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.
CHAPTER THREE
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?”
Making her voice cackly and creepy, Mrs. Zimmermann recited, “‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes’!”
“Exactly,” responded Jonathan. “Ex-actly. And of course you know why I took my little detour on the way to the bridge.”
“You bet your boots I do,” answered Mrs. Zimmermann tartly. “To check on the old Jebediah Clabbernong farm. Well, it’s still as dead as ever. If I might say so, Jonathan, that was not one of your brighter ideas! I wouldn’t have minded checking out the place with you, but to bring Lewis and Rose Rita along—well, I’m glad nothing happened.”
For several seconds Jonathan did not answer. Then Lewis heard him say, “Florence, did you ever walk around on that farm? Did you ever touch one of the dead trees?”
“Ugh!” replied Mrs. Zimmermann, and Lewis could picture her shuddering elaborately. “No, thank you! I’d just as soon plunge my hand into a bucket of squirming slimy slugs!”
“Well, I’ve tried it,” Jonathan said. “And between you and me, I’d also prefer the slugs. Anyway, more than twenty years ago, back before World War Two, I went exploring there one day. When you walk across that dead grass, it crunches to gritty powder under your feet. And when you put your hand against one of those tree trunks and push, your hand just sinks inside. The stuff doesn’t feel like wood. It’s more like sticking your hand into a crumbly old hornets’ nest—”
“Empty, I hope,” put in Mrs. Zimmermann.
Jonathan chuckled without much humor. “Well, I didn’t get stung at least. But I’m not kidding. You could drive your hand through one of those trunks if you wanted. Isn’t it odd that after all these years, none of them has fallen? You’d think that the first good storm would blast them to smithereens.”
“I wouldn’t think about it at all, given the choice,” replied Mrs. Zimmermann. “So what happened?”
“A little after that, I got scared,” admitted Uncle Jonathan. “I got scared, and I hurried away from there, and I’ve never set foot on the place again. Florence, it’s uncanny. It’s as if the very life of everything on that farm was—was sucked right out of it!” He dropped his voice. “I didn’t tell you the worst thing I saw.”
Lewis heard Mrs. Zimmermann take a deep breath that time. “All right,” she said in a steady voice. “What was the worst?”
“I think it was a woodchuck,” answered Jonathan, his voice shaky. “It was that size, anyway. Some burrowing animal the size of a small dog. It was halfway out of its hole. It had no fur left. Its skin was that wrinkled, grayish-white color of a dried wasps’ nest. If I had to guess, I’d say it had been halfway out of that burrow ever since the night in 1885 when the meteor crashed to Earth just behind the old farmhouse.”
“And it was just like the trees, I suppose,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “That is pretty bad.”
“It’s worse than that,” muttered Uncle Jonathan in a voice so soft, Lewis had to put his ear almost up to the crack in the door to hear him. In fact, Lewis was so close that he could smell the aroma of coffee. His uncle was saying, “I didn’t want to touch that—that thing, not after the way the tree had felt. I walked a couple of hundred feet off the farm, found a fallen branch that was pretty solid, and walked back. I pushed the stick into the creature’s back. It sank right in with an awful crackling sound.”
“Ugh,” cried Mrs. Zimmermann. “I don’t think I can finish this cup now. Just as well. That picture’s going to keep me up the rest of the night, anyway.”
“Florence,” whispered Uncle Jonathan. “Florence—it—it moved.”
Lewis had to brace himself against the wall with one hand. He felt his stomach lurch. The coffee smell was suddenly very strong, so strong that it sickened him.
“Oh, Jonathan,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, her voice appalled. “You never said anything.”
“The memory of it has haunted my nightmares ever since,” said Jonathan. “I didn’t want to burden you too. Not until now. Now I think I have to. Florence, the poor creature tried to creep out of its burrow. It made a ghastly hissing sound—trying to breathe, I think. Both of its front paws snapped off the second it tried to drag itself forward. Its body was splitting open. I—I pulverized it. I used that branch to pound it to powder.” Lewis heard his uncle gasp. Then he continued, “I put it out of its misery. At least, I hope I did. To think otherwise—to think that the nasty pile of gritty powder I left behind still had some kind of unholy life in it—that’s too much for me.”
Lewis heard the hiss of breath, and he realized that Mrs. Zimmermann had just exhaled. “That’s more than enough for me too,” she said in a low voice. “Very well. We’ll mobilize the Capharnaum County Magicians Society. We’ll all keep a weather eye out, an ear to the ground, and our noses to the grindstone. And then while we’re in that ridiculous posture, someone will probably sneak up behind us and give us a good swift kick in the seat of the pants!”
Lewis heard his uncle give a weak little laugh. “I think we’d better watch you-know-who, as well. I haven’t trusted those two since this whole bridge business began. If anybody is going to get involved in some kind of diabolical mischief around here, it will be that pair, you mark my words.”
Lewis felt crushed. Was his uncle talking about Rose Rita and him? When he thought about it, he feared it might be so. In Lewis’s mind, memories of all the times in the past when he had disobeyed his uncle rose up. He remembered occasions when his thoughtlessness had put them all in danger. His heart sank. He crept back upstairs feeling as lonely as he had ever felt in his life. He stopped in the bathroom and drank by ducking his head sideways in the sink and sucking in a trickle of water. Then he dragged himself back to bed.
What if his uncle had really lost all trust in Lewis? What if he decided to send him away? Lewis knew one boy who had become such a problem that his parents had shipped him off to a military school. What if that happened to him? How could he even live without Rose Rita’s friendship or Mrs. Zimmermann’s kindness and concern or his uncle’s unfailing good hu
mor?
Hunched beneath the thin sheet, Lewis felt alone and abandoned. And then he had another thought, a very disturbing one.
CAVE, the stained-glass window had said. That was an English word, but English was not the only language in the world. Lewis had also studied Latin at school. As it happened, cave was a perfectly good Latin word, but it had nothing to do with caverns or stalactites or stalagmites.
Instead, in Latin the word was a warning.
It meant—
BEWARE!
CHAPTER FOUR
Lewis had no way of knowing it, but at the same time he was eavesdropping on his uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann, another couple was having a heated conversation outside of New Zebedee. Like Uncle Jonathan, the woman had pulled her car off on the side of Wilder Creek Road not far from the skeletal old bridge. Then she had climbed out of the auto, a battered black Buick. For a few moments she looked up and down the asphalt road, but at that hour of the morning, no traffic moved on it and no light showed, not even from a distant farmhouse. The eastern horizon lay still and dark, with no sign yet of dawn.
Everything was quiet, except for the faint, distant howling of a farm dog far away. A yellow rind of moon sailed low in the sky. It gave off a little light, just enough to see the outlines of things. Weak moonlight gleamed dully on the old car’s fenders and hood.
The woman went around to the passenger side to help a shaky old man climb out. They both appeared to be about the same age, nearly eighty, but she was tall, with a tight bun of glimmering white hair, and she moved with a spring in her step. Despite the warm night, she wore a long dark coat that came to her ankles and was buttoned up to her chin. The man she assisted was slow, bald, bent, and quarrelsome. He was wearing a black suit over a white shirt, its collar open. He struggled from the car. “I can get out on my own,” he growled, slapping at the woman’s hands. “You go open the trunk!” He stood tottering on the grassy shoulder, shaking his egglike head from side to side and leaning with all his weight on a walking stick.
The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge Page 3