The Thrum Below

An estranged couple's remote ice fishing trip becomes a nightmare when the frozen lake reveals its own unnatural sickness.

The key wouldn’t turn. George jiggled it in the frozen brass lock of the fishing hut, his breath pluming in the flat, gray air. A grunt of frustration, low and tight in his throat. He rattled the key again, harder this time, the metallic scrape echoing unnaturally in the vast quiet.

“It’s frozen,” Wendy said from behind him. Her voice was as brittle as the air. She didn’t offer to help. She just stood there, a few feet back, wrapped in a parka that was too big for her, her arms crossed tight against her chest.

“I can see that,” George snapped, yanking the key out. He pulled off a glove with his teeth and blew hot air into the lock. The silence that fell between his breaths was absolute. It wasn't peaceful. It was a dead quiet, a pressure against the eardrums. No birds. No wind whistling through the distant, skeletal pines that lined the shore. He glanced around. Their footprints were the only marks on the endless expanse of snow-dusted ice. Nothing else moved. Not a rabbit track, not a fox trail. Nothing.

He jammed the key back in and this time, with a painful shriek of metal, the lock turned. The door swung open into the tiny, dark space. It smelled of old wood and stale kerosene. He kicked a block of ice away from the threshold and gestured inside. “Well?”

Wendy edged past him without a word, her boots scuffing on the plywood floor. The hut was barely big enough for the two of them, a pair of built-in benches, and the square hole in the floor that opened to the dark water below. It was a cramped, claustrophobic box dropped in the middle of nowhere. Their last chance, he’d called it. A place to talk without distractions. But the silence out here was louder than any of their arguments.

George set about his tasks with a methodical, angry efficiency. He primed the small propane heater, which coughed to life with a sullen *whoomph*. He unpacked the auger, the rods, the tackle box. Each click and scrape of his gear was an intrusion. Wendy sat on the bench, her gaze fixed on the open hole in the ice. The water was black, impossibly black, absorbing the weak light from the doorway.

He spent twenty minutes drilling a new hole a few feet outside the hut, the engine’s roar a brief, welcome violence against the stillness. When he was done, the silence rushed back in, heavier than before. He baited a hook and dropped the line into the water, watching the thin filament disappear into the depths. He was doing the things they were supposed to be doing. He was making an effort. He glanced at Wendy. She hadn't moved.

An hour passed. Then another. Nothing. Not a single nibble. The cold seeped through the floor, a deep, penetrating chill that the heater couldn't touch. George reeled in his line to check the bait. It was untouched. He sighed, a sound of profound weariness, and cast it again.

Suddenly, the tip of his rod dipped, a sharp, decisive tug. Relief washed over him, a stupid, giddy feeling. “Got one,” he said, trying to keep the triumph out of his voice. He worked the reel, the line tightening. It was heavy. A good one. He could feel its weight, a dead, sullen resistance. Not much of a fighter.

He pulled it through the hole, a large lake trout, its sides flashing silver in the gloom. It flopped onto the ice, but it didn't thrash. It just lay there, arching its back once, a single, spastic movement. George reached down to grab it. His fingers brushed its skin and he recoiled. It was cold. Not the normal, wet cold of a fish from icy water. This was a deep, unnatural cold, a cold that felt like it came from the center of the fish, from its very bones. He picked it up. It was already stiffening, its body unnaturally rigid. He held it for a moment, confused. It was as if it had been flash-frozen solid in the few seconds it took to pull it from the water into the air. He dropped it on the ice with a hard thud. It didn’t move. Its eye, a black, glassy bead, stared up at nothing.

“What’s wrong with it?” Wendy’s voice was a whisper.

“I don’t know. The shock, maybe.” The excuse sounded thin even to him. He nudged the fish with the toe of his boot. It was like a piece of wood.

Wendy stood up, agitated. “Do you hear that?”

George listened. The hiss of the propane heater. Nothing else. “Hear what?”

“A sound. A low… humming.” She tilted her head, her eyes unfocused. “Like an engine, but not. It’s… rhythmic.”

He strained his ears again. Nothing. Just the endless, suffocating quiet. “It’s the heater, Wen. Or your ears are ringing from the silence.” He dismissed it, turning his attention back to the dead fish, wanting to understand the simple, physical problem in front of him instead of the intangible one she was presenting.

“It’s not the heater,” she insisted, her voice rising. “It’s coming from below. From under the ice.”

“There’s nothing under the ice but water and mud.” He was losing his patience. She was always finding things, seeing patterns, hearing sounds that weren’t there. It was why they were here, to get away from all that. To get back to something real.

“George, listen.”

“I am listening! There’s nothing there!”

She stared at him, her face pale, her lips a thin line. The accusation was clear in her eyes. You never listen. She pulled her hood up and pushed past him, out the door. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Fine,” he muttered to the empty doorway. He sat heavily on the bench, the rigid, frozen fish mocking him from the ice. He tried to listen again, really listened, blocking out the heater’s hiss. But all he heard was the sound of his own blood in his ears. Nothing. He was right. She was imagining it.

Wendy walked without purpose, her boots crunching on the crust of snow. The gray sky seemed to press down on the ice, making the world feel small and tight. The thrumming was fainter out here, but it was still there, a low-frequency vibration she felt more than heard, a pulse in the soles of her feet. She kept walking, away from the hut, toward the center of the lake. And then she saw them.

A cluster of holes. Not jagged, auger-drilled holes like the one George had made, but a dozen perfect circles, each about two feet in diameter, spaced in a strangely uniform pattern. They looked like they’d been melted through the ice. A faint, foul-smelling vapor, like boiled chemicals and rot, rose from them. It stung the back of her throat.

She approached cautiously, peering into the nearest one. The water was as black as the water in their hut, but this felt different. Viscous. Unhealthy. She knelt, her knees sinking into the snow, and stared into the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust. The thrumming seemed louder here, emanating directly from the depths. And for a split second, she saw it. A flicker of movement. Something pale and smooth, deep down. It was gone before she could even process its shape, a ghostly afterimage that made her scramble backward, her heart hammering against her ribs.

She ran back to the hut, stumbling on the uneven ice. She burst through the door, out of breath. “George! There are holes out there. Drilled in the ice. Something’s in them.”

He looked up from his phone, his expression a mask of weary annoyance. “What are you talking about?”

“Holes! Perfect circles. They stink. And I saw something move in one of them.”

He stood up slowly. “Show me.”

They walked back out together, the sky already beginning to darken at the edges. Wendy pointed. But the holes were gone. There was only a wide, flat expanse of unmarked snow. She stopped, bewildered. “They were right here. I swear. A dozen of them.”

George scanned the area, his hands on his hips. He kicked at the snow. “There’s nothing here, Wendy. Not even a footprint besides yours.”

“They were here,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “The smell… can’t you smell it?”

He took a slow, deliberate breath. “I smell cold air. That’s it.” He looked at her, and it was the look he’d given her a hundred times before. The one that said she was broken. Unreliable. “Let’s go back inside. It’s getting dark.”

Night fell quickly, a final, suffocating blanket of black. They sat in the hut, the lantern casting long, dancing shadows. They didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say. George stared at the fishing line, pretending to be interested. Wendy had her hands pressed flat against the plywood floor, her eyes closed.

The thrumming was back. And it was louder now. Much louder. It wasn't just a sound anymore. It was a physical sensation, a deep, resonant vibration that pulsed up through the floor, through the benches, into their bones. George couldn’t deny it now. He looked over at Wendy. Her eyes were open, wide with terror, locked on his.

He could feel it shifting. The rhythmic pulse wasn't stationary. It was moving. It passed beneath them, the whole hut trembling slightly, and then it was on the other side. A slow, grinding beat that faded and then grew stronger as it completed a wide arc. It wasn’t just a sound from the deep anymore.

It was moving, a slow, deliberate circle tightening around them in the dark.