Kingdom Keepers the Return Book 3

by Ridley Pearson

  Then, knowing when to end a tease, Mattie muttered, “I wish I could find that darn shoe,” and walked out of the break room, leaving the tear-streaked Antonella, unflinching, and unmoving.

  JESS TURNED A CORNER and faced a wall filled with a dozen oversize drawers. She didn’t like the look of the drawers or the table at its center, or the power tools on the wall and countertops. This was a butcher shop. This was someplace horrible.

  She swallowed dryly while trying to grab hold of a drawer handle. But her hand passed through the metal. On her third try, furious, she suddenly made contact. She pulled the heavy drawer open, revealing a black bag and the gag-inducing chemical smell. She fought the urge to vomit.

  Her hologram hands trembled as they hesitated over the zipper. She did not want to open the bag; did not want to look inside.

  She heard a voice. Close!

  She called back as she frantically opened a drawer.

  She screamed. An old guy with yellow, puckered skin.

  She slammed the drawer shut.

  She fell off the footstool.

  Willa’s head—only her head!—stuck out of the next drawer over. A rag was stuffed into her mouth.

  “Willa?”

  Tears squirting from her eyes, Jess concentrated and tried to remove the rag.

  “A little help?”

  Jess felt faint, having no idea what to do. She was half laughing, half crying as Willa wiggled her hologram farther out. “This hurts,” Willa said, slipping back into the drawer.

  Jess slid open the drawer. Willa, lethargic and dulled, scrambled to get out of there. Her panic fluctuated her between a hologram and a mortal girl. Hugging her, Jess pulled her out and laid her onto the concrete floor. She tried to let go, but Willa wouldn’t let her. The two girls hugged while Willa cried, sobbing, “I’ve never been so scared. Pitch-dark…this fan…They wanted me to die in there.”

  “You’re here now. You’re okay.”

  “We’re holograms.”

  “How about that?” Jess said. “I called Philby. It’s all Philby.”

  “Dell?” Willa said, using her boyfriend’s first name.

  “Uh-huh! Philby saved you.”

  Willa’s sobs evolved to a slow, personal laughter meant only for herself. She continued clinging to Jess. “You saved me. Philby just pushed a few buttons.”

  “Details, details,” Jess said. This time, the girls laughed together.

  LESS THAN A MINUTE LATER, pain shuddered through Jess and Willa like a seizure. They’d made it all of two steps trying to get out of the funeral home’s room of death drawers before being stricken.

  “Wh…at’s…ha…ppen…ing?” Jess moaned, her limbs twitching. Her face cramped like she had lockjaw, making talking excruciatingly painful.

  Beside her, Willa’s hologram face was a mask of horror, her cheeks moving as if small animals beneath her skin were trying to find a way out. Her eyes bulged, and Jess had to look away; it was so disgusting. Worse yet, she knew her face was the same gruesome vision.

  The girls flapped and convulsed for a minute or more and then lay still, breathing as if they had run hard and fast.

  “What was that?” Jess asked, her voice pinched by the remnants of suffering.

  Willa spent a moment contemplating before speaking. “I’d suspect it’s our projections. A problem on Philby’s end.”

  “Sorry I asked.”

  “Do you think you can stand?”

  “I’m not sure I can move. I’m afraid to try.”

  “I feel the same. Our fear may be in opposition to the holograms. Maybe the spasms are part of that.” Willa tested the movement of her ankle. “Nothing,” she said. She sat up. “It’s over.”

  Jess kneeled, moving carefully, afraid.

  Willa waved her arm toward the leg of a stainless steel table. She hit it, and it hurt. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve lost my hologram.”

  Jess reached out and touched Willa. “Me too. Is that what that was?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve always returned smoothly. Being here, in 1955, it’s all different. Our sleeping selves are sixty years in the future. Crossing over and returning when we’re here is so strange. So different.”

  Both girls stood, assessing their condition by moving and flexing.

  “Have you thought about that?” Jess asked. “If what we’re doing here has anything to do with the present?”

  “I have.”

  “I’d like to hear that sometime.”

  “Yeah, same here,” Willa said.

  “Right now, I think the others need us.” Jess explained the situation at the old hotel. “Philby didn’t know what was up with Maybeck and Charlene. They were supposed to rotate over here.”

  “So they could be outside looking for us.” Willa sounded strained.

  “I suppose.”

  “If we’ve lost our holograms, we can’t leave without setting off the alarms. So once we leave, we don’t come back. We head straight to the hotel.”

  “But whoever was in here will know we were in here, too,” Jess said. Her brow furrowed the way it did when she was thinking.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “We need to look around, Willa. It’s probably our last chance. We need to know what those men were doing here.”

  “I think we know.”

  “So, we need to confirm it, then. Prove it.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of looking in these other drawers.” Willa counted a dozen total—four across, three high.

  “Yeah, I get that, but it has to be done.”

  “And fast,” Willa said. “If we’ve lost our holograms, we can be pretty sure the others did as well. And that can’t be good for anyone.”

  “THIS DOOR’S CHAINED, TOO,” Finn said, getting a closer look at the nearest exit.

  Amanda remained balled up, frozen.

  “Mandy, we’re going to be all right.” Finn moved over to comfort her. “I know how horrible what they’re doing is. For me, too. But this is why you came to 1955. This is what it’s all about. This, right here. We’ve got to stop them.”

  “You’re repeating yourself.”

  “I’m pumped.”

  “I guess,” she groaned.

  They both knew what was scaring them both: the skin-and-bones man orchestrating the transformation. Hollingsworth was calling some of the shots, but it was the Traveler, the man they called Skellington, who had turned the mannequin into a living witch.

  “This is when it happened,” Finn said. “Today. Now. This is the start of the Overtakers. This place. These people. I can’t believe we’re actually here.”

  Against the white sheet, Witch Hazel’s eerie, elongated shadow jerked and twitched. Her movement was growing smoother. A craggy, grating voice spoke, quiet at first, but increasingly loud and confident. She was speaking. The words began as malformed, indecipherable grunts, but soon began to take clearer shape.

  “We’re outnumbered,” Amanda said. “Skellington has powers that we’ve never heard of. We need to get out of here and organize. We need help, Finn.”

  All the while, behind them, the three smaller shadows reached out and connected to Witch Hazel’s shadow.

  “We can’t take time to get organized. This is happening right now.”

  “The kids are obviously being manipulated by Skellington. Hypnotized into pushing knowledge and maybe emotions into her,” Amanda said. “I swear, this is not only the start of the Overtakers, it’s the start of the Fairlies. So what if he hypnotizes us? Puts a spell on us? He’s turning a piece of wood into someone, instead of something. How are we supposed to stop that?”

  “No clue,” Finn said, his mind calculating. “But if we don’t do something fast there’s going to be even more dark magic than the scarecrow in here, and we can’t allow that. This is the part of history we came to change. You don’t get second chances at things like
this, trust me!”

  “We can’t fight that guy!”

  “Mandy…we don’t have a choice.”

  “WHY AREN’T THEY OUT YET?” Charlene asked Maybeck. “Something’s happened.”

  Maybeck stared down the long alley. “We’re supposed to be relieving Jess and Willa at the funeral home. This isn’t our shift. We should get out of here.”

  “Seriously?” she said. “We cannot possibly leave! We should go in there.”

  “Finn didn’t want that.”

  “Who cares? You didn’t care a few minutes ago.”

  A calico cat crossed the alley. A lonely car horn sounded someplace far away. “Are those bats up there flying around?” Maybeck asked.

  “Terry, come on. Get serious for once.”

  “Ouch! Okay, hear me out. Finn knows the place. We don’t. He has Amanda with him. She can push anything. I’m not too worried about them.”

  “You are. I can tell you are.”

  “Yeah, well…” Maybeck trailed off, then cleared his throat and said, “How do we find them? It’s huge! And what do we do if Finn doesn’t want us in there?”

  “Terry, they haven’t come out.”

  “Noted.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the sky. “I’m pretty sure those are bats.”

  “We can’t just sit here.”

  “We’re standing. But agreed. We belong over at the funeral home.”

  “We’re going inside,” Charlene announced.

  “No, we’re not!”

  “Together. We’re going to look around.”

  “And if we’re caught?” Maybeck asked. “If we wreck things by prowling around in there?” He lowered his head. “I hate bats.”

  She huffed, annoyed with him. “Then I guess we mess it all up. But we mess it up trying to help, not sitting around. Since when do you sit around?”

  “Since Finn told us to hang back,” Maybeck answered.

  “Since when do you care what Finn says?” she asked.

  “Yeah, good point. Okay, then we do this my way. But listen, if there are bats in there, count me out.”

  “FINGERS,” JESS SAID. “Missing…fingers, basically like the graveyard. I’m going to be sick.” She descended the small metal stepladder, which led down from a top drawer. Running to the nearby sink, she unloaded, rinsed out her mouth, and wiped her face with a paper towel. “Oh, ick. Eeww.”

  Willa heaved a lower drawer shut, having barely opened it. “Enough! This is so disgusting. Why are they doing this?”

  Her face pale with illness, Jess faced Willa and said, “There are Fairlies, like Mattie, who can read things—but for them it’s objects instead of people. They touch something and they get an image in their heads. A couple times, I’ve been able to see stuff like that without being asleep—”

  “Epcot. I remember.”

  “Yes. Epcot. And one or two times after that. Out in the hallway a few minutes ago.”

  “What’s up, Jess?” Willa stepped toward her friend, suddenly concerned. “You don’t look so good.”

  “At the graveyard…Finn asked me about the arms. And I saw the past, Willa! I’ve never seen the past, only the future. In all the confusion…And then the next dream. Pinocchio. I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. It was Finn and Mandy, so we don’t know exactly what they saw.”

  “I’m a little lost.”

  “You think you are! Don’t you get it?”

  “Apparently not,” Willa confided. “Which kind of upsets me, honestly.”

  “The past, Willa! I’ve been taking all my dreams as future-dreams because I dream the future. But we’re in the past! And I’m dreaming—”

  “—the past!” Willa reached to balance herself.

  “Which means all my interpretations are wrong! I can’t help the way I see things, but I filter it—I know I do—because it’s always the future. And I’ve filtered these recent ones wrong.”

  “Jess, you’re kind of freaking me out.”

  Jess was pacing now, twisting her hands together. Her face looked frenzied, almost wild.

  “In the graveyard I was interrupted. But now I know what I have to do, Willa.” She paused, locked eyes with her friend. “I need you to help me, support me, whatever.”

  “Jess, no!” Willa said, stepping up to block her approach. “You’re not going to do that again.” Jess wrestled at her, trying to get past. “That was Finn asking you to do something he should have never asked you to do.”

  “He can’t dream the future, can’t read the past, which I just did five minutes ago out in the hallway! There was a reason he asked me. I’ve got to do this,” Jess said.

  “Don’t, please!”

  Jess saw tears in Willa’s eyes.

  “I have to. The fingers…what if I can see what’s going on with them? That’s important!”

  “There must be another way.”

  “Apparently, I can sometimes dream, or read, the past instead of the future. Who knew?” Jess took a deep breath, steadying her voice, and said, “Now, please, step aside.”

  JESS PULLED THE DRAWER OPEN. Seeing the older lady lying there gave her a sickening chill.

  “Jess, don’t.”

  Willa’s prompt had the opposite effect. Jess looked once, just enough to know where to grab hold. Then she jabbed her hand toward the spot and looked the other way, closing her eyes.

  It belongs to a man. His grip is firm as he takes hold of her finger. There’s the sound of something cracking, like garden scissors on a stalky weed.

  Jess squints more tightly, pushing past the sound, into the man doing this.

  An almond-shaped darkness. It takes her a moment to visualize, to realize she is tiny, hovering above a satchel or purse. She has never felt so small, so claustrophobic.

  She’s the broken finger as it moves into the satchel and, as the light changes, she’s faced with not one, but a half dozen others.

  Jess wants this to stop. Struggles to let go of the dead woman’s hand.

  Willa sees Jess’s eyelids flutter frighteningly. She calls for Jess to let go.

  The darkness clears. Other fingers are being stacked atop a pile of…hair or fur, or both. There’s something like a movie screen behind it all, and other material under the hair, shreds of fabric, dried husks of crayfish, insect shells, and what looks like red cotton balls. A match is lit by the same long fingers; the cotton balls come alive with a twist of gray smoke. Something colorful and blurry comes between the fire and her eyes, not fully in focus until it lights upon the uprising flames.

  It’s Lady Tremaine. The woman melts, dissolves, and joins the coils of black soot.

  Jess’s eyes pop open. She releases the old lady’s hand. Willa catches her as Jess loses her balance. “I know what they do with the fingers,” she declares.

  WILLA EASED JESS TO THE FLOOR, ran to the sink, gathered water, and lightly splashed her face. Jess blinked and sat up, breathless.

  “It’s a ritual,” Jess said. “The fingers, the cels. They’ve done this before.”

  “The hotel. Of course! The mannequins. Like what happened with Pinocchio!”

  Jess appeared to be in a haze, utterly exhausted by her vision. Willa propped her up, speaking in a whirl of words as the pieces fit together in her head.

  “Jess, it all makes sense to me. The mannequins being shipped to Hollingsworth’s company at the hotel. The Pinocchio mannequin. We have to warn the others! Look at the time!” She pointed to the wall clock. “Let’s hope Maybeck and Charlie are outside waiting, because if they’re not, if they’re late…” Willa offered Jess a hand and pulled her up. “Can you do this?”

  Jess nodded weakly. “I’m good.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  “Without our holograms, we’re going to set off the alarm. Once we do, the police.”

  “I saw the guy, the same skinny guy from the graveyard, up on the hill. Him. I don’t think he’s imitation anything,” Jess warned. “He’s some
kind of sorcerer, or one of those spirit dwellers.”

  “A shaman.”

  “Yes! Exactly! It’s like his eyes have no irises, just big black pupils. They don’t blink. They just stare into the flames. It’s like he’s talking to the flames. Willa, I think he’s the Devil.”

  MINARA, THE SHAPE-SHIFTER, was showing off in front of the gathering, first transfiguring into the giant spider she had used to terrify Frontierland, then into an enormous spotted lizard. Now she was a green stick-bug.

  Humphrey stood among the few leaders up front, as did the girl, Antonella. But it was Mary Ann’s moment, her blue hair covering her left eye, her lips stern.

  A dozen or so Fairlies looked on, all dressed in their Cast Member costumes. Mattie, wearing her World of Disney outfit, could account for all the Fairlies but one—probably a door guard keeping watch. If her count was accurate, no one was guarding Zeke, though he was locked in his room and she had no idea who had the key.

  Mary Ann stepped up to address the group. “Today, all the practice comes to an end. No more make-believe.”

  “Nice one!” a guy shouted.

  Mary Ann seemed to choose her words carefully. “We go about our Cast Member jobs just like it’s any other day. We give away nothing. All it takes is one of us to mess this up. They’re looking for us. You understand? Disney is looking for kids who messed up the park earlier in the week. Us. We can’t give them anything to suspect.”

  “Finally!” a girl called out. “Been waiting for this!”

  “Yes, we all have,” Mary Ann said. “We will fail if we don’t do this together, if it isn’t timed just right. We’ve worked long and hard. Our housing has not been great.”

  The small group laughed.

  “But we can put all that behind us now. Today, we prove what we can do.”

  Mattie tuned out the talk about how they were going to change things forever, her focus on Humphrey standing alongside Mary Ann, and on Antonella, who was in the crowd with Mattie, almost close enough to touch.