Lurking

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.