The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories

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Full moon would soon be rising to shed a cool brilliance over our hot, aching summer city.

Somewhere across the night of the world it waited to edge up over the rooftops, first a birth of light in the sky, then a thin gold rump mounting above chimneys swimming towards it, finally the enormous and splendid low-hung lantern itself.

People would stand at open windows and gaze at it, watching it ‘rise’, never thinking that it was instead they who dizzily descended round towards it, themselves forever falling away. Lovers in the parks would stare entranced, feeling its platinum heat burn in their veins, watching its light drip white on the buildings like a warm summer-night snow.

But the moon is not only beautiful, it has other strengths. Its terrible pull alters each month the shape of whole oceans. Millions upon millions of tons of salt wet water go creeping up and down the world as from somewhere, radiant and invisible, it pulls. Just as, like a restless sleep, it pulls at the smaller tides in human veins.

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