Read The Return: Disney Lands for Free Online

blanket, a beautiful blue. A warm breeze whistled, ruffling his hair in the most pleasant way. Therewasn’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 noapparent 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. Ofno 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 offFinn 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 DapperDan, 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 DisneylandRailroad, 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 tokeep 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. Thiseffect 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!” TheDapper 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.
    Finnpulled his hand out. He knew that all things DHI required trust. It had been one of the early lessons Wayne had taught them. Crossing over was as much about one’s belief as it was
about photons and high-data projection systems. Fear was a 1.6 DHI’s undoing. Confidence, his mainstay. If a geometric plane, his projection would strike the glass; if a line—the