Dead Waters - Anton Strout [60]
“What’s the Hell Gate Bridge?” I asked.
Elyse turned to me, suspicion in her eyes. “Excuse me?” she said.
“One of the notebooks fluttered open when they fell and the name caught my eye,” I lied.
Elyse seemed to buy the story, and once she finished putting everything down, she wandered back over to me.
“It’s one of the more structurally sound old-world bridges around Manhattan,” she said. “Hell Gate actually refers to the strait beneath the bridge. It comes from the Dutch phrase hellegat, which means both ‘hell gate’ as well as ‘bright passage,’ which was the name originally given to the entire East River.”
“Sure you’re not a history major?” I asked. “You sure have a lot of New York knowledge.”
“I should,” she said. “Professor Redfield was making a documentary on the bridge. It was the project he was working on, before. . . you know.”
“Gotcha,” I said. My spider-sense started to tingle. Was there something more sinister to its history than just its name? Was the East River a portal to Hell or something along those lines? It seemed kind of ludicrous, but Other Division did deal with the ludicrous on a pretty regular basis.
“So the professor was working on a documentary?” I asked. “Seems strange, given his filmic proclivities.”
“How do you mean?” Elyse said.
“You know. . . with his love of old-school horror and monster movies of the Sinbad variety,” I said. “Urban architecture just seems like a strange choice, is all.”
“Not really,” Elyse said, stiffening a little. “Do you only watch one kind of movies? I mean, genre cinema was his passion, but his scope wasn’t limited to just that. You don’t teach at NYU long if you can’t reach beyond your own personal passions. I mean, for instance, I dance, sing, and act, but I wouldn’t define myself through just any one of those things. Neither would Professor Redfield. But if you’re looking for a link to his love of all things horror film, the name of the bridge was Hell Gate. I think that appealed to Professor Redfield’s sense of horror, the kind that exists in the real world.”
“Bridges inspire a sense of horror?” I asked.
“They hold their own dark histories, don’t they?” she asked, putting on a dark dramatic tone, setting a bit of spooky mood.
I still wasn’t getting what she was driving at. “Such as. . . ?”
“Hell Gate was built as a commuter bridge,” she said. “We’re talking all kinds of potential chaos with that. Train accidents, people getting run down, jumpers. . . you name it.”
Just her delivery of her little speech here was enough to give me the chills. Elyse would graduate and find herself a working actress for sure. I stepped away from her and headed over to the closest computer station, where George was working.
“So, what?” I asked. “You’re going to finish the documentary for the dearly departed professor?”
Elyse danced around me with a graceful twirl, cutting me off before I could get over to George and his machine. “There are several projects of his that we’re working on.”
I tried looking past her at whatever George was doing, but Elyse kept her eyes locked on mine and kept in my way. “I’d love to see it sometime,” I said.
Elyse’s face darkened. This time she didn’t look like she was acting. “I bet you would,” she said, becoming short with me. “Look. We’ve got a lot to do here, Simon, so if you don’t mind, we’d appreciate you leaving.”
“I will,” I said, “but I just thought—”
“I’m sure you think a lot of things,” Elyse said, cutting me off, “but here’s my thing. I’ve got a problem. I have to wonder how well you really knew the professor.”
I could face zombies in the street no problem, but trying to pretend like this had my heart beating out of my chest as her