The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge

by Brad Strickland

  “I can make a guess,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “that Elihu scattered those ashes in the creek and later built the bridge over them. Either that, or he put them in a jar with some lead sinkers and tossed them into the creek. It’s strangely deep at that point, you know—that’s why it was odd that Elihu chose that place to build the bridge.”

  “What came to Earth in the meteorite?” someone else asked.

  Lewis heard his uncle sigh. “That we don’t know,” he confessed. “Though it seems clear that Jebediah did call the meteorite down, somehow, and that something came to Earth along with it. But whether that something was an alien creature or a spirit or a Cracker Jack prize, we haven’t been able to learn. Florence and I tried to track down anything that Elihu left when he passed away in 1947, but we’ve had very little luck. He bequeathed all his money to various charities. The law firm in Kalamazoo that handled his estate refuses to comment on what happened to his personal papers.”

  “What law firm?” asked Mrs. Jaeger, a pleasant, rather vague sorceress whose spells usually backfired.

  “Moote, Mull, and Boyd,” said Jonathan. “Unfortunately, Mr. Moote is retired now, Mr. Mull is dead, and I must say that Mr. Boyd is about as talkative as the Sphinx.”

  “However,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “I did drive over to Kalamazoo to have a look at the will—that’s public record, you know. It’s a perfectly ordinary legal document, stuffed with whereases and therefores and parties of the umpty parts. Except, that is, for one very strange paragraph.” Lewis heard the rustle of paper. Mrs. Zimmermann coughed and said, “I copied this down. See if you can make sense out of it. The paragraph says: ‘Meanings may have other meanings. One thing I have learned is that the heart is the seat of the soul. The soul is the life. And the key to finding the life is, at the very bottom, a healthy heart.’” The paper rattled again, and Mrs. Zimmermann said, “Well?”

  The group muttered its puzzlement, and someone said, “Sounds like a health tip to me. Did Elihu die of a heart attack?”

  “Pneumonia,” Jonathan answered. “We’re just as much in the dark as you are. Florence has made copies of that part of the will, and we’ll hand them out. If anyone can think of a way to solve the riddle, or just prove that there’s nothing to it, get in touch at once. Otherwise, let’s all get busy.”

  “What do you want us to do?” asked someone.

  “For one thing,” said Mrs. Zimmermann, “we need a subcommittee to study this journal. Howard, you and Walter know more about this kind of magic than anyone else here. If you two and Mildred could see what you can make of the book, we’d all appreciate a full report.”

  “For another,” added Jonathan, “we need to have more information on this comet. When’s it coming? What will its coming mean? What kind of influence will it have? I’ll tackle that question. And finally, we have to keep up our watch on Wilder Creek. Florence and I are firmly convinced that something is stirring there, but we can’t yet tell whether it’s ghost or wizard or galloping woo-hoo. Florence can’t detect any magic at work—”

  “Then none is there,” someone said. “I’d trust Florence with my life, where magic is concerned.”

  “So would I,” responded Jonathan. “But let’s be safe instead of sorry. Now, I’d suggest all of you with clairvoyance work out a rotation so we can keep tabs on the place twenty-four hours a day. Keep your crystal balls ready. I happen to know that on Friday the last piling of the old bridge comes out. Something may occur then. If it does, we need to know about it pronto.”

  Very little else happened. The meeting broke up into groups of people chatting and munching on snacks. With everyone still in the study, Lewis and Rose Rita slipped down the secret passage to the other end, came out in the kitchen, and took the back door outside. Dusk was falling already. They walked toward Rose Rita’s house on Mansion Street.

  “I guess our job is pretty clear too,” said Rose Rita. “We have to help without getting caught.”

  “Haven’t we done our part?” asked Lewis. “We turned the journal over to Uncle Jonathan.”

  “We still have things to do,” insisted Rose Rita. “For one thing, I want to write down that puzzle from old Elihu’s will while I can still remember it. Maybe we can figure that out. And we’re going to be on watch just as much as the magicians are.”

  Lewis grunted. You couldn’t argue with Rose Rita when she was in the mood to take charge. They reached her house. After Rose Rita had jotted down the words from Elihu Clabbernong’s will, they went to the backyard, where they sat on patio furniture. From inside the Pottinger house came the sounds of a boxing match on TV or the radio. Crickets chirped all around. The night grew darker and darker. Lewis lay back in his lawn chair and stared up at the sky. He could see a handful of stars strewn across the heavens. Somewhere among them might lurk the comet known as the Red Star. With every moment that passed, it was streaking closer to the Earth.

  And who knew what disaster it might bring?

  * * *

  Not very far away, on a hill just outside New Zebedee, two other people were studying the stars. They were the old couple Mephistopheles and Ermine Moote, and they took turns bending over their telescope.

  “It’s coming faster than we thought, Mephisto,” said the woman. “It will be visible to the naked eye any day now.”

  “No matter, no matter,” the gnarled old man said in his raspy voice. “The cursed bridge is almost down. We will be free to act soon. Even if those busybodies in town find out about the comet, it will be too late! Once he is free, none will dare to oppose us!”

  The woman backed away from the telescope, and the old man bent over the eyepiece with a gloating chuckle. The telescope mechanism ticked like a loud alarm clock. After a few moments the woman said, “Mephisto, while you were napping, Ernest Boyd telephoned from Kalamazoo. He said the Zimmermann woman had been trying to find if any of Jebediah’s papers survived.”

  “Hah!” the old man cried out. “Much luck to her! What isn’t burned is safely hidden away—hidden where no one, burglar, witch, or wizard, can find them!”

  “One thing isn’t,” said the woman. “The will.”

  Mephistopheles Moote slowly straightened up from the eyepiece. “And what would she learn from the will, you fool? Just that Elihu frittered his hard-earned money on orphans and widows! There’s nothing in the will that can possibly hurt us!”

  “Except the paragraph you never could understand,” the woman said. “That part about the soul and the life and the heart.”

  With an annoyed grunt, Moote turned back to his telescope. “If she is smart enough to figure that rigmarole out, she is smarter than Mephistopheles P. Moote! I doubt that, but if she seems to be about to solve it—if she seems even close—we will take care of her, my dear.” He chuckled nastily. “Witches aren’t immortal, you know. A witch can die.”

  The woman laughed too, a low, throaty sound in the dark. “Yes,” she said. “A witch can certainly die.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Friday came and went peacefully. Lewis began to hope that everything might be all right, after all. On Saturday the newspaper reported that the last portion of the old bridge had been removed. Nothing, apparently, had happened to the workmen.

  On Saturday too, a delivery truck pulled up in front of 100 High Street, and Uncle Jonathan signed for an assortment of mysterious packages, one of them taller than Lewis himself. Uncle Jonathan told Lewis to ask Rose Rita over if he wanted. He did, and only when she arrived did Uncle Jonathan consent to unpack all the boxes.

  “Wow!” Lewis exclaimed when they had opened the tall one. It was a gleaming white tube with black metal fittings. Lewis knew what it was right away. “A telescope!”

  “A good one, I hope,” Uncle Jonathan stated. “I paid enough for it! It’s an eight-inch reflector with a focal length of sixty-four inches. There’s also a spotting scope, a pedestal mount with an electric motor, mounting rings, and eyepieces that will give you anywhere from thirty to five h
undred magnification. I, uh, thought backyard astronomy might be an interesting hobby.”

  They had a fine time assembling the instrument. As he and Uncle Jonathan were carefully attaching the tube to the mount, Lewis said, “I bet I know why you have to have a motor. The moon and stars and planets move, and the telescope has to move to keep them in sight.”

  “The Earth moves,” corrected Rose Rita. “The stars seem to move because the Earth is rotating.”

  Uncle Jonathan had been kneeling as he finished the job. He stood up and took out a big bandana handkerchief to wipe his hands. He had a splotch of oil across his nose too that he didn’t even notice. “There!” he said. “What a beauty! If it’s clear tonight, we’ll try it out.” He took his gold pocket watch from a bottom vest pocket and said, “We’ve taken up most of the afternoon with this! I wonder if Gravel Gertie is home. Rose Rita, call Mrs. Zimmermann and ask her if she’d like to come over and see one of the wonders of the twentieth century.”

  Rose Rita ran to the phone. A minute later she came back and said, “She just got in from the library. She’ll be right over.”

  “Good,” said Uncle Jonathan. “Think she’ll be impressed?”

  “I think she’ll be more impressed if you get the smudge off your nose,” said Rose Rita.

  Uncle Jonathan laughed and swabbed his face with the bandana. A moment later Mrs. Zimmermann walked in without knocking. She was carrying a manila folder, and she shook her head and clucked her tongue when she saw the telescope. “That must have cost a mint.”

  “It was pretty expensive, but since Grandpa left me a pile of money and I’ve invested wisely,” Jonathan explained, “I thought I’d indulge myself. Care to join us tonight for a little stargazing? Afterward, I thought I’d conjure up the Battle of the Nile, for the pleasure and edification of all!”

  Jonathan and Lewis hauled the telescope to the center of the backyard, where they would have a reasonably good view of the heavens. Mrs. Zimmermann stood beside Rose Rita, watching them wrestle the instrument into place. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. “If you’re going to be serious about this astronomy, Frazzle Face, you’re going to have to get that thing up higher, where trees won’t block your view. Maybe you can knock a hole in the ceiling of Castle Barnavelt and put an observatory dome there!”

  “Maybe,” agreed Jonathan cheerfully. “Or maybe I’ll buy the Hawaii House and take the roof off that sleeping porch on the top. That would be a dandy place for a telescope.”

  Lewis wasn’t really sure if his uncle was kidding or not. The Hawaii House stood a few streets away in New Zebedee. The man who had built it back in the 1800’s had been a representative of the United States government to the Sandwich Islands, which was what the Hawaiian Islands were called back then. After spending years there, the man had retired to New Zebedee and had built a spectacular house in the style of a tropical mansion. Among its features was a sleeping verandah on the roof. In Hawaii the heat at night would have made that a comfortable bedroom, though in Michigan’s climate it couldn’t be used more than a few months a year. In fact, local people said that the original builder of the Hawaii House died one January night when he decided to sleep there and froze solid.

  They played with the telescope for a while, with Uncle Jonathan showing Mrs. Zimmermann how the electric motor worked and how the eyepieces slid into their little tube. He aimed the telescope at the top of a fairly distant tree and adjusted the spotting scope, which was a much smaller telescope attached to the main one. It was easy to aim, and when a target was lined up, the large telescope also showed the same thing. Lewis peered into the 6ox eyepiece, which made everything look sixty times closer than it was. Still, Lewis was amazed at how crisp and clear every leaf appeared. He also noticed that the tree looked upside down in the eyepiece.

  “That’s because this is an astronomical telescope,” declared Uncle Jonathan. “It flips the image top to bottom, so when you look at the moon through it, north is at the bottom and south is at the top.” He looked around. “Say, where is Rose Rita?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lewis. “I’ll go find her.” He ran to the kitchen door and almost collided with her. “Where were you?” Lewis asked.

  In a loud voice, Rose Rita said, “I had to visit the bathroom.” Then, whispering to Lewis, she added, “I was really looking at the stuff Mrs. Zimmermann brought over in the folder. Want to hear about it?”

  Lewis turned and said, “Uncle Jonathan, we’re gonna watch some TV.”

  His uncle waved at him. Lewis and Rose Rita went to the front parlor. Lewis switched on the TV, and when it warmed up, he found a Detroit Tigers baseball game. “That was kind of sneaky of you,” he said to Rose Rita.

  “I know,” replied Rose Rita. “I’m not exactly proud of myself, but I thought it had to be done. Mrs. Zimmermann’s been looking up stuff about the Clabbernongs. Want to hear?”

  Lewis said, “I guess I’d better.”

  “Okay.” Rose Rita began to hold up fingers as she counted off the items in the folder. “First, there’s a photocopy of a newspaper article from the twenties about the Clabbernong place. Some scientists thought the plants were infected by a fungus, but they couldn’t track it down. The fellow who had bought the farm just moved away and abandoned it. Second, there’s an obituary about Elihu Clabbernong from 1947. It just says he died of acute pneumonia and that he was eighty-four years old. Third, there’s a piece of paper with ‘Mephistopheles P. Moote, Attorney-at-Law’ written on it, and an office address in Kalamazoo.”

  Lewis frowned. “Wasn’t that the name of Elihu’s lawyer?”

  “You bet it was,” said Rose Rita. “I think we ought to investigate him.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to,” argued Lewis. “Nothing’s happened so far. Maybe we should leave the farm alone, and—”

  “Your uncle doesn’t think so,” Rose Rita pointed out. “And neither do I.”

  “But why do we need to rock the boat?” asked Lewis, his tone woeful.

  Rose Rita shook her head in a pitying way. “All right,” she said. “If you’re too scared to help me—”

  “I didn’t say that!” protested Lewis. He knew he had lost the argument already. “What do you think we ought to do?” he asked.

  “Lots of things,” answered Rose Rita. “See if this lawyer, Moote, knows anything. Figure out that peculiar paragraph from Elihu Clabbernong’s will. Find out if anybody has made sense of Jebediah’s crazy journal. Keep an eye out.”

  “All right,” agreed Lewis. “But promise me that if we can’t turn anything up by next week, we’ll forget the whole thing. Okay? I don’t want this to be my life’s work or anything.”

  “Bored already?” asked Rose Rita with a crooked smile. “Hey, Lewis, I’m just as scared as you are. But that doesn’t mean we can leave our friends in the lurch.”

  “You can’t be as scared as I am,” grumbled Lewis. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  * * *

  All went well that evening, up to a point. Mrs. Zimmermann dryly observed that her Saturday-evening dinners were getting to be a habit, but for all her pretend grumpiness she prepared a delicious meal: tender roast chicken, some incredibly sweet fresh corn on the cob, mounds of bright green peas dripping with butter sauce, and some wonderful home-baked rolls, with a piping hot apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert. Afterward, Lewis and Rose Rita pitched in to help with the dishes, while Jonathan went out into the backyard and fiddled with the telescope as the sun sank and it became dark.

  By the time Lewis, Rose Rita, and Mrs. Zimmermann all trooped outside, a few stars were glittering overhead. The moon was a little more than half full, and Uncle Jonathan had aimed the telescope at it. “Lewis,” he said, “want to take a peek at the surface of another world?”

  Lewis squinted through the eyepiece at the image of the moon, glaring white in places, smooth and gray in others. The craters, especially near its ragged edge, were pools of jet black. The magnifi
ed face of the moon shimmered a little. Lewis found it absolutely enchanting.

  Rose Rita took her turn next, then Mrs. Zimmermann. “Very pretty,” she said. “Any planets up there?”

  “Sure,” replied Jonathan. “Let me make a few adjustments.” He swung the telescope tube around, peered through the spotting scope, and then twiddled some knobs. “Take a look at this,” he said.

  Lewis again was first. He saw a pale yellow disk with a thin white ring around it. “Saturn!” he said.

  “A-plus!” boomed Uncle Jonathan with a chuckle. “Don’t hog the eyepiece, now!”

  After they had all taken a look, Jonathan asked, “Any more special requests?”

  In an innocent-sounding voice, Rose Rita asked, “Are there any comets we could look at?”

  Lewis almost felt a chill in the air. Then Jonathan coughed and said, “There’s supposed to be one. I’ll have to line up the telescope with the setting circles, though. You can’t see the comet yet with a small instrument like the spotting scope. Let me see.” He fooled with the setting circles, looked in the eyepiece, and made more adjustments. Finally he said, “See what you think.”

  Lewis saw a fuzzy star with a bright red center. Then he realized that the blur around the star was really the coma, the part of a comet’s tail that surrounds the icy head. With the aid of the telescope, Lewis could make out the tail itself, stretching away from the central red glare at an angle. “Does it have a name?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” said Uncle Jonathan. “It’s got a number, though. If what the magazines say is correct, we’ll be able to see it next week without a telescope. It’s whizzing in pretty fast.” After everyone else had looked at the comet, Uncle Jonathan said, “Let’s call it a night. Tell you what: We’ll have our special show on Monday. The Fourth of July deserves a few fireworks.”

  Lewis agreed, but only halfheartedly. His uncle clearly dreaded something.

  And that only made Lewis feel more apprehensive than ever.