Full MoonCity (11 page)

“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.