Floors #2: 3 Below

by Patrick Carman

  “Grab the book,” Remi said. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get back in the elevator.”

  Leo found the spine for Penguin Island. The author was on the spine, too: France. Pulling out the book, Leo hoped there wouldn’t be some sort of explosion that would knock him off the ladder, but he didn’t need to worry. Absolutely nothing happened.

  “This is ridiculous,” Leo said, irritated with Merganzer’s crazy way of hiding things. But peering into the space where the book had been, Leo saw another book hidden in the shadows. He pulled out four or five books on each side and dropped them to the floor. It rained books, and Leo felt bad. Not for Remi, who was unsuccessfully dodging about half of them, but because the books were being damaged on the way down.

  “Try to catch them!” Leo yelled, but he wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening down below. He was laser-focused on the copy of Oliver Twist that was standing alone between two slabs of marble. It was a hardback edition, thick and old.

  “I think I’m figuring it out,” Leo called to Remi.

  “Great. Maybe warn me if you’re going to keep throwing books. A guy wants to be prepared.”

  But there were no more books to throw. Leo pulled out the copy of Oliver Twist and set it gently in the space he’d created by removing other, less important books.

  And there it was.

  All alone, deep in the dark shadow of the library, a single book stood hidden.

  “I think I found it!” Leo said.

  Leo took a deep breath and reached back into the darkness. It crossed his mind that there might be spiders or mice or rats in the darkest part of an old library, and he hadn’t actually seen what the book was. It was too dark for that. Still, he gathered his courage, reached all the way in up to his shoulder, and took the spine in his hand.

  And then he pulled.

  “I got it! It is the right book,” Leo yelled down. “It’s Robinson Crusoe!”

  Leo waited for something to happen, but nothing did. He began to think maybe he was supposed to do something with the book and started flipping through its pages.

  “Um, Leo?” Remi said.

  “Ah, you’ve set things in motion. Very exciting,” Blop said, and then he went on about the mechanics of how the shelves were moving. Unfortunately for Leo, he wasn’t really listening to Blop, and Remi was nearly speechless.

  “This book is past due,” Leo said, shaking his head and wondering why it was hidden in a secret place. He had one arm hooked through the ladder as he came to the last page. “It’s not even Merganzer’s book. He checked it out from the Brooklyn Public Library twenty-three years ago and never returned it.”

  “Leo,” Remi said, finally getting his voice back. “Hold on!”

  Leo closed the book and looked down, wondering what the problem was. But before he could get a good look, Remi shoved the ladder as hard as he could. This time, Leo couldn’t hold on.

  He was falling, and the only thing that was going to save him were the shelves of books that were flying past. Leo dropped the copy of Robinson Crusoe and reached out, grabbing the ledge of a shelf full of books about polar bears, whales, and sea creatures. The impact stretched Leo’s arms to the breaking point, then he let go and caught the next ledge down. He was going slower the second time, and held firm.

  “Get out of the way, Leo!” Remi shouted.

  Leo looked down and saw his legs hanging limply in the air. He was losing his grip, but that wasn’t the worse part of his predicament. The shelves below him were spinning like revolving doors. Ten-feet-high sections, starting at the floor, were whirling in circles as if stuck to a pole in a furious wind.

  And the spinning sections of bookshelves were getting closer.

  Leo was nearly forty feet in the air. But two ten-feet-high sections were already spinning, and the section right below him was starting to move. He didn’t have much time before the section of shelf he was hanging from would start spinning, too.

  “Try to climb down!” Remi yelled. But the ladder had been pushed off to the side and the spinning shelves weren’t going to let it back in.

  “But how?!” Leo yelled. He glanced down as three of his four fingers on each hand pulled away.

  I can time this just right, Leo said to himself. I can do it.

  The shelf Leo was holding on to began to move, and as it did, Leo let go with his last fingers. He landed with a thud on the turning shelf below, and slid off to the side, nearly falling all the way to the hard floor of the library. Just as he was about to be knocked in the head by the shelf above, he dropped once more, landing on the top edge of the second-highest spinning shelf.

  “You’re doing it!” Remi said, clapping his hands together in excitement.

  “I know, right?” Leo smiled, but he should have been watching while he was celebrating. The shelf above him came around and knocked him off his feet. He tumbled down, landed hard on the first spinning shelf, then dropped the final ten feet like a bag of flour, knocking Remi over.

  Both boys crawled out of the way as Blop began talking about the book Leo had found.

  “First book in the Whippet Library, Robinson Crusoe,” Blop said. Leo was just happy to be alive, and Remi was extremely glad his brother and best friend was okay.

  “Second book, Oliver Twist. Third book —”

  “Let me guess,” Remi said. “Penguin Island?”

  “Third book, Penguin Island. Fourth book, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Fifth book . . .”

  “Can you set him on the floor while we check this out?” Leo asked. “There are thousands of books in here. He could be at this a while.”

  Remi nodded his agreement and set Blop on the floor, where he happily recited the names and the order of the books that had become part of the collection of the Whippet Library.

  “I think we’ll need to be careful,” Remi said. “Do you have the zip rope?”

  Leo patted his hand on one of the side pockets of his maintenance overalls. “Got it.”

  All the shelves were still spinning, including the bottom one, but not so fast that they couldn’t slip through as the opening appeared. Once they reached the other side they found stairs leading down into darkness.

  “I don’t understand this hotel at all,” Leo said. “There must be a hidden floor here, one no one knows about.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, the boys stopped abruptly, for they had stumbled onto something that looked extremely fragile.

  “Don’t move,” Leo said.

  “Dude, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Remi said, which was saying a lot, given all the rooms in the Whippet Hotel. “We have to make it go.”

  On the vast floor before them were thousands upon thousands of dominoes. They wound all through the space, up and down long ramps, through silver rings, under bridges of stone. In the very center of the room sat a safe, and on top of the safe, a golden duck.

  “He does like himself a good duck,” Remi observed.

  “I wonder how it all works,” Leo said.

  “Easy, you just push one over and the whole thing tumbles!” Without asking Leo, Remi touched the toe of his shiny doorman shoe to the edge of the very closest domino.

  “No, don’t!” Leo warned, covering his eyes at the thought of having to set all the dominoes back up again if it didn’t work.

  “Hey,” Remi said, touching the first domino again. “It’s not moving.” Remi tapped the domino a little harder. Then he kicked it. Then he jumped on top of a whole bunch of standing dominoes.

  None of them moved.

  “Interesting,” Leo observed, kneeling down for a closer look. “They’re metal, and so is the floor.”

  “Heaviest dominoes I ever saw,” Remi said, but Leo thought he knew the truth.

  “It’s like the puzzle downstairs. The floor is a giant magnet holding them all perfectly still.”

  “Merganzer is awesome,” Remi said, shaking his head at such a wacky invention.

  They both t
raveled through the maze of dominoes and stood in front of the safe, which had a handle of weathered wood. Leo tried opening it, but it was shut tight, and there was no dial or lock. He also noticed a strange humming sound in the air, like the sound of many bees high in a tree.

  “Has to be the dominoes,” Leo said. “There must be a way to make them move.”

  “Number eighty-seven, The Cat in the Hat,” Blop said. “A personal favorite.”

  The little robot had rolled up to the edge of the stairs. He was looking down at them with his bright mechanical eyes.

  “Blop,” Leo called, walking back toward the stairs and leaving Remi to stare at the golden duck, “do you know how to make the dominoes move?”

  “Number eighty-eight,” Blop said, but then he stopped, having been given a different directive. “Why, yes, I do know how to make the dominoes move. It’s fun to watch. Would you like to move them?”

  “I would,” Leo said.

  “Pull the duck’s leg.”

  Leo looked back at Remi, who already had his hand on the narrow leg of the golden duck.

  “Like this?” Remi asked, and he pulled. The leg came up and the humming sound disappeared.

  “Cool,” Remi said. He backed up two steps, letting go of the leg, and accidentally touched the heel of his shoe against a random metal domino. It fell over, knocking down other dominoes in their turn.

  “Must be done in the right order, or the emergency lock will engage,” Blop said. “Only Merganzer can open it if that happens.”

  The dominoes were falling fast, racing around the room with incredible speed. “We have to stop it before it’s too late!” Leo cried.

  Remi took this to mean that he should dive onto the moving dominoes and try to stop them, which was funny to watch but not very helpful. He dove from section to section, trying to bring things to a halt, but dominoes kept falling all around him.

  “Blop,” Leo said, staring up at the robot at the top of the stairs, “can we stop it?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Can you tell me how?” Leo asked in his calmest voice. He wanted to freak out, but he knew Blop responded best to direct and simple commands.

  “Push the duck’s leg back down.”

  This time it was Leo running through the room, knocking down dominoes with almost every step he took. By the time he reached the golden duck, about ninety percent of all the dominoes had fallen. He pushed the golden leg back down and heard the humming sound return. Like magic, every domino jumped back to its starting position, all standing at attention like thousands of rectangular army men.

  “Whew,” Remi said. “That was a close call.”

  Leo stayed where he was and sent Remi back to the stairs, where he waited for Leo to pull the golden duck leg up again. When he did, Remi tapped the first domino. Leo and Remi got to watch as every last one fell in perfect order: up ramps, under bridges, through rings that had lit up with fire.

  Near the end, the dominoes toppled up a long ramp that ended above the safe. The last domino fell, landing directly on the duck. There was a slot on the golden duck’s back and the domino fit perfectly inside.

  Then the golden duck laid a golden egg, which dropped through a hole on top of the safe.

  “It’s moving,” Remi said, pointing to the duck.

  The golden duck began to rise into the air on a long, thin pole. Up it went past the ceiling, to places Leo and Remi couldn’t see.

  “I think it’s on the roof,” Leo said, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He grabbed the wooden handle in front of him and opened Merganzer D. Whippet’s safe.

  The door was heavy as iron, but it glided on solid brass hinges without a sound. By the time Leo had the safe open, Remi was standing next to him. They both peered in at once.

  “There’s the egg,” Leo said. The golden egg was perched on a stem that looked like a long, silver golf tee. It had landed perfectly. In the center of the safe was a round circle painted in white with a word in the middle:

  Fizz.

  “Better put the bottle there,” Leo said.

  Remi took the last bottle of Flart’s Fizz out of his red jacket pocket and looked longingly at it one last time. It was orange or brown or sort of yellow inside, he couldn’t say. Flart’s Fizz was funny like that, a color that was not a color, with the best kind of surprise inside.

  “He knows how to hit me where it hurts,” Remi said, but he knew it was for the best. It wasn’t his bottle of Flart’s Fizz.

  Remi set the bottle in its place. “This is going really well, don’t you think?”

  Leo thought about everything they’d already been through in such a short time, how dangerous it had been, and of Ms. Sparks lurking inside his beloved hotel.

  “Sure, Remi,” he said. “It’s going swell. I just hope the second half is easier than the first.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Remi said.

  Along one side of the safe was a collection of crumpled manila envelopes. The envelopes had the appearance of having been well used, with paint splatters and small notations and schematic drawings in weathered pencil everywhere on their surfaces. Remi pulled one out and found that it had a red wax seal keeping it shut, just like the envelope they’d been given. The seal had a letter W pressed into it.

  “Looks official,” Leo said. “And there are dozens of them. I wonder what’s inside.”

  Remi turned the envelope over and gasped.

  “No way.”

  There were words written there in a wispy, Merganzer D. Whippet style.

  Master plans: The Pinball Machine

  Leo beamed as he started pulling out envelopes. Each one was crumpled and worn at the edges, full with the sense of having been on location when the real work was happening.

  “Remi,” Leo whispered. “These are the master plans. It’s amazing!”

  Leo read two:

  Master program and schematic: Blop

  Plan model: The Double Helix

  “The Double Helix!” Leo yelled. “I LOVE the Double Helix!”

  The Double Helix was a secret elevator that ran up the middle of the Whippet Hotel, but really, it was more like the best thrill ride ever. Fast, treacherous, spinning, twisting!

  Remi read two more:

  Master plan: The Flying Farm Room

  The Realm of Gears

  And this particular envelope had another note scratched on it, a note that had been written more recently: Open only when traveling in the Realm of Gears.

  “Whoa, Leo,” Remi whispered. “The Realm of Gears. Isn’t that one of the places Ingrid said something about?”

  “I think you’re right,” Leo agreed. “It sounds like there are instructions inside.”

  “But remember what she said: If we needed over a million, we’d have to go there. So we’re fine. There’s no reason to take the envelope, I guess.”

  “Actually,” Leo said, “I didn’t want to worry you, but yeah, we’re in some trouble. She wants seven million, not seven hundred thousand.”

  “Ouch,” Remi said. “I don’t think selling my comics will get us that far. Or my four bucks.”

  Both boys thought about what the gears might be like and whether or not the route would be dangerous. They put all the other envelopes away, but kept the one about the Realm of Gears.

  “He would have wanted us to have it, right?” Remi said, looking up at Leo for guidance. Leo wasn’t older, not really, not enough to matter. But he had always seemed like a barely bigger brother, someone he could trust when he didn’t know the answer to a tough problem.

  “He’s forgetful, for sure,” Leo said. “Maybe he meant to say we should take it. He didn’t say not to.”

  That was all the convincing Remi needed. He liked the idea of having some insurance in case things went sideways underground. Folding the envelope the long way, Remi stuffed it in his inside jacket pocket for safekeeping.

  They asked Blop how to close the safe, and the little robot explained about
the golden egg, how to put it back into the golden duck, and how to close the safe again so it would open when they came back.

  “But we’d have to go to the roof to do that,” Leo said. “That duck is all the way up there now, at the end of this pole. We don’t have time for that now, not with Ms. Sparks threatening to auction off the hotel in about five hours.”

  They’d made a little bit of a mess, but there was no time to pick up all the fallen books and put everything back the way it was. In fact, there was no time to stop the shelves from turning, even though Blop was determined to tell them the complicated way in which it should be done.

  Instead, they ran through the Whippet Library, newly excited by the places they would need to explore in order to finish what they’d started.

  The first thing Leo noticed when he returned to the duck elevator was the item that was no longer there.

  It’s gone,” Leo said.

  “What’s gone?” Remi asked.

  “The fuse, and it’s the only one we have. We can’t get back under the hotel without it.”

  “Did you hear that?” Remi asked.

  “Hear what?” Leo asked back.

  Someone had used the trapdoor on top of the duck elevator and was still sitting up there, Remi was sure of it. He pointed to the ceiling of the small space.

  “Put Blop away before he starts talking,” Leo whispered in his smallest voice.

  “Who’s up there?” Remi shouted without thinking, blowing their cover as Leo slapped his forehead in frustration.

  “Perfect,” Leo said, but in a way he was glad. They needed the fuse and the only way they were going to get it was to first find out who’d taken it. At least Remi followed Leo’s instructions about Blop. There was only one sure way to make the robot go quiet: put him upside down in Remi’s red jacket pocket. It was like putting him to sleep, something even Remi did once in a while for a break from the never-ending monotony of Blop’s voice.

  “If that’s you, Jane Yancey, you’re in big trouble!” Remi said once Blop was safely upside down in his pocket. “Loopa better not be up there! She could get loose in the elevator shaft!”