SECRETS IN THE ICE

SECRETS IN THE ICE TRAILER

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EXCERPT

Chapter One

The early evening mist moved gradually across the frozen lake’s surface and between the trees, enveloping cabins and boats in a ghostly motion, claiming ownership over every part of the town.

Tim fell in and out of sleep this evening, and wasn’t sure which part was real and which was a dream.  This was going to be another restless night in Upper Michigan, as his thoughts drifted back to looking across the lake.  It didn’t take long before he was in another world again.

He trudged through the deep snow as he made his way to the lake, his boots crunching noisily as he walked through the thick woods, holding on to branches as he stepped over fallen logs.  Following a snow-covered path through the woods, it was challenging to see where to step.  Tim was a strong, six-foot outdoorsman, who spent a lot of time outside even in the winter.  A carpenter by trade, he could fix any problem his neighbors had around Kisinaw Lake and in Manitow, and was well-liked by everyone he worked with.

The clean smell of white pines and cedars was barely noticeable throughout the woods this time of year, but he didn’t slow down to savor it the way he usually did.  Fresh snow dusted the tree branches and covered the ground.  It was a beautiful scene, but he was not in a state of mind to stop and take in the view.  The cedar trees had snow on every branch, like a store bought Christmas tree made up perfectly in a window display,

EXCERPT

but he clumsily knocked the branches on his way past these silent giants.  The trees just stood there, as they had for many years, not interfering, unable to reach out to him.  Loud and noticeable, each breath escaped his mouth and nostrils like smoke from a chimney.  With no sounds of traffic from the nearby highway, Tim heard only the noises he made as he continued his solitary march through the woods.

Eventually, the path led up to the frozen lake, where he stood and looked out over the ice for a minute.  Along the lake’s edge, a thinly drawn line separated where the land ended and the lake began.  Spectacular.  Many of the trees leaned out over the lake as though they offered something to the water or pointed out hidden secrets.  Tim eased his way down the two-foot drop from the woods to the icy surface, but slipped when his shoes met the ice.  He slid on his back for several feet onto the frozen lake, but immediately got up and walked out farther.

He felt as though he was wrapped in a blanket of silence, hearing no signs of life, not even from the residents living around the lake or from the train that regularly traveled alongside the highway about this time.  He only recognized the sounds of his own labored breathing and his hard footsteps as they crushed the ice crystals on the frozen surface.  By this time, the cold air burned as he breathed it in, but he was used to feeling like this from all the times he spent outside this time of year working on a neighbor’s roof or fixing a shed.

He looked down at the ice as he walked carefully, like a toddler planning each step, then after a couple of minutes, he stopped.  Tim thought he heard something from the woods along the edge of the lake.  He looked up, followed the shoreline with his eyes, and saw the cabin set back into the trees.  The dark stained log cabin had snow on the roof and looked much like an island in a sea of white with cedar and birch trees on each side.

Tim was no more than twenty yards from shore when he stopped to catch his breath and listen for another sound.  His mouth was dry, but he ignored his thirst.  While standing in the stillness of the cold air, something moved slightly in the ice under his hiking boots and he tried to stabilize himself.  The ice was getting thinner now with the warmer weather on its way, and it wouldn’t be able to support a man’s weight for much longer.  He wondered if he was on a thin section of the ice now.

A hand punched up through the surface of the ice and grabbed one of his ankles.  The pale, bluish-grey hand didn’t look healthy; in fact it looked like old, rotted flesh.  Tim felt as though he might lose his balance and fall through the ice, when another grisly hand reached up through the thin ice and grabbed his other leg.  Terror engulfed him as he looked down at the ice cracking below him.  Horrible faces with blank white eyes peered up at him through the ice with anticipation.  The ice gave way beneath him with a loud crack and as he fell, he reached out grasping at anything in a panicked effort to keep his head from going under the black water.  Rotting hands beneath the surface kept pulling him down by his legs as he struggled to get himself back up onto the ice.  Another hand reached up from the freezing water behind him, grabbed the top of his head, and pulled him backward as Tim’s hands slid helplessly across the icy surface.  Unable to hold himself up any longer, he was pulled down into the darkness of the cold water.

Tim woke up from the dream gasping for breath and sat up quickly, covered with sweat, as he looked around the room terrified.  He was in the cabin from his dream, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he eventually saw things in the room that brought him back to reality: the pictures of his parents on the wall, the knick-knacks he bought in town on the shelves, the familiar lamps on the dressers, all helped him to relax a little bit and realize he just woke up from a nightmare.  He fell back on the pillow, breathing hard just like in his dream, and stared up into the dim light of the cabin for several minutes.

He had been staying in the cabin for almost a year, and this wasn’t the first nightmare he experienced while living there.  Some of the townspeople warned him it was haunted, but he told everyone he didn’t believe in ghosts.  After this nightmare, he wasn’t so certain anymore.  It had all seemed so real, and his heart pounded even after being awake for several minutes. Everything in the dream was accurate and vividly clear: the way the path looked after a snowfall, the way the cabin looked from the frozen lake, and even the faint winter smells of the trees as he walked by them in the dream.

It was still dark, and Tim wanted desperately to fall back to sleep.  However, a pulse of fear gripped him mercilessly at the thought of having another terrible dream.  As far as he could remember, he hadn’t experienced any nightmares except for when he was a little child, but since he started staying at the cabin, this was the third or fourth one.  Could there truly be something with this cabin that gave him these realistic night terrors?  Fortunately, his exhausted body won out over his fear, and he dozed off again for a few hours of restless sleep.