Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book Two: Legacy of Secrets (30 page)

“That might work,” said Philby, “except it hasn’t been built yet.”

Maybeck looked crushed. “Oh, yeah, there is that.”

“The horse-drawn carriage on Main Street!” Willa shouted out the words like a game show contestant. People at other tables turned and looked over. She lowered her voice and slouched down in her chair. “A horse-drawn carriage, like Terry said…the back part, the part you ride in, is a cab.”

“What about the second half of the poem?” Charlene said. “We can’t just ignore it!”

“We take it in order,” Philby said. “It’s a puzzle. You solve puzzles in order. We’ve done this before. Finn? We inspect the cab first.”

“I’ll distract the driver. Charlene will go under the cab to look around, while Willa and Maybeck get inside to check it out. It’s an open-door carriage, so it won’t present problems for our holograms. No handles to turn.”

“We’re getting better at that,” Charlene said, demonstrating her superiority by spinning a pencil on the table.

“Some of us, not so much,” Maybeck said, waving his hand through the pencil and the wood beneath it.

“The point is,” Charlene said, “I can help out, if needed.”

“You’re thinking about the guys in the old hotel,” Finn said.

“I am. I doubt we’ve seen the last of them.”

T
HINGS STARTED OFF WELL.
As Maybeck and Willa climbed into the horse-drawn carriage at the Plaza, Finn approached and spoke to the driver.

“Excuse me, sir. Can you explain the story behind the carriage?”

“Why, yes, son! Happy to. Mr. Disney grew up in a wonderful small town in Missouri. He saw many Main Streets just like this one, Main Street USA. He loved the old carriages and horses, and the reminder of a simpler time in America. The idea is to give you, our guest, the chance to relive those days.”

“Gee whiz,” Finn said, trying to sound like Wayne, “that sounds just super!” He thanked the man as Charlene came out from beneath the carriage. She gave Finn a thumbs-up and headed for the sidewalk.

“So?” Finn said, joining her.

“I’m not sure what it means,” Charlene said, “but I’ve got something.”

“Like what?” he asked excitedly.

“Yeah, like what?” came a voice from behind them.

Turning, Finn saw the mistake they’d made. Among the park guests waiting in line for the carriage were four older boys in dress pants and button-down shirts. They were apparently in disguise, dressed as normal people, not Cast Members, in order to close in on the Keepers. They’d nearly gotten away with it.

“Heads up! Four OTKs working undercover, coming for us!”

Two of the boys went for Finn, two for Charlene. Grabbing for the holograms, the hotel boys encountered an agile Finn, who managed to shove both back. The two grabbing for Charlene came up empty, then looked at one another in astonishment.

“Fast,” one of them said, believing she’d jumped out of the way in time to make him miss.

“Ghost!” called the other, reeling violently away from her, trying to process the fact that his hand had swiped through what should have been her body.

Charlene could have run away right then; she had the few milliseconds required to turn and flee. But she had a competitive streak, and it was especially strong when she was pitted girl against boy. She wasn’t going to be the loser in any one-on-one situation. Finn had seen it enough times to know. So when the one boy called her a ghost, she shouted “Boo!” and jumped at him.

It might have worked, but the other boy stuck out his leg, and Charlene tripped and fell. Exactly how that was possible escaped Finn; if she’d been all clear—pure hologram—there was no way she could have tripped. It reminded him how unstable and unpredictable an existence they lived in 1955. It was an existence he had no desire to further test.

He sprang forward and helped her up, as first one, and then two of the boys attacked. Finn ducked, and the two OTKs embraced each other.

People in line laughed at the sight of two young men hugging. Kids had gathered around as the whispers of “Ghost!” continued to rustle along on the breeze. Throwing caution to the wind, Finn pulled Charlene through the kids, who screeched, shrieked, and giggled.

Something flashed in the corner of Finn’s eye. A reflection off the glass, Finn thought. Or maybe it was more like he’d imagined it—like having been in the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, he’d mingled thought and reality, holograms, and his real self.

The reflection, or image, was of a man: Amery Hollingsworth, standing among the crowd, enjoying the “staged fight.” Finn imagined, or perhaps it was real, that he and the man locked eyes, that in those dark sockets he saw hatred and cruelty the likes of which even Overtakers like Maleficent and Chernabog hadn’t possessed.

Venom seeped across Main Street USA as if shot from a snake’s upturned fangs. Witchcraft and sorcery. The kind of savage, primal loathing that had somehow festered into a yellow, stinging pus, oozing from a mental wound. In that gaze, Finn saw real, unmasked hatred.

Terrified, he grabbed for Charlene and led her down Main Street at a run. A dozen young kids broke away from their parents and followed, calling out, “Wait!” “Come back!” “Golly gee!”

“Don’t look now, but we’re a kite with a tail,” Finn hissed to Charlene.

“I don’t like running away!”

“They’re following us, Charlie. They’re back there. Think of something!” They passed the Intimate Apparel shop, Ruggles Glass and China Shop, and Grandma’s Baby Shop.

“Not easy,” Charlene said.

“No fooling.”

“I’ve got it! How stable do you think our projections are?”

“Not great.”

“Willing to take a risk?”

“Such as?”

“Little piece of Disney trivia you may not know…”

“You going to talk trivia while we’re running? I can barely breathe.”

“Then you shut up. I’ll talk. In 1955, all the lakes and lagoons in Disneyland were connected.”

“What!?”

“Yes. It’s one big water system.”

“Not possible! So you’re saying…?”

“We’re going for a swim.”

At the end of Main Street, they’d lost all but a handful of the kids. The four older boys dressed as guests were right on their tail, however. Body humming with tension, Charlene steered Finn toward Adventureland. Reaching a bridge, she dove. Finn did as well.

In the murky water, their DHI projections glowed like goldfish. The kids left the path and chased the shifting colors as they moved underwater. The four fake Cast Members pushed a few of the younger kids aside and moved closer to the water’s edge.

“We’ve got ’em now,” one of them said. “This pond is tiny. Surround it! All sides!”

The remaining three spread out.

What Willa had told them about being a projected image underwater proved true a second time. Still no pressure on Finn’s chest; no sense of urgency to breathe. Charlene, twice the underwater swimmer he was—surprise!—hesitated a moment, a great darkness ahead of her. She looked like a blond mermaid, except none of her clothes and none of her hair was waving in the water.

He rose and sipped some air, but there was no sense of suffocating. It was incredible to swim this way, Finn thought, and freeing. Charlene motioned Finn ahead. His vision adjusted; he saw what she intended for them. A conduit pipe three feet in diameter, dark as a well and scary as all get-out.

He shook his head vigorously, as if to say,
Not me!

Charlene stuck her glowing tongue out at him and led the way into the pitch-black pipe.

Soon after, Finn surfaced again for some air. They were passing the bandstand. Charlene nudged him back down and through another pipe. Together, they entered the water in front of the castle. Finn could hear people shouting—he thought passersby had probably seen what appeared to be
giant fish
in the castle moat.

The next pipe went on forever. Reaching the end was the first time Finn felt certain they weren’t being followed. He gulped more air and returned underwater. Charlene, recharged as well, stayed near the lake’s sandy bottom and soon Finn understood why: motorboats from the Speedboat Rides zoomed by repeatedly overhead, though from what Finn could see, they weren’t exactly speedy. She led Finn down an arm of the lake, which narrowed quickly. At last, the two crawled out onto dry land. Autopia cars zoomed around a sharp corner not twenty yards away.

“We can get out through Tomorrowland,” she said, and reached out to take Finn’s hand. But her hologram was incapable, and Finn was glad for that. No more hand holding. No more trouble. “Aren’t you going to ask what I saw underneath the cab?”

“I’d almost forgotten,” Finn said.

“A brand, you know, like hot metal burned into wood? Small, but easy to make out. A famous mouse, one hand on his hip, the other in the air.”

“Mickey!” Finn said.

T
IA
D
ALMA, THE
B
LACK
M
AMBA,
fanned the flames, her chipped teeth parting in a craggy smile. At last, the conjuring formula was working. The bones had accepted the flesh. The flesh had re-formed into an ugly entity, like something she imagined pulling out of a cracked dinosaur egg. Like a young animal.

Her hands worked busily, putting the finishing touches on the straw-and-grass doll she’d been working on for nearly two weeks. Its feminine form was unmistakably adult, sleek, and refined, like that of a dancer. The chin was pointed, the neck long and thin. The Black Mamba had woven the grass to form beautifully braided skin, as green as a chameleon lizard in the garden. The eyes had been plucked from a living bat, and the fairy wings from a dead one.

Tia Dalma painstakingly wove the wings into the straw figure’s upper back. The doll’s hair was made from clippings of her own matted locks, ensuring that the two would share a physical trait forever.

Forever, she thought calmly, was such a nice long time.

“W
ITHOUT
W
AYNE,
we’d have never figured out any of this,” Willa said. She’d noticed that the boys—especially the boys—tended to take credit where it wasn’t always due.

“That’s not entirely true,” Philby said.

They’d timed their mission to their advantage. It was the first time they’d employed the strategy of entering a structure as holograms, so as to be there when they turned back into normal bodies. That way, no one could follow them inside without unlocking a door, making noise, or drawing attention to themselves.

Their destination was the park’s wood shop. Wayne knew the Mickey brand that Charlene had seen on the bottom of the carriage. When the wood shop built an original piece, they liked to mark it with their own version of a hidden Mickey.

“All this time, we were sleeping about twenty yards from where we wanted to be,” Finn said to the others.

“How bizarre is that?” Maybeck said.

“There’s still the second half of the poem,” Charlene reminded everyone. “I still think we should have solved that riddle before we got here.”

“It’s the right place to solve it,” Philby said. “You’ll see.”

“But Wayne isn’t with us.”