They formed a long line, wrapping around the side of the castle, their backs to Tomorrowland, where the manicured lawn spilled down toward the moat. Finn pushed against the cool stone blocks. He started at knee height and pushed against every stone he could. Then he moved an arm’s length toward Charlene, immediately to his right, and started again.
A few minutes into this process Willa called out, “Got it!”
Finn and the others hurried over.
A door had opened in the wall of the castle.
It was pitch-black inside.
Philby said, “Always trust computer games.”
With no one stepping up, Finn took the lead. The chilly corridor smelled damp and old.
Philby entered last. He said, “Wait up! We’ve got to shut this thing.”
Willa turned to help him. She found an iron handle sticking out of the wall. She pushed and couldn’t move it, then leaned her weight onto it and it rotated toward the floor. The stone door made a sound like fingernails on a blackboard as it closed.
Finn was still very wet from his ordeal at Splash Mountain; his soaked clothes made him very cold now. He felt his way along the cool rock, tripped when he reached some stairs, and warned the others in a dry whisper to look out. Together they climbed the stairs, at the top of which Finn encountered a dead end. It was a stone wall that didn’t budge when he leaned against it.
Charlene found an iron handle, just like the one Willa had found at the other end. The two girls leaned against it, and the wall in front of Finn moved open a crack. He and Philby pushed it farther open….
“The throne!” Finn said, recognizing where this door led.
They stepped into the throne room in the waiting area for Cinderella’s Royal Table. There were tapestries and flags on the walls. The throne was attached to the hidden door, so that when the door had opened the throne had moved with it. As a team they pushed the door back, but not before Philby had taken a moment to find the hidden switch, a wooden knob tucked away on the back of the throne itself. When this knob was moved, the door tripped open. They tried it once the door was back in place, and sure enough, it came open for them, offering them a way out, if needed.
Minutes later the three others followed Finn up Escher’s Keep. He had carefully memorized the way, but took his time, knowing one false step could—
“Thar they be!” came a gruff voice from behind and down below.
Finn and the others turned to see the same two Audio-Animatronic pirates standing at the base of Escher’s Keep. They appeared to be overwhelmed by the complications of the stairways, ladders, and platforms, all of which were interconnected in improbable ways.
One pirate was dressed in a blue coat, the other red. The one in red pulled out his knife and pointed up the stairs.
“Hurry!” Charlene cried out.
The sound of clunky mechanical legs echoed up the first stairway.
“We can’t hurry,” Finn replied. “We make a mistake and we end up in the moat, and that would mean security guards.”
The pirates continued to climb.
Philby said, “Besides, they won’t figure it out.”
But to his amazement, the two pirates made a lucky guess at the first platform and found the correct stairway. At the top, the red pirate turned left, but the blue one grabbed him by the shoulder and stopped him. They were frighteningly close to the kids now, only one stairway behind.
Finn remembered how to get onto the upside-down mirror stairs. He stepped on the correct tiles and then tested the stairway with his right foot. It was solid. He climbed, and the others followed. As they came out the end of a short tunnel their images appeared upside down to the pirates below.
“Avast!” the red pirate called out sharply.
He and the blue pirate hurried up the set of stairs in front of them. Charlene charged past Finn, clearly afraid. But Philby, Willa, and Finn watched from their inverted positions as the two pirates reached the next landing and tried to decide on a course. They argued between themselves.
“You wouldn’t know east if the sun was rising!”
“No? When was the last time you knew fore from aft?”
They stepped up onto a set of stairs, seemingly proud of their choice, and promptly vanished from sight amid a roar of rough-sounding words.
A moment later, two splashes.
Finn said, “And that would be the moat.”
A few minutes later the four kids rode the night-sky elevator to the apartment together. To their confusion, they found the remote button on the coffee table, exactly where Finn had left it.
“Either he came here and sent himself back,” Philby said, “leaving us the remote, or—”
“He never left here in the first place,” Finn completed.