Gone In A Flash

Chapter 13: Sunday (4)

Please be warned for offscreen violence and murder in this chapter, as well as some onscreen blood! Nothing too graphic, but it's there. Stay safe! :D

Chapter 13: Sunday (4)

The area beyond the double oak doors resembled no less than a throne room. Draped with decadent black and white velvet on every wall, with patterned grey carpeting and everything leading up to a short set of stairs with a - yes, that was an actual throne, right there - it was exactly the sort of place you'd expect the Count Von Viscount, in all his overdramatic glory, to hang out in.

There were bloodstains all over the floor, and -

On the throne itself - because there was really no other word for the elegantly carved ebony chair taking up the centre of the room - was another slumped figure, and this one wasn't moving at all.

Hitch approached cautiously, gun at the ready.

The man in the chair was slouching, with his head turned upwards. He was dressed in a style that one might call old-fashioned, or perhaps Victorian - he certainly would put you in mind of a vampire, or a villain from an old B-movie. It was very much black and white. Part of his coat had fluttered upwards at some point, to cover most of his face.

His fingers were splayed almost delicately over the armrests, as if he were about to raise them at any moment, ready to conduct an imaginary orchestra. He seemed out of place and frozen in time, as if somebody had paused a recording of him and transplanted the image into real life.

It was unmistakable who he was.

"The Count," Hitch murmured, and nudged the man none-too-gently with his foot, causing his coat to flap aside, covering more of his face and exposing his undershirt.

A dark red stain had begun to creep across his chest at some point, but had been frozen either when he had run out of blood to let or when time had simply dried it up. The Count Von Viscount was most definitely dead, and had been for a while.

Hitch stepped back, and took a few seconds to simply process the fact that the man who had plagued the lives of Spectrum agents for so long was now gone, permanently - and in the most melodramatic way possible, too - a gunshot to the chest seemed like an apt way for the movie director-turned-villain to go.

He wondered briefly just who had done the deed. Had it been one of his employees, or a superior, or even just some rogue vigilante-?

Hitch leaned forward, and readjusted the coat that had fallen across the dead man's face, so his features could be easily seen. As he did, he let out a low, shocked whistle. Whoever had killed the Count obviously hadn't felt that it was enough to just shoot him in the chest - they had done the same to his head, too. It barely even resembled a human face anymore. The Count's long nose and chiselled cheekbones had been reduced to so much bloody, torn meat. Bits of his skull were visible through the pulp. Not a pretty way to go, even for the most evil of men.

He froze for a long moment as he spotted something else - fingerprints, on the side of the Count's face that had been untouched by the destruction. They were small fingerprints, and couldn't have belonged to anybody but a child, or maybe a teenager.

No, he thought, she couldn't have-

And then he went over the facts in his head.

One - apart from Ruby and the now-deceased Count, Hitch hadn't seen anybody at all in the area inside the mountain. The entire place seemed utterly deserted.

Two - there was apparently only one way out and in, and that way had been locked off for the past couple of hours.

Three - when he had last seen Ruby, all of two minutes ago, she had been covered in blood- and she had said it wasn't hers.