The Beast Under the Wizard's Bridge Read Online Free Page A

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. Jonathan 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 ifhe 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.
    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.”
    â€œOh,” 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