Kingdom Keepers VII (2 page)

T
HROUGH THE WINDOWS
, an image. At first, the Security guard—appropriately named Bert; he looks like a Bert, and was even named for the character in
Mary Poppins
—can hardly believe it. Here? At this hour? Waving to him like they’re old friends?

Bert glances at a photograph hanging on the interior wall of the Frank G. Wells building at the Disney Studios. In the photo is the the same man, much younger, standing with Becky Cline and Mickey Mouse at the grand opening of the Disney Archives. They call him a Disney Legend. In the courtyard terrace outside, this man’s palm prints and name adorn a ceramic-tile plaque on a pillar supporting the trellis. A child prodigy, he worked with Walt Disney himself, helped design Disneyland and later, Walt Disney World, overseeing the creation of attractions. He was a founding member of what would come to be called “the Imagineers”—those Cast Members whose job it is to have vision.

He is old now, his hair white as cotton, but his ruddy face is youthful and full of surprise. Bert feels better just seeing him out there. Wayne Kresky has the power of personality, of confidence and willful joy. It almost looks like he’s glowing.

Wayne motions for Bert to unlock the door. Later, this will strike Bert as odd; surely Wayne possesses every key, every code needed to access any building anywhere in the Disney kingdom—so why signal for Bert’s help?

But Bert does not hesitate. Who is he to deny Wayne Kresky anything? It might as well be a royal prince making the request. As Bert moves toward the door, he is once again struck by Wayne’s charisma. Against the backdrop of night, the man appears cloaked in incandescence—almost shimmering.

Bert bumps the door’s push bar and heaves it open with his hip.

“Good evening, sir.”

“I have business to attend to.…Do you mind?”

The two sentences seem—somehow—prerecorded, like two different pieces of dialogue edited together. But Bert is overcome by the man’s presence. Wayne Kresky, here! Bert doesn’t stop to question anything about the situation. Hindsight will help others fill in the blanks. For now, the Security man is awestruck. Albert Pujols or Kobe Bryant would have less of an impact upon him than Wayne Kresky.

“Of course!”

“The Archives.”

“I was just looking at the picture of you and—”

Wayne’s face is devoid of emotion as he pulls the door farther open and blocks it with his foot. It’s an aggressive act: so unexpected, it stops Bert cold, in midsentence.

“Welcome to Walt Disney World!” Wayne says in a theatrical voice different from any inflection he’s used thus far.

Bert thinks,
But this is Burbank. South of here is Anaheim,
home to Disney
land
. Disney
World
? Why did he say that? Can the
old dog no longer hunt?

Just above the courtyard, a string of specks appears in the night sky. If this wasn’t Southern California, Bert might think they were snowflakes. Fireflies, perhaps. Hummingbirds. The specks grow in size and proximity quickly—they are flying, flying fast, straight toward an openmouthed Bert, whose expression changes now from wonder to dread. Not snowflakes. Not hummingbirds. If he didn’t work for Disney, he would have thought,
not possible!

The first three or four come into focus: brooms, brooms with buckets—the nemeses of Mickey in his role as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Flying brooms. No, not flying—the brooms are carried by ghosts, the ghosts followed by demons and monsters, hollow-eyed, horrid creatures from unseen graveyards, decayed and fetid, so grotesque that Bert averts his eyes, recoiling as they swoop under the courtyard’s trellis and flow inside the building driven by a ferocious wind.

“No!” Bert hollers. “Please! No!”

But who’s to hear? A demon hovers over him, gray and toothless with the shriveled, sunken cheeks of a two-thousand-year-old mummy and eyes like wrinkled dates. The demon points the bony nub of one long, skeletal finger at Bert as he floats lower…lower.…

Bert shrinks into a tight ball, moaning in terror. The finger pokes him.

And then…blackness.

W
HY DOES SENIOR PROM
have to be held at Disney World? In every other way, the evening is perfect: the hotel ballroom is decked out with life-size photographs of high school seniors set to graduate in three weeks, colorful crepe paper streamers, and a mirror ball suspended over the crowded dance floor; blue and gold lasers blast from each corner of the cavernous room; the two DJs are laying down jams that produce massive cheers as the thumping rhythms play nonstop. It’s dreamy, even for a boy.

Finn Whitman is dancing with Amanda Lockhart. Truth be told, he doesn’t hear the music. He’s pretty much in an alternate universe—a realm in which Amanda is the sun. She throws off heat and brilliance that make his cheeks redden. Four whole hours of this—whoever came up with the idea of prom night should be immortalized, Finn thinks. They deserve a national monument in Washington, D.C., a library on the banks of the Mississippi, and a statue in Central Park.

Amanda’s arms are clasped around his neck; his hands hold her waist. They aren’t all glued together the way some of the other kids are. There’s a sliver of distance between them that feels magnetic; Finn has to hold himself back from pressing closer.

“This is nice,” Amanda says. The queen of understatement.

“Not really,” Finn says. He feels her body tense in apprehension. A cloud of confusion suddenly hangs between them. Amanda seems ready to push away. He speaks in a whisper. “It goes so far beyond ‘nice,’ so far beyond amazing and perfect and brilliant and glorious and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, that you ought to have to sit in the corner for making it sound so underwhelming.”

Amanda’s arms slip down from around his neck to his back and she compresses the space between them. For an instant, they hug. It’s quick, but powerful.

“Thank you.”

Her breath, so close to his ear, sends chills down his spine.

“My only complaint, and it’s a small one: it had to be Disney World.”

“Can you believe it?” She laughs. “More work than treasure.”

He nearly corrects her. The expression is “more work than pleasure” or “more work than leisure.” But he lets it go. Learning to care about someone means trying not to correct or criticize.

By
work
, Amanda is referring to Finn’s own version of an alternate universe, a universe in which she and her sister, Jess (who isn’t her biological sister) have become full-fledged citizens. Amanda and Jess now travel in the same orbit as Finn and his four closest friends, who have all earned full college scholarships by serving as models for Disney hologram hosts in the theme parks.

The internal Disney technical term for the role Finn and his four friends play in the parks is Disney Host Interactive or Daylight Hologram Image: DHI. What started essentially as a modeling job has grown into something more complex; the kids—they were so young when they all started, Finn thinks—learned that they’d actually been recruited to form a five-person strike force, the Kingdom Keepers. That’s the nickname the Internet community has assigned Finn and the other DHIs. Their real job was to enter the parks at night and battle a dark force attempting to corrupt the park experience. Disney villains who wanted to take over the parks—dubbed Overtakers—were wreaking havoc. The DHIs were meant to put an end to all that.

It turned out that the OTs’ ambitions went far beyond stealing cars from Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin; they meant to destroy the magic of the parks, the magic of Disney. They were instigating a revolution, and the DHIs turned out to be the only force standing in their way.

For the past several years, Finn and his co-DHIs, Philby, Charlene, Maybeck, and Willa, have been more Navy SEAL than hologram host. And even though Amanda and Jess are not official DHIs, Philby and the Keepers have secretly installed the girls’ data onto the DHI computer servers, enabling them as holograms. All of the Keepers have, on numerous occasions, risked their lives to keep the magic alive. If they’d known from the start what they were getting into, maybe they wouldn’t have volunteered. But the expansion of their responsibilities just kind of crept up on them. On one level, Finn thinks, their mentor and leader, an original Disney Imagineer, tricked them into accepting their roles: they were told that if they bailed, Disney would never be the same. Thanks for the warning, Finn thinks grimly.

It has been three years since Finn lost his friend Dillard Cole in the Mexican jungle. Dillard died because of the Overtakers. Since that dark day, the Kingdom Keepers have enjoyed three years of relative quiet. Yet not a single night has passed that Finn hasn’t dreamed of that awful moment. Finn can’t help but feel that he was responsible for Dillard’s death. But according to their fellow DHIs, that is far from the truth.

After he returned from Mexico, Finn’s parents made him go to counseling. That came to an abrupt halt when Finn showed up one day as a DHI and shocked the psychologist by walking through the office door without opening it. It was the psychologist who needed therapy after that.

Next, they put Finn on “medication.” That ill-conceived solution lasted all of one week. He slept better and didn’t dream about Dillard, but he didn’t feel like himself. Finn and his parents decided it wasn’t worth it. Weirdly, the ordeal drew him closer to his parents, especially his mom. For a long time he’d felt alone as a Kingdom Keeper. His mom eventually rallied behind him, but then became a victim of the Overtakers herself. Not a good situation. Throughout an entire fifteen-day voyage on a Disney cruise ship, Finn worried he might never get his real mother back. Now their family was reunited, feeling somehow stronger than before. And Finn’s mom knew what it was like to live with the fear of the Overtakers.

“Can you believe how long we’ve known each other?” Finn asks, and then feels stupid. “Sorry! That came out awkward.”

“No it didn’t.”

“I just meant—”

“I know what you meant—what you mean. I know you, remember? You mean that we’ve been friends—just friends—for a long time now. That both of us…that sometimes it doesn’t feel exactly like friends.” Amanda giggles softly. Nervously.

For Finn, the sound of her laughter is sweeter than any of the songs the DJ has played.

“So I’m just going to say it,” Amanda continues.

“Why don’t you?”

Another giggle. He wills the song to keep playing. He wants this dance to go on for the rest of the night.

“We’re more than just friends,” she says.

“We are.” Can she hear his heart beating?

“But we’ve kept it like this because to lose this isn’t worth what we might gain by it not being like this. Does that make any sense?”

“It does.” Did it just get hotter in here? Is anyone else sweating the way he is? “But things change.”

“They do,” she says.

She can’t look at him. Is that good or bad? he wonders. “And as much as we’d like for things to stay the same, that isn’t how it works.”

“No,” she says.

He’s not sure how to take that. Does she mean that’s not how it works? Did he overstep? He says, “It could ruin things, right?”

“Totally.”

“And that would be horrible. The worst thing ever.”

“The apocalypse.”

They laugh. The couple next to them shoots them a look that says,
Shut up!

“Vampires,” he says. He kisses her neck, pretending to bite her.

“Werewol—” His kiss catches her off guard. She stops talking so quickly that it sounds as if she inhaled an insect. “Do that again,” she whispers. “Please.”

“I was just kidding around.”

“Oh…”

The moment passes. Finn could slap himself.
She asked you
to bite her neck again, you jerk!
So he aims for the same spot.

“No!” She stops him. “Never mind.”

They dance through a chorus and another verse. “See?” Finn says, “I’d be horrible at this.”

“I had to stop you because I didn’t want to faint on the dance floor.”

It takes him a few seconds to process this. He relaxes. She isn’t angry. She isn’t going to walk off the dance floor and leave him standing alone.

“Maybe just friends is a good thing,” he says.

“Definitely.”

He leans back so that he can see her eyes. Colored lights spin across her face. She seems to be glowing from within. Finn knows it’s just an effect of the lighting, but he convinces himself it’s more than that. They’ve stopped dancing despite the continuing music. She didn’t mean it. He didn’t mean it. This is it: the moment. He never quite pictured it like this. But here it is. Their heads move slowly closer. Her lips part ever so slightly. He can’t believe it’s finally going to happen—again, now—a lifetime after their first kiss.

“Finn!”

Finn and Amanda jump away from each other. Whatever they just had shatters into pieces on the floor and melts away. Finn can’t breathe—but he could put a fist through Philby’s face.

What is he doing here? Philby doesn’t even go to their school. And he isn’t dressed up for a prom; he’s dressed the way he always is, like…well, like Philby: preppie, with the Scottish air that comes from his red hair and freckles. But Philby has clearly finally hit his long-delayed growth spurt—he looks like he’s grown about six inches since the end of the DHIs’ Disney cruise. In fact, all the Keepers look different now, Finn realizes. It’s like they’re not themselves anymore.

Except Amanda. She’s the same person, but somehow better than back then. Amazing Amanda.

“What the—?” Finn is trying to process the interruption.

Philby keeps his voice low so that the nearby dancers cannot hear him over the throbbing music. But Finn hears, Amanda hears. “Your phone,” Philby hisses in a patronizing tone.

“I’m dancing here,” Finn says, gesturing toward Amanda, whom Philby has yet to acknowledge.

“Hey, Mandy,” Philby says. “Sorry.” Polite, gentlemanly. Then back to Finn, and now he’s condescending again. “Your phone is off.”

“It’s on Do Not Disturb. As in: Do Not Disturb!”

“Something’s going down. They need us.” Philby looks at his friends intently. “They need us to take a ‘nap.’”

For the last three years since the cruise, things have been quiet. The Keepers have officially done little more than some image maintenance and new voice recordings for their in-park holographic guides. Unofficially, they have gone on occasional DHI “surprise inspections” of the Walt Disney World parks—late night walkabouts to make sure the peace is being kept. Now this.

One everyday skill that all the Keepers have developed as a result of their DHI service is the ability to fall asleep easily. All the Keepers, and Amanda and Jess too, can lie down and drift off in a matter of minutes. Once asleep, they can be “crossed over” and make the jump to their DHI hologram form—a bio-electronic mechanism that hasn’t ever been fully explained to any of them. Nor is it fully understood by anyone but the old man who serves as their mentor, Wayne Kresky.

“Where?” Finn asks.

“Everyone else is in the back of Maybeck’s van, waiting.”

Finn looks Philby up and down, taking the measure of his seriousness, and decides this is not a practical joke.

With one word, Amanda lets Finn know that she both understands the situation and feels hurt nonetheless—a one-two punch that leaves his stomach in a knot. “Go,” she says.