The wolf puts its paw up on the bed, one on either side of her, and she can smell its breath… hot, but somehow not unpleasant. Its yellow eyes stare into her.
“Lover,” she whispers, and closes her eyes.
It falls upon her.
Love is like dying.
MARCH
The last real blizzard of the year-heavy, wet snow turning to sleet as dusk comes on and the night closes in-has brought branches tumbling down all over Tarker's Mills with the heavy gunshot cracks of rotted wood. Mother Nature's pruning out her deadwood, Milt Sturmfuller, the town librarian, tells his wife over coffee. He is a thin man with a narrow head and pale blue eyes, and he has kept his pretty, silent wife in a bondage of terror for twelve years now. There are a few who suspect the truth-Constable Neary's wife Joan is one-but the town can be a dark place, and no one knows for sure but them. The town keeps its secrets.
Milt likes his phrase so well that he says it again: Yep, Mother Nature is pruning her deadwood… and then the lights go out and Donna Lee Sturmfuller utters a gasping little scream. She also spills her coffee.
You clean that up, her husband says coldly. You clean that up right… now.
Yes, honey. Okay.
In the dark, she fumbles for a dishtowel with which to clean up the spilled coffee and barks her shin on a footstool. She cries out. In the dark, her husband laughs heartily. He finds his wife's pain more amusing than anything, except maybe the jokes they have in The Reader's Digest. Those jokes-Humor in Uniform, Life in These United States-really tickle his funnybone.
As well as deadwood, Mother Nature has pruned a few powerlines out by Tarker Brook this wild March night; the sleet has coated the big lines, growing heavier and heavier, until they have parted and fallen on the road like a nest of snakes, lazily turning and spitting blue fire.
All of Tarker's Mills goes dark.
As if finally satisfied, the storm begins to slack off, and not long before midnight the temperature has plummeted from thirty-three degrees to sixteen. Slush freezes solid in weird sculptures. Old Man Hague's hayfield—known locally as Forty
Acre Field-takes on a cracked glaze look. The houses remain dark; oil furnaces tick and cool. No linesman is yet able to get up the skating-rink roads.
The clouds pull apart. A full moon slips in and out between the remnants. The ice coating Main Street glows like dead bone.
In the night, something begins to howl.
Later, no one will be able to say where the sound came from; it was everywhere and nowhere as the full moon painted the darkened houses of the village, everywhere and nowhere as the March wind began to rise and moan like a dead Berserker winding his horn, it drifted on the wind, lonely and savage.
Donna Lee hears it as her unpleasant husband sleeps the sleep of the just beside her; constable Neary hears it as he stands at the bedroom window of his Laurel Street apartment in his longhandles; Ollie Parker, the fat and ineffectual grammar school principal hears it in his own bedroom; others hear it, as well. One of them is a boy in a wheelchair.
No one sees it. And no one knows the name of the drifter the linesman found the next morning when he finally got out by Tarker Brook to repair the downed cables. The drifter was coated with ice, head cocked back in a silent scream, ragged old coat and shirt beneath chewed open. The drifter sat in a frozen pool of his own blood, staring at the downed lines, his hands still held up in a warding-off gesture with ice between the fingers.
And all around him are pawprints.
Wolfprints.
APRIL
By the middle of the month, the last of the snow flurries have turned to showers of rain and something amazing is happening in Tarker's Mills: it is starting to green up. The ice in Matty Tellingham's cow-pond has gone out, and the patches of snow in the tract of forest called the Big Woods have all begun to shrink. It seems that the old and wonderful trick is going to happen again. Spring is going to come.
The townsfolk celebrate it in small ways in spite of the shadow that has fallen over the town. Gramma Hague bakes pies and sets them out on the kitchen windowsill to cool. On Sunday, at the Grace Baptist Church, the Reverend Lester Lowe reads from The Song of Solomon and preaches a sermon titled “The Spring of the Lord's Love.” On a more secular note, Chris Wrightson, the biggest drunk in Tarker's Mills, throws his Great Spring Drunk and staggers off in the silvery, unreal light of a nearly full April moon. Billy Robertson, bartender and proprietor of the pub, Tarker's Mills' only saloon, watches him go and mutters to the barmaid, “If that wolf takes someone tonight, I guess it'll be Chris.”
“Don't talk about it,” the barmaid replies, shuddering. Her name is Elise Fournier, she is twenty-four, and she attends the Grace Baptist and sings in the choir because she has a crush on the Rev. Lowe. But she plans to leave the Mills by summer; crush or no crush, this wolf business has begun to scare her. She has begun to think that the tips might be better in Portsmouth… and the only wolves there wore sailors' uniforms.
Nights in Tarker's Mills as the moon grows fat for the third time that year are uncomfortable times… the days are better. On the town common, there is suddenly a skyful of kites each afternoon.
Brady Kincaid, eleven years old, has gotten a Vulture for his birthday and has lost all track of time in his pleasure at feeling the kite tug in his hands like a live thing, watching it dip and swoop through the blue sky above the bandstand. He has forgotten about going home for supper, he is unaware that the other kite-fliers have left one by one, with their box-kites and tent-kites and Aluminum Fliers tucked securely under their arms, unaware that he is alone.
It is the fading daylight and advancing blue shadows which finally make him realize he has lingered too long-that, and the moon just rising over the woods at the edge of the park. For the first time it is a warm-weather moon, bloated and orange instead of a cold white, but Brady doesn't notice this; he is only aware that he has stayed too long, his father is probably going to whup him… and dark is coming.
At school, he has laughed at his schoolmates' fanciful tales of the werewolf they say killed the drifter last month, Stella Randolph the month before, Arnie Westrum the month before that. But he doesn't laugh now. As the moon turns April dusk into a bloody furnace-glow, the stories seem all too real.
He begins to wind twine onto his ball as fast as he can, dragging the Vulture with its two bloodshot eyes out of the darkening sky. He brings it in too fast, and the breeze suddenly dies. As a result, the kite dives behind the bandstand.
He starts toward it, winding up string as he goes, glancing nervously back over his shoulder… and suddenly the string begins to twitch and move in his hands, sawing back and forth. It reminds him of the way his fishing pole feels when he's hooked a big one in Tarker's Stream, above the Mills. He looks at it, frowning, and the line goes slack.
A shattering roar suddenly fills the night and Brady Kincaid screams. He believes now, Yes, he believes now, all right, but it's too late and his scream is lost under that snarling roar that rises in a sudden, chilling glissade to a howl.