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.

March