“You?” she gasped dryly.
Jess smiled widely. “Me,” she said, gloating. “Enjoy the show.”
Jess pushed the button and in a flash of light and smoke Maleficent was gone.
45
AS THE FIRE-BURST surrounding Maleficent’s entrance receded, leaving a coil of gray smoke twisting high above the stage, Finn saw a Security guard holding back Mickey, the Brave Little Tailor, preventing the Cast Member from going onstage. Finn had no time to glance overhead and try to spot Charlene and prevent the dragon from rearing its ugly head—all forty-five feet of it; no time to ensure he wouldn’t be burned to a crisp by Chernabog, who he assumed had taken the dragon’s place the same way Maleficent had taken the place of the Cast Member playing her. What odd fun this substitution must have been for them—acting out themselves in front of audiences and tech rehearsals, subtly changing the show in ways the Imagineers couldn’t troubleshoot. Preparing for something much bigger, much more sinister. Taking the audience of ten thousand hostage? Threatening to burn them if they left their seats? Such an act would give the Overtakers the kind of clout they sought, would provide them a negotiating position.
Maleficent turned to taunt Mickey, as was her role.
Finn noted that she had a green bandage on her neck—where he had cut her with the sword.
Finn stepped out onto the stage, the sword held down at his side. He’d wondered how hard it might be to determine if he had the right Maleficent and not the Cast Member playing her, but his question was answered immediately. Not only was her skin green and bandaged, her eyes were bloodshot, and the look in them pure hatred. But there was also that twisted smile—a smile he’d witnessed in the back corridors of the Animal Kingdom’s veterinary clinic.
“Silly, silly boy,” she said, her voice amplified by the microphone she wore.
Presuming that Charlene was in place and that Philby had temporarily turned off the fire effect in the dragon, Finn took another step closer.
“We know about Epcot,” he said. “The seat belts.”
Her face reacted like a child opening a Christmas present only to discover coal inside the box.
The plan was in place. Finn was to antagonize her to the point she’d leave her mark on stage, stepping away from the cauldron. He would keep her focused and mad, so that she would direct Chernabog, or whatever force inhabited the stage dragon, to lash out at Finn with his fire breathing. But Finn would lead her mistakenly to enter into the path of the fire—the release of which would be controlled by Philby, not the dragon—and just as the beast unleashed its fury, Philby would drop Finn through Mickey the Brave Little Tailor’s trapdoor to safety, while Maleficent would be caught and consumed—and eliminated—by her own evil plan.
If all else failed, he had the sword with which to defend himself, though he had known all along he would never actually strike her with it. The idea of that repulsed him, no matter how many times he’d seen it in a movie, or made it happen in a video game. No matter that Wayne had obviously believed it would come to that.
Finn crossed the stage, keeping the steaming cauldron between himself and Maleficent. Philby had done an excellent job—none of this was in the script. The cauldron should have been gone by now. Maleficent should have already summoned the dragon. As agreed, Finn took these changes to mean that Philby was in control and would trip the trapdoor when needed. Knowing that Philby had his back gave Finn added confidence.
“You silly, silly boy,” she retched at him. “Do you actually believe a few children have any sort of chance against our powers?” She waved a hand and the cauldron tipped over, spilling a steaming green, viscous goo that would have caught Finn’s feet had he not jumped quickly out of the way.
The Fantasmic! cauldron was always empty; the steam that poured from it was merely an effect. She did that! Finn thought.
The fairy reeled back her arm, and a fireball appeared in her hand. She launched it at Finn, who raised the sword and deflected it. The ball flew into the wings and exploded. He heard fire extinguishers whooshing as stagehands tried to extinguish the flames.
A pair of stagehands approached her. “Loretta!” the first one called at the witch. “What’s going on?”
She threw a second fireball at them. They ducked and that fireball also flew offstage.
“We have a rehearsal going on here!” she hollered crisply. “The show’s been through a rewrite, didn’t you know?”
One of the stagehands held up an outstretched palm—he didn’t want any more of her. The pair gingerly backed off the stage.
“The new show includes the defeat of the Kingdom Keepers.” She motioned toward Finn and, as she did, a fence of bright laserlike beams surrounded him.
Finn heard, “The Kingdom Keepers! Of course! I knew I’d seen that kid somewhere!” and other such remarks trickle through the wings.
Finn couldn’t allow Maleficent to hold him—it would all be over quickly if she contained him. He drew in a calming breath. The sword fell from his hand as he achieved all-clear, and he stepped through the beams without harm.
She snarled, her eyes rolling back in her head.
Finn glanced back at the sword—it was trapped inside the lasers, out of his reach. He wondered how much of this Philby was aware of. Things weren’t exactly going according to plan.
“Tricky, tricky,” Maleficent said. “That’s a new one.”
Finn had to move her, had to shift her to her left, his right—and he had to do so quickly. Any second—
Maleficent raised her arm.
BOOM! A blinding flash of white light preceded a dazzling wash of fog and smoke that rose high into the sky revealing…Chernabog. It was her spell, her show now—no longer Fantasmic!, all Maleficent’s doing. Finn had to change that somehow—to take it away from her.
The creature was only visible for a matter of a second or two. Had anyone else even seen him? But his image lingered in Finn’s thought: a horrific giant of a beast. In his place appeared a four-story dragon. It looked like the dragon puppet that Finn had seen before in the show—only it was real.
Charlene was supposed to keep the dragon up there on the platform. The one thing they could ill afford was for the dragon to leap down onto the main stage and come after Finn. He couldn’t fight both Maleficent and the dragon at the same time.
Maleficent grinned and threw another fireball at him. Finn stood still. It passed right through him and landed in the water.
“Old green fairies are no longer needed here,” he said, continuing to move to his right. “Did I mention—ugly, old green fairies?”
She boiled, but began moving in concert with him now. “Little children should know their place. And you know what they say about children playing with fire?”
She raised her arm to signal the dragon.
It all seemed wrong. Finn had not yet reached the mark on stage indicating the trapdoor he was to fall through. The dragon craned its huge head toward him, its red eyes—eyeballs the size of cars—blinking at him, while a clear goo ran down from them. It opened its jaws. It moved its feet.
Charlene was not in place! Worse, Philby had not opened the trapdoor.
Finn rushed Maleficent and took hold of her arm and prevented her from lowering it, stopped her from signaling the dragon to release his flame.
Her arm was ice-cold. His hand stuck to her green skin, like a tongue sticking to a dry piece of ice.
Finn now saw something extraordinary in Maleficent’s eyes: uncertainty. Confusion. She had ridden that platform to the stage expecting to perform the same scene she’d been performing for some time now. Finn’s arrival and Philby’s manipulation of the stage effects had thrown the show off-script; she clearly wasn’t sure what to do next. She had tried hurling her fireballs to no effect; her laser cage had failed to contain him.
Or was it fear he saw in her eyes? Fear that he might do to her now what he’d done once before: choked her to near-unconsciousness, rendering her powers useless. Did he po
ssess that ability still?
But no. The arm he held began sprouting feathers, the skin turning prickly and leathery. Her face elongated and changed from green to brown. Her pointy nose stretched and hardened into a beak. A flap of skin stretched from under her jaw and turned a brilliant red.
Finn heard the cursing of men horrified by what they saw. He heard loud footfalls as the stagehands fled for the emergency exits.
She was transfiguring into a hideous vulture. Finn drove into her and knocked her backward, sending her sprawling over the fallen cauldron. Her right wing hit the spilled green goo and the feathers started dissolving. But a talon came up between them and found his chest and pushed him back, throwing Finn across the stage.
The vulture rose to its feet, its wings extended. It was a foul-looking thing, with a bald head, a hooked beak, and sagging eyes. Finn backed up, looking for the open trapdoor in the floor.
He glanced up higher without really meaning to: the dragon was practically falling off its perch, its neck extended, its mouth coming open.
Finn was going to get flamed.
“Philby!” he shouted.
He needed that trapdoor to open right now.
* * *
Philby’s head felt as if someone had hooked up an air hose to his ear and pumped his head full to exploding. The stinging in his elbow continued. He couldn’t make sense of what was happening to him. The only other time he’d felt like this he’d been…at the hospital. He’d come down with a terrible fever and his mother had taken him to the emergency room and they’d put a…needle in his arm…and it had felt…exactly like this.
The Jell-O brain was a new sensation entirely, but even with his thoughts clouded, Philby could imagine his parents finding him in the Syndrome and overreacting. His mother had overreacting down to an art form.
Doctors! They were messing with him and his DHI was experiencing what his normal self was experiencing the same way his normal self suffered what happened to his DHI.
He breathed deeper and faster. They were medicating him. He had to fight it and get past it.
Fire.
He had to do something related to fire. For the first time in several minutes Philby looked out through the control booth’s main window.
There was a huge, butt-ugly bird on stage flapping its wings at—Finn!
Perched above Finn was a—dragon.
Now things began to make a little more sense. Dragon, fire, Finn. This had something to do with him and the mouse in his right hand.
Had Finn called out his name? Had he heard that faintly through the speaker marked STAGE SOUND LIVE?
A sudden pounding on the control booth door made him jump in the chair. He heard a man’s voice. “Is someone in there? Open up!”
Philby kept silent but wondered how long it would be until that man got inside.
That jolt of panic briefly cleared his thought. Philby felt much more like himself all of a sudden.
He spotted a small video camera in the upper left corner of the window. It was focused down toward the show. He followed its wires with his eyes, back behind the console to his left, past several wireless receivers and steel boxes. He reached behind to make sure he had traced the correct wires. They led to a silver Panasonic digital video recorder; its lights were on, including an illuminated red RECORD button. Plugged into the front of the machine was a silver thumb drive bearing Mickey ears, also with a red light flashing. To the left was a box containing a pile of similar thumb drives. It only made sense they would record the shows and use the recordings to troubleshoot or improve things.
The flashing red lights triggered something inside him.
Finn: trapdoor. Dragon: no fire.
He checked the flat-panel display. Yes! There were several lines labeled TRAP, and a separate monitor to his left displayed a stage floor plan with TRAP-1, TRAP-2, TRAP-3, all the way through TRAP-7.
Philby wiggled the mouse, drawing the cursor across the screen, and went to work.
* * *
Charlene had to move because the guys beneath her were never going to. At this point, what did it matter if they saw her? The dragon was alive up there. He was huge, and she had to stop him.
As she climbed, the chain around her shoulders rattled again the steel ladder.
“Hey! You!” came an angry voice from below.
“You can’t go up there! Get down here!”
She thought she heard Security mentioned. No matter what, she wouldn’t have much time.
As she arrived to the top of the ladder, Charlene’s head swooned. The mountain peak rose at least forty feet above the stage and much higher than that off the ground to the back of the structure—it looked like eighty or a hundred feet. She felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. It took her an extra second or two to realize that the greenish-brown tree trunk in front of her was the dragon’s right leg. The size of it shocked her. She’d known her task was to lock down the dragon, but she’d never expected this. At that moment, the beast was hunched so far forward, his neck craned down toward the stage, that he seemed poised to jump. Her job was to prevent this from happening and her first reaction was that she’d failed. She’d let Finn and the team down.
But the dragon didn’t jump. He just stayed there leering toward Finn as if….
He’s going to spit fire! she thought.
Charlene’s conscious thought was replaced by instinct and action. It wasn’t so different from a soccer game or gymnastics: you stopped thinking and let your body take over. She ducked her head and caught one end of the chain as it fell off, springing up and over the disgusting, scaly skin of the dragon’s right foot, grabbing hold of a spine of leathery skin—if you could call it skin—across the bridge of his four-toed foot, all the while dragging the chain with her. She couldn’t allow the beast to slip his foot out, so as she landed back on the upper platform she climbed the foot again to put a full turn around the dragon’s ankle, but by now he’d felt her, by now his attention had been distracted from the stage, and one gooey eyeball slid to the side of its socket and caught the gnat-size girl doing something down there on his foot and…kicked her off.
Charlene flew from the dragon’s foot like a bug being brushed off a child’s arm. But she held on to the chain, so that instead of being flung to her death, she ended up being swung out and around and coming back down to the floor with a thud, but with the chain now looped around the dragon’s ankle exactly as she’d wanted it. Bruised and aching, she forced herself up on her hands and knees and crawled toward the free end of the chain, where it was hanging over the rung of the nearby safety ladder.
The dragon briefly lost his balance in his attempt to lose the bug. He stepped back to recover, driving his heel down.
Charlene saw it coming and rolled, letting go of the chain. The heel came down with a stomp. Right on top of the chain.
Charlene stood and pulled with everything she had, but the chain would not budge.
The dragon—irritated and bothered—reared back his head, ready to throw a tongue of flame at his target.
She caught something out of the corner of her eye: a small pile of props, including some bows and arrows and four or five spears. They looked like they’d been there forever. But she took hold of one of the spears, tested its strength, and thought back to the one time her track coach had let her try to throw the javelin. She looked up at the dragon, remembering her Language Arts block on Greek mythology.
Achilles.
His mother, Thetis, had dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal. But since she had held him by one heel to dunk him, this one part of his body had remained dry, and was the only part of him vulnerable to any weapon.
Achilles’ heel.
She ran to the side of the beast’s ankle, searching for the indentation at the back of the ankle—the soft, fleshy part between ankle and tendon.
She reared back the spear, then in an instant coiled down, using every muscle in her abdomen and back to whip her body forward, h
er arm hesitating and waiting for the sling effect that would draw first her shoulder, then her elbow, wrist, and hand ahead, up, and over her head, so that the spear seemed now to be part of her body.
She let go.
* * *
Finn froze, locked in fear as the vulture moved toward him, pushing him farther back and away from any of the glow-tape Xs that marked the various trapdoors on the stage floor. If he couldn’t get himself atop one of those Xs, he was going to fry. Get barbecued. Roasted. Killed. The dragon had been about to flame-throw when he’d suddenly looked away and stumbled. Charlene, Finn thought. At last! But nothing was going to stop Maleficent. The vulture threw her neck forward, trying to peck Finn’s head off his shoulders. He looked over at the sword inside the glowing cage of laser light.
If only….
“You and me,” Finn said, looking directly into the hideous, drooling eyes. The vulture advanced another step, her pink tongue appearing as its beak opened.
“It’s over.”
He heard the voice but didn’t quite believe it. A trick of his mind, perhaps. Wishful thinking. For there was no questioning whose voice it was: Wayne’s.
He looked to his right. High above him on an outcropping of rock stood the old geezer with his khaki pants, his white hair, and his Epcot windbreaker. Exactly as Jess had envisioned him.
“We’ve lost. It’s over. Surrender is the only option.”
“No!” Finn shouted. “They’ll trap us in the Syndrome. We’ll be there forever.”
“Listen to him!” the vulture croaked out in a grating voice much like Maleficent’s. “He’s trying to help you!”
“No!” Finn said, taking another dangerous step even farther from the series of trapdoors.
“It’s over,” Wayne said, turning and looking down at him. “Save yourself….”
“Finn!”
Finn reeled in the opposite direction toward the voice. Her voice.
Amanda appeared at the edge of the stage. Amanda, who had deserted him. Was she behind this?
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