Clash of the Worlds. Ned Vizzini

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      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!