Chapter 78 - The Trestle Above the Void
We burst through the rusted iron exit door of the tunnel out onto the eastern trestle of the Mount Washington Cog Railway.
The sudden onslaught of the blizzard took my breath away. The wind shrieked at seventy miles an hour across the knife-edge ridge, whipping blinding sheets of horizontal snow that cut into our exposed skin like shards of glass.
We were suspended on an open timber-and-steel railroad trestle, hanging four thousand feet above the Great Gulf Wilderness. Below us, an abyss of swirling white fog and black granite drop-offs vanished into infinite darkness. The narrow wooden ties of the track were coated in a thick, slick glaze of rime ice.
Fifty feet ahead on the trestle stood Evelyn.
She was kneeling beside the massive mechanical housing of the cog-wheel gear mechanism—the central drive assembly that held the cog cars from sliding into the abyss. She had jammed the heavy bronze wrench into the gear teeth, preparing to trip the emergency cable release that would plunge the entire track assembly into the gorge below, cutting off any pursuit forever.
"Evelyn!" I screamed against the howling gale, fighting to keep my footing on the frozen ties, shielding Lily behind my body.
Evelyn whipped around. The wind had torn her hair free from its severe bun, whipping black strands across her wild, blood-streaked face. Her cashmere coat was drenched in melted snow, looking more like soaked crimson rags.
"Stay back!" she shrieked, her voice barely carrying over the storm. "Don't take another step, Claire, or I drop this entire trestle into the canyon!"
"You'll drop yourself with it!" I shouted back, taking one slow, agonizing step forward, testing the ice beneath my woolen socks. "There’s nowhere left to run, Evelyn! Look around you! The board isn't coming for you! The police are waiting at the base station! Julian survived! It’s over!"
"It isn't over until I have that cipher!" she screamed, pointing a trembling, frostbitten finger at Lily. "The silver drive in the ballroom—it played Father's voice, yes! But do you know what he said right before the tape cut off? He said, *'The kingdom belongs to the child who remembers the hymn.'* The hymn Mother sang! The frequencies are embedded in the analog coil inside that locket!"
Lily stepped out from behind me, her eyes wide, staring at the woman who was her aunt.
"Mom told me the hymn," Lily said, her small voice cutting through the wind with an eerie, piercing clarity. "She sang it to me every night when we were cold. She didn't sing it for the money, Aunt Evelyn. She sang it so I wouldn't be afraid."
Evelyn froze, her chest heaving, her manic gaze locking onto my daughter. For a brief, fleeting moment, a ghost of human sorrow flickered across her features, as if the memory of our mother had touched a long-dead nerve deep within her calcified soul.
Then, her face twisted back into a mask of pure, unadulterated venom.
"Then give it to me," Evelyn whispered, reaching her bloody hand out over the void. "Give me the locket, Lily. And maybe I let your mother live."
May you like
*00:30.*
A low, resonant horn echoed from the summit above us. The mountain core had completed its diagnostic loop. The automated sequence was initiating.
