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

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 seemore 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.
    â€œI’m afraid of tunnels,” said Rose Rita.
    Lewis remembered that Rose Rita had a bad case ofclaustrophobia. 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