Floors:
Authors: Patrick Carman
Tags: #Humorous Stories, #Action & Adventure, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #General, #Mysteries & Detective Stories
FLOORS
by Patrick Carman
For Riley,
whose imagination inspires me
You will prosper in the field of wacky inventions
CHAPTER 3: M
R.
P
OWELL
E
XPLAINS THE
R
ULES
CHAPTER 4: I
NTO THE
P
INBALL
M
ACHINE
CHAPTER 5: T
HE
R
OOM OF
R
INGS OR THE
R
ING OF
R
OOMS
CHAPTER 6: T
HEODORE
B
UMP AND THE
T
ROUBLESOME
R
OBOT
CHAPTER 7: T
EN
T
HOUSAND
P
APER
C
LIPS
CHAPTER 9: T
HE
C
ENTRAL
P
ARK
T
RAIN
CHAPTER 10: T
HE
F
IELD OF
W
ACKY
I
NVENTIONS
CHAPTER 11: A H
AUNTED
D
INNER
P
arty
CHAPTER 15: T
HE
T
HIRTEENTH
F
LOOR
Merganzer Whippet was an impulsive young man of fifteen when he raced into his father’s room just in time to hear these fateful words. Merganzer had just finished his tenth consecutive year of boarding school, during which his father had been busy building a financial empire. Needless to say, the two had never been close.
The words were not the sort of thing Merganzer’s father was known for saying. People close to the old man would have expected something like
Buy cheap, sell high! And whatever you do, don’t squander the family fortune.
But twelve seconds later, Walter E. Whippet was dead.
You will prosper in the field of wacky inventions
were the only words of advice Merganzer had been given.
If only Merganzer had known they were spoken by a man who’d been talking gibberish for weeks.
Things might have turned out differently.
O THE
R
OOF!
L
eo Fillmore awoke to the sound of snipping. It was Mr. Phipps, the gardener, trimming and shaping the bushes outside the small window, his ghostly shadow moving across the basement walls. Every Monday at the crack of dawn, Mr. Phipps trimmed outside Leo’s window, the echo of the shears like a voice that seemed to say
Wake up, wake up, wake up!
Leo sat up in bed and thought first of his mother’s voice; then he thought of ducks and breakfast. After that, he remembered the one thing he’d hoped to forget in his sleep: Merganzer D. Whippet, the owner and creator of the Whippet Hotel, was gone. He’d been gone a long time — one hundred days and counting — and
Leo was beginning to wonder if the man who’d built the most extraordinary hotel in the world would ever find his way back. He tried to set this thought aside as he watched Mr. Phipps’s shadow pass by.
Leo was a small boy of ten, with a sizable blob of curly hair on top of his head. Were she still alive, his mother would have cut it months ago. Sometimes Mr. Phipps, who was quiet by nature, would look at Leo’s head like it was a tall green hedge that needed trimming.
When Leo’s mother died, he and his father had moved into the basement boiler room from which the two of them took care of the Whippet Hotel. Five years later, it felt like the only home Leo knew. They slept on cots separated by a glugging Whirlpool washer. There was a desk made of cinder blocks with an old door for a top, piled high with tools and manuals and receipts. The basement window let in soft light and shadows. There were other, larger tools and boxes every where, and shelves full of old doorknobs and hotel parts. In the dampest, darkest corner of the basement sat a giant, leaking boiler.
It may sound as if the basement of the Whippet Hotel was a shabby sort of place to live, but it was cozy and especially cool in the hot summer months. Leo loved the warm sounds and smells, his threadbare blanket, the tiny kitchen that folded down from one of the walls, and the gulping boiler that never seemed to sleep.
As Mr. Phipps moved on, the sound of snipping growing softer outside the window, Leo tiptoed to the coffeemaker and the paint-splattered sink. Soon enough, the coffeepot filled the basement with the rich smell of morning, and Leo’s father started to stir. A few minutes later, Clarence and Leo Fillmore stood in their pajamas before the call center, taking stock of the day that lay ahead. The call center occupied all the space above the makeshift desk, and it was but one example of the strange and unusual things Mr. Whippet had created throughout the hotel. There were bells and buzzers and lights on the wall that flashed and spun. There was a horn with brass pipes that twisted all along the ceiling. There were dials, banks of buttons, and meters with water pressure readings and temperatures. And in the very center of it all was a shark’s head, its crooked teeth smiling gleefully. Under the shark’s head was the word
Daisy
, presumably the shark’s name. Daisy looked as if she had come blasting through the wall and gotten stuck there, forever cursed to deliver messages in the Whippet Hotel basement.
“We’ve got about thirty seconds before she wakes up,” said Clarence Fillmore, slurping the coffee and scratching the gray stubble on his chin. Daisy’s eyes were closed as if she were in a dream, chasing a school of terrified goldfish. “We’d better get out of these pajamas.”
Leo knew better than to doubt his dad’s intuition. Clarence Fillmore had an uncanny sense of timing when it came to the Whippet Hotel and its many needs, so Leo had already pulled on his maintenance overalls by the time the first message arrived.
Daisy’s eyes opened wide and the sound of a ticker-tape machine filled the basement. Lights blinked yellow and green, a sign that whatever message Daisy was about to deliver was not a catastrophe. If a water main had burst or the air-conditioning had gone on the fritz, there would have been a siren wail and red lights, which were both very unpleasant at the crack of dawn.
A thin strip of white paper, like an endless fortune out of a fortune cookie, curled out of Daisy’s mouth.
“Ms. Sparks, as I suspected,” Clarence said, ripping the curling paper from the shark’s crooked teeth with his big hand. “It wouldn’t be Monday morning at the Whippet without her.”
Leo took one end of the long, curled strip of paper in his hand and looked at it curiously. “I used to think Mr. Whippet was in charge of the orders, even if they came from someone else,” he said. “I guess I was wrong.”
Clarence Fillmore looked at his son and felt a little sad for the boy.
“You know Mr. Whippet wouldn’t leave for good without the ducks,” Clarence said. “Stay focused, Leo.
It will take your mind off your troubles. And besides, the last thing we need is Ms. Sparks breathing down our necks all day.”
Clarence Fillmore was a big, lumbering man, often slow to speak. Like a giant in the basement, he was constantly ducking under pipes and ductwork. Leo had long understood that these characteristics of his father’s made some people think Clarence was a simple maintenance man without much going on upstairs. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Taking care of a hotel, especially
this
hotel, required an encyclopedic understanding of architecture, machinery, cooling systems, heating systems, plumbing, duck control, and a million other things. Without his dad on the job, Leo suspected, the Whippet Hotel would probably keel over within a week.
“A day without Ms. Sparks would be nice,” Leo said. “Sometimes I wish she’d go on vacation and never come back.”
Ms. Sparks, who had become more and more demanding each day Mr. Whippet did not return, was the desk clerk and general manager of the hotel. She had long fingers for pointing out all the things Leo and his father hadn’t done, and she wore an outrageous beehive hairdo that seemed to say
I am in charge here. Don’t cross me
. Whenever Ms. Sparks gave a command to the maid or
the gardener or anyone else, she leaned forward and gave them the evil eye, her great head of hair teetering over whomever she was ordering around, casting a dark shadow.