The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge

by Brad Strickland

  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.

  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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  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:

  Mystic Journal of Jebediah Clabbernong

  “Well,” said Rose Rita, “at least we kno
w 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:

  March 1860. Calculations and great disappointment. Red Star will not appear for 94 to 96 years. I must not die before opening the Portal! I must try the Rite of Kl’ash-t’un. Perhaps I may pull a fragment from the comet to Earth ahead of time. Even that might suffice. Great power required. What would it take from me? Health? Sanity? Worth any risk!

  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:

  Have performed the awful Rite of Kl’ash-t’un, to the Rule of Three, and Six, and Nine, for nine days, eighteen days, and twenty-seven days. Success. Exhaustion, prostration, slept for 3 days, very weak. How long to wait? Ten years? Twenty-five? I am in middle age! Must live until Rite is fulfilled. Perhaps a sacrifice to extend my years.