3 Below

by Patrick Carman

  Powell wished it weren’t true, but with all the worldwide plans they had before them, they had to put someone in charge. If Merganzer wanted to make a game of who was to hold the post, so be it. It was a gamble Powell would have to accept whether he liked it or not.

  While Merganzer was busy at work in the field of wacky inventions, Leo was staring at a hazy version of himself. He stood before a wall, but it was no ordinary wall, for this one was made of mirrored glass. A thick blanket of fog swirled in the air all around him, drifting on an aimless wind.

  “Merganzer, where do you get your ideas?” Leo marveled, because the wall before him was one of many such walls in the hidden floor of the Foxtrot Hotel. There were, in fact, hundreds of them. They created a labyrinth of mirrors where six different people were trapped like rats in an ever-reflecting maze.

  “Remi! Lucy! Alfred!” Leo yelled, but it was no use. The fog swallowed up all the names he was saying, and everything he heard seemed far off in the distance. Voices bounced off mirrored walls, but the fog was like a sponge soaking up water: It devoured every sound, turning the whole floor into a dull roar of muted voices.

  There was only one thing to be done, and that was to walk. But Leo was a very smart boy. Not only had he known how important a roll of duct tape was, and gone back to get it when it might have been lost forever, he knew he’d come upon a moment made for duct tape. As the fog churned all around him, he stuck the end of the roll of tape onto the mirror where he stood. Only then did he begin walking, unrolling the tape with a loud screeching sound with each step he took.

  “I hope I don’t get into any trouble for duct taping this mirror maze,” Leo said out loud. “At least it’s silver duct tape. It matches.”

  Leo glanced behind him and saw that his footsteps left a mark in the fog, like stepping into whipped cream. The footsteps stayed there for a few seconds, then they were eaten up by a rolling mist.

  “Cool,” Leo said.

  He turned a corner, then another, then went down a long straight hall of mirrors until he arrived at a dead end. He ripped the tape from the roll and knew he’d need to turn back.

  “Crumb,” Leo said. He thought he could hear Remi’s voice clearer now, and Lucy’s, too. But they still sounded like they were calling from a distant shore.

  “What’s this?” Leo asked himself, spying something hidden in the swirling fog. He waved his hands back and forth, kneeling on the floor, and found a pile of yellow wooden blocks. Each of the blocks had a letter on one side.

  “I think I better take these,” Leo said, gathering all six blocks into his hands and putting them in the big front pocket of his maintenance overalls. He backtracked, following the eye-level silver line he’d already made on the mirror. When he arrived at a fork in the maze, he took out a black Sharpie and started writing on the tape: don’t go that way (arrow), do go this way (arrow). Then he started taping again. In this way Leo eventually bumped into Lucy, who was very excited to see him. She had also been taping and marking.

  “Great minds think alike, I guess,” she said, snapping the top back onto her pen with a smile.

  “Have you seen anyone else?” Leo asked.

  “Nope. I think they’re all heading for the middle just like us, but from different parts of the floor.”

  Leo had noticed that the halls of mirrors were getting shorter and narrower as he went, but it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be because he was getting closer to the center of the hotel.

  “Did you find any of these?” Lucy asked. She held up a blue letter block, like the ones Leo had found.

  “Yeah, I found a bunch of them —” He pulled them out of his pockets and held them in his cupped hands. “But mine are yellow.”

  Leo had six, two each of the letters U, Y, and O.

  “I found seven,” she said, looking more carefully at Leo’s. “I have one weird block in my set. It has a 2x on it. What do you think it means?”

  “I bet it’s a multiplier. It must mean Merganzer wants us to see your letters as two of each, like mine.”

  Leo examined Lucy’s up close and saw that she had the letters M, E, R, T, H, O, and an extra E.

  “Phil almost got out of my pocket about ten minutes ago,” Lucy said as the little dinosaur’s head popped out for a look around. “I might have never found him again in this fog.”

  The idea of a little dinosaur running around in a foggy maze of mirrors struck Leo as the kind of trouble that one wanted to avoid at all cost on a Merganzer D. Whippet adventure.

  “Better keep a close eye on him,” Leo said as they started off together. Through the use of duct tape as a sort of bread crumb trail, Lucy and Leo had come a lot farther in the maze than anyone else had. If they could have popped the top off the floor and floated far above, they would have seen that Remi, Alfred, Mr. Pilf, and Miss Sheezley were much closer to the outside edges of the hotel. In fact, Leo and Lucy turned one more corner and found themselves staring at a wall of swirling fog.

  “It looks like we’ve arrived,” Lucy said.

  “What do you suppose is beyond the fog?” Leo asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “Only one way to find out,” Lucy said, and she stuck her head through the fog. Leo couldn’t see past her shoulders anymore. It reminded him of the headless horseman, which made him nervous, so he grabbed Lucy by her maintenance overalls and pulled her back. When he did, Phil fell out of Lucy’s pocket and disappeared into the whirling mist.

  “What did you do that for?!” Lucy yelled, then she dove headfirst into the wall of fog, and Leo lost sight of her entirely.

  “This is getting superduper, very, totally weird,” Leo said. He put his hand through the churning white fog, hoping to feel something on the other side that would tell him what lay hidden there. Instead, he felt like he’d put his hand sideways into a swimming pool. It turned all heavy or weightless or some indescribable combination of both.

  “Lucy!” he yelled.

  “Come on in!” Lucy yelled back. “Just dive — it’s fine!”

  Leo decided he’d rather play it a little safer than diving into a room that felt strange, so he stuck his head in, as Lucy had done. His face felt droopy and slow, and it finally struck him what was inside the room.

  “It’s an antigravity chamber,” he said with a smile, because it was something he’d always wanted to step inside of. It was impossible, but then so was a hotel room that was also a working pinball machine. So much of Merganzer D. Whippet’s world seemed impossible, but when you believed, it was possible. It would have warmed Leo’s heart if he’d known the Wyro, a thing he had retrieved himself, was powering what Merganzer called the AG chamber.

  “Help me corral Phil,” Lucy said. She was floating around the room trying not to do flips and turns as she looked for Phil. The problem was the wooden blocks, which numbered in the thousands. They were floating everywhere, and even from the door Leo had to push dozens of them aside as they drifted by.

  “Hang on!” Leo said. “I’m coming in!”

  Leo stripped out two feet of silver duct tape and stuck it to the wall, then peeled off another two feet and dove into the antigravity room. The tape held him in one spot, where he floated as if he was in a tank full of water. He looked down for the first time and found that the wooden blocks floated all through the chamber, the bottom of which was quite a lot farther away than he was expecting.

  “The bottom must be somewhere inside the floor below us, in the tiny dinosaur zoo. The antigravity must have kicked in when the two floors clicked together.”

  He couldn’t shake the fact that the floor of the chamber was at least twenty feet below the place where they floated in the air. If the antigravity stopped working, they’d surely hit the bottom hard.

  “This is the coolest thing ever,” Lucy said. She was smiling from ear to ear, her ponytail lolling in circles behind her head.

  “I’ll have to invite you to my hotel sometime. The Whippet has a lot of stuff like this. I’ve g
ot a roller coaster that will blow your mind. And a room that’s a giant pinball machine. You can play it!”

  “Count me in!” she yelled.

  Leo looked up at the ceiling. Through the storm of wooden blocks, he saw two things: a digital clock with red numbers that was counting down, and beneath the clock, nine small squares. The clock had run down to ten minutes, but Leo had no idea what it was for.

  “Hey, there’s Phil! Over there!”

  Phil was hugging a wooden block with all four limbs, biting into it over and over again while he did cartwheels in the air. He wasn’t too far away from Leo, so Leo stripped an arm’s length of tape and pushed off from the wall in Phil’s direction. The sticky side of the duct tape was filling with blocks as Leo reached out as far as he could and just about grabbed Phil before Lucy yelled.

  “He’s pretty wound up. Better not grab him or he might bite.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Leo said, but he had long been a master of picking up lizards, spiders, and mice. He had an exceptional talent for that sort of thing. More important, he had a pair of hot-coal tongs he kept in one of the really long pockets of his overalls.

  “Come to papa,” Leo whispered, taking the tongs in hand and snapping them open and shut like a long, skinny pair of pliers. Phil was preoccupied with eating the wooden block, so when he floated just close enough, Leo had no trouble gently clamping the hot-coal tongs around Phil’s waist. The tiny dinosaur was not happy. He thrashed around like a little monster caught in a trap until Lucy finally made her way back and put him in her pocket.

  “Maybe give him a toy to play with,” Leo said as he put away the tongs. Lucy grabbed the first wooden block to come by and dangled it next to Phil’s head. He held the block with his small front claws and tried to eat it.

  “Dinosaurs aren’t that smart, huh?” Leo asked.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking maybe that’s why they’re extinct,” Lucy replied.

  “I have a feeling I know how this puzzle works,” Leo said as Lucy started to float away. He reached out his hand and she took it. There was a little zap of electricity in the air and the current ran between them, making them both laugh nervously.

  “Sorry about that,” Leo said.

  Lucy smiled awkwardly, but kept holding his hand as they hovered in the room together. “So. The puzzle?”

  “Oh, right, that,” Leo stammered. “Well, I think the letters we have spell something. I’ve been thinking about my letters — two sets of O, Y, and U — that’s gotta be two yous. And your letters — M, E, R, T, H, O, and an extra E. I think that spells the more. And you have that 2x block, a multiplier.”

  “You think a lot,” Lucy said.

  “I know. It’s a habit.”

  A bell seemed to go off in Lucy’s head. “So we have two sets of the more you!”

  “That we do.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “I’m guessing the others had letter blocks on their journey, too.”

  Leo pointed toward the far wall, where two more openings filled with cloudy white fog swirled and moved. They both took in the four walls of the room and found a total of six such doors, one for each person in the maze.

  “Hey!” Remi’s voice filled the antigravity chamber, and Lucy, surprised by the noise, let go of Leo’s hand. She floated out into the middle of the room, and Leo realized that she had mastered moving where she pleased. She swam toward Remi as Leo stayed stuck where he was.

  “Hi, Remi — glad you could make it,” Lucy said as she swam through the air. She turned her feet toward Remi and executed a ninja kick. But Remi’s attention had drifted elsewhere. He was looking at the floor of the chamber, which was a long way down.

  “You don’t have to come inside,” Leo said. He knew Remi was not the kind of person who sought out adventure unless it contained things like seat belts, donuts, and pizza.

  “Oh yes, you do!” Lucy said. She had arrived at the door where Remi’s head was. Putting her hand through the fog, she grabbed his red doorman’s jacket and pulled him in.

  “Whadja do that for?” Remi said. He was turning somersaults like an Olympic gymnast, tumbling across the room toward Leo.

  “Whoa there, fella!” Leo called out. “Whoa!”

  But there was no stopping Remi, who plowed through countless toy blocks and smashed into Leo. The two of them tangled and ended up back-to-back, stuck to each other with all the tape Leo had rolled into the chamber.

  “You had to bring the duct tape, didn’t you?” Remi said.

  “Cool place, right?” Leo said, trying to wrench himself free without success as Lucy laughed.

  “What on earth are you idiots doing in there?”

  Miss Sheezley had arrived at her door, where her pencil-thin eyebrows were raised so high she looked like the bride of Frankenstein.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” Alfred Whitney said from the other side of the room, where he, too, had finally landed.

  “Everyone just stay where you are,” Leo said. “I’ve got this thing figured out … I think. I just need a second here.”

  He was turned upside down when he took out the box-cutting knife and began to slice away the duct tape. By the time he was free of his brother, Remi had grown used to the antigravity chamber and was laughing like a lunatic.

  To everyone’s surprise, Alfred Whitney jumped right in and let Comet free inside the antigravity chamber. There was never a happier duckling, for he found that his barely formed wings could carry him like a real grown-up duck. His mother would have been proud as he dodged and parried around wooden blocks, zooming through the air on moth-size wings, having the time of his little life.

  “Everyone listen,” Leo said, righting himself against one of the walls. “Did you find any wooden blocks in your sections of the maze?”

  “I did!” Remi said. “They were green. I’ve got them here in my pocket with Blop.”

  Remi dug into his pocket and accidentally let Blop out into the open, where the small, talkative robot opened his eyes and realized where he was.

  “Fascinating,” he said, floating wildly in the air as wooden blocks bounced off him from every side. But that didn’t stop him from speculating about the room. “Mr. Whippet worked up these plans ages ago, but I never thought he’d actually pull it together. Who gave him a Wyro?”

  “We did!” Remi said joyfully. “Remember? We got it from Dr. Flart!”

  “He must have fired the Wyro in the field of wacky inventions,” Blop said. “The thing about a Wyro is it’ll only last a little while. An hour at most.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Remi asked.

  “It means this chamber isn’t going to stay antigravity for much longer!” Leo yelled. “That must be what the clock is for.”

  “Uh-oh,” Alfred said, looking up at the ceiling and seeing the clock that Leo was referring to. “If that’s true, we only have six more minutes.”

  “Idiots,” Miss Sheezley added. They could see only her head, which looked like it was detached from the rest of her body.

  “Remi, what letters did you get?” Leo asked frantically.

  “Let’s see … K, E, A, and T.”

  “Everyone, what’s that spell if we unscramble it? Lucy and I got two sets of the more you with our letters.”

  “TAKE!” Alfred yelled. “It spells take!”

  “Excellent!” Leo said. “And what about you, Alfred? What letters did you get?”

  “Mine were purple. There were five, and I already know what they spell out: leave.”

  “Fantastic!” Leo said. “That only leaves Miss Sheezley. Where is she?”

  “I’m over here, where it’s safe,” she said. “And you’ve got five minutes.”

  “I bet I know what letters she has,” Lucy said. She seemed to be searching through the floating letters, trying to find certain ones. “She has B, E, H, I, N, D.”

  “Why, she’s right,” Miss Sheezley said. “Clever girl.”

  “Looks like Leo’s
not the only puzzle solver in the bunch,” Remi said. He was curled up in a cannonball, torpedoing through blocks.

  “What are you looking for?” Leo asked Lucy.

  “The answer to the riddle,” she said.

  “And what is the riddle?” As Alfred asked this, Comet flew right up in front of his face, showing off how talented he was, and Alfred carefully took hold of him in both hands, placing the duckling safely back inside his pocket.

  “Leo and I each had two sets of the same thing — the more you — and the rest of you had a total of three words — take, leave, and behind.”

  “So the riddle is this,” Leo finished what she was saying. “The more you take, the more you leave behind.”

  “And the answer is footsteps,” Lucy said with delight. “So I’m looking for those letters. I found an F and an S so far.”

  Alfred piped in next. “I have an O!”

  “Me too!” Remi shouted. “And a T!”

  “I have just now grabbed another T out of the air,” Miss Sheezley said. She was leaning out into the antigravity chamber, but she had not gone so far as to jump in. “It’s the least I could do.”

  “We’re down to three minutes,” Leo said. “There are nine slots for the answer up by the clock. Everyone! To the top as fast as you can! And keep searching for another S, an E, and a P.”

  Everyone started swimming for the top. They’d all gotten used to how antigravity felt and moved with ease among the blocks. Remi swam by Blop and picked him up as he kept talking about the Wyro and gravity and how it was about to come to a stop.

  “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!” Remi screamed, looking down at the floor of the antigravity chamber, far below.

  “Remi, calm down,” Leo said. “There’s time to finish the puzzle and get to the bottom before this thing shuts down. Come on! We need your letters!”

  Lucy swam by Miss Sheezley and grabbed the letters from her hands, then arrived at the ceiling before everyone else. She placed her letters into the correct slots, where they stuck like magnets, and turned to her friends.

  “Hurry! We’ve only got one minute left!”