North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

of the abyss.
    Garner visualized him—thrashing against his tack in a black well as the jagged circle of grayish light above shrank away, inch by lurching inch—and he felt the pull of night inside himself, the age-old gravity of the dark. Then a hand closed around his ankle.
    Bishop, clinging to the ice, a hand-slip away from tumbling into the crevasse himself: face blanched, eyes red rimmed inside his goggles.
    “Shit,” Garner said. “Here—”
    He reached down, locked his hand around Bishop’s wrist, and hauled him up, boots slipping. Momentum carried him over backwards, floundering in the snow as Bishop curled fetal beside him.
    “You okay?”
    “My ankle,” he said through gritted teeth.
    “Here, let me see.”
    “Not now. Connelly. What happened to Connelly?”
    “He fell off—”
    With a metallic screech, the sledge broke loose. It slid a foot, a foot and a half, and then it hung up. The dogs screamed. Garner had never heard a dog make a noise like that—he didn’t know dogs could make a noise like that—and for a moment their blind, inarticulate terror swam through him. He thought again of Atka, dangling there, turning, feet clawing at the darkness, and he felt something stir inside him once again—
    “Steady, man,” Bishop said.
    Garner drew in a long breath, icy air lacerating his lungs.
    “You gotta be steady now, Doc,” Bishop said. “You gotta go cut him loose.”
    “No—”
    “We’re gonna lose the sledge. And the rest of the team. That happens, we’re all gonna die out here, okay? I’m busted up right now, I need you to do this thing—”
    “What about Connell—”
    “Not now, Doc. Listen to me. We don’t have time. Okay?”
    Bishop held his gaze. Garner tried to look away, could not. The other man’s eyes fixed him.
    “Okay,” he said.
    Garner stood and stumbled away. Went to his knees to dig through the wreckage. Flung aside a sack of rice, frozen in clumps, wrenched open a crate of flares—useless—shoved it aside, and dragged another one toward him. This time he was lucky: he dug out a coil of rope, a hammer, a handful of pitons. The sledge lurched on its lip of ice, the rear end swinging, setting off another round of whimpering.
    “Hurry,” Bishop said.
    Garner drove the pitons deep into the permafrost and threaded the rope through their eyes, his hands stiff inside his gloves. Lashing the other end around his waist, he edged back onto the broken ice shelf. It shifted underneath him, creaking. The sledge shuddered, but held. Below him, beyond the moiling clump of dogs, he could see the leather trace leads, stretched taut across the jagged rim of the abyss.
    He dropped back, letting rope out as he descended. The world fell away above him. Down and down, and then he was on his knees at the very edge of the shelf, the hot, rank stink of the dogs enveloping him. He used his teeth to loosen one glove. Working quickly against the icy assault of the elements, he fumbled his knife out of its sheath and pressed the blade to the first of the traces. He sawed at it until the leather separated with a snap.
    Atka’s weight shifted in the darkness below him, and the dog howled mournfully. Garner set to work on the second trace, felt it let go, everything—the sledge, the terrified dogs—slipping toward darkness. For a moment he thought the whole thing would go. But it held. He went to work on the third trace, gone loose now by some trick of tension. It too separated beneath his blade, and he once again felt Atka’s weight shift in the well of darkness beneath him.
    Garner peered into the blackness. He could see the dim blur of the dog, could feel its dumb terror welling up around him, and as he brought the blade to the final trace, a painstakingly erected dike gave way in his mind. Memory flooded through him: the feel of mangled flesh beneath his fingers, the distant whump of artillery, Elizabeth’s drawn and somber face.
    His fingers faltered. Tears blinded him. The sledge