Full MoonCity by Holly Black, Gene Wolfe, Mike Resnick, Ian Watson, Peter S. Beagle, Ron Goulart, Tanith Lee, Lisa Tuttle, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Esther M. Friesner, Carrie Vaughn, P. D. Cacek, Gregory Frost, Darrell Schweitzer, Martin Harry Greenberg, Holly Phillips Page B

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