The Return: Disney Lands (5 page)

Maybe he’d crossed over onto the set of a movie shoot.

But it was sight of his own hand that caused the panic. It was black-and-white! Incredibly small
compared to the Audio-Animatronics. He’d shrunk! Outlined in a thin gray line, he was some
kind of corrupted DHI projection. Abort! he thought, having no idea how to return.

The announcer’s booming voice continued its spiel—about the marvel of invention and the promise of progress. Finn shielded his eyes from the stage lights and managed another sweeping
glimpse of the audience. No matter
how hard he searched, he saw only the retro boys and girls.

He reached for the Return he kept in his pocket when crossing over. The Return, which looked a lot like an automobile key fob, was used to shut down Finn’s hologram projection and return
his consciousness to the sleeping boy in his bed. This, so he could wake up from his DHI state.

Problem: his miniature black-and-white image
was two-dimensional, not three. He didn’t have pockets. Therefore, no Return. No way back. Another problem: he didn’t remember crossing
over in the first place.

He ran to his left and smacked into an unseen barrier. He fell down. Some in the audience laughed. At him?

He jumped and struck his head. “Ow!”

More laughter.

He felt around. He was in some kind of a glass cage. He couldn’t
make out walls on either side, but something had stopped him. The same thing had happened when he’d tried to touch
the top and bottom.

The announcer was still speaking; he referred to the woman Audio-Animatronic as “Mother.” She wore her oddly yellow hair carefully trimmed at her shoulders.

Yellow, as in color. The stage lights were color as well. Yet Finn was black-and-white. Why?

Two Audio-Animatronic kids, a boy and a girl, sat on the floor in front of him, staring. Color. Light flickered across their faces, light that seemed to be coming from Finn. The kids dipped
their mannequin hands into clear plastic bowls, eating fake popcorn. They were watching television.

Finn was on TV! No, he was
in
the TV! And he wanted out.
Now!

With skills honed from many adventures
in the parks, he sensed something coming at him from his left. A small silver golf ball that looked sort of like a UFO, flying at him fast. It was also
black-and-white and in extremely low resolution. If it was a special effect, it was incredibly unspecial.

The UFO shot dashed lines at him. Remarkably, when they hit Finn’s arm, the dashes zapped him with little bursts of electricity. They
stung! Finn ducked to avoid them. The spaceship
altered course. The dashes of stinging pain hit him again.

Wincing, Finn stepped forward—and banged into the glass of the television picture tube. The spaceship zapped him again.
Dang!
Finn turned sideways and stepped toward the glass,
leading with the side edge of his image instead of the full plane.

Success. He fell out of the TV’s
confines and landed on the stage, flat as a sheet of paper.

The audience applauded.

Finn sat up, still flat as a pancake. He was regular size now, no longer miniature.

He vaguely recalled strange sounding music, and looked over his shoulder to see a small television screen in a large box. The flying saucer on the screen was the same one that had shot him. The
television threw flickering
light down onto the stage.

Although he struggled to understand how it might have happened, he seemed to have come out of that same television.

The show’s narrator spoke. “The family of the future will enjoy television in full color. The kids will be able to record their favorite shows on a videotape.”

Finn came to his feet.

The crowd applauded and cheered.

The stage went suddenly
dark then, and the narrator’s voice cut off mid-word. The house lights came up. A different man spoke over the public address system. “Ladies and gentlemen,
girls and boys, this attraction is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please proceed calmly to the nearest exit, and be sure to return later.”

The crowd rose obediently. Mumbling patrons moved quietly toward the exits.

“You there!” The loud male voice belonged to one of two security guards dressed as rent-a-cops with brass Mickey Mouse badges pinned to their uniform shirts. These two were
definitely not Audio-Animatronics, definitely not part of the show. They dodged around the stage, heading directly for Finn. Big guys, red in the face and looking hostile.

The guards did not look happy. They were going
to want answers Finn didn’t have. Like, why was he black-and-white and two-dimensional?

It was then that he saw the boy, a college-aged kid, maybe a few years older, standing calmly at the back of the auditorium. The boy had a penetrating, all-knowing expression on his face. Serene
and confident.

With seeming ease, he lifted a poster board sign. And Finn’s heart nearly jumped out of
his black-and-white chest.

On the sign was drawn a single image.

A large fountain pen.

F
OR SEVEN YEARS
, Finn’s life had
been as much about conquering his fears as battling Disney
villains. As a DHI, crossed over inside the parks, Finn always knew and understood the mission. So why couldn’t he remember what he was doing now?

In fact, he couldn’t remember a thing about the past few hours. All he had were random, fleeting images and some bizarre music as his signposts.

He remembered stuff like Jess and Amanda
being enrolled in the Disney School of Imagineering; that the other Keepers were eager to move on with their lives; that his parents worried about him;
that Wayne had been killed while trying to help Finn save the kingdom…

But no matter what was really going on, the look of determination on the faces of the two security guards told him he did not want to be caught.

Work with what you’re
given, he reminded himself.

Currently he didn’t have much. He was no Philby when it came to math and science, but he knew his geometry. If two-dimensional, presented from the side he should be nothing but a line. A
thin, nearly
nonexistent
line.

He rotated ninety degrees, the approaching men now to his left.

“What the…?” called one of the two guards as he skidded to a stop. “Where’d
he go?”

“Gee whillikers! He was right here!” exclaimed the other.

“You check over there. I’ll take—” As the man took a step forward, he swore like a sailor.

He’d spotted Finn.

Finn rotated again. The gruff guard reached down and swiped. Finn burst into sparks of black-and-white photons like a scattering of fireflies in the backyard.

A fraction of a second later, Finn’s black-and-white
shoulder reformed, the sparkling particles coming back together.

He couldn’t wait to tell Philby about this!

The guard reached for Finn a second time. Again, a starburst of sparkling light scattered and reassembled. Finn felt mild pain, but the sensation vanished with the reassembly.

The frustrated guard grabbed repeatedly for Finn. But Finn danced out of the man’s reach each time
the guard tried.

“You don’t want to do this,” Finn warned in a high-pitched cartoon voice he didn’t recognize. “Joe will have your badge.”

“It can speak!”

“Don’t know no Joe,” the other guard barked.

“Joe Garlington. Him or the head of the Imagineers. Bruce Vaughn.”

“Nice try, kid. You mean Mr. Irving. He’s the executive in charge.”

“Dagnabit, if I don’t got the willies,”
whispered the second guard.

“Because of this?” Finn turned sideways and slipped through the gap separating the two men, silently thanking Mr. MacDonald—his middle school math teacher. Jumping offstage, he
fled through the nearest exit.

The boy holding the sign was gone. Outside, Finn passed the Carousel of Progress—and what he saw made his two-dimensional head spin. This place was identical
to, and yet unlike the
Disneyland he knew. He had little time to reflect on the extra space, the design of the signage. All he knew was that it was Different—with a capital D. Somehow not the Disneyland he knew,
while at the same time the park he loved.

As he whirled about, unsure where to go, Finn was struck by it being daytime; typically the Keepers crossed over at night. Also, the park
was teeming with people dressed like the audience inside
the attraction. Park guests stared; children pointed, their mothers grabbing their arms to correct their impoliteness.

The sky was like a velvet blanket, a beautiful blue. A warm breeze whistled, ruffling his hair in the most pleasant way. There
wasn’t a cloud to be seen. He took a tentative sniff. The air was light, and dry, carrying all sorts of scents into his nostrils including roasted peanuts and the strangely comforting smell
of people. Hairs rose on the back of his neck, and he glanced around.
¹

It had to be a movie set, but where were the cameras, the lights, the director? And why were the extras swarming the park with no
apparent organization at all?

He looked for a pay phone; if Philby had manually crossed him over, then he needed to signal his friend to bring him back. He spotted a bank of three pay phones not far away and ran over to
them. He yanked up the receiver before he looked closely. It had a dial tone, but the phone itself had no push buttons, just a spinning dial with holes at the numbers. Of
no use to him, Finn
thought; the retro pay phone had to be part of a park display.

As he hung up, Finn spotted the boy with the sign across the park walkway. Despite their being separated by crowds, he was fixated on Finn, his eyes alight with a penetrating glare. He was in
the process of hoisting his sign for a second time—showing off the fountain pen—when he flicked his attention off
Finn and onto a Dapper Dan, dressed in a red and white jacket, a straw
hat, and pressed white pants. Finn knew the Dapper Dans as typically part of a singing quartet that roamed the parks. The Dapper Dan seemed interested in both the guy with the sign and Finn.

The guy with the sign offered Finn a faint shake of the head.
No
, he was saying. Finn took that to mean don’t go near the Dapper
Dan, toward whom he looked a second time. Finn had
always thought kindly of Dapper Dans; this warning surprised him. When Finn checked back for the guy with the sign, he was gone again.

In the meantime, the Dapper Dan was closing in on him.

Somewhere in the distance, a train whistle blew. Finn cut around the curving outside of the Carousel of Progress, hoping to catch the Disneyland
Railroad, but the train had pulled out of the
station. Worse yet, he was beginning to attract a following of the curious. And there, in the distance, still pursuing him, the Dapper Dan.

Finn pulled on a door handle on the exterior of the huge pavilion housing the Carousel of Progress. Locked. Another, also locked. Forced to move in the direction of the approaching Dapper Dan in
order to
keep testing doors, he hurried now, tendrils of panic choking his nerves. Locked. Locked.

Unexpectedly, a door burst open and swung through the black-and-white Finn, dispersing his pixels like confetti. People wearing the same retro costumes flowed out the door. Finn’s image
reassembled, and he hurried inside. Each time a person bumped him, he exploded into the same dustlike pixels. This
effect impeded his progress; the pixels had to re-form into his image before Finn
could move again.

The Dapper Dan’s striped jacket and white pants moved against the outgoing tide, coming for Finn.

Finn dodged through the human pylons as if in a video game, trying to avoid being delayed by pixelization. Inside the same auditorium as before, he hurried toward the stage.

“You!” The
Dapper Dan was close now.

Onstage, Finn panicked. He was life-size; the TV screen, tiny. When he led with his open palm, the picture tube’s glass proved an unbreakable barrier; his hand slapped uselessly against
it. He tried his fingertips, like a jab. Now his projected hand went through the glass and shrank to a tenth of its size.

The Dapper Dan charged up the stage stairs.