3 Below Read online

  “Can’t talk now, need to land more airships!” Mr. Powell said.

  Mr. Powell carefully moved each of the other five buildings into position, controlling the airships from inside the cockpit. If Leo and Remi could have seen the control panel Mr. Powell was in command of, its complexity would have made them marvel with delight.

  “This is turning out to be a very weird night,” Remi said as other hotel roofs settled into place with a hiss of steam on lighted pads. Underfoot, a clatter of mechanical sounds led Leo to believe the top of the Whippet Hotel would forever after be something else. It was being bolted into place on the ground, where the Whippet was bound to stay. Its days of grandeur at the top of a building had, it seemed, come to an end.

  There were wide tree trunks and tangled limbs everywhere, but Remi and Leo could see around those things as the other five floors settled into place across the grounds. Leo had a keen sense of observation, and he found it curious that none of the other floors landed with an array of mechanical sounds. Gazing up into the trees, Leo saw strange, unexplainable tracks running everywhere. Vines hung from the great oaks, and, pushing a few of them to the side, Remi looked up and saw one of the airships hovering quietly overhead like a parent watching his or her children in a new and dangerous place.

  “Hey, Blop,” Remi said, pulling the robot out of his pocket so he could have a good look around. “What can you tell us about this place?”

  Blop spun around two or three times, made some important-sounding whirs and beeps, and answered: “Number of spiders in the immediate vicinity: between twelve thousand and two million. Odds of having one crawl into your mouth if we sleep outside tonight: fifty-fifty.”

  “That was so unhelpful,” Remi said, gulping as he imagined a spider crawling down his throat.

  “I’m not that useful after midnight,” Blop explained in his tinny voice. “Low energy.”

  Remi put Blop back in his pocket and shook his head.

  “Weird robot,” Leo said.

  “You’re telling me. I live with the guy. You should hear some of the predictions he gives me in the middle of the night. Did you know the odds of finding a snake in your bed at some point in your life are —”

  “Stop!” Leo said, putting his hand up in Remi’s face. “I don’t want to know.”

  “One in nine,” Blop said from Remi’s pocket, his mechanical voice all muffled and faraway-sounding.

  Leo couldn’t believe they’d gotten into such a meaningless conversation. Nor could he fathom the terrible odds he’d just been given about snakes and spiders in the night. While Leo thought about these things, an army of orange-tailed monkeys descended from the trees. They slid down a long orange zip rope attached to a golden duck at the center of the roof.

  “Hey! It’s the same kind of guys as under the hotel back home!” Remi said. “Cool.”

  Leo and Remi watched as the Leprechaun monkeys began untying all the ropes that held the airship to the roof of the Whippet Hotel.

  “Looks like we might be staying awhile,” Leo said, taking notice as each rope came untied. Only the center line — the orange zip rope — remained. It had once been a monkey’s tail, but now it was just another of Merganzer D. Whippet’s outrageous inventions: the strongest rope in the world, strong enough to pick up a building or lasso a whale.

  “Leo!”

  Mr. Powell was leaning out from the cab above, staring down at the boys.

  “You’ll have to do the last part. Use these!”

  Mr. Powell tossed something out of the sky. It missed the pond by only a foot, landing with a thud on the green grass of the hotel roof.

  “Quickly now,” Mr. Powell said. “Untie the zip rope! I’ve made all the preparations for takeoff.”

  Mr. Powell vanished for a moment, then he was back, leaning down and yelling.

  “I’m off on a supply run. Quickly now, Leo. Untie me!”

  Leo picked up the strangest set of pliers he’d ever seen. They had four prongs that came together when the handles were squeezed. Leo tried them and the four prongs set off sparks at the center.

  “Whoa. That’s a mean set of pliers you got there,” Remi said. “I bet they’d work on a snake in your bed. I’ll give you a dollar for them.”

  Leo loved tools of every kind and kept many of them in his maintenance overalls. He was thrilled to have such a rare and unusual pair of pliers. The golden duck was in the center of the pond, but the monkeys had all made a chain overhead that ran from one side of the building to the other, right over the center of the water, wrapping their limbs together. One of them reached down and grabbed Leo by the back of his maintenance overalls and picked him up, passing him along the chain of monkeys.

  “On my way!” Leo yelled up to Mr. Powell.

  “So I see.” Mr. Powell laughed.

  While Leo made his way to the zip rope on a chain of orange-tailed monkeys, Merganzer D. Whippet suddenly appeared next to Remi.

  “He’s doing quite well, wouldn’t you say?”

  Remi was so taken by surprise he nearly jumped out of his bellboy jacket.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. I thought you were a snake.”

  “The snakes around here are very quiet. You wouldn’t know they were close until it was too late.”

  “Sometimes it’s better if you don’t share everything.”

  Merganzer chuckled softly. He retrieved his coat, which had come off when he’d gone skydiving.

  “My dear boy, I’m only telling a tall tale. There are no snakes here. The spiders are huge, but no snakes. I promise.”

  “Okay, ready?” Leo yelled. He’d arrived at the golden duck, where the orange zip rope was tightly tied in place.

  “Untie it!” Merganzer yelled back.

  Leo turned around and smiled at Merganzer, then looked up at Mr. Powell just to be sure. Mr. Powell gave a thumbs-up, but when he leaned over the edge of the cab this time, he was wearing a big, goofy helmet and racing goggles.

  “Ready!” he said.

  “Why’s he wearing a helmet?” Remi asked Merganzer.

  Merganzer shook his head as if telling Remi he shouldn’t worry, everything was going to be fine. “Takeoff can be a little bit unstable.”

  Leo reached down and put the four prongs around the zip-rope knot and pressed the handles together. Sparks flew and the pliers jumped in Leo’s hand, like he’d just sent a jolt of electricity through the knot. He watched, but the knot didn’t move.

  “Turn it up to ten and hit it again!” Merganzer said.

  Leo examined the pliers more carefully and found a round dial at the end of one of the handles. There were ten small numbers on the face of the dial, and it was currently set to number 2.

  “Are you sure we should go straight to ten?” Leo asked.

  “Oh yes, definitely go for the gusto,” Merganzer said. Mr. Powell looked down, and though the goggles hid part of his round face, Remi was pretty sure Mr. Powell was alarmed.

  When Leo had clicked the dial eight times and it was set at a whopping number 10, he took a deep breath and held the four prongs over the knot.

  “We should probably stand back,” Merganzer said, putting a hand against Remi’s red jacket and pushing him toward the rail of the Whippet Hotel.

  “What about Leo?” Remi asked, scared for his brother, who was hanging right over the top of the knot.

  Merganzer didn’t have time to answer before Leo pressed the handles together and the four metal prongs delivered a mega-sized shot of electricity. Leo and the monkeys were blown back as though they’d bounced off a gigantic trampoline. The sky filled with monkeys, flipping and turning in every direction, while Leo went airborne thirty feet over the Whippet Hotel.

  “Leo!” Remi yelled. His little bellboy cap had been blown off and his jacket buttons had burst open from the impact, but he didn’t care about any of that. His brother was in real trouble … or so he thought.

  The monkeys began to catch one another’s hands, formin
g a long chain that ran from thick tree limbs above out into the night sky. Two of them — just to be extra safe — had hold of Leo’s maintenance overalls, and soon it was clear that Leo was getting the ride of his life. He swayed back and forth on a string of monkeys, laughing and acting like an airplane as he flew back and forth.

  “How come he gets to have all the fun?” Remi asked.

  “Well, he does own the hotel,” Merganzer said, putting a hand on Remi’s shoulder. “And he’s very handy.”

  Remi looked down at his hands and remembered that he was often fumble-fingered when it came to delicate tasks.

  “You picked the right guy for the job.”

  The monkeys set Leo down on the roof and retreated up into the trees, where they sat watching the airship. The zip rope hadn’t come untied, but the knot was loosening ever so slowly.

  “That was quite a jolt,” Leo said. “Maybe next time you could warn me.”

  “If you’d known, you’d never have done it,” Merganzer said. “That’s a life lesson worth noting.”

  Merganzer knelt down and looked at the two boys. “Life is full of adventures we’d never take if we knew how they were going to turn out before we did them. But we’re always better for having had the courage to live. Understand?”

  Both boys did understand. They’d spent enough time in Merganzer’s world to have already learned the lesson. Would they have ever ventured under the Whippet Hotel if they’d known how dangerous it would be? Certainly not! But looking back, they’d never, ever want to have missed meeting Clyde, the mechanical dog, or Dr. Flart, or Loopa the monkey. If they’d known the danger that lurked below — the atomic ants, the realm of gears — they would have been too afraid. But then they’d never have burped after a Flart’s Fizz or enjoyed the amazing grape flavor of foamy Flooooog.

  The boys were thinking of all those adventures, wishing they could do them all again, when the knot on the zip rope finally popped free with a loud snap!

  “And he’s off!” Merganzer said, standing and turning his head skyward. The airship shot into the air, rising like a rocket taking off for the moon. Merganzer took a key card out of his coat and pressed the screen.

  “Everything all right, George?”

  Mr. Powell’s distant voice returned: “All systems go! Stabilizing!”

  “Excellent! Make sure to bring more pickles,” Merganzer said. “And onion rings.”

  “Check!” Mr. Powell said. “Will be back in a few days!”

  Merganzer smiled down at Leo and Remi, putting a hand on each shoulder as Betty and her little ducklings came near. She was quacking angrily, like all the commotion had woken her up.

  “Never wake a duck,” Merganzer said. “They hold a grudge.”

  “Noted,” Remi said as the duckling Merganzer had named Comet pecked at his shoe.

  “It’s been a long night,” Merganzer said with a sigh. “Time to get some sleep. Tomorrow morning, all will be revealed!”

  Before either of the boys could reply, a tiny monkey with an orange tail landed on Remi’s shoulder and he turned to look at it. “Why am I not surprised?”

  There was a monkey on Leo’s shoulder, too, and suddenly the two boys were being hoisted into the sky on their way to a tree house, where they would spend a quiet night among the monkeys.

  Little did they know that a competition was already afoot, one that would require all their skills and every bit of courage they could muster.

  The biggest adventure of them all was about to arrive in the field of wacky inventions.

  Leo woke to the gurgling hum of Remi’s breathing at the crack of dawn. At first he mistook the sound for the basement boiler at the Whippet Hotel, but sitting up and looking from side to side, he realized he was no longer in the great city of Manhattan. Blue sky peeked through the canopy of limbs and leaves overhead. Standing up, Leo investigated the three rooms of the small tree house: a bathroom (he stopped in for a little visit); a sitting room, with a table holding a bowl of bright green apples (he took one and bit into it); and the sleeping porch, with its two hammocks (one nearly touched the floor under the weight of his stepbrother).

  Instead of waking up Remi, Leo crept past the sagging hammock and went outside with his crunchy apple. A catwalk with a rail made of tree limbs ran a circle around the tree house, and Leo walked the whole way around, trying to get a good look at the ground below. The tracks he’d barely been able to see the night before looped and twirled in parallel sets between the giant oaks. But they were hard to see even in the morning light, because the rails looked more like tree limbs and roots than any sort of track something might ride on. Leo was way up in the tree, far enough that much of the world he now found himself in remained a mystery, hidden behind leaves and limbs. He could see some tents and a long, angular building painted with polka dots, and he could see the far edge of the wall in one spot, but that was about it. When he looked straight up, he saw a series of wood slats nailed to the side of the tree, leading to a platform even higher still.

  Leo finished his apple and tossed the core out into the open space below the tree, but before it could hit the ground, not one but four monkeys had either grabbed it or were trying to steal it from one another. They made a lot of noise, which finally woke up Remi.

  “What a racket,” Remi said, stumbling out onto the porch, barely awake. “Any food around here?”

  “In there, on the table,” Leo said as he took an inventory of his maintenance overalls. He couldn’t quite remember all that he’d brought, and it had occurred to him on waking that tools could be very important in a place like this. Remi came alongside, eating an apple.

  “You didn’t by any chance bring a candy bar, did you?” he asked, making a sour face at the tart flavor of the one thing they had to eat. “This thing tastes like monkey food.”

  One of the guiding principles of the universe is that you don’t have to tell a monkey twice that you’re holding monkey food. The words were barely out of Remi’s mouth when the apple was snatched out of his hand and fought over by more squealing monkeys.

  “I have those crazy pliers Mr. Powell threw down to me,” Leo said, starting to pull things out and put them back into his many pockets one by one. “And I brought some other stuff that might be useful: half a roll of duct tape, a Swiss Army knife, a rock hammer, a ball of string, and three pennies. Oh, and some beef jerky, but it’s been in here for about a year. None of that really helps us figure out what to do next, does it?”

  “I only brought a robot,” Remi responded, swiping the beef jerky with noticeable excitement.

  Remi pulled Blop out of his pocket and held him at arm’s length as his eyes opened up.

  “You shouldn’t hold me this way,” Blop said. “I could fall.”

  Blop began to explain what would happen if he were dropped from a high distance — what it could do to his memory chip, how delicate his wiring was, and so on. The best thing to do when Blop talked about something no one cared about was to point his attention toward something else. He was highly distractible.

  “My guess is you were invented here,” Remi said. “Got any memories about that?”

  Blop’s little head whirled back and forth and he made a lot of goofy beeping sounds. “There are dangerous things down there,” Blop said. “Better stay up here, where it’s safe. But if you must go down there — highly unwise — you can use the zip lines.”

  “Why’d you have to go and say that?” Remi tried to say, for he hated zip lines. But his mouth was full of linty, dry beef jerky, so instead it sounded like fwy chew haffa go a shay sat?

  “This is not a language I know,” Blop said in reply. “Is it Yeti?”

  After that there was no use with Blop. He hated not knowing the answer to things and became highly annoying whenever it happened. Remi rolled his eyes and put Blop back in his jacket pocket.

  “Up there!” Leo said. He’d already spied a long row of tree limbs nailed to the side of the tree leading overhead to a platform.
“Come on! We can get down there before anyone wakes up and have a look around.”

  “And why would we want to do that?”

  Remi had managed, with great effort, to swallow the beef jerky. It was wholly unsatisfying.

  “Wait for me!” he yelled up, because Leo knew there was one thing Remi hated more than riding zip lines: getting left behind.

  When the two boys arrived on the platform, they found it considerably less stable than they’d hoped it would be. It wobbled in the soft morning breeze blowing through the limbs, and there were no rails whatsoever. Just a flat place to stand, a wooden box of rollers for riding on, and a long zip line that ended someplace they couldn’t see.

  “Remember how we used these before?” Leo asked. “Under the Whippet Hotel, in the underground jungle?”

  “I remember it was not enjoyable,” said Remi. “Especially the landing part.”

  “Come on — it’ll be fun,” Leo said. “I bet there are pancakes down there.”

  Remi’s eyes lit up. The beef jerky had tasted like dirt, and he knew Merganzer was famous for cooking up breakfasts that were super-amazing, fantastic, and great.

  “You had me at pancakes,” Remi said. “Let’s do this.”

  They each picked up one of the rollers, and Leo set his over the top of the rigid line. “Follow me. I’ll yell back if there are any obstacles.”

  “Obstacles? Who said anything about obstacles?”

  Before Remi could change his mind about the whole endeavor, Leo dove off the platform and into the air, zipping down the line, away from the tree house. Remi followed a little too close, and because he was heavier, caught up to Leo in approximately two seconds.

  “Incoming!” Remi screamed, plowing into Leo’s back and sending him twisting and turning as they approached a wide limb in their path. Leo barely lifted his legs in time.

  “Lift your legs, Remi! Quick!”

  Remi did as he was told, but he was quite a bit shorter than Leo, so he hadn’t needed to lift his legs. Forming into a cannonball did make him go faster, though, and he clobbered Leo again as they both screamed and careened down the zip line toward a platform in the middle of the outer wall. The line leveled out as they approached the end, and Leo was able to hop off and stand upright, the wall around the field of wacky inventions staring him in the face. Remi came in like a bowling ball, toppling Leo like a pin and slamming into the stone wall.