The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge

by Brad Strickland

  Lewis felt goose pimples breaking out on his arms. “I don’t like this story,” he said in a quavery voice. “That’s just what happened to me!”

  Mrs. Zimmermann leaned over and gave Lewis a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Except that your uncle is a very good man, Lewis. Even if he does play a lousy game of poker! Where was I? Elihu grew up on Jebediah’s farm, and people say that his uncle taught him sorcery. I don’t know anything about that. Elihu never talked about magic, and he never joined the Capharnaum County Magicians Society. The few times I saw him, he seemed perfectly normal—for a rich recluse, I mean.”

  “Do you mean he was some kind of hermit?” asked Rose Rita.

  Mrs. Zimmermann looked thoughtful. “You could say that. He pretty much minded his own business. At any rate, what I do know is that one December midnight in 1885, a meteor came whizzing through the skies. It lit up everything for miles around Capharnaum County. People said it was as red as blood, and that the weird light lingered behind it for ten minutes. The meteorite crashed to Earth somewhere past the barn on the Clabbernong farm with a tremendous explosion that made church bells ring and cracked windows all the way into town. That same night, just about the time the meteorite slammed down, old Jebediah died.”

  Lewis gulped. He asked, “Did the meteorite hit him?”

  “Oh, no,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “I think the timing of his death was just a coincidence. Elihu was about twenty-two or twenty-three, so the farm and everything went straight to him. He had a mysterious bonfire the next day. People suppose that he burned Uncle Jebediah’s evil magic books and papers. Then he burned his uncle.”

  “So he didn’t really become a magician himself,” said Rose Rita.

  Mrs. Zimmermann replied, “I don’t think so. Maybe he considered himself too well-off to need magic. By then he could legally control the money that had been put in trust for him, and it had grown with interest over the years. In the next weeks Elihu added to his wealth. He sold almost everything, abandoned the family farm, and moved into New Zebedee. Can you guess the one thing he didn’t sell?”

  Lewis shook his head.

  Rose Rita bit her lip and screwed up her face as she thought hard. “The meteorite,” she said at last.

  “Bingo!” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “Good guess, Rose Rita. I never saw the thing, but an older friend of mine did. She said it was not much bigger than a baseball, and that it gleamed with unearthly colors, colors she couldn’t even describe. It made her nervous just to look at it, she told me, and it didn’t do much for Elihu’s nerves either. Even though Elihu had plenty of money, he was timid and jumpy and always acted as if something were following him. Finally, in 1892, seven years after his uncle’s death, he offered to replace the old wooden bridge over Wilder Creek with an iron one. He would pay for the whole thing himself. Of course the county accepted. Now, they say that Elihu melted the meteorite down and mixed it into the iron used to make the bridge. At any rate, after the iron bridge was finished that fall, Elihu was a happier man. He invested in banks and businesses. He got richer and richer, and he lived in New Zebedee right up until the time he died of natural causes in 1947. No ghost ever got him, so I suppose his bridge worked.”

  “So you’re not worried?” asked Rose Rita.

  With a sigh, Mrs. Zimmermann shrugged. “The ghost of old Jebediah doesn’t have anyone to come after. Elihu never married, and there are no other living Clabbernong descendants. So even if tearing the old bridge down lets that tormented spirit cross Wilder Creek, it has no victim it could haunt or hurt.”

  “Then why is my uncle so upset?” asked Lewis.

  Giving him a kind smile, Mrs. Zimmermann replied, “Well, Lewis, it could be that your uncle is more like you than you know. He doesn’t care too much for change, and especially for any change that has to do with magic. Then too for many years now, I’ve realized that Jonathan Barnavelt, whatever he may say, is a first-class fretter!”

  Rose Rita laughed at that. Even Lewis felt a little bit of relief.

  But he was still concerned. And as more weeks went past, and March became April and April turned into May, his anxiety never went away, but just grew deeper. By the first of June it was like an ache buried in his heart. An ache for which he could find no cure.

  CHAPTER TWO

  School ended for the summer, but even that didn’t lighten Lewis’s mood. On the last afternoon of the school year, Mrs. Zimmermann announced that the next day she was going to give a picnic at her cottage on Lyon Lake, and everyone was invited. It would be the first Thursday of summer vacation. Lewis called Rose Rita, who was happy to come along. The water was still too cold for swimming, but they could play badminton, gorge on hamburgers, and relax.

  Uncle Jonathan agreed to drive everyone in his big old car. That Thursday morning was sunny and warm, with a clear blue sky. Still, Lewis wished he could shake the nagging sense of dread he felt. He had almost become used to it, but like a dull pain, it was something that he could never want to live with. He had finally convinced his uncle to stop buying him corduroy pants, and that morning he put on jeans, a pair of black Keds sneakers, and a white T-shirt.

  Jonathan Barnavelt was dressed as usual in his tan khaki trousers, blue work shirt, red vest, and a ratty old tweed jacket. He lugged an enormous wicker picnic hamper over from Mrs. Zimmermann’s house and stored it in the trunk. Mrs. Zimmermann walked behind him, wearing a purple dress and a broad-brimmed purple sun hat. “Well, Lewis,” she said as he opened the car door for her, “how does it feel to have the shackles off for the summer?”

  “All right, I guess,” said Lewis with a shy smile. He got into the backseat, Uncle Jonathan climbed in behind the steering wheel, and they were off in a cloud of exhaust smoke. They stopped at Rose Rita’s house on Mansion Street just long enough to pick her up, and she came running out wearing sneakers, jeans, and a baggy red T-shirt about two sizes too large for her.

  She got in next to Lewis, and when Mrs. Zimmermann repeated her question, Rose Rita grinned and said, “It feels great to be out of school! For one thing, I was getting sick up to here with plaid skirts and blue blouses!”

  It was a pleasant morning, and Jonathan drove down Homer Road in a cheerful, relaxed mood. Mrs. Zimmermann talked about what she was doing with her yard that year. She had planted some new kinds of flowers, daylilies and Shasta daisies and a bed of violets for which she had high hopes. “Violets are violet, after all,” she said, “and that isn’t too far from purple. And if they don’t turn out purple enough, I’ll just zap them with a little spell! What about you, Jonathan? Have you done anything special with your yard?”

  “Well, Florence, I’ve been considering that very question. I’m thinking about paving it over with concrete,” Jonathan said in a serious voice. “Then I could paint it green, and if I wanted flowers, I could buy some plastic ones, drill some holes in the concrete, and—”

  “Oh, stop your teasing, Brush Mush,” Mrs. Zimmermann retorted.

  They arrived at Mrs. Zimmermann’s cottage. While Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann unloaded the hamper and got the grill ready, Lewis and Rose Rita put up the badminton net. They whacked the birdie back and forth for a while, not really keeping score. Lewis was pretty good. He was more interested in keeping the game going as long as possible than in scoring points, so he almost always lobbed the birdie. Sometimes Rose Rita was able to smash it past him, but for five or ten minutes at a stretch they often managed to keep it flying between them.

  When Lewis and Rose Rita got tired of that, they switched to a game of horseshoes. Rose Rita was better at it than Lewis. With the pink tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, she would take careful, deadly aim at the metal stake. Then she would toss her horseshoe spinning through the air, and as often as not, it would land around the stake with a loud clank! Lewis’s horseshoes fell short or sometimes wound up leaning against the stake. “You going to Boy Scout Camp this summer?” Rose Rita asked Lewis.

  Lewis shrug
ged as he picked up his next horseshoe. “I don’t know. Uncle Jonathan and I haven’t talked about it.”

  Rose Rita threw a shoe, which hit the stake and twirled around it noisily before thunking to earth. “Perfect!” she crowed. “Well, we’re not going on a long vacation this year. Mom and Dad want to go to the Upper Peninsula for a week. Guess the rest of the time we’ll just stick around New Zebedee.”

  Lewis pitched his horseshoe and missed the stake by a mile. “Uncle Jonathan hasn’t mentioned vacations either. I think he wants to stay in town just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” asked Rose Rita, sounding surprised.

  Lewis gave her a quick look. He glanced over his shoulder. Near the cottage, Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann were cooking at the grill, standing in a fragrant billow of hickory smoke. They were paying no attention to Lewis and Rose Rita. Still, Lewis lowered his voice to a whisper. “You know. They’ve opened the new bridge over Wilder Creek. I think the county’s already tearing the old one down.”

  For a second Rose Rita looked at him as if he’d just announced he was visiting from the planet Mars and planned to marry the queen of England. Then understanding dawned in her eyes. “The old iron bridge?” she asked in a disbelieving voice. “Good grief, are you still fretting about that?”

  Lewis shrugged dejectedly. “I can’t get it off my mind.”

  Rose Rita blinked at him through her round spectacles. “Lewis, why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t want to bother anybody,” mumbled Lewis. “Look, there’s nothing we can do if the county wants to tear down some stupid old bridge. Uncle Jonathan hasn’t said anything about the bridge since last February, and when we asked Mrs. Zimmermann, she didn’t think there was anything to be afraid of. So I already know it’s dumb of me, but—” He broke off, unable to finish the thought.

  “But you can’t help it,” said Rose Rita sympathetically. “Hmm. Let me think about this. Maybe we can find some way to check up on things. If nothing else, we can make sure there’s really nothing to worry about.”

  And there they left it for a time. Soon Uncle Jonathan called them to lunch, and they had a wonderful picnic meal on the grass near the lake. Mrs. Zimmermann had a secret recipe for hamburgers that made them juicy and delicious, and she served creamy potato salad and some of her own dill pickles too. They weren’t like the kind of flabby, squooshy pickles that Jonathan bought at the supermarket but were crunchy and sour and salty all at once. For the first time in ages, Lewis ate with a good appetite.

  Afterward, they all pitched in to clean up, and everyone lazed around in the afternoon. Uncle Jonathan produced a deck of cards, and for a couple of hours, they sat outside around a folding card table playing silly poker games: spit-out-the-window, Johnny’s nightshirt, shifty Jack, grocery store, and seven-toed Pete. Jonathan lost most of the time, grumbling in a good-natured way that he preferred straight five-card draw. “The trouble with these games,” he said, “is that I can’t even remember the crazy rules!”

  “Very well,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, who had the next turn to deal. “We’ll play something simple. Now, in this game, jacks, sevens, and red threes are wild—”

  Jonathan groaned, but he was laughing at the same time.

  It was a good way to pass a warm, drowsy afternoon. Finally, toward four o’clock, everyone was ready to head back to New Zebedee.

  “Why don’t we all go to a movie tonight?” asked Mrs. Zimmermann as they took the folding chairs and table back into her cottage. “I think there’s a pirate film showing downtown. If it’s a good one, Jonathan can re-create all the battles with one of his spells, and we’ll take turns being the pirate captain.” They came outside again and Mrs. Zimmermann locked the door.

  Lewis thought the movie sounded like fun, but before he could say anything, Rose Rita asked, “On the way back to town could we go see the new bridge over Wilder Creek?”

  Mrs. Zimmermann looked at her sharply, and Uncle Jonathan, who was putting the hamper in the trunk of his big old car, froze. He turned slowly around. “That’s a strange idea, Rose Rita! What put it into your head?”

  With an innocent smile, Rose Rita said, “I just wondered what the new bridge is like, that’s all. And if they’re taking down the old one.”

  Uncle Jonathan exchanged a look with Mrs. Zimmermann. To Lewis it seemed to be a dark look, as if Uncle Jonathan were asking a question without speaking aloud. Mrs. Zimmermann gave him a quick, short nod, really just a downward jerk of her chin.

  “Sure, why not?” Uncle Jonathan asked in a hearty voice. “We can take Twelve Mile Road over to Wilder Creek Road. I haven’t been out that way lately myself. We might as well see how the construction is going.”

  Lewis opened the door for Rose Rita, and as she started to get in the car, he whispered, “What’s the big idea?”

  “Just checking up,” Rose Rita whispered back. “We’ll watch your uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann. If something is wrong, those two will know it!”

  Lewis swallowed hard, but he climbed into the backseat beside Rose Rita. Maybe it would be better to know than to remain in an agony of uncertainty. They left the cottage, and after a while, Jonathan took a little back road. It wasn’t even paved, just covered with loose gravel that crunched and popped under the old car’s big balloon tires. Mrs. Zimmermann said, “I thought we were heading for Twelve Mile Road.”

  “Shortcut,” said Uncle Jonathan with a grunt. For some minutes the car moved over the gravel, traveling slowly. Looking out his window, Lewis saw some pretty wild land, overgrown pastures, woods that seemed to have run riot with thick growths of thorny brush, and here and there, an abandoned farmhouse or two. Jonathan slowed the car to a crawl.

  “Looks like there’s been a forest fire,” said Rose Rita.

  Lewis felt his heart thud. Off to the right, a big patch of ground, several acres at least, was dead. The trees were leafless, the bark crumbling off their trunks. Their branches and twigs seemed to claw up at the sky in desperation, as if the trees had tried frantically to escape before they died. The stubble on the ground lay gray and lifeless. A farmhouse near the center of this desolate land didn’t look burned, but it was ruined. Its rusty red tin roof had fallen in, and the windows gaped dark and empty, like the eye sockets of a skull. Lewis wrinkled his nose. The place had a sickening smell, faintly sweet but rotten too, with a strong, bitter tinge of mildew. He knew with every ounce of his being that some evil thing had visited this patch of barren earth.

  “Jonathan,” said Mrs. Zimmermann in a testy voice, “I think we could safely go a little faster than this.”

  Jonathan put his foot on the accelerator, and the car rolled away from the blasted farm. The trees began to have leaves again, and soon everything looked normal. Deserted, but normal. Then the gravel road led onto Twelve Mile Road, which was paved with asphalt. They turned, and before very long they reached the spot that Lewis still saw sometimes in his nightmares. A rusty Civil War cannon stood in a grassy triangular park. An old white country church with dusty stained-glass windows was on one side of the road, and across from it stood a general store with a green SALADA sign in its window. This was where Jonathan had made a desperate screeching turn that night when Lewis was only ten and the ghost of Mrs. Izard had been pursuing them in a deadly race.

  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. Jona
than 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.