Ned Vizzini - Clash of the Worlds

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Novel Approach LLC 2016

Illustrations copyright © Tom Percival 2013

Jacket Illustration © Cliff Nielsen, 2016

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007465859

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007465880

Version: 2016-04-05

For Ned

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Epilogue

Also by

About the Publisher

Brendan Walker knew this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.

He stood on the beach near his home on Sea Cliff Avenue with his sisters, Cordelia and Eleanor, and stared out at the San Francisco Bay. Not at the whole bay, but rather at the exact spot in the water where they had just seen their friend, a colossus named Fat Jagger, standing a few moments ago.

Cars were stopped on the Golden Gate Bridge. Several people peered over the edge, likely wondering if they had really just seen a massive, fifty-storey tall, overweight version of Mick Jagger in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, howling at the moon.

But it simply couldn’t have been possible. Fat Jagger wasn’t real , at least not in the same way that he and his sisters were. He was just a character in an old novel by Denver Kristoff. Or so Brendan had thought. Then again, the Walker children had witnessed enough “impossible” things in the past few months to convince them that literally anything was possible.

Most kids would probably run away screaming if they saw a huge colossus wearing a loincloth rise up out of the ocean. Or at the very least, call 911. They certainly wouldn’t try to lure the massive giant even closer. But the three Walker children were definitely not like most kids. At least, not any more. Not since they had moved into Kristoff House and found themselves thrown into the magical world of his books – engaged in a seemingly endless battle with the evil Wind Witch, frost beasts, Nazi cyborgs, bloodthirsty pirates, and a variety of other horrors from the depths of the author’s imagination.

“Well, now what?” Brendan asked. “We could call my English teacher, Ms Krumbsly, to lure him out. She’s still single and almost as big as Fat Jagger. They might make a cute couple?”

His younger sister, Eleanor, slapped his arm. “Bren!” she scolded. “Fat Jagger’s our friend ! You should be nicer to him; he did save our lives a couple of times. Ms Krumbsly is way too mean – I wouldn’t even wish her on my worst enemies.”

“Yeah, I know, Nell,” Brendan said. “I guess what I’m saying is that we don’t exactly have a good plan.”

“Since when have you ever worried about having a well-structured plan in place before acting?” Cordelia asked.

She was the oldest of the three Walker kids at nearly sixteen, although she tended to sometimes talk and act like she was at least twice her age.

“Hey, I can make plans and be the leader sometimes too,” Brendan protested. His sisters just looked at him. They knew, as well as he did, that he was much better at making jokes.

The three Walker children were standing on the beach directly below the cliff upon which the Victorian, three-storey Kristoff House was precariously perched – the same house that they would only be able to call home for one more night. Because after once again barely escaping from the fantastical book world with their lives, they had returned to a reality in which their father had managed to gamble away a ten-million-dollar fortune. And so the next morning they’d be moving back into a cramped apartment near Fisherman’s Wharf.

“Come on,” Cordelia said, pulling her coat closed to fend off the biting ocean breeze. “Let’s at least try to get closer to the bridge, in the vicinity of where he surfaced. Standing around talking certainly isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

Brendan and Eleanor followed Cordelia along the beach towards the bridge. There was still no sign of Fat Jagger.

As the three Walkers moved further along the beach, they passed a homeless man with a long grey beard sitting in the brush at the base of the cliff. He watched them walk by, but said nothing. The moonlight seemed to make his eyes shine like diamonds in the darkness of the shadows. For a split second, Brendan thought it was the Storm King, which was what Denver Kristoff had been calling himself ever since The Book of Doom and Desire had corrupted his soul years ago.

But that book was gone now; Eleanor had banished it for ever, using its own magic against it. And so was the Storm King. The three Walker siblings had seen him get hit and killed by a city bus outside the Bohemian Club in downtown San Francisco – killed by his own daughter no less, Dahlia Kristoff, aka the Wind Witch. But in spite of the online news article claiming his body had been buried in a nearby mausoleum under an assumed identity, Brendan wasn’t completely convinced that the crooked old wizard was actually dead.