The frozen lake cracked beneath his feet. But how? The ice was thick and with the colder days and nights it was frozen solid a few feet deep. He took another step forward and did not hear another cracking sound, so he cautiously moved along. After a few more steps, he heard another crack with a bit of a vibration that shook through him. Getting down on his hands and knees and falling slowly into a flat position on his stomach to even out his weight upon the ice, he decided to crawl back the quarter of a mile he had already endured in the darkness. The winter weather had a cold to it, that he could feel on his face bare to the elements, but he was a tough guy who lived in this area for the last fifty years of his life and he was used to it. With the lamp light on his toque dimming as he forgot to replace the batteries that morning, he could see enough of the ice in front of him and the crack forming. It was coming up from the bottom and it had volume to it in width. Something he had never witnessed before and it confused him.

With all the stories of a few disappearances in this particular lake, he didn't want to be one of them and just wanted to get home from a long twelve hour day at work. After all it was his day off tomorrow and he wanted to enjoy it ice skating on this lake with his three teen kids, so it was good that he was sort of testing this out now, he thought to himself, bringing confidence to the fear that was dwelling inside of him. At this part of the lake he knew it was two hundred feet deep as he fished it in the summer times. He would sink fast if he went through the ice and drown, but what worried him more was, would they find his body? They didn't find the bodies of those that drowned, even though their drownings were witnessed by others. Where did the bodies go?

He had managed to crawl about ten feet, when he felt another thud under the ice and could hear the slow crack upon him. It wasn't the crack that caught his attention, but the thud that came before it and he felt it to his inner core. "What is that?" he asked himself. The headlight on his helmet was dimming even more, and because there was no snow on the ice, he was able to see something, large and dark, under the ice, moving too fast for him to be comfortable just laying there on his stomach. Once realizing it wasn't his weight causing the ice to crack, but something lurking underneath it became a good time to stand up, run and get off the ice.

Once fully standing, he wasn't sure if he should head back the way he came or keep on going to get home. The ice was not cracking beneath him, by his own weight or cause, so he knew he could make it the other quarter mile to home. Seeing the lights of his house in the distance, made him confident in his decision to move forward. As slow as he was going across the lake ice, he felt he could make it in ten minutes with the cold snapping wind against him. He took a few more steps and THUD, this time more violent with a shake running through his body instilling a deeper fear. Should I run, he thought. Being this dark without moonlight he could possibly fall into a hole in the lake, if one was there. He was polluting his own mind with the thoughts of the two men that disappeared crossing the ice on the lake at night, through holes that no one knew how they were made. That wasn't his nature, to be paranoid.

He lived at the end of an eleven mile long lake and at his end of the lake it was a mile wide. The roads were closed to his place as the old unpaved logging road was snowed in, every winter. So he walked across the lake five days a week in the winter to his friends house, where he stored his own truck to get to work. Walking across that lake in the mornings was like walking on it at night....dark, silent and sometimes just eerie in it's surroundings, unless a good moonlight was upon it, lighting up the lake, giving it a refreshing feel in it's sight.

Two loud vibrating thuds this time, and the cracking noise lasted a good five seconds and not your typical second. That worried him and then THUD again and this time he didn't care what was ahead of him in his last quarter mile to get home, he started running, mustering up the strength through adrenaline. With his work sack on his back and heavy steel toed boots, and the wind against him, he felt he was getting no where. It seemed time just stood still even though with his running he could see the house lights ahead as they bounced in his vision. For sure he thought to himself, he could make it. He opted to remain optimistic. What could be living in the lake that was so large it could crack thick ice from below? It scared him thinking about it and he just kept up a slow jog as quick as his tired fifty year old body would take him. Never a man to pray, he mumbled out in breathlessness, "God help me", as a paranoid fear took over his emotions.

Then he heard a ripping of the ice ahead of him, that sounded like something came through it and with the light of his helmet now dark as the batteries had died, he knew he could be in serious trouble. His visual of anything became obsolete, except for the lights of his house in the distance, which he just kept running too.

Deidre Hall

@Deidre

Deidre Hall has not written a story.