Clash of the Worlds

by Chris Columbus

  Finally able to catch their breaths, Sir Ed, Jumbo, and Brendan continued down the newly discovered secret passage. It was a short hallway that ended at a massive wooden door. Sir Ed pressed it open, and the three of them stepped into a large chamber.

  Their faces were lit up with reflected golden light.

  “We did it!” Sir Ed cried, setting the torch in a crevice on the wall.

  The chamber was fairly large, perhaps as big as a standard school classroom. And it was filled with all sorts of treasures. Old paintings that Brendan could only assume were stolen from museums across Nazi-occupied France, and were likely worth a fortune. Treasure chests full of old bonds, cash, and jewelry. Stacks and stacks of gold bars covered in dust lined the back wall.

  Brendan had no idea how he was going to sort through all of it to find the Worldkeeper. Jumbo and Sir Ed were already wrist-deep inside several chests full of coins and jewels. As much as he wanted to join them, he knew that this was one of those moments that counted . . . where he needed to do the right thing as opposed to what he wanted to do, which was stuff his own pockets with gold and jewels and lost treasures like Jumbo and Sir Ed.

  But the right thing was to forget all of that and simply find the Worldkeeper. Brendan started by discreetly pulling out Denver’s Journal from his back pocket. He reread the description of the Worldkeeper inside Wazner’s Revenge.

  No mortally made substance can withstand it’s wicked edges.

  He reread this sentence several times. It was essentially the only line that even remotely described what the item was. At first he was frustrated that it was so vague, but then he took a deep breath and reminded himself what was on the line. Even if it didn’t say what it was, he could use it to figure out what it definitely wasn’t. The process of elimination—his best friend when taking multiple-choice exams he hadn’t studied for in class.

  The Worldkeeper was infinitely powerful and had wicked edges. Based on that, Brendan could already eliminate half the things in sight, including the paintings, gold coins, bonds, cash, and stacks of silver and gold bars. He glanced over at Sir Ed and Jumbo, who were digging through piles of treasure with enough glee to remind him of the Christmas when he was eight years old and got his first Xbox. He’d been so excited, he ran up and down the stairs holding the machine, still in the box, over his head and screaming like the lead singer in an all-female metal band. His mom had recorded the whole thing and made extended family watch it every few years to his increasing horror and embarrassment. It had been one of his life’s biggest goals to keep the video off of YouTube.

  “Jumbo, look at this!” Sir Ed said, holding up a chalice encrusted with jewels.

  But Jumbo barely looked up. He seemed to be on a mission to find something specific. He dug through a pile of old crystal and china with reckless abandon, tossing most of the items to the side as if they were junk instead of invaluable dinnerware.

  Brendan had a weird feeling that Jumbo might be looking for exactly the same thing he was, which meant he needed to stop standing there like a frozen mime and get back to work.

  He dropped to his knees and pried open an old trunk near him. The undead mummies and vengeful pharaoh still lurking somewhere inside the vast network of pyramid chambers and passages were nearly forgotten at the moment.

  The chest was mostly full of old garments: clothes and robes that looked as if they might have been worn by ancient French royalty. Garments that were no doubt worth more than a whole fleet of Maseratis. Brendan tossed most of them aside, but snatched a silk handkerchief to tie around his ear like a headband to stop the bleeding. He moved on to a smaller treasure chest behind the large trunk.

  The box contained a mixture of old jewels, a crown, several jewel-encrusted scepters and something so striking that it nearly stopped his heart. Not just due to its appearance, which was magnificent, but mostly because as soon as he saw it, he knew it was the Worldkeeper. It was almost like he could feel its power before he even touched it.

  It was a knife. But clearly no ordinary knife. It had a gold handle with several large red gemstones set near the hilt. The blade itself didn’t appear to be made of any metal Brendan had ever seen—it was incandescent and clear, almost as if it was constructed entirely of diamond. It sparkled in the light from the torch as if it were glowing, alive, and had its own bioluminescence. It was around ten inches long and curved at the tip, forming a wicked-looking U—as if it were designed specifically to savagely rip open the bellies of enemies. Invictum was etched into the handle.

  Brendan reached out and slowly picked up the knife. The handle was hot in spite of spending years inside a dank and cool chamber underground. It almost felt like it was on fire, and Brendan had to resist the urge to drop it. He quickly reached behind him and grabbed an elaborately patterned, ornate velvet scarf from the huge clothes trunk and wrapped it around the knife. He stuffed it under his shirt and pinned it to his body with his left arm.

  Brendan knew that even if this wasn’t what Jumbo was so frantically searching for, it was unlikely they were just going to let him have it. It was clearly the most remarkable item among the treasures. It was obvious just from looking at it. The knife had an actual presence.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” Brendan suddenly announced.

  “I’m certain you won’t find any modern conveniences in here,” Sir Ed said, annoyed at the distraction. He was too busy making a mental inventory of their finds to worry about Brendan.

  “I drank too much water back there,” said Brendan, hopping up and down on one foot.

  “Do what you need to do,” Sir Ed said, pointing at the door. “Out there, away from us.”

  Brendan nodded and then carefully stepped out into the dark hallway, the Invictum still clutched under his arm, inside his shirt. He thought about trying to weave his way back out of the labyrinth of pyramid chambers and corridors in the complete dark with vicious mummies and pools of liquid death still on the prowl.

  Clearly not an option.

  But where did that leave him? He pulled out the small device Gilbert had given him in case he needed help.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” he muttered to himself and then pressed the button.

  Several seconds later, he felt the ground rumbling beneath his feet. He grabbed the wall to steady himself and the ceiling above him caved in with a thunderous crash.

  Far away, across a vast expanse of the book world, Cordelia also felt like she was being crushed. Not by a collapsed pyramid, however, but instead by the sheer terror of a monster so huge and overwhelming that it seemed to absorb all light nearby, leaving the world around it draped in black.

  Cordelia wasn’t sure what she had expected the Iku-Turso to be. She’d been so worried about simply finding the Eternal Abyss that she hadn’t stopped to actually consider what might be guarding it. But now she was certain that she couldn’t have possibly imagined anything half as horrifying as it was in reality.

  The Iku-Turso was massive, bigger than a blue whale, which Cordelia knew was the largest single animal in existence in her own world. And she’d had a sense of the scale ever since fourth grade, when some save-the-whales organization brought in a huge, inflatable replica of a blue whale to their school and all the kids got to walk through it to see how big they actually were.

  This beast was easily as large as that, if not larger. It had a body shape similar to a whale’s, but that’s where all similarities ended. The Iku-Turso had a big head, like a human’s head, with a mouth filled with multiple rows of jagged teeth. But it also had a series of massive horns protruding from it like antlers, and thousands of long tentacles coming from the bottom of its jaws like a beard. The tentacles moved on their own and flashed with little jagged lines of blue electricity. Cordelia didn’t even need to touch them to guess that they had a paralyzing effect on its victims. Horns and spikes ran down the length of its spine, ending in a tail covered in razor-sharp bones. It had three sets of fins, and swam and dove through the
water with surprising speed and grace—almost like it was going through a ballet routine.

  It dipped, circled around, and finished off the other half of the massive crocodile sea-creature in one deadly bite. Then it spun around and faced the submarine containing Adie, Anapos, and Cordelia: a light dessert.

  “We should probably start trying to get away now,” Cordelia said.

  “Could not agree more,” Anapos said, putting both hands on the control console. “Buckle up.”

  Two chairs opened up from the floor behind Anapos. Adie and Cordelia ran to them, sat down, and then strapped in using shoulder harnesses made from interlocked and dried seaweeds.

  As soon as their buckles clicked into place, the ship immediately began a sharp nosedive deeper into the abyss. Cordelia had been on several roller coasters in her life, and the rush of plunging into the Eternal Abyss made them feel like a simple drive down steep California Avenue in downtown San Francisco.

  Adie was screaming next to her. This was, essentially, her first-ever roller-coaster ride as they suddenly pulled up and then began spinning and diving and dipping every which way within the abyss. Several times, Cordelia was convinced they were going to crash into the wall of the trench ridges, but Anapos always pulled up or spun away at the last possible moment. It didn’t take long for Cordelia to be screaming right alongside Adie.

  She craned her head around and saw a glimpse of the horrible, spiny beast in close pursuit. Each time it snapped its massive jaws at the ship, it came closer and closer to crushing it between its teeth.

  Then it did finally manage to clamp its jaws around the ship, and for a moment they were looking at the back side of its teeth from inside its mouth. But Anapos managed to spin them right through a small gap in its teeth and back out into the open water a few seconds later.

  Cordelia had to mentally will herself to breathe again.

  “I can’t keep this thing off us,” Anapos yelled. “It’s too quick!”

  “What’s that, down there?” Cordelia asked, pointing at a faint light deep below them.

  “No idea,” Anapos said.

  “It might be our only hope,” Adie said, looking back and seeing the Iku-Turso gaining on them.

  Anapos pressed the throttle forward and the ship rocketed deeper into the abyss toward the strange light. Cordelia had no idea what sort of technology the Atlantisans had developed, but she knew that any human-made vessel would have been crushed down to the size of a soup can by now this deep underwater. It was as if the vessel were completely impervious to any of the pressure effects of the deep ocean.

  They gathered more speed as they descended, actually gaining a little bit of ground on the Iku-Turso. Of course, they all knew they’d never have a chance outrunning him back out of the deep trench. But that was a problem for later . . . if there ever was a later.

  As they approached the light near the bottom of the abyss, they noticed two things: They were nowhere near the “bottom” of the abyss—the depths below them stretched on seemingly forever, in spite of the fact that they had to have been twice as deep as the Mariana Trench by now—which in the real world would have put them past the boundary of the earth’s core. Secondly, the faint blue light was coming from a small opening in the sidewall of the deep abyss. It was an entrance to an underwater cave containing some unknown source of pale blue light.

  “Is the cave opening large enough for our ship?” Cordelia asked.

  “We’re about to find out,” Anapos said, dragging a hand across the control panel.

  The command sent the submarine spiraling into a right-angled turn at near breakneck speed. As they approached the cave opening, Cordelia realized that it was much larger than it had looked. She panicked and considered the possibility that they were about to drive directly into the Iku-Turso’s lair.

  But it was too late now—the massive creature was still bearing down on them and approaching so quickly it gave Cordelia motion sickness to look up at its open jaws and electric tentacle beard.

  Anapos drove them into the cave. The pale blue light was still visible somewhere up ahead, deeper inside the underwater cavern. Adie looked back, her mouth dropping open in terror.

  “Look out!” she screamed.

  Cordelia and Anapos spun around and gasped as they found themselves staring directly into one of the beast’s glowing red-and-yellow eyes. Nothing existed behind it but malice and death. Its tentacles streamed into the cave toward the vessel, and the three occupants screamed as the ends sizzled with blue arcs of electricity.

  Back in the pyramid containing Wazner’s lost tomb, Brendan stood and blinked uncertainly at the hole in the ceiling that Gilbert had just blasted above him. It ran all the way up to the surface. He could see a dot of pale blue sky at least six or seven hundred feet above, at the end of the long, hollow tunnel that had suddenly appeared.

  The ceiling hadn’t actually caved in like he first thought. Instead, the rock and dirt and clay simply seemed to incinerate as Gilbert’s ship passed right through it.

  The tiny door in the sphere opened and Gilbert poked his head out.

  “Hello, Brendan,” he said.

  Brendan never thought in a million years he’d be so happy to see a pretentious alien.

  “What in the name of the queen is that thing?” Sir Ed shouted from the now-open doorway behind him.

  The British explorer fumbled for his gun.

  Brendan crouched down and dove inside the small spherical spaceship.

  “Shall I telepathically vector-force implode that man?” Gilbert asked.

  “No, he’s a good dude; let’s just get out of here!” Brendan said as Sir Ed took aim with his pistol.

  Gilbert pressed a button, and the ship fired up into the sky with enough speed to almost knock Brendan unconscious. He sat up once they were up in the clouds and had slowed down. He pulled out the Invictum and grinned. He did it! He’d actually succeeded in getting the Worldkeeper.

  He saw Gilbert staring at him with his beady, black eyes.

  “I did it, Gilbert!” Brendan said. “I got the Worldkeeper!”

  “I knew you would succeed,” Gilbert said.

  “Really?” Brendan asked, touched at the alien’s confidence in him.

  “Of course,” Gilbert replied. “You may be a most unattractive species, but you are also quite resourceful and resilient for possessing such primitive brains.”

  “Uh, thanks?” Brendan said.

  “Now, where is our ensuing destination?” Gilbert asked.

  Brendan smiled and handed his new little friend the map of the book world.

  “See that dot labeled Tinz?” Brendan said. “We need to go there. It’s time to meet back up with my family!”

  Deep inside Wazner’s Pyramid, Sir Ed looked up through the huge hole that the strange sphere that had eaten the boy had flown through. He shook his head in disbelief. Animated mummies, duplicate treasure maps, odd spheres with strange little martians inside of them? He lived for adventure, sure, but this was almost too much!

  He stumbled back inside the treasure chamber.

  “Did you see that?” he asked Jumbo. “It was like something out of an H. G. Wells novel.”

  Jumbo wasn’t paying attention at all, however. He was still frantically tossing things aside inside the chamber. He threw one gold bar so hard that it punched a hole right through three invaluable paintings stacked near the far wall.

  “Brendan took it!” Jumbo screamed.

  “Took what?” Sir Ed asked. “What are you so upset about? And how do you know the boy’s name? I don’t believe he ever formally introduced himself . . . typical American . . .”

  Jumbo looked up at him, his eyes smoldering in a way Sir Ed had never seen before. This was not his usual assistant anymore. He was someone or something else entirely.

  “The Invictum!” Jumbo hissed. “You let him get away with it!”

  Sir Ed took a frightened step backward, holding up his hands.

  “I don’t
know what you’re talking about,” Sir Ed said, realizing now that Jumbo was somehow holding his pistol. “Jumbo, my boy, I don’t know why you’re acting so irrationally . . . but I beg you, put the gun down. . . .”

  Jumbo screamed in rage and pulled the trigger.

  Deep within a hidden cave inside the Eternal Abyss, Cordelia, Adie, and Anapos’s screaming slowly subsided as they realized the Iku-Turso’s beard tentacles were going to fall short of the submarine. They were parked well out of the beast’s range. And the cave opening, despite being large enough to fit a huge military submarine through, was nowhere near accommodating the impressive girth of the Iku-Turso.

  So they watched as the giant beast swam in circles back and forth in front of the cave’s opening, apparently content to sit there and wait for their inevitable exit.

  “Come on,” Anapos said. “Let’s find out what that blue light is.”

  Cordelia nodded and patted Adie’s arm.

  “How are you doing?”

  The girl’s eyes were wide and she gripped her seat as if she’d never let go. And then, slowly, her mouth opened and she uttered, “Well, that was sort of fun.”

  There was a pause, and then suddenly the three of them fell into fits of laughter. The tension was momentarily broken.

  As Anapos steered the ship through the massive underwater cave, the blue light ahead of them remained frustratingly faint. But after a few minutes, Cordelia realized that it was, in fact, getting brighter.

  Eventually, the light was so bright that it was practically on top of them. But they’d reached the end of the tunnel. They stared straight ahead at nothing but a solid rock wall—there was nowhere else to go.

  “What now?” Cordelia asked, looking up at the nearly blinding light.

  “I think there’s an unflooded cavern above us,” Anapos said.