Crowns of the Kingdom

Chapter 23: Jungle Jazz and Jeopardy, Redux

Maleficent sat on her stone throne and seethed. Diabolo, preening on his perch nearby, pointedly ignored her, for he knew better than to interfere with a mood this black. The displeasure radiated from her like insidious heat, and he had no wish to get burned.

She was frustrated to the point of disgust by the current state of affairs—for all their promise, all their potential, the Dispirations had achieved pathetically little. They kept falling just short of the goal. They had managed several times to cross paths with Mickey Mouse and his little friends and send them fleeing, but no more; so far the do-gooders had managed to escape all but unscathed every time. Furthermore, the Dispirations inevitably lost focus after each encounter, utterly failing to take advantage of anything they might learn about the group's movements. They were growing cleverer by the hour—she could tell it in the increasingly cunning ways in which they manifested and disguised themselves—but in some very important respects, they were as mindless as ever.

She ground her teeth, slumping further down in her seat and gripping the armrests with fingertip-bruising pressure. If she had wanted feeble incompetence from her minions, she would have stuck with her goons.

Even more disturbing (perhaps) was the fact that it was getting harder for her to keep track of them all. Partly, this was because she had released so many at once—hundreds, surely—and though she retained some connection to all of them, even Maleficent could not divide her attention that finely. But beyond that, when she tried to get a general sense of their status, she could not escape the impression that there were too few of them. It was as though whole sets of them had simply disappeared—no crippling loss, as she could always replace them—but discomfiting all the same. What was happening to them?

Before she could muse too much, Diabolo abruptly stopped preening, leaped off his perch, and flew to the elevated back of the throne, emitting staccato caws in the direction of the doorway to the chamber. Maleficent lifted to see four slit-pupiled eyes shining in the shadows beyond the archway—electric blue eyes, close to the floor. She held back a small urge to smirk—no wonder the raven was so alarmed—and instead deepened her scowl as the owners of the eyes sauntered into the room, grinning like a different sort of cat altogether.

"I do not recall granting you permission to enter my domain," she said icily.

Si and Am glided right up to the throne, moving and speaking in complementary synchrony. "We are Siamese, if you please. We are not needing permission." One turned to the other. "What is saying? 'Cat may stare at emperor?'" "Yes," agreed the other sibilantly. "And Maleficent no emperor is." They turned a sidelong gaze back to her. "Yet," they chorused.

Skepticism narrowed the Wicked Fairy's eyes yet farther. "Do not toy with me, little beasts. Even were I in the best of humors, I would not tolerate such disrespect, not here in my own place. Indeed, explain why I should not rend you to dust where you sit."

The two cats traded a sly look. "Because we know things," they said. "Things you maybe should be knowing also, if you are wanting plan to succeed."

"Rubbish," said Maleficent, turning her head aside and feigning a sudden interest in the polish on her staff. "What could you possibly have to offer me? And furthermore, why would you even care whether my plan succeeds?"

Suddenly, one of them was perched on the armrest of the throne, right under her nose. She found the intrusion surprising, but oddly not offensive—maybe there was something to that assertion about the status and privileges claimed by cats. "Because we are thinking," said the animal, "that you are having right ideas." There was a soft sound on the other side of Maleficent, and when she turned she was not too surprised to see that the other cat had leapt onto the other armrest. "Even if you are not knowing very much about how to deal with…mice."

It suddenly occurred to Maleficent that perhaps she had been too quick to dismiss her fellow Villains, back at the beginning of her venture. The assumption that Si and Am were mere pets, capable of making life difficult for a naïve cocker spaniel but nothing more, was an easy one to make…but maybe the simple truth was that they had never been challenged with anything more.

And they were cats, and as such could be expected to be experts in the stalking, toying with, and extermination of rodents…

"All right," she said. "I'm listening."

Four electric blue eyes glinted in the dim light of the chamber.


Of all the times of day to enjoy Adventureland, dusk is not normally the best. The tree-shaded walkways, so pleasantly cool in the small hours of the afternoon while the rest of the park is roasting in full sunlight, grow chilly at a nearly uncomfortable pace once the sun has set. The sunset itself is most often a simple affair, as the usually cloudless and somewhat polluted Southern California sky cannot put on a display to match the expectations set up by the carefully executed illusion of a tropical rainforest.

Of course, normally the park really is in Southern California, and not floating in a realm of pure ideation…

The sunset over the Tahitian Terrace, where the Sensational Six (minus one, at the moment) waited for the arrival of the musicians, was magnificent—vermilion, shading through scarlet and violet to the deep, inky indigo of the night sky above, and streaked with rose and lavender where a few cirrocumulus clouds foretold rain in a day or two. For the time being, though, the weather was perfect, maybe a trifle warmer than ideal, but mitigated by breezes that periodically kissed the patio with the scent of sea salt and orchids. The only sounds were the whisper of said breezes, the burring of nocturnal insects, and snatches of Polynesian drum music, floating in from some distant-sounding source.

Mickey had never been to the actual Tahiti (though he had been to both Hawaii and Guam), and he couldn't help but think that if it was anything like people imagined to be, anything like this, then it fully deserved its common designation of "paradise."

An approaching noise of singing children, coming from beyond the confines of the patio, snatched him out of his reverie. The tune being sung was as familiar as it was multilingual. "Pluto's back with the kids," Mickey observed, springing up out of his chair in order to hold the gate for the dog and his sprightly retinue. As he moved toward the edge of the patio, he saw in his peripheral vision the sky fade from its lush tropical sunset palette to a much more prosaic gradient of orange, olive, and dark teal.

Pluto was obviously very pleased with himself as he trotted up the walkway in perfect time to the children's singing—his ears stood erect and bent forward like upside-down L's, his chest puffed out with pride. Two of the youngsters—Anneliese and Tikaani—rode on his back, while the other four pranced alongside. All six kids were way happier than they had any right to be, given what they were about to be part of.

Mickey held the patio gate open for them. "Did you run into any trouble?" he asked Pluto. A vigorous headshake was the reply. "Good. C'mon in and have a seat, kids. The others should be along any minute."

Sure enough, hardly had he finished speaking when he began to hear the slap of several pairs of webbed feet approaching. A moment later, the owners of the feet came into view: four ganders, smartly dressed in waistcoats and bowler hats and conversing in tones that covered the full male vocal range. They nearly collided at the patio gate with another group arriving from the opposite direction: three pirates, two of them carrying a mandolin and a concertina, and a scruffy dog. Both pirates and ganders being generally aggressive sorts, at least when they aren't singing, a full-scale squabble threatened to break out until Mickey intervened. Minnie sprang up from her seat to help him see them into the patio. Mere seconds after that was done, a few twanging sounds from the direction of New Orleans Square indicated that the Bear Rugs were on their way, tuning their homemade bluegrass instruments as they went.

The delegation from the Haunted Mansion was, naturally enough, the last to arrive, once all traces of daylight were gone from the western sky. An elegant hearse drawn by an equally elegant (but completely invisible) horse pulled up alongside the Tahitian Terrace. The driver—a skeletally gaunt man in Victorian attire—descended from his seat with funereal slowness, shuffled around to the rear of the hearse, and unloaded five crates that turned out to contain the Phantom Five, better known as the Singing Busts. Five large marble busts, faintly phosphorescent in the dim light of nighttime. The one with the most profoundly basso voice, Uncle Theodore by name, was in two pieces, broken somewhere around his necktie, so that the hearse driver had to prop his head precariously against his shoulders in order for him to be anything close to upright on the ground.

"I don't know about this," Daisy muttered at the sight of them.

"Boy, Madam Leota wasn't kiddin', was she?" said Goofy, seemingly out of nowhere. At the others' confused looks, he continued. "Well, she said some of the musicians in the Haunted Mansion don't have hands. I guess she was talkin' about these guys."

"They don't have feet either," Donald pointed out. "And they look awful heavy."

"Oh, not to worry, I've been on a diet," said Ned Nub, the second tenor. Having finished unpacking all five of them, the hearse driver returned to his seat, turned wordlessly toward Mickey with a blank gaze in his bulging eyes, saluted, and then flicked the invisible horse's reins. They all watched the grim coach depart, trailing ectoplasmic mist from its ostrich-plume decorations.

"So," said Mickey, his voice quavering slightly. "That's everyone. Let's get this show on the river!"


It would have been too much to expect the Zambezi Miss a second time, and the boat waiting at the Jungle Cruise dock was in fact the Nile Princess. But strangely enough, the skipper at the helm was none other than Joe, wavy hair, freckles and all. Mickey wasn't sure what to make of that, but he was pretty sure that it didn't matter a whole lot.

"You came back?" Joe exclaimed, in full self-deprecation mode. "You were lucky enough to survive the Jungle Cruise once; why tempt fate by taking a second trip?"

"Oh, your jokes weren't that bad, Joe," said Minnie. "Come on, fellas!" She waved the rest of the group forward as she boarded the boat herself.

"And you brought friends?" said Joe. "I guess it's true: misery does love company."

Minnie was followed by Daisy and Pluto, who were followed by the "it's a small world" children, who were followed by the ganders from America Sings, who were followed by the Bear Rugs, who were followed by the pirate musicians and Scruffy. Bringing up the rear were Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, staggering under the divided weight of the Singing Busts. Altogether, it made for a crowded boat that sat almost too low in the water for comfort.

Joe warily eyeballed the rippling surface of the river as it threatened to slop over the sides of the vessel. "This is going to be an interesting trip," he muttered, starting up the boat.

"You have no idea," Donald confided, plopping down his share of the Phantom Five at his feet.

The tour got underway, and it quickly became evident that however eerie and alive the jungle had been earlier that day, it was all the more so now that it was night. The tiger wasn't in its normal spot in the temple ruins, but its soft growling could be heard among the nearby foliage, and Joe's spotlight flashed briefly upon slinking stripes. The air rang with frog and insect calls, and the water swished with the movements of snakes and crocodiles. In the aggregate, it was alarming enough that Joe stammered and stumbled over his spiel of jokes and finally gave up altogether, which was just as well, because the passengers weren't really listening anyway. They were listening to the predatory-sounding rustles in the brush around them, and between instances of that, to Mickey's attempt at a pep talk.

"This won't be easy—in fact, it'll be the ultimate test of our musical skills and our, um, scrappiness." He didn't want to be so explicit as to say combat even though he knew it would very likely be involved. "We'll need to combine teamwork, improvisation, and split-second timing in order to stay ahead of our opponents long enough to break the spell they have over King Louie."

"No offense, Mickey," said Uncle Theodore, "but just what are we doing?"

"You guys didn't tell them?" said Daisy.

"It's complicated," Minnie said shortly. "Uncle Theodore, what we're doing—in a nutshell—is fighting monsters with music. Evil creatures are using music to keep King Louie under some kind of mind control, and we're hoping to counteract it."

"Right," said Mickey, picking up the thread again. "So we'll need the teams to switch off pretty quickly, keep the Dispirations from using their music to cancel us out. And even so…" He exhaled stiffly. "…I suspect this is going to be as much a battle as a concert. So whenever you're not performing, keep an eye on whoever is and protect them from…well, anything."

By this time, they had reached the Elephants' Bathing Pool, which was a far cry from the scene that had prevailed earlier: the site's pachyderm patrons had abandoned it for the evening, with the exception of Bertha, the elderly cow who always monopolized the waterfall/shower. She was a welcome sight in the dark jungle, but too self-absorbed to be more than a familiar landmark as the Nile Princess cruised by.

"Shoot! We're almost there!" Mickey realized. "And there's no way Fido can carry all of us!"

"No problem, Mickey," Donald piped up.

"Yeah, we gotcha covered," Goofy agreed.

"Or rather, they do," Minnie added, gesturing toward the back of the boat. "Fellas, you're up!"

A moment later, Joe turned to make a godawful joke about the jungle plant life (involving the word "bamboozle"), only to find himself staring up the barrel of a flintlock pistol, while an extremely scruffy dog growled softly, not quite threateningly, somewhere in the vicinity of his kneecaps. He opened his mouth to say something sarcastically appropriate, and a wordless squeak came out.

"Now, lad, there be no call for girlish hysterics," said Long Dan from the safe end of the firearm. "We simply be hijackin' this vessel, see? There's a good lad."

Mickey winced. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

"No," Minnie admitted. "But we have to get to shore somehow, and this is what we came up with."

"That's our story, and we're stickin' to it!" said Goofy.

Joe may have been a teenager, but he was no idiot. He eased out of the driver's seat in a way that clearly indicated that he wasn't even thinking about going for his own pistol, even though it was within easy reach in case of hippo attack, and let Billy Willikins take the wheel. Thus the whole party was brought to their landing point with hardly any fuss at all, and that only from Fido (who probably would have taken the opportunity to squirt Donald no matter what).

"Sorry about this, Joe," said Mickey as the group disembarked. "At least this way, you won't get into any trouble, right? Dispatch can't hold you accountable for getting hijacked by pirates."

The jungle was even stranger away from the river. Maybe it was because the only light was the pearly eldritch glow emanating from the Phantom Five, but the trees and shrubs and boulders seemed to change as they watched—slowly, like shadows over the course of a morning, but enough to be noticeable. Once, Tennessee of the Bear Rugs tried to push aside a knot of hanging vines…only to have them dissolve into a patch of fog under his paw, and reform, after he pulled back, with a large flower that hadn't been there before.

"Well, dang," said bandleader Zeke in an awed hush. "This is a right creepy place we're a-headin' into. I'm glad I left Oscar with Trixie back at the playhouse."

"It wasn't quite like this before," said Daisy. "I wonder what's going on."

"The park is drifting further away from reality, that's what," said Mickey. "Merlin and Professor von Drake said we'd see more evidence of it. It's hitting here first because…maybe because the public never sees this, so there are fewer memories to base things on. Or maybe it's because of the Dispirations. We just have to—"

He was interrupted when, for the second time that day, monkeys dropped down out of the branches and surrounded the group, beating the ground and shrieking. Since it was a much larger group, it took several times as many monkeys to surround them. But monkeys were never in short supply in the Adventureland jungle, especially with the Dispirations bolstering their numbers. The wan light from the Singing Busts reflected off dozens of prominent eyeteeth.

"Soooooo…" said the lead monkey, prodding Mickey's chest with a hairy forefinger. "Come back with an army, have you? Thinking of taking over his Swingin' Majesty's domain, are you?"

"No!" Mickey said hurriedly. Then, breathing deeply and drawing on the lingering remnants of his earlier euphoria, he made an expansive gesture. "In fact, we've come to apologize to King Louie for causing trouble. And as a token of good will, we've brought all the best musicians in Disneyland to entertain him, maybe even shake up his routine a little."

The best part was that it wasn't exactly a lie. Mickey was sorry about the trouble of that morning (if not in the sense of apology), and he was definitely hoping to boost the jungle monarch out of the rut into which he had fallen. The monkey seemed to mull things over. Almost as if on cue, the Bear Rugs and pirates held up their instruments, drawing attention to them, the Small World children smiled angelically, and the ganders hummed a beautiful four-part chord—G major, if Mickey wasn't mistaken. "Well, you seem to be on the up-and-up," said the monkey. "But make no mistake, Mouse Man—if King Louie just says the word, we'll rip the hide off every last one of you and make, uh…hey, fellas, what should we make?"

"Curtains!" suggested one. "That way we can say 'it's curtains for you!' I always wanted to say that.

"Yeah, curtains," agreed the lead monkey. "And as for you stach-oo-air-ee folks," he added, pointing meaningfully at the Singing Bust called Cousin Algernon, "His Swingin' Majesty probly wouldn't say no to a gravel patio to go with his new curtains. So no funny stuff, you dig?" He snapped his fingers, and the whole troop of monkeys began hustling the other group toward King Louie's ruined temple.

As before, they heard the ape monarch's court well before they saw it, as the rowdy jazz beat traveled through the ground. This time, however, the subtle wrongness of the music was detectable even from a distance. And when they arrived, King Louie wasn't even participating in his own entertainment anymore. He was lounging sideways on his throne, with his head propped against one armrest and his legs draped over the other, and one hand tapped the back of the throne in a desultory fashion while the other made little conducting motions, but his expression was so glazed that he almost appeared to be drugged. A good half-dozen Dispirations-in-monkeys'-clothing perched on the back of the throne like vultures (and not the friendly, barbershop-quartet kind), crooning their mind-fogging melodies, which by now were also affecting Louie's court musicians quite a bit, hence the deteriorated quality of the jazz.

The lead monkey stepped forward to announce the arrivals, and Louie barely seemed to notice. He perked up a hair when he saw the Bear Rugs taking their places and doing a last-minute tune-up on their instruments. Maybe two hairs. "Hey, a concert," he said, while above him the Dispirations hissed through their song. "Far out, cuz. Lay it on me—I'm always up for new tunes."

"That's what we're counting on," Mickey said under his breath. Then the performance began, and as he reflected afterward, the only regrettable thing about it was that they hadn't brought any recording devices.

The bears, whose philosophy was to start every show with a bang, struck up "Devilish Mary." Louie didn't seem too impressed with the bluegrass style, so they hustled off the "stage" at the end of the first chorus, revealing the Singing Busts, whom the pirates had pushed into place behind them, hidden behind the bruins' bulk. The busts presented an a cappella rendition of "Grim, Grinning Ghosts" and somehow managed to give it a lounge jazz beat that definitely caught Louie's interest. He shifted into a more alert posture on his throne.

The Dispirations' interest was also roused. Two of the ones on the throne back leaned down closer to Louie, reinforcing their hypnotic spell, while the others, including several that had up until that point appeared to be normal monkeys in the crowd, slunk away into the shadows beyond the tumbled temple stone.

It was time to change rhythm again, to cut through the Dispirations' song, so the Singing Busts fell silent and yielded the floor to the ganders, who launched into "Sweet Adeline." The shift in tempo was so abrupt that the crooning Dispirations had to scramble to match it, and for a few promising instants, their control over Louie slipped. "Hey, now, what happened to the beat?" he frowned. As if they had rehearsed it, the ganders let their barbershop harmony fade out and gestured across the space to where the Small World children faded in with their world-famous title song. Their pace was livelier than the ganders' and seemed to mollify the orangutan.

Halfway through the chorus of "It's a Small World (After All)," the Dispirations that had disappeared chose that moment to reappear, leaping out of the nearby foliage. They had changed shape slightly—still roughly simian in form, they had more and sharper teeth than any real monkey, as well as dangerous-looking claws. They sprang at the children, whose singing trailed off into cries of alarm—except for Anneliese, who whipped off one of her clogs and wound up to throw it. She was spared the trouble by the pirates, who quickly interposed themselves between children and Dispirations, belting out the chorus to "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me)" with rhythmic lunges of their cutlasses, fending off the attackers just in time to trade blades for instruments and provide their own accompaniment for the verse.

From that point on, the concert-cum-battle was in full swing. The troops handed off performance cues with professional seamlessness, juggling the music like lit torches…and it was the Dispirations that were getting burned. Mickey could almost see the progressive unraveling of their spell over King Louie, in the split seconds he could spare while holding the enemy at bay.

The performers began to get more creative. The Singing Busts and the ganders teamed up to sing "Goodbye My Coney Island Baby" in nine-part harmony, producing possibly the richest chords that had ever been heard in that part of the jungle. The Bear Rugs drifted from bluegrass to Dixieland jazz, which they (correctly) thought Louie would like better. The Small World children ended a verse by having Masamba scream "Drum solo!" and pound away so rapidly that he seemed to be playing "Wipe Out," an impression that was heightened after about thirty seconds, when Umeko took it upon herself to add in the guitar part on her samisen. The result was a fascinating fusion style that the Surfaris never could have dreamed of. Even Pluto got in on the act, barking a counterpoint to Scruffy's melodious howls as the pirates sang and played "Fifteen Men."

The two Dispiration-monkeys still perched on King Louie's throne did their best to keep up, but the louder they got in order to be heard over the concert, the more they risked Louie becoming aware of what they were doing. He was growing more alert by the minute, occasionally twisting a finger in his ears as though trying to clear them out. The rest of the Dispiration-monkeys kept on getting angrier and uglier, sprouting all kinds of variations on the theme of horns, claws, and fangs in their attempts to break up the performances. Their elaborate "natural" weaponry, however, was no match for steel cutlasses and ursine brawn and childish energy and the determined bravado of two species of waterfowl. (Donald and Daisy were a sight to see—one moment walloping Dispirations in tandem, the next moment jitterbugging to the music, then doing both at the same time, with the same movements.)

And then the moment of success came, and it was perfect. Mickey had the luck to be looking right at King Louie when it happened—all the musicians were performing at once, leaving themselves open to attack, and the Dispirations were gathering for a coordinated leap, when the music crescendoed into a chord of such purity and strength that it could probably have cut through any black magic. All at once, the light returned to Louie's eyes, and the first thing he was fully conscious of was the sour notes coming from above him. He immediately stood up and slapped the two culprits that they not only flew off the back of the throne, but disintegrated in mid-air.

"That ain't right!" he declared, bristling with primal wariness. He spun about, saw the rest of the Dispirations massed to assault the performers, and brought his hands together in a mighty clap. "Unnatural invaders! To arms, men!" The real monkeys, who had watched the proceedings with interest but little if any favoritism, rushed at the Dispirations in a shrieking horde. Their only care was for the commands of their king.

The Dispirations took their own decisive action—they fled, reducing back to normal monkey shapes. The jig was up, the spell was broken, and they weren't about to wait around for the aftermath. "And stay out!" a few of the younger members of King Louie's court tossed off. (Then they congratulated each other for their amazing wit.)

Louie turned a royally appraising eye on the Sensational Six and the musical troupes, in the midst of their own mutual congratulations and hugs of relief. "All right, spill the beans," he said. "What were those things?"

"Dispirations," said Mickey. "Evil shapeshifters from…it's a long story. They used music to hypnotize you, see we used music to break the spell."

"Hypnotize me? Why'd they want to do that?"

Mickey was taken aback. "I…I don't know."

"Mickey," said Minnie, "do you suppose they knew—"

She was cut off by a tremendous crunching sound, the clamor of snapping timber and thousands of dry leaves being pulverized at once, as a monstrous thing plowed through the trees and stomped onto the temple grounds. Twenty feet tall, it seemed to be mostly tree itself—a conglomeration of leaves and lianas in the rough shape of an ape. A mane of writhing vines flowed from its head, its mossy hands were tipped with claws made of huge thorns, and its eyes glowed like a forest fire.

"What on Earth is that?" Mickey whimpered, shocked into childlike fright.

"I think it's the same Dispirations!" Minnie said, dragging him backward, out of reach of those gorilla-like arms. One swipe would surely be bone-crushing. "Like the giant squid—remember me telling you? Come on, Louie, what are you waiting for?"

Everyone else was scattering out of the path of the lurching jungle-monster. But King Louie stood transfixed, his expression pure concentrated primeval fury. He was incensed at the new intrusion; his own eyes burned like candles and his lips were pulled back in a grimace of violent rage that showed every last tooth. (Most people, asked to think about teeth in the jungle, think of a tiger or a leopard. But an adult orangutan has both of them beat by a full set of molars.)

He was going to fight, Mickey realized, to defend his territory. And judging by the ease with which the monster shattered a stone pillar in its way, he was going to get creamed.

Actually, it was Louie's lucky night. As the plant-thing drew back to take a swing at him, a swarm of squealing winged creatures—bats, they looked like, probably scared up by the knocking-over of their roosting tree—flew in its face, wrecking any chance of it actually seeing its target. Unmoved, it brought its hand down for the blow anyway, but Louie wasn't so enraged that dodging was beyond him, and he neatly sidestepped the descending claws and, grimace upturning into a sly grin, took hold of the massive hand and demonstrated exactly why he was King of the Swingers, so secure on his throne that even Shere Khan never dared try to overthrow him.

With a great heave, Louie yanked the monster off-balance and dragged it to the ground with a crash that shook centuries of dust from the ruins. The bats scattered out of the path of its fall. Then, while the crowd goggled, Louie picked up a stout broken branch and, with a mighty war whoop, laid into the flailing creature with Kubrickian ferocity. For the next minute or so, the air was a shower of bark chips and leaf fragments, most of which quickly dissolved into mist. It would have been utterly gruesome if it had not all been, basically, garden mulch.

When the haze cleared, Louie was revealed standing upon the heap of what remained, leaning one elbow on his impromptu club and buffing the nails of the other hand against his chest. As a pose of regal triumph it was less than impressive, but they were all impressed enough already. Even the monkeys were struck dumb with amazement.

"Well," Louie said, hopping down from the pile of defeated vegetable matter, "that takes care o' that. I bet those shapeshiftin' squares'll think twice before messin' with King Louie again! So, Mickey, you were saying?"

Mickey couldn't remember where exactly the conversation had been interrupted, so he cut to the chase. "King Louie, we need to borrow your crown."

"Done," said the jungle monarch. He snapped his fingers, and a small monkey scampered up, bearing the drooping leafy construct on a "pillow" that was actually one of the temple's old paving-stones. Louie took it and unceremoniously tossed it to Mickey. "Keep it," he said, chewing on a banana that he had somehow obtained. "I'll just make another one. And speaking of creating things, I'd like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to my jungle brothers in the sky, for their creation of a most timely distraction. Zee-bop-a-zoo-zah-zaaaay," he added in song, for good measure.

Four of the largest bats detached themselves from the perches they had taken up on nearby pillars and bits of wall and swooped down toward the gathering. The Small World children crowed with delight, and Mickey had just enough time to think, Bats don't perch, they hang, before one of them landed on his reflexively upflung hand, gripping with X-shaped feet and fanning long tail feathers that glowed scarlet in the light from Louie's firefly-powered party lanterns.

"It is our pleasure to be of service," said the rainbow macaw with the oscillating pitch and over-pronounced vowels of a heavy Mexican accent.

"José!" Mickey exclaimed, looking around at the other three flyers, who did in fact prove to be the other three Tiki Room emcees. "Fellas! You're all right!"

"Mais oui," said Pierre the French macaw, ruffling his plumage. "Unfortunately, our beloved tropical hideaway has become, how you say, enemy territory."

"We know. We were there," said Daisy dryly.

"Then you've seen them?" said Michael the Irish macaw, hovering in front of her face. "The flock o' black-hearted fiends wearin' our feathers? I tell you true, we were lucky to escape with our lives!"

"I'm just glad you all did," said Mickey. "We've been so worried ever since we saw what happened to the Tiki Room! So you've been hiding out in the jungle all day?"

"Ja," said Fritz the German macaw. "Ve escaped t'rough our zecret tunnel. But ve didn't know vhat to do next until ve heard your concert." He shrugged, which looks odd on a creature with wings. "Too bad ve miss most of it."

King Louie began to feel a certain lack of attention being paid to himself. "Well, ain't this just the happiest ending that ever was? I just love hap—"

"Not yet," said Mickey. "We've still got a long way to go before we can claim a happy ending. And we can't know in advance whose help we'll need, or when…so I'm asking all of you to come with us, to see why it's not a happy ending yet. And Louie, you'll see why we need your crown."

"Yeah!" Goofy piped up. "Not to mention, it'll save us havin' to explain everything again!"

After what they had all just been through, no one was inclined to protest. Louie assigned some monkeys to carry the Singing Busts, and the whole motley crew struck out for the river, tired but triumphant…and in the case of the Sensational Six, more determined than ever to see things through.


The problem, as Si and Am explained it, was that the Dispirations kept tipping their hand too soon. They were excellent at stealth—obviously enough—but they didn't know how to set up and follow through with a proper ambush.

"And you're sure such a stratagem will work?" Maleficent asked.

The two cats simply smiled in reply. One lifted a forepaw, pads up, and slowly extended all five claws so that their needle-tips gleamed in the green torchlight. The message was clear: We know what we're talking about—our species does this for a living!

"Very well," said Maleficent. "Let's give it a try, shall we?"

She reached out with her power and began to recall the Dispirations from around the park.

To Be Continued…

A/N: And thus ends the longest phase of this story to date. I never meant for the 1975 segment to get so huge—I just wanted a fairly lighthearted scenario that would require the Sensational Six to visit all the legendary attractions that sprang up between 1965 and 1975. Instead, I wound up with a Plot Tumor. If I had it to do over again, I'd come up with something different, something that could be resolved more quickly.

A note about character names: if you're familiar with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, you probably know who Mandolin Mike, Billy Willikins, and Long Dan are supposed to be—they're the trio that plays and sings, with their dog, outside the donkey stable just before the burning town scene. Those, however, are not their official names—in fact, none of the audio-animatronic pirates have official names, except for the retconned movie characters. So I came up with those names myself, figuring them to be nicely evocative and pirate-y.

The names of the Small World characters also are not official—to the best of my knowledge, they, like the pirates, do not have any official names (unless the names on the mermaids' fishtail stockings in the holiday season overlay are meant to be official). But my sister and I think they should, so not too long ago, we sat down with a bunch of baby-name books and assigned ethnically appropriate names to at least one girl and one boy from each country represented, unless said country doesn't have both a girl and a boy. The six featured here are just the tip of the iceberg.

On the other hand, the Singing Busts do have official names, which I have used. The full roster, from left to right as they are placed in the graveyard, is Rollo Rumkin, Uncle Theodore, Cousin Algernon, Ned Nub, and Phineas P. Pock (not to be confused with the Haunted Mansion's other Phineas, who stands near the end of the ride with his top hat and carpetbag, thumbing a ride). I originally had a drawn-out conversation between all five busts so that I could reveal all their names, but it didn't add anything to the chapter and I wound up axing it. As for the vocal ranges I've attributed to Ned and Algie, I basically just picked out of a hat. The thing is, only one of the busts has a specific voice actor—Uncle Theodore, whose solo lines make it obvious that he is voiced by the great Thurl Ravenscroft. The other four busts are collectively voiced by the other three Mellomen—Bill Lee, Bill Cole, and Gene Merlino (or possibly Max Smith, depending upon when "Grim, Grinning Ghosts" was recorded). This has been your Disneyland Trivia Tidbit for the day.

—Karalora