The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge (17 page)

At last, with the roar of tires on gravel, Jonathan pulled the Muggins Simoon off close to the new bridge. They all spilled out. Mrs. Zimmermann said quickly, “Jonathan, you and I have to work out a spell. Everyone else, watch out for trouble! If Mr. Moote and his horrible pet show up, you'll have to hold them off. We can't help you there. One way or another, we have to end this tonight.”

“I'm scared,” said Rose Rita.

Jonathan laughed, surprising Lewis. “Welcome to the club,” he said. Then, to Mrs. Zimmermann, he added, “Okay, Pruny Face, I'm ready to help. What do we have to do?”

While the two of them put their heads together, Mrs. Jaeger, Lewis, and Rose Rita kept watch. The road lay
deserted. Overhead, the comet neared zenith, its fiery tail streaming off to the east. Lewis had just begun to breathe easier when everything fell silent. The crickets and other night insects stopped their chirping, as though a knob had been turned.

“They're here,” said Mrs. Jaeger, waving the wooden spoon she used as a wand. “I don't know where, but they're here.”

Lewis switched on his flashlight. He shone it up and down the road, but nothing moved. Rose Rita muttered, “Maybe they're going to—”

And then Lewis heard a bellow coming from behind him! He spun. The terrible creature was climbing up the bank beyond Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann. At its touch, all the grass wilted immediately. Right behind the monster, Mephisto Moote floated in the air, his face contorted in hatred. “Stop this foolishness!” he screamed, setting his feet on the ground again. “Pitiful worms, your death has come for you!”

Lewis heard Mrs. Zimmermann say, “All right, Jonathan?”

Uncle Jonathan said, “Lewis, shine that light on me, if you please.”

The monster was fifteen feet away. It took a step forward, its awful, mismatched eyes rolling. The choking stench of it made Lewis retch. But he turned the flashlight toward his uncle.

Jonathan held up the ruby. “See this, Moote? Know what it is?
You
know what it is, don't you—Jebediah?”

The creature stopped, shaking. It made a blubbing sound, almost like a question.

“There's some dim part inside you that knows what this is,” continued Jonathan.

“Shut up, shut up!” screamed Moote. “You—you parlor magician! I'll destroy you!”

“Then you will also destroy the soul of Jebediah Clabbernong!” shouted Jonathan.

The creature quivered all over. “S-soulll?” it moaned in its awful, burbling voice. “Ss-ss-oullll?”

Shrieking in rage, Moote said, “If he won't take care of you, I will!” He raised his wand—and the monster whipped around, one of its lashing tentacles striking him hard in the chest. With a howl of pain and hatred, Moote stumbled backward and fell off the creek bank. No splash followed.

Jonathan said, “Show our friend the rivet, Lewis.”

Lewis held up the piece of iron. Its colors were unusually bright. The thing that had been Jebediah Clabbernong made a horrible gurgling snarl.

“That's right,” said Jonathan. “It's what kept you safely underwater all those years. Now, what would happen if we put
this
”—Jonathan raised the ruby heart—“together with
that
? Especially with the Red Star overhead?”

The creature struck forward, lashing with a tentacle. Jonathan flung the ruby heart up and yelled, “
Now
, Florence!”

With her robes billowing, Mrs. Zimmermann spoke a spell and pointed the crystal on her wand toward the heart. It zoomed into the air—and Lewis felt the rivet
jerk from his grasp! Two glowing streaks shot high into the darkness.

With a scream of terror, the monster reached up, up—and then it
streamed
away, turning to a silvery liquid, pouring into the night sky, trying to reach the streaking heart!

For a few moments they all watched. The three gleams of light went higher, higher—until they gradually dimmed and vanished. “Will they ever come down?” asked Rose Rita.

“They will come down, if that's what you call it, on the surface of the comet,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. For the first time Lewis noticed that her robes were gone, and her wand. She clutched her simple black umbrella again. Only the crystal knob shone with a purple star at its heart.

Jonathan had walked over to the stream and was shining the flashlight down. “Yuck,” he said.

Lewis joined him. What was left of Mephisto Moote was a drift of gray powder on the surface of the creek. “What happened?” he asked.

“That thing touched him,” said Uncle Jonathan. “It sucked the life force right out of him. Left him just a brittle husk. When he fell, he crumbled.”

“Is it over?” asked Rose Rita.

Mrs. Zimmermann sighed. “Only time will tell.”

Then the night insects began to sing again. Lewis thought he had never heard a more comforting sound.

The summer passed. September came, and school began again. The whole time, Lewis felt jumpy, as if something had not quite ended. He found it hard to sleep, because terrifying dreams kept jolting him awake. Rose Rita confessed that she too was having nightmares. The thought of the strange creature and the red comet still troubled her.

Then, one calm Friday evening, Mrs. Zimmermann came over to make dinner for Jonathan, Lewis, and Rose Rita. Lewis and Rose Rita were in the kitchen helping her whip potatoes when they all heard Jonathan shout, “Quick! Come in here!”

They hurried to the parlor. Jonathan pointed to the TV screen. “Listen to this!”

The news announcer was saying, “Astronomers now
believe that the unusual red comet visible last July must have been destroyed. It vanished behind the sun in August and should have reappeared by the first of this month. Something, scientists say, probably collided with it, perhaps a small asteroid. That was enough to knock the comet off its normal orbit, and it either broke up completely because of the sun's gravity or, more likely, fell straight into the sun. In other news . . .”

“Well!” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “Good news if I ever heard it. That's one less thing to worry about!”

“It wasn't an asteroid that hit it,” said Rose Rita, her voice filled with understanding. “It was a ruby and a rivet and a gloppy mess.”

“It sure was,” agreed Jonathan. “All of it jet-propelled by Frizzy Wig's dandy magic spell, designed to send everything up to the red comet that was supposed to be holding the Great Old Ones inside it. That was a stroke of genius, Florence, directing the magic at those things instead of at Moote and his monster.”

“Thank you, Brush Mush,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann with a smile. “Though I really didn't know whether it would work or not! I'm glad that my aim was accurate.”

“Well,
I'm
glad the Mootes have departed this vale of tears for good and all,” said Jonathan. “Those rats had planned all this for years. Why, I found out that they were the two citizens who complained about the old bridge over Wilder Creek in the first place. They were the ones who persuaded the county to tear it down—because they knew the red comet was coming, and they wanted that creature to be free when it got here.”

“Was it really Jebediah Clabbernong?” asked Rose Rita.

Mrs. Zimmermann replied, “It was—in part. And the other part was a creature from some other dimension that rode to Earth on a meteorite. I think it started out as a shapeless blob of jelly. After Elihu poured old Jebediah's ashes into the creek, the blob soaked them up. It was just human enough to want a soul and monstrous enough to draw the life out of anything it could touch.”

Uncle Jonathan stroked his red beard. “So good riddance to Mephistopheles and Ermine Moote, who set the dreadful thing free. Florence, I told you the first time I saw those two birds that they'd get themselves mixed up in some diabolical plot—”

“The Mootes!” Lewis yelled. “You were talking about the Mootes! My gosh, Uncle Jonathan, I overheard you say that. I thought you were talking about Rose Rita and me!”

Jonathan looked astonished. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Lewis, you should know me better by now!” he said. “Mind you, I'm not really happy about your sneaking around and climbing down wells—but Lewis, you're more than just my nephew. You're my whole family. My whole world!”

“And everyone else's whole world is safe now, right?” asked Rose Rita, sounding anxious.

Mrs. Zimmermann put a hand on her shoulder. “It's safe forever from the mad Mootes and from old Jebediah Clabbernong's restless spirit,” she assured her young friend. Lewis saw Rose Rita finally relax. Mrs. Zimmermann
patted her shoulder and added, “And if anything else awful comes along, I'd say the four of us have some powerful magic to pit against it.”

“We've got friendship,” agreed Jonathan. “And people who look out for each other, and people who act for the best even when they're shaking in their boots from terror. And we also have some halfway decent food, or my nose deceives me!”

They had a scrumptious dinner. Then, later, in the cool, clear air of early fall, they went into the backyard and spent an hour gazing through the telescope at the stars and planets. None of them looked the least bit frightening. They were all wonderful, bright, beautiful, and mysterious.

Lewis felt the worries and fears of the summer falling away from him as he lost himself in staring through the eyepiece. Around him, the universe wheeled on, orderly and regular, and a million brilliant and kindly lights eased the darkness and made the face of the night less lonely. After a long while, everyone went inside again, and that night Lewis slept deeply and peacefully, and his dreams were happy ones.

John Bellairs
is the critically acclaimed, best-selling author of many Gothic novels, including
The House With a Clock in Its Walls
and other novels starring Lewis Barnavelt and Rose Rita Pottinger. John Bellairs died in 1991.

Brad Strickland
completed several novels that John Bellairs had begun before his death and has continued the series that John Bellairs had created.

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