Chapter 6
Sora, Goofy, Donald, and Jiminy sat on a bench near one of Disneyland's many outdoor eateries, talking earnestly.
"But you're already got a girlfriend!" Jiminy Cricket scowled at Sora.
"I do?"
"Kairi! You haven't forgotten her already, have you?"
"I could never forget Kairi, ever," said Sora. "It's not possible. And this isn't a date, anyway."
"I've seen the way you look at her," said Donald. "Same way I look at Daisy."
"And the same way you looked at all those ladies in bathing suits down in Acapulco," said Goofy. "Remember that? You were quite the dandy back then."
Donald's face turned red, but whether that was from embarrassment or anger was not clear. He shouted something that might have been a denial, punctuated by his hopping up and down on one foot and waving his right arm in a circle. Goofy shrugged nonchalantly.
Jiminy looked unimpressed. "Regardless of what Goofy did or didn't do in Mexico, you already have a responsibility to be loyal to Kairi. Yet, here you are, on a date with Mira."
"I told you," said Sora, "it's not a date."
"Why are you holding her hand, then?"
Sora ducked his head away so he couldn't see Jiminy's sternly wagging finger. With no adequate response to Jiminy's question, he found himself looking for a change of subject. It came in the form of Mira returning with four ice cream cones in tow.
"Mira!" said Sora. "You got chocolate?"
"Chocolate for you, peanut butter for Donald, mango kiwi for Goofy, and strawberry for me." Mira took a lick off the top of her cone. Sora noted that the pink ice cream complemented her rosy cheeks.
"Thanks!" said Donald without taking his eyes off of the mass of brown sludge piled atop his cone. Goofy reached for his snack before bothering with thanking Mira, and he finished half of it within the first minute.
"Oww," he howled. "My head!"
Mira giggled. "You shouldn't eat so fast. You'll get an ice cream headache."
"Now
you tell me." Goofy doubled over in pain, clutched his temple with
his free hand, and then sat upright and took another oversized bite
of his ice cream.
"Shouldn't what, now?"
Mira sat down next to Sora and put her arm around his shoulder. "Your friends are so silly. I'm sure glad we could all spend this wonderful, happy birthday together."
"I'm happy to be with you, too," said Sora. "Really, I am."
"That's
great," said Mira. She took a lick of strawberry ice cream and
leaned her head against Sora's shoulder. "Better hurry up,
though. We've got lots to see. You say you've never been here
before, right?"
"Never," said Sora. "We're not from
around here."
"You just met those guys recently, then?" Mira looked puzzled. "I figured they would have given you a tour before."
"Huh?" said Sora.
"Yeah," said Donald, "we met recently. Though Goofy and I used to work at the, uh, other amusement park. Yeah, that's it. So we've never been here before, either."
"Disney World?" Mira's puzzlement faded.
"Yeah, Disney World," said Donald. "I'd forgotten the name."
Mira just laughed. "Funny people like you would be the ones to work at a place like this, wouldn't you?"
"That's us," said Goofy. "We're funny to the end."
"Right," said Sora. "To the end."
XXX
"Is it supposed to be so dark?" Sora couldn't help but feel a slight chill as his boat carried him and Mira into the depths of the Tunnel of Love.
"Of course it is," said Mira. "That way, there's no distractions."
"No distractions from what?" Sora wondered.
"From us," said Mira. "It's just us two, along and unfettered, traveling down the highway of life and cruising under a tunnel. A special tunnel. The Tunnel of Love."
"Sounds kind of cheesy," said Sora.
"Don't talk like that," said Mira. "This is supposed to be special."
"Sorry," said Sora. "The dark just makes me a little nervous, that's all."
"And you're making fun of it to make it less scary?"
"I guess that's it."
Sora couldn't see Mira's eyes brighten at his words, but he could almost feel them. "That's not the best way. Sit closer to me. I'll keep you safe."
Sora flinched as Mira drew nearer and snuggled up to his side, weighing in his mind the potential consequences of telling Mira just what about the darkness scared him so much.
XXX
A few hundred feet away, Goofy walked through the turnstile at the entrance to a bumper car ride for, he estimated, the eighth time in the past hour and a half. Though the jostling and thumping had taking somewhat of a toll on his ability to see the world clearly, to say nothing of his sense of balance, he found that he just couldn't pull himself away. For the first time in a long while, he had found an activity at which he was the undisputed king. No one else in the arena could take a beating like he could.
Yet, the other seemed to be figuring that fact out. As the afternoon wore on, fewer and fewer people stood in line with him, and lately, there weren't even enough to man all of the cars. Goofy assumed they were shying away because they were tired of being humiliated. Though the concept of not wanting to be humiliated any long didn't quite register in Goofy's mind, it was the best explanation he could come up with, and it was the only one he entertained until the ride operator jerked him out of his fantasyland.
"This ride is closing," said the pimply faced boy working the front of the line.
"Closing?" Goofy's heart sank. "Can't I just ride it alone?"
"No one will be riding any more today," said the boy. "Move along. Go home. I don't care."
XXX
Donald couldn't take much bumper car abuse from Goofy, so he sat alone on the bench where he had eaten his ice cream. In fact, he had been sitting there for well over an hour while Sora, Mira, and Goofy entertained themselves elsewhere. He did not resent staying behind, though. Rather, he had taken up the sport of people watching.
The people in this new world seemed so utterly alien to him that they turned his mind in knots just by walking by and innocuously following their local customs. He was under the impression that parents brought their kids to Disneyland to entertain them, but the vast majority of the kids he watched looked unhappy. There was certainly an inverse relationship between age and happiness, though that relationship was far from easy to determine. The best he could say was that the youngest of kids all looked unhappy, and the older kids were less likely to cry. The parents looked invariably bothered, whether they were chasing down errant toddlers or purchasing overpriced food or recovering from a particularly jarring ride.
The rides, also, made no sense. Their size and the number of billboards advertising them gave Donald the impression that they were one of the main reasons for the park to exist, but he could not figure out why someplace whose main attractions were machines whose job was to shake, disorient, and jolt guests into probably neck cramps could have the word amusement in its name. Amusement park? The place was about as amusing as a picnic with Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
He was sure, too, that operating hours for the park ran from early in the morning until late at night, but within the past fifteen minutes or so, he had noticed the crowds thinning considerably. He could not determine the cause, as his first hypothesis, that they were all going to dinner, seemed wrong. It wasn't dinner time, and the restaurants were all eerily empty.
Another thing that had been bothering Donald since he first arrived in the park, yet had remained eluding him for most of the day, was that throughout the entire park, he heard no music. None. Nobody playing anything over a speaker. Nobody with a radio. Nobody humming as they walked. Nothing.
He wanted to pack that observation away as simply another strange custom of the land, but he couldn't quite convince himself that it was normal. Something about it screamed unnatural at him, and he found the lack of explanation for it even more troubling.
He then saw something more troubling still. At first, he didn't quite know what it was, but something a couple of eateries over caught his eye. Upon closer inspection, he noticed that the something looked quite like a duck. A duck wearing a sailor outfit and a small blue cap. In fact, the duck he saw looked remarkably like the duck he saw in the mirror every morning back home.
His curiosity piqued, Donald left his bench to follow the strange new duck. When he was about fifty feet away, he could make out that it was carrying a fist full of strings attached to balloons for handing out to small children. A smile of the kind one sees only on the deranged or the hopelessly naïve sat etched permanently on the stranger's face, daring him to come closer. People around devoted all of their attention to the giddy balloon duck. As he came nearer, Donald couldn't help but feel a slight pang of jealousy.
But that disappeared, replaced with a shot of adrenaline, when the Donald look-a-like spotted him. The real Donald could see the imposter do a quick double take and then excuse himself from his crowd. A few seconds later, the Donald doppelganger walked as quickly as he could toward an uninviting fence behind one of the restaurant buildings. Donald followed him.
The doppelganger periodically turned his head back, and each time he saw his pursuer, he quickened his pace. Donald followed suit, even though it brought him to what he was sure was a restricted section. First a restricted section, anyway. Then and out-of-the-way corner of a restricted section, and then a dark, abandoned alley.
The imposter Donald stopped. The real Donald slowed down and stared as hard as he could and the figure in front of him, watching as it turned around and met his gaze. Then, in a move Donald did not expect in the slightest, its mouth opened up.
The inside of the mouth of the Donald costume, as Donald assumed it must have been, was pitch black. It was the kind of black that could swallow a murder of crows. It was the kind of black that could make an astronomer blush. It was the kind of black that almost glowed.
As the mouth opened wider, the blackness spilled out into the air around it, like smoke. It ran onto the rest of the suit and down the ground, where it collected in a pool of pure night. The level of the pool rose steadily up the sides of the legs and then the body and finally the head, engulfing the costume and leaving no trace of its Donald-like features. Even its shape disappeared until the darkness. Donald stood transfixed as the mass of black swelled and throbbed, until finally a pair of red eyes appeared about where the mouth had been.
Without saying a word, Donald readied his staff.
XXX
Everywhere in the park, the remaining guests dashed to and fro, each desperate to escape the horrifying dark creatures overrunning the place. Goofy and Donald fought as bravely as they could, but no one else had seen Heartless before, and in any case, no one else seemed to have any means of driving them off. Most were of the small and relatively easily vanquished variety, but a few were stronger, and they all posed a clear threat to the unarmed population. More than a few innocent bystanders found that out the hard way.
Accompanying the ruckus was something neither Donald nor Goofy normally associated with Heartless attacks—an incredibly loud, piercing screech, which had remained at a constant decibel level for several minutes. Its source seemed to be a series of transparent apparitions flitting high above the park grounds themselves. Donald noticed that the noisy things appeared to be making a systematic scan of every area they came across, as if they were in search of a particular target.
Donald's magic remained ineffective, but his staff still remained an effective way to beat off any attackers. Goofy had even less trouble. Neither, however, could reach the shrieking ghosts, and both found themselves wearing down under the strain of incessant battle and headache-inducing noise.
XXX
Mira clung tightly to Sora's feet as their boat pulled out of the Tunnel of Love. Sora stood in his seat and swatted any Heartless that tried to climb aboard. He could not hear Mira's sobs of fright over the awful din of the screech ghosts, as he called them. As bad as the Heartless were, he hated the screech ghosts worse.
After several minutes of intensive fighting, Sora managed to clear the boat, leaving Mira free to collapse on the floor and cover her ears with her hands. Sora felt like doing the same, as the screeching seemed to grow louder by the second, but he could not bring himself to put down his Keyblade. Even with the first wave of Heartless vanquished, he couldn't take the chance of having something take him by surprise.
The noise proved a worse enemy than the Heartless, however, and Sora eventually dropped to his knees. Too late, he realized his error.
The second he no longer wielded the Keyblade, a line of four screech ghosts dove towards him. Sora closed his eyes and braced for the worst.
But the worst did not come. Not to Sora. Instead of a killing blow to the back of his head, as he expected, Sora felt nothing but relief when, suddenly, the screeching noise ceased. He opened his eyes and saw the Keyblade intact and, to his surprise, not stolen. Then he looked up.
A hundred feet in the air and rising, a ghost, no longer screeching, carried a girl in an expensive party dress away from the boat, and away from Sora. The ghost did not scream, but the girl did.
And so did Sora.
