KK01 - The Kingdom Keepers aka Disney After Dark

by Ridley Pearson

  They’d been tricked. Jez and Maleficent had wanted to be followed.

  Maybeck made a quick move to his left, but with a simple wave of her gloved hand Maleficent threw up a series of white vibrating lines that connected one column to the next. A cage of light.

  The lines hummed and sparked with electricity. They added light to the gloominess.

  A second wave of her hands erected more lines, intricately connected. She had created a complex fence around the boys.

  She said, “You’re familiar with shock collars for dogs? Wireless fences? Same concept. I don’t advise testing it, but be my guests, if you must.”

  The light allowed Finn to see the purple of her robes. Too scared to talk, he summoned his courage, refusing to look directly at her while at the same time keeping a monstrous image in his mind’s eye.

  “We know you have it on you,” she said, “you clever child. Now…place the pen down on the floor there. As soon as you do, your girlfriends will feel fine.”

  Silence. Not even Maybeck responded with his usual sarcasm.

  Philby’s eyes danced toward the sparking white lines that caged them. Finn could feel him plotting escape.

  Finn felt it worth a lie. “It might help if I knew what you were talking about.”

  “You insolent young man.”

  “We were there. One Man’s Dream.” Jez stepped out from behind another column.

  “One Witch’s Dream, too,” Maleficent said. “These parks grow so…claustrophobic—don’t you think?”

  Seeing these two side by side, Finn realized how different they looked. It was hard to believe Jez was this woman’s daughter. And now he felt awful for doubting Amanda. Now she sat semiconscious somewhere above them.

  “You two can go,” Maleficent said to Philby and Maybeck. She swept her hand to one side and the fence sputtered and vanished. “Omnia haec obliviscantur!” she chanted musically, then said, “When you reach the surface, you will remember none of what has gone on here. Neither the events nor the way down. All you will recall is going to the restroom together. You don’t know where Finn is. Haven’t seen him in a while. Now go.”

  The two boys remained rooted firmly in place. “No way!” Philby said.

  “Silly, silly boy.” She clapped her gloved hands together. Philby seemed to lose every bone in his body. He fell to the floor in a heap of unwilling limbs and muscle, a lump of flesh.

  “I’m giving you a very generous opportunity here. Terry knows better than to disobey, don’t you, Terry?”

  Maybeck’s lips moved, but no sound came out.

  “I can add some pain, if you like,” she said to Philby.

  “No!” Maybeck said, reaching for Philby.

  “Go!” Finn instructed them.

  They looked pained to hear this from him.

  “Go,” he repeated.

  Losing her patience, Maleficent asked, “Or do you prefer fire?”

  Her left hand suddenly held a ball of flame. She blew it out.

  “Or wind?” The room swirled with a gale force that blew dust into their eyes and knocked the boys off their feet. Neither Jez’s robes nor her mother’s so much as fluttered.

  “Want to play some more?” she asked.

  Maleficent lit another ball of flame in her hand. She blew on it, sending it rolling directly for Maybeck. It exploded in a puff of black smoke just before reaching him.

  Helping Philby up, Finn leaned in and whispered, “Keep an image in your head. Focus on something. Protect your memory.” He gave him a little shove. “Now, go!” he said more loudly.

  Maybeck led Philby by the arm. They hurried out of the room.

  When they were gone, Finn said to the witch, “You’re head of the Overtakers.”

  She cackled an edgy laugh. “Me? Head? False compliments will get you nowhere with me, young man. I am but a humble servant to she who lives within. My powers are so small and insignificant. Do not waste your breath. I’m an errand runner, that’s all.”

  Finn felt his knees go weak. There was something more powerful than she was?

  She instructed him: “Now, put it on the floor. Do so, or suffer. Your choice.”

  “Make me,” Finn said.

  Maleficent waved her right hand and Finn’s cape blew open. The assortment of pens and pencils taken from Walt’s desk stuck out from the cape’s inside pocket. The witch turned away and the cape fell shut.

  “If you could make me hand it over, you would have,” he told her. “But you can’t. For some reason, you need me to cooperate. Why is that?”

  He flashed open the cape again. And again, she averted her gaze.

  “He protected against this, didn’t he? Walt Disney,” Finn said as he concealed the pens and pencils again.

  Maleficent dared to venture a look at the pens, her eyes sparkling, as if Finn were holding a million dollars in gold.

  He took hold of the pens and held them out toward her. Maleficent cowered away from him.

  “Interesting,” Finn said. “You need one of these pens or pencils, don’t you? But which one?”

  He stepped forward. She moved back, and away, ducking behind the nearest column. “The real quill can hurt you, can’t it? Dull your powers?” He understood then. This was how Wayne could stop the Overtakers.

  “It can stop your plans, this pen, can’t it? You need to get rid of it. Destroy it. Even just its existence has threatened you all these years.”

  “What do you know? You’re just a boy! And we all know little boys shouldn’t play with fire.”

  With that, she pretended she was bowling. A large ball of fire rolled from her hand and across the floor at Finn. He dodged it easily enough, but then came a second, and a third.

  Jez “caught” the balls of fire on the opposite side and bowled them back toward Maleficent.

  Finn, trapped in the middle, danced to avoid the flames.

  A ball singed his cape. He couldn’t keep this up for long. He found himself hopping around like an Irish step dancer.

  “You will do exactly as I say,” Maleficent instructed him, still bowling her fireballs at him.

  Finn understood what he had to do. Dodging the fire as he landed, he scattered several of the pens across the stone floor. A ball of fire tumbled toward the pens.

  “No!” the witch shouted. With a wave of her hand, the flaming balls vanished into wisps of black smoke and the tangy smell that follows a lightning storm.

  So, Finn thought, she doesn’t want to destroy the pen, and she can’t touch it herself. She has a use for it, but is also afraid of its power.

  “You think yourself so clever?” she called out angrily. She walked right through his electric cage, straight for the pens.

  Finn dove across the floor, swept them up into his hand, and sprinted for the white sparking fence. She had passed through without so much as a spark.

  When he was crossed over, Finn had been able to walk through walls and counter the currents of Splash Mountain by concentrating on the DHI essence of his crossed-over body. So why not pass through this electric fence unharmed?

  He focused on the single idea: I am light. I am nothing but light. Nothing can stop me if I’m nothing but light. Nothing can harm me if I’m—

  Wham!

  Reaching the fence at full stride, he was knocked back off his feet and onto the floor. He felt as if he’d been stabbed in the chest.

  Maleficent seemed to float, not walk, as she approached. She towered over him. Scowling, the witch raised her arm, about to deliver a spell. Finn clutched the pens and jumped toward her, lightning fast. He thrust the pens in her face. Sparks flew as the pens connected with Maleficent.

  She flew back and fell to the stone floor.

  “Your Grace?” Jez called out.

  The witch lay on the stone floor, stunned. The electric fence sputtered.

  Finn stepped closer to the fallen witch, the pens held in front of him like a sword. She recoiled, expecting him to strike again.

  “Lo
wer the fence!” he instructed Jez. He never took his eyes off Maleficent. She seemed to be gaining her strength back. “Lower the fence, or I’ll do it again,” Finn warned.

  The bars of buzzing white lines sparked twice more and then vanished.

  “Release Amanda and Charlene,” he told her. When Jez hesitated, he stepped closer to Maleficent. The feeling of cold increased. Her strength was indeed returning. He needed Jez to do this quickly, before her mother came to her senses.

  He stabbed at Maleficent with the fistful of pens. A second burst of sparks threw her down again.

  “Okay!” Jez exclaimed. She waved her hands. “It’s done.”

  Finn backed up and reached the stairway.

  A weakened Maleficent lifted her head and said, “We will meet again, young man. We have unfinished business, you and I.”

  Finn turned and ran.

  31

  The kids needed the plans that had been stolen from Finn at One Man’s Dream, and no one had any doubts as to who had taken them. Maleficent would return for the pen—the Stonecutter’s Quil

  —with a vengeance. Whatever powers the pen and the plans possessed when combined, each side had their reasons for wanting what the other now possessed.

  Before he left Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, Finn paid Wayne a visit to explain the night’s events.

  “It’s always such a noisy night,” Wayne complained. He looked silly dressed in a pair of pajamas and a plaid robe. He wore Mickey and Minnie Mouse fuzzy slippers.

  “We need your help.”

  “So it would seem. So it would seem.” Wayne paced his small apartment over the fire station, glancing out the windows occasionally. Finn heard him mutter, “When will they go home?” Then he paced some more. “Two birds with one stone,” he said, now addressing Finn.

  “How’s that?” Finn asked, impatient to hook back up with his friends and leave the park.

  “I can help you—will help you—but it won’t come without additional risk to us all. She has to be desperate to be bowling fire at your feet. Revealing herself like that.” He studied the pens spread out on the small dining table, where Finn had put them. “You’ll keep all of these, because they’ve obviously come in handy. Tomorrow’s the day. They’ll be expecting you by night, of course, because that’s when you’re usually here. So it can’t be night. It must be day. Furthermore, if you’re to secure the plans, then you must be a boy, not crossed over.”

  “But we can touch and hold things when we’re crossed over. I can get those plans back.”

  “You can’t do that where I’m sending you,” Wayne countered. “You’ll have to be yourself. The others as well. And you’ll need disguises, or you’ll get caught.” Wayne paused, thinking hard.

  “Cast-member costumes, you understand? Employees. Each of you. I can help there as well.”

  “But why? Where are you sending us?”

  “You showed me,” Wayne said. “I might have never figured this out by myself.”

  “Showed you what?”

  “Where’s the one place that a weakened Maleficent can hide without being questioned?”

  “Here in the park.”

  “I mean, where in the park?”

  “Whatever ride, whatever attraction she’s part of.”

  “But that’s the point. She isn’t part of one,” Wayne answered. “Her role is over at the studios.

  She’s in Fantasmics. That’s all she does here—that one show. She turns herself into the dragon.

  Maybe in real life as well.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m an old man talking to himself, that’s all. Back to the important question: where can she hide in the Magic Kingdom?”

  “Out in the open?” Finn guessed.

  “Precisely. And if I were her, if I’d stolen these plans and then led boys down to my secret lair, I would need someplace new to lay low. The boys might tell people about the dungeons. They could be searched. I could be caught. I need a place no one can find me.”

  “But where?” Finn asked, feeling as if they were talking in circles.

  “We’ll need all five of you to dress as cast members. You’ll meet me at the Transportation and Ticket Center, bus stop number five, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Can you make that?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday. Probably. I suppose so.”

  “Make sure you do,” he advised.

  “What did you mean by ‘two birds with one stone’?”

  “We’re going to use her own tactics against her. If you manage to get the plans, she’ll come after you. She’ll want to stop you from getting them to me, especially now that she knows you have the pen.”

  “So?”

  “You’re going to lead her into a trap.” His old eyes brightened.

  “You’re going to use us as bait?”

  Wayne looked at Finn. His features softened. “How terribly impolite of me. It has been so long, you see. We’re so close now. So very close.” He straightened up and looked Finn in the eye.

  “I need your help—yours and the others’—in catching Maleficent. It is a task not without risk, but one I assure you well worth the effort, if you’re game. This is, I believe, what Walt had intended all along—the capture of an Overtaker, the beginning of the end for them.” He paused and allowed Finn to think through his proposal. Then he asked, “So? Will you help me?”

  At nine the next morning, Finn stood with the others in line at bus stop number five at the Transportation and Ticket Center.

  A large bus pulled up. The door swung open, and from behind the wheel Wayne motioned them inside. “Well?” the old guy said, “Hurry it up!”

  The kids piled on, and Wayne shut the door and drove off. They were all alone in the otherwise empty bus.

  “There isn’t time,” Wayne said. “There’s a bag for each of you.”

  Finn’s name was written on one of five grocery bags. Inside was a costume.

  “Put it on,” Wayne instructed. “Ladies to the back.”

  Some blankets had been strung across the rear seats to provide the girls privacy.

  “Gentlemen up front.”

  Wayne turned the bus at the next corner, and the boys, all in various degrees of undress, had to hold on to keep their balance.

  Wayne picked up the microphone and announced so the girls could hear as well, “I’ll bring you in around the back of the park at Frontierland. You’ll enter the tunnels from there.”

  “Tunnels?” Finn asked.

  “After that, it’s up to the five of you, I’m afraid.”

  When the boys were dressed, Charlene and Willa came forward. Willa wore an old-fashioned blue-striped dress and a puffy-sleeved blouse printed with pastel flowers, the uniform of food-service workers in Frontierland. Charlene wore a skirt and top of a deckhand on the paddle wheel steamboat that circled Tom Sawyer Island.

  “Listen, all of you! There’s a schedule in place we must keep to in order for this to work.”

  Wayne was one of the worst drivers Finn had ever met. The bus nearly sideswiped two cars, then veered left and scraped its wheels against the curb, before smashing back down to the roadway.

  “Okay, we’re listening,” Finn said, realizing that the old goat was agitated.

  Philby was dressed as a boatman on the Jungle Cruise. Finn was a newspaper boy from Main Street. Maybeck wore a turban-topped outfit from the Magic Carpets of Aladdin.

  Wayne pulled the bus over and threw open the door. Amanda boarded.

  “She is necessary to our plans,” Wayne announced.

  Amanda looked Finn in the eye and then, without saying anything, took a seat in the middle of the bus.

  Wayne explained, “Amanda has the run of the place. She’s not on the DHI watch list. She’ll act as sentry and guide when you need her.”

  Now inside the Magic Kingdom, Wayne slowed the bus next to a large white building that, according to its sign, had something to do with waste disposal. A wide metal tube,
connected to the building, extended out from an earthen bank. A paved road led up the rise to a very large double gate in the wooden wall. Flowers and shrubs covered a small hill that bordered a tall wooden fence, which was behind Frontierland.

  Wayne spun to face them, still behind the wheel. He nervously checked his wristwatch. “You’ll wear these ID tags around your necks at all times. But turn them so they face in, so the ID picture doesn’t show.” Wayne had borrowed some ID tags for them.

  “What’s this building?” Maybeck asked. Dressed as Ali Baba, or whoever he was, Finn thought he looked pretty cool.

  Wayne answered. “This is important to you, Finn. Have you ever seen a garbage bag being carried around inside the park?” Wayne asked.

  All five shook their heads.

  “This building is why. All the park’s trash travels underground through a series of steel tubes.

  Those tubes terminate here, where the trash is compacted, and then shipped off to a dump. The process is automated. I’ve briefed Amanda.”

  She remained in the back, silent and studious. Briefed Amanda about the trash? Finn wondered. He kept his mouth shut.

  “Once I get you inside,” Wayne instructed, “you’re on your own. The Utilidor here—that’s what the park tunnels are called—is complicated and big. The corridors are more like underground roads than sidewalks. There are golf carts and electric buggies down there, so keep alert and don’t get hit. Cast members know the Utilidor well, and you’re cast members now. You’ll need to look comfortable.”

  “What about Maleficent?” Finn asked. “The plans?”

  “Terrence,” Wayne said to Maybeck, “what’s likely the coldest room in an office building?”

  “The computer room,” Maybeck answered. “The server center.”

  “So where’s the safest, most comfortable place for someone who likes the cold to spend time?”

  “A refrigerator?” Charlene answered, not paying enough attention.

  “One possibility, yes, and one that you and Willa will pursue. There’s an entire section of the Utilidor devoted to cold food storage.”

  “The computer center,” Maybeck said, answering Wayne’s question.

  “The servers are housed at the back of what we call the Control Room. That’s for you and the boys.” Wayne warned them, “Stay alert for a sudden drop in temperature. That’s what you’re looking for. The missing plans won’t be far away. We need those plans.” Wayne looked troubled and concerned. “The point is, from what Finn described, he wounded Maleficent. Weakened her.