Among the Wolves

"'When I was younger, I used to ice-skate,' he said, speaking slowly. I blinked. I thought he was deliberately, and rather discourteously, changing the subject, and I reached for the ignition keys. But Ramsey continued. 'I learned to skate quite well,' he said. 'I was never particularly adept at sports or games but in ice-skating I seemed to be more talented than most. I enjoyed it enormously. I learned to figure-skate, to cut designs across the ice. People used to watch me, admiring my abilities. But there was one strange thing. I wouldn't skate when it was dark. All the young people used to go to the rink at night, but the very thought gave me a chill. I had a vague dread - a fear even - of what lay beneath the ice at night. I visualized it - saw it in cross-section, as it were. There I was, cutting my smooth figures across the flat, predictable surface of the ice, and beneath that level there was the dark body of unfrozen water. The ice and water were related and yet they were not the same. I fashioned my designs at one plane while beneath me lay uncharted depths and inconceivable forms. So it is with life - with the human mind. We live our allotted years and carve out patterns upon a solitary level of existence, content and satisfied perhaps, and then something happens which opens a window, just for an instant, through the surface and allows us to glimpse the deeper, darker dimensions with which we share existence. We peer through this hole, we see cowled shapes and malformed concepts bloated in the waters and we shudder and look away until the ice freezes over once more and our world is smooth and flat again. Our world is as we know it, as we wish it, and we skate off and leave our pitiful little etching under our runners. And yet, from time to time, those broken areas of open waters appear to disrupt our placid world. Most men shun the glimpse, ignore the depths, pretend the ice is solid. But not all men. In the minds of a few, the hole does not freeze over quickly enough, they stare too long through the break - long enough for something to rise and crawl from that hole and take possession of the upper levels...'

'Madness?' I said.

'Who knows? Not sanity, surely. But madness belongs to our surface ice. After all, it is we who have defined it. It is our minds which have hardened into ice. What may come up from below, from those regions we have not labelled and named because we have not conceived of them...'"