“Be GONE!” Alex thundered, shaking his broom in the air. There came a glaring blast of blue-white light from behind him and he spun to see one of Beckman’s fake fists bursting from the darkness. The white hand swung at nothing, then disappeared through the gate again. When Alex turned back, the last two teens were disappearing on their ropes over the edge of the rock.

“Forgive us!”

The music ended as the tape in their machine ran out. A second later, there came a low, distant breaking sound. Not from below this time.

Directly above, a thin line of white-blue light now shone through the clouds, as if a crack of daylight were breaking into the night. As Alex watched, transfixed, the crack lengthened, ripping across the sky in a jagged, sinister diagonal. From miles away, he could just see another glinting path of light tearing toward it, on a course to meet as one. He remembered his grandfather drawing a diagonal line on the map. The Kandel mountain at one end. The ruined castle at the other.

“Fault line,” Alex whispered.

The rock beneath him groaned, shifted, settled. He stared at his feet, at the landscape around him. With a slow, horrifying sense of realization, he recalled the story told by the climbers on the Kandel:

“At the very top, there used to be a . . . great, massive black rock that hung out. They called it die Teufelskanzel—the Devil’s Pulpit . . . Now, in 1981, you see, the Devil’s Pulpit suddenly disintegrated overnight. Tons and tons of rock . . . it all just came falling down . . .”

Before he could recall any more, he was flattened by Zia, who came flying through the gate and crashed into him as if she had been thrown. They collapsed in a tangle together.

“Where’s Willy?” she said, sitting up and glancing rapidly around. “What did you do?”

“I don’t think he’ll get here for a while yet,” Alex managed to croak.

“Eh?”

The rock was shaking steadily now. Alex could hear a hard rain of pieces falling from the edges. The rip in the sky was breaking open, and there were things moving up there, beyond the sky, flying things. Shafts of blue-white light slanted down across the landscape. He lurched as the mountain quivered horribly again.

“There’s all sorts of monstrous things in there now.” Zia nodded urgently toward the gate. “We need to help Father, get him out.”

“But we can’t stay out here!” Alex gestured frantically. “This whole part of the mountain is about to collapse. I think we’ve . . .” He fought to catch a breath and get his head around what he was going to say. “We’ve come out into 1981.”

Zia frowned, then dismissed it. “Close enough. Just out by four decades or so. Considering we were aiming across all eternity, rabbit, that’s like hitting a bull’s-eye.”