Full Moon City

Sea Warg by Tanith Lee

One dull red star was sinking through the air into the sea. It was the sun. But eastward the October night had already commenced. There the water was dark green and the air purple, and the old ruinous pier stood between like a burnt spider.

Under the pier was a ghostly blackness, holed by mysterious luminous apertures. Ancient weeds and shreds of nets dripped. The insectile, leprous, wooden legs of the pier seemed to ripple, just as their drowning reflections did. The tide would be high.

The sea pushed softly against the land. It was destroying the land. The cliffs, eaten alive by the sea (smelling of antique metal, fish odour of Leviathan, depth, death), were crumbling in little pieces and large slabs, and the promenade, where sea-siders had strolled not more than thirty years ago, rotted and grew rank. Even the danger notices had faded and in the dark were only pale splashes, daubed with words that might have been printed in Russian.

But the sea-influencing moon would rise in a while.

Almost full tonight.

Under the pier the water twitched. Something moved through it. Perhaps a late swimmer who was indifferent to the cold evening or the warning danger-keep out. Or nothing at all maybe, just some rogue current, for the currents were temperamental all along this stretch of coast.

A small rock fell from above and clove the water, copying the sound of a rising fish.

The sun had been squashed from view. Half a mile westward the lights of hotels and restaurants shone upward, like the rays of another world, another planet.

When the man had stabbed him in the groin, Johnson had not really believed it. Hadn’t understood the fountain of blood. When the next moment two security guards burst in and threw the weeping man onto the fitted carpet, Johnson simply sat there. “Are you okay? Fuck. You’re not,” said the first security guard. “Oh. I’m-” said Johnson. The next thing he recalled, subsequently, was the hospital.

The compensation had been generous. And a partial pension, too, until in eighteen years’ time he came of age to draw it in full. The matter was hushed up otherwise, obliterated. Office bullying by the venomous Mr. Haine had driven a single employee-not to the usual nervous breakdown or mere resignation-but to stab reliable Mr. Johnson, leaving him with a permanent limp and some slight but ineradicable impairments both of a digestive and a sexual nature. “I hope you won’t think of us too badly,” said old Mr. Birch, gentle as an Alzheimer’s lamb. “Not at all, sir,” replied Johnson in his normal, quiet, pragmatic way.

Sandbourne was his choice for the bungalow with the view of the sea-what his own dead father had always wanted, and never achieved.

Johnson wasn’t quite certain why he fitted himself, so seamlessly, into that redundant role.

Probably the run-down nature of the seaside town provided inducement. House prices were much lower than elsewhere in the south-east. And he had always liked the sea. Besides, there were endless opportunities in Sandbourne for the long, tough walks he must now take, every day of his life if possible, to keep the spoilt muscles in his left leg in working order.

But he didn’t mind walking. It gave extra scope for the other thing he liked, which had originally furnished his job in staff liaison at Haine and Birch. Johnson was fascinated by people. He never tired of the study he gave them. A literate and practiced reader, he found they provided him with animated books. His perceptions had, he was aware, cost him his five-year marriage: he had seen too well what Susan, clever though she had been, was up to. But then, Susan wouldn’t have wanted him now anyway, with his limp and the bungalow, forty-two years of age, and two months into the town-city and walking everywhere, staring at the wet wilderness of waters.

“I see that dog again, up by the old pier.”

“Yeah?” asked the man behind the counter. “What dog’s that, then?”

“I tol’ yer. Didn’ I? I was up there shrimping. An’ I looks an’ it’s swimming aroun’ out there, great big fucker, too. Don’ like the looks of it, mate. I can tell yer.”

“Right.”

“Think I oughta call the RSPCee like?”

“What, the Animal Rights people?” chipped in the other man.

“Nah. He means the RSPCA, don’t ya, Benny?”

“ ’S right. RSPCee. Only it shouldn’ be out there like that on its own. No one about. Just druggies and pushers.”

The man behind the counter filled Benny’s mug with a brown foam of coffee and slapped a bacon sandwich down before the other man at the counter. Johnson, sitting back by the café wall, his breakfast finished, watched them closely in the way he had perfected, seeming not to, seeming miles off.

“An’ it’s allus this time of the month.”

“Didn’t know you still had them, Benny, times of the month.”

Benny shook his head, dismissing-or just missing-the joke. “I don’ mean that.”

“What do ya mean then, pal?”

“I don’ like it. Great big bloody dog like that, out there in the water when it starts ter get dark and just that big moon ter show it.”

“Sure it weren’t a shark?”

“Dog. It was a dog.”

“Live and let live,” said the counter man.

Benny slouched to a table. “You ain’t seen it.”

After breakfast Johnson had meant to walk up steep Hill Road and take the rocky path along the clifftop and inland, through the forest of newish high-rises, well-decked shops, and SF-movie-dominated cinemas, to the less fashionable supermarket at Crakes Bay.

Now he decided to go eastwards along the beach, following the cliff line, to the place where the warning notices were. There had been a few major rockfalls in the 1990s, so he had heard; less now, they said. People were always getting over the council barricade. A haunt of drug-addicts, too, that area, ‘down-and-outs holing up like rats’ among the boarded-up shops and drownfoundationed houses farther up. Johnson wasn’t afraid of any of that. He didn’t look either well-off or so impoverished as to be desperate. Besides, he’d been mugged in London once or twice. As a general rule, if you kept calm and gave them what they wanted without fuss, no harm befell you. No, it was in a smart office with a weakened man in tears that harm had happened.

The beach was an easy walk. Have to do something more arduous later.

The sand was still damp, the low October sun reflecting in smooth, mirrored strafes where the sea had decided to remain until the next incoming tide fetched it. A faintly hazy morning, salt-smelling and chilly and fresh.

Johnson thought about the dog. Poor animal, no doubt belonging to one of the drugged outcasts. He wondered if, neglected and famished, it had learned to swim out to sea, catching the fish that a full moon lured to the water’s surface.

There were quite a few other people walking on the beach, but after the half mile it took to come around to the pier-end, none at all. There was a dismal beauty to the scene. The steely sea and soft grey-blue sky featuring its sun. The derelict promenade, much of which had collapsed. Behind these the defunct shops with their look of broken toy models, and then the long, helpless arm of the pier, with the hulks of its arcades and tea-rooms, and the ballroom, now mostly a skeleton, where had hung, so books on Sandbourne’s history told one, sixteen crystal chandeliers.

Johnson climbed the rocks and rubbish-soggy pizza boxes, orange peels, beer cans-and stood up against the creviced pavement of the esplanade. It looked as if bombs had exploded there.

Out at sea nothing moved, but for the eternal sideways running of the waves.

At the beginning of the previous century, a steamboat had sailed across regularly from France, putting in by the pier, then a white confection like a bridal cake. The strange currents that beset this coast had made that the only safe spot. The fishing fleet had gone out from here too, this old part of the city-town, the roots of which had been there, it seemed, since Saxon times. Now the boats put off from the west end of Sandbourne, or at least they did so when the rest of Europe allowed it.

Johnson wondered whether it was worth the climb, awkward now with his leg, over the boarding and notices. By day there were no movements, no people. They were night dwellers very likely, eyes sore from skunk, skins scabrous from crack.

And by night, of course, this place would indeed be dangerous.

As he turned and started back along the shore, Johnson’s eye was attracted by something not the cloud-and-sea shades of the morning, lying at the very edge of the land. He took it at first for some unusual shell or sea-life washed ashore. Then decided it must be something manufactured, some gruesome modern fancy for Halloween, perhaps.

In fact, when he went down the beach and saw it clearly, lying there as if it had tried to clutch at the coast, kept its grip but let go of all else, he found it wasn’t plastic or rubber but quite real. A man’s hand, torn off raggedly just behind the wrist bone, a little of which stuck out from the bloated and discolouring skin.

Naturally he thought about it, the severed hand.

He had never, even in London, come across such an item. But then, probably, he’d never been in the right (wrong) place to do so.

Johnson imagined that one of the down-and-outs had killed another, for drugs or cash. Maybe even for a burger from the Alnite Caff.

He did wonder, briefly, if the near-starving dog might have liked to eat the hand. But there wasn’t much meat on a hand, was there?

That evening, after he had gone to the supermarket and walked all the way back along Bourne Road, he poured himself a Guinness and sat at his table in the little ‘study’ of the bungalow and wrote up his find in his journal. He had kept a journal ever since he started work in Staff Liaison. Case-notes, histories… people-cameos, whole bios sometimes.

Later he fried a couple of chops and ate them with a green salad.

Nothing on TV. He read Trollope until 11:36, then went to bed.

He dreamed of being in the sea, swimming with great strength and ability, although in reality he had always been an inadequate swimmer. In the dream he was aware of a dog nearby, but was not made afraid by this. Instead he felt a vague exhilaration, which on waking he labeled as a sort of puerile pleasure in unsafety. Physically he had long outgrown it. But there, deep in his own mind, perhaps not so?

The young man was leaning over his motorbike, adjusting something apparently. The action was reminiscent of a rider with his favourite steed, checking the animal for discomfort.

Johnson thought he had seen him before. He was what? Twenty-five, thirty? He had a thick shock of darkish fair hair, cut short the way they did now, and a lean face from which the summer tan was fading. In the sickly glare under the streetlight his clothes were good but ordinary. He had, Johnson thought, very long fingers, and his body was tall and almost athletic in build.

This was outside the pub they called in Sandbourne the “Biker Inn.”

Johnson didn’t know the make of the bike, but it was a powerful model, elegant.

Turning off Ship Street, Johnson went into the Cat In Clover. He wasn’t yet curious as to why he had noted the man with the bike. Johnson noted virtually everyone. An hour into the evening he did, however, recall where he had twice seen him before, which was in the same launderette Johnson himself frequented. Nice and clean then. Also perhaps, like Johnson, more interested in coming out to do the wash than in buying a machine.

During the rest of the week Johnson found he kept seeing the man he then named, for the convenience of the journal, Biker. The rather mundane region where Johnson lived was one of those village-in-city conurbations featured by London journalists writing on London -like Hampstead, for example, if without the dosh. You did get to be aware, indirectly, sometimes, of the locals, as they of you, perhaps. Johnson believed that in fact he wasn’t coincidentally and now constantly “bumping into” Biker, but that he had become aware of Biker. Therefore he noticed him now each time he saw him, whereas formerly he had frequently seen him without noticing, therefore without consciously seeing.

This kind of thing had happened before.

In the beginning, when in his teens, Johnson had thought it meant something profoundly important, particularly when it was a girl he abruptly kept on seeing-that was, noticing. Even in his thirties he had been misled by that idea, with Susan. He had realized, after their separation, that what had drawn him to her at first wasn’t love or sex but her own quirkiness and his observation of it. She had worked it out herself, eventually. In the final year of their life together she came to call those he especially studied (including those at Haine and Birch) his “prey.” “Which of your prey are you seeing tomorrow?” she would ask playfully.

Now grasping that it was some type of acuity in him that latched on to certain others in this fashion, Johnson had not an instant’s doubt that he had reacted differently to Biker.

So what was it then, with Biker? What had alerted Johnson there under the streetlamp on that moonless night?

During the next week, Johnson took his washing to the launderette about 6 p.m., and there Biker sat.

Biker was unloading his wash, but raised his eyes. They were very long eyes, extraordinarily clear, a pale, gleaming grey.

“Cold out,” said Johnson, dumping the washing.

“Yeah,” said Biker.

“Damn it, this machine isn’t working.”

“Yeah,” said Biker. He looked up again. “Try kicking it.”

“You’re joking,” said Johnson placidly.

“No,” said Biker, and he came over quite calmly, and did something astonishing. Which was he jumped straight upward with enormous agility and power, and fetched the washer the lightest but most expressive slap with his left foot. Landing, he was like a lion-totally co-ordinated, unfazed. While the machine, which had let out a rattling roar, now gulped straight into its cycle. Biker nodded and returned to his wash.

“Wow,” said Johnson. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I owe you a drink. The girlfriend’s refused to come round till I get these bloody sheets done.”

Biker glanced at him.

Johnson saw there was neither reluctance nor interest in the smooth, lean face, hardly any expression at all. The eyes were only mercury and white china.

“I’ll be in the Victory,” he said.

Once Biker left, Johnson, not to seem too eager, stayed ten minutes with his washing. He had chosen the crank machine on purpose. And what a response he had got! Biker must be an acrobat. At the very least a trained dancer.

Perhaps, Johnson thought, he shouldn’t indulge this. Perhaps it was unwise. But then, he usually did indulge his observation. It had never led to anything bad. Except once.

Had being stabbed and disabled made him reckless? He thought not. Johnson wasn’t reckless. And he could afford the price of a couple of drinks.

When he got into the pub, the place was already full. The music machine filled the air with huge thuddings, while on every side other machines for gambling flashed like a firework display.

He looked round, then went to the bar and ordered a drink, whisky for the cold. He could already see Biker wasn’t there.

Which might mean he had distrusted Johnson, or that something else had called him away. Or anything, really.

Johnson was not unduly disappointed. Sometimes not knowing was the more intriguing state. Besides, going out of the door he heard a man say, as if signaling to him, “Yeah, there’s something out by the old pier sometimes. I seen it too. Big animal. Dolphin p’rhaps. But it was dark.”

Yet another week after the exchange with Biker, Johnson was leaving the smaller Sainsbury, near the Odeon, when he glimpsed his quarry, bikeless, driving by in a dark blue BMW.

Johnson knew he would thereafter keep his eyes open also for the car, whose number-plate he had at once memorized. He was sure, inevitably, that he had often seen the car as well. He was struck by an idea, too, that Biker, in some strange, low-key way, wished to be visible-the bike itself, the car, the habit of the launderette. And that in turn implied (perhaps) a wish to be less visible, or non-visible, on other occasions.

With his groceries Johnson picked up one of the local papers. He liked to glance at it; the doings of the city of Sandbourne amused and puzzled him. Accordingly he presently read in it that another late-season holiday maker had gone missing. There had apparently been two the previous summer, who vanished without a trace. Keen swimmers, they were thought to have fallen foul of the wild currents east of the town. The new case, however, one Alice Minerva McClunes, had been a talented lady from New York. On the south-east coast to visit a niece, she had gone out with her camera and sketch-pad and failed to return. “She wanted to stay on the beach,” the presumably woebegone niece reported, “till moonrise. It was the full moon.” Alice was, it seemed, known for her photography of moonlight on various things.

This small article stayed intransigently with Johnson for the rest of the evening. He reread it twice, not knowing quite why.

Johnson the observer had made no friendships in Sandbourne, but he had by now gained a few acquaintances to say “hello” to.

He went to the local library the next day, then to the fishmarket above the beach. There, in between the little shops, he met the man he knew as Reg. And then Biker appeared walking along from the east end of the town, from the direction actually of the eldritch pier. And Reg called out to him, “Hi, mate. Okay?” and Biker smiled and was gone.

As one might, Johnson said, “You know him? I’ve seen him around-nice bike. Drives a car, too, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s Jason. Don’t know his other name. Lives in one of the rock-houses. Got a posh IT job in London -only goes up a couple of times a week. Oh, and once a month, three days and nights in Nores.” Reg pronounced this neighbouring, still parochial, town in the proper local way as Nor-ez. “Bit of money, yes.”

“A rock-house? They’re the ones built into the cliff, aren’t they?”

“Yep. Caves in back with pools of seawater. Pretty trendy now. Not so good when we get a freak high tide. Flooded out last year, all of ’em. Only, he was off at Nores-three days every time. Thought he might come back to see the damage but he never did. When I saw him he just says, I’ll just buy a new carpet. Okay for some.”

“Yes,” said Johnson regretfully.

But his mind was busy springing off along the last stretch of habitable Sandbourne, mentally inspecting the houses set back into the cliffs. Smugglers had put them to good use in the 1800s. Now renovated and “smart,” they engaged the wealthy and artistic. He was curious (of course he was) as to which house was Jason’s-Jason, who, after all, must be rich. He thought of the pools of sea that lay behind the facades, and the great stoops of bending cliff that overhung them. Johnson had seen photographs of these structures in History of Sandbourne.

He visualized acrobatic Jason leaping straight down into a glimmering, glittery, nocturnal pool, descending like a spear, wriggling effortless and subtle as an eel out through some pipe or fissure, and so into the black-emerald bowel of the sea. He pictured those cold silver eyes under the glazes of blind green water, and the whip of the two legs, working as one, like a merman’s tail. But somehow, too, Johnson pictured Jason as a sort of dog-hairy, unrecognizable, though swimming-as if there had been a dream of this, and now he, Johnson, recalled. As gradually he had remembered, was remembering all the rest, the sightings in launderette, car-all, everything.

Turquoise, blood-orange, daylight snagged the drips of nets under the skeletal arm of the pier. Bottle-green light gloomed through rotted struts, shining up the mud, debris, the crinkle of water like pleated glass…

And the day lifted to its zenith, and folded away. It was November now. Behind the west end, the sky bled through paintwork themes of amber and golden sienna. The sea blued. Sidelit, long tidal runners, like snakes with triangular pale indigo heads, swarmed inward on the land. Darkness began to stir in the east.

They forgot, people, how the dark began there, eastward, just as light did. The sun, the moon, rose always from the east. But so did night.

Never mind that. Soon the moon would be full again.

Under the pier, the mind was lying in its shell of skull. As dark filled in on dark, dark was in the brain, smooth and spontaneously ambient as the ink of a squid.

Under the pier.

Overhead the ruin, and the ancient ballroom, which a full moon might light better than sixteen chandeliers.

Something not a wave moved through the water.

Perhaps a late swimmer, indifferent to the cold.

Jason lived in the house behind the courtyard. It had high gates that were, most of the time, kept shut and presumably locked. A craning tree of a type unknown to Johnson grew up the wall, partly hiding with its bare, twisted slender branches an upper-storey window. Johnson discovered the correct house by knocking at another in the group, asking innocently for Jason, the man with the bike. An uninterested young woman said the man with the bike lived at the one with the courtyard. She didn’t want to know Johnson’s business. Johnson guessed the BMW would be parked in one of the garages above that corresponded with the rock terrace. The bike, according to the woman, was kept in the yard.

Having walked past the relevant house, he walked back and up Pelling Road to the clifftop. He sat on a bench there, looking down at the winter shore and the greyling sea. From here, away along the saucer curve of the earth, he could make out the pier like a thing of matchsticks. They said any storm destroyed always another piece of it. And yet there it still was, incredibly enduring.

He had visited the library again, looking at back numbers of the local papers. There had been a few disappearances mentioned in those past years he had viewed. But he supposed only tax-paying citizens or visitors would be counted. The coast’s flotsam might well vanish without a trace.

That night the moon came up like a white plate in the tree at the end of the bungalow’s small fenced garden.

The disk wasn’t yet full, but filling out; in another couple of nights it would be perfect.

Johnson put down the Graham Greene novel he was reading and went out into the dusk.

Sea-influencing, blood-influencing, mind-influencing moon.

He thought of Jason, perhaps in his rich-man’s house just above the beach, behind the high gates and the yard, inside stone walls with the sea in the back of them.

By midnight Johnson was in bed asleep. He dreamed clearly and concisely of standing inside the cliffs, in a huge cave that was pearl white, lit by a great flush of brilliance at either end. And the far end opened to the sea, long thick rollers combering in, and where they struck the inner floor of the cave, white chalk sprayed up in the surf. But then out of the sea a figure came, riding fast on a motorbike. He was clad in denim and had short and lustrous hair, but as he burst through the cave, brushing Johnson with the rush of his passage, anyone would have noticed that the biker had the face of a dog, and in his parted jaws, rather delicately, he held a man’s severed hand.

Waking from this, Johnson found he had sat bolt upright.

There was a dull, groaning ache in his lower gut and back, which he experienced off and on since the stabbing. He was barely aware of it.

Johnson was thinking of the changes the moon brought. And how something so affected might well share an affinity with the lunar-tidal sea. But also Johnson thought of an old acquaintance of his, fussy Geoffry Prentiss, who had been fascinated by the sightings, detailed in papers, of strange fauna, such as the Beast of Bodmin. He’d coined a term for such a phenomenon: warg. An acronym, WARG stood for Weird Animal Reported Generally.

With a slow, inevitable movement, not really disturbing, Johnson got up, went into the bathroom, and presently returned to put on his clothes and boots.

By the time he reached St. Luke’s, the clock showed ten minutes to 3 a.m. There had been almost no one on the upper streets, just a young couple kissing. Soon though, a surreal distant pounding revealed the area of the nearest nightclubs, and outside the Jester a trio of youths were holding up another, who was being impressively sick. Compared to London, Sandbourne was a mild place. Or so it had seemed.

He wondered, when he turned east along the promenade, under the high lamps already strung with their Christmas neons of holly and stars, if he were sleepwalking. He considered this with complete calm, analytically. Never before had he taken his study of others to such an extremity. Had he in fact had a breakdown, or in more honest words, gone mad?

But the night was keen. He felt and smelled and saw and experienced the night. This was not a dream. He walked in the world.

The moon had vanished westward in cloud, as if in pretense of modesty. Beyond the line of land, the sea was jet-black under jet-black sky, yet the pale fringes of wavelets came in and in. Constant renewal. Repetition of the most elaborate and harmonious kind. Or the most relentless kind.

In the end, the seas would devour all the landmasses of the earth. The waters would cover them.

Several elderly men, drunk or drugged, sprawled on a bench and swore at him as he passed, less maliciously than in a sort of greeting for which, by now, they lacked other words.

Gulls, which never slept, circled high above the town, lit underneath translucently by the lamps.

Johnson went down the steps and into the area where the fishing fleet left its boats and sheds. The sand, the sheds, the boats, were sleeping. Only a tiny glow of fire about fifty feet away showed someone there keeping watch, or dossing.

The shadows clung as he passed the fish shops and turned into the terraced street above the shore. The lamps by the rock-houses were greenish and less powerful. They threw a stark quarter-glow on the stone walls, then on the many-armed tree, the two high gates. One of which stood ajar.

Jason, the acrobat with metallic eyes. And the gate was open.

Inside, the yard had been paved, but the bike wasn’t to be seen. Instead a single window burned yellow in the lower storey, casting a reflected oblong, vivid and unreal as if painted there, on the ground.

Johnson accepted that it was impossible not to equate this with a trap, or an invitation, and that it was probably neither.

He hesitated with only the utter silence, the silence of the sea, which was a sound, to guide him. Such an ancient noise, the clockwork rhythm of an immortal god that could never cease. No wonder it was cruel, implacable.

He went through the gate and stepped softly over the yard until he reached the window’s edge.

The bright room was lit by a powerful overhead source. It showed banks of computers, mechanical accessories, a twenty-first-century nerd’s paradise. And there in the middle of it Jason kneeled on the uncarpeted floor. He was dressed in jeans, shirt, and jumper. He was eating a late supper.

A shock passed through Johnson, quite a violent one.

Afterwards, he was slightly amazed at his own reaction.

For Jason was not dining on a severed hand, not on anything human at all, and yet- Yet the way he ate and what he ate-a fish, evidently raw and very fresh, head and scales and fins and tail and eyes and bones all there, tearing at them with his opened jaws, eating, gnawing, swallowing all, those metal eyes glazed like those of a lion, a dragon- This alone. It was enough.

Not since London had Johnson driven, but his license was current and immaculate. Even his ironic leg, driving, gave him no problems.

He hired the red Skoda in town. It wasn’t bad, easy to handle.

On the afternoon of the almost full moon, having waited on the Nores Road for six and three-quarter hours, he spotted Jason’s blue BMW instantly. Johnson followed it on through forty minutes of country lanes, between winter fields and tall, bare trees, all the way to a small village known as Stacklebridge. Here, at a roundabout, the BMW turned around and drove straight back the way it had come.

Johnson, however, drove on to Newsham and spent an hour admiring the Saxon church, sheep, and rush-hour traffic going north and south. He had not risked the obvious move of also turning and tracking the other car homeward. Near Sandbourne, he was sure, Jason would park his vehicle in concealment off the road, perhaps in a derelict barn. Then walk, maybe even sprint the last distance, to reach his house or the pier before moonrise.

The nature of his studies had often meant Johnson must be patient. He had realized, even before following the blue car, that he could do nothing now, that was, nothing this month; it was already too late. But waiting was always part of watching, wasn’t it? And he had been stupidly inattentive and over-confident only once, and so received the corrective punishment of a knife. He would be careful this time.

He didn’t need to dream about it now. He was forewarned, forearmed.

But the dream still occurred.

He was in the pier ballroom, and it was years ago because the ballroom was almost intact, just some broken windows and holes in the floor and walls, where brickwork and struts and darkness and black water showed. But the chandeliers burned with a cold, sparkling lemon glory overhead. All about were heaps of dancers, lying in their dancing clothes, black and white and rainbow. They were all dead and mutilated, torn, bitten, and rotted almost to unrecognizability.

Jason came up from under the pier, directly through the floor, already eating, with a savage hunger that was more like rage, a long white arm with ringed fingers.

But his eyes weren’t glazed now. They were fixed on Johnson. They knew Johnson. And in ten seconds more Jason would spring, and as he sprang, would become what he truly was, even if only for three nights of every month. The nights he had made sure everyone who knew of him here also thought he spent in Nores.

Johnson reacted prudently. He woke himself up.

He had had dreams about other people, too, which had indicated to him some psychological key to what was troubling them, far beyond anything they had been able to say. Johnson had normally trusted the dreams, reckoning they were his own mechanism of analysis, explaining to him. And he had been very accurate. Then Johnson had dreamed that gentle, tearful Mark Cruikshank from Publicity had come up to him on the carpark roof at Haine and Birch and stuck a long, pointed fingernail through his heart. The dream was so absurd, so out of character, so overdramatic that Johnson dismissed it as indigestion. But a couple of days later Mark stabbed him in the groin, with the kind of knife you could now buy anywhere in the backways of London. For this reason Johnson did not think to discount the dreams of Jason. And for this reason, too, Johnson had known, almost at once, exactly what he was dealing with.

Christmas, personally irrelevant to Johnson for years, was much more important this year. Just as December was, with its crowds of frantic shoppers-not only in the festive, noisy shops, but in their cars racing up to London and back, or to Nores and back.

Moonrise on the first of the three nights (waxing full, declining to gibbous) was earlier in the day, according to the calendar Johnson had bought. It was due at 5:33 p.m.

Not knowing, therefore, if Jason would set out earlier than he had the previous month in order to beat the rush-hour traffic after four, Johnson parked the hired Skoda in a lay-by just clear of the suburbs, where the Nores Road began.

In fact the BMW didn’t appear until three-thirty. Perhaps Jason had been delayed. Or perhaps, as Johnson suspected, a frisson of excitement always ruled the man’s life at this time, adding pleasure to the danger of cutting things fine. For, once the moon was up, visible to Jason and to others; the change must happen. (There were plenty of books, fiction and non, to apprise any researcher of this point.)

On this occasion, Johnson only followed the blue car far enough to get out into the hump-backed country lanes. Then he pulled off the road and parked on a narrow, pebbly shoulder.

He had himself to judge everything to within a hair’s breadth.

To begin the manoeuvre too soon would be to call attention, and therefore assistance and so dispersal. Indeed, the local radio station would doubtless report it, and so might warn Jason off. There were other places after all that Jason, or what Jason became, could seek refuge in.

Probably Jason always turned round at the Stacklebridge roundabout, however. It was the easiest spot to do so.

Johnson kept his eye on his watch. He had made the trip twice more in the interim, and it took consistently roughly eighty minutes to the village and back. But already there was a steady increase in cars buzzing, and frequently too quickly, along the sea-bound lane.

At ten to four the sun went. The sky stayed a fiery lavender for another thirteen minutes.

At four twenty-five Johnson, using a brief gap in traffic, started the Skoda and drove it back fast onto and across the narrow road, simultaneously slamming into reverse. A horrible crunching. The car juddered to a permanent halt.

He had judged it on his last trip: stalled and slanted sidelong across the lane, the Skoda blocked the thoroughfare entirely for anything-save a supermodel on a bicycle.

Johnson got out of the car and locked the doors. He made no attempt to warn the next car whose headlamps he could see blooming. It came bounding over the crest of the lane, registered it had about twenty yards to brake, almost managed it, and tapped into the Skoda with a bump and screech. Belted in, the driver didn’t come to much harm. But he had buckled a headlight, and the Skoda’s bodywork would need some repairs, aside from its gearbox. The driver scrambled out and began to swear at Johnson, who was most apologetic, describing how his vehicle had gone out of control. They exchanged details. Johnson’s were the real ones; he saw no need to disguise them.

As they communicated, three more cars flowed over the crest and, not going quite so fast, pulled to a halt without mishap. Meanwhile two other cars coming from the direction of Sandbourne were also forced to stop.

Soon there was quite a crowd.

The police must be called, and the AA, plus partners and others waiting. Lights from headlamps and digital gadgets flickered and blazed. Mobiles were out all along the verges, chattering and chiming and playing silly tunes under the darkling winter trees.

All the while, the back-up of trapped cars on either side was growing.

Covered by this group event, Johnson absented himself carefully, slipping off along the tree-walled hem of the fields, making his way back up the static vehicular line towards Stacklebridge.

People asked him if he knew what had happened, how long help would be in coming. He said some idiot had crashed his gears. He said the police were on their way.

It was full dark, five-fifteen, eighteen minutes to moonrise, when he noted Jason’s BMW. It was boxed in on all sides, and people were out of their cars here, too, shouting, making calls, angry, frustrated, and only Jason still there, poised over the wheel, staring out blankly like something caught in a cage. He didn’t look angry. He wasn’t making a call. Standing back in darkness under the leafless boughs, Johnson observed Jason and timed the moon on his luminous watch.

In fact, the disk didn’t come up over the slope to the left until the dial showed 5:41. By then the changes were well advanced.

Afterward, Johnson guessed no one else had noticed much what happened inside the BMW. It was the Age of Solipsism. You cared only for yourself and what was yours. The agony of another, unless presented on celluloid, was missed.

But Johnson saw.

He saw the flurry and then the frenzy, planes of half light and deep darkness fighting with each other like two vultures over a corpse. And he heard the screams.

And when the creature-and by then this was all one could call it-burst out, straight out the side of the BMW, none of them could ignore that they might have to deal with it.

Jason had become his true self. He-it-was about seven feet tall and solidly built, but as fluid in movement as an eel. The head and face, chest and back and arms were heavily hairy, covered in a sort of pelt through which two pale, fishlike eyes and a row of icy teeth glared and flamed. The genital area was also sheathed in fur, but under that the legs were scaled like those of a giant snake or fish. When the huge clawed hands rose up, they, too, had scales, very pallid in the blaze of headlights. It snarled, and it stank, rank, stale, fishy. This anomalous thing, with the face of a dog and the eyes of a cod, sprang directly against the crowd.

Johnson, cool, calculating, lonely Johnson (to whom every human was a type of study animal), had deemed casualties inevitable, and certainly there were a few. But then, as he, student of humanity, had predicted, they turned.

Subsequent news broadcasts spared no one who heard, saw, or read them the account of how a mob of already outraged people had ripped the monstrous beast apart. Questioned later they had been nauseous, shivering, crying, but at the hour, Johnson himself had seen what they did, and how they stood there after, looking down at the mess smeared and trampled on the roadway. Jason of course, given half a chance, would have and had done the same to them. And contrary to the myth, he did not alter back in death to human form, to lie there, defenseless and accusing. No, he, it, had retained the metamorphosis, to puzzle everyone for months, perhaps years, to come. Naturally, too, it hadn’t needed a silver bullet, either. Silver bullets were the product of legends where the only strong metal, church candlesticks, was melted down to make suitable ammunition. If Johnson had had any doubt, Jason’s own silvery eyes would have removed it.

That night, when the howling tumult and the flying sprays of blood had ceased, Johnson had stood there under the trees. He had felt quite collected. Self-aware, he was thinking of Mark Cruikshank, who had stabbed him, and that finally he, Johnson, for once in his bleak and manacled life, had got his own back on this bloody and insane world of aliens-werewolves, human beings.