Floors #2: 3 Below Read online

“I’m what you might call a gatekeeper,” Ingrid said. “No one gets any lower in the Whippet Hotel without going through me. So let’s hear it. Why’d Merganzer send you?”

  “Can I let her in here?” Remi asked. Loopa was sitting alone at the door, staring in with pleading eyes.

  “If I let her in, they’ll all think they can follow. Trust me, that’s a bad idea. They’ll break something. I never let a monkey in the house.”

  “How long have you been down here?” asked Leo. “And how far down are we?”

  Ingrid laughed. “I thought I was asking the questions! But I can see that’s not going to work. You two are either very shrewd or super dumb. I’m withholding judgment.”

  She stepped across the room on short, stubby legs and opened the lid on a wooden box not unlike the one Leo had seen attached to the tree above. Reaching down inside, she pulled out three glass bottles.

  “I get them from Dr. Flart,” she said, closing the lid and returning to the table. “He’s madly in love with me, but I’ve got my heart set on someone else.”

  Ingrid set two of the soda bottles on the table and said something about how a girl wants flowers and dates and more gross stuff Remi and Leo had no interest in. They stole a glance at each other as Ingrid set the top of the third bottle against the edge of the table. She smacked it with the top of her hand and the cap flew off, landing on the floor. There were a lot of caps on the floor, like peanut shells at a ball game, so it was clear she drank a lot of whatever Dr. Flart was sending her.

  She held the bottle out to Remi, then opened the other two in the same manner.

  “Here’s to Remi,” she toasted, and they all tapped their bottles together. “For riding the zip line against his better judgment.”

  There was a commotion outside on the metal grate, where the Leprechauns were putting the chair back in place. Looking into the bottle, Leo got a little nervous. Whatever was in there had started to bubble up orange and frothy.

  “Drink up before it starts to disintegrate!” Ingrid shouted. She tipped her bottle back and guzzled all the contents down in six giant swallows. The lady could chug, no doubt.

  Ingrid let loose a burp that was so loud and long, both boys were actually a little bit jealous as they stared at their own drinks. The liquid was half gone in both bottles, bubbling and frothing into thin air right before their eyes. Thinking they were already down to half a monster burp, they started gulping.

  Seconds later the bottles were empty, and the two boys looked at each other, smiling. They had that feeling of the best burp ever rising up from their guts and, wow, when they let them rip, they were magnificent.

  “And it tastes good, too!” Remi laughed.

  “Was it grape or lime?” Leo asked.

  “No, no — it was root beer and orange soda. No, wait . . .” Remi pondered.

  “Let me save you the trouble,” Ingrid said. “It’s Flart’s Fizz, the one and only. Nothing like it in the world.”

  “You’ve got to market this stuff! People would go crazy for it! You could make millions,” Remi said. He licked the edge of the bottle, but the flavor was all gone.

  “Or at least seven hundred thousand,” Leo mumbled under his breath.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” Ingrid leaned over the table, let out a leftover, unimpressive little burp, and got right to the point. “You two were sent down here for funds, I can tell. He’s run out of money again, hasn’t he?”

  “Not exactly,” Leo said, and then he completely spilled the beans about the taxes and owning the hotel, right up to the part about the other things they would need. He didn’t get that part out, because Ingrid huffed and interrupted.

  “Giving you the hotel is just the kind of ridiculous nonsense he’s always doing! Is it still standing?”

  Remi came to Leo’s defense. “Of course it’s still standing. Leo is the best second-generation maintenance man in the whole city of New York. And I’m the best bellboy.”

  Remi beamed, but Ingrid just rolled her eyes. She couldn’t believe the most secretive, the most important, the most amazing hotel in the world was owned by the kid sitting in front of her.

  “Go on,” she said wearily. “What else did he tell you?”

  “He gave us a list of things to bring back,” Leo began. “And a certain amount of money he was hoping to get. Not for us, for the taxes.”

  “Right, for the taxes.” It wasn’t clear to Leo and Remi whether she entirely believed them.

  “It’s, uh . . .” Leo trailed off. “Well, it’s seven hundred thousand dollars. That’s how much he needs.”

  Ingrid had one of those stony, hard-to-read expressions on her face. She betrayed no emotion. Surprise, disgust, relief? Leo and Remi had no idea how to read the immovable object that was her face.

  There was a cigar box on the table, and she flipped open the lid, which made Remi recoil in his chair. He’d lived in a building where the superintendent smoked cheap cigars all day long. Whenever the man had showed up at the crummy door to his crummier apartment, he’d blown smoke in Remi’s face and laughed as Remi gagged. Remi had grown to despise them. If Ingrid could burp like a sailor, maybe she smoked giant stinky cigars, too.

  Ingrid fished around in the box with her hand, searching for something. She took out a brown paper bag and shut the cigar box.

  “Did I mention I have asthma?” Remi said, fake coughing for effect. Leo looked at him sideways as Ingrid uncrumpled the top of the bag and pulled out two objects: a pad of paper and a pen. Remi let out an audible sigh of relief and looked back at Loopa, wishing she could come inside. She was hanging from the top of the door by her long tail, swinging back and forth like a ball on a string.

  “Take this to the tax man,” Ingrid said as Remi turned back around. She had written something on the paper and was ripping it off the pad. Ingrid looked up, smiling, as she began putting things away. “I thought you were going to ask for a lot more. Anything over a million and we’d have to involve the Realm of Gears. You don’t want to go down there unless you have to. Very dangerous.”

  “What’s the Realm of Gears?” Remi asked, but Ingrid waved his question away as if it didn’t matter, since they weren’t going there anyway.

  Leo took the piece of paper in his hand. It was official, that much he could tell by the gold leaf edges, the Bank of New York symbol, and the guarantee signed by the sitting president of the Federal Reserve.

  “Is that a real signature?”

  Remi leaned in close.

  “Whoooooooooooa,” he said, drawing the word out in a long whisper.

  Ingrid pushed her tiny round glasses up on her nose and nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Now,” she said, leaning forward on her elbows, “what about that list of things you needed? Let’s hear it.”

  Leo pocketed the note for seven hundred thousand dollars and began to feel a lot better about how this was going.

  “I got this,” Remi said, putting an arm in front of Leo just as he was about to speak. Leo wasn’t so sure after all the joking Remi had done about the list, but he let it pass.

  “Merganzer asked us to bring him . . .” Remi stopped for dramatic effect. “He asked us to bring him four Floogers, a zip rope, the iron box, and a bottle of Flart’s Fizz.”

  “Wait, that’s not —” Leo tried to say, but Remi elbowed him in the gut. Also, Ingrid had a big reaction to this news. She was up on her feet in the blink of an eye.

  “Four Floogers and the iron box?! That’s outrageous!”

  Remi was pleased she hadn’t mentioned the bottle of Flart’s Fizz and felt that the small white lie was well worth another world-class burp on the way back to the hotel.

  “And the zip rope,” Remi said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Quiet down about the rope,” Ingrid said in a half whisper. She motioned toward Loopa, whose eyes had widened into even bigger green saucers.

  Ingrid stepped to the door and met Loopa’s eyes as the monkey swung back and forth.r />
  “Go and check on the duck; make sure she’s not eating the flowers. When you get back you can have a bottle all to yourself.”

  The monkey was gone almost before the words left Ingrid’s mouth. As Ingrid turned to the boys, they could see that her expression had changed. She was no longer only nervous. She was downright worried.

  “They live for Flart’s Fizz. It’s a very, very rare treat.”

  “Why not give it to them all the time?” asked Remi. He thought the idea of monkey burps was hilarious. If he ran this place, he’d be handing out Flart’s Fizz to every monkey in the tree.

  Loopa and the other monkeys were gone (they tended to travel in a pack), and Ingrid came back to the table. She was concerned as she looked at the two boys.

  “I can’t believe he would send two kids down here for the iron box. And four Floogers. Very unusual.”

  “And a bottle of —” Remi started to say, but this time Leo elbowed Remi in the arm and Remi stopped short.

  “Why is it such a big deal, Ingrid?” Leo asked.

  She walked past them to the box on the floor, kicking open the lid with her foot.

  “You can only get Floogers from Dr. Flart,” she said. “He’s not as easy to deal with as I am. Mad scientists are by nature . . . unpredictable.”

  Ingrid took out two bottles of Flart’s Fizz and set them on the table.

  “It’s a dungeon down there,” she warned.

  Remi had been thinking of meeting Dr. Flart and getting all sorts of great stuff he could have fun with. And there were the two bottles of Fizz on the table, which he very much wanted to grab and run away with. But the way Ingrid said dungeon spooked him. He felt a chill in his bones.

  “And the iron box,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s held in a perilous place. One only goes there when one must.”

  The whole undertaking was starting to sound diabolical to Leo. His responsibility was the Whippet Hotel, and he already had the money he needed to pay the taxes.

  “Let’s take the payment back to the hotel,” Leo said. “Maybe that’s all we really need right now.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Ingrid said. “Merganzer never asks for something he doesn’t desperately need.”

  Loopa had returned, and this time she sat patiently in the doorway. More monkeys were gathered outside, staring into the tree house from the open windows.

  “Don’t get too close,” Ingrid said. “This will be terribly loud.”

  Remi and Leo had no idea what Ingrid was talking about as she picked up one of the two bottles of Flart’s Fizz and carried it to the door. She cracked it open on the windowsill with a loud pop! and the metal cap flew into the air. All the monkeys leaned even closer to watch the orange bubbles, their eyes growing larger and greener.

  Ingrid got down on one knee and held the bottle out to Loopa. When she did, the very small monkey grabbed it, tipping it into her mouth with lightning speed. All the other monkeys stood transfixed as the contents of the bottle slowly vanished.

  Ingrid ran back into the tree house, hiding behind the table like someone was about to launch a water balloon attack.

  “Why are you hiding behind the table?” Leo asked.

  “Hiding? Who’s hiding? I’m not hiding.”

  Leo and Remi turned in their seats and faced the door, where Loopa’s little stomach had stretched to the size of a basketball. It happened fast, too fast for Leo and Remi to react — an earsplitting, high-pitched rumble as Loopa’s mouth opened and the burp to end all burps escaped into the tree house. It was a wet, Fizz-flavored burp that blew Remi’s hair back and pierced his eardrums. The sound ripping through the tree house was, Leo thought, like the taste of Flart’s Fizz: He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what the sound was. In the same way that Flart’s Fizz tasted like all the best flavors rolled into one, the sound of Loopa’s burp held many sounds at once, all of them earsplitting and high-pitched. Loopa’s cheeks flapped wildly as the burp just kept getting louder and longer until finally, like a balloon emptied of air, she flopped down on her butt with a big grin on her face.

  “Is it over?” Remi asked. He’d been covering his eyes and, peeking out from behind a finger, he couldn’t be sure if there was another round heading his way or not.

  “Yup, that’s about it,” Ingrid said. “She’ll want a nap.”

  Leo felt a light film of wetness on his face and arms. “Eww,” he said, but it smelled pretty good as it evaporated, like Flart’s Fizz.

  “The thing I don’t understand is why he needs so many Floogers,” said Ingrid as she walked toward the monkeys, shaking her head with confusion. “That’s a lot of power.”

  “Power?” Leo questioned. “What kind of power?”

  Ingrid stood in front of the door and wouldn’t look back at the boys. “I’ve said too much,” she whispered, but Leo and Remi had both heard her. They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and tried to imagine what a Flooger was and what kind of power it would deliver. Remi figured that if it was anything like Loopa’s burp, a Flooger could probably power a small city for a month.

  Ingrid leaned against the frame of the door like she was waiting for something to happen. She looked at her watch and nodded, then Loopa hiccupped and her eyes went very wide. After that, the little monkey stumbled to the edge of the door and curled into a ball, where she appeared to fall asleep.

  “One zip rope,” Ingrid said, bending down and picking up Loopa’s long, orange tail, which was no longer attached to Loopa.

  “Okay, that’s just wrong,” said Remi. “Loopa’s tail fell off!”

  “Take it easy — she’s trying to sleep,” Ingrid said softly. She returned to the table carrying the zip rope, also known as Loopa’s tail.

  “Is she okay?” Leo asked. He’d heard about lizards that could shed their tails if they were frightened by a loud noise or an intruder. But a monkey losing its tail?

  “Well, sure, she’s okay.” Ingrid laughed. “Takes about a month, but it’ll grow back. They do love Flart’s Fizz. Drives them crazy with delight.”

  “Is it, you know, gross?” asked Remi. He was imagining that only moments ago the tail had been attached to a monkey. Ingrid whipped the tail around like it was a rubber hose. Then she tied the end of it to one of the table legs and started walking out of the tree house. When the zip rope was ten or eleven feet long and still hadn’t snapped or oozed something gross, Remi started getting interested.

  “That’s a supercool monkey tail you’ve got there,” he said.

  Ingrid started walking toward them, and the zip rope got shorter and shorter until she untied it and held it over her palm. At rest, it was about four feet long.

  “You won’t believe how far it will stretch or how strong it is. No one does.”

  “Ten feet?” Leo asked.

  “Twenty!” Remi guessed.

  “You two are small thinkers,” Ingrid said, smiling as she held out the zip rope.

  “More?” Leo asked.

  “That’s impossible!” Remi screamed, slapping his forehead with amazement.

  “Most things in Merganzer D. Whippet’s world are impossible. I would have thought you’d come to expect that by now.”

  She got very serious then, opened up the cigar box once more, and took out a key card. It was copper and scuffed, old with use. There was an etching of a science beaker on one side with bubbles coming out of the top. It looked like a key card designed for entrance into a mad scientist’s lab.

  “Now both of you need to listen to me, and listen good. Merganzer is up to something big. Bigger than the hotel. Even bigger than what’s under the hotel. Travel carefully. And use this only if you really, really need those Floogers.”

  “And the iron box,” Remi added.

  “Yes,” Ingrid said slowly, quietly. “And the iron box, too. You’ll probably need this.”

  Ingrid went back to the cigar box one last time and took out one of the fuses required to run the duck elevator undergroun
d.

  “It’s the only one I have, so be careful with it. Without that fuse, there’s no getting to Dr. Flart.”

  Leo remembered Merganzer’s words: “You can get more fuses from Dr. Flart — he should have a few of them lying around.”

  “One more question,” Leo said, putting the zip rope and the scratched-up copper key in the front pocket of his maintenance overalls. He was already thinking of all the ways he could use the zip rope, like jumping off the roof of the hotel, but those things would have to wait. “How many floors are down here?”

  “Including mine, three,” Ingrid said. “Three below, and more danger the lower you go.”

  Leo looked at the sleeping monkey, felt the note for seven hundred thousand dollars in his front pocket, and smiled.

  He was bound and determined to visit every single floor in the Whippet Hotel.

  I don’t see why you had to bring the cat. It smells awful.”

  Ms. Sparks was in a foul mood as she walked up Fifth Avenue. It was hot and sticky and Mr. Carp’s cat really did put off an odor. He’d tried everything — mothballs, kitty baths, perfume — but Claudius was born to stink.

  Mr. Carp glanced down at the long-haired feline attached to a ragged leash (Claudius hated the leash) and tried to cover for what appeared to be his only friend in the world.

  “It’s not my fault I can’t afford a cat walker,” Mr. Carp complained. “Claudius spends all day inside a sweltering apartment; what do you expect?” He was sweating under the rim of a wide sun hat as he tried to keep up with Ms. Sparks, whose long stride was equal to two of his own.

  Ms. Sparks crumpled her nose in disgust.

  “I’ll make Leo Fillmore keep it in the basement. It’s the only way.”

  “But —”

  “Silence!” Ms. Sparks said as they approached the vast grounds of the Whippet Hotel. Mr. Carp thought she looked positively mesmerized at the sight of the tall iron gate. She gazed into the openness and stood as still as a statue, her heart leaping at the wonder of what lay inside. She wasn’t the only one who felt this way. It was common for passersby to gawk at the property as if they’d stumbled onto the edge of the Grand Canyon. With skyscrapers all around its edges, the corner lot where the hotel sat was a gripping sight. Rolling pathways on green grass, giant bushes cut into the shapes of animals, a pond — all with the tiny, miraculous hotel in the middle.