Full MoonCity (12 page)

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.

N
ow we live on the edge of the bombed quarter of the Parish of St. Quatain in the City of Mondevalcón. The buildings are crooked here, tall tenements shoved awry by the bomb blasts and scorched by the fires. At home in our valleys we whitewashed the houses every spring, even the poorest of us, brightening away the winter’s soot. Here, for all the rent we pay, the landlords say they are too poor to paint, and we live in a dark gray, soot-streaked world, leaning away from the wind and the dirty rain. Spring comes as weeds sprouting in the empty lots where no one has yet begun to build. Build what? We are outside the rumors, we who only moved here after the war. My village was only a hundred miles away, but I am a foreigner here. Stubbornly, like most of us, I am still in my heart a native of my village; I only happen to live in this alien place.

Elena Markassa lives high at the top of a creaking staircase, in her “tower,” she says, where she can look far out and down. They are bright rooms, though cold and restless with the wind that sneaks in through the broken and never-mended panes. But the rest of us live lower down, out of the reach of the sun, so we often gather there, wrapped in our sweaters and shawls. Lydia Santovar huffs and puffs after the climb, but Agnola Shovetz and I are mountain women and too proud, even carrying a sack of potatoes between us. Elena Markassa never leaves her flat; she’s an antiquated princess in her gloomy tower, waiting for her perennially absent son to come home.

We all have absent sons.

“These boys!” Agnola Shovetz says with a toss of her hands and a note of humor in her voice, but Elena Markassa’s broad face is heavy as she brings the flour tin from the pantry. We are making peroshki today, a long and fussy chore demanding company.

“They need work,” Lydia Santovar says.

“My boy works,” Agnola Shovetz says, ready for a mild quarrel.

“I don’t mean that kind of work. Waiting tables! I can’t blame my boy, even grown men take what they can find these days, but what kind of work is that for a man? And all for a pocketful of small bills. I hardly saw a coin from one end of the month to the other, back home. Who needed it? We worked the land, and it gave us what we needed. The apple trees and the barley fields and the cows: there was always something that needed doing at home. That was work, all of us together, building up the farm. That was where the wealth was, and you always knew where the boys were…”

At home. Is this all we talk about? Home. The war took it away from us, or took us away from it. The land we all thought eternal was ruined or lost, simply lost, as if the mountains had closed in, folding the valleys away out of reach. It’s true, the word conjures our small house with the walls of plaster over stone, and the icon of St. Terlouz growing dark as an eclipsed sun over the hearth. But it’s also true that when I hear that word I think of Georgi out on the mountain slopes, running through the streams of moonlight that splash through the spruce boughs and shine off the patchy remnants of snow. How he could run! Not a handsome man, my Georgi, and with a shy, hostile look with strangers, as if he were poised between a snarl and a fast retreat, but oh, to see him moving across the steep meadows, dancing from rock to rock above the backs of the scurrying sheep. Our son moves a little like that, so that it hurts sometimes to see him hemmed in by all these stony walls.
Mountains, buildings,
my boy says to me,
it’s all rock, Mama. Either way, it’s only rock.

It isn’t the buildings, his father would have said. It’s the walls.

Lydia makes a well in the mound of flour on the table and I start cracking eggs while Elena fills the big kettle at the tap.

“This morning,” Elena says, pitching her voice over the rush of the water, “I had to hear from my neighbor across the hall on the other side, she looks over the roofs going down to the harbor. She says all last night she heard the boys out on the roof, drinking, fighting, God knows what they get up to-”

“My boy’s not a fighter,” Agnola says.

“Whatever they do,” Elena says, “this morning the roofs were covered with dead birds. Feathers like a ruined bed, that’s what my neighbor said, and the birds all lying there like a fox went through the henhouse, dead.”

“They keep hens on the roof over there?” Lydia says. Her strong arm is pumping as she beats the eggs into a yellow froth.

“Not hens,” Elena says. “Pigeons, seagulls. Should I know? City birds. Nobody keeps hens here.”

“People keep doves,” Agnola says. She has a worried look, always on the verge of hunger.

“Not for eating,” Elena says authoritatively. Perhaps living in her tower has made her an expert on the city’s heights. “They’re racing pigeons, for sport.”

“We used to snare wood doves and cook them into pies,” Agnola says.

“You can’t eat city birds,” Lydia says. She’s a little short of breath. “No better than rats, with what they eat.”

“It’s the
dead
birds I’m talking about.” Elena bangs the kettle down on the stove and turns to us. “Of course I had to hear it from my neighbor.
He
comes home almost at dawn, when all night I hardly slept for wondering where he is, and ‘Where were you?’ I say, but it’s ‘Mama, I have to go to work, do I have any clean socks?’ ”

“Oh, but my boy’s just the same,” says Lydia. “They’re all the same, aren’t they, Nadia?”

They look at me, because they think my boy is the ringleader, the troublemaker, the one whose role in life is to lead the innocent astray. But what can I say? That, no, unlike their boys he tells me everything, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark?

The clouds blew away before midnight last night, and the moon shone so bright the birds mistook it for day. Down below, far below the height of rooftops on the hill, the harbor looked like a circle of sky, black water and moon sequins embraced by a lunar crescent of headlands. The water trembled under the wind that cleansed the air of its night smokes, and the birds, confused by the brilliance of the moon, lifted their wings, half aloft as the sea air flowed over and around them. Multitudes of pigeons on the roof leads leaned silently into the wind, bright eyes colorless, ruffled feathers like pewter. They stood in ranks like a congregation waiting for the hand of God to part the curtain of sky and sweep them away to another world; city doves, gray as the pavements, waiting for the right hand of God. And all around, like lumps of creosote on chimneys, finials on church spires, heat-slumped lightning rods and weather vanes frozen by the cold light, perched the owls.

If you move slow enough, not stalking-slow, but easy, you have to have some humor about it, be a little careless-but if you’re easy, you can walk right among them. They’re used to people; it’s like feeding them in the square, except they’re so still, in a trance, soft around your feet. In the cold you can feel the warmth of them against your ankles, the soft feathers of their breasts.

I can feel it. I can see the sleepy shutter-blink of their eyes as they stare out to sea, bemused, be-mooned.

The boys climbed the roofs as if tenements were mountain peaks and they were wolves climbing into the thin air to serenade the moon. And what happens to the hundreds of souls under the roofs when the roofs are no longer roofs, the buildings no longer buildings but hills, and the streets are only ravines, black with moon-shadow? What happens to all the dreamers when our boys are alone with the birds on the high hills? Do we dream beneath their feet like the dead dream, locked in the solid earth?

The boys stood on the steep roof slope, feet warmed by pigeons and faces icy in the wind. The pigeons with their wings half-spread, and maybe the boys, too, with their arms thrown wide, so many saints on so many crosses of moonlight, waiting for the right hand of God. And the owls, their yellow eyes the only color in the world, lifting free from chimney and spire, more silent than the blustering wind.

And you’ll never know, Mama, you’ll never know how it is to see the plunge, the hard short fight, the feathers flying like confetti at a wedding, and feel the hot
bloody claws clench your arm. They’re so strong.

They’re so strong.

But I do know. You can’t tell your son that, not when he’s sitting on the edge of your widow’s bed with his young blood running so hot and fast in his veins. But I know. I can see it still and breathe the cold air that pours like slow water off the edge of the snowfields. Spring in the valleys, but winter on the heights, so cold there is ice in the air to catch the light of the moon. The waning snow is so white it turns the rest of the mountain to shadow; and the broke-neck grouse, wings wide and head lolling below a halo of scattered feathers; and my Georgi, a shadow, with only his eyes bright with moon. Is that why I left the mountains? Not because there was nothing left but scarred fields and a gutted house, nothing for my son but the choice between brigandage and hunger. But because as long as I am here, or anywhere else, I can see my husband there-as if I had to leave before he could come home from the war.

But the women, my country friends, are looking at me, waiting for an answer. “Yes,” I say with just the right sort of sigh, “these boys, they’re all the same.” And I reach for a potato and a paring knife, taking my share of the chore.

When you’re trudging through the gray streets, with maybe a shopping basket in one hand, an umbrella in the other, bumping along with all the other umbrellas on the way to market to buy vegetables off a truck without even a crumb of good dirt in sight-when you’re walking the daytime streets, you’d think there’s only two kinds of animal in the world: the pigeons and the cats. Maybe if you look hard, you see the little house sparrows, brave as orphans snatching up what the pigeons are too slow to grab, and the seagulls lording it up on the gutters and the gable ends; and there are cormorants down in the harbor, drying their wings like so many broken umbrellas on the pilings; and of course there are the poor city dogs, tugged about on leashes when they’re not trapped inside; and rats you only ever hear scrabbling in the walls. But the city belongs to the pigeons and the cats, like rival armies in a battle as old as the city, and this city is very old. Very old. And somehow, it’s the pigeons that believe themselves in the ascendant, though you’d think it would be the cats, arrogant with their superior armament of teeth and claws. But it’s the pigeons who bustle around like women on market day, keeping a sharp eye out for a good bit of gossip and a bargain, while the cats slink about on the edges of things, holding themselves equally ready for a fast retreat or a lightning raid. Only at night, when the pigeons hide from the dark and the streets are quiet, do the cats quietly take command.

Mondevalcón is a snarl of streets, a tip-tilted tangle running across the hills that rise between the harbor and the high black mountains inland. Even with the new electric streetlights going up, there is a lot of darkness here at night, and of course the streetlights are going up first among the palaces on the hill and the docks down by the water. In between, where most of us live, there is still darkness, deep as the sea. Only, sometimes the moon slips in, canny and elusive as the little gray tabby that comes to my balcony for her saucer of milk or her bit of egg every morning. Yes, moonlight comes like a cat, easing silently down one street angled just so, skipping across the battered roofs, running rampant in the bomb sites, then darting, sudden and bright, down an alley so narrow you would have sworn it hadn’t been touched by natural light for a thousand years. And one night the foxes from the wild mountains followed the moon into town.

You should have seen them, Mama!
my son says in the dark of my curtained room. I can hardly see him for the darkness, just the shape of a gesture or the glint of an eye, but I can smell the sharp sweat of him, still more boy than man, and the fruit tang of the liquor he shares with his friends. I hear, too, the wild energy that still has him in its grasp. He won’t sleep until it lets him go, so I prop a second pillow under my head and listen.
You should have seen them,
he says.

Cats are solitary creatures and seldom gather, so it’s a curious thing when they do. They came so quietly, as if they gathered substance out of the night air, appearing like the dew on the cobblestones of the street, on wide marble steps and the lofty pediments of the grand old buildings, the banks and palaces and guild halls, that survived the war. There is one wide avenue on the seaward face of the Mondevalcón hill, Penitents Climb, that rises, steep and nearly straight, from the harbor front to Cathedral Square. It runs on from the square, the same wide street though its name has changed, down the back side of the hill, past the townhouses of the rich, and up again, past the train yards and coal depots and feedlots, and up still more into the harsh black rock country of the high mountains, shaded here and there by the juniper and pine. This was the road the foxes took as they came dancing on their long black-stockinged legs, their grinning teeth and laughing eyes bright in the light of the moon. They were not silent. Like soldiers marching into town with a weekend leave before them, they stepped with a quick, hard tapping of claws and let out the occasional yelp or a vixen scream to tease the lapdogs barking and howling from the safety of their masters’ houses, and so their coming was heralded.

The cats waited where Penitents Climb runs into the square. The bombed cathedral stood in its cage of scaffolding, as if it were half a thousand years ago and it was being raised for the first, not the second, time. The cobblestones, where light once fell from jewel-toned windows, were dark, and the square, domain of pigeons in the daylight, was a black field waiting for battle to be joined. How did the boys find themselves there, so far from their usual harborside haunts?

We followed the moon,
my son says, though perhaps they only followed the cats.

The silent cats. In the moonlight you could see the wrinkled demon-masks of their small faces when they hissed, the needle-teeth white, the ears pressed flat, and the eyes. Eyes black in the darkness, black and empty as the space between the stars. Even in the colorless light of midnight you could see all the mongrel variety of them, small and dainty, long and rangy, big and pillow-soft in the case of the neutered toms; and the coats, all gray, it’s true, but showing their patches, their brindles, their stripes. All the cats of the city, alley cats and shop cats and pampered house cats, thousands of cats, as many and as silent as the ghosts of the city’s dead, so many killed by the bombs, and all gathered there to repel the invasion of the mountain wilds.