“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 possess 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.