Chapter 51 - The Plunge into the Abyss
The engine screamed like a dying leviathan.
Through the forward windows, Clara and Caleb could see the terrifying black void of the Devil's Chasm looming through the snowstorm. Just five hundred yards ahead, the twin ribbons of steel track abruptly ended in empty space, suspended hundreds of feet above the roaring, razor-sharp rocks of the canyon floor.
"We have to decouple the rear cars!" Caleb shouted over the roar of the rushing wind, grabbing Clara's arm and dragging her toward the back platform.
The velocity was pinning them against the vibrating steel. Below the coupling plate, the iron pin was twisted, jammed tight by the force of the runaway engine's torque.
Caleb picked up a discarded heavy iron crowbar, wedging it beneath the rusted pin. "Help me lever it! If we drop the rear coach, the emergency drag chains will catch the railbed before the drop!"
Together, they threw their entire weight onto the iron bar. The metal groaned. The pin began to inch upward—one inch, two inches.
Ahead, the black chasm rushed toward them at sixty miles an hour. Three hundred yards. Two hundred yards.
With a final, desperate roar, Caleb shoved the bar down.
*CLANG!*
The coupling pin snapped free. The rear parlor car shuddered violently as its undercarriage dropped onto the ties, throwing sparks thirty feet into the black night, slowing down by inches.
But the momentum did not stop.
The car skidded to the very lip of the abyss. The front wheels punched through the end-stops, tilting downward into the howling, bottomless void.
The carriage swung wildly in the mountain gale, teetering on a forty-five-degree angle, balanced between the icy cliff edge and the dark river far below.
Inside the tipped car, Clara was sliding down the slick mahogany floor toward the open rear door, her fingers clawing desperately at the splintered rug. The black ledger and the deed slipped from her grasp, tumbling into the endless dark.
"Clara! Take my hand!"
Caleb hung from the twisted doorframe with one arm, his fingers stretching out across the terrifying drop.
May you like
Their fingertips brushed.
Far down the gorge, the roar of the shattered locomotive echoed as it smashed into the canyon floor. And then, from the cliff edge above, the sound of tearing iron shrieked as the carriage's remaining chain began to snap, link by link...
