Floors #2: 3 Below

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: A Wedding at the Whippet

  Chapter 2: Four Floogers, a Zip Rope, and the Iron Box!

  Chapter 3: The Jungle Room

  Chapter 4: Trouble Brewing Up Above

  Chapter 5: An Isle of Penguins, a Boy Named Twist, Robinson Crusoe!

  Chapter 6: The Trapdoor Closes

  Chapter 7: Dr. Flart

  Chapter 8: The Ant Farm

  Chapter 9: Firing the Wyro

  Chapter 10: The Door of Warnings

  Chapter 11: Into the Realm of Gears

  Chapter 12: Merganzer’s Plan Unfolds

  Copyright

  Four blocks over and twenty-one blocks down from the Whippet Hotel, there was a crumbling neighborhood of mostly empty buildings. Somewhere in that neighborhood, at the end of its darkest alley, a man stood before a grim door. He’d walked down six concrete steps to arrive at the door, where he stood, unsure of what he should do next. His elbow had caught the edge of a spiderweb on his way down, and he nervously brushed it away.

  Twice already he had raised his hand to knock, only to pull it back and consider his options. He could return to his basement cubicle at the New York tax office, where the ceilings were lit with awful yellow buzzing lights and his cell phone wouldn’t work. All day long he stared into a computer screen looking for mistakes on forms. It was a thankless, depressing job, for which he was paid only enough to afford a one-room apartment in the very neighborhood where the grim door stood.

  His name was Mr. Carp, and he hated his day job. It ran the risk of turning him bitter like the burnt coffee they served in the basement.

  Any casual observer would see how Mr. Carp’s whole awful existence appeared to well up inside him — his mangy cat, Claudius; his threadbare couch; a total lack of interesting hobbies; basic cable.

  He was a man, it seemed, with nothing much to lose. And so, against his better judgment, he knocked on the forbidding door.

  He instantly turned to leave, as if he knew it was a mistake. When his foot touched the last concrete stair and he was about to make his escape into the dismal gloom of the alley, the door opened.

  “Mr. Carp, what a pleasant surprise.”

  It was a sharp voice, filled with the kind of power that stopped sad, desperate men in their tracks. Carp looked back and tried to be polite.

  “Ms. Sparks, I presume?”

  “The one and only,” she answered, tapping the edge of the door with her long fingernails. She eyed the attaché case under Mr. Carp’s arm and smiled wickedly. “Come in, then, come in. I’ve just put on the tea. We’ll have a nice long chat, us two.”

  Ms. Sparks leaned out the door as Mr. Carp came back and stood beneath the shadow of her large beehive hairdo.

  “I have some business to discuss,” Mr. Carp said, anxiously straightening his wire-rimmed glasses as he stared up into Ms. Sparks’s narrow eyes. He had a thick, tangled-looking mustache, which he ran his hand over nervously.

  Although Ms. Sparks did not seem impressed, that was all part of her act. She knew this was a visitor of some importance, for Mr. Carp had the power to turn the fate of the Whippet Hotel in a different direction.

  The grim door shut and a secret conversation was had.

  There is no better place on earth for a wedding than the roof of the Whippet Hotel. At least that’s what Leo Fillmore thought as he watched six yellow ducklings waddle down the grassy path toward him. They had rings of delicate white flowers from Mr. Phipps’s garden tied around their necks. Now and then, the ducklings would turn clumsily with the idea of eating the flowers, but looming overhead they saw Betty, their mother, staring down at them. Any ideas about eating flowers before they reached the pond quickly vanished.

  A mariachi band strummed three guitars in perfect unison as a robot the size of a coffee cup arrived at the top of the grass pathway.

  “Here comes Blop,” Leo’s best friend in the whole world, Remi, said, straightening his tie nervously. “I hope he can stay quiet long enough to get down here.” Remi had a round face and brown skin like his mother.

  “Stop worrying,” Leo said, patting Remi on the back. “Blop knows better. He’s got this.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Remi said, and he might have been right to worry. Blop was a terrible chatterbox.

  Both Leo and Remi were anxious as Blop weaved back and forth toward them with bubbles rising out of his metal belly button. As the bubbles climbed into the air, they popped, freeing glitter that fell like sparkling snowflakes over the gathering of people.

  “Nifty trick.” Remi smiled. “I was afraid he was going to burp the ABCs.”

  Blop whirled all the way down to the edge of the pond and aimed his head like a cannon over the water.

  “Time for his big finale,” said Remi. “I hope it doesn’t backfire.”

  A circle opened on Blop’s round head and there was the sound of swooshing air as small daisy petals shot up and showered down over the pond.

  “Amazing how many of those will fit inside such a small space,” Remi observed, but mostly he was glad the whole thing had gone off without a hitch as Blop zigzagged back to where the boys stood.

  Leo smiled and gazed over the pond, where the ducklings were chasing one another around glowing lanterns floating on the water. When the petals started to land all around them, they were at once confused and elated. They were too young to realize that petals did not normally fall from the sky, so they simply did what ducks do: They gladly gobbled up whatever fell their way.

  Leo, too, looked up into the night sky, thinking how strange it was that at age eleven he owned this remarkable hotel. It was a lot of responsibility, but he’d done a fine job keeping it running during his first year on the job. All around him were tall buildings full of light, encircling the Whippet Hotel like centurions. He searched for Merganzer D. Whippet, the man who had built and formerly owned the hotel, wondering if he would appear.

  Meanwhile, Blop whirled to a stop next to Remi. “That was harder than it looked,” said the robot, staring up at the two boys as the last of the bubbles drifted up and away. And then, “Not much of a view from way down here. Just a lot of shoes and —”

  “Shhhh,” Remi scolded, picking up Blop and placing him gently into his jacket pocket. When Remi looked up again, Leo’s dad was coming down the path. Clarence Fillmore might be the head maintenance man at the Whippet Hotel, but tonight he looked like a movie star at the Academy Awards.

  “Mr. Fillmore cleans up better than I expected,” said Mr. Phipps, the gardener, leaning down and whispering to the boys.

  “He’ll be back in his overalls by morning, you can bet on it,” Leo joked, but he had to admit, his dad did look like a million bucks: clean shaven, hair in perfect order, dapper in a tuxedo and shiny black shoes. He arrived next to the boys, smiled at them both, and took up his position next to a remarkable sculpted green bush, one of Mr. Phipps’s masterpieces: two green doves standing three feet high, filled with dots of light, and between them, a silver plate holding two rings.

  “You’ve outdone yourself, Mr. Phipps,” Clarence Fillmore whispered.

  But the Whippet gardener (and, on this night, its justice of the peace) ignored the compliment. His attention was riveted elsewhere, and as Clarence Fillmore followed the gardener’s gaze, he understood why.

  It would be said for years after by everyone in attendance that Mr. Fillmore and the doves and the floating lanterns, the bubbles and ducklings and flower petals, the quiet buildings towering overhead on every side, and all the rest — it all paled in comparison to the person who arrived alone at the top of the grassy path just then. There came a hush over the pr
oceedings. The guitars stopped playing and even the ducklings stopped swimming on the slick surface of the water.

  The bride had arrived on the scene.

  “Wow,” Blop said from Remi’s pocket, but that was all he could manage. Even for the most talkative robot Mr. Whippet had ever constructed, Remi’s mom was unexplainably beautiful.

  Mr. Phipps finally cleared his throat in the direction of the band and they stirred awake. “Here Comes the Bride” played on three guitars as she began to walk. Leo felt his dad trembling beside him.

  “Steady, big guy,” he whispered. “You’re going to make it.”

  Pilar smiled nervously as she came down the path. The train of her dress was long and white, and her smile was contagious.

  When she arrived next to Leo’s dad, she unexpectedly leaned down to Leo’s level and looked into his eyes.

  “We have something for you, will that be all right?”

  She had a Mexican accent — soft around the edges — that had always enchanted Leo, so it was possible Pilar could have said “I need to kick you as hard as I can right now, will that be all right?” and Leo would have nodded just the same. Pilar glanced up at Mr. Fillmore for one last sign of reassurance, and he nodded knowingly. The two of them had talked about what was about to happen, and they had agreed it was the right thing to do.

  And so it was that when Pilar stood, she also waved gently in the direction of a gathering of bushes next to the small pond. Out of the darkness came Captain Rickenbacker and Theodore Bump, two of the Whippet’s long-stay tenants. Captain Rickenbacker lived on the third floor in the Pinball Machine and had long imagined he was a superhero. On this night, he wore a black cape in the style of Batman, and in his hands he held a box covered with an equally black velvet cloth. Theodore Bump had been at the hotel forever and a day. He wrote novels by the dozen and kept mostly to himself, but tonight he was staying close, making sure Captain Rickenbacker didn’t drop whatever it was he was carrying.

  “I don’t remember this from the rehearsal,” Remi said, but his mother looked at him in a way Remi knew all too well: Be patient, you will see.

  Captain Rickenbacker walked with an important sort of stride, and when he reached the two carved doves, he set the box on top of the silver tray. Then he stood aside and Mr. Bump removed the black velvet cloth so Leo could see what was underneath.

  “It’s a full moon,” Leo’s dad said. “We planned it this way.”

  A glass box sat on the silver tray, and inside, a white ghost orchid was quiet and sleeping. It had been his mother’s special flower, the one so hard to grow.

  “The moon will wake her up,” said Pilar.

  Leo looked at Pilar, who was about to become his new mom. It was very hard to think about replacing his real mother, but she’d already been gone such a long time. There were days when it was hard for Leo to remember what she looked like without taking out her picture. The silver tray was at Leo’s eye level, and as he stepped toward it, the ghost orchid began to bloom in the soft moonlight on the roof of the Whippet Hotel.

  “So you know she is always here with us,” Pilar said. “With our family. Is this okay?”

  Leo wiped a tear that had found its way to his cheek. He couldn’t take his eyes off the orchid, so peaceful and perfect, just like his mom had been.

  “It’s okay,” Leo said, and it was. Pilar was going to be his mom, and it was going to be fine. He smiled wistfully at her and his dad, then looked at the flower once more as it reached out toward them all.

  The wedding vows were said and the band roared into gear. There was a lot of dancing and laughing and cake-eating. After a time, Mr. Phipps took the glass box to the safety of his garden shed, because like a special memory, a ghost orchid is a fragile thing.

  When the dancing really got cooking, Leo let Ms. Pompadore return to her room and get Hiney, her yappy little dog. Ms. Pompadore had been paying her way as the concierge since Leo had taken over the hotel. As a former Texas socialite, the task fit her like a glove. If a guest needed tickets to a show or information about a museum, Ms. Pompadore was always there with a snappy answer.

  “Just keep Hiney away from the ducks,” Leo said. “You know how they get with each other.”

  “I’ll carry my little Hiney, not to worry!” Ms. Pompadore was gone in a flash, leaving Remi and Leo to giggle.

  Now and then a very important person doesn’t show up for a wedding, the kind of person who is missed but not mentioned because it makes everyone a little sad to remember they are at a party without that special you-know-who. Maybe he’s only trying to make a surprise entrance and he will show up after all, everyone thinks. Such was the case at the Whippet Hotel wedding as a one-of-a-kind blimp secretly drifted between two skyscrapers, its full shape coming into view directly behind the pond. No one noticed it at first, because the pilot of the blimp was being crafty about his business. And the blimp was special in the way it reflected light, so that it was very hard to see if a person wasn’t looking for it. But then, suddenly, the blimp lit up with a message, written out in bright lights along its curved side:

  CONGRATULATIONS, PILAR AND CLARENCE!

  Everyone on the roof looked up and gasped.

  “I had a feeling he might show up unexpectedly.” Captain Rickenbacker smiled.

  “I have a great urge to return to my room and write this all down,” said Theodore Bump, but instead he whipped a pen out from behind his ear and began taking notes on a wedding napkin.

  Everyone was enchanted, beguiled, overwhelmed with happiness as Merganzer Whippet leaned his head out over the crowd and bowed, a great top hat falling, falling, falling off his head until it landed in Pilar’s outstretched hand.

  “Oh dear,” said Merganzer, touching the wild flop of hair on top of his head. “I’ve dropped my hat.”

  “Come closer!” yelled Pilar, laughing along with everyone else. “I’ll throw it back to you!”

  But he vanished once more inside the cab, blasting a shot of hot air into the blimp to hold it steady. Mr. Powell, Merganzer’s oldest and dearest friend, emerged for a split second and waved, yelling hello. And then he, too, was gone.

  “The blimp is passing over,” said Pilar. She was a sad bride, which is one of the saddest things in all the world. “I wish he could stay.”

  “Wish granted!” Merganzer shouted, throwing a long rope ladder down one side of the cab. Mr. Powell did the same from the other side, and soon the ropes were secured and two figures were climbing down to join the party. Betty waited at the bottom of Merganzer’s rope ladder, honking excitedly.

  “Oh my, you’ve gone and had ducklings again,” said Merganzer, kneeling down to Betty and putting his long hand out toward her. The ducklings gathered around and nudged against his legs, for they knew a lover of ducks when they saw one. Merganzer laughed, pointing his tremendously long nose up into the air, and the music, which had stopped, began playing again.

  “May I?” Merganzer asked, looking at Clarence Fillmore for permission to dance with his new wife.

  “By all means, dance all night if you want!”

  Pilar tried to return his hat but he told her to keep it, so she put it gamely on her own head and began teaching Merganzer how to cha-cha.

  Mr. Powell was not a dancer, so he stood with Leo and Remi near the gift table.

  “Where have you been all this time?” Leo asked, because the two of them hadn’t been seen in almost a year.

  “Near enough to know we weren’t needed,” said Mr. Powell. “You’re doing a fine job with the hotel, a fine job indeed. If there’s one thing Merganzer knows how to do, it’s get out of the way when he’s no longer needed.”

  “Isn’t it enough that we miss him?” Remi asked. He took Blop out of his pocket and set him on the gift table, where the robot could whirl around and examine the packages.

  “I’m afraid being missed isn’t enough,” said Mr. Powell. “He’s very busy. Many important things to do.”

  “Busy doing wh
at?” Leo asked. “And where?”

  Mr. Powell looked at Leo as if he’d gone mad.

  “Making things in the field of wacky inventions, of course! What else would he be doing?”

  This was an exciting idea for Leo, and he thought seriously about scaling the rope ladder while no one was watching so that he could stow away to the field of wacky inventions and see what was going on there.

  “What sorts of things is he making?” asked Remi, gazing up at Mr. Powell with big, round eyes.

  “Secret things.”

  “But those are the best kind!” complained Remi. “And besides, we can keep a secret. Can’t we, Leo? Tell us just one thing he’s working on, won’t you?”

  Leo wasn’t going to beg. If Remi wanted to, that was fine. But Leo would sooner dance the cha-cha than grovel for information. George Powell asked about the finances and the guests and the state of things at the hotel, but he would say no more about wacky inventions.

  When the dance ended, Merganzer hugged Pilar and walked around the roof, taking a moment to talk to each and every guest. The blimp seemed to be pulling harder in the wind as Merganzer tapped a special key card and blasted more hot air inside to hold it steady. Everyone gasped with delight when the blimp lit up. They all wished he would stay, but it was becoming clear he would be leaving them again, and soon.

  Leo and Remi left Mr. Powell with Blop and joined Merganzer at the rope ladders.

  “Can I look inside?” asked Remi. The cab was way up in the air and Remi was short and round, so seeing inside would take some effort. Merganzer studied the boy carefully.

  “I think maybe not,” he said. “There are complicated controls in there. This is no ordinary blimp.”

  “How so?” asked Leo. He pretended as if he only cared a little.

  “Can’t say, too perilous,” Merganzer replied. Leo loved the way Merganzer always made everything sound dangerous.

  “You have to go again, don’t you?” Leo asked. He was feeling sorry for himself as he thought about all the fun he and Merganzer had shared in the past.