The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge (7 page)

Lewis opened the drawer of his night table. It held lots of junk: old playing cards, some Monopoly tokens, a few photos, a rosary, and other odds and ends. Gingerly, using just the tip of his finger, Lewis flicked at the rivet until it rolled into the drawer. Then he slammed the
drawer shut. He looked fearfully at the tip of his right forefinger, wondering if it would start to glow. The strange tints and hues on the rivet apparently were not catching, because his fingertip just looked like skin.

Not long after that, the power came back on. The storm blew over, retreating toward the east with some last bellowed threats of thunder and a few spiteful lashings of rain. Lewis knelt at his window and looked out. The sky was clearing, with patches of blue already breaking through the clouds. A few sodden leaves stuck to his window, and he could hear water dripping from the chestnut tree in the front yard. Still, the storm had ended.

By dinner that evening the sky was clear. The weatherman on television predicted a warm, bright Saturday and Sunday. Lewis knew that his and Rose Rita's trip was still on, and his heart felt heavy inside his chest. That night he slept fitfully. Once more he had strange, terrifying dreams, though he could not exactly remember them when he woke up at four minutes past three o'clock. He just had the impression that something vast and without pity had been chasing him. And what about the rivet? What was it doing?

With mingled dread and anticipation, Lewis opened the drawer of his bedside table. Nothing glowed inside. The rivet was just a three-inch piece of iron. Lewis closed the drawer again and dropped off to sleep.

*  *  *

The alarm went off at six-thirty, its metallic clatter jarring Lewis from a deep, dreamless doze. He flailed out and switched the clock off then sat on the edge of
his bed, woozy from his broken sleep. Little patches of sticky gunk made his eyelids feel gluey. He got up, went to the bathroom, and splashed water on his face. Then he plodded back and peeped out the window. The day was fair. Rose Rita would be there in twenty-five minutes.

Lewis got dressed and went quietly downstairs, in case his uncle was still asleep. Before he reached the bottom of the stairs, though, Lewis smelled bacon. He found Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann in the kitchen, both of them wearing aprons and bustling around the stove. “Good morning, Magellan,” Uncle Jonathan said. “Before you set off on your voyage of exploration, would you like one scrambled egg or two?”

Lewis had two, as well as a couple of pieces of thick-cut bacon and two wonderful slices of sourdough toast, spread with country butter and Mrs. Zimmermann's own tangy apple jelly. Mrs. Zimmermann said, “I knew that Jonathan's idea of making a sandwich is simply to slap some meat between two pieces of bread, so I came over and put your picnic together. You have two sandwiches apiece. I've also put in a couple of my extra-fudge brownies and two of my special dill pickles. That recipe for pickles won a blue ribbon at the Capharnaum County Fair back in 1938, so you eat them with reverence!”

With a smile Lewis promised that he and Rose Rita would. He packed all the food into his bike's saddlebags. “What are you going to drink?” asked Jonathan, standing at the back door.

“We'll stop at a filling station somewhere and buy two sodas,” replied Lewis.

Jonathan reached into his pocket and pulled out his fat old brown leather wallet. He took two one-dollar bills from it. “Here you are,” he said. “And you may keep the change. Lewis, Mrs. Zimmermann and I have a few errands to run, so I may not be home until three or a little later. Tell Rose Rita that if she wants to eat dinner with us, Haggy's volunteered to cook.”

Behind him, in the kitchen, Mrs. Zimmermann snorted pertly. “Good thing for you I have! The only real nourishment you boys ever get comes from my cooking!”

“I'll invite Rose Rita to dinner,” said Lewis, and he wheeled his bike around to the front. He bounced it carefully down the steps to the sidewalk, and a few seconds later, Rose Rita appeared, pumping the pedals of her bike hard as she pulled up the hill.

She came to a stop, huffing and puffing. “Ready?” she asked, leaning on one foot.

Lewis nodded glumly. “I guess so.”

“Then let's go.” She turned, and they rolled down the slope without even pedaling, and headed downtown. It was barely seven o'clock, and New Zebedee was just waking up. Few cars were moving, though they saw the milkman for the Twin Oaks Dairy making his rounds. They rode through town and then turned south, with the sun on their left. Away to the right, their shadows, long in the morning light, flickered along the edge of the road and out across dew-covered meadows.

By 7:30 they reached Wilder Creek Road, pedaling silently in single file, with Rose Rita in the lead. Once or twice a pickup truck rattled past, full of sweet corn, tomatoes, and other produce the farmer was taking into New Zebedee to sell.

In a way Lewis found the trip very pleasant. The weather was exactly right, not too warm and just cool enough. Robins and mockingbirds sang jaunty morning songs from the chestnut and oak trees they passed. Lewis began to get that second-wind feeling, the sense that he could go on like this forever, knees pumping, heart pounding steadily, and not ever get tired.

Rose Rita pulled off the road just short of the new bridge. Lewis stopped too and rolled his bike up beside hers. “They've almost finished,” he said. All the iron that had made up the frame of the old bridge had been taken down. Only the two heavy side supports and four upright piers remained. A big truck with a long bed had been loaded up with black girders, and it sagged under their weight.

As Lewis and Rose Rita stared at the sad ruin of the old bridge, a maroon 1949 Ford pulled up and stopped near a bulldozer. A chunky red-faced man got out. He wore a blue-and-white checked shirt, faded jeans, and scuffed brown work boots. A droopy, bushy black mustache hid his mouth, and although the top of his head was bald, big poofs of black hair clung to the sides, just behind his ears. “Hiya,” he said, waving in a friendly way. “Quite a thunder-boomer yesterday, huh?”

“Pretty bad storm,” Rose Rita agreed. “Are you working on the bridge?”

The man had reached into his Ford for a clipboard and white safety helmet. He slammed the car door shut and said, “Well, now, I'd say the work
on
the bridge is just about over. She's a real beauty, huh? We're gonna pull up the roots of the old one, and then I guess our job is done.”

“When will you finish?” asked Rose Rita.

The workman looked at what remained of the bridge. He scratched his nose thoughtfully. “Hmm. We're behind schedule—that's why we're working on Saturday—but it won't be long. Take just a little more time to get the last parts up. We'll be done by next weekend, probably. Might take a coupla sticks of dynamite to loosen these old pilings. But after, oh, week from today, you'll never know there useta be an old bridge here.”

“What happens to the iron?” asked Lewis.

“Huh?” The man scratched his bald head, then clapped his helmet on. “Dunno, sonny. Never thought about it, t' tell ya the truth. I s'pose the comp'ny sells it for scrap, something like that. Tell ya one thing, though: This is good iron. Sturdy as all get-out and not a speck o' rust anywhere. They don't make it like this anymore.”

“I guess not,” said Lewis.

A truck full of workmen bounced off onto the shoulder of the road on the other side of the bridge, and the man began to yell for them to get busy. Rose Rita rode her bike across the new bridge, with Lewis right behind
her. For nearly an hour they pedaled through the countryside, neither saying anything. At the little crossroads with the cannon, the church, and the general store, they stopped to buy sodas and use the rest room. Luckily, the store had just opened. A yawning man wished them a good morning and sold them two bottles of cola.

By then it was past eight-thirty. They got to the old Clabbernong farm at fifteen minutes past nine. Once a dirt drive had run down from the farmhouse to the road. The driveway had become a rutted, rough track too cut by washouts for them to ride across. They got off and rolled their bikes up to the dilapidated farmhouse.

The second-floor windows were choked with fallen timbers and twisted, rusty pieces of the collapsed tin roof. All the glass in the first-floor windows was long gone, leaving gaping holes into the darkness. Close to the house, the nauseating smell lingered, though after the rain it didn't seem as strong as it had been. Lewis felt a strange disorientation. For a moment he could not put his finger on the cause, but then he whispered, “Rose Rita, listen.”

Rose Rita stopped. “I don't hear anything.”

“That's what I mean,” said Lewis. “All the time we were riding, I could hear birds singing or katydids chirping. But here there's nothing.”

“Creepy,” agreed Rose Rita. They had reached the sagging farmhouse porch. “Let's leave our bikes here,” she suggested.

Lewis put down the kickstand on his bike. “I don't
think we should go inside,” he said, staring through the open doorway of the old house. Lazy dust motes floated there in a shaft of sunlight, but everything around it was dark. “This place looks like it could collapse any second. And the smell is terrible.”

Rose Rita nodded. “It's like old moldy food and dead mice and rotten tomatoes—”

“Please,” groaned Lewis. “I don't want to be sick.”

They prowled around the side of the house. As Uncle Jonathan had said, the grass was not only dead but somehow almost crystallized. It crunched under their feet, turning into gritty powder. Behind the house they found a swaybacked barn, its tin roof intact. The boards were blackened with age and warped from the weather. Off to the left Lewis saw a crumbling redbrick well, which rose about as high as his waist. The windlass was still in place, wound with a decayed rope. A bashed-in old bucket stood on the well's lip, though it had rusted to a solid orange-red.

“I don't see anything,” said Lewis in a timid voice. “I don't think there's anything to find.”

“Let's look past the barn,” replied Rose Rita. “Mrs. Zimmermann said the meteorite crashed down somewhere beyond it.”

Unwillingly, Lewis followed her. A few old fence posts leaned crazily this way and that, connected by rusty strands of barbed wire. Dead weeds stood at stiff attention in the abandoned pasture. Whenever Lewis or Rose Rita brushed against them, they dissolved into grit.
“Why hasn't the weather destroyed all this stuff?” asked Lewis. “You'd think that rain and hail and wind would have—”

He broke off at a squeak from Rose Rita, a few steps ahead of him. “Here it is,” she said, standing at the crest of a low hill. Lewis toiled up after her and stared down into a bowl-shaped crater. “It's not smoldering, though,” added Rose Rita. “I wonder if the
Chronicle
would still pay me the ten dollars.”

The crater, if that's what it was, was bare. No grass grew around or in it. Some water had collected—just a small puddle. The sides were mud, but mud that already was drying and cracked. Lewis guessed the pit was ten feet across at the top, fifteen feet deep, and tapered down until at the bottom it was only a couple of feet in diameter. The sides sloped steeply down. “Now that we've found it,” said Lewis, “what are we supposed to do? I'm not going to dig around in that glop, if that's what you're thinking.”

“I don't believe we'd find anything anyway,” said Rose Rita. “At least we know where the meteorite hit, though. Okay, let's head to someplace less stinky, and we can have our sandwiches and decide what to do next.”

They were passing the barn when, with a yelp, Rose Rita pitched forward and vanished! For a stunned moment Lewis thought she had pulled off some magic trick. Then he heard her terrified wail, “Get me out of here! Help!”

Lewis saw that a hole had opened in the earth, and Rose Rita had dropped inside. He could see the broken
ends of rotted planks. Lewis fell to his stomach and crept to the edge of the hole. Looking down, he had a glimpse of old brick walls. Sunlight streamed into the darkness, and in it, Rose Rita's pale face was looking up at him. She was only a couple of feet below him.

“I can get you,” he said, reaching down. “Grab my hands!”

Rose Rita was panting. “This is an old storm cellar,” she said, her voice panicky. “Wait a minute—here, take this. Hurry! Take it!” She thrust something into Lewis's hands, and he hauled it out. It was a red cedar box about the size of a cigar humidor. “Now pull me out!” Rose Rita screamed. “I can't stand this!”

Lewis knew Rose Rita's suffocating fear of tight spaces was overpowering her. He dropped the wooden box and thrust his hands down to her again. He felt her grab his wrists, and he hauled back. Rose Rita's head and shoulders popped out of the hole. She let go with her left hand and pushed down against the ground. With her shoving and Lewis pulling, somehow they hoisted her free.

Rose Rita could not stop shivering. “Ugh! It was so d-dark down th-there, and it smelled like it had been closed off for a h-hundred years!”

Lewis heard something behind him. A dry, rustling sound, like crackly old paper being slowly crunched. A hoarse, wheezing
hhaahhhh
sound, as if something were breathing its last. Rose Rita looked over his shoulder toward the barn. She clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and filled with terror.

Feeling as if his heart were climbing right into his mouth, Lewis forced himself to turn.

Something was trying to walk from the ruined old barn.

Something big and gray and lurching.

Once it might have been a horse.

Now it was a lumpy, dry, silvery shape. As its misshapen foreleg tried to take a step, chunks of grainy flesh fell away in a shower of flakes. The smooth brittle bones splintered. The mouth parted and horrible moaning sounds came out. The eye sockets were empty, but to Lewis they seemed to plead for an ending—for death.