Crowns of the Kingdom
Chapter 7: The First Advance
The Mark Twain floated on the river near the halfway point of its usual circuit, alongside a small protrusion of land at the north end of the island. The Imagineers had built the boat's track to maintain a more-or-less constant distance from the island's shore, but even they couldn't make it parallel the smallest features while still accommodating the paddlewheeler's massive hull. The gap between land and vessel was only eight or nine feet at this point—hardly an insurmountable distance, but just broad enough to be tricky, especially with the deck railings in the way, preventing them from jumping with a running start.
Mickey leaned against one of said railings and frowned at the island. A cursory search of the boat had turned up nothing that could potentially be used to bridge the space. The mooring ropes were not only quite a bit too short, but firmly secured to the wrong side of the deck. No part of the fancy ironwork that embellished the Mark Twain could be readily detached.
"If it comes to it," Minnie said reassuringly, "I don't mind swimming."
"Well, I do," Donald grumbled. "I'm not going whitewater rafting without a raft again!"
"Gawrsh, Donald, do you think it'll happen again?" Goofy winced.
"That's just it," said Mickey. "It might, or it might not…I won't risk it. I don't know what's going on with this river, but it's gotta be related to Maleficent's spell somehow, and that means it's trouble for us. Nobody's touching that water if we can possibly avoid it."
"But what else can we do?" wondered Minnie.
Mickey sighed. "We may have to ask Walt to take us back to the dock so we can go get something to make into a bridge. I'm sure the General Store has some building supplies, even if they're only supposed to be for decoration. Lucky thing the Imagineers pay such attention to detail, huh?"
"Yeah, yeah, hooray for realism," Donald scowled. "Do you think we'll have time to backtrack like that? It's getting to be late afternoon, and I don't want to have to look for that crown in the dark."
"Donald, you're the one who doesn't want to swim," Minnie pointed out.
"Nobody is going swimming!" Mickey reminded them, growing uncharacteristically petulant.
Meanwhile, Goofy was squinting at the shore, counting on his fingers, spreading his arms wide and looking back and forth along their span, and shaking his shoulders like pistons. All this went completely unnoticed by the others until he spoke up. "Hey, fellas—maybe I could throw you all over!"
The semi-argument stopped cold.
"That was weird," said Mickey. "I just thought I heard Goofy say he'd throw us over."
"I did say that, Mickey," Goofy explained. "I've been workin' it out. You're all pretty light, and I've still got my pitchin' arm from back when I used to do sports cartoons. It should be no trouble at all!"
As it worked out, it was more like caber tossing than baseball pitching. One at a time, Goofy picked up the other four, backed up all the way up to the far railing, crossed the deck in a few short bounds, picking up speed, and launched them with both hands. Each described a lovely parabola in the air before landing roughly on the dusty ground. Finally, Goofy was the only one of the Fab Five still onboard the Mark Twain.
"Great work, Goofy!" Mickey called back across the yards. "But how will you get across?"
Hardly had he spoken before Goofy moved back to the other railing and charged forward once more. When he reached the closer edge of the deck, he made a little hopping jump, folded himself up, put his big floppy hands under his bigger floppier feet, and somehow launched himself across the span of water just as he had the others, in a display that on the scale of violations of physical laws, was somewhere between armed robbery and negligent manslaughter.
Well, if anyone could get away with cosmological felonies, it was Goofy.
Even so, he landed a bit short and came to rest lying full-length at the river's edge, with his legs from the knees down actually trailing in the water. He raised his head and made a sheepish "A-hyuk!"
"I gotta say, Goofy," Mickey observed, "When you do come up with a bright idea, it's usually a doozy!"
"And I gotta say that Donald was right," Minnie teased. "When are you going to pitch in and do something besides give orders, Mickey?"
"We'll see how it goes," Mickey replied impishly, helping Goofy to his dampened feet. "So, Minnie, where did you say that crown was?"
Minnie recalled. "It should be close by. Where those trees are."
The trees in question were scarcely worthy of the name. No more than fifteen feet tall, they were part of the minimal landscaping that time and budget allowed for when Tom Sawyer's Island was first constructed. There were no clear paths; the shrubs and native grasses that covered the low hill were allowed to grow unchecked, the better to fill the undeveloped space and make it look wild and woodsy. That, combined with the unevenness of the ground and the steep grade of the artificial hill, made the short trek to the small grove of pine trees a bit of a hike. Though the sun was well on the way to setting, merciless heat, stored over the course of the day, radiated from the poorly shaded soil as from an oven when the door is suddenly opened.
There is a subtle but important line separating calculated realism from true authenticity. The Fab Five were learning, as they pushed their way through sagebrush and stumbled over small boulders, that most of Disneyland's crafted environments hugged that line closely but never actually crossed it. The exception was the island during that first year. It was startling to discover that verisimilitude, that elusive quality for which the park was famous, was desirable only up to a point.
After several silent, panting minutes, the group arrived at the trees. The shade was a welcome sight, but not half as welcome as the crown, the Mouseketeer Crown, which rested on the carpet of shed pine needles as though someone had simply forgotten it there.
Mickey stopped himself in the tenth of a second before he lunged for the crown. Something, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not right.
"Why's it so small?" Goofy asked no one in particular.
It was true. When they had last seen it—in the last instant before it was dragged into Maleficent's black void—the Mouseketeer Crown had of course been large enough to comfortably fit a turret on Sleeping Beauty's Castle, several feet in diameter. But the object before them was a much more prosaic size. Mickey himself could have worn it without incident.
"We'd better be careful. It might be a decoy," Minnie observed.
"A pretty obvious one if it is," Donald remarked.
Pluto crept forward, body low to the ground, eyes locked on the crown as though he were stalking it. He sniffed it gingerly, taking care not to let his twitching nose quite contact the diamond-encrusted gold. After a moment of this, he relaxed, looked back over his shoulder, and barked a happy all-clear.
Mickey's held breath whooshed out of him. "Great job, pal!" he cheered, hurrying forward. "I don't know how it got so small, but I trust your nose!" He stooped to pick up the crown, and two surprising things happened.
The first was that he missed. No, not missed—the agile cartoon star could never be so clumsy as to miss an unmoving target right at his feet. His hands had passed through it exactly as if it were not even there. But it was there. They all saw it, and no mere optical illusion could look so solid, could exhibit such a detailed play of sunlight over its molded surface. No mirage could have a tiny lip of powdery soil encroaching up its sides where it had pushed aside the dirt when, by whatever means, it was placed there.
The other thing that happened, simultaneous with the first, was that Mickey's right shorts pocket suddenly began vibrating at a high pitch, so vigorously that the others noticed it and sauntered over to look.
"Your cell phone?" Goofy asked.
"In 1955?" Mickey scoffed, reaching into his pocket to investigate. His hand touched metal, and brought out another crown, smaller, simpler: the crown handed to him by the Queen of Hearts on the Castle drawbridge, hours that already felt like days ago. It was humming, nearly soundless but so intensely that it sent violent tremors up through Mickey's hands all the way to his shoulders. He had the impression of holding onto one end of a huge rubber band that had been stretched and plucked; there was a tension in the air between the two crowns, drawing the one toward the other.
He didn't fight it. He let the moment and the momentum carry him, and the two crowns made contact.
And exploded.
At least, something apparently exploded. They were never sure exactly what happened, even though it ultimately happened several more times. The space under the immature pine trees was bathed in an exquisite golden-white light that was also a wind, because it buffeted the verdant branches overhead and stirred the spent brown needles and dust underfoot as it emanated in waves from the two crowns. As the brilliance washed over the Fab Five, it felt to them like a thundering cataract of pure joy, both familiar and unfamiliar, made up of…of…
As suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, leaving them awestruck and bemused.
Donald was the first to speak, the words dropping slowly from his beak. "What was that?"
Mickey shook his head, panting from the experience. "I don't know, but…" He trailed off, looking down at the crown in his hands. It was the Mouseketeer Crown, now a comfortably real weight on his palms and fingers. The Queen of Hearts' crown had disappeared.
Or had it…? Turning the other crown over and over, Mickey had a suspicion…but it was hard to formulate. The thing in his hands kept distracting him with its peculiar presence. It was still buzzing, much more low-key than before, and now it was not the oscillation of a plucked rubber band but the singing of a wineglass when a wet finger is drawn around its rim. The sun had sunk low, and the apricot-colored light added a rosy luster to the gold.
A piece of the crown was missing from the bottom edge, but Mickey wasn't bothered. The awkward notch corresponded with the gleaming bit that had been left behind on the Castle turret.
Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he could feel the decade that the crown represented, seething inside its physical form, ten years of memories and achievements and lessons learned yearning to break free from their jeweled prison and resume their normal place in the stream of time. Maleficent had been right—history itself was bound up in the crown.
"So what do we do now?" Minnie's voice broke through his reverie.
"Get this thing back to the Castle, I imagine," Mickey replied. Strangely, he felt exhausted and invigorated at the same time, as if he and the crown were engaged in mutual energy-vampirism. "Let's go!"
The Mark Twain couldn't move fast enough to satisfy Mickey. It had been designed for safety and appearance, not speed—but even a high-powered speedboat would have been too slow for the sense of urgency he felt. He didn't even wait for the paddlewheeler to reach the dock, but perched on the boarding gate and jumped while the outside bank was still farther away than his own height. He set off at a dead run for Central Plaza and the Castle, the Mouseketeer Crown tucked under one arm like a priceless football, not even caring that he was leaving the others far behind. They would catch up.
Even his good-bye to Walt, while the boat was still a good way up the river from the dock, was rushed. But that was only partly because of his hurry.
He wondered briefly, as he drew near to the Castle, eliciting pop-eyed stares from the three characters still amusing themselves with card games in the Plaza, just how fast he was going. Twenty miles per hour? Twenty-five? More? He felt like he was flying, friction with the ground something that only happened to other people. He wished he could fly, because he had no idea how he was going to reach the turret where the crown actually belonged. If only Pluto hadn't collapsed the scaffolding inside…
He wondered how it was going to fit around the tower when it was small enough for him to wear.
As Mickey reached the drawbridge, inspiration struck. With hardly a break in his stride, he sprang up onto the low concrete guard wall that protected pedestrians from falling into the moat, took hold of the crown with his tail, and began climbing one of the banner poles that lined the walkway. When he reached the top, he balanced on the crosspiece and hopped to the next one, which brought him within reach of a slim, cross-shaped decorative cutout in the wall, just below the main parapet of the Castle and a scant few feet from the turret where the Mouseketeer Crown belonged.
Dangling by one hand from the decorative arrow slit, his other hand and his feet unable to find purchase, the crown an awkward weight on his tail, Mickey suddenly considered that maybe he had been too hasty. He was not so high up at this point that a fall would be too damaging—not to him at least, though the crown was another story. It would be painful. But it wasn't as though he could turn back. His need to return the crown to its place was almost overwhelming, and he could still sense the ten-year stretch of time pulsating inside it, pleading to be freed. He began to feel a vicarious desperation.
So close…
Mickey took a moment to catch his breath, let the crown slip to the very end of his tail, so that one small loop of the appendage was all that kept it from dropping ignominiously onto the stony drawbridge or into the grimy moat, and began to swing his body from side to side, pendulum-style, using the crown's weight to give himself momentum. With every vacillation, there was an instant of fear as his fingers, precarious enough without the movement, shifted inside the arrow slit and threatened to slip out. But the apex of every arc was higher than the previous one, and the edge of the embattlement was right there, and Mickey grabbed for it with his free hand and caught it, and his feet braced against the rough stones and he heaved himself over the edge onto the parapet.
He sat panting for a moment. Voices drifted up to him from the area of the drawbridge: the rest of the Fab Five, only just arriving. Had his climb taken so little time, then? It already felt like a dream he was waking up from.
Mickey stood and waved triumphantly to his friends down below. Then he took the crown in both hands and turned to face the turret. The gold circlet, so heavy a moment before, felt as light as a cloud. Mickey made a gentle tossing motion, and it rose up out of his hands as if under its own power, floated through the air like a pop fly in slow motion, and hooked itself nearly over the gilt spire.
It was as if the whole world lurched around him. Mickey dropped to his hands and knees and braced himself against the peculiar sensation that existence itself was hurtling past him at an astonishing speed in all directions at once. It was like a fantastically powerful, absolutely steady wind that registered directly in his brain, bypassing his skin altogether. There was a sound too, also reminiscent of the roar of wind, but with a musical undertone like the most flawlessly formed crystal bell. It made his teeth rattle and his sinuses buzz, though not unpleasantly.
It was the sound of time passing, sped up by a factor of more than half a million. The normal pitch of this sound is so very low as to be quite undetectable by any living ear, and must be discerned in the bones. It was Mickey's bones that recognized it in its vastly accelerated state.
He dared to open his eyes and watch.
The first thing he saw was the trees visibly growing, in a spectacle that made the most carefully executed time-lapse photography look like Jared Fogle's Before and After pictures. Buds swelling into leaves unfurling at the tips of twigs lengthening and thickening into branches putting forth new buds swelling into leaves…and all of it happening with perfect, smooth continuity, free of gaps or jumps or breaks. It was magnificent to see!
As Mickey was marveling, a gleam of white just to the left of the Tomorrowland gates captured his attention. And what he saw there was so extraordinary that he forgot, for the moment, all about the trees.
There beside the parade route, something was sprouting—something quite large. White and mushroom-like, it bulged upward from the asphalt and then spread out at the top into a four-lobed cap that nagged at Mickey's memory. The outlines of the thing became sleeker, sharper, more angular, and the four sections of the cap, now block-shaped, split top and bottom to reveal shining…windows?
It was the House of the Future!
Mickey felt almost scandalized. There was no mistaking the building's form—it was the Monsanto Corporation's famous "all-plastic house," whose most heavily publicized feature was that it was synthetic, inorganic…yet he had just watched it grow out of the paved ground like a plant! Before he could even try to make sense of what he had witnessed, he was distracted again.
Just northeast of the self-contradicting house, the low, flat-topped hill of soil called, variously, Holiday Hill, Lookout Mountain, or Snow Hill was shuddering and rumbling. Huge cracks opened in its sides, and with a great whoosh, the whole thing crumbled to the ground, taking its picnic tables and benches with it but leaving a lumpy grey core that rose and rose until it was more than twice as tall as its predecessor. A gust of wind blasted the new structure, frosting the top of it with snow (and blowing away the dusty remains of Holiday Hill)…and it was the Matterhorn.
It was happening all over the park. Graceful and gleaming, the S.S. Columbia floated up from the murkiness of the Rivers of America and unfurled the Stars and Stripes from its main mast. In Tomorrowland, what looked at first like thick vines snaked out of the ground, intertwined, and rigidified into the coiling Monorail track. At the Adventureland gate, bamboo stalks and palm fibers plaited themselves into the Enchanted Tiki Room. And everywhere, signs were changing, some of them more than once—shapes altering, new colors sweeping across their faces, words blurring into illegibility and refocusing as completely different ones.
Disneyland was developing itself! Displaced in its own history, it wasn't being built, it was growing, like a living thing! It was dizzying to witness, not least because throughout, Mickey still had to contend with the rushing sensation and sound as time catapulted by. All told, ten years passed in what seemed like ten minutes. By the time things snapped back to normalcy, Mickey was quite breathless from the experience.
"Wow," he said in a tiny voice. Slowly, he rose to his feet and gazed out at the transformed park. A lot had changed in those first ten years!
The visible progress was immensely encouraging. Between the dominating Matterhorn, the winding Monorail track, and the spreading canopy of the Disneydendron semperflorens grandis in Adventureland (with the Swiss Family Treehouse nestled in its branches), the park's skyline already looked significantly more modern. But that was only the beginning. There were less obvious but equally important changes afoot in 1965, as well as wonders shortly to be revealed. Mr. Lincoln was firmly established in the Opera House, the first of a new breed of lifelike human-shaped audio-animatronics. At the northern edge of Disneyland, the sprawling patterned façade of "it's a small world" was taking shape, while the entirely new land of New Orleans Square (Pirates of the Caribbean! The Haunted Mansion!) was close to completion between Adventureland and Frontierland.
And in Tomorrowland, the very air was charged with anticipation. The ground had only just been broken behind the construction barriers, but the New Tomorrowland—an exciting update to the park's unique vision of the future—was right around the corner.
He turned to look at the Mouseketeer Crown on its turret. It had expanded back to its full magnificent size and settled into its proper place on the embattled stones of the tower. But something was still out of place on the spire—
"Well done, Mickey Mouse," said a coldly mellifluous voice behind him.
Mickey whipped around, already knowing what he would see, and was not disappointed. She stood there, as tall and malignant as ever, in just the same spot she had been when she instigated the whole mess.
"Maleficent!" Mickey yelped, feeling horrendously exposed and vulnerable. He fought the urge to shrink away from her.
Her right hand was outstretched, but not in threat or any other gesture; she seemed to be studying it with an almost beatific smile on her angular face. She remained thus for a moment, turning the hand this way and that, alternately fanning and curling the graceful spidery fingers, before acknowledging Mickey again.
"I suppose the genteel thing to do, under such circumstances as these, would be to thank you," she said coolly. But in a more practical sense, I owe you nothing, inasmuch as my rescue was merely a side effect, as it were, of the more general rescue of everyone else who joined the Disney Family over the past decade. What say you?"
"I'd say I don't need your thanks in any case, Maleficent!" Mickey spat.
"Charmed, I'm sure," the Wicked Fairy deadpanned. "Nonetheless, be justly warned that my freedom means the task ahead of you will become that much more difficult. I will oppose you, Mickey Mouse, in ways you cannot even begin to imagine, if you persist in playing the hero."
"It's a risk I'm willing to take," he shot back. After a split second, he added, "You'd be surprised what I can imagine!"
"Come now," she said in her dreadfully reasonable tone of voice. "Won't you reconsider? 1965 is not such a bad year in which to remain. I've a feeling that even if you do assay to take the next ten-year step forward, you will find that you lack a certain…strength of character…to carry it through. Courage and sentimentality make poor neighbors, you know."
"What are you implying?" Mickey asked uneasily.
Maleficent swept in close, looking toward him without exactly looking at him. "What, just tell you? I wouldn't wish to deny you the thrill of discovery. Until we meet again, then, Sorcerer's Apprentice." And with that, she was gone, twisting into a sliver of darkness in the air before vanishing altogether.
Mickey couldn't help feeling shaken. Maleficent never insinuated that a situation was any worse than it actually was, lest the victims of her psychological warfare grow to dismiss her hints as attempts to induce paranoia—which they were, but they were also tidbits of horrible truth. It was both cruel and astoundingly effective at causing suffering. Which was, of course, the whole point.
He especially didn't like the suggestion that he could be either brave or sentimental, but not both. He had made a notable career out of being both, thank you very much.
"Mickey! Come down and see!"
It was Minnie calling him from the ground. She sounded happy, so she must not have spotted Maleficent.
"Be right there!" Mickey replied, forcing his voice to remain steady. In fact, he decided it would be better if he banished that whole encounter from his mind. Psychological warfare, to be successful, did require a certain amount of complicity on the part of the attackee.
Shrugging off the Wicked Fairy's words, he set about climbing down from the Castle parapet.
To Be Continued…
A/N: I want to take this opportunity to give BIG THANKS to everyone who has read and reviewed so far! I had no idea there would be such a "market" for this story, which has already garnered more reviews than my other three fics combined! I've tried to be conscientious about replying individually to your reviews, but if I've missed you, let me know and I'll give you some attention!
And, just in case it needs saying, keep on reading—there's (more) good stuff coming!
