Floors: (7 page)

“I think it’s time I opened the box again,” Leo said. Betty didn’t quack, but she seemed to approve of the idea, and Leo slid the cover off, staring inside. Over dinner he had figured out that the lid would slide onto the back of the box as well, and this he did so as not to leave it behind if he got lost in the maze.

“I think I’m standing right here,” he said, setting the
box and the very large purple ping-pong ball on the floor next to him. He was pointing to a small, round mark on the floor of the model while Betty waddled off behind him.

The box was full of colored rings of different sizes, and so was the room. All the walls in the real room were bright white, lit from behind frosty glass. And all the rings were positioned exactly where they were in the box. The advantage to having the box, it seemed to Leo, was that he knew how to navigate the complex maze before him.

Betty quacked from farther away than Leo was comfortable with. She was a mischievous companion, known to wander off on her own, and he felt sure she was about to somehow open the door and send the ladder back into the room below. But when he looked over his shoulder, he saw that she was simply staring at a white wall of frosty glass, where a message had started to appear. Leo took three steps toward her through the only ringless space in the whole maze and watched as the words appeared. It was as if someone were behind the glass, writing on a foggy window with his finger.

Did you bring the ball?
Make it fly, make it fall.
   MR. M.

Something fell out of the ceiling, missing Betty by a hair, and a dark shadow moved behind the glass. Leo jumped back, afraid of something in the Whippet Hotel for the first time in his life.

He wasn’t alone in the Room of Rings, as he’d supposed. And what was more frightening still: MR. M. wasn’t a figment of someone’s imagination. He was real.

Maybe Captain Rickenbacker wasn’t totally off his rocker after all.

Leo gathered his nerves and picked up what had fallen out of the ceiling. It looked like it had been designed to work with the box. It had a metal platform and two handles sticking out, like the handles of a motorcycle. He took up the box and placed it carefully on top of the square platform between the handles. A perfect fit, if ever there was one. A new sound rose from behind him — the sound of wind. When Leo turned, the giant purple ping-pong ball had floated up into the air.

“I know what I’m supposed to do!” he said excitedly. “I understand!”

Leo told Betty to stay right behind him and to do exactly as he did, and somehow he knew she’d understood. She fell in line as Leo held the handles on the box and stared into the model.

“I know the way out of here, but there must be some trick to it, and the trick must involve the ball.”

As he neared the floating ball, he felt what he’d expected: A strong channel of air was coming out of the floor, holding up the ball. Leo twisted the right handle as if he were actually riding a motorcycle and watched as the ball moved slowly forward. Twisting it the other way brought the ball right back. He tilted the front edge of the box down and the ball descended, the flow of air from the floor growing weaker. Then he tilted the front of the box up faster than he should have and the ball bounced off the ceiling. He leveled the box, and the ball was back, holding steady in front of his eyes.

“Well, Betty, I know how to get this ball through the maze. I just don’t know why I’m doing it.”

Leo shrugged. There was nothing to be done but guide the ball and follow it through, and so he began. Everything started out fine, twisting and turning through one green, then one yellow, then two red rings, Betty hopping through the rings behind him. But then he came to a place in the round maze where there were two rings to choose from. They were in the opening that would send him deeper into the maze, closer to the middle and the very end. Would it matter which one he chose? He thought not, and sent the ball through the blue ring on the right. When he did, the
ring filled with spires of electricity and the ball exploded into dust.

Leo lurched back, nearly falling into one of the rings, and stared in shock at the purple dust particles flying every where. If there were such a thing as fairy dust, Leo thought, it would look like this. The electric charge had turned the ball into sparkling purple mist that stuck in Leo’s round tuft of hair and danced on the wind.

He tried to calm himself down, but could only imagine what would happen to him if he went through the wrong ring. Would he, too, be turned to dust, never to escape the Ring of Rooms or the Room of Rings?

“At least now I know what the purple ball was for,” he said. “But it’s gone now.”

Leo was aware of the time ticking away, and this only added to his anxiety. Checking his watch, he saw that he’d already been gone a full hour. Ms. Sparks would be furious about the ducks being left in the pond. Then she’d find that Betty was missing and go ballistic. And what about his father — what would he say if Leo couldn’t be found?

Leo was looking at Betty like she might have the answer to all his problems, but it turned out she had the key to a different question. She was staring at one of the frosty glass walls again, watching a new message
appear. Leo joined her as an unseen finger wrote out seven words before the shadow moved off again.

Leo was beside himself with worry, but he couldn’t give up now. For starters, he didn’t know how to get the round door back open again. And even if he could get it open, there would be Captain Rickenbacker and his flying bowling balls to deal with.

He turned the handle back once, a second time, then once more. A big blue ball, round and perfect, dropped out of the ceiling and was held on the wind in front of the two rings.

“I wonder how many of these I get,” Leo said to Betty, excited to have another ball but realizing he had to be extremely careful. If he got too far into the maze and ran out of balls, he might never get out. He’d have to remember exactly which rings were capable of turning him into fairy dust.

Leo twisted the handle forward and sent the blue ball safely through the opening on the left, then stepped through himself. Betty flew carefully through the ring as well, and they were safely into the second circular layer of the maze. Looking at the model in the box, Leo
saw many openings that led to the next inner level, but only one had an arrow pointing inside. He was excited again, less nervous, realizing that no one else but he could complete the maze and live to tell about it.

During the next twenty minutes, Leo blew up four more giant ping-pong balls on his way to the center of the Room of Rings. He began to anticipate seeing them explode and felt less anxious when they did. Watching the orange ball blast into dust was particularly enjoyable, because orange was his favorite color.

He couldn’t have known, for there were no mirrors in the maze, but his hair was starting to look like a rainbow, dusted with purple, green, orange, yellow, and blue as he arrived in the inner circle of the maze.

He’d exploded the green ball on the way into this chamber, and passing through the opening into the center of the maze, he felt as if he were standing in the middle of an igloo. The walls were frosty white and perfectly round, curved into a dome at the top. He stood there with his box and his duck and wondered what he should do, for the room was completely empty.

The opening to the room, which he had just passed through, was suddenly gone, filled by a curved wall sliding down from above. Leo was trapped in a half circle
of pure white, his heart beating faster as a terrible thought crossed his mind.

No one knows I’m here.

But that wasn’t entirely true. There was one person who knew, and whoever it was began writing a message on the ceiling, just like he’d written the other messages before.

“Is that you, Merganzer?” asked Leo, setting the purple box and the handles on the floor and reaching up toward the ceiling. “Won’t you please come out?”

He’d had his suspicions, but there was no way he could know for sure. It was a dangerous path he’d taken to the white room, and it would be unlike his old friend to place him in harm’s way. Then again, who else could it be, helping him along and pretending to be MR. M. all this time?

It was a short message, only three words:

At first the message made no sense, because there were no rings in the room to take. But then something small dropped through a hole in the ceiling. Quickly thrusting out his hand, Leo caught the object before it hit the floor.

There was a deep silence then. Even Betty seemed to understand that something important had just happened. Leo knew it, too, but he didn’t say anything. There was something very special about the ring that had fallen into his hand. Something so special, it nearly made him cry, but not quite, as he placed it in his pocket next to his mother’s watch.

“Thank you, whoever you are.”

Without any warning at all, the hole in the ceiling got bigger and a blue box fell through. It was the exact same shape and size as the purple box sitting in the center of the room. Leo caught the blue box as it was falling, finding it heavier than the purple box, but not by much. On the lid was a message.

The emblem of Merganzer’s head was also on the box, right in the middle.

“I got another box,” said Leo, very proud of himself for what he’d done. “What do you think of that, Betty?”

Betty was growing very bored and extremely hungry. She honked irritably, staring up at Leo as if to say
I’ve had it with rings and rooms and boxes. Get me to the roof or I’ll chew on your shoes.

“We
have
been in here a while, haven’t we? But I don’t know how to get out.”

Leo wanted desperately to open the blue box, but he’d been told not to, so instead he took the purple box off the handles and set them aside. He put the lid back on the purple box and set the boxes next to each other.

And then he sat there for about a minute, unsure what to do, until a new message appeared on the ceiling.

Like all the earlier messages, this one appeared, then slowly drifted away, the frost returning to the glass.

It took only a moment for Leo to figure out that the blue box slid snugly on top of the purple box on little wooden rails he hadn’t paid any mind to before. The two were one now, inseparable unless they were intentionally slid apart.

There was one last message being drawn with a finger on the glass, and this one worried Leo greatly.

He didn’t see any reason to hold on tight, so the message unnerved him. Should he hold the boxes tight,
or pick up Betty and hold her tight, or was the floor about to fa —

The third thing Leo thought — the thought about the floor falling away — was the reason he was supposed to hold on tight. He found himself on a twisting slide and wondered if he was inside one of the tubes of the Double Helix. Those were far too narrow, he knew, but things had gotten so terribly strange at the Whippet Hotel that he couldn’t tell up from down. Wherever he was, he was falling fast, turning sharply every few seconds, barely keeping hold of the two boxes that had become one. He came to a harrowing U-turn and was tossed from the tube, landing squarely on top of the duck elevator. He made the mistake of turning toward the echoing sound of Betty sliding down behind him, and she crashed into his face, feathers flying as she regained her webbed footing and quacked angrily.

Leo threw open the trapdoor atop the duck elevator and jumped inside, landing with a bouncy
thud
. He grabbed the boxes first, then the duck, and shut himself inside.

“It’s getting awfully crowded in here, wouldn’t you say?” he asked Betty. Two boxes, a boy, and a duck did take up some space when there wasn’t much to be had.

There was plenty of good news, though, as the small elevator lurched to life and started its slow descent to
the lobby. Leo was in possession of the second of four boxes. He was halfway to somewhere, though he had no idea where. He had a special ring in his pocket. And he was free of the Room of Rings or the Ring of Rooms, whichever it was called.

The bad news?

The walkie-talkie had started working again, and Ms. Sparks was screaming at him.

Bernard Frescobaldi was back in the hotel across the street, staring at the huge, nearly empty block that held the Whippet Hotel. Something was troubling him.

“Milton, a cappuccino, if you please.”

“Right away, sir. Right away.”

Milton went to work at the rather elaborate coffee-making machine in the corner of the room. It had been brought over from Italy, along with Italian espresso beans, cups, saucers, spoons, and a grinder. The room filled with the smells and sounds of good, strong coffee.