by Matthew Ward
“Ah, there you are, Arthur,” declared Uncle Mervyn as the boy handed him his drink. “You’ve made it just in time! While you were gone, your family achieved the Highest Number of Uniquely Posed Photographs in Ten Minutes, putting them just one record away from their quota. So—as there’s nothing scheduled on this stage for the next half hour—how would you like to get up and have a go at your latest attempt? Think of how thrilled the others will be when they find it’s you who’s ensured their eligibility for the championships!”
Mrs. Waite nodded. “Won’t that be wonderful, Arthur?”
“Oh,” said Arthur in surprise. He had in fact been secretly hoping for just such an opportunity—but to be asked to make an attempt on such short notice in front of so distinguished a crowd suddenly gave him pause. “Well,” he said, “I don’t have my bullwhip or my milk bottle with me—and I’m afraid it will take at least fifteen minutes to go and get them, and by that time…”
“Mrs. Waite’s been kind enough to fetch them for you already,” retorted Uncle Mervyn, grinning warmly at the housekeeper. “You’ll find them over there, just next to the stage.”
“Really?” said Arthur with a nervous smile. “Thanks, Uncle Mervyn; thanks, Mrs. Waite. I’ve never really performed an attempt on stage before.”
“Well, here’s your chance then, lad. But I’ve a feeling,” Uncle Mervyn added with an encouraging wink, “this may end up being more than just an attempt for you.” He had a twinkle in his eye that made it difficult for Arthur not to believe him.
Arthur went to retrieve his bullwhip and milk bottle while Uncle Mervyn took to the stage to gather the crowd. There were only a few stragglers still milling about from the previous act, as most of the audience had since moved on to the next stage, where Mr. Mahankali’s high-diving dogs were attempting a new synchronized diving record.
“Ladies and gentlemen, lads and lasses,” Uncle Mervyn called to the six audience members who apparently did not care for canine acrobatics, “prepare yourself for an act like none you have ever witnessed before. Watch in amazement as this rarely seen member of the Whipple family strives to break his very first world record and secure his family’s position at this year’s championships by cracking a bullwhip 932 consecutive times while balancing a milk bottle on his head. Please welcome to the stage—Arthur Whipple and his magical bullwhip!”
Arthur’s heart was pounding through his chest. He had not expected his uncle’s boastful introduction, and now he didn’t know how he could possibly live up to it. The time for backing out, however, had long since passed—so he put one foot in front of the other and started up the stage steps.
Reaching into his pocket, Arthur grasped the magical domino his uncle had given him for his birthday—and began rubbing it with all his might. He could only hope some of its magic would now rub off on him.
The tiny crowd clapped indifferently as the boy with the bullwhip stepped onto the stage.
When he had reached the middle of the platform, Arthur placed the milk bottle on top of his head, and the halfhearted applause died down. He suddenly found himself stranded in a sea of silence and realized it was up to him to fill it.
Arthur glanced to his uncle with a look of dismay—but Uncle Mervyn simply looked up from his watch and shouted, “Begin!”
THE RECORD ATTEMPT
Arthur cocked back his arm, then snapped it downward. The tail of the whip shot out in front of him—but to his dread, it made no sound.
He brought the whip up again and snapped his arm down a second time—but again, the whip did not crack.
One of the audience members, an old Chinese man with a long white mustache—who happened to be the owner of the First Motorized Wheelchair Ever Assembled—slowly pivoted his antique wheelchair and inched his way toward the high-diving dog show.
Arthur began to panic. Had he completely forgotten how to crack a whip? What if he couldn’t manage to crack it even once? What was he doing wrong?
He closed his eyes and tried to recall the fundamentals of whip cracking, as taught to him by his uncle.
“I trust you’ve learned,” Uncle Mervyn had said, “that a sonic boom occurs when an object travels faster than the speed of sound—or roughly 761 miles per hour. I imagine you’ve even heard a sonic boom yourself once or twice when a jet plane has torn across the sky above you and broken the sound barrier. But what you might not have known, Arthur, is that common cows have been traveling faster than the speed of sound since the early Roman Empire—long before the First Jet Aeroplane was ever invented. You see, lad, the sound of a bullwhip cracking is actually the result of a small sonic boom. When properly handled, the tail end of a whip can reach speeds in excess of 760 miles per hour, thus breaking the sound barrier and creating the noise we hear as a whip ‘crack.’ And of course, bullwhips are made from leather, and leather is really just tanned cow hide. So, you see, contrary to popular belief, the race to achieve supersonic flight was not won by a man—but by a cow, some two thousand years ago when the First Leather Whip was cracked, and it took us humans till the mid-1940s just to catch up. Now of course, some might say this discrepancy in technological advancement is due to the fact that no cow has ever survived the flight, making it difficult for our scientists to question them about their methods. But I have other suspicions….”
Indeed, Uncle Mervyn believed that some sort of magic must be involved in order for common cows to succeed at such a complex endeavor. Which is why at Christmas he had presented Arthur with a magical bullwhip.
“But what makes it magical, Uncle Mervyn?” Arthur had asked.
“Well,” replied his uncle, “how else could a cow break the speed of sound without being strapped to a rocket?”
As Arthur stood alone on stage, on the verge of disaster, his uncle’s words now brought him clarity. Seeing as this was a magical bullwhip he was dealing with—why was he trying so hard to make it work? Surely, the whip had much greater powers than he had.
Arthur glanced again at Uncle Mervyn, who, despite the boy’s rocky start, was grinning back at him and offering an encouraging thumbs-up. The boy closed his eyes and cleared his mind. He raised the bullwhip handle once more, and then—without giving it too much thought—brought the whip down with a crack.
Arthur let out a sigh of relief. All right, he said to himself. Just 931 more cracks to go.
The first hundred or so were a bit shaky, but by the 101st crack, Arthur had hit his whip-cracking stride. He was cracking the whip naturally and fluidly, without even having to think about what he was doing. So much so, that he began to focus his attention elsewhere.
Arthur soon realized what a ragtag bunch his audience actually was. The old wheelchair-bound Chinese man was halfway to the next stage by now, leaving behind five less-than-ideal specimens of spectatorship. It was clear the only reason they had stayed behind was that it required far less effort than walking the one hundred feet or so to get to the next act. Their eyes were glazed over, and their faces carried blank expressions.
With such unsupportive supporters, Arthur felt his momentum slipping away, his technique growing clunkier and clunkier with each crack. He found himself wondering how much easier this all would have been if he had just had a larger audience, with people who were somewhat interested in bullwhip cracking and milk-bottle balancing. He would not have to wonder for long.
Up at the next stage, the last of Mr. Mahankali’s high-diving dogs executed a reverse triple somersault before plunging into the large portable diving pool with barely a splash—sending the surrounding crowd into a frenzy of applause. And this was only the warm-up round.
Dressed in a finely tailored dinner suit, the dogs’ trainer—who, of course, had as much hair on his face and body as any of the beasts he cared for—had just turned to the diving platform to set the height for the actual record attempt, when he happened to glance toward Arthur’s stage.
He was delighted at first to see the boy attempting another record, but it soon became clear
, even from a hundred feet away, that Arthur was struggling—and that he was performing in front of what may have been the World’s Worst Audience.
When Mr. Mahankali had finished his adjustments, he strode to the front of the diving pool and addressed the crowd. “Thank you, good people,” he said. “The high-diving dogs will now be taking a fifteen-minute break before attempting their next world record. In the meantime, please join me in proceeding back to stage number 9, where one of the great Whipple children is in the process of breaking a world record of his own.”
Then, in one swift motion, the uncommonly hairy man climbed onto the back of Shiva, his elephant transport, and took hold of the reins. As he started toward Arthur’s stage, Mr. Mahankali called out to the mass of bewildered people behind him: “Come now. Follow me.”
When Arthur noticed the elephant heading toward him and the throng of people following behind it, his heart swelled. Were all those people really coming to watch him?
Finally, his efforts would be fully appreciated by a crowd of sophisticated observers—some of whom might actually be whip-cracking enthusiasts. It was just what he needed to raise his spirits and rekindle his momentum. As the new arrivals shuffled in around Arthur’s stage, his whip-cracking instincts returned.
Arthur had cracked the whip 699 times before the sheer magnitude of his new audience finally struck him.
He had been staring out at the night sky for most of the attempt, as he concentrated on keeping the milk bottle balanced. But when the crowd cheered at his seven-hundredth crack, he allowed himself a full view of his surroundings. The present crowd was well over ten times the size of his previous audience.
Suddenly Arthur felt incredibly small. Had all these people really come to watch him?
It was hard to believe he had ever hoped for anything beyond the benign little crowd he’d started with. He tried to forget they were there, but it was no use. There were simply too many of them. Then he remembered a bit of advice he had once heard—that if you get nervous in front of an audience, you should picture its members in their under-garments. He figured it was worth a try—but it did not have quite the effect he had anticipated.
As Arthur closed his eyes and imagined them all without clothes, he found it rather unsettling how well they were taking it. Here they had just lost all but a few scraps of their clothing, and they were acting like nothing had even happened. Arthur longed to have that kind of confidence. He wasn’t half that self-assured with all of his clothes on.
More dismayed than encouraged, Arthur opened his eyes and wiped all thoughts of scantily clad audience members from his mind. He decided it was better to be stared at by a group of regular, fully clothed people, than by a bunch of strangely confident, half-naked ones.
Fortunately, the whole business of picturing the audience without clothes on and then pondering the implications of such a proposition, had in fact taken Arthur’s mind off his anxiety for several moments. Before he knew it, the crowd was cheering again as he hit eight hundred whip cracks. The cheers were even louder this time, as Arthur neared the home stretch, with only 132 cracks to go.
All of Arthur’s uneasiness seemed to magically lift from his shoulders. The finish line was pulling him now. All he had to do was go along for the ride.
At the 901st crack, Uncle Mervyn began counting down from thirty-two, and the audience quickly joined in.
“Thirty-two!” called out Uncle Mervyn.
Crack! went the whip.
“Thirty-one!”
Crack!
“Thirty!”
Crack!
Arthur began imagining what it would feel like to be hoisted onto the crowd’s shoulders and paraded around the estate.
“Twenty-five!” shouted the audience.
Crack! went the whip.
They would carry him across the lawn and all the other guests would turn to each other and whisper, “Who is that?” And someone would exclaim, “Why, it’s Arthur Whipple! He’s finally done it! Oh, happy day!”
“Twenty!” shouted the audience.
Crack! went the whip.
They would set him down in front of his family, who would all be grinning with pride. His father would say, “Well done, my boy! I am proud to call you my son! You are a Whipple, after all!” His mother would cry, “Oh, Arthur, you are as good a son as any mother could hope for!” His brothers and sisters would argue over who would get to be Arthur’s partner for the upcoming Table Tennis Tournament of Champions.
“Fifteen!” shouted the audience.
Crack! went the whip.
All of his dreams would come true. He would never feel like an outsider again.
As Arthur scanned the crowd, trying to determine which onlookers were most likely to storm the stage first, he was startled by a strangely familiar pair of sparkling green eyes staring up at him from the third row back.
The hopeful gears of his imagination ground to a halt as a rush of horror swept over him. There, only a few feet from the front of the stage, stood the ominous ghost girl from the Crosley estate.
She looked even more fearsome than he remembered. Her face was a ghastly shade of pale, her lips a deep dark red, nearly black—not unlike the color of her swirling wavy hair, which hovered about her shoulders like wisps of reddish inky smoke.
Arthur’s breath caught in his throat. What insidious sort of spirit was this? As everybody knows, only the most powerful poltergeists are able to leave the confines of their designated haunting grounds—and here this one was standing on his own lawn.
He knew he would not escape a second time from such a determined demon, but he was not yet ready to die. Not when he was in the midst of his most successful world record attempt to date.
Please, he pleaded with the phantom, let me finish this one last attempt so I don’t die completely recordless.
But Arthur’s concentration had been shattered by the promise of certain death.
“Eleven!” shouted the audience.
Ffffft! went the whip.
The crowd gasped.
After 922 consecutive whip cracks while balancing a milk bottle on his head, Arthur’s whip had ceased to crack, just ten cracks away from a new world record—and the fulfillment of all his dreams. Upon his impending demise, the Grazelby Guide would remain unmarked by Arthur’s name for all eternity.
Having just had it so thoroughly crushed, Arthur could no longer see much use for his soul, and at that moment, he found himself longing for the wraith to come devour it—if in fact it was still interested. But when he searched the audience, he found the ghost girl had vanished.
Somehow, the specter’s disappearance caused Arthur even more distress than its arrival had. Was he losing his mind? Had he just ruined his best chance at breaking a world record simply by being unable to control an overactive imagination?
There was an awkward silence as the audience came to grips with what they had just witnessed. The only audible sound was the steadily increasing whine of a dilapidated wheelchair motor as the old Chinese man finally made his way back to Arthur’s stage. When the old man realized he had made the journey between stages twice now without witnessing a single record-breaking feat, he let out a sigh of indignation.
After a few more moments of disbelief, the silence was broken by the solitary sound of two hands clapping.
Still seated astride the elephant, Mr. Mahankali applauded Arthur’s valiant effort—and decided to ignore the small matter of the boy’s failure to succeed. Gradually, other members of the audience joined in the applause, but most were simply too dumbfounded to show any sort of response. Much of the crowd turned away and slowly headed back to the next stage.
Arthur removed the milk bottle and hung his head in despair. He had just achieved the best failure quotient of his life—a near-perfect 1.0108—but somehow this only made him feel worse.
Uncle Mervyn, however, seemed to feel otherwise. “Good show, Arthur!” he exclaimed as Arthur climbed down from the stage. “That was yo
ur best attempt yet! They don’t come much closer than that, lad. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be filling out the paperwork for your first world record!”
Although he had been hearing his uncle’s pep talks for as long as he could remember, and not one of them had ever proved accurate, Arthur once again felt his disappointment begin to dissipate.
UNWELCOME GUESTS
As Arthur made his way toward the main stage with Uncle Mervyn and Mrs. Waite, he tried not to think about how close he had just come to achieving his one true goal in life. Fortunately, he would soon have the start of official birthday celebrations to occupy his mind.
After weaving their way through the gathering crowd, the boy and his chaperones found their places near the front of the towering stage at the festivities’ center. Minutes later, the crackle of a microphone joined the pop of a spotlight as it cut through the night air and gleamed onto the curtain.
The crowd hushed as a short, balding man in a black tailcoat and white tie stepped up to the microphone. Arthur recognized him as “Nonstop” Norman Prattle, the popular radio personality who held the record for Most Logged Hours of Radio Airtime.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” the man declared in a rich but nasally voice, “on behalf of Mr. and Mrs. Whipple, as well as the entire Whipple clan, it is my honor and privilege to welcome you to the Eighteenth Annual Whipple Family Birthday Extravaganza!”
The crowd broke into thunderous applause, filling Arthur with a deep sense of pride.
As the applause faded, Nonstop Norman continued. “And now, it is my great pleasure to introduce the musical entertainment for tonight’s festivities. All the way from Chicago, Illinois, performing their hit song, ‘All of Me,’ please welcome—Johnny Stump and the Missing Limbs!”