Clash of the Worlds

At the other end of the Walkers’ apartment, Cordelia was in the middle of the strangest dream of her life. In fact, it didn’t feel like a dream to her at all, but more like reality, with actual sounds and smells and textures. If it weren’t for the fact that what was happening in her dream was impossible, she would have believed it was really happening.

Cordelia was back in the book world. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she was certain of it. Perhaps it was partly because the sunshine seemed a little too bright as it poured through the narrow windows lining the walls of a huge castle. The slivers of sun lit up her feet as she moved through a long, vast stone hallway.

Except that her feet didn’t look like her feet. They seemed … bigger, but also lighter somehow, almost as if they were capable of floating. But they were her feet; they had to be, since Cordelia could feel the coldness of the stone floors through strange, thin leather shoes.

She entered a large room at the end of the extensive hallway. It didn’t take long to recognise the lush tapestries on the walls and large windows. The massive bone and amethyst throne at the end of the red silk carpet was the surest giveaway of all.

Cordelia was back at Castle Corroway from Denver Kristoff’s book Savage Warriors. She was inside the evil Queen Daphne’s throne room. Even as the royal guards knelt before her, Cordelia knew it couldn’t be true. But yet, it clearly was. And somehow she was the new queen.

But still she pressed on, almost as if something was driving her besides her own free will. Cordelia marched up to her throne like she truly belonged there. She sat down and surveyed the room. She had guests, it seemed. But they were certainly not ordinary guests.

Before Cordelia’s throne stood the most bizarre array of creatures and people that had likely ever assembled inside a castle, fictional or otherwise. Krom was there, from their first adventure, as the new leader of the band of Savage Warriors who carried out Queen Daphne’s most vicious orders. Next to him stood a familiar German general who looked exactly like the only other German general Cordelia had ever met, the Nazi cyborg, Heinrich Volnheim, Generalleutnant of the Fifteenth Panzergrenadier Division from Kristoff’s book Assault of the Nazi Cyborgs. But it couldn’t have been Volnheim himself, because she’d watched him get blown to bits on a snowy mountainside by a tank cannon. All of the cyborg generals must look exactly alike.

Next to the Nazi cyborg stood a very stereotypical-looking vampire, complete with a pronounced widow’s peak in his slicked black hair, pale skin, a black cape with a high collar and protruding bloody fangs. There was also Ungil, the slave gladiator from Emperor Occipus’s Roman Colosseum, German pilots most likely from the World War One adventure novel, The Fighting Ace, a group of Prohibition-era mobsters, military officers from what looked like virtually every major war, a few hideous purple aliens with tentacles, and a vast array of other creatures and characters that Cordelia didn’t recognise.

They were all staring at her expectantly. So Cordelia began to speak, surprising herself with the authority and confidence of her words.

“Welcome!” she said. “Thank you all for joining me. As you know, I’ve been trapped here for months. But now our time draws near. The worlds are ready to converge. As we speak, more of us are finding ways to break through, slipping past the barriers that separate us from the outside, from the place that is truly ours. And once we finally break through, nothing will be able to stop us.”

The creatures and soldiers cheered. More words spilled from her mouth, almost of their own accord. Cordelia could feel that she meant what she was saying even though each word that came out shocked her. It was almost like talking on the phone with someone and hearing an echo of your own voice.

“The only person who could have stopped us is now dead!” Cordelia announced excitedly to the crowd. Except that by now she suspected she was not really herself, and she had a sinking feeling she knew precisely what was happening. “The old man’s magic is broken, decaying like his rotting corpse inside the cold ground. So now the time has come for us to act. We must make our plans accordingly and prepare for the moment when …”

Suddenly Cordelia was torn violently from her dream. She was being shaken and there were voices whispering harshly into her ear.

“Cordelia, wake up!” the voice said. “They’re coming through! They’re going to kill us all!”

Cordelia Walker sat up quickly at the sound of Brendan’s panicked voice and her head slammed into the metal frame of the top bunk. She cried out in pain, suppressing the urge to curse loudly.

“Ouch! What’s the matter with you, Bren?” Cordelia asked as she rubbed her aching forehead.

“Sorry about that,” Brendan said. “I maybe got a little excited there, but I swear it’s super-important. You’re gonna want to see this right away. Both of you.”

Cordelia was used to having her own room and her own queen-size bed. But their apartment by Fisherman’s Wharf only had two small bedrooms and a den. And so now Eleanor and Cordelia had to share a room. The movers had brought back their old bunk beds from storage that evening.

“Are you OK, Deal?” Eleanor whispered.

“Yeah, there’s no blood,” Cordelia said, still holding her sore forehead and trying not to take it out on her sister. She knew it wasn’t Eleanor’s fault that they had to move back into the bunk beds.

Eleanor climbed down the ladder from the top bunk as Cordelia groaned and dragged herself out of the lower bed.

“This better not be a collection of your toenail clippings again, Bren,” Cordelia said. “That wasn’t even funny the first time you did it!”

“No, this is for real,” Brendan said. “And, by the way … that was hilarious.”

A few years ago, Brendan had told Cordelia he had something extremely urgent and awesome to show her. He’d sold it so well he even managed to get her to pay a one-dollar entry fee to get into his room. Then he’d proudly shown her a collection of toenail clippings that he’d arranged into the phrase Cordelia = Nerd across his desk.

“Took me two years to collect enough toenails,” Brendan said, smirking at the memory.

“Eww, Bren, let’s just go see whatever it is you want to show us,” Cordelia said, making a face.

They followed Brendan out into the dark hallway of the apartment. The door to their parents’ room was closed and the light was off. The silence was broken only by the creaking of their footsteps down the hall towards Brendan’s room at the front of the unit. His “bedroom” wasn’t technically a bedroom at all. It was really a den that they had converted into a room for him.

Cordelia held her breath as she slowly pushed the door. The hinges creaked as it swung open. The room was dark, but a pale blue glow splashed across the bed like they were in a garishly lit horror movie.

It took Cordelia’s eyes a few seconds to adjust to the light, and then she gasped in shock. She stared at Brendan’s TV in silence. Her mouth hung open, her dream almost completely forgotten for the moment. Brendan pushed past her and sat down on the edge of his bed.

“Insane, right?” he said.

Eleanor shuffled around Cordelia so she could get a better look at the TV. This was another of those frequent moments when she hated being the youngest and smallest. She could never see anything!

She stepped into the centre of the room and finally got a clear view. Eleanor gasped, just like Cordelia had.

How could this be possible?

Eleanor stood there shaking her head, as if it could make what she was seeing go away. It turned out that Fat Jagger wasn’t the only character to cross over into the real world from one of Denver Kristoff’s books.

A CNN headline scrolling across the bottom of Brendan’s TV read: “Real Abominable Snowman Gunned Down in Santa Rosa, CA”.

Eleanor quickly recognised that the dead beast displayed on the screen wasn’t merely an abominable snowman. It was one of the deadly frost beasts that she and the gladiator Felix had battled in Kristoff’s book world alongside Wangchuk and his order of monks. One of the surviving frost beasts had not only crossed over into the real world … it had made its way to California!

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.

“The key to curing people,” he’d explained, “is as simple as keeping your mind focused on the underlying cause. Don’t try to fix the symptoms, instead fix the issue causing the symptoms. Sometimes they don’t even seem related. Like, if your leg hurts all of the time, you can’t just take aspirin every day for the rest of your life. Instead, you have to figure out what’s causing the pain and fix that. Leg pain can be caused by a number of ailments not occurring in your leg at all, like back issues or a neurological disorder. That’s why we strive to treat the underlying problem or cause, not just the symptoms themselves.”

It was important to keep Fat Jagger safe, but Cordelia knew they couldn’t merely ask him to hide in the ocean for the rest of his life. They would eventually need to find out how to get him back home. She knew nobody else was coming to help; the only other person alive who even knew the book world existed at all was the Wind Witch; which meant it was up to the three Walker children to somehow save the world.

“If only there was a way we could talk to dead people,” Cordelia speculated aloud.

“What are you talking about?” Brendan asked, holding up three fingers in front of her face again. “Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”

“I’m talking about Denver Kristoff,” Cordelia said, pushing his hand away again. “If he were alive, he might be able to tell us what to do. How to fix this.”

“That old monster wouldn’t help us even if we could somehow talk to his ghost,” Brendan said. “He’d probably want his creations to exist in real life. What writer wouldn’t?”

“Are you so sure about that?” Cordelia asked, pointing at the TV still showing images of the dead frost beast. “I mean, if his characters crossed over, many of them would probably end up getting killed. People shoot first and ask questions later. Would Kristoff really want to see his characters getting massacred? Or destroying the city he loved?”

“This is a ridiculous conversation,” Brendan said. “Kristoff’s dead. Unless you have a Ouija board and psychic abilities, we won’t get a single word out of that stiff!”

“That’s it!” Cordelia shouted. “You’re brilliant, Bren!”

“Now you’re calling me brilliant?” Brendan asked. “I think we need to get you a CAT scan.”

“No, remember what happened at the Bohemian Club when we saw Aldrich Hayes and Denver raise the spirits of dead Lorekeepers with a simple spell?”

Brendan nodded, already not liking where this was headed.

“I don’t see why their own spirits can’t be summoned as well,” Cordelia said.

“What are you saying?” Eleanor asked nervously.

“We’re going to resurrect the spirit of the Storm King!”

“But we have to help Fat Jagger first!” Eleanor nearly yelled. “I already have a plan and everything.”

“We will help him, Nell. I promise,” Cordelia assured her. “But we also need to find a way to fix this for good. And Denver Kristoff is probably the only one who can tell us how to do that. Brendan, do you still remember that spell?”

Brendan had an incredible memory. He could remember the smallest details years later after only having heard or seen something once – as long as it was something that interested him, like sports statistics, or cryptic spells that summoned real ghosts.

He nodded reluctantly – remembering that horrifying experience all too well.

“Good, so you get the job of trying to summon the Storm King’s spirit,” Cordelia said. “Nell and I will try to help Fat Jagger.”

“This is never going to work,” Brendan said.

“We have to try something,” Cordelia said.

“Last time we snuck into the Bohemian Club we almost got killed,” Brendan said. “So where exactly am I supposed to hold this charade of a séance? In our living room? Or how about a random street corner? Larkin and Bay sounds kind of magical …”

“Start with the cemetery,” Cordelia suggested, ignoring his sarcasm. “Where the old fart is buried. Use your brain, Bren, I can’t always be the one with all of the ideas!”

Brendan didn’t really have a strong desire to raise the dead alone in a cemetery. But it’d be in broad daylight. He could handle that. Plus, he didn’t want to look like a complete wuss in front of his sisters. So he nodded, pretending it was no big deal.

“Yeah, cool,” Brendan said, raising his chin to look confident. “But when are we going to do this? We have school tomorrow. Are we going to call in sick, or just wait until the bell rings?”

“We can’t wait that long,” Cordelia said, shaking her head. “Even as we speak, more creatures from Denver’s books might be streaming into the real world! We have to do it now.”

“Now?” Brendan asked, his voice cracking.

“Yes!” Eleanor said, her eyes glowing. “Poor Fat Jagger’s probably getting tired of hanging out under all that water. He’s all alone and scared!”

“He’s all alone and scared?” Brendan asked, completely dropping his thin facade of bravery. “What about me? Your brother! I’m the one going to a cemetery alone in the middle of the night! The place is probably filled with San Francisco’s weirdest creeps and lurkers …”

“You’ve faced a lot tougher stuff than a graveyard at night,” Cordelia said. “You can do this, Bren.”

She put a reassuring hand on her brother’s shoulder and smiled. Brendan turned to Eleanor. His little sister nodded at him; the look in her eyes reflecting back just how much she really did look up to him.

“We believe in you, Bren,” she said.

Brendan couldn’t back down now. His sisters could be a royal pain sometimes. But at moments like this, when he needed a burst of strength or confidence, they always provided it.

He smiled and nodded back.

“OK,” Brendan said. “Let’s do this.”

To any regular bystander, Cordelia and Eleanor Walker must have looked completely insane. After all, it’s hard to imagine why a fifteen- and eight-year-old would be standing near the shore of the San Francisco Bay at two thirty a.m. throwing pounds and pounds of raw meat into a huge pile. They had created a meat tower of steaks, ground hamburger, pork shoulders, chicken thighs and cheap fish fillets. The pile was almost as big as the two of them put together.

It had taken nearly all of the three Walker children’s saved-up allowances and birthday and holiday money to amass such an impressive supply of meat. But Eleanor was still worried it wouldn’t be enough. After all, even though the pile could feed a whole army of human beings, to Fat Jagger it was only the equivalent of a small chunk of beef jerky.

They’d all snuck out of the apartment and taken a late-night bus to a twenty-four-hour Safeway to get their stockpile. Brendan had helped them haul it out to Torpedo Wharf and then departed for Fernwood Cemetery, where Denver Kristoff was buried under a fake name.

It was three in the morning, cold, damp and nearly pitch-black by the time the Walker sisters arrived at Torpedo Wharf, cut open all of the packages of meat, and dumped them into a massive pile at the edge of the concrete pier. They shivered miserably while they stood and waited.