Kingdom Keepers III

1


FINN WHITMAN RAN HARD, then all the harder still, Donnie Maybeck by his side and keeping up. By day, Tom Sawyer Island in the Magic Kingdom was an intriguing tangle of trees and bushes interrupted by meandering pathways. By night, it was something altogether different.

Especially with four insanely angry, sword-carrying pirates bearing down on you, followed closely by an alien with a genetic malfunction that posed like Elvis Presley and looked slightly like a cross between a koala bear and a cuddly dog.

The guys in the torn T-shirts and calf-length pants had leaped from the shadows surrounding Pirates of the Caribbean—the park having been closed for nearly three hours—immediately in pursuit. Stitch, on the other hand, had appeared out of nowhere.

Finn made the mistake of glancing back at them.

“Don’t look back!” Maybeck called out sharply. “Your face, your skin is like a flashlight. You’ll give us away! Believe me, Whitman, this is when it pays to be yours truly.”

Maybeck thought of himself as God’s answer to everything, and wasn’t afraid to share that opinion. If given half a chance, he would make the point that his great-grandparents had been slaves, and his grandparents sharecroppers on Florida sugarcane plantations; he was fiercely proud of his African American heritage and of the fact that his family were some of the original Floridians, instead of being descendants of snowbird retirees, like Finn and so many of his friends—and their fellow DHIs.

DHI stood for Disney Host Interactive, or Daylight Holographic Image, depending on who you asked. There were five DHIs, including Finn and Maybeck—holograms of teenage hosts that, by day, acted as guides to guests at the Magic Kingdom. (The other three, Philby, Willa, and Charlene, were by now supposed to be awaiting the two boys in the Indian Village across the water from Tom Sawyer Island.)

There was a glitch in the software that projected the holograms in the park: when any of the five teens who’d originally modeled for the DHIs went to sleep at night, they would wake up, not as themselves, but as their holograms, inside the Magic Kingdom. As it turned out this was no glitch—an old guy, a Disney Imagineer named Wayne, had intentionally made this “crossover” possible by rewriting the projection computer code.

He’d done this because he’d needed the help of the DHIs to solve a riddle left behind by Walt Disney years before.

But tonight was different: the kids had gone to sleep; they’d crossed over, becoming their DHIs inside the Magic Kingdom at night—something they were used to by now. They had left a special fob with a button, like a garage door opener, inside a teepee, to ensure that they could all simultaneously cross back over, retreating into their sleeping bodies in their homes. That was all pretty much the same as usual; what made it different was why they were here in the first place.

Wayne was missing.

He’d been missing for nearly three weeks, ever since one very long day inside Disney’s Animal Kingdom where the teens had battled the wicked fairy Maleficent and the gargoyle beast Chernabog.

It was unacceptable to leave Wayne missing. He was the last Imagineer alive who’d known Walt Disney personally, who’d known Walt’s plans and intentions for the parks and characters. Wayne had created their ability to cross over. He was their mentor and their leader in trying to fight Maleficent and her ambitious plans.

Wayne had explained it all to Finn, what seemed like a long time ago now.

“You know the movie Toy Story?” Wayne had asked.

“Of course.”

“Andy’s toys come alive when he leaves the room.”

“I know,” Finn had said.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly a new idea around here. Walt designed it so that when the last of the humans—the guests, the cast members, the cleaners, maintenance personnel, even the security guys—leave the Magic Kingdom, the characters get to have it all to themselves.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious,” Wayne had said. “We began to suspect this as odd things started happening, like finding equipment moved or an Audio-Animatronics in a different position than it had been left in the night before. Strange, unexplainable events. But Walt had wanted it this way, and we left it alone. That is…until the trouble began. Even now, security rarely patrols the parks at night, and when they do, the good characters are left alone to enjoy their freedom as Walt wanted.”

The good characters, Finn thought.

He would later discover that Wayne was telling the truth, but when he’d first heard the story, he’d thought the guy was nuts. He hadn’t believed a word. Having been raised to be polite, he kept quiet and didn’t challenge the old man.