The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge (4 page)

The car was on Wilder Creek Road now, heading toward New Zebedee. No one said anything as the road wound its way over hills and past farms. At last they came to the top of a high hill, and below them Lewis could see Wilder Creek winding in the afternoon sunlight. To the left, the old iron bridge still spanned the water. The road had been closed off for several hundred yards on either side of it. To replace that stretch, a new part of the road had been created, and its black asphalt gleamed. Straight ahead, a modern concrete bridge took the road right across the creek. The time was past five o'clock, and the workmen had finished for the day, but their equipment still stood around, yellow bulldozers, cranes, and other construction machinery. Jonathan slowly drove across the concrete bridge, then found a place to pull off the road and park.

They all climbed out and walked back along the shoulder of the road. Lewis could see that the workmen had already removed the wooden bridge boards from the black iron framework of the old span. Some of the girders had been taken down and lay in a careless pile off to the side. Everyone walked right up to the edge of the old bridge. Looking down where the boards used to be, Lewis could see the creek flowing smoothly underneath. It wasn't much of a drop to the water's surface, not much more than ten feet, but Lewis felt woozy and dizzy, as if
he were looking over a high cliff. The world seemed to spin around his head. He backed away and stepped on something hard.

Lewis moved his sneaker and found that he had stepped on a loose iron rivet, about three inches long. It must have fallen out of one of the girders when the workmen were taking the old bridge apart. Without really thinking, he reached down and picked it up. The rivet felt strangely heavy in his hand, solid and warm. And the warmth was not like that of iron left in the sun, not exactly. Somehow—Lewis could not have said how—the piece of metal felt almost alive, as if it produced its own heat. Lewis turned the rivet this way and that, looking at it in the fading sunlight. Its surface glistened, untouched by rust. Lewis could hardly believe that the rivet had been in the bridge for over sixty years. It showed no corrosion. It might have been forged just that morning.

Lewis shook his head. Rose Rita had said something to him. Hurriedly, he dropped the rivet into his front jeans pocket, where it felt heavy but comforting. “Huh?” he said.

Rose Rita hadn't been looking at Lewis, but at the two adults, who stood about fifteen feet away. She glanced at him, pushing her glasses back into place on her nose. “I said, nothing seems too horrible.”

“Oh,” said Lewis. “No, I guess not.”

Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann had their heads together, carrying on a soft conversation that Lewis could not hear. Finally, Uncle Jonathan nodded.
He turned toward them and declared, “Kids, I guess I deserve the prize for being the world's biggest worrier, but Frizzy Wig tells me she can't sense anything wrong here. And if Florence can't find it, it isn't there. Lewis, I'm sorry that I upset you back when we first heard the news about this old bridge. Anyway, it appears that all my anxiety was wasted. We'll keep an eye out, just in case, but I'll take Pruny's word any day, and she says there doesn't seem to be anything to be concerned about.”

That might have ended it. They drove back to New Zebedee, saw their movie, and dropped Rose Rita off at her house. By the time Lewis went to bed, it was nearly ten, and he was tired. He took the rivet out of his jeans pocket and put it on the table beside his bed, next to his alarm clock and reading lamp. Then he switched off the light and hopped between the sheets.

For a few minutes he lay there in the dark, with his eyes closed. In his imagination he was aboard the pirate ship in the movie, climbing the shrouds to the maintop, fighting a ferocious cutlass duel along the yardarm, then getting to the deck by thrusting his sword into the mainsail, jumping, and holding on to the sword hilt as the blade ripped its way down the sail. Lewis could almost hear the clang of steel and the explosions of the cannon. He could all but smell the firecracker scent of smoke.

An enormous yawn interrupted his train of thought. He opened his eyes and looked over toward the luminous hands of the clock to see what time it was. Then, with a gasp, he sat up in bed.

The rivet was glowing in the dark. Colors crawled along its iron surface, writhing and shimmering like the rainbow hues you see if a drop of oil is spilled onto wet concrete. Lewis had learned a funny-sounding name to remember all the colors of the rainbow: Roy G. Biv. That stood for “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.” All those tints were there.

But he also saw colors that he could not identify. Colors that seemed to come from some place other than this world.

And all of them glowed softly in the darkness beside his bed.

That Saturday night Lewis had the first of many bad dreams. In this one, he, Mrs. Zimmermann, Rose Rita, and Uncle Jonathan were at some zoo. It was unlike any real place Lewis had ever seen. All the animal cages were vast, tall structures of black iron bars, so heavy that sometimes it was hard to see the restless animals pacing back and forth behind them.

In the dream Lewis had the creepy feeling of déjà vu, the sense that all this had happened to him before and that he knew what was going to happen next. As they all walked slowly between one enormous cage containing a herd of shuffling elephants and another that held a dozen tall, brown-spotted giraffes, Lewis
knew
that Mrs. Zimmermann was about to say, “I wish we could see
more of the animals and less of the cages.” An oppressive feeling came over Lewis. If Mrs. Zimmermann said that, something terrible was going to happen. Lewis turned to ask Mrs. Zimmermann not to speak.

Too late. Pulling her purple shawl more tightly around her shoulders, Mrs. Zimmermann said, “I wish we could see more of the animals and less of the cages.”

The words echoed in Lewis's brain. Somehow he knew a gruesome fate awaited them all. From every cage came loud trumpetings, snarls, roars, and screeches.

Everything about this place is wrong, Lewis thought desperately. Without his understanding how it happened, they were riding on a miniature train. A black locomotive chuffed and huffed, and the cars clattered along a narrow track. Lewis and Rose Rita rode in the car just behind the locomotive, and behind them were Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann. A round iron safety bar swung down over their knees to hold them in place. The engineer was a tall, spindly man, all knees and elbows. He wore overalls, but instead of a blue-striped engineer's cap, he had a shiny top hat so deeply black that the reflections in its silk were midnight blue. The driver blew the train whistle with great enthusiasm, but the sound was anything but cheerful. Its low, mournful
whoo-ooo-ooo-ooo!
made Lewis think of dark nights, lonely graveyards, and staring owls. Ahead of them was the dark opening of a tunnel.

“I'm afraid of tunnels,” said Rose Rita.

Lewis remembered that Rose Rita had a bad case of
claustrophobia. Any closed-in space soon gave her a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, and if the space was small, she would quickly get terrified and be unable to breathe.

The train dove into the dark arch. They plunged down a steep incline so fast that Lewis could not even catch his breath. He heard Rose Rita shriek, a thin, panic-stricken scream. Wind whistled past his face. He felt as if the train had run off the edge of the world and was falling through space, falling forever.

Lewis closed his eyes, clenching the iron safety bar. He heard a whoosh! and opened his eyes. The train had shot out of the tunnel. Now the tracks ran right between two rows of drooping willow trees that dripped their branches so low, the leaves brushed their hair. Though Lewis still had the impression of tremendous speed, the cars seemed to be moving slowly, no more than five or ten miles an hour. Lewis looked sideways at Rose Rita and was not surprised to see her face had turned a sickly green with fright. He knew, he
knew
, that she was going to ask him if it was over.

She looked at him. “Lewis, is it over?”

“I don't think so,” replied Lewis forlornly. Like green curtains being pulled aside in a theater, the willows parted. Ahead of the locomotive loomed the biggest cage yet, an iron monstrosity that towered up to the clouds, taller than any skyscraper. Something slow moved behind the black bars. Something obscure, something huge. The train slowed to a crawl and then stopped. Lewis saw the track ended in the grass, as if it had been cut off, or never completed.

Suddenly the engineer leaped out and turned. Lewis heard the shocked gasps of his uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann. Rose Rita cried out in alarm.

The engineer was a skeleton. His face was a grinning skull. He made an elaborate bow and swept the top hat off the ivory dome of his head. “End of the line!” he screamed in a horrible high-pitched voice. “End of the line and feeding time!”

He vanished. Lewis and Rose Rita struggled to get out of the train, but the bars across their laps held them in a tight and deadly grip. The cage before them began to sway, its metal bars creaking and groaning. The dark, shapeless mass it held stared at them with a yellow eye. It made a nasty, snuffling, grunting sound, like a hungry hog. Something smooth and slimy, resembling the tentacle of an octopus, wrapped around one of the bars and shook it.

Like a house of cards, the cage fell apart. Iron girders fifty feet long and a foot in diameter came tumbling down. They blocked out the sun. Lewis looked up and saw them falling on top of him, ready to crush the life from him—

With a dry scream, Lewis sat up in bed. He choked for air. For a minute he didn't know where he was or how he got there. Then he realized he was safe in his own room, that it had all been a nightmare. He looked fearfully at his bedside table, but the rivet was no longer glowing with those unearthly colors. Instead, he saw the familiar greenish-yellow hands of his alarm clock: 4:24.

For a little while Lewis lay still, letting his heart return to its normal beat. His throat and mouth were parched,
as if he had been traveling in a desert. He had to get a drink of water.

Lewis switched on his lamp and slipped out of bed. He walked barefoot to the bathroom, but the paper-cup dispenser was empty. He would have to go downstairs.

Normally, that wouldn't have bothered him. Uncle Jonathan's mansion was eccentric, with a few magical touches here and there, but Lewis knew it held nothing that could hurt him. He gathered his courage and went down the back stairway, the one with the odd oval stained-glass window. Jonathan had tried out a magic spell on it long ago, and the spell had never worn off. The window changed from time to time. When Lewis had first come to live with Jonathan, it had pictured a red-tomato sun setting in a sea the color of old medicine bottles. During the next few years, it had shown many different scenes. Lewis glanced at it as he reached the landing, and then he froze, puzzled. The window was red, a lurid scarlet that glowed with its own light. Across it, in yellow capital letters, was the single word

CAVE

as if advertising Carlsbad Caverns or Mammoth Cave.

Lewis didn't know of any caves anywhere close to New Zebedee. Maybe the magic had gone a little cuckoo, he thought. He headed for the kitchen, but the soft sound of voices stopped him. Mrs. Zimmermann and his uncle were sitting in the study talking quietly. What could have brought Mrs. Zimmermann over at that hour of the morning?

Walking on tiptoe, Lewis paused just beside the study door. It was ajar, and through the inch-wide opening he could clearly hear Mrs. Zimmermann's tired voice: “Very well, Jonathan. We'll keep an eye on that bridge. Mind you, I think that whatever spook was after old Elihu has long since gone to its reward. I didn't feel anything when we were at the bridge, and I've checked my crystal ball since then. Nothing. But I know you too well to make fun of you if the old bridge has really given you the screaming meemies.”

Lewis heard his uncle take in a long, slow, deep breath. “It isn't that exactly, Florence. Oh, I don't know—maybe it all has to do with the Izards. I spent ten years or so helping fight the evil those two nasty buzzards stirred up. The night that old Creepy Drawers almost caught us on Wilder Creek Road was one of the worst evenings of my life. Still, I have a bad case of what old Bill Shakespeare might call itchy thumbs. You remember
Macbeth
?”