Chapter 59 - Shadows over the Black River
The wooden planks of the old covered bridge groaned violently beneath their weight as Arthur dragged Vance into the tunnel.
The roof of the bridge had partially rotted away, letting diagonal curtains of snow slice through the skeletal rafters.
Below them, eighty feet down through the broken floorboards, the Black River surged beneath sheets of black, jagged ice.
Vance could barely put weight on his left leg now, his consciousness flickering like a dying lightbulb.
He fell against the heavy oak railing, his breathing shallow and erratic.
Arthur propped him behind a structural support beam, checking the magazine of his rifle; only nine rounds remained.
Heavy footsteps echoed at the entrance of the bridge, deliberate and unhurried.
Arthur raised the weapon, peering around the beam into the swirling darkness of the tunnel.
Dr. Davenport stepped into the amber glow of the bridge's single surviving maintenance lantern, limping heavily.
He was no longer the cultured, refined medical director Arthur had met in the interrogation room.
His face was blackened with soot, his coat torn, and in his right hand, he carried a 12-gauge tactical pump shotgun.
Davenport called out to Arthur, his voice echoing wetly against the hollow timbers.
He said that Vance was dead whether Arthur surrendered or not; internal hemorrhaging would take him before sunrise.
He promised that if Arthur laid down the rifle, Eleanor would keep him alive in a private facility in Switzerland under heavy sedation.
He said it was the only mercy left on the table.
Arthur stepped out from behind the beam, the rifle aimed squarely at Davenport’s chest.
Arthur asked him how much Eleanor was paying him to sell his soul to a monster.
Davenport chuckled, a low, rasping sound that rattled with madness.
He confessed that it had never been about the money; it was about the art of absolute behavioral erasure.
He said Eleanor was the most brilliant psychological specimen he had ever studied, an apex predator devoid of all human weakness.
From the far end of the bridge, a sudden sharp crack sounded as a board snapped.
Arthur didn't turn, but his peripheral vision caught the ghostly white outline moving along the exterior maintenance cat-walk.
Eleanor was flanking them, moving over the sheer drop of the river like a phantom on the ice.
Vance suddenly yelled with his last breath, firing his .38 blindly toward the high rafters above Davenport’s head.
The bullet severed an ancient, rusted pulley holding a counterweight for the bridge’s snow-clearing shutter.
A three-hundred-pound block of pig iron dropped from the roof trusses like a guillotine.
Davenport looked up just in time to see the iron shadow before it struck him full in the chest.
The impact pulverized his ribcage with a sickening crunch, crushing him straight through the rotten bridge floor.
His scream was cut short as his body plummeted into the roaring black current eighty feet below, swallowed instantly by the ice.
Arthur spun around just as Eleanor kicked through the rotting side slats of the bridge.
She wasn't holding a gun anymore; she was holding the heavy bronze candlestick she had carried from the parlor of Ravenscliff.
Her eyes were wide, wild, and completely detached from sanity.
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She hissed that she had given Arthur life, given him a name, and that she would beat his brains onto the snow before she let him betray her.
She lunged at him with demonic speed, bringing the heavy bronze weapon down with lethal, bone-cracking force.
