Kingdom Keepers: The Syndrome Page 9

  I entered the welcome room. So far, so good. Glancing back, I saw the top of the dark-haired woman’s head moving as rudely as I had, cutting the line by pushing her way forward.

  The dark-haired head pushed closer. My right leg shook nervously, the way it sometimes did before math tests. Instinctively, I moved toward the doors, which I knew were about to open. As we were admitted, I crossed the octagonal chamber to the panel that would lead to the Doom Buggies.

  Our Cast Member host told us to stay away from the walls. The doors closed. I didn’t see the security woman. She hadn’t made it inside the Stretching Room.

  For the first time in several long minutes, I felt myself relax. I enjoyed the voice of the ghost, the puns, and the storyline. But then I screamed the loudest as, in the midst of total darkness, a booming, evil voice called out, “Of course, there’s always my way!”

  The guests looked up. A few let out muffled screams.

  The lights came on. Instructions were spoken. The wall panel slid open. The crowd surged forward.

  The dark-haired woman stood mere feet away from me. She’d been in the room all along. She’d used the darkness and my distraction to sneak up on me. She reached out…

  I shoved her back. Other guests complained “Cut it out!” “Stop it!”

  My plan had been to take the “chicken door,” an emergency exit that allowed frightened guests to skip the Doom Buggies, but that door moved just slightly as I was about to push through. It breathed open and closed, alerting me to another door on the same hallway that had just opened. The gift-shop woman was inside.

  Clearly, their plan was to grab me up in the privacy of the chicken door hallway, away from the prying eyes of curious guests. The dark-haired woman’s sole purpose was to scare me into using the exit.

  So I didn’t. My plan required bold action, luck, and perfect timing—

  Which made me think of Finn’s message.

  “Sorry,” I said, barging my way through the crowd, giving no thought to being polite. The line narrowed to single file and funneled into path lines that turned back on themselves. No way I could get stuck in there.

  A velvet rope chain blocked off the handicap access. As I jumped the chain, I tried something I’d never tried before. “I’m with the Kingdom Keepers! Don’t stop the buggies!” I ran down the moving belt and slipped in unexpectedly on a mother and her son just as the bar was about to lower. I kept my legs over the bar, so I wouldn’t be trapped, and held my breath, not yet saying so much as hello, expecting the ride to stop. Expecting to be caught.

  The ride did not stop.

  “Hi,” I said, addressing the mother. “Sorry!” To the boy I asked, “Have you ever heard of the Kingdom Keepers?”

  “Are you kidding me!?”

  That was an affirmative.

  “If you see a woman—blue shirt, dark hair—if you see her, I need you to scream as loud as you can. Will do that?”

  The mother objected, horrified by the intrusion. But the boy said, “Be quiet, Mom! This is important.” She clucked her tongue, as if shocked by her son’s rudeness, but didn’t say anything.

  It was dark now. We were in a tunnel. I jumped, using the safety bar as a springboard. Hooking my fingers over the clamshell back of the next Doom Buggy in line, I swung my feet around the side. Two young girls screamed. The nice thing about the Haunted Mansion, I realized with a rush of joy, was that such reactions were expected. People could scream as loud as they liked, and nothing would seem out of the ordinary.

  We slid past changing wall art, then entered and passed through the ghost story library. I clambered ahead through two more buggies. A lot more screaming. The ghostly dining room was below. I strained to look for glass jars, knowing how important this station had been to Finn and Jess. Nothing.

  When I heard a young boy’s piercing, bloodcurdling scream from behind me, I took it as the signal that my scout had come through: the security Cast Member was close behind.

  I saw strobe lights, chandeliers, and the infinity hallway. Leading out of the hallway were doors.

  I jumped off. The ride immediately stopped, as if I’d thrown a switch (and of course, I had, by tripping a sensor!). If I’d planned correctly, my attacker would be caught in the library while I fled down the infinity hallway. The first door did not open—a prop. The one immediately across from it, the same. The next…

  The handle turned.

  I stepped inside, pulled it shut behind me, and turned the small nub on the handle.

  Locked.

  I was in a world unto itself. The Keepers had shared dozens of hair-raising stories about the backstage areas in Disney World; they’d told me these secret places defied understanding. One in particular, a subterranean catacomb beneath Pirates of the Caribbean, was a place I never wanted to see in person. A place I was no longer welcome.

  Faced with oddly positioned doors and a hallway that wandered left and right without logic, I decided I’d entered a haunted house, not the Haunted Mansion. Between the brightly colored doors were floor to ceiling mirrors, which distorted my image into fat, thin, tall, short reflections. Cobwebs clouded the overhead light fixtures, turning the space murky; a line of ants bisected the path before me. This seemed to be the work of whoever had designed Escher’s Keep, a place the Keepers had spoken of often. I’d finally seen it for myself. The mirrors reflected parts of the opposite walls.

  When a ghoul appeared over my shoulder, I screamed and jumped. The lights flickered on and off. Nearby, someone moaned. I’d seen these effects on the main attraction before, but here they felt far less like special effects and far more real.

  I touched a doorknob. Cold. I elected not to open that one. Maleficent was constantly cold—and though dead, I wanted no look into her afterlife. I cracked open the next, a royal blue door, and peered through. An empty black space as dark and void of light as if I were buried. I wasn’t going in there. A brown-green door inside of which was a flooded floor. I wasn’t going in there either.

  I tried a door across the hall, unable to look at my stretched visage, which gave me the head and immense eyes of an alien. I was beginning to imagine this hallway as some kind of purgatory, a place the one thousand souls the Haunted Mansion meant to claim had to pass through to be accepted as the final piece of the puzzle. How many people, living or dead, had wandered this hall in search of a “way out”? Was I condemned to try door after door and never escape the mansion’s clutches?

  Threatened by tears, I closed my eyes, trying to collect myself, but I was too scared to keep them shut. I shuddered. Gooseflesh rippled up my arms. I felt like I might throw up.

  Think like a Keeper, I scolded myself. I pushed away the fear—step one. Told myself the moaning girl’s voice, the bizarre, ugly images of me in the mirrors—all these were nothing but illusion. I worked feverishly to set aside emotion, clear my head, and focus on the positive.

  The security woman had not followed me here. I wanted desperately to take that as a positive, but what if she’d stopped because she’d known where I was headed? The same swirling head and sick stomach sensation overcame me. I fell to my knees along with the wobbly figure-eight-headed Amanda in the mirror.

  “Go away!” I shouted at my image. It shouted back at me though a mouth that looked like it belonged on a Halloween pumpkin. Only then did I feel a tickling sensation on the fingers of both my hands; only then did I see the ants swarming over me.

  The first bit into my skin. Then the second. I shook my hands. Ants flew off, but some landed in my hair, on my face. Fifteen, twenty stinging bites. My cheek. My right eyelid swelled. My vision blurred.

  This wasn’t purgatory. This was where the attraction claimed its victims. The ants would blind me, swell my tongue and lips. Then who knew what they’d do, what the haunted house would send? Rats? Feral cats? Snakes?

  Water! The ants would not survive water. Crawling on hands and knees, seeing out of only one eye, swatting desperately, brushing the ants off, pinching my lips
shut tightly so they wouldn’t get inside, I made my way to the brown-green door. I reached up, turned the knob, and rolled inside. Thankfully, the water turned out to be only inches deep. Facedown, I squirmed like an alligator. I felt the ants fall off, felt the stinging subside. It was as if—was it possible?—the water was some kind of solvent for the bites.

  As I rolled and sat up, splashing water all over me and rubbing my arms and my face, the swelling lessened, the pain vanished. The door had swung closed shutting out all light. I did not want to go back out there with the ants.

  I did not like the dark. Never had. In Barracks 14, one of the tests they’d put us through involved subjecting us to total darkness. They placed me in a pitch-black room and told me I’d be there for two hours, or until I found the way out. I was there seven minutes. I pushed in four directions. The last push threw open a trapdoor in the floor, and I climbed down and out. They’d tricked me into using my “gift,” something I’d resisted doing. I wasn’t the only one.

  Poor Jess couldn’t use her gift in a place like that. She stayed in the dark for the full duration. I’m not sure she was ever the same after that.

  Of course, a solution for one problem is not always right for another, similar problem. But try convincing the human brain of that. Recalling my experience at Barracks 14, reliving the sense of panic the dark room instilled in me, I turned away from the hallway door, and I pushed.

  That insight about one solution not fitting all problems revisited me a little late. I’d acted on instinct before allowing my brain had time to catch up, something the Keepers always listed as a rule not to violate. Don’t let your emotions dictate your actions. But panic owned me.

  I heard an unfamiliar and unwanted sound. I couldn’t identify it because it was foreign to me. The unfamiliarity spiked adrenaline in my limbs and the center of my chest—it was a threatening sound. It was bad. It was coming at me.

  It was water.

  My push had unleashed a wave, apparently driving all the water away from me to where it struck an obstacle—a wall—and came crashing back. I was lifted off my feet. Thrown into a slow motion backflip, water roiling over me, I mistakenly released air through my nose. Simultaneously, I spit out water and clamped my lips tight, swimming frantically up—or at least I hoped it was up.

  As it passed, the wave dropped out from under me and slammed me onto my hands and knees on a rubbery, slimy floor. I gasped for breath, coughing.

  Then it hit me from behind, tumbling me forward into an unexpected somersault and threatening to drown me once more. My toes hit the rubber; I got my feet under me and leaped. My head broke the surface; I sucked in air. The wave passed, throwing me to the floor again, this time onto my back, knocking the wind out of me.

  Now I knew the pattern. I rolled and turned headfirst into the expected wave. It came. In a diving position, I glided through and settled back onto the slime, as though I was body-surfing. With each pass, the force of the wave lessened until it was just sloshing, like when you move back and forth in the bathtub too fast. The rubber floor was certainly not hiding a trapdoor, and searching the walls, I found nothing to give me hope. At last, I ventured meekly back out into the horror hallway. The ants were gone, but that was hardly reassuring.

  Fourth door to the right: a graveyard. My first instinct: slam the door shut. But this gave way to eager curiosity. Near the end of the ride, a living graveyard presented some chills and scares. I had to test whether these graveyards were one and the same. If true, I’d just found my way out.

  Venturing into the gray space, I took a moment to identify my door. It was disguised as a panel on the side of a large tomb, and fit perfectly with the set. I didn’t dare pull it shut until I could figure out how to open it from this side. Carefully, I located its latch, an angel’s wing.

  Surrounded by tombstones, ghouls, and statues of the dead, I tiptoed quietly, keeping my head low, afraid I might come into view of the Doom Buggies.

  All I wanted was out. Away from this place.

  When I spotted the red eyes of the raven above the door to the hitchhiking ghosts’ room, it signaled the end. I practically let out a shriek of relief! The problem now was that by trying to get to the Doom Buggies, I would inadvertently trip the emergency stop again. I needed another way out. If I stopped the ride for a second time, I’d certainly be caught and captured.

  The answer lay below me: a red, glowing exit sign angled so that the guests could not see it. I lowered myself to hands and knees and scrambled from tombstone to tombstone. The exit led to the hallway accessed by the chicken door, which I recognized immediately. Cracking it open, I waited. And waited. Finally, a mother and her two crying sons came down the hall. I slipped through and followed them outside, head down.

  Only one location left to check: the place Finn where had won my heart for good.

  The raft ride to Tom Sawyer Island passed peacefully. The only thing I found disturbing was the awful mixture of smells—suntan lotion, turkey legs, and popcorn. Once on the island, my chest ached from the pains of memory. Walking slowly toward the fort, crossing the rope bridge, reliving the powerful feeling of friendship that had only grown stronger with time. I missed Finn. And I was tired of the word “friend”; it felt so limiting to me now. Ours was more a bond of innocence mixed with commitment. A tad Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” a bit Olaf-and-the-fireplace. In the absence of that connection, I felt like I was walking to a funeral.

  Maybe it was a holdover from the mansion.

  Given the earlier pursuit, I remained on high alert. I couldn’t let my emotions take me out of the present moment. But so many images were flooding me that I might as well have been Jess. Going off the path, I moved inexorably forward, like a toy pulled by a string. This place was where Finn had kissed me for the first time. Just a peck, but a real kiss, too. Something he’d meant to stay with me. It had.

  The tree near where we’d been standing had grown, or I had shrunk, but things were different, a condition I found unsettling. My right knee locked, sending intense pain shooting through me. I shook it loose. I could see him. I could hear him. Did I dare admit, I could feel him?

  I studied the open tunnel entrance that led into the fort. I considered the tree for a second time. I submerged myself in a roiling tsunami of loss and expectation, of regret and encouragement. I’d either lost Finn completely, or I was about to find him. I’d exhausted every possible location for “our time in MK,” and found no jar to fill. Nothing was mine for the knowing.

  “Finn,” I moaned softly.

  Then I saw it.

  JESS

  Even from inside the small, climate-controlled Kissimmee air terminal that housed private planes, I could feel the Florida heat coming through the windows. I sat with Joe and the two Imagineers who’d been on the plane with us in an empty corner of the luxury lounge, awaiting the driver who’d take us to Walt Disney World.

  Joe seemed increasingly impatient. He and the Imagineers were engaged in hushed conversation. I was definitely unwanted, but being the outsider I was used to that.

  Apparently invisible, I set my backpack, my only luggage, on my lap and pulled out my phone. I mindlessly scrolled through Tumblr, pretending to be distracted while I strained to hear their conversation. They were obviously working on some kind of project they didn’t want me to know about. That only made me want to know about it more.

  Joe turned to me suddenly. “Want something to drink, Jessica? Why don’t you go get something to drink?”

  “I’m good,” I said, returning to my phone, feigning disinterest.

  “For me then. How about an orange soda?” Joe checked with the others. They declined. He handed me some money. “There’s a vending machine over there.” He pointed to the far end of the building.

  I could take a hint, though I snarled involuntarily. I headed for the far wall.

  As a confidante of the Keepers, I knew things that likely qualified as Disney company secrets. I’d agreed to keep all such inf
ormation confidential when I’d accepted the internship. If I violated that agreement, they’d expel me. So their secrecy didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Not unless it was super secret. That possibility left me all the more curious.

  Returning from the vending machine, I took the long way around, approaching Joe and the others from the opposite side, keeping my head down while trying to eavesdrop. One of the men with Joe was speaking. “The DNA came back as reptilian, possibly prehistor—”

  Joe interrupted, cutting him off. “Hey Jessica, find it for me?” He must have had eyes in the back of his head.

  I handed him the orange soda.

  Joe shifted on his feet. He and the others looked seriously uncomfortable. “We were just talking about…what’s next. We suggest you contact Amanda and arrange for me to meet with her.”

  Keeping secrets was one thing. It was understandable on many levels. Outright lies cut me to the core. The Keepers, Amanda, and I had done so much to help the Kingdom. Being lied to was almost too much to take.

  Almost.

  “Ah, of course. Sure thing,” I pursed my lips and offered a tight smile. The resulting silence was awkward, and was only broken by the arrival of the black SUV.

  The car ride into the parks thrilled me. I had so many memories here—most wonderful, some scary. Disney World was so much more than an amusement park. It was a kingdom. A place where my life had started over in so many ways. A place I’d made real friends. Friends that were real keepers. I giggled to myself, excited as we passed beneath the welcoming sign that spanned the road.

  Home.

  When the car turned into the entrance to the Grand Floridian, I practically squealed aloud. What a place. All white antebellum-Victorian architecture. A carriage out front. We’d passed the Wedding Pavilion on the way.

  “We’ve got to pick up the Magic Bands from the front desk. You can wait in the front lobby with Bob,” Joe said.