Kingdom Keepers: The Syndrome (4 page)

MATTIE

Engulfed in my thoughts, I hardly noticed Amanda board the bus. She seemed disheveled and distant, but I knew that I couldn’t reach out to her. Not with Luowski lurking on
board.

Amanda was glancing out the window when she caught my reflection. Our eyes met and hers widened in surprise, but I couldn’t acknowledge her. Instead I gave her a sharp look of rebuke to
keep her from making contact. It worked. She slipped into a seat across from mine. My whole body tensed. I hoped there wouldn’t be a scene.

When Amanda got off at Mizell Avenue, I finally breathed a sigh of relief. Best for me to stay on board, I decided, since Luowski also remained on board.

We were supposed to meet at Starbucks. I could still make that happen.

AMANDA

I got off at Mizell Avenue, before the hospital, way before the Corners. Had to walk five more long blocks because of it.

I went from thinking someone was behind me to discovering Mattie was ahead of me.

Disoriented, disturbed, and still unable to stop thinking about Finn, I headed for the Corners. The Starbucks there had practically been part of Winter Park High our senior year. They could have
renamed it the Caffeine Lab. I arrived and took a table.

Mattie showed up a few minutes later. She didn’t look happy.

“Hi, there!” I said, decaf mocha in hand. “What was that about on the bus?”

“You were five feet away from Luowski,” she said.

“Not possible.”

“For real. I promise. And if this is this some kind of test or something, I don’t appreciate it!” Mattie glanced around, making sure no one could overhear us, paying special
attention to those outside.

“No test,” I groaned. “He was on the bus?”

“He got on the stop before yours. He was out of breath, like he’d been running hard. Why the note? Why’d you want me here?”

“I came all the way from Burbank to find Finn. I need your help. This has nothing to do with Luowski!” As I said his name, my chest tightened. I was either going to cough or throw
up. I coughed. “To be sure: Luowski? Greg Luowski?”

“That’s the one. He was on there when you saw me.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

I’d allowed spotting Mattie to distract me. You don’t survive mistakes like that. “Come on!”

“What?” she asked, pulling away.

I tugged her T-shirt. It read:
NO HOPE? GOOD LUCK!
“We’re going. Now.”

I walked her east, taking several precautions to make sure Luowski wasn’t following us.

“We’re good,” I said from inside the lobby of a bank. I led her out the back door into a parking lot, through a connecting parking lot, and across the street to a bus stop. We
boarded, and I picked a bench seat by the back door. We needed to be able to get off quickly.

“He was running to make sure he caught your bus, wasn’t he?” Mattie asked.

I shared my sense that someone had been following me.

“Yeah, well, I think he outsmarted you. He figured out you were heading for the bus and raced to board ahead of you.”

“Trouble is,” I said, “that’s not like him. There is nothing subtle or stealthy about Greg Luowski. He’s completely in your face. An imbecile of the first order.
But he can and will hurt anyone he feels like hurting. He’s no one to mess with.”

Mattie was silent, but she had an air of secrecy about her.

“What?” I said. “I know the guy, believe me.”

Mattie’s confident expression didn’t change. “I read him,” she said.

I gasped, looking down at her gloved hands. “And?”

“I think he remembered me.”

“Meaning?”

“From the ship. Remember? I read him on the Disney
Dream
. The first time I read someone, most people have no idea what’s happening. The second time is different. I’ve
never experienced it myself, of course, but from the looks I’ve seen, it’s like that sensation of losing your phone or wallet, like something’s missing and you can’t figure
out what it is. Most people check their purse, or tap their pockets, reviewing a list of the most important things they carry. An internal inventory, kind of.

“Well, with Greg, I didn’t give him the chance to see me,” she continued, “but I felt his reaction. There were enough people trying to get off the bus that he
wouldn’t have known exactly who touched him, but I have a feeling that this time he knew it had happened.”

“And?”

“If I tell you, you have to promise you won’t scream or freak out.”

“If? Of course you’re going to tell me.” I waited. She waited. “Okay,” I said, “I promise.”

“He was stronger than that time on the ship. Not physically. I don’t mean that. Stronger inside. More determined, you could say.”

“But Finn said Luowski expressed misgivings, said maybe he’d changed his mind about the whole OTK thing.”

“OTK?”

“Overtaker Kid. The green eyes. There are a bunch of them. We think the OTs put them under some kind of spell.”

“But she’s dead, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Doesn’t that mean there’s no one to remove the spell? Maybe the longer you’re under it, the more intense it grows.”

“It’s been three years,” I said.

“So it’s a lot more intense,” Mattie said.

The bus passed over some bumps in the road. It was a surprisingly quiet, comfortable ride. I realized all the discomfort was coming from inside me.

“How long have you been on the East Coast?” I asked.

“I came out here chasing rainbows, but we can catch up another time.” She looked away, out the window, and I sensed her distance had more to do with the past few years than the
suburban landscape. After a moment, she said, “It was more than his intensity, Amanda. I read for Finn. I can target that way. Otherwise, it’s like you’ve been let into a
gymnasium of five hundred sixth graders. You can’t believe how noisy it is inside most people. Noisy is the norm. Noisy is good. Others are super quiet. There’s good quiet and bad,
scary quiet.”

“Luowski was quiet,” I said.

“Like I said, I read him for Finn. Targeting blocks out most of the noise. Whatever it is that passes between us, and believe me, I have no idea how this works, it stays with me for a few
seconds.”

“Pushing is like that for me. It lingers.”

“Yes! It lingers. It takes me over. It goes dark; I see and hear stuff—” Her voice caught. She stopped talking.

I said nothing. I knew she wanted to tell me something, but had been avoiding it for a few minutes now. I gave her time, hoping my silence would force her to fill the void. It worked.

“His daydream…the image inside him that he wants to see…like how as a kid you could see a particular present under the tree—”

“I get it! Come on, Mattie, tell me what you saw?”

She knitted her forehead, forcing her eyebrows toward the bridge of her nose. Mattie was a simple looking girl, but as I was learning, she was full of facial expressions. This was a girl who was
horribly upset, ruinously troubled. It was as if she were divulging a truth while sworn to secrecy.

“He plans…It was something to do with Finn. All I remember after reading that is screaming. Horrible screaming.”

JESS

Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, was making me crazy. Amanda had barely been gone for twenty-four hours but I could barely stand it. I needed to do something. To act.

Tracing my recurring dreams through a Disney park last year had helped me make sense of them, so it seemed logical that I should start my search for answers at the source: Disneyland. My dream
of Amanda being caught by the Barracks 14ers included glimpses of an antique lamp, a big bed, and a long toy train on a high shelf. I knew intuitively I should start in Disneyland. By seeking out
these images, I thought maybe I’d see or dream more. Maybe I’d be able to determine if what I’d dreamed had been fact or fiction.

Rolling out of bed, I grabbed the first T-shirt and black leggings I laid my hands on. I slipped on running shoes and a black hoodie and was out the door and into the cool LA night in a matter
of minutes. I couldn’t plan what I was about to do, or I knew I’d talk myself out of it.

The parks were open until midnight during the summer. By breaking into a light jog, I managed to make it onto the last shuttle.

“Disneyland?” the driver asked as I boarded. “You know it closes in ten minutes? You’ll get there too late.”

“I’m meeting a friend at Downtown Disney,” I lied smoothly. The driver shrugged. I took a seat near the back, squinting against the harsh fluorescent lighting.

The short ride gave me time to process my dream. I recognized the location, or at least a piece of it. The room was distinctly fancy, something you wouldn’t find in a hotel, no matter how
nice. The lamp was the key. Something about it seemed familiar. Even in my dream, I could tell it was an antique, but more than anything, its placement in the window was what seemed familiar. I had
seen it before, I was sure. Not in Walt Disney World, though. After all our adventures there, the seven of us knew the Florida parks like our own homes, maybe better. So I knew I was on the right
track with Disneyland.

My task was made easier, too, by the fact that at Disney everything was completely themed, down to the smallest chair or lamp. Nothing in one part of the park would ever be found in another, and
by the looks of it, the lamp from my drawing only fit on Main Street, USA.

The shuttle pulled into the bus station opposite the central plaza from Downtown Disney. After disembarking, I turned immediately right, avoiding the late-night crowds spilling out of the park,
and used my newly issued Cast Member ID to cut backstage through the Cast Member entrance. I’d only had it for a few weeks, and I felt a slight pang of guilt at abusing it already. But I
reassured myself with the thought that if I was caught by security, Joe or Brad—the Imagineers overseeing the Keepers—would come to my aid. They knew everything we’d done to save
the Kingdom, knew that sometimes we had to do things that might seem strange, things we weren’t allowed to explain until much later.

Unfortunately, I also knew security was not the only obstacle I had to worry about. The buddy system was the first rule of the Keepers; and while we had all broken that rule at one time or
another, it had been put in place for a reason. I thought about texting Amanda, even though she was thousands of miles away, just to let her know I was here. But I wasn’t prepared to answer
the questions I would get in response.

I cut across the open backstage, running in a crouch below a row of shuttered windows in a building behind Space Mountain; I passed a set of lockers, and slipped through the backstage door of
the Opera House. Silently, I moved into an empty exhibition room. In the dim lighting I made out a model of the United States Capitol. Through the windows of the room ahead, I saw the faint light
of Main Street. I’d timed it just right, I realized. The shuttle ride had taken long enough that the last of the guests were being shuffled out the front gates by security.

I stayed in the shadows, crouched near a roped-off antique park bench. Fifteen minutes later, the gates were closed, the lights were out, and the security guards had dispersed to the rest of the
park.

Town Square glowed under the crescent moon. The flagpole stood tall; the train station and streets were empty—the guests had gone home, and the vehicles had been taken backstage for the
night.

Most of the buildings’ decorative lights had been turned off, part of an effort to conserve energy, and as enchanted as the park may seem during the day, at this hour it felt haunted. All
the windows stood dark, save the one directly across the square, above the firehouse.

Recognition hit me hard. Although my dream sketch showed the whole lamp, and therefore from a location inside, there was no mistaking the antique lamp. It shined from the other side of a small
window above the firehouse, a place I knew to be Walt Disney’s private apartment.

I cut straight through the center of the square, dodging flower beds and benches, not pausing until I reached the shadows of the Emporium opposite. I slipped through a narrow door that took me
off limits. I climbed the back staircase to Walt’s famous apartment.

I tried the handle. Locked. Peeking through a window, I could see a short hallway and the corner of the room. The couch from my dream was there, too, along with the lamp on the end table: enough
to convince me I was in the right place, or at least one of the right places. But no matter how tightly I squeezed my eyes shut and willed a dream to come, I didn’t even get a flicker. I
slumped on the top step, defeated. Something about my dream didn’t add up. I couldn’t see any train set running across a high shelf, nor could I see a large bed.

But the lamp was definitely the lamp.

I sat on the step, and let my mind drift, hoping for an image. Opening my eyes, I saw someone tumbling down these very stairs. Amanda? There were Barracks 14ers in crisp suits. I lost it. Gone.
Only then did I actually open my eyes: they’d been shut all along.

I’d dreamed!

The Keepers had demonstrated time and again that puzzles were better solved by a team. I had none. Philby would’ve been able to search his encyclopedic memory, or Maybeck’s
artist’s eye would’ve noticed a detail I’d missed in my sketch. I had my phone in my pocket; I could call one of them…except Amanda had tried that, which is why she’d left
in the first place.

My phone! Of course. I almost laughed out loud: the solution had been with me all along.

Careful to avoid screen glare revealing me, I conducted an Internet search for “Disneyland, train set,” only turned up kids’ toys for sale on Amazon, and “Disneyland park
model train set” brought up stories about Walt Disney’s personal model train collection. Getting frustrated again, I cleared the search box and started over, this time adding one word
to the search. I did it out of desperation and spite. There was no reason it should help, but I was out of ideas, and I really was searching for a dream.

I began typing “Disneyland Park Dream”…and to my relief, Google had one search suggestion—”Disneyland Park Dream Suite.” I went with it and clicked the first
result.