Kingdom Keepers the Return Book 3 Read online

  She stripped down to a matte black bikini that fit perfectly with her purpose. Crammed her shed clothing into a stuff sack and hung it from a hook on the back of the stall door. Now came the hard part. Since its beginnings, the procedure had confounded doctors, parents, her friends, even herself. It came from a place of wishing and wanting, of anger and hope, disillusionment and fear. It came not from concentration but from release, from turning herself over to an image she formed in her head. Always an animal.

  Despite the pain, it felt surprisingly good. Delicious, even. As colorful lines raised like welts on her skin, her muscles began responding as well, pulling and bending her limbs, her bones, into contortions seen only at the circus. Here, in the tiny bathroom stall, browns and blacks crept up her legs, long gray hairs were drawn across her belly, forming what looked like fur; her back began to arch, her neck and head to invert. Her back bend continued until she threw her hands over her head to catch herself. Her pose looked like that of a gymnast, feet flat on the floor, hips and chest stretching high in a backward arch, head hanging, arms outreaching.

  The stinging that covered her body cooled somewhat and she knew “the drawing” (as she thought of it) was complete. She began to move automatically as if she’d walked on all fours all her life, first hands, then feet, her back breaking in an upside-down arch. Immediately, there were bloodcurdling screams. The slapping of sandals on tile sounded like hands clapping; the girls and women rushed from the restroom in panic, fleeing the giant tarantula.

  At first, the guests who saw the running and heard the screaming outside the restroom were entertained. This was Disneyland, after all. But the panicked cries seemed so…real, and the women doing the screaming, so…terrified.

  The entertainment element passed as the King Kong of spiders arrived into the sunshine. It moved in all directions at once. Forward; to the side; spinning in sharp, quick movements. Children froze, paralyzed, as their parents scooped them up and took off running.

  But it was the congestion and steady flow of park guests in and around Big Thunder Mountain that turned panic into bedlam, order into chaos.

  Javelot heard the screams behind her and grinned. Minara could scare the tar out of you. Despite the vestiges of a smile, she maintained a kind of mental shield, keeping all thought and energy off her. It was like having a thick plastic bag or see-through helmet over her head.

  Her attention was directed onto the silhouette of the captain of the Mark Twain Riverboat on the Rivers of America steamboat.

  Her effort wasn’t an effort at all, but a kind of wishful joining. Easily accomplished, she simply “wished to know.” As long as that wish involved a living animal, she became whatever, whoever it was. The connection never lasted long, though she could return to it repeatedly. During the brief joining, it wasn’t a matter of hearing the person’s thoughts or memories. It was more like taking the steering wheel of a car from the driver.

  It had started at the age of eight when the family dog ran into the street in front of a UPS truck. Javelot was there, in full empathy with the dog. It stopped and reversed itself as if tugged sharply by a leash. Her mother had seen the dog’s impossible about-face and called it a miracle. And Javelot had, from that day forth, begun to think of herself as just that—a miracle, and that confidence drove her to bigger and more ambitious attempts at mind control. Her mother should have caught on when her grades went from Cs to all As.

  The captain of the Mark Twain Riverboat never knew what hit him. One minute he was piloting the vessel as it circumnavigated the Rivers of America, clockwise, as always. The next, he’d pushed the throttle fully forward and aimed his paddleboat for the Sailing Ship Columbia, anchored away from the dock.

  If the guests registered the change, they offered little initial reaction. Several visitors on the deck of the Columbia spotted the giant paddleboat steaming straight at them and called out the alarm. By the time those aboard the Mark Twain Riverboat comprehended the physics involved—a body in motion—the collision was imminent.

  It came as an explosion of wood, as people dived from both vessels into the languid water below. At the moment of contact, the captain looked down at his own hand on the throttle, seeing it as if it belonged to someone else. His only explanation was that he’d blacked out momentarily, an inexcusable and unconscionable act.

  The terrified shouting that had begun with the sighting of the giant tarantula swept throughout Frontierland, through New Orleans Square, and as far as Critter Country. Guests helped panicked swimmers out of the water on Tom Sawyer Island and all along the park’s shoreline. There were skinned knees and banged elbows, a few bloody noses, and more than a few guests suffering from shock. But no serious injuries.

  As the collision of the boats drew everyone’s attention to the water, the tarantula withdrew, nearly unnoticed, to the women’s restroom. Moments later, a young woman was heard screaming from inside. She sprinted out of the restroom yelling, “Spiiiiderrrrr!”

  She was tall and thin with a drawn face and exceptionally pale skin.

  This girl was joined by a smaller, dark-haired girl with a bad haircut. They fled amid the hundreds of other park guests running in every direction. By the time these two girls reached Main Street USA, another flood of terrified guests originating from Tomorrowland was flowing toward the turnstiles. Thousands of them now.

  One girl looked at the other. Both grinned devilishly. They joined hands and ran their hearts out.

  While others cried in terror, theirs were cries of joy and accomplishment.

  FINN WHITMAN WAS A LOT LIKE other kids, only he wasn’t. The same could be said for his friends, Philby, Charlene, Maybeck, and Willa.

  The five were gathered in a workshop backstage at Disneyland. It looked like the inside of a garage but had a whiff of mad-scientist. Contributing to the peculiarities of the place was the obvious lack of anything modern. It was as if they were in a museum: the hand tools, the lighting, the absence of any kind of plastic. It was all metal, leather, and wood. Bare lightbulbs hung from thick black wires.

  The giveaway to the peculiarity of Finn’s situation was the wall calendar. It showed a full-figured girl in a tight sweater standing alongside a sports car. The calendar carried the banner title JULY and, in smaller type in the upper right corner, the year: 1955.

  Finn stared at that calendar. He and all but two of the others had been living in 1955 for ten days now. It hit him hard that none of them would even be born for another forty years.

  Through a series of strange, though explainable, events, the five had left the comforts of smartphones, smart cars, and Smart Water behind. They had boarded Disneyland’s King Arthur Carrousel as holograms (yes: holograms!) in the time of Taylor Swift and arrived in the original Disneyland at the time of Elvis Presley.

  The problem they now faced was terrifying: they lacked the technology to return to the future. Time travel was tricky, to say the least.

  A Disneyland Cast Member about the same age, a nineteen-year-old guy named Wayne Kresky, had been helping them. He wore the same baggy khaki pants and button-down shirt as the other backstage Cast Members. His eyes looked gray indoors, but blue in direct sunlight. The artificial lighting changed his blond hair to sand.

  “Here’s the deal,” said the redheaded Philby in a vaguely British-accented voice. “Obviously the technology available to us is a bit prehistoric in 1955. Color TV is barely on the scene, there’s never been an astronaut—”

  “We know all this!” complained Maybeck. “Talk to us about the Return!”

  Maybe it was his being taller that made Terry Maybeck seem older than the others. Maybe it was his occasional reminders to the others that he was the descendant of great-grandparents who’d been slaves. He deservedly carried that chip on his shoulder, and somehow it made him seem more mature, more experienced than the other Keepers. Whatever the case, Maybeck had that “it” that made him cool. The “it” that made him stand out.

  “I was simply explaining—”


  “Well, don’t! None of this is simple, and none of us care about the technology!” said Maybeck. “We don’t need a Professor Philby moment. We need to know if you and Wayne have come up with a way to get us back to the present. To our families. Please tell me you have, because we already lost our real selves. We’re stuck as holograms until the park closes, same as it’s been each and every day since we got here.”

  “Some of us got here late,” Willa reminded them, pointing out two others in their company. Jess and Amanda had followed them into the past and were currently in a state of partial shock. It was one of those it-seemed-like-a-better-idea-at-the-time things that now, by the looks on their faces, they probably regretted.

  Jess and Amanda, both unusual and exceptional in their own ways, had plunged themselves into the past, each to deliver a message. They were, in fact, twin deliverers of impending doom, the kind of messengers no one wanted to listen to. For both, the idea of the Keepers taking on yet another mission was almost too much to bear.

  “We were able to return an inanimate object,” Philby said.

  “English!” Maybeck demanded.

  “You don’t have to be such a Neanderthal,” Charlene snapped. Maybeck listened to Charlene, paid attention to her and her cheerleader good looks. The two had a thing going—a more-than-friends thing, a romance thing—that kept Maybeck on a short leash. “He means an un-living object. Not a plant or animal.”

  “A Coca-Cola bottle cap,” Philby supplied. “Small. Easily identifiable as belonging to now, 1955. We know it worked because it disappeared from the carousel and then reappeared about twelve hours later.”

  “That’s huge!” Finn said.

  Philby nodded toward him. “It is. But what we can’t seem to pull off, at least not yet, is returning a living object and keeping it that way. We tried a green leaf, but we toasted it.” He lifted a curled, blackened stem. “We know the Imagineers in the future received it like this because they sent it back with a note.”

  “We made adjustments, and sent across a beetle in a cage of toothpicks,” Wayne said. “It’s a dual test because the toothpicks are themselves formerly living matter. Golly, if even the cage can make the journey, it’s a big step in the right direction.”

  Finn took this all in. Considered the leader of the group, he found it better to listen than to express opinions too quickly. To be a decent leader he had to be right at least some of the time, and given that he barely understood the science of what Wayne and Philby were attempting, he’d kept quiet so far.

  But a leader can’t remain quiet forever. There was a much bigger elephant in the room. He knew who had to address it; it did no one any good to put it off any longer. But he also knew how unpopular he was about to become.

  “The fact you’ve made any progress at all is amazing.” Heads nodded in agreement. All but Maybeck’s. A good start. “But we all know we’re avoiding the bigger issue. Amanda and Jess have been here a week—”

  “Eight days,” Jess said, correcting him.

  “Eight days!” Finn trumpeted. “Amanda warned us about Amery Hollingsworth being behind the creation of the Overtakers, and we’ve done nothing about that. Jess has had a dream about Jack Skellington burning bones. If that’s also Hollingsworth’s doing, then we have to act!”

  Speaking the name Hollingsworth was like shouting “Satan!” in church, or “Benedict Arnold” in Congress. By 1955, Amery Hollingsworth, a former rising star in the Disney company, had become a traitor of the first order, a disgruntled employee intent on ruining Walt Disney’s company and the man’s dream. Hollingsworth was said to be a brilliant but dangerous man.

  Amanda’s unusual looks—she might have been some small part Asian or Hispanic—her calming voice, and her wise-beyond-her-years confidence projected an authority few of the others ever challenged. She and Jess had shared a rough childhood that had cemented a friendship stronger than some sisters, and she carried that mystery with her as well. “I know none of you wanted to hear that Hollingsworth turns the villains against the parks, but it’s true. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t true. He’s responsible. He’s the source—the creator, I guess—of all the awful stuff that we end up fighting in sixty years. The battle you guys face in the future started here, in 1955. If you—we, I guess—can stop it now, maybe it won’t happen then. I’m not saying I know anything about time travel, but maybe we can prevent the tragedies, the destruction to the parks, the darkness from ever happening.”

  Her message cut to the hearts of the five Kingdom Keepers. They had given years over to battling the Disney villains in order to stop them from ruining everything Disney. The idea that all that horror could be prevented was nearly too much to process.

  “Dillard,” Finn whispered. Finn’s closest neighborhood friend had died for the cause.

  “We don’t know that we can stop that!” Maybeck spoke sympathetically and compassionately.

  “We can hope,” Finn said, his voice trembling. “Can’t we? If the villains never rise to power, Dillard’s never involved in any of this. He lives!” He caught the others staring at his trembling fingers and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  The workshop door rattled. “Kresky?” called a strident voice.

  Everyone, including Wayne Kresky, froze as still as the spiral pillars in front of Snow White’s Scary Adventures. Wayne pointed into the back of the workshop, to a narrow, open-ended storage area that held scrap lumber and odds and ends. All seven kids rushed to it like trained dogs. They scrambled in, some ducking, some climbing amid the racks. The idea was to get as deeply into shadow as possible. The teens ended up in groups of two and three, pressed into one another, and curled up as small as they could. Finn put his arm around Amanda and held her close; she leaned her head onto his shoulder and whispered.

  “We can save Dillard. We’re going to save—”

  A conversation at the door cut her off.

  * * *

  “Yes? What is it? I’m busy here,” Wayne said, appropriately testy. He faced two kids younger than him.

  “My name’s Shane,” said the red-haired, square-shouldered boy in a wobbly baritone. It was as if he was trying to make himself sound older than he was: likely sixteen or seventeen.

  “Yes, I can read that on your shiny new Cast Member pin,” said Wayne. “I haven’t seen you around before, so welcome to Disneyland. New, are we?”

  “I’m Thia, like in Cynthia.” The young woman looked a year or two older than her counterpart. She had a solid, unflattering build and poor posture. Her face was round, with pink, puffy cheeks and beady dark eyes reminiscent of chocolate chips.

  “We’re your new trainees,” said Shane.

  “Gee willikers! What’s that supposed to mean?” Wayne blinked, confused.

  “We’ve been assigned to your team—”

  “To learn the ropes—”

  “To serve an apprenticeship—”

  “To get the hang of, to get down cold, to get a look-see at what you do and how you do it,” Shane said. “Exactly.”

  “I don’t want to be mean, but I don’t work with apprentices or any others. Mr. Disney himself gave me this assignment. I test new gizmos. I invent stuff. It isn’t work you do as a group.”

  The two looked crestfallen, heads cast to the floor.

  “Who arranged this?”

  Thia spoke, her voice quavering. “Ah…Mr. Hawkins, Jim…Hawkins. Four weeks of apprenticeship.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with Mr. Hawkins.”

  Shane spoke, though clumsily. “He’s at W.E.D.”

  “You don’t want us?” Thia said, clearly hurt by Wayne’s reaction.

  “It’s not that. Please. I’m busy, that’s all. I work by myself.”

  “We could watch,” Shane suggested. “We’d be quiet and all. It’s only a few weeks.”

  “We could run errands for you.” It was Thia’s turn to try to convince Wayne. “Or stay out of your way. Gosh, this place is spiffy! What’
s all the wires and such on that table?”

  “I…work…alone,” Wayne repeated.

  “If you don’t want us, what are we supposed to do?” Thia asked, sounding on the verge of tears.

  “Okay, cut the gas and listen up,” Wayne said. “Write this down. It’s a test. If you get it right, you can watch me work later on today. Don’t bother coming back here until you have it solved. Ready?”

  Shane prepared to write on his hand. Thia held a Disneyland notebook.

  “Ready,” she said.

  “Write this down: There’s a basket containing five apples. How do you divide the apples among five children so that each child has one apple while one apple remains in the basket? I’m not going to repeat it. Now, shoo, and don’t come back until you’ve got it.” He shut the door with a thud.

  “You can come out now,” Wayne said a full minute later. “They’ve gone.”

  “What was that about?” Willa asked. The quietest of the five Kingdom Keepers, Willa was also one of the smartest. She lacked Charlene’s head-turning good looks, but she also put almost no effort into her appearance. Slightly mousy with unremarkable brown hair and a reddish nose that gave one the idea she’d been crying, Willa eschewed leggings for jeans and covered her top in layers of bralettes, camis, and Bob’s Burgers T-shirts.

  “I’m assuming you heard,” Wayne said.

  “I heard,” Willa said, “but I also happen to have a mother who can’t stop watching ancient TV shows like I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best. Jimmy Hawkins was—is, I suppose, given that it’s 1955—a kid actor on Annie Oakley. That’s a little too coincidental, don’t you think?”

  “She made up the name?” Wayne questioned.

  “She said the first name that came to mind. I would check if there’s actually a Jim Hawkins in W.E.D.,” Willa said. “I doubt it very much.”