Däremellan

Hannah Lee, Third Place

The lake beyond the mountains sang

all winter long.

After nearly a month, the grip of polar night slowly released her hand on the land. Unforgiving winter and twenty-eight days without sun—nothing but darkness and the constant fall of snow—left the world barren in its wake. Here, at the top of the world, there was a bargain: the midnight sun in June in exchange for the polar night in December.

The lake settled and sank in the valley, solidifying into stone. Evergreens weighed down by snow ran down the swooping mountain range, stopping on the banks of the frozen lake.

There, beside the lake, an old man lived alone.

He had seen the lake freeze and thaw enough times to know that each year the ice was different. Some years, the ice broke apart into pointed shards before freezing down solid, creating a crown of spikes along the outer banks. In quieter years, the water went still without a fight and froze clear as glass.

This year, frozen pockets of air ran up through the ice like trailing rivers. Long, thick cracks ran parallel to the shore, betraying the shifting water beneath. Through the years, the man had seen every shade of blue reflected in the ice—had seen the sun change the hue of the lake like a glass window. He had grown fond of life by the water and the sounds the lake would make.

As the ice shifted and expanded, settling atop the water, the ice cried out wordlessly— each crack a plaintive call. Deep and resounding, the notes swooped in the air like diving birds weighed down by a foot of ice. Many years ago, the old man had heard the call of a breaching whale beside the sea. It was the closest comparison he had to the sound of the ice. And, all winter, the lake called out like a living creature larger than the greatest animal in the sea.

This week had brought the first glimpse of light since November. A sunrise hovered along the horizon before slipping back to the other side of the world. Spring would come in the following months—but now it was a matter of waiting. The old man had seen the seasons come and go. He could outlast the season between seasons when winter refused to release her grip. Stuck between winter and spring, the world could only wait until spring grew strong enough to take lead.

They said winter lasted six months in the north, but it wasn’t really winter. It was a terrible space of in-between, the two seasons

fighting to control the dance. It was the anticipation of warmth that bothered him. Now that the polar night was over, it was a game of waiting.

But, in his old age, Mikael was tired of waiting—tired of the indefinite countdown for spring. Waiting in darkness for sun was more difficult when mutually waiting for his last heartbeat.

Life had turned gray long before winter came this year. Now his winter rations turned to mush in his mouth, and he had no desire to taste them. His meager traps had yielded no capture for weeks, and he had eaten no fresh meat since fall.

It wasn’t that he was a poor trapper. His aching bones simply wouldn’t let him wander far enough to place them where he wanted to. And few animals came close to the lake in winter—one reason why Mikael lived alone.

He had enough rations to last until spring, but he didn’t want them. He wanted to eat the way he had eaten in his youth when his body had been strong and he could walk around the lake in a day. Even in the winter, he had never gone a month without catching a stray rabbit or doe. Now it was a chore simply to keep the fire going and cook what stores he had.

This year, out of stubbornness, the old man fought the way of life he had come to accept. He had gone fishing.

To fish now, in the remains of polar darkness, was madness. But perhaps he was a little mad. Under the spell of an eternal night, he had forgotten his own mortality. All he could think of was the smell of fresh fish searing on the stove. Memories of spring and summer had all but left him, but he clung to this—the smell of fresh meat falling off the bone.

Hours had passed, and yet not a bite.

Bundled against the cold, the weathered man sat hunched on a stool beside a hole in the ice. In his youth, he would sit on his pack, but he didn’t trust his knees for such a thing anymore. Back then it had also taken less than an hour to saw through the ice—tonight thicker than he had ever seen it—to create a hole in the surface.

Years he had spent beside this lake, learning how she flowed and moved in each season, and yet, for days he hadn’t felt as much as a tug at the end of his line. It had been days.

After leaving the line unattended for periods of time to return to the warmth of his home, the old man had resigned himself to waiting with his line until the lake yielded to him. The precious moments of the day’s sunlight had long passed, sending them into the blue world of prolonged sunset, and now all was dark again.

The ice shuddered beneath him as the ice split a half-mile away, singing out in protest. In response, a dozen hairline breaks shot off in the direction of the shore. It was nothing of concern—no more than the settling of the lake.

If Mikael had had a companion waiting for his return, perhaps they would have chastised him for his stubbornness and convinced him

to come home. His fingers ached with cold—the bones radiating with it.

But his home was empty—no one to remind him of his age and aching bones other than the cold herself, and she had settled into his joints long before setting foot on the ice.

He stared at the rough circle in the ice before him. The black water looked back at him like a dark beady eye, like the eye of a great beast, and he glared at it. The ice split again, crying out like a creature of the deep. But the man stood above it all. He had created this eye, and he would wait. This was his lake.

His shoulders shook as he held the rod in his cramping hands. The fishing line trailed down into the water and he watched it, seeking out any movement or the slightest brush in the water.

Hours passed quietly with only the singing of the ice. If there were any stars or moonlight to be seen, they could not cut through the thick cloud cover. From his feet came the soft hiss of his kerosene lamp, illuminating the long fishing line and the puff of his breath. The clouds had not lifted all winter. All winter, and he had not once glimpsed the aurora borealis.

For hours he had prayed for a break in the clouds—pled for some deity to cut a circle in the cover.

Simultaneously, he cursed the ice below him.

The frozen lake was a giver of life—his main source of food in the months following the polar night—but it could take life just as easily. Shifting waters made the ice unsteady. He had once prided himself in being able to read the lake—finding the places where fish would hide and recognizing from a distance where the ice became thin, like skin, with trailing veins cracking her surface.

But three days and still no catch. Perhaps age had taken more from him than he had thought.

When the sun rose again, the man hardly noticed the slip of day. His eyes were locked on the opening in the ice and his mind was far away in a place where he could not feel the cold hollowing his hands and feet. The hour of light came and went quickly without anyone to recognize it—only a hunched man and his hissing lamp.

The old man awoke from his daze hours later when the line shifted in his hands. His glazed eyes focused, blinking as the line trailed to the side. He waited—every muscle taut in anticipation.

The line went slack. He waited, but the water did not move again.

Too tired to mourn the loss, Mikael glanced around at the dark trees crowding the frozen bank before turning back to the ice, taking up his position again

But, in the dark window to the water below, something peered back. At first, he thought it to be a broken chunk of white ice or the body of a fish floating in the water. But it was neither. It was something new.

A living face looked up from the darkness. It was the face of new life—a child not older than

ten years. Terribly misplaced, but seemingly unbothered, the boy in the water looked up at the old man with intent.

Fear pumped in Mikael’s veins, setting alight the nerves in his heavy limbs. Yet he could not move—could do nothing but stare at the beautiful young face in the water, pale as death.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light—he thought—only a piece of ice that resembled a face. With a shaking hand, the man took up his kerosine lamp. But the light revealed a neck beneath the ice, and narrow shoulders. The harsh light reflected in the boy’s pale blue eyes, making them flash like the glazed eyes of a fish, and he did not look away from the old man.

The boy hovered, the ice thick on either side of him. No air slipped from his lips.

In silence, they regarded each other in the darkness. Even the ice had stopped singing.

Then the boy’s face broke the surface, and he was real—as real as the old man’s weathered hands and aching bones. Skin soft and unblemished, he shone like the moon. No blood rose in his face to protest the cold. A head of slicked, blond hair stuck to his forehead, and he indeed had blue eyes—as blue as the ice in late spring.

The old man’s mind could not fight the hunger now driving him—the need that had chained him to the lake for over a day—and for a moment he did not see the child, but instead a living source of food. He cursed himself for it, but his hands were shaking, and his stomach felt as empty as a stone. Not a fish—a child—he told himself. A child.

Mikael moved to remove his coat and cover the boy, but he did not shake in the cold. He settled to a seat on the ice, his legs still submerged within the frigid water as if sitting on a dock in summer.

This was no living child, surely. It was a ghost, or perhaps even the echo of a life that had never begun. A selfish part of the man wondered if the boy was the reflection of the son he had never fathered. Or perhaps he was simply a boy who had belonged to other parents a hundred years before.

The beautiful boy opened his mouth, his face round as the moon, and the old man leaned forward to hear him.

“Do you know how to leave the in-between?” the boy asked him.

He spoke in a curious way, with the voice of a child. Yet, the old man knew the words were older than he himself was. The boy’s tone echoed with the remnants of a time before the foundation of the mountains had formed— before the lake had first settled.

The boy looked at him expectantly. His eyes were round and soft, but his gaze weighed more than that of the ancient man curled on his stool before him.

Some deep part of Mikael knew this was the voice of the days between seasons—the place between places—the space between awake and asleep. The true patron of the lake.

The old man’s hand trembled as he set down

his fishing reel.

“I do not,” he told the boy evenly, his own voice hoarse from not speaking for months.

The boy tilted his head in response, as if Mikael had not told the truth.

“Then you will be locked within, as well,” the boy said simply. He did not seem disappointed.

The old man looked into the boy’s eyes, transfixed. Spirit, phantom, or even premonition, the boy before him had known death—he had seen it and clawed back to the surface. He now stood not in life, or in death, but in an unnamed place. Mikael’s curiosity surpassed his fear.

“What is on the other side?” the old man asked. He knew better than to ask the fae folk for favors, or ask spirits of the seasons his questions, but the words seemed to leave his lips before his wisdom could remind him.

“Much of the same,” the boy responded freely in that same ancient, young tone. “Only flipped— so you can’t recognize anything at all. Even yourself.”

Pearls of water slipped down the boy’s face— seemingly as tangible as the mittens on Mikael’s worn hands.

“How did you die, spirit?” the man asked.

“Am I dead?” the boy asked. He did not seem to know the answer himself. But Mikael was in no position to say.

After a long while, when the old man had regained his tongue, he dared to ask another question.

He tried to hide the shake in his voice, the shake in his hands, as he sat before the child.

“Why have you come to me now?”

“You know why I have come,” the boy said simply.

Yes, he supposed he did.

“Can I stay?” the old man asked. Spring would come soon, surely. “I don’t want to leave.”

“What does it mean to leave?” the boy asked.

The old man struggled to speak. “I don’t want to be stuck there—where you are,” Mikael said, trying to explain.

The boy’s face softened. “Of the two of us,” he said, “I am not the one who is stuck.”

A splash came from the water—a sound the man had hoped to hear for hours, but now stopped his heart in his chest. A wet hand reached up from the shadows of the lake. A pale hand—a mirror of the boy’s own—fastened onto the old man’s calf. A second hand shot forward, reaching for his other leg, and a third stretched forward.

He should have known it would be the winter to take him.

The old man cried out, scrambling to get away, but the hands held fast. He fell to the ground—tried to kick—but his limbs were weak and locked from hours on the ice.

The boy watched quietly as the small hands secured their grip, hauling the man’s body

with the strength of grown men. Mikael was dragged across the ground—his own hands clawing against the snow and ice but finding no purchase—and the cold radiated up through his clothing.

The lake that had preserved his life for so many years would now claim it in exchange.

With one great tug, he was pulled into the water. His legs burned like fire and his muscles seized as he clung to the lip of the ice, arms shaking as he fought to keep his head above water. His labored breathing filled the air with mist, and he did not recognize his own voice— old and creaking, filled with desperation.

The boy sitting on the ice remained motionless. His young face was the last thing the old man saw before the water enclosed over his head, blinding him.

He was pulled down into the darkness beneath the ice—between worlds. No longer feeling his body, but still tied to it, he could do nothing but hold the breath still in his lungs. Around him stretched a world upside down— just as dark as the world above.

It had not been a break in the clouds to take him, but a break in the ice—one that he had created himself.

Still deeper they went, further than the lake bottom could possibly go until the shadows had eaten up all the light. There, in a darkness greater than the polar night, the world flipped to become something entirely new. And Mikael had been wrong. Death was not black at all—but white.

He woke up with a start. His cheek was numb—frozen to the ice—and his ears rang with pain. His body was aching but still alive—still clinging to warmth.

Sitting up slowly, he found the lamp had burned out and gone cold. Clouds had parted above to reveal a slip of moon. The light illuminated the plush glow of the snowy lake, and the vacant window in the ice before him, still open and waiting. In the moment, it looked like the window to his home a mile away.

Resting beside the ring of water, the body of a white-bellied perch sat in the snow where a boy had once been.

No travelers passed by the lake until the next spring, and, by then, the old man was gone. They found his cabin empty with no note left behind. Snow from the roof dripped steadily, falling onto the soft ground where the slips of spring were just beginning. Hopefully he had gone quietly, they said. Hopefully he had not waited long.

And he hadn’t.