The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge (8 page)

Afterward, he could not even remember starting to run. All he knew was that he was rushing to their bikes, dragging Rose Rita by the hand. They had promised each other they would run like rabbits, and Lewis certainly did. He did not even notice that Rose Rita had picked up the wooden box.

“Look!” shouted Rose Rita at the corner of the house.

The shambling monstrosity had reached the old storm cellar. The wood gave way beneath it. With a final despairing bawl, it fell into the pit. An explosion of dust boiled up.

And then, somehow, they were both on their bikes, pedaling for their lives, riding away from the farm and its terrible secrets.

Lewis and Rose Rita rode their bikes all the way back to New Zebedee without even pausing for breath. By the time they rolled to a stop in East End Park, both of them were gasping, and Lewis's legs felt dead with fatigue. They had been going without a break for miles, and he was worn out.

They let their bikes clatter to the ground and sat on the grass, panting. Lewis's lungs were burning, and each gulp of air didn't seem enough to keep him going. At last Rose Rita got to her feet, almost staggering. She jerked her head toward a bench under a tall fir, and Lewis forced himself to stand up and follow her. He collapsed onto the bench. “Let's eat,” said Rose Rita. “It's already noon.”

“In a minute,” replied Lewis. “I'm gonna die if I have to move again. I have to rest.”

“I'll get the sandwiches,” said Rose Rita.

The two of them munched their sandwiches and sipped their warm sodas while people walked past. Lewis barely noticed what he was eating. That was a shame, because Mrs. Zimmermann had really outdone herself with roast beef, sweet onions, cheese, creamy mild mustard, lettuce, and tomatoes. But Lewis might as well have been swallowing cardboard on whole wheat.

A few other people came to sit in the park or strolled past, but no one paid them much attention. Around midday, lots of people ate sandwiches in the park. Lewis felt strange. Not because anything in the park was odd—far from it. No, the park, the passersby, the cars on the street, the warm sun, all these were
normal
. So normal that they made everything that had happened at the farm seem like one more nightmare. If only Lewis could have awakened from it, he would have been grateful.

Unfortunately, he knew that what had happened was real—just as real as Mrs. Zimmermann's crunchy dill pickles. When Lewis and Rose Rita had finished their lunches, he balled up the wax-paper wrappers and tossed them into a trash can. He put their empty soda bottles in his bike saddlebags because he could get back deposit money for them. “Okay,” said Rose Rita, opening her own saddlebag. From inside it she took the wooden box she had found at the farm. “I guess I feel up to it now. Let's see what this booby prize can be.”

She turned the box around and over, trying to see how
it opened. To Lewis the container looked like a solid piece of wood, though he remembered that something had clunked inside it when he had taken it from Rose Rita. Finally, Rose Rita found a tiny crack, no thicker than a hair. She tried to work her fingernail into it, without success.

Lewis reached into his jeans pocket and found his Boy Scout pocketknife. “Here,” said Lewis, holding it out to Rose Rita. “Try this.”

Rose Rita opened the penknife blade and slipped the tip into the crack. Prying into the seam, she forced the box lid open at last. It swung on a hidden hinge. Inside the box lay a book about nine inches high and six inches wide, not very thick. The binding was a faded pale green cloth, with badly scuffed oxblood-red leather reinforcements on the spine and corners. To Lewis the volume looked like an old-fashioned ledger. An aroma of cedar, clean and sharp, drifted from the box as Rose Rita took the book out.

“Well?” asked Lewis impatiently. “Does it have a title, or—”

“Keep your shirt on,” murmured Rose Rita. “Let's see.” She carefully opened the book, and Lewis could see it was indeed a ledger, the pages marked with faint blue ruled lines. The old leaves were shiny, although they had faded to a dull tan. On the first page, inscribed in a spidery handwriting in ink that had aged to the color of chocolate, was the title:

“Well,” said Rose Rita, “at least we know this thing belonged to Old Creepy. Let's see what he has to say.” She turned to the next page. For a moment both of them just stared at it, baffled. To Lewis's disappointment, the book didn't make any sense at all. Page after page was filled with fussy little sketches of stars, mermaids, anchors, weird-looking flowers, and lumpy human and animal figures, with some annotations in the same handwriting as the title: “Ffp. in 2 segs., w/d.k.a., prep'd accd to Rule of Yog.” “Tried 9th incnt. from N'con, tr. from Fr. copy. Rslt nil. No good w/o Elem. of Salamander. Mst. chk in Josephus or Clavicle.” “Voorish sign, midnight, on stony height. Partial manifst. poss. G-O-O. Or Spirit? Or Elemental?”

Lewis sat shaking his head as Rose Rita turned the pages. Then, halfway through the book—about fifty pages in—the writing suddenly settled into a diary format. The first entry read:

Lewis frowned as they read other entries, usually separated by gaps of weeks or months. Jebediah spent lots of
time wondering where he could find things: “Must read the Seven Rituals in the Book of Nameless Horrors. Only copy in country is in Mass. Must travel there.” Later, he had written, “Oh, for a complete edition of the Names of the Dead Ones! It maddens me to be so close and not have the great key!”

In June of 1865 he had written:

And then, six months later: “It is done. Nephew and his wife. Burial tomorrow. What of grandnephew? Only relative. Orphanage? No. I have desired an apprentice. Only two years old. Much time to bind and twist him to my will.”

Rose Rita looked up from the book, her expression appalled. “He killed his own nephew and his wife! Somehow he sacrificed them both so he would live long enough to see the fragment of the Red Star.”

“The meteor,” put in Lewis. “The paper said it was as red as blood.”

“So it took twenty years to get to Earth,” said Rose Rita.

Lewis slowly said, “And the two-year-old grandnephew would have been Elihu Clabbernong.” He
looked around, but no one was anywhere close to them. “My gosh, Rose Rita, Jebediah Clabbernong was using his terrible magic! We've got to give this journal to Uncle Jonathan!”

Rose Rita shook her head. “Let's finish reading it first. The more we know, the better off we are.”

They pieced together some faint understanding of what Jebediah Clabbernong had been trying to do. Lewis was not clear on any of the details, but Jebediah had believed that before humans existed on Earth, a race of creatures he called the Great Old Ones had lived here. These beings practiced some kind of diabolical sorcery, and because of that, some great power had banished them to another dimension.

Lewis got the impression that the Great Old Ones were monsters, not even remotely shaped like humans. Though the book did not really describe them, it left images of wet, slimy things in Lewis's mind, squids and slugs and starfish. Some of the Great Old Ones were always trying to break through into our dimension to reclaim the Earth as their own. Others had flown away to the depths of outer space. After humans spread over the Earth, most people believed the Great Old Ones had been some kind of demon. Others thought they were only myths and legends.

But a few people, like Jebediah, worshiped them as gods. Jebediah believed that if he could “open the Portal” and let at least one of the Great Old Ones through, they would destroy humanity and become lords of Earth
again. As for Jebediah, he would be changed in body into a Great Old One himself. Then he would have enormous power and would never die. He bent his whole life to that cause.

Toward the end of the journal, Jebediah was becoming more and more angry and frantic. “I age! I age! Half blind, weak in arms and legs! How much longer can I endure?” he had written. And “Curse this Earth! Curse its people, all of them merely crawling worms! Just let me live until the Red Star lights all the heavens and the time is right for the Opening of the Way!”

And, at last, the final entry, dated December 1, 1885. It was simple and short and chilling: “It comes.”

After that, only blank pages remained.

Rose Rita closed the book. “Twenty days later the meteorite hit,” she said in a low voice. “And old spooky Jebediah died.”

“Wh-what if he didn't?” asked Lewis. “I m-mean, wh-what if Elihu
thought
he was dead, but the old man really b-became—became—” He could not even finish the thought.

Rose Rita looked sick. “What if he—he became like that—that animal we saw?” she asked. For a moment she didn't say anything, and when she spoke again, her voice was a whisper. “He was nutty enough to try that, if he thought it would let him hang on until the Red Star came and he could open his crazy Portal.”

Lewis took a long, shaky breath. “I don't understand. People must have been out to that place since 1885,” he
said. “People are curious.
Someone
must have visited the farm after Jebediah died or disappeared. How come they didn't see that—that creature?”

Rose Rita said thoughtfully, “Maybe it wasn't there then. Or maybe it was just a pile of dry dust in the corner of a barn stall. If what Jebediah wrote was accurate, the Red Star should be showing up any year now. Maybe as it comes close to Earth, it's bringing the creatures to—not to life, but to some kind of awareness and movement. Maybe—maybe old Jebediah is about to rise from the dead—” She broke off, closing her eyes.

“We've got to give this book to Uncle Jonathan,” said Lewis again. “But if we do, he's going to know I've been meddling.”

Rose Rita bit her lip. “I think we can fix that. Have you got any money on you?”

Lewis took the change out of his pocket and counted it. “I've got a dollar and eighty cents.”

“Good,” Rose Rita said. “Go over to the dime store and buy a pad, a pencil, and a ruler. Then come back.”

Lewis hurried across the street and soon returned with a yellow writing pad, a wooden ruler, and a Ticonderoga number 2 pencil. He sharpened the pencil with his Boy Scout knife. The cedar aroma nearly made him gag because it reminded him of the book. When the pencil was sharp, Rose Rita took it from him. “If you print in block letters, using a ruler as a guide, nobody can recognize your handwriting,” she explained.

Lewis blinked. “Huh? How'd you know that?”

“I heard it on
Philip Marlowe
,” answered Rose Rita.

That was a detective show she really liked. “Okay. Let's figure out what we ought to say.”

They worked out the note, and then, carefully, Rose Rita printed the message on a sheet of paper. When she finished, both she and Lewis read it over:

Rose Rita had wanted to sign the note “The Hidden Avenger,” but Lewis talked her out of that. “It may do the trick,” Lewis said. “Now what?”