Nicholas' Light
By S.E. Casey
The hiss of the deer sounds like a blown steam engine, a heart-stopping gasp coming without warning from the dark. The territorial retort warns me that I have wandered too close to a protective doe. I veer away from the aggressive snort to avoid a hoof to the head.
The nocturnal animals are but one of the dangers in walking home after sunset, however, I have little choice, the mill offering extra hours on Christmas Eve. It's a win-win: the mill gets ahead of its orders before the holiday shutdown, while we get a little more coin in our pockets. My family can certainly use the extra money. I'm sure the other families feel the same way.
The late afternoon light I had to start my journey quickly faded leaving me in the cold and dark. I could have avoided the night passage and waited for the next trolley, but it would have been selfish to spend any hard-earned extra money solely on myself. Besides, with its many stops coupled with the typical Christmas Eve delays would make the cramped trip twice as long as usual. By taking the direct path through the mountain valley, I will get home to my wife and daughters a little sooner. On the night before Christmas, time is precious, each minute a chance to create those indelible family memories that remain for a lifetime. The darkness is a manageable obstacle, hiking this route countless times before in worse conditions, I know the way home well.
The threatening animals divert me onto the ice of Gibbons Lake. The wildlings faithfully avoid the lake even when chased or cornered as if commanded by a hard-wired aversion. Rarely, an innocent faun or coyote pup would stumble onto the ice, but still the pack wouldn't dare follow. Their avoidance of the lake is so strong that despite maternal instincts, they would imperil their young rather than briefly taking to the ice to corral them.
While dodging the threat from the animals, I am merely trading dangers, as the entire lake hasn't frozen. Although the start of winter has been an abnormally cold, and a thick layer has built around the shoreline, the center hasn't yet solidified.
But the middle of Gibbons Lake never ices over, not even in historically cold winters. Unfortunately, I can't see where the ice becomes perilously thin, the darkness a complication to my journey. I gauge its thickness by feel and sound, determining any change in composition or timbre as a forewarning that I may be drifting out too far. However, I don't want to strike too conservative a line and end up back on dry land that the possessive deer and more terrible beasts guard. Dividing my attention between these two unseen hazards, I curse the darkness.
Mountains of varying height and distance rise on all sides, their blank outlines proudly competing with the midnight colored sky. The wiry peaks and thick clouds that stick to the steep crags limit the ambient light that is allowed into the basin as well as shielding the nighttime constellations from sight. Fortunately, there is one beacon visible in the valley—Nicholas' Light.
The white point shines like a star, just over the outline of the northern mountains. The mysterious lodestar provides a point of reference for travelers, this phenomenon occurring no matter the time of year or weather. Striking a path towards it, I make sure to stay a little to its left. Taking a direct route would lead me into the middle of the lake and the unfrozen waters so deep that the floor remains entirely unplumbed and unseen.
Maybe it is because of this terrible depth that the waters of Gibbons Lake doesn't freeze. The middle of the lake exudes an undefinable quality, always calm and pristine. It takes a hearty gust of wind just to ripple the water and never does flotsam mar its surface. Perfect for swimming, it's where the town's young gather in the lazy heat of summer. In adolescent defiance (or foolish curiosity), there is a contest amongst the young to be the first to lay eyes on the lake's mysterious floor. However, no matter the capacity to hold one's breath or bravado, no one has yet to spy the lakebed. Given the clarity of the water allowing a great range of visibility, the depth of Gibbons Lake has to be remarkable, the only wonder in the otherwise nondescript town.
In my younger years, I took many plunges into the middle of the lake. The journey down is as refreshing as it is effortless. A steady undertow aiding the descent, the lake's drag is firm yet gentle like a mother's embrace. It is dangerously easy to be deceived by this downward hug, distracting the calculation of the point of no return. Like many, I risked a few breathless escapes, the trip back to the surface seemingly longer than the descent.
However, it has been many years since my last dive. With age comes wisdom, marriage, and children and those adolescent plunges were reckless. Indeed, the town has endured tragedy, the indiscriminate waters claiming many a victim. No one has kept a count, past generations of casualties forgotten to history.
There are no monuments commemorating the drowned, no list of names chiseled into slabs of expensive marble. The lack of honor for the dead is neither condemned nor criticized, the town too ashamed to confront its past. Or maybe it is simply denial, so many living here having been terribly affected in some way, myself not excluded.
The memories that haunt me over blind walk over the lake prove exhausting, not even the anticipation of Christmas distracting me from the fatigue. It's not a long journey across the mountain valley, but the care required for each step quickly drains me. I estimate to be halfway across, but this is where the danger is the greatest: the closest point to the thin ice. However, Nicholas' Light will keep me safe, as long as I keep it anchored slightly to my left. My brother has always watched over me, even though I failed to watch over him.
The ice beneath erupts with a teeth-rattling crack. The electric popping echoes that skitter away are worse than the sharp report, the deep bass reverberations a chilling portent of the below fathoms. I shut my eyes (although given the darkness changes little) and listen to the ominous moaning of the settling ice. A pained old man's groan fades into silence. Somehow, the ice has held.
I don't inhale fearful that a lungful of air will tip the scales and send me crashing through. My lungs burn and chest tightens as I fight the urge to breathe, thoughts of the depths filled with ill-gotten treasure keeping me from giving in.
No one has ever been recovered from Gibbons Lake, the bodies lost forever to the undiscovered depths. When the fierce storms of spring send the torrential snowmelt runoff into the lake, grieving parents often mill about the shore. In groups of two, they gather for the morbid possibility that the storm-churned waters will loose one of its claims. But never did it give anything back, the lake the stingiest of misers.
Periodically, the town discusses building a submersible device to explore the lake floor, but always finds an excuse to not. The town has little appetite to confront the potential stacks of bodies half-eaten by pathetic deep-water fish. But that isn't it entirely; there too is a less obvious, greater fear. A philosophical bug gnaws at the edges of the imagination—what if no bottom were to be found? This undefinable, ungraspable dread seeps into the town's consciousness, a miserable prospect that an infinite pit may exist in such close proximity of our homes, businesses, schools, holidays, and other mundane institutions and traditions.
I soothe my fear by slowly drawing in the night air refilling my lungs. The mute ice remains intact. I open my eyes.
Something is amiss. I scan the valley landscape, but in the starless night only can see the vague line differentiating black-blue mountaintops from a blue-black sky. However, this bruising darkness is the difference. Nicholas' Light is gone, my twin brother's beacon extinguished. Without anything to orient me, I wobble in a nauseating wave of vertigo.
I need to choose a direction without the guiding light. One misstep and there will be no stopping a sink to the
bottom—the water too cold and my work clothes too heavy to extricate myself once in the lake's clutch. Taking a cue from the weakened ice, I figure I am near the lake's center. My intention to pass it to my left, I take a long step in the opposite direction.
The ice buckles, another booming crack filling the valley as my foot breaks through. I skip back quickly, feeling cold water seeping into my boot. The ice sheet shifts and moans miserably, but doesn't give away.
The thought that my younger twin has somehow misled me is unavoidable. Has his light not navigated me safely past the deadly part of the lake, but into it? And of all nights on Christmas Eve, my family waiting for me. But twenty-five years ago, it was Nicholas who needed me. I recall the stillness of the water under which he dove, a dreadful pane of glass. A painful lump leaps into my throat as I again relive the summer day my twin never resurfaced, nothing I could do but watch and wait and hope.
I never saw him again.
Despite being lost to that heartless pit, Nicholas has always afforded a light to guide me back to my warm home and loving family. Why not tonight?
The fact that it is Christmas Eve can't be a coincidence. A wave