Kingdom Keepers the Return Book 3

by Ridley Pearson

“Let’s make it the Fantasyland Theatre in an hour,” Joe said. “Can you spread the word by then?”

  “My Mary’s the one who can fly, friend Joe. She, Tink, and Peter can cover this park in no time. Let’s see what we can whip up.”

  HE NEEDED A MOMENT to collect himself. Taking a deep breath, Joe looked out from the stage beneath the Fantasyland Theatre tent top onto a gathering of Disney characters.

  These weren’t Cast Members, he reminded himself, not employees, not people with families and bills to pay or places to get to, but Disney characters—living, breathing Disney characters. Mulan strode in from offstage and took a seat out front, as did Pocahontas. He saw Sulley and Tiana sitting with Elsa. Ariel moved gracefully in from backstage, too, followed by Mickey and Rapunzel, each part of the “Mickey and the Magical Map” show. A dozen rats from Ratatouille chatted with Ewoks. Chip and Dale and Flik sat with Stitch.

  “Hello, everyone. Allow me to introduce myself!” And Joe did just that. He gave a short explanation of the Imagineers, tying its creation, like that of the characters, to Walt Disney. He spoke of the Kingdom Keepers, who received a standing ovation, and showed his audience how he, too, was now a hologram. After briefly describing the DHIs’ final battle with the villains, an event none of the characters would soon forget, he extended his explanation into something larger.

  “You are some of the most beloved characters of all time. You’ve won worldwide admiration from your films and your representatives in the Disney parks. You’ve made millions of children happy, and that is some of the best work anyone could ever do. But in the same way Walt Disney helped create you, the Imagineers, of which I’m one, have come to realize there is a single human being, a man who is responsible for the unhappiness and destructive nature of the Disney villains.”

  A chorus of booing rose and died like the tent taking a giant breath.

  “This man has built himself a human army, an army of children with special talents, children he and his people have treated cruelly and unfairly, an army willing to do as they are told because they fear what this man will do to them if they don’t.”

  Joe let the wave of murmuring subside before he spoke again.

  “These children—teenagers, actually young adults—possess an assortment of powers that range from starting fires just by looking at something to reading minds. No two are the same. All of them are dangerous. We Imagineers do not have enough people inside the parks, especially young people, to search out these intruders. I’ve called you together to ask for your help. Your Cast Member characters are able to see so much. That will help us. But we know you wander the parks as well. We would like you to watch for trouble in ways we cannot. We ask only that! We do not want you interfering with these young people. In fact, we advise against it: they could very well mean you harm.”

  More conversation erupted.

  “But we do need your help. Adults talk about how ‘real’ it all is, and we’ve long believed that much of that can be attributed to your interaction with the guests, however it’s accomplished. Now we need that interaction more than ever. We need your eyes. Your senses. We need to know if we’re under attack and by whom.”

  “We’re with you!” shouted a character from the crowd. Joe thought it was Jasmine, but it could have been the Fairy Godmother behind her.

  “Over the coming days, we will have more Plaids than usual in the parks—Cast Members wearing blue-and-red-plaid vests. Please, share any suspicions or sightings with them. We can ill afford another catastrophe like those that happened near Thunder Mountain and in Tomorrowland.”

  Loud muttering. A lot of nodding.

  “We must stop that kind of trouble before it occurs. For that, we need you.”

  He faced row after row of princesses, overgrown mice, and stunted forest creatures. How useful could such an assembly be? Joe wondered. To face the evil intentions of Amery Hollingsworth Jr. with a band of the sweetest characters ever seemed like a fool’s errand.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” bellowed the voice of a security guard standing at the back of the pavilion.

  The characters jumped up and scattered, tripping, falling, hurrying to the exits.

  Joe froze, panicked. Normally he had the clearance to be here, but if he stuck around, he risked being identified as a hologram, something he feared for a variety of reasons. His mission was to make the Disney characters allies of the Imagineers. There was no question of their loyalty to the Keepers, but what about adults wearing name tags?

  For Hollingsworth’s Fairlie attack to succeed, the man would need double agents in Disney security. His crime was therefore not only the physical threat he presented to Disneyland and California Adventure, but the seeding of distrust between characters and Cast Members. Joe needed to quiet the security guy before the man ruined things. In order to do that, he needed to lead him away from the pavilion and the characters—and quickly.

  Mind made up, Joe moved offstage and into the wings. He located the stairs and descended.

  “You!” the security man called out, having nearly caught up to Joe in record time. Joe felt tingling in his arms: fear. Fear was his enemy. He ran as fast as he could, darting beneath the colonnaded overhang of the gazebo that fronted It’s a Small World; emerging out the other side, he veered right. A Return fob had been placed at the base of the Storybook Land Canal Boat lighthouse.

  Trouble was, the guard was only a stride or two away from tackling him—or trying to. The Imagineers were on record as having shut down the hologram development program following the completion of Version 2.0, a model of DHI not yet introduced to the parks. Any discovery that the program was up and running could be disastrous. If the security guard attempted to physically stop Joe, the secret would be out.

  Joe heard a whoomph and glanced back. He gasped: the security guard had been knocked to the pavement, and a large striped tiger—Tigger—was rolling past him. Tigger came to his paws and hurried away, leaving the security guard reaching for his hat.

  Without thinking, Joe tried to step over the fence surrounding the red-and-white miniature lighthouse. But his hologram moved, ghostlike, right through the divider. Joe worked his way around the cylinder, searching for the small key fob. At last, he spotted it in the grass and bent to pick it up.

  The security guard, having turned on his jets, reached the replica lighthouse only a few steps behind Joe. He hurdled the fence and hurried around the structure.

  No one. The man he’d been chasing had…vanished!

  There was an overriding sense that something strange and unexplainable had just happened. The guard frowned, turning in useless circles. How was he supposed to explain this? His fellow workers would think he was going crazy. No, he wouldn’t mention this to anyone.

  Not even to his dog, Steamboat Willie.

  A TWIN PROPELLER TWA airplane grabbed the attention of Jess’s hologram as she worked her way down the narrow backstage passage that paralleled Disneyland’s Main Street USA. She found the grinding roar of the plane easier to take than the blast of a jet.

  Cars, on the other hand, made far more noise in this time. Radio music was scratchier, but thunderstorms had stayed the same. From what she’d seen so far, living in 1955 was slower, its people friendlier and less worried, the sky clearer.

  The last to arrive into the past, Jess had acted on impulse. She’d not thought to dress for 1955. The clothes she’d been wearing when she’d gone to sleep in the present comprised the outfit her DHI now wore each and every day. Thankfully, for her Imagineering internship, she’d had on black jeggings and a vintage orange Walt Disney World T-shirt. To Cast Members in 1955, her leggings looked like tights—very Fantasyland—and her T-shirt like something from Tomorrowland (since no one had heard of Walt Disney World).

  As she walked, Jess received smiles, nods, and tips of the hat from some of the men. The occasional sparkling of her hologram worried her—until it was met with outright grins of enthusiasm from passersby. The beautiful thing about C
ast Members was their openness to fantasy and creative expression. Rather than look confused by her, they looked somewhat envious.

  Jess’s Fairlie ability had been thrust upon her: she could future-dream. Dubbed by the Fairlies a “Dreamer,” Jess seldom knew which dreams were actual visions of things to come, and which were her nocturnal imagination. Over the past few years, she’d honed her ability considerably. The haunting images of a graveyard at night had been real. They possessed her. So did her dream of the night before: she and a boy at the Plaza Pavilion restaurant. In the dream, a smartly dressed mother of two at the next table asked a gentleman for the time. “Two o’clock on the button!” the gentleman replied spryly.

  In her dream, the boy’s ice-cream float filled half the glass—a real drinking glass, not plastic. So she and the boy had been there at least long enough to buy drinks, sit down, and dip into them. It was currently 1:35 p.m. Jess had heard the Keepers complaining about their first week or so in the park, how their projections had been two-dimensional. Philby and Wayne had overcome that limitation, so Jess now projected fully. However, in certain zones within the park, the projections weakened or disappeared. Wayne called these the “dead zones.” Philby was in the process of mapping them.

  Added to this very real concern, bright light threatened their 1955 holograms. Jess and the others looked decent in sunlight and terrific after sunset, but any kind of glare cut right through them—a reflection of sunlight off water by day, a bright flashlight or car headlight by night. Such highlights overexposed them, rendering their images an obvious projection. With this in mind, she stayed vigilant, trying to spot reflective surfaces. Oddly for someone consisting of nothing but light, she feared it.

  Entering the terraced seating area in front of the Pavilion restaurant, Jess carefully examined her surroundings, trying to match her dream with reality. She had to be extra careful not to connect with any of the white wrought-iron chairs or tables, as they would pass through her hologram and bring unwanted attention. Life as a hologram was a whole lot more complicated than it had once sounded.

  She stopped in front of an empty table, the only empty table on the terrace. Before someone else grabbed it, she allowed herself to think of the graveyard dream. Briefly made solid by the thought, she quickly sat down, ducking beneath the open umbrella at its center. Despite being a hologram, her heart beat wildly in her chest. She closed her eyes and focused on her hands. Her fingers tingled. She tentatively reached for a red plastic catsup bottle, which was paired with a yellow mustard one. She touched it, felt it, and watched as the bottle dented with the contact. She thought she must have looked odd to people watching her, but at least her finger had not passed through it.

  Nearby, small gray birds challenged one another for table crumbs. A bold seagull sat perched atop the roof of the Pavilion. Jess waited. And waited. Heat rose from the pavement. Car horns sounded from an unseen intersection.

  Then a thin guy of medium height wearing thick black-rimmed glasses approached. His dark hair was parted to the side and oiled, his face long and thin, like the rest of him. He had a square chin and kindness in his eyes. When he smiled, as he did at Jess, his cheeks creased more on the left than the right, as sharp as an arrow, but his dark brown eyes never wavered or squinted. They remained fixed on her and deeply interested. Intense, without feeling threatening.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he said in a thick New Jersey accent that reminded Jess of old gangster movies, “you look incredible.” His eyes darted around to the other tables. He lowered his voice. “And I think you know what I mean.” Again, he smiled from nose to chin.

  She spun the catsup bottle for him.

  “Impressive. Really, super-duper.” He wore a blue button-down and khaki chinos. His brown shoes were polished and laced tightly.

  They didn’t speak for a moment. The nondescript birds fluttered at their feet and around the tables. At last, he said, “The name’s Marty. Marty Sklar. I’m a newspaper man. Was in college, anyway. The Bruin. UCLA. Now, for the company. That’s what I do. The Disneyland News. Some publicity and marketing, too.”

  “O…kay? I’m Jessica.”

  “So I keep my nose to the ground. I make it my business to know what’s going on in the park as well as outside of it.”

  “Sure,” Jess said.

  “And I’m buddies with Wayne. So when I started poking around about the stuff guests were saying, I ended up with Wayne. Basically forced him to tell me something about you and your friends.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “What I believe, what I don’t believe. No never mind. Nothing to worry about, kiddo.” He drew his lips closed, like pulling an imaginary zipper. “Tight as a drum. But I came across this piece. One of those giveaway rags. Police blotter sensational stuff. Still, I’m a curious sort, so I read everything I can get my hands on. Wayne tells me one of these kids he’s helping has dreams. That would be you.”

  “That would be me.”

  “He says on occasion these dreams have the feel of our own Esmeralda. She’s our fortune-teller.”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “Said you told your friends about a dream involving a graveyard.”

  “Did he?”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy here, doll. To the company. To Wayne. To you. Nothing leaves my lips. On that, you can depend.”

  “You talk funny for a writer.”

  “I probably write that way, too! Who knows why Mr. Disney asked me to run his paper?”

  “I think you’re being modest.”

  He shrugged. “I’m just trying to be Marty. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  “So…what’s the point, Marty?”

  “Direct! I like that.”

  Jess liked his smile a lot. She felt in no hurry to go anywhere—a rarity.

  “So, there’s this.” He reached into his pants pocket and produced a wrinkled sheet of paper. He unfolded it and slid it across the patio table. The right column of the small newsprint page held ads. The printing method left the letters fat and rough. Marty called it mimeograph; most of the cheap “giveaway rags,” he said, were of similar poor quality.

  A GRAVE SITUATION

  Residents of Hollywood Hills report vandalism and desecration at a local private cemetery that dates back to the 1920s. The little-known resting place, on a hill west of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, has been the source of vandalism in the past, but “never on this scale,” says LAPD officer Sam Self. “At least two graves were disturbed. The possibility that one or more of the dead may have been exhumed is under investigation.”

  Marty produced a second page from a different paper. It, too, contained an article about a graveyard being vandalized. Jess reread both pieces and pushed the second sheet back to him.

  “Ring any bells?” he asked.

  “Breaking apart gravestones…not that one. But this one?” She tapped the first. “Yes, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Sorry? It’s uncanny! Incredible! I’d think it’d thrill you!”

  “Not exactly. I used to get excited about ‘coincidences’ like this, yeah, but that was a long time ago. In another world. I have a history of this, Marty, and that means I’m about ninety percent sure this article is right. There were two well-dressed men there. Two more digging. It was foggy, or maybe smoky.”

  “Thursday? Yes! Dense fog all along the hills!” He paused to appraise her like she was some sort of science project. Jess sighed. She was used to it. “Did you know that about the weather?” he asked. “You didn’t, did you? I can tell by just looking at you!” He smirked. “Gee whiz! Isn’t that something?”

  “Oh, it’s something, all right. But not anything you’d want, believe me.”

  “May I…may I ask the nature of your dream? If I’m not being rude.”

  “You’re not, Marty. It’s fine. Look, I tend to dream of stuff that’s threatening, you know? To me, my friends. A lot of the time, I’m personally connected somehow. Other times, I can’t
figure out the connection until much later. Does that make sense?”

  “I have no idea if it does or doesn’t,” he said, still sounding excited. “I’ve never spoken to anyone who can dream the future before!”

  “A little quieter, please.” Jess had seen a few heads turn in their direction.

  Marty cupped his mouth. “So sorry!” He studied her long and hard, clearly impressed. “So, what’s next?”

  Jess paused, thinking. “Research. That’s what Philby calls it. I’d say it’s more like investigating or spying, but that’s Philby. He’s the scholar of the group.”

  “I think I’d like to meet him.”

  “Yeah, you two would get along for sure.”

  “You’re different,” Marty said, “but then, we all are, Jessica. For gosh sakes, don’t let it get you down.”

  “I don’t know how much Wayne told you, Marty, but different doesn’t begin to describe me.”

  Marty lowered his voice to beneath a whisper. It sounded more like a soft breeze. “You’re from another time.”

  Jess matched his volume. “I don’t expect you to believe it.”

  “Why not? I’m in Disneyland, after all.”

  “I’m a girl from the future, in the past, dreaming the future. You want to talk about confused!”

  “Well, I’d rather talk about the process.”

  A guy in 1955, Jess was realizing, didn’t necessarily understand expressions from the 2000s. “The process is a mystery. Like so many mysteries, it just stays unexplained and unexplainable. I guess when it happens to you, you eventually accept it. First you deny it; then you tolerate it; then you accept it. That’s the real process.”

  “Oh, I see. Not exciting, then.” He sounded apologetic and contrite.

  “It’s okay. Really! That’s how everyone sees it. But to me and my friends—other friends, not the ones here—it can feel like we’re dwarves in the circus.”

  “The bearded lady, that scares me,” said Marty.

  “I don’t get that so much because you can’t see what I do. But my friends, for sure.”