Kingdom Keepers VII

by Pearson, Ridley

  Amanda reaches over the seat back and places her hand tenderly on Finn’s shoulder. Maybeck gives an exaggeratedly heavy sigh and Charlene punches him in the shoulder.

  “There’s something else,” Finn says, winning their undivided attention. “If she’s living in Lilly Belle, where are the rest of them? The Evil Queen? Tia Dalma? Chernabog? We didn’t think about this: these OTs show up from Disney World and the cruise, but their characters are already here—all but Chernabog, and he’s not easy to hide.”

  “Interesting,” Philby says.

  “It’s a small park,” Charlene says. “It’s not like there are a million places to hide.”

  “Storey might be able to help us,” says Maybeck—the guy who never wants help. “She found a place to stow away in the park. She must have tried others.”

  “We need to find her,” Philby says. “She may know others things we don’t.”

  “What about Wayne’s warning about Mickey?” Jess asks Finn. “I know you’re all desperate to track down the Overtakers, but honestly, from where I am—from where Amanda and I are—Wayne has always known what matters. The rest feels like a distraction.”

  The van’s wheels whine on the freeway. The radio blares.

  Finn looks at the others. “She’s right.”

  “I don’t want to sound cruel,” Jess says, “but what if that’s the point? The Overtakers know how we feel about Wayne, and from what you all say, there’ve been a couple times in the past when they could have killed him.”

  “He sacrificed himself,” Finn says. “He let it happen.”

  “Okay. I’m sure that’s right,” Jess says. “But would he have wanted us to spend our time on revenge? A few minutes before, he was sharing secrets with you, Finn. Things he needed you to hear. But for the past couple days, you’ve been focused—”

  “On your sketch,” Maybeck says, cutting her off. “There was an oil rig in your sketch.”

  “There’s Mickey Mouse, octopus tentacles, fire, a grasshopper or something,” she reminds him. “Wayne’s message to Finn was about the original sketch of Oswald.”

  “Of Mickey,” Finn corrects her. “He said the OTs destroyed Mickey: ‘A single sketch kept in a file in his office. Never far out of reach.’ Whatever that means.”

  “But if they destroyed Mickey, wouldn’t the magic be gone?” Willa says.

  “Maybe it is,” Charlene says. “Maybe Wayne and the Imagineers have kept things going by sheer will. But with the OTs reorganized and Chernabog rebooted, Wayne knew it wasn’t enough. Look, he could have told us this years ago, right? So why now? Because time’s running out, and he felt too old to get things done. He brought us in, coached us, spent time training us.” It’s the athlete in her speaking. “Now he’s passed the baton. He sacrificed himself to save us—absolutely. But what if he also did that to push us?”

  “Dang,” Maybeck says. “I wish I could say that that sounds ridiculous.”

  “But it makes sense,” says Willa.

  “Times ten,” says Philby.

  “This sketch,” says Jess. “Do you suppose it’s still around?”

  “That couldn’t have been what the OTs stole from the Archives, could it?” Amanda asks.

  “We’ve seen that stuff,” Finn says. “There’s nothing like that in there. They’re looking for the sheet with the invisible ink. We don’t know if they found it, if they even figured it out.”

  “We keep going around in circles,” a frustrated Maybeck says. “It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Jess is right,” Finn declares. “Going after the OTs makes no sense. Stopping them is way more important.”

  “But they’re the same thing,” Maybeck says. He sounds increasingly agitated. “If we go after them, we stop them.”

  “I think what Jess and Finn are saying,” says Charlene, “is that there’s something bigger going on. It’s like in cheerleading.” Maybeck stifles a groan. “There’s your individual routine, but there’s also the team’s routine. Wayne talking to Finn was about the team routine. Not our team, the Overtakers’. He decided we were ready to coach ourselves.”

  Willa says, “If that’s a metaphor, I don’t think it works. What exactly is our team routine?”

  “Something bigger,” Finn says. “Charlie’s saying we’ve got to see the bigger picture. We’re chasing oily footprints instead of trying to figure out what Wayne was saying about Mickey.”

  “But those footprints led us to this,” Philby says, holding up the voodoo doll again. “And you found Cruella. It’s not like we’re wasting our time.”

  “It starts and ends in lightning,” Jess says, recalling the revelation that came to her in the Indiana Jones attraction. “There’s lightning in my sketch. And fire.”

  “We have to follow the leads we’re given,” Philby says. “To defeat an enemy, you have to establish his vulnerabilities. All we’re doing is pursuing leads. We have to do that!”

  “But following the footprints,” Charlene says, “is following leads given to us by the Overtakers. Whose leads do we trust, theirs or Wayne’s?”

  The van slows. The Cast Member turns the radio down. Ahead, the Keepers glimpse the mortuary, a stucco building called Sunny Skies, which looks like a country club. There are cars everywhere, and dozens of people streaming inside.

  A woman wearing a spectacularly colorful dress and a big red flower over her ear greets guests at the door.

  “Look!” says Charlene. “It’s Wanda.”

  * * *

  As Finn approaches Wanda in the long line of arriving guests paying their last respects, a lump closes off his throat and his eyes brim with tears. As they hug there’s an energy that passes between them. Wanda pours out stuff about how much Finn meant to her dad, how grateful she is that Finn came into his life even if late in his years. She talks about Finn being the “son Dad never had,” which makes Finn feel guilty for causing a man’s daughter to feel this way. He cries all the harder, thanks her, pulls away and moves on, comforted by Amanda and Jess.

  “Can you wait a moment please?” Wanda asks Charlene once everyone is done with their condolences.

  Charlene steps to one side.

  Fifteen minutes later, with the last of the guests inside, Wanda pulls Charlene deeper into the building and corners her.

  “I need to ask you to do something for me.” Wanda’s eyes mist over. She takes Charlene’s hand and presses something into it. “My dad’s watch. He wanted Finn to have it. Made me promise to give it to him. But honestly, Finn is just so much like my dad that when I…you know, just now…I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew I would just fall apart. You know? Keep it. Give it to Finn for my dad. He wanted me to tell Finn ‘It’s all about time.’ He made me promise I’d say it just like that.”

  Charlene nearly interrupts to tell her that Wayne already passed along that same message to Finn when they met in Club 33, but the timing, the mood are all wrong. She keeps it to herself. Instead, she nods a little too fast, overcome by emotion herself. “No problem,” Charlene says.

  Wanda thanks her profusely. They hug. Charlene is still overcome when she sits down at the end of a row next to Maybeck. She looks down the row at Finn. He catches her staring at him and she waves. This is no time to bother him; she wouldn’t be able to get a word out without bawling. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to Finn.

  He’s listed in the program as one of the speakers.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know I was going to be up here,” Finn says from behind the lectern. He and Wanda exchange a look. “Wayne was always full of surprises and I guess his daughter is carrying on the tradition.”

  Those gathered chuckle. Finn is facing a sea of smiles, which makes him feel much more comfortable.

  “Wayne was actually my boss. He hired me to model for Disney. I met a group of kids because of that and they’ve become my best friends on earth. The best friends, ever. Like any friends, you go through a lot of challenges, and we’ve had our share, for
sure.” The Keepers grin up at him. Amanda and Willa are weeping openly.

  “It’s too late now to thank him, but I think when you give someone else a friend, you give the most awesome gift ever. He gave me six friends. So I guess that makes it exponential or something. Philby’s the math guy.”

  More laughter from the crowd.

  “I have wonderful parents and grandparents, so I don’t know where exactly a guy like Wayne fits in, but he was sort of all of those and more, and all at once. I guess what I’m saying is he taught me a lot of things. And I don’t mean facts. Not like that. Not like school stuff. He taught me that fear makes us”—Finn addresses the Keepers now, who are all nodding at everything he says—“imperfect and vulnerable.” When Finn feels he’s about to lose it, he looks away from his friends’ eyes. “Wayne taught me there’s real magic in the world and to trust that. To believe it. To live it. Easier said than done.”

  Again the crowd chuckles, but Finn didn’t mean his remark as funny and the reaction takes him aback.

  “Wayne taught me that leadership is about what you do, not what you say. That sometimes you feel super alone when you’re doing the right thing and that’s what makes it so hard. But you do it anyway.

  “He lived all those things. That’s the thing about him, what made him so different. He always kept his cool, always knew exactly the right thing to say. He knew stuff no one else will ever figure out or understand. Not ever. Particle physics. Stuff that only people like Einstein understood.”

  Finn feels frustrated as he’s getting Isn’t he cute! looks from most of the adults—all but Joe, Brad, other Cryptos, and Imagineers, all of whom are sitting together in one long row, all of whom seem to be hanging on Finn’s every word, afraid he’s going to spill state secrets.

  “My guess is, there will be books written about Wayne and everything he’s done. Someday there will be. Maybe movies. People will come to the Disney parks and see them in a whole new way. See them…for what they really are. Wayne was more than a dreamer. I know I could never have dreamed up everything he gave me and my friends, everything he gave the company—Disney, I mean—and the parks, and everything. There’s only one Wayne Kresky.” Finn feels tears running down his cheeks; he didn’t know he was crying. “And I don’t know about stuff like heaven and immortality. Maybe I’m too young; maybe I’m too naïve. But if real immortality—can you even say that? real immortality?—is about never dying because all the people around you, all the people who loved you, will never let you out of their hearts, and if they never let you out of their hearts then you’re never gone in the first place, then Wayne’s already immortal.” Finn touches his chest and, to his surprise, the Keepers all stand and place their hands over their hearts as well. And then, almost incredibly, one by one, two by two, others in the crowd stand and do the same. Some are weeping; others, laughing. Some look up to the ceiling; some hang their heads.

  An infant cries in the back of the room. It breaks whatever spell held the audience in thrall.

  As Finn returns to his seat, Wanda stands and embraces him fiercely. There’s a collective sigh, and then a teary-eyed Wanda faces the crowd and speaks. “Like Dad always said, I love this boy.”

  * * *

  Finn is nearly mobbed after the service by well-wishers and people thanking him for his eulogy. Charlene has passed him Wayne’s watch, but the gift feels wrong in a way he can’t explain. More than one person tells him it was the best part of the service. He and the other Keepers keep close to Wanda and are with her when the main room finally empties out. Tea and cookies are being served down the hall, but no one’s hungry.

  Wanda praises Finn for being brave enough to share his emotions honestly. She thanks all the Keepers for making the end of her dad’s life “mean something.”

  “It isn’t over,” Philby says. “Just like Finn said.”

  “I wanted to give this back to you,” Finn says, proffering the watch.

  Wanda instinctively yanks her hand away when she sees it, and the watch falls to the carpet.

  Philby bends to scoop it up. “Huh!” he says. “Check this out. There’s stuff on the back.”

  He shows it to Finn, and the others gather around.

  “The drawings made with the invisible ink could easily have been these same images,” Philby says. “Wayne’s carving in Club 33 is like a piece of this stair thingy.” Philby traces the lines engraved in the metal surface of the back of the watch with his fingernail. “It hasn’t been cleaned in a long time.”

  “Dad hasn’t worn that for as long as I can remember. It must be very old,” says Wanda. Maybe a memory hits her, or maybe it’s this day, but she suddenly looks as if she wants to speak, but can’t. She reaches out for all of the Keepers, and they fall into a group hug that lasts through laughter and tears, but suffers from the gravity of the moment, the inescapable feeling of finality.

  “He would have hated to miss this,” Wanda says.

  And led by Wayne’s daughter, they all begin laughing, louder and more fully than any of them has laughed in days.

  THE SECURITY PERSONNEL FINISH sweeping the room for listening devices and give the okay. Everyone around the table watches as Joe sees them out and locks the main door to the Disney Archives. Returning to sit at the head of the library table, he addresses the group, which includes the Keepers, the two Fairlies, Brad, and Becky Cline, who oversees the Archives. Becky holds a large box; a number of oversize portfolios sit beside her on the table.

  Joe holds up an enlargement of the photo of Wayne’s watch that Finn now wears. “We have stairs, an eyeball, and some kind of biblical-looking king. We know that when Wayne was given the watch, it didn’t have this inscription on the back. He had it put there. He also wanted the watch passed to Finn. But there’s more. Much more,” Joe says. “Wayne mentioned the importance of time to Finn—”

  “And the watch to Wanda,” Charlene says, interrupting.

  “When he said that to me he held up his watch for me to see,” Finn says. “This watch.” Finn rattles it on his wrist.

  “Yes.” Joe doesn’t take well to being interrupted. “There’s the discovery of Tia Dalma’s possible presence at an oil drilling site.”

  “Possible? It’s a voodoo doll.” Philby points; the doll lays on the table in front of Becky Cline. “Right, Becky?”

  “I’m not an expert in the occult, in witchcraft. However, I’m not altogether unfamiliar with it, either. Certain spells and powers possessed by our villains fall under that category. We have discovered similar items on a few occasions—even on Castaway Cay.” Becky opens the archival gray cardboard file box. Inside are three different twig-and-twine dolls, all extremely similar. “To my uneducated eye, I would say this new doll fits well with these others. But that’s as far as I’ll go.”

  “And we have this,” Maybeck says. He’s sitting next to Jess. They’ve both had their heads down, sketching furiously. To look at them, one might think they’re bored and doodling, but that’s far from the truth. Jess holds up a photocopy: the page from the stolen file, with the watermarks and invisible ink. Maybeck holds up another photocopy, of the rubbing that Finn made in Club 33. “Check it out,” Maybeck says.

  They have each drawn over their photocopies. Jess has filled in the areas suggested by the water spills; Maybeck has deepened the shading in order to make the rubbed images stand out more boldly.

  Silence falls over the table.

  Jess presents three images: a set of steps, an eye, and a bearded man sitting. Maybeck’s sheet shows what looks like a chair. Joe silently slides the photo of Wayne’s watch alongside the other two sheets. They all depict the same images.

  “Well,” Brad says, “that takes care of that.”

  “Becky?” Joe says.

  “There’s one fact I can add to the mix,” Becky says. “Despite Wanda Kresky’s assertion, neither Wayne nor any other Imagineer was ever presented with a gold Mickey Mouse watch. Moreover, in Walt’s time, the watches were made by a
company in St. Louis. Wayne’s is from New Jersey. It must have been something Walt ordered himself, a custom watch made expressly for Wayne. I find that interesting—from a historical point of view.”

  “It speaks to how special Wayne was to him,” Brad says.

  Finn turns to Becky, speaking over Brad. “Is there any chance the steps and the eye are used for black magic? Or whatever magic the OTs use—the Disney villains, I mean.”

  “I know all about the Overtakers, Finn. Wraiths and all,” Becky says. “Give me a moment.” She leaves the table and heads into the back room.

  “The OTs have gone to a lot of trouble to get Chernabog back here,” Philby says. “We should include that on our list. Do we have a list?”

  “Yes,” Joe says, making a note to himself. “We are keeping extensive records of all known events. Both for the sake of Becky and the Archives and—” He can’t finish his sentence.

  “In case none of us is around at the end of this,” Willa says.

  Joe smirks. “You said that. I didn’t.”

  “All the OTs we’ve encountered,” Charlene says. “The headless horseman, Madame Leota, the ghost of the Native American—I mean, is that normal?”

  “Not normal,” Brad says. Joe shoots him a condemnatory look, and Brad shrugs defensively. “What? Joe, we’re giving Philby a key to the Crypt. We’ve agreed: no more secrets. They’re over eighteen. They can handle it. They have to handle it.”

  Joe clears his throat, clearly uncomfortable.

  “I’m getting keys to the Crypt?” Philby says, joy rushing across his face.

  “We,” Joe says, “and by that I mean some select Imagineers, as well as some chief executives, believe that recent events may—may—suggest an endgame on the part of the Overtakers. That this in turn necessitates an aggressive strategy for intervention and cessation on our part.”