The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge (5 page)

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 humor?

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!

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.

“Just don't fall and break your neck, you old fool,” returned the woman in a sour, flat voice. “Not now. Not when the time is so close.”

The old man straightened his back with a jerk and waved his walking stick at her. “Nyahh-hhh!” Leaning on the cane again, he limped to the rear of the car and watched as the woman unlocked the trunk and took out something long and tubular. In the dimness it looked like a five-foot length of cardboard tubing used to wrap carpets around. She carefully set this on end, then took out a heavy wooden tripod. “Where do you want me to set it up?” she asked.

The man gestured wildly with his cane. “Anywhere!
Anywhere! We know the altitude and the azimuth, so it's all the same! Just find a good level spot. Hurry!”

With the folded tripod under one arm, the woman walked toward the old bridge. Though the workmen had changed the course of Wilder Creek Road, a short strip of asphalt leading onto the old bridge had not been torn up. She set the tripod on this. It snapped open with a clack, and she grunted as she tightened the legs. The tripod supported a heavy-looking mount of some kind.

When the woman finished with the tripod, she went back to get the tube. The old man walked beside her on the way to the car and back, grumbling and complaining the whole time. The woman refused to be hurried. Moving slowly but with assurance, as if she had done the same thing in the dark hundreds of times, she attached the tube to the mount. Twirling some round chrome knobs, she tilted the tube up toward the sky, and at last anyone could have seen it was a reflecting telescope, the kind that uses a mirror instead of a lens to magnify the image.

Humming a slow, gloomy tune, the woman fitted an eyepiece into its holder on the side of the tube. Then from her coat pocket she took a penlight with a red bulb. She switched it on. In the faint, ruddy glow, she adjusted first the tripod, then the telescope, studying a compass and two metal rings that were set into the mount. The rings were etched with lines and numbers, as if they were some kind of circular ruler. When the woman seemed satisfied with the numbers showing on each ring, she
switched off the penlight and dropped it back into her pocket.

She pushed a button on the telescope mount, and a clockwork motor began ticking softly. “That should be right,” she said. In a sarcastic, sneering tone, she added, “Should I check the view, or do you want to have the first look, O great lord and master?”

“Shut up, shut up!” snarled the old man, his voice trembling with anger. “I'll look! You wouldn't know it if you saw it!”

The woman sniffed, but she didn't reply. The man hobbled to the telescope, and being careful not to touch the tube, he peered into the eyepiece. Muttering, he twiddled a knob to focus the instrument. At once he broke into a delighted cackle. “I see it!” he announced. “I see it! Beautiful! Like a hairy little red star, and right smack in the center of the field of view. Oh, well done, my darling wife! Just think, the last time it came toward Earth, the inhabitants of lost Atlantis cowered beneath its light! Fourteen thousand years have passed, and now the Red Star returns!”

“It's a comet, you old fool,” returned the woman. “Well? Do I get a look?”

The old man stepped away from the telescope. “Certainly, my dear Ermine. Gaze upon it. Look your fill.” As the woman bent over the eyepiece, the man stared up into the dark night sky. He said, “It is still invisible to the naked eye. But it is coming closer every moment. Soon, soon it will blaze in the sky! And our hour will come
around at last!” The idea seemed to move him. He shook with a sob.

The woman did not look up from the eyepiece. The old man fished a crumpled handkerchief from his trouser pocket and limped toward the old bridge, wiping his eyes and blowing his nose. He stopped at the very edge of the bridge, staring down into a swirl of dark water. There was nothing to see but a rippling reflection of the faint moon. Suddenly the surface boiled with a gurgling foam of bubbles, phosphorescent in the night. The old man laughed. “Soon, my pet, soon! Soon you will be free to do the bidding of Mephistopheles Moote! And a world full of fools will bow and cringe before me!”