“We are doing what we feel we need to do. If you are trying to pressure me into—”
“Not at all!” Mrs. Whitman said. “I’m not trying to pressure you into anything.”
“What if they should never come back?” Mrs. Philby said, her words choked. “I don’t accept all this nonsense our children have told us about dreaming and traveling…if you ask me, it’s…well, I can’t even say it. It’s horrible is what it is. The evil of our society. Where our children, our dear, precious children, could ever get hold of such things—”
“It is not what you think!” Mrs. Whitman gasped.
“The doctors will run tests. We shall see what we see.”
“Our children—their holograms—are trapped inside the parks somewhere.”
“And you actually believe that nonsense,” Mrs. Philby replied, “which means this conversation is over.”
“If we work together,” Mrs. Whitman said, “maybe we can figure out where they’ve gone. Maybe we can find them and bring them back.”
“Listen to you!”
“The Overtakers have kidnapped Wayne. I…Finn…your son was here at my house. We…there was a cryptogram, a kind of mathematical—”
“I know what a cryptogram is!” Mrs. Philby said. “Will you listen to yourself, Mrs. Whitman? Will you listen to what you are saying?”
“I know it sounds—”
“Ridiculous? Absurd? Impossible? Yes, it does! And you? You’re delusional if you believe such…such garbage.” Mrs. Philby was breathing heavily into the phone. “What do you mean, he was at your house?”
“After school. He and our Finn and another of the—Willa…listen, I know how far-fetched all of it sounds. We’ve been asked to endure so much. But my point is: if there is some truth to what they say about what happened to Donnie Maybeck that time, about where they go at night, about Wayne and this…this war they seem to be fighting—”
“Would you just listen to yourself?”
“But if there is,” Mrs. Whitman persisted. “If there should be—”
“But there isn’t. How could there be?”
Mrs. Whitman felt a tremendous headache coming on. She gripped her head with her free hand and tried to be objective about what she was saying. She knew that if she were the one on the receiving end of her own argument she’d think the other person a nutcase.
“I don’t know,” she muttered.
“When the doctors render their opinion,” Mrs. Philby said, “I will contact you and the other parents.”
“Kind of you.”
“It’s the least I can do. Should I call this number?”
Mrs. Whitman gave her her mobile number instead.
“Are you…going out?” Mrs. Philby asked, as if Mrs. Whitman would be committing the ultimate bad-parent crime by leaving her comatose son in his present state.
“My husband will be here with Finn,” Mrs. Whitman said. “I…that is…Donnie’s aunt and I—”
“The artist?”
“The same. Yes. Donnie let slip something about Epcot.” She hesitated, knowing the scorn she faced for bringing up the subject. “We can’t just sit by and do nothing, you see?”
“But…you can’t possibly believe any of what they tell us!”
“Actually…well…that is…yes. I’m afraid I do.”
PHILBY KNEW HE HAD IT in him. He stood behind the control room that overlooked the expansive but empty amphitheater facing the Fantasmic! stage and walked through the wall, thinking this must be how Harry Potter felt when entering Platform 9 3/4 for the Hogwarts Express. Philby had always considered that to be purely fictional, impossible—and yet here he was, doing it. He stepped through and found himself alongside gunmetal gray shelves holding a dozen flashing computer slaves. He was standing to the left of, and looking over the shoulder of, a man wearing a Disney ball cap and a dark blue sweatshirt. The man’s full attention was on the show onstage, and it was a good thing too, for his angle of view allowed Philby to spot his own reflection in the control room’s slanted windows; if the man looked slightly to his own left he would have seen the boy spying on him. Philby stepped behind an open locker door, screening himself, so that he could peer through the crack between the door and the cabinet. He studied the man’s every move—where he looked, how he controlled the array of knobs and buttons on the board and various boxes in front of him as well as off to his side. Philby quickly identified the lighting and sound boards. Everything was computerized: the show’s effects were brought together on a single computer screen that tracked by hundredths of seconds and started and stopped each particular function, from the opening and closing of a trapdoor to a light changing color. Everything was synchronized with the music. The show played out on a large flat-screen display that showed dozens of different rows of categories: five for music; six for live sound; fifteen for lights; six for pyrotechnics; plus a dozen other stage events.
The man wore a headset through which he communicated with the rest of the crew, keeping one eye on the display, the other on the stage below.
“Okay,” Philby heard the director from the house say over an intercom, “we’re through the opening without a glitch, let’s keep it running.” The technician clicked a button on the console in front of him, keeping his eyes on the screen.
Philby quickly saw that the variously colored segments of each row on the master display related directly to events happening onstage below. The tech director stopped the show to adjust one of the lighting cues, and the technician, following his instructions, tapped a few keys on his console, extending one blue bulge on the lighting display. When they ran the cue again, a corresponding blue light on stage remained lit a fraction of a second longer than before. Satisfied, the man let the show continue.
To the right of the console were several other computer screens, and while this might have overwhelmed any of the other Kingdom Keepers, Philby found himself right at home. The top screen was a list of pyrotechnic effects and, as Philby studied it, he realized that the other screens pertained to the other categories on the larger flat panel. The screens on the right expanded and explained the events on the main screen. The discovery intrigued Philby: if he could get into that chair, he would have full control over every light, sound, trapdoor, and explosion that happened on stage.
Including those that were never supposed to happen.
* * *
Charlene, Amanda, and Finn were tucked into a thicket that looked out onto the backstage entrance to the Fantasmic! stage. From here the structure looked like an oil-rig platform, a series of open concrete platforms rising higher and higher, enclosed in steel-pipe railings painted a sky blue. For safety’s sake, there was only a single entrance to the backstage area. And though that entrance was presently unguarded, something warned Finn not to try it. Don’t go there, a voice said in his head, and he took this to be not only his own unconscious thought, but somehow—and he didn’t pretend to know how it might be possible—a message from Wayne. He felt something guiding him, like the kind of power a song could have over him, or the way he felt sometimes late at night when nothing in the world made any sense, and then he’d picture his mother or father and for no explainable reason he would feel okay again. Like that. Weird, strange emotions that carried through and penetrated his core, so deep that he knew to obey them.
“We need another way in,” he said, bracing himself for the challenges he felt certain to come. But on this night he was to be surprised.
“Okay,” Charlene said. She’d never taken her eyes off the stage’s superstructure. She seemed to be breaking it down level by level, bolt by bolt. “I have a theory. Just a theory. I need like thirty seconds to check it out.”
“Involving?”
“If I’m right,” she said, “I can get you in there.”
“Go for it,” he said.
“It’s a little risky,” she added. “So if anything happens…well, don’t forget about me. I’m not saying that. But do what needs to be done first and fi
gure me out after. You got it?”
Was this the same girl who had once tried to make everything all about her? Could one person change like that? So quickly? So completely? Charlene herself attributed the change to her participation in the adventure at Animal Kingdom. And where Maybeck might have questioned her, or accused her of being the traitor they all expected, Finn decided to do otherwise.
“Should I talk you out of it?” he asked.
“No. I hope not. Stay tuned. BRB.”
As she took off, running out into the open, Finn reached for her arm to stop her, but missed. As far as he could tell she had not yet taken her eyes off the superstructure. Whatever her idea was, it seemed to consume all her attention. Even now, as she sprinted across the paved area, as Finn feared she was going to go against what he’d said and use the backstage entrance anyway, as he rose and felt his jaw drop to allow him to yell out to stop her, she never flinched, never looked away from the superstructure above and ahead of her.
As he was about to call out, Amanda took his arm and pulled him back down. He shook her off and broke her grip, furious that she’d stopped him. What did she know? If something happened to Charlene, it wasn’t Amanda who’d get blamed. No, the blame would fall squarely on him. Being the leader also meant being the loser if there was loss.
Charlene jumped and spun around and was suddenly running backward nearly as fast as she had been going forward. She’d broken her staring contest with the stage, and was now looking back at the trees, at her friends. Her eyes were defiant, as if she possessed a secret none of the rest of them knew. Finn felt as if she were looking him straight in the eye. For a moment an icy panic stole through him: she was the traitor about to betray them.
And then she disappeared.
Vanished.
Gone.
Amanda took Finn’s arm again, but her face was filled with exhilaration, not the terror and dread he felt.
“DHI shadow,” she said softly.
The terraced audience seating of Fantasmic!’s outdoor amphitheater sloped down a hundred feet or more toward the artificial lake in front of the stage. The back of the stage rose to the same height as the highest level of the audience area. Charlene had figured out that if she ran down to the lowest level—the stage-door entrance—she would be in a projection shadow.
“See?” Charlene said, causing Finn to jump. She was standing a few feet behind them. “I cut around and came back through the landscaping. The projection line is just about dead even with the door. It runs about a quarter of the way around that far side. I found the other edge. But there’s a nice solid shadow, thirty or forty feet or more.”
“That was some kind of risk to take,” Finn said.
“Would you have said that if Philby had been the one to discover it?” She waited for his answer, but he wasn’t going to encourage her. “I think you need to open your mind, Finn Whitman. It took some calculation, I admit it, but it wasn’t a total guess. There’s never been any voiceover work, never any green-screen work, never even any discussion of our taking part in Fantasmic! Why?”
“Because our DHIs don’t reach over here,” he answered.
“Or there’s enough interference to make it a hassle. And they’re not about to install one of those projectors for a single attraction. Not when they cost as much as they do.”
Finn had had all this same information at his disposal. Why had she figured it out while he had not?
“I can get you in there,” she said. “I can climb up there, find some rope—there’s got to be a ton of rope backstage, or strapping, or something, and get you both up there. Amanda’s new at this, so maybe she can’t touch stuff when she’s invisible, but you and I can haul her up. Once we’re in, we’re in. No one’s going to question our being there. I’ve counted twenty-five people so far.”
Finn realized that had been part of what Charlene had been doing earlier: counting Cast Members.
“There will be costumes somewhere. Stuff like that. We can make this work. We can get you onto the stage before Maleficent’s scene.”
Finn reminded her, “When you go to sleep, things in your pockets or a wristwatch or necklace cross over with you. Things held in your hands do not—maybe because as you fell asleep you let go. What if when I go down there into projection shadow, the sword doesn’t come with me?”
“Good point. So you’ll have to tie it to the rope. We’ll haul it up after you two have made it. That way it won’t give you away.” She pointed. “We’ll go this way, through the woods. Once we disappear, that’s it. We’re doing this blind. I’ll do my best, but I won’t know where you are, I won’t be able to see you, and you won’t be able to see me, so here’s the code: one tug on the rope means go. Three means stop.”
“What about two tugs?” Amanda asked.
Finn answered, “Two means nothing. We won’t use two tugs, just to make sure there’s no confusion.”
“You guys have done this before,” Amanda said in a voice of resignation.
“Just a little bit,” said Charlene, motioning for them both to follow.
THE PLAN WAS A SIMPLE ONE: to get Finn into position prior to Maleficent’s appearance in the show. Assuming the Overtaker Maleficent had taken the place of the Cast Member playing her—in order to “hide out in the open”—and that Chernabog had done the same thing as well, Maleficent’s appearance in Fantasmic! would be the moment for Finn to attack her with the sword.
Charlene had an equally difficult assignment: she was to try to figure out a way to trap Chernabog, hopefully preventing his becoming a dragon, as he did at the end of the show. The way it played out, the dragon was eventually subdued by water, which worked nicely for theater; but if the Overtakers realized they were under attack, they weren’t about to let some water stop them. The dragon would battle back with everything he had, including fire breathing. Finn didn’t want to get up close and personal with that.
The bigger issue facing Finn, Amanda, and Charlene at the moment was how big a grip the Overtakers had on the show. Was it just Chernabog and Maleficent, or were others involved? And if so: characters in the show, or stagehands, or both?
“Remember,” Finn said to Amanda, as they stared at an empty wall where they believed an invisible Charlene was climbing, “once we’re in shadow, you won’t be visible, and maybe we shouldn’t speak either. Don’t want someone hearing a ghost.”
“You’re taking Mickey’s place, right?”
“Yes.”
“But what if they’ve already gotten to him?”
“If they’ve kidnapped and replaced the Cast Member who plays Mickey, then we’ve probably lost already. Mickey’s got to be on our side. Maybe they’re ultimately after him. You’ve seen how the major Cast Members—all the Cast Member princesses, Minnie and Mickey, Goofy, Pluto—always travel around the park with a ‘handler?’” he said. “Guests are made to believe the handler is there to guide the character, manage them, speak for them when necessary. Wayne says they’re actually bodyguards. Even the smallest handler is trained in martial arts. They’ve been around ever since the Overtakers appeared. The Imagineers protect them at all costs. If the parks were ever to lose the Mickey and Minnie who show up after the park closes…”
“Mickey’s a big part of the show.”
“He is the show. His character has obvious powers—powers greater than Maleficent’s, and he has the show itself on his side—it’s written and staged so that he wins. For all we know, Maleficent wanted these additional tech rehearsals—she arranged for them to take place—so she could study and practice how to defeat Mickey, to defeat him in battle. Then, at some point, the plan is to lure the real Mickey, not the Cast Member Mickey, from the Magic Kingdom over here to the show. That wouldn’t be terribly difficult. He steps onto the stage and she defeats him, and the balance of power is shifted forever. We can’t pretend to know the way she thinks. She’s cunning in that way: it’s never as simple as it looks.”
“Sometimes it is,” she sai
d. “Sometimes things are really obvious and really simple.”
“You think?” he said. Was that the traitor speaking? he wondered. “You call scaling a wall while being invisible simple? Do you know how much a person relies on looking down and seeing his or her foot take a toehold, or see her fingers grab a rock? It’s like climbing blind. It’s incredibly hard. That’s why Charlene went first,” he said. “She’s half-monkey.”
Amanda looked hurt. Finn wasn’t sure what he’d said to cause that.
“I wouldn’t let her hear you say that,” Amanda said. “She likes you, you know?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She just does.”
“And you know this because?”
“Girls know this stuff, Finn, and we talk about it. And we text about it. And we IM about it. It’s what girls do. You guys do sports and Xbox. We figure out who likes who.”
“Ah….”
“She’s beautiful. You have to admit that. Pretty enough to be on TV or in the movies. And she’s a jock. What’s not to like?”
“I guess.”
“You ought to give it a shot.”
Finn felt the center of his chest turn to stone. Why was Amanda trying to do this?
“Maybe I will,” he said.
“Maybe you should.”
Why was she bringing this up now? Why was she pushing him?
“But I thought…” he said.
“What?”
“About us. Never mind. It’s nothing.”
“You thought what? That we’re something or we’re nothing?”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I guess that’s right. Nothing I guess.” He felt his world implode and didn’t understand any of it. He thought that he and Amanda—after all the hand touching—had something going. He thought they were more than just friends. His heart wouldn’t stand still when he was around her; he got all jumpy and found himself hearing her voice among all the others. He wanted to catch her looking at him. Wanted to see that she was listening when he spoke.
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