Disney After Dark (2 page)

“What you’ll be missing. The park after dark. Basically all to yourself. The attractions operate day and night. Not many people know that.”

“Now I know I’m dreaming.”

“But you aren’t,” Wayne explained. “Are you forgetting your arm?”

Finn studied his arm once more. “I’ll admit, that is…interesting. It’s almost like—” Finn caught himself.

“Like you’re glowing,” Wayne said in an all-knowing, I-told-you-so tone of voice.

“Am I?”

“What might account for that?” Wayne inquired.

Finn understood somehow that a lot hung on his answer—his imagining this place, or dreaming it, or whatever was happening to him. His ability to stay here. To return. He wasn’t quick to answer. He didn’t want to face what Wayne was suggesting.

“I give up,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” Wayne protested. “You never would have been chosen for this if you were the kind who gives up on things. You’re a finisher, Finn. That’s what I liked about you from your first audition tape.”

Stunned by what the old guy had just said, Finn felt his mouth go dry. How did Wayne know about his audition tape? Exactly how complicated could a dream get?

“Who are you?” Finn blurted out.

“I’m Wayne. I work here. I was one of the first people hired by Walt Disney to imagine this park. The rides, the attractions. They call us Imagineers.”

“You knew Walt Disney?” Finn tried not to sound impressed.

“He was my boss, you might say. At any rate, he’s the reason I’m here. The reason you’re here.”

“Me?”

“I know this can’t be easy.”

“It’s a dream,” Finn said, thinking, What’s so hard about a dream?

“No, it’s not a dream,” Wayne said. “Take a look at the moon.” Finn didn’t move. Wayne’s voice became more severe. “I said: look at the moon.”

Finn had to turn around to locate the moon. A half-moon, like a crooked smile, hung well above the horizon.

“When you wake up—when you think you wake up—take a look out the window. You’ll see the same moon, and you’ll know.”

“Know what?” Finn asked.

“That you were here. Sitting here in Disney World with an old guy named Wayne.”

“You’re telling me this isn’t a dream?” Finn felt his words catch in his throat.

“We’ve got a problem. A big problem. A problem that affects not only the park, but the world outside the park. We call them the Overtakers.”

“The what?” Finn didn’t like the sound of that.

Wayne said urgently, “You need to contact the other hosts. All four. Arrange to meet them here at the same time. That will mean all of you going to bed, going to sleep, fairly close to the same time. Within a half hour of one another. Tell them that. That should work, I think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a fable, a story, a puzzle of sorts that was left in case of a problem like this. It’s called the Stonecutter’s Quill.”

“A problem like what?” Finn felt totally confused. The Stonecutter’s Quill—the title had an eerie sound.

Just then, Tom Sawyer came out of Frontierland and headed up a long ramp into the castle.

Is that really
the
Tom Sawyer? Finn wondered. The barefoot boy was smoking a pipe with a long stem. Wayne did a good job of not reacting, of pretending he didn’t see the kid.

Wayne said, “The puzzle has to be solved to be understood. It has to be understood to be of any use to us.” He paused and looked over at Finn. It felt to Finn as if Wayne were looking right through him. “You’re going to solve it.”

“Me?”

“The five of you,” Wayne said.

Finn jumped away from the man. Again he thought: how complicated can a dream get? If Wayne was only a part of the dream, how could he possibly know about the four other hosts? How could he talk about Finn’s audition tape the way he had? It was all related, all rolled into one, but Finn couldn’t sort it out.

Finn said, “You’re talking about MGM Studios.”

“Of course I am,” Wayne said. “You see? I knew you were the right one. You’re the leader, Finn.”

“I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about,” Finn said.

“Nice try. But of course you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You just don’t want to face it. Perfectly understandable. That will change.”

“A fable,” Finn said, testing him again. Could a dream remember itself?

“The moon,” Wayne reminded him. “Don’t forget the moon.”

I won’t.”

“All five of you. I need you together. Here. All in the same place at the same time. I can explain it to you then. Once. As a group. Just the one time. You can decide—as a group—to help us or not.”

“Us?” Finn said.

“I’ll explain that as well .”

“This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had!” Finn said, not realizing he was shouting.

“You’ll get over it,” Wayne said. He raised his right hand—the one carrying the black remote-control fob—and pressed the button with his thumb.

Finn awoke, sitting up in bed. His bedside clock read 2:07 A.M. He collected himself, checked his surroundings. He reached out and touched the glass of water next to the clock. Just the feel of it was reassuring. Thank goodness, he thought.

A dream? he wondered. “Whoa,” he heard himself say aloud. “What a dream!” This time his voice sounded more the way it always sounded, which reminded him of how thin and electronic it had sounded in the park.

“Whoa,” he repeated, just to hear himself say it. He scratched an itch on his head, and another on his belly. That felt better. He lay back down, his head on the pillow, his green eyes wide open to the dark room.

All at once Finn spotted a shaft of light—bluish light—on his ceiling. It was in the shape of a knife blade.
Moonlight.

Finn slipped out of bed with trepidation. He crept toward the window, afraid to look. The closer he got to it, the more his face was bathed in that pale light seeping through a small crack in the curtains.

Finn raised his arm and caught sight of his watch. His arm appeared
solid.
It did not glow and shimmer the way it had while he was with Wayne. That came as a relief.

Finn parted the curtains.

There, out the window, hanging
in the exact same place
in the sky, where Wayne had pointed it out to him, Finn saw the curving smile of a half-moon. Could he have known that in his sleep? How? He looked again.

The moon seemed to be laughing at him.

2

T
he halways of Finn’s middle school could sometimes feel as long as runways. Late for class, he found this to be one of those times. Steel lockers occupied most of the space between the doors to the classrooms. The lockers were covered with stickers and pictures of movie stars or pro athletes, which instantly distinguished a girl’s locker from a boy’s. Fluorescent-tube lighting cast a sickly glow over everything, and made human skin look vaguely greenish.

“He said there was a fable. A story of some kind,” Finn said to the boy standing next to him.

“That my friends and I are supposed to save the park, or something.” He realized how ridiculous this sounded. “Whatever that means.”

“By ‘friends’ you mean like, me?” Dillard Cole asked. Dillard ate enough for two kids and had the body to show for it.

“He didn’t mean you, Dillard,” Finn said gently, trying not to hurt the guy’s feelings. “Not exactly. He meant the other…the hosts. At Disney World. The DHIs.”

“No way.”

“Way,” Finn said, hurrying off to his fourth-period classroom.

“It was only a dream!” Dillard shouted after him.

Finn wasn’t so sure about that.

“We’re honored you could join us, Mr. Whitman,” said Mr. Richardson as Finn rushed in to his world history class. Mr. Richardson was probably the most boring teacher in the entire school.

He’d lived in the U.S. for twenty-some years, but still spoke with a thick British accent. He sounded like a pompous snob.

Finn checked the wall clock; he was eight minutes late, just under the ten-minute deadline when Richardson would have given him a tardy. Three tardies meant after-school study hall. Finn already had collected two others, both from science class.

“You’ll sit up front, please,” Mr. Richardson said, indicating an empty chair. Torture on top of humiliation. “For the record, your notoriety pulls no weight in my class. I beg you to remember that when grades are issued. I find the idea of child actors tedious at best.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Finn said, sliding down into the chair, resentful that he’d been made to apologize.

He’d taken the job at Disney World somewhat against his will, mostly at his mother’s urging.

At the time she’d had no idea she was making him into a middle-school rock star. He remembered it well.

* * *

“There will be money in it,” his mother had said. “Your father and I can put a little something away for your college.”

“I don’t know, Mom,” Finn had complained.

“This is Walt Disney World, don’t forget. You would be a host, like a guide, in Walt Disney World.”

“It’s not exactly
me.
”

“It’ll look like you. Sound like you. It’ll seem like you to everyone but you. You’d be there for years, Finn Whitman. Maybe forever. You can’t get any ‘cooler’ than Disney World.”

His mother didn’t know everything, but when she was right she was right. Finn loved the Disney parks. So did his friends. Even though they lived in Orlando, they all went to the parks whenever they could afford it. “But the Magic Kingdom, Mom? It’s for little kids. At Disney-MGM, sure! Animal Kingdom would be awesome. But the Magic Kingdom?”

“You love the Magic Kingdom, and you know it. Besides, the rest of your family would get complimentary passes—several a year, every year, for life. As in, forever. We could basically go whenever we want.”

“Without me.”

“I thought you just said you’re too old for the Magic Kingdom.” Finn’s mom could twist almost anything he said. He picked his arguments carefully with her. She had explained the terms of the contract to him, but Finn hadn’t really paid attention.

“Tell me about the disguise stuff again,” he said.

“You would only be allowed to visit the Magic Kingdom with prior approval. Once permission is granted, you’d still have to go in disguise. But a hat and sunglasses would be enough. You’d only have to wear them when you’re in the Magic Kingdom. They can’t have two of you running around, the real you and the hologram-host you. It makes sense if you think about it.”

It did make sense, but he wasn’t about to admit that.

She said, “It sounds so easy. All you do is let them film you walking and gesturing. You read the script a couple times into a microphone. They process the film, or whatever, and, presto!

You’re a hologram-host at the Magic Kingdom. With a college nest egg and lifetime complimentary passes. Finn, you love special effects! What they’re offering is for you to
be
the special effect. How much cooler can that be?” She was right again, but he resisted an all-out agreement. His mother had once called a new toaster “high-tech.” What did she know?

“All I have to do is audition?” he asked, testing her.

“That’s right! They might not even take you.”

“Mom,” Finn said, “this is me we’re talking about. Of course they’ll take me.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hotshot, but I do not want to hear you talking that way, and you know it. If this is going to go to your head, we are not doing this.”

Actually, Finn’s mom loved to hear him talk that way, though she pretended otherwise. She had schooled him in self-confidence. He’d auditioned for several things and never won a part yet, but not because he lacked confidence.

“Okay. I’ll do it,” he said.

She beamed. He loved to see her like that—bright-eyed and childlike.

A month after Finn had passed the final audition and won a place as a Disney Host Interactive, or DHI, he arrived at an enormous soundstage at Disney-MGM Studios.

The size of a jet aircraft hangar, the soundstage was rigged with hundreds of film lights, a green screen that filled one entire wall, trampolines, cameras, boom microphones, and dozens of scruffily dressed crew members. He’d never seen anything like it, except in movies, though he did his best to pretend otherwise. A college-age girl dressed in black and gray wore a headset with a microphone mouthpiece, a fuzzy black ball by her lips. She called herself a “PA.” It took Finn four days to realize that that stood for
production assistant.
Her boss was a guy named Brad, from Disney Imagineering.

Brad made Finn dress in green tights and a green stretchy top and walk around on a green stage. The costume had small metal sensors, like thin coins, stuck to the tights on every joint of his body—dozens of the things. Cameras hooked up to a computer recorded the movement of the small metal disks. In the cameras’ eyes, the green costume, moving against the green background, basically made Finn’s body disappear. The computer saw him instead as a floating cloud of shiny points. The engineers would later use the recordings of Finn’s movements to animate the holograms of Finn and the other kids. Brad explained that this process was called “motion capture.”

There were five kids in all. One very pretty girl, Charlene, had sandy blond hair and blue eyes, with pale skin. The other girl, Willa, struck him as a little geeky, but extremely smart. She was sweet, but not knockout gorgeous like Charlene. Not many girls looked like Charlene. Willa struck him as moody. With her hooded brown eyes and dark, braided hair, she might have been Asian or Native American. Maybeck, an African American kid, was taller than Finn by a full head and had the big-guy attitude to go along with it. For some reason he made a point of telling Finn that he was a Baptist. Finn, who wasn’t terribly religious, wasn’t sure what to do with that information, nor even what it meant.