Kingdom Keepers VII (25 page)

Contributing to Finn’s nausea is the idea of Willa wandering the park alone, looking for him, while the eyes of Overtakers seek them all. He has violated the DHI partner rule. Now Willa’s doing the same: anarchy.

“The best way to explain it,” Wayne’s voice whispers through the one working earphone, “is that Mickey has always been considered the greatest threat to the OTs. He wins over the villains every night in the Fantasmic! show. His sorcerer’s cap and, to a lesser degree, his conductor’s baton, are his bewitching tools—his weapons, if you will. You must understand the history involved. This goes clear back to the early days. I was a boy your age, or not much older. Walt was a young man—only in his fifties—with big dreams. The park was perhaps half built, but not yet open. Mickey Mouse was everything Disney. There was no Mary Poppins, no Winnie the Pooh in Walt’s world. Not yet. It was this mouse, this silly little mouse everyone loved.

“Or nearly everyone. A divide emerged. A schism within the ranks of the villains. How, we don’t exactly know. We don’t even know when. But it was early. And it was real. Rebellion. Nothing short of it.

“For those who became the Overtakers, all they could see was that darn mouse, Mickey, looking back with his big eyes. Destroy Mickey, maybe you destroy Walt’s dream. Maybe, if you’re an OT, you’re never again demoted to the status of class clown, rendered insignificant with the stroke of an illustrator’s pen, made absurdly colorful, your features exaggerated, your personality stereotyped. Maybe, the reasoning went—at least, this is what we think—there was a way to stop Disney’s magic before it ever began.”

“But they didn’t destroy Mickey,” Finn says. “Disneyland’s here. Walt built Disney World. All the movies got made. I don’t get it.”

“There’s so much magic in the kingdom, Finn. So much magic.” Wayne sounds tired, almost defeated. The aching timbre of his voice fills Finn with dread.

“But that’s a good thing. That’s what we love about Disney. Isn’t it?”

“It can be.”

Looking through the peephole, Finn has to wonder if the old Imagineer’s head is slumped to disguise his speaking, or if it’s a sign of unconscious surrender.

Wayne speaks carefully. “Good magic and dark magic.”

“Understood,” Finn says.

“It took them years, you see? Decades.”

“The Overtakers,” Finn says, attempting to clarify the point. Wayne no longer seems to be talking to Finn, but only to himself.

“They started by attacking the park’s characters after hours. In Disney World, we built Mickey and Minnie their own homes. Not for the guests’ sake, Finn, but for the characters’ security.”

“Those aren’t there anymore. Fantasyland…” Finn is struggling to understand what Wayne is telling him. “You’re saying they
got
him? The Overtakers
got
Mickey?”

He speaks too loudly. Wayne’s head lifts as several diners look over toward the wall. Finn overhears two men’s voices: “Who said that?” “Where’d that come from?”

Finn quickly sets down the headphones and the microphone. Believing that the nearest security camera, and therefore his DHI projector, is likely near the stairs and the maître d’s station, Finn squats and flattens himself against the wall of the closet, hoping to force himself entirely into DHI shadow.

The cupboard door swings open.

Finn is looking into the face of a waiter. It’s clear from the man’s expression that he doesn’t see Finn. The man’s eyes drop downward.

“Get a load of that!” he says to the fellow waiter who now appears beside him. “A pair of running shoes.”

Finn looks down: his running shoes are visible from tongue to toe. From the waiters’ perspective, the depth of the cupboard’s interior must explain why only part of the shoes shows.

“Since when did this become our lost and found?” The man eases the door shut and Finn heaves a sigh of relief.

He waits a few seconds.

“I’m back,” Finn carefully whispers to Wayne through the ancient mic.

“I need not remind you that the OTs have ears
everywhere
, Finn. We wouldn’t be meeting like this if it weren’t necessary.”

“Understood. I’ll keep it down.”

“The point is this,” Wayne says gravely. “The last time you saw Mickey, the last time
anyone
saw Mickey, was very, very long ago. You don’t kidnap someone as iconic as Mickey Mouse. You destroy him.”

Finn finds it hard to breathe. “Come again?”

“You heard me.”

“The Overtakers destroyed Mickey Mouse?”

“And nearly all the magic that goes with him.”

The news hits Finn hard, reminding him of his first time entering Escher’s Keep all those years ago, when the idea of being a Kingdom Keeper was a novelty. He’s unsure what is up, down, right, wrong, forward, backward. He reaches out mentally for something solid to hold on to. Solid. Yeah, unlike anything I, or the other Keepers are, he thinks. This news…it changes everything. Everything we’ve ever thought about ourselves, what we’ve done, who we are, what becomes of us now.
³⁸

“Walt’s pen,” Finn says, remembering the power that instrument still possesses.
Something solid.

“A pittance by comparison, but yes: you’d have to get up early to beat Walt Disney.”

“But if the OTs got Mickey?”

“They didn’t
get
anything. And, by the way, I hate that word. It’s an ineffective word. You can do better!”

Wayne’s always been petty about the oddest things; but more than anything else so far this comment convinces Finn that he’s dealing with the real deal. No Overtaker would know how to fake the quirkier aspects of Wayne’s personality.

“They destroyed Mickey. But what does that mean, exactly?” Finn can’t see what Wayne’s aiming at.

“Ever notice how
everything
in these parks, in the films,
everything
to do with the kingdom is symbolic? It’s a magical world built on symbolism, whether it’s Main Street, USA, a Fairy Godmother, or Hades himself. It started with a rabbit. Oswald. But it was Mickey who launched an empire. Mickey who carried this company and all it stands for on his back, and Walt never forgot that for a moment. He treasured that first sketch of Mickey like it was the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. That was, symbolically at least, the start of everything
good
in the kingdom. A single sketch kept in a file in Walt’s office, never far out of reach.”

“Now you’re giving me goose bumps.”

“I must focus!” Wayne says. “It’s about time. Do you hear me? Can you
see
me, Finn?”

Through the peephole Finn sees Wayne fiddle with his wristwatch.

“By coming here to Disneyland, Finn, the Overtakers have increased their powers exponentially. This is where it all began. You and your team made a valiant effort to keep them away. You, and Dillard in particular, sacrificed a great deal. No matter. They have returned. The incident at the Haunted Mansion is proof. This event justified my taking a chance to reach you. Here we are. And now it must be stopped.
They
must be stopped. Do not for a minute assume that earthquake in Mexico was a fluke. Be on guard to prevent it from happening again, and…”

Finn tries to take all this in, but it’s overwhelming. He’s supposed to stop
an earthquake
? Dillard’s name distracts him, sends him plunging into his own dark memories, momentarily deafens him almost, like static buzzing in his ears. He’s not sure what Wayne says next, but he knows better than to ask the man to repeat himself.

“…So you must be vigilant. Betrayal is guaranteed—”

“‘An enemy within.’ The Cryptos warned us.” Finn feels sick and knows he’s lost his full DHI. Should anyone open the cupboard now…

“Without a doubt. You must trust: it is not me. It would never, will never, be me. But betrayal will come
from all sides
. These are the dark days, Finn. The final hours. All clichés, yes, but there’s no other way to say it. It comes down to this: do or die. You and your friends must
do
.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Finn doesn’t like the sound of that. “If we ‘do,’ then who dies? No more dying! Please, no more dying!”

T
HE CAST MEMBER “WORKING THE BOARD,”
as it’s known in Security, sees a code appear in the “hot box”—a normally blank box on the computer screen that posts one of a dozen codes to signal a problem. It might be a code for improper use of an emergency exit door, a spot power failure, a data interrupt—all signals that appear so commonly, the Security officer has them memorized. But this code puzzles her. Three years working the board, and she’s never seen it.

More to the point, the first two of its six digits—54—tell her it’s an old code going back to 1954, the early days, when Disneyland’s security system was being installed during the park’s construction. She suspects a computer error or a software glitch; an errant line of computer code must have spit out a false alarm. But her job is to be thorough. Earlier today, the Haunted Mansion was closed; an officer at the back gate reported a zombielike truck driver whose truck was later found abandoned, nowhere near its destination. Strange goings-on. Terrorism is on everyone’s mind, and Security is trained to spot even the slightest indicator. She is prepared and trained for the worst.

She leafs through the three-ring notebook listing the various codes. As she suspected, she finds the number that’s currently occupying the hot box handwritten in a two-column list on the first page. Some of the codes reference Walt’s apartment above the fire station and the status of the light that glows in that window; others reference long-defunct attractions such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and are highlighted in orange to indicate rides or spectacles that have been retired.

But the code she matches is not only retired, it’s just plain ancient, a code from Club 33, one she doesn’t even understand. A code she has to call her supervisor about. When her supervisor informs her that he must make a call in turn, she feels sure that it’s a dead code, a computer misfire, as she originally suspected.

To her surprise, her supervisor comes back on the line and asks her to repeat the code slowly, like spelling for a two-year-old.

“Five-four-three-three-two-two.” After she finishes, there’s a long silence. It sounds as if he’s hung up.

“You still there?” she asks.

“I’m here,” he says, but it sounds as if he wishes otherwise. He asks if she’s sure she has read him the code she is looking at correctly. She assures him that yes, she has.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Darned if I know,” he answers. “Do me a favor.” He walks her through a series of tests she’s never used before, followed by some she has: tests of data flow, of voltage and wattage on specific circuits. It takes her a minute, but she sees what he’s doing. Her suspicions are confirmed as he instructs her to run an audio interrupt on a live audio feed from Club 33, which is sort of like putting a telephone call onto speakerphone.

“Do you hear anything?” he asks. It’s a rhetorical question: the information she’s gleaned suggests voice traffic.

“How is this possible?”

“What? Tell me what you hear!”

“Two men talking. We have a dining room bugged? Isn’t that illegal?”

“We didn’t do it. It was the Imagineers before they were Imagineers.” He sounds agitated and impatient. “Walt being clever way before anyone was ready for that type of cleverness. Every table in the room is wired for sound, for eavesdropping. The system allows guests to talk to an omniscient voice that comes out of the ceiling. And yes, there were legal issues. It was never used.”

“Until now,” she says.

“Until now,” he echoes. “What do you hear? Who is it? What are they talking about? Why now, all these years later? No one even knows of that system’s existence, much less how to use it. Am I supposed to think Walt Disney himself has been resurrected?”

“Which question would you like answered first?” she asks.

“Send a pair of guards to check it out,” he says, ignoring her. “And you take notes, officer. You take notes like a stenographer. You got that?”

“Got it,” she says, her head ringing with a dozen questions of her own.