Ned Vizzini - Clash of the Worlds

The three Walkers watched the TV in silence for several minutes. Grainy footage from someone’s mobile phone showed three local sheriffs posing next to the dead creature. One of them crouched on top of the massive, furry chest, holding an automatic rifle in his hand. Even with the poor video quality, the kids could clearly see a gaping bullet wound on top of the beast’s head, right at its fontanel – which was the frost beasts’ only weakness.

The news footage then cut to an interview with one of the sheriffs.

“Well, at first he wouldn’t go down,” the young deputy said into the camera, clearly struggling to keep a wide grin off his face. “But we just kept shooting, until the monster fell to its knees. Then I stepped up and put one right in his head and he dropped dead. Just like that.”

Brendan hit the Mute button.

“What’s going on?” Brendan asked. “Are we going to see Nazi cyborgs storming the White House next? Or giant dragonflies snatching up dogs off leashes in Central Park?”

“No!” Eleanor nearly shouted at the thought of poor dogs getting eaten by giant bugs. She clamped her hands over her mouth, worried that she might have accidentally woken her mom.

“My dream wasn’t a dream at all,” Cordelia said softly to herself. “It was … real .”

Eleanor and Brendan looked at each other and then turned their confused faces towards their older sister. Cordelia shook her head; her eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and disgust. It was the same look she had on her face when she’d discovered they were all direct descendants of the Wind Witch.

“What dream?” Eleanor asked.

“My dream, it was actually real,” Cordelia repeated as if in a trance. “Which means all of this is really happening. And it’s only going to get worse. The Wind Witch knows how to make it all worse somehow …”

“Hello-ooo, Deal ?” Brendan said, waving a hand in front of her face. “You want to clue us in on what you’re talking about, please!”

Cordelia finally looked up and met Brendan’s worried eyes. Then she glanced down at Eleanor, wondering briefly if her little sister could handle what she’d just figured out.

“Maybe you should go back to our bedroom while Bren and I talk?” Cordelia suggested gently.

Eleanor cocked her head indignantly, scowling.

“I’m not a baby,” she said. “You don’t have to protect me. Anything Bren can hear, so can I!”

Cordelia looked at Brendan, who merely shrugged. Perhaps she was right, somewhere along the way, they were going to have to stop treating Eleanor like a helpless toddler. Especially after everything they’d been through together.

“When you woke me up … I’d been having this dream,” Cordelia began. “Except that it wasn’t like any dream I’ve had before. It was like I was inside someone else’s mind. And I think I actually was!”

She gestured towards the ongoing news story of the slain frost beast.

“Maybe you just banged your head a little too hard when you woke up,” Brendan said. He held up two fingers in front of her face. “Maybe you got a concussion. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two,” Cordelia said, slapping Brendan’s fingers away. “It was real! I’m linked to someone for ever, remember? And when I was sleeping, I somehow became her, I saw what she saw, said what she said. I became another person.”

“Who?” Eleanor asked, even though both she and Brendan feared they already knew.

“The Wind Witch,” Cordelia said. “I was the Wind Witch.”

“How is that even possible?” Brendan asked.

“Remember back when I read our great-great-grandmother’s journal?” Cordelia said. “The Wind Witch was somehow able to read it through my eyes . It must work both ways; sometimes she sees what I see, and I see what she sees.”

“Great,” Brendan muttered, “my sister is synched up to an evil she-devil like some sort of supernatural Wi-Fi network.”

Cordelia shot him a look that could have killed someone less healthy.

“What happened in the dream?” Eleanor asked.

Eleanor and Brendan sat and listened quietly while Cordelia explained what she’d experienced earlier that night. About seeing all of the characters from Denver’s different books gathered in one place: Castle Corroway.

“It’s hard to remember which characters were all there, exactly,” Cordelia said, frowning. “Even though it felt real, it’s still like a dream in that I can’t remember all of the specific details.”

“It sort of sounds like it was a gathering of the Dark Avengers ,” Brendan said. “Like an all-villain supergroup.”

“Yeah, it almost would have been funny to see Dracula sitting between a Nazi cyborg and Krom if it weren’t for the fact that they were definitely plotting something horrible,” Cordelia explained. “I said … or, I mean, the Wind Witch told everyone that even though they thought they were trapped inside the book world … they really weren’t. She said there was a way they could escape, a way they could all get out into the real world. She said the seams between the two worlds are frayed and getting worse with each passing day. Something about the magic being weakened. One of the last things she said before I woke up was that the only person who knew how to stop her was dead.”

“Denver Kristoff!” Brendan said under his breath. “That old bag of rotting goat guts.”

Cordelia nodded. “It makes perfect sense. After he died, we were able to bring an artefact from his books back with us into San Francisco—”

“The Nazi treasure map,” Brendan said.

“And then Fat Jagger somehow crossed over,” Eleanor said.

“And now a frost beast,” Brendan added.

“It’s only a matter of time before more characters get through,” Cordelia agreed. “Or before the Wind Witch is able to pull off whatever it is she’s planning and all of them get through.”

“What do you think that is?” Eleanor asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Cordelia admitted. “But whatever it is, it will let everything from the book world come through. I think she’s amassing a whole army of evil book characters for an invasion.”

“An invasion of our world?” Eleanor asked.

Cordelia nodded.

“You do have to admit, it would be kind of cool to see a T. rex tromping through downtown San Francisco,” Brendan said. “Or a bridge troll escaping Alcatraz.”

Cordelia and Eleanor both rolled their eyes.

“This is serious, Brendan,” Cordelia snapped. “Thousands of people would die.”

“I know that,” he agreed miserably. “I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it. I mean, how could we stop something like that? It would take the army, navy, air force, all the cops in the city … and maybe that wouldn’t even be enough!”

“The first thing we need to do is get to Fat Jagger,” Eleanor said, not able to get the image of the dead frost beast from her head. She kept envisaging Fat Jagger on TV instead of the frost beast, his giant body riddled with bullet holes. “He’s our friend, and we have to help him first. We need to make sure he knows that he needs to get away from the city and stay hidden until we figure this out.”

“We will, Nell,” Cordelia assured her.

But she also knew that would merely be treating one of the symptoms of the problem, not actually fixing the cause of the problem itself. Dr Walker had explained the theory behind practising medicine to Cordelia when she was ten years old and had spent the day at the hospital with him.