He blinked. It wasn’t good, this ice. He knew what good ice was and the ice was bad. The ice seemed to be thin and sensitive ready open up and swallow Tim. He cast his eyes over the lake, looking for proof of its weakness. A vast crystallised shelf lay stretched about him. A wilderness of silence rang in his ears. Even the wind sounds were silent rushes of the force of nature rather than sporadic howls of confused velocity. Then for a moment even the air around him seemed to stop and he seemed caught in suspension, held there, a nonentity… a spirit floating above an endless sparkling landscape.
And then he saw it; The break in the ice which had seemingly appeared out of the blue. It was midway across the lake hit by a ray of moonlight, showing the waves lapping against the whiter lip of ice. It was all the reason he needed for getting out of here. Except there was a catch, as there almost always was in life, and the catch was a long object he had just spotted lying across the break. It was a log or something. It couldn’t be anything else, except… except that down deep he knew it wasn’t a log. It was that simple. Somehow, he knew that the object was a girl, her long jacket blowing slightly in the wind. Another skater, probably. Somebody like himself, stupid enough to skate over untested ice. Somebody who went out too far and freaked out when she saw that break. Somebody so scared, she’d just laid dawn, right where she was.
‘Hello?’ he yelled, his voice sounding too loud, scaring him. He yelled again: ‘Are you all right? Hello!’ The wind blew wet and cold against his face. Snow, he thought numbly. It’s snowing. ‘Hello!’ The girl lay silent, close to the water.
Tim wasn’t going out there. It was too dangerous. He would go for help, but he wasn’t going out there. He turned to go and couldn’t, not until he’d answered the question that kept buzzing in his head like an insect. Was the girl freezing and if he waited to go for help would it be too late? Was it a question of minutes, seconds? If he didn’t go out there and if the girl died, he’d never know if it was his fault. He felt a rush of anger. It wasn’t fair that he was out here alone and that he had to risk his own life and that he was so painfully cold, so cold that the pain of it was almost unbearable. Damn the girl who was putting him through this.
He began to walk, feeling his way, fearing the blades of his skates. He shouted one last time: ‘Hello! Hello!’ He could have sworn that somebody was listening to him. He could feel it and yet the silence was unbroken by human response. His throat was aching from swallowing the cold air. Could the girl be listening to him and not answering? The ice cracked under the blade of his left skate. Shuddering, he jerked his foot up. A line of water bubbled up through the crack. He watched it trickle along the ice, creating a line of weakness. It was madness to be out here. And the further he went, the deeper the water, the greater the danger. Why had the girl gone out so far? I’ll never make it he thought.
But he was so close, so damned close. He was not going to give up, now that he was so close. Quickly, trembling, he lowered himself on to the ice and began to crawl towards the girl, knives of pain stabbing through the palms of his hands, needles of pain pricking his whole body. The pain was worse than his fear. And the fear was bad.
He blinked cold tears out of his eyes and squinted. There was something about the girl’s jacket, blowing open in the wind. Why was the jacket open? Why not zipped up? The girl was close enough to touch now. He was positive that he recognized that jacket. Dark hooded jacket, with fur around the sleeves and hood. Oh, Jesus, he knew that jacket.
‘It’s me,’ he whispered, trembling. ‘ It’s Tim. Are you okay?’ The girl lay there, not moving. Not alive. Tim let himself think for the first time. He was afraid that the girl was dead. Violently, he took hold of her and began to shake her.
The moonlight shone thinly upon a blood-soaked jumper. Tim’s hands slid slowly from the girl’s body. He stared and then he turned her head to one side and began to vomit. He heaved for a full minute before he could begin to scream. The girl’s head had been neatly severed from her throat. It bobbed up and down in the waves, sightlessly, silently, like a ball floating in the middle of nowhere, her blonde hair wet and streaming over the water.
Tim turned away, his scream, hoarse yet loud enough, rising into the night like an evil vapour, its final choked note cut off in mid-tremble by a sudden rush of frigid air. Then all was silent.
Tim’s heart raced in his chest walls as he moved away, tried to move away, crawling his way back to safety. Behind him the silence was broken by a harsh cracking of branches and the hasty shuffling of an eerie shadow moving through the trees like a restless spectre roaming the world aimlessly. Tim’s body slackened and his pendulous legs began to give way.
The silhouette of someone or something emerged suddenly from the trees. Tim turned, saw slivers of moonlight move across his face, saw the girl’s face bob upright, eyes still open in a horrified gaze, saw blood frozen to her cheeks and the corners of her mouth, saw…
Suddenly, everything went pitch-black. Tim reached out, fell. Saw nothing.
Then, like ice suddenly placed on a burn, he felt the pain of his flesh vanish, felt himself drawn under, deeper into a dreaded void where his mind stopped, frozen in mid-thought forever.