52 Project #20: The Lake (Patreon)

Based on the Kate Bush song "Under Ice", and a poem of mine called "entropy reversed".

It's so fresh and clear, out here on the ice. I feel so free. There's no one around, for as far as I can see.

The cold is crisp, bracing, and the ice on the lake is unbelievably clear. Not the sort of transparent clarity that makes it untrustworthy – a thick, wavy, distorted sort of clarity that tells me the ice is strong. Under it the lake is dark, winter black and sluggish, so cold looking. But I am free and clear above the ice, skating.

As I skate past trees and bushes, the wind bites at my face – good, clean cold! It's so sharp and refreshing. I can feel my face turning red, but it's not uncomfortable. After the stuffy heat inside, the cold air is like water, running through the clogged channels of my mind. So fresh and bright... The cool wind whips through my hair, teases at my earmuffs, as I skate faster.

The world is so open before me I feel as if I could do anything. This is like new territory, unexplored. My skates make little white lines on the dark ice I am here! I have gone here! the lines say. There is not another living soul around. I could skate to the other side of the lake, the far side I cannot see in the morning fog, and never see another person. It's such a wonderful feeling! I am a pioneer, going where no one has before. I can do whatever I want, and no one will see me, or stop me. My skates place my mark on virgin ice, frontier territory untraversed by humanity. So exhilarating!

And as I skate, I think about entropy.

Entropy is often thought of as chaos, but what it actually is, is a measure of the energy within a system that’s unavailable for doing work. The molecules become more disordered as the energy is expended. Because energy can’t be created or destroyed, the energy is still there, but in a useless form, because the molecules are too disordered to get anything done. Heat is the last step energy takes before it becomes entropic. Decay releases heat, and then the heat dissipates, transferring from the place where there’s a lot of heat – the point of decay, the thing undergoing entropic breakdown – to the place where there is not. It merges with the universe, and is lost.

The sun shining up above does not make me think of decay. It makes me think of positive energy and negative entropy – endless transfer of heat and light energy to our planet, allowing everything that is alive to re-order their molecules in a way that does work. It’s not actually endless, of course, but humanity will probably be gone long before that light runs out.

In reality, I know, the sunshine should warm the ice and weaken it, turn it into liquid like the cold dark water underneath. But the sun is life and energy. The water is cold death. 

The sun is strengthening the ice. Protecting me. Shining down on me, making the chill exhilarating, the experience of skating fun. I expect it to burn away the fog at the far side of the lake and let me see the other shore. Any minute now.

Things loom in the fog, far away. Mountains, maybe. Rocks. Giant monsters. There’s no way to know; they’re too far away and the fog covers them, so I can’t see that far. 

It’s afternoon. I’ve been skating for a very long time, haven’t I? My muscles have started to burn and ache, and the cold that was so invigorating this morning has started to seep into me. But I’m still strong, I’m still active and focused. I can keep skating. I haven’t much choice, after all; I haven’t reached the far side yet, and now the shore I came from is lost behind me, hidden in the fog. There’s nothing around me but the lake.

I can’t really remember what the shore looked like. It doesn’t matter. Keep moving forward, that’s the important thing.

I catch a glimpse of something moving under the ice, trying to follow me.

I don’t look down. I skate faster, despite the burn in my muscles. I want to outrun whatever that is, under the ice. A monster? A sea serpent? Maybe it’s just my reflection, but I don’t want to look. 

The shore seems very far away.

The sun is going down. Exhausted, I skate more slowly, unable to keep up my pace, and I see the thing again. Something distorted, writhing. A Lovecraftian horror, but pink. I’d have expected green from an underwater monster. 

The sun is going down, and the energy it imparts to the world is fading. The air is growing colder, more bitter. The ice should be hardening, growing stronger, but it’s not. 

This is not a place that works by the laws of physics I know.

The ice is growing thinner.

I stop and look down. For a moment I think it’s my own reflection, and I laugh at myself for being so scared of it. But then I see that it’s moving independently of me. Writhing under there, trying to break out, to get out—

In horror I begin to back away. Then a distorted screaming shape presses itself to the ice, and I see that it's a person.

A person! What's a person doing there? I begin to feel panicked. I’ve been skating, trying to escape this person, and the whole time they’ve been trapped down there, drowning! I want to smash the ice, to let them free, to pull them out, but it’s still too thick.

I start stamping on the ice, trying to shatter it with the blades of my skates. Both of us are banging on the ice, trying to break it from both sides, but it's still too thick, it won't even crack. 

The cold has filled me, a tiring, dragging cold, pulling all my limbs down. Tired, I kneel down on the ice, hoping to get more leverage. Then I see the person's face.

Then I see. And know.

I stand up and skate away, fleeing the future. My future, the other side of a divide I am trying to run away from.

Night is falling, and the ice is weakening. I cannot see either shoreline; even the fog has disappeared into darkness. There are no more looming shapes, nothing at all but endless ice in every direction, and the ice is getting thinner.

It’s me under the ice, and I’m running, I’m skating as fast as I can, but I can’t outrun the fall of night, and I can’t outrun myself. Swimming after me, under the ice. Waiting for the moment when the ice cracks, when time meets itself again and the me that I am now becomes the me of the future, trapped in the dark water.

“Help me,” I try to call, but my voice has become weak and hoarse, and the cold is in me everywhere, and there’s no one to hear me call anyway.

The ice is melting in the cold and dark, the ice that needs the sun, because it’s the wall between me and the endless dark water and without the sun it’s melting, melting…

Beneath me the thin ice cracks, and I fall into the dark and the cold.

For a moment, as I fall, I see the one who was chasing me, the self below the water, embracing me. And then there’s just me, and I look up, and see another me above in the sunlight, above the ice, trying to skate away from me, to forget I am here.

Weighted down by my skates, I keep falling, falling, further down into the cold and black.