The Song of the Thaw

If one had never spent time near a frozen lake, they’d be astonished by the cornucopia of sounds that emanated from such a body. People called it singing: the trills, chirps, and pings that resounded across the ice. Every tiny crack and minute shift was a note in an exotic chorus that was not to be heard anywhere else.

As winter yielded to spring, the tone of this symphony would shift. Little thuds began to join the chorus. Those strange, impish voices were drowned out by louder, harsher utterances. At first it was like the crackling of fire. Then came those twanging snaps like the severing of high tension wires. The great white veins that ran through the disintegrating ice were heralded by claps as from an alien thunderstorm. It was this song—the song of the thaw—that had Sheriff Janet Whaley’s nerves on end.

For days now, the cold crust of the lake had been fragmenting into smaller and smaller burgs. The ice was slick as Janet inched away from the shore. The runny ice lit up like gold under the sun, and it looked to Janet like her boots were slipping through quicksilver.

“Morgan!” she called out to the figure seated out on the lake. She’d been calling to the young woman for over ten minutes now. Others had gathered at the shoreline, hub-bubbing things like, “Someone’s got to go out there,” without producing any volunteers.

“Honey, you need to come in!”

Morgan Delaney was a skinny thing whom some of the towners described as moody, others sad. There’d been a noticeable skip in her normally sagging step of late, attributed to a newborn romance with one Peter Salazar. Why Morgan was now sitting disheveled out on the melting lake, nobody could guess. She was too far out for anyone to discern her expression, though tiny convulsions suggested that she was crying.

“Whatever’s wrong, we can talk about it,” Janet yelled. “Just come towards me.”

A large fissure roared into existence near the bank, and the onlookers jumped. Sparkling droplets leapt from the space between the drifting shards of ice. Janet’s heart raced. If the ice beneath Morgan cracked, if she fell into the freezing water and went into shock, if her body slid beneath an unbroken sheet—

“Morgan, please!” Janet begged. The young lady remained unresponsive.

“Here, sheriff!” Janet looked over her shoulder. One of the nearby residents had fetched a rowboat and was carefully pushing it like a shopping cart onto the ice.

The two proceeded forward with the little craft between them, hands on the sides, ready to leap in should the surface give out beneath them.

“Stay right there, don’t move,” Janet now instructed the young woman. At least this order she obeyed. For all Janet could tell, Morgan hadn’t even heard her. She might well have been lost in a world where the only sounds were her grief and the increasingly lethal song of the thawing lake.

They were half way to her now, a couple hundred feet from the shore. A crack forked across the ice like a lightning bolt, zipping past Morgan. Janet quickened her pace, the boat scraping along the ice, its owner huffing to keep up. Then another crack slithered across the first at a right angle, forming an X. “Please, Lord,” Janet mumbled. “Please, Lord, please, please, please....” There was a twang of breaking tension and suddenly Janet was thrown off balance. A loose fragment of the lake bobbed beneath her feet. Janet pitched forward over the gap and hit the ice with her knees.

The sheriff gripped the side of the boat for support. The lake cried out angrily. Janet looked up and saw as the area surrounding Morgan splintered and she disappeared in a shower of glistening particles. The young lady didn’t seem to mind or even notice as the lake swallowed her up. Janet screamed out her name, but by then Morgan could no longer hear her.

A week later the water had all but completely melted. The lake was dragged. People kept watch for Miss Delaney’s body on the beach. But the greedy lake seemed to be keeping this treasure for itself. And so the thaw ended, and the singing lake went silent.

* * *

Wanda was sunk up to her shoulder in the cushions of the couch. One naked foot rested on Peter’s lap. The other he kneaded with strong, warm fingers. His own bare feet were stretched toward a glowing fireplace. The light danced in Wanda’s eyes as she leered at him from beneath widespread lashes.

It was the heart of winter. The tragedy of the early spring had been forgotten. Peter’s was one of a row of little houses that faced the icy lake. The windows behind the couch were frosted and radiating cold, while waves of heat wafted from the crackling logs. Wanda found herself in that perfect middle space where the temperatures met, feeling both the excitement of the chill and comfort of the heat. She was like a slice of warm apple pie a la mode, and Peter—well, he was welcome to eat her up.

His fingers bent one of her toes until it cracked satisfactorily. He made his way down the row, crack, crack, cracking. Wanda hummed with delight. “Tell me a story,” she commanded.

“A story?” Peter smiled. “What kind of story?”

“I don’t know. Small towns always have weird stories, urban legends, scandals....” The pleasing rotations of Peter’s fingers slowed, and in the dancing light his gaze seemed to drift beyond Wanda, as if toward an unhappy memory. “Something wrong?” Wanda asked.

Peter shook off the melancholy like a dog shaking off water. “No, nothing. Let’s see, weird stories, urban legends. What about a ghost story?”

“Oooh, yes please,” said Wanda, her toes wriggling in a sudden thrill. The crackling of the fire seemed to intensify in anticipation of the tale to come.

Peter set her foot down and took up the other. “There was this kid, maybe eight or nine years old, who used to get bullied at the local elementary school. One day, the other kids get really out of control and start pushing him around. This one big bully-kid starts wailing on him. The little guy tries to be brave and fight back....”

The popping of the burning logs seemed now to be all around Wanda, and she was suddenly aware that the clicks and cracks she heard weren’t from the fire at all but were coming from outside. She propped herself up in alarm. Was there a fire outside? As Wanda listened, an overture of distant noises like nothing she’d ever heard met her ear.

“That’s just the lake,” Peter told her.

“The lake?” Wanda asked. The electric-sounding chimes hardly sounded like anything that should come out of a lake; more like the sound effects from a science fiction movie.

“Yeah. Frozen lakes are always expanding and contracting and making all sorts of weird noises.”

Wanda continued listening to the hypnotic, alien chorus. “That’s so crazy,” she commented. Finally she realized she was holding up the story. “Sorry,” said Wanda. “What happened to the little boy?”

“Like I said,” resumed Peter, “he starts trying to fight back. But the bully goes berserk and starts pounding away on him, completely loses his mind....”

Wanda jolted, unconsciously withdrawing her feet. From outside had rung out a clap like two cupped hands slamming together. Its echo lasted several seconds, and the windows shuddered in their frames.

“Wow,” said Peter. “That was a big one. It doesn’t normally get like that until the lake starts to thaw.”

The crack was followed by another, and another still. It sounded like an assault of hale on a tin roof. All the while, those sing-songy lake noises grew louder.

Peter eyed the wall that faced the lake. His hand drifted over to Wanda’s knee and he said, “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

The snaps and claps became thicker, deeper. Wanda pictured a giant oak splintering as a giant bent it in half. It wasn’t just getting louder, but closer. And all those chirps and trills began to take on a quality of living voices. The hand on Wanda’s knee trembled.

Then came the crash—a thunderbolt hurled from Zeus’s own hand. Wanda imagined the ice of the lake exploding upward.

One distinct voice rose above the others, a haunting alto. Peter rose to his feet so abruptly Wanda gave a small cry, then moved to the front door. “Peter!” she called out to him. He stopped inches from the door, unmoving. The ghostly aria came louder and clearer, backed by a chorus of smaller, sinister voices.

Peter put his hand on the door handle. Wanda called out his name again as she rose.

“Yes,” he said, then again a moment later, “yes.” It seemed it wasn’t Wanda he was replying to. “You know I do. I only want you.” He twisted the knob.

Wanda leaped after Peter. The frozen jamb hugged the door in its place long enough for her to seize his arm and jerk him away. “What are you doing?” she cried.

Peter turned abruptly and charged into Wanda, driving her backward onto the couch. He grasped her desperately, head pressed to her chest. “No, no, no,” he wailed. “Don’t let her. I don’t want to.”

“What is it?” screamed Wanda.

“I can’t stop myself. I have to go to her!”

“Don’t go anywhere,” Wanda demanded, clasping his head and pressing it against her. Then a new horror chilled her bones, for the sounds outside hadn’t just grown nearer—they were moving around the house. All those pops and twangs, the chittering and chanting, the prima donna with her bitter song—they were sliding around the corner and up along the wall nearest the cowering pair.

“She’s so beautiful,” sobbed Peter. “God, she’s the most beautiful girl in the world. It hurts. It hurts to think of her. Oh, God, I want her so badly.”

The frosted windows shook, and Wanda imagined that the incarnation of that hideous cacophony was peering in on them through the frost.

“I’m sorry!” Peter screamed out. “It was a mistake! I didn’t mean to hurt you! I’m so sorry! Please, don’t make me! I love you! I love you so much! Let me go!”

Peter drew backward away from Wanda. She held him fast, pleading for him to stay with her. With a lurch, she was pulled off the couch onto the floor, and Peter broke free. He struggled a moment with the front door, then tore it open and disappeared screaming into the darkness. “I’m coming, Morgan! I’m coming!”

The din of ghostly noises withdrew from the house with startling rapidity. Peter’s screaming voice joined the hellish chorus. There was a thunderous crescendo, and then everything was quiet.

* * *

When the sun rose, a trail of staggering footprints was traced from the house to the lake. A standing bird pond near the porch had been knocked over and shattered, the half sphere of frozen water lying in the frost. On the lake were small bloody dots and tiny flecks of meat where naked feet had stuck to the ice and torn free. Then a streak of blood ran along the frozen surface, yards and yards until it abruptly stopped. Closer inspection revealed that it actually continued inside the shell of the frozen lake until it faded away into the white scrim of the ice.

The following spring, once the song of the thaw had passed and the lake could again be accessed, a search was made for the young man’s body. While he was never found, Morgan Delaney was. Her icy blue body had been perfectly preserved in the cold depths of the lake. Those who saw her said her face was one of absolute tranquility, and even that her blue lips seemed curled at one corner into the suggestion of a smile.