment he’s done shooting stuff.

“Oh, and it seems that the SuperDuper Hotline has been called. Every hero in a thousand miles will be here in a little over ten minutes.”

“There he is again,” Mordecai screeched. “Seize him!”

I expected one or two loyal fools. But every tech turned and walked toward the door. Nobody even looked in Mordecai’s direction.

I grinned and followed them. Mordecai’s eyes widened in fury I closed the door behind me.

In the hallway, the techs piled up behind a wall of goons, who lurched like zombies, groaning and bleary eyed, their feet dragging along the floor.

I had paid off the building’s coffee supplier to replace their latest shipment with decaf.

I made my way to the nearest CCTV camera and waved.

Mordecai growled over the intercom. “Menkowitz,” he hissed in melodramatic sotto voce.

A flash of delight ran through me. I was nemesis material. But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing my pleasure.

Mordecai’s expression soured when I didn’t whisper his name back. “Take my hired help, fine. But there are plenty in this building who will gladly rip you limb from limb.”

I shrugged, pushed to the front of the queue and waited for the elevator. Everyone glared at me, but nobody was going to kill without being paid. The door slid open to reveal a group of shivering techs, who cringed against the wall as I leaned in and mashed the buttons for all the floors in the building.

“He’ll destroy you,” the nearest tech hissed.

“He did that already. Didn’t take,” I said.

The doors closed. I repeated the process with each elevator in turn, drawing groans from those lined up. A unanimous whisper rippled through the crowd: “Asshole.”

I took a bow and headed for the stairs. Further down the stairwell, I could hear dozens of monstrous sidekicks lumbering up towards me. From their silhouettes I guessed they were fitted with every body-mod on the market: shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, miniguns, chainsaws, the works.

Problem was, they weighed three hundred pounds each. And Mordecai had put his lair at the top of a very tall building.

---

I made it to the top floor winded but unmolested. By the pitiful moans echoing in the stairwell, I suspected a few of the sidekicks had succumbed to coronaries.

Mordecai’s lair was in darkness except for a spotlit area in the centre. Mordecai didn’t startle at my entrance, but rather stepped forward grandly as though beginning a stage act. “Impressive, impressive. You’ve certainly showed me a lesson, and I hereby award you the coveted position of chief sidekick. Now, let’s be done with this and get back to the business of destroying the city.”

I winced. “Sorry. I kinda… can’t.”

His upper lip twitched. “Oh? And why is that?”

“Well, if there’s no city left and no people in it, I can’t practice my craft.” I shrugged. “I wish I could help you out, but it’s like you said: I’m small evil, and I’ll never be anything else.”

He glared at me, fists shaking. “No matter!” he yelled, with such force that he almost bent double. “You and those heroes are no match for my Ultimate Solution.”

I rolled my eyes. These proper nouns were killing me.

“Your doom is upon you, puny cur. Meet MegaDoom.”

MegaDoom stomped into the spotlit arena, a giant man encased in a mech suit with a Tyrannosaurus head. There seemed to be real animal carcasses impaled on the steak knives serving as teeth. The mech suit roared, generating a putrid wind that got flecks of rotting meat everywhere.

“Charmed,” I said.

MegaDoom pressed a button beside his head with his tongue, and the suit bristled with knives, spinning saw blades and flamethrowers.

“Prepares lil’ chick to meets your–“

“Let me guess. Doom? Only, more mega?”

“Precisionly! MegaDoom.” MegaDoom threw back their head and laughed, a sound like tinfoil in a meat grinder possessed by a banshee.

I cocked my head. “Why is your laugh so weird?”

“I–eh? It ain’ts weird.”

I shrugged. “Okay…”

“Ain’t. Look, see.” The blades stopped spinning; the flamethrowers extinguished. MegaDoom let fly another rendition of Satan’s opera.

I crossed my arms and sighed. “Mmm… sorry. No offence, I just think it’s an odd laugh, you know?”

“I’s got more normal laughs than any T-Rex in histories. Now shadap and sit still whiles I kills you.”

“If you say so, ‘MegaDoom’.”

A long pause stretched out. “I gots a normal laugh.”

Mordecai flung out his arms, eyed wide with disbelief. “Oh, for the love of–will you just kill him, please? What am I paying you for?”

I held up a placating hand. “Apologies. My mistake, ‘MegaDoom’.” I made exaggerated air quotes each time I said his name, wrinkling my nose as though suppressing a giggle.

“You think being all annoyin’ is gowna save you–stop that!”

He pointed a claw at my raised hand, which I had pinched into the shape of a beak that ‘spoke’ in sync with him.

“That tiny hand ain’t me. Could never be me. I’m taller thans the mountains, furioser than thems volcanoes. I. Am MegaDoom!”

“Indeed,” I sighed, taking out my phone and opening my photos app. “Hard to believe you were this little guy, once upon a time.”

I held up the phone and swiped through a dozen photographs of a mud-spattered little boy dressed in a papier-mâché dinosaur costume. He was being laughed at and pushed around by groups of older kids.

“So cute,” I simpered. “Oh, look at this one.”

The last photo revealed the sad fate of the papier-mâché costume: melted in a public swimming pool while the little boy flailed and screamed.

MegaDoom glanced in horror at Mordecai. “He’s lying, boss! I’s always been Mega, I’s born Doom. He’s lying, he’s–”

But Mordecai’s face had fallen into an unedited mask of disgust. His shoulders slumped. “Oh, I’m done,” he muttered.

“It makes so much sense, that little boy still lashing out, just wanting to be loved,” I said.

“Shut UP! Don’t look at me!” MegaDoom screamed. They dashed to the wall, kicked through the concrete with their clawed feet, and leaped over the side.

---

I approached Mordecai, who had sunk to his knees.

“Your final boss needs some work. If you can scrape them off the street, get them to therapy,” I said. I reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew his wallet, plucking from it his Hidden Ministry membership card. “You won’t need this anymore. Go sip margheritas on a beach or something.”

“Why?” he sobbed.

I cleared my throat. “’Real evil can’t be bought; it’s an art of precision and determination. Every villain must commit fully to their discipline,’ I said, quoting from So You Want to be A Villain?

Mordecai hung his head. “I hate that damn book.”

I threw his wallet at his feet, which still bulged with more cash than I’d likely see in a lifetime. “You should try reading it. Say hi to the heroes for me.”

And I left him there on the floor.