Early Riser

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘What’s your interest in this car, Worthing?’

  I had to think. I knew almost no one in Sector Twelve. Birgitta regarded me as you might an ambulatory dinner, Jonesy and Fodder were loyal to Toccata and Lloyd was a porter, whose first priority was the continued smooth running of the Dormitorium. Laura had her head filled with myths and fables and Treacle was little more than a jailbird and a baby-peddler. I needed a friend. Aurora had saved my life – twice – and on that basis alone was about as good a friend as I was ever likely to get.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said with a sigh, realising that I’d have to tell Aurora things I could never tell anyone, ‘because although I’ve never set foot in this car park, I’ve seen the blue Buick and the rabbit’s-foot key ring before.’

  She raised the eyebrow over her non-seeing eye.

  ‘In my . . . dreams.’

  My shoulders slumped as a sweep of memories came back, but this time it was textures only – the leaves, the splays of lichen on the rocks, the granular appearance of the soil, the rust on the Buick bumpers, the crackled paint on the car body. I thought of Birgitta on the beach to clear it out, and with the gurgling laugh of the child with the beach ball, the flashback evaporated.

  ‘I so need a Dormeopath,’ I said in a useless sort of voice.

  Aurora told me that back in her civvy days she used to be a Sleepy-D, and that she wasn’t doing anything for the next hour.

  ‘We could have a coffee at the Wincarnis,’ she said.

  I glanced at my watch. Jonesy wasn’t expecting to meet me until midday.

  ‘Do we have time for me to retrieve Birgitta?’

  ‘All the time you want.’

  I crawled underneath the car and looked into Birgitta’s violet eyes, hoping for some sort of recognition, but she simply stared at me blankly.

  ‘I love you, Charlie,’ she whispered.

  ‘I love you, too,’ I whispered back, my heart thumping. I knew I meant it, too – and not when I’d been her husband, but for myself, now. Yes, it was dumb, illogical and, admittedly, a little creepy, but who wouldn’t? She was smart, driven, talented, and, as a bonus, exceptionally pleasing to the eye. Everything, in fact, except being alive – and that she didn’t love me back, and couldn’t and wouldn’t, not ever.

  ‘Kiki needs the cylinder,’ she said, kind of mirroring Mrs Nesbit’s demand for the cylinder in my dream. I fed her two Snickers then helped her out from under the car. Once out, she stood there, rocking on the balls of her feet, eyes scanning randomly around the basement until she found me, then locked hard on to my eyes. For a brief moment I thought she was there – but then her eyes wandered off again, and the moment was gone.

  ‘So,’ I said once we’d attached dog leads to the nightwalkers and headed for the exit ramp, ‘the panga in a scabbard on your back. Is that actually practical?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Aurora, demonstrating how, if heavily dressed, it was almost impossible to reach in a hurry, ‘but it’s very in at the moment. Oh, word of advice: don’t use a panga on nightwalkers. It’s really messy.’

  Glitzy Tiara mumbled about multi-pack toilet roll and the wisdom of ‘Buy One Get One Free’ deals while Eddie Tangiers attempted, while we walked, to bundle with each vehicle we passed and, once, a concrete building support. It might have been funny if it wasn’t kind of sad.

  ‘I’ve got some plasters and iodine in the truck,’ said Aurora, for Tangiers’ activities were not damage-free.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s gotta hurt.’

  The Wincarnis

  ‘ . . . In the main square of every town there would be a large block of stone, inset with a bronze ring. Capital offenders would be stripped, shackled to the ring, then abandoned. Below the survival threshold of minus ten, the offender would last between two and six hours. Fear, drowsiness, torpor, death . . . ’

  – Law and Order on the Winterlands, by Idris Roberts

  Aurora’s transport was an ex-military command car painted in light sand camouflage, the wheels to the height of my chest. She pushed the fresh snow off the windshield while I tied the nightwalkers’ leads to the back of the truck. We climbed aboard, the vehicle started with a hiss of compressed air, and as we drove towards the centre of town at a slow walking pace, I tried to make sense of what had just happened. There was no rational explanation as to how Birgitta could say the very same thing in life that I’d dreamed about the previous night. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t make sense. Logic would demand that you dream about things that you’d already witnessed – dreams follow reality, not the other way round.

  ‘How are you on HotPots?’ asked Aurora as we took a right at the billboard.

  ‘Nothing beyond General Skills training.’

  ‘The Cambrensis’ HotPot had an unexplained overheat a week ago,’ she explained, gesturing towards the Dormitorium as we drove past.

  ‘Luckily, the fuel rods dropped into the pond when it cooked up and shut itself down. Toccata ordered the Cambrensis abandoned. One of the rehoused residents was Carmen Miranda.’

  ‘What, with the fruit hat and everything?’ I asked.

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘But Carmen Miranda must be – ancient.’

  ‘She credits the Samba for her longevity,’ said Aurora, ‘but I think it’s more likely a statistical quirk of the ageing process.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, surprised that she should be still alive, and, odder still, living out here. ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Aurora. ‘When they opened her door they discovered that she’d walked. Jonesy had to retire her.’

  The tyres crunched on the rutted, refrozen snow as we passed the railway station and then finally reached the main square, where Aurora parked her vehicle, the three Vacants still tied to the back.

  The town square appeared larger in full daylight, and unchanged these past four weeks aside from more snow and ice. We’d parked next to the bronze statue, and I could see now that it was a preacher, set on a sandstone plinth. He was holding a prayer book and in mid-oration, his features obscured by a concretion of snow that had turned to ice, thawed then refrozen, so the figure appeared to be both melting and weeping. Below the statue a man sat huddled in a foetal position, his blue-white arms clasped around his knees.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Howell Harris,’ said Aurora, ‘a preacher who lived near here. There’s a Dormitorium named after him. Died last century some time. Should be a statue of Don Hector, really – or Gwendolyn the – what are we up to now?

  ‘Thirty-eighth, I think. Not the statue – the frozen guy.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Aurora, ‘him. That’s Jedediah Bloom, Sector Footman.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I said, looking closer.

  ‘We caught him trying to smuggle drugs out of HiberTech, and that’s a mandatory Frigicution – even if it was only to supply the winsomniacs.’

  I stared at Bloom, thinking it was a bit harsh, even so.

  ‘I was off-duty at the time,’ said Aurora, probably thinking the same as I, ‘and Hooke was acting Head of Security. He has very many fine qualities but the notion of proportionality is not one of them.’

  I kneeled down and stared at the cadaver with an odd sense of morbid curiosity. Bloom was frozen quite solid. His pallid blue-grey skin was flecked with snow, and every single follicle of his winterdown was standing hard out in a last-ditch effort to forestall the inevitable. He was covered with a dusting of snowflakes, which made him look fluffy, and his milky eyes were wide open and staring off into the middle distance, his expression placid. Near the end you start to feel warm, hallucinate, and then lose all fear.

  ‘He looks like he died only last night,’ I said.

  ‘He did,’ said Aurora, ‘as fresh as frozen peas.’

  I hastily stood up, the recentness of his death so
mehow making the event seem more shocking. Bloom was the grim reality of Frigicution.

  ‘That’s the thing about the Winter,’ said Aurora, ‘it takes the lawless the same as it takes the diseased and the underweight and the elderly. Society’s spring cleaner, hoovering up the substandard before they become a burden.’

  Aurora walked toward the Wincarnis, and I followed. Above the door, the Edwardian woman on the Restorative Tonics sign was still grinning out at the Winter, her cheery smile and bright enamelled colours undiminished by season or cold.

  Shamanic Bob looked up from the reception desk from where he had appeared to be dozing.

  ‘Back to ride the night train to Dreamville?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘How are you and your odious bunch of sleep-shy?’ asked Aurora. ‘Thinned out much?’

  ‘I’ll pass on your good wishes,’ said Shamanic Bob sarcastically.

  We walked into the bar. At one table were a foursome playing Scrabble but they remained oblivious to our arrival. I recognised the receptionist named Josh from HiberTech, but not the others. The only other customers in the room were the drowsy named Zsazsa, who was more intriguing now her younger self had starred in my dream, and a dozen dozing dreamers, who paid us no attention at all.

  ‘There are now fifty-four winsomniacs in the Sector,’ said Aurora, sitting down and taking off her gloves, ‘and there’s been no wastage for almost five days. I left a note suggesting to Toccata that we tell them there’s a good selection of videos at the Captain Mayberry. The trek would have at least a thirty per cent attrition rate, perhaps as high as forty if we timed it during an ice storm.’

  ‘Is that legal?’ I asked.

  ‘The trick is to try and get them to do potentially fatal things voluntarily with a full understanding of the risks. We call it ethical reduction.’*

  ‘Unless there isn’t a good stock of videos in the Mayberry,’ I said.

  ‘And therein lies the problem,’ replied Aurora. ‘The selection isn’t terrific. Mostly Police Academy comedies, endless Die Hard sequels and boxed sets of Emmerdale and Dynasty. Hey, Shambob. Two coffees.’

  There was a grunt from Shamanic Bob and he moved with almost snail-like speed towards the coffee machine.

  Aurora brought out her knitting. It wasn’t a bobble hat this time, it was a sock with an Argyle pattern. We’d sat near the window so we could keep an eye on the nightwalkers. Since you couldn’t actually own another human being, possession – and the bounty thereof – was based nominally on custody and proximity. But on reflection, I doubted, given Aurora’s standing, that anyone would try and steal them.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘let me be your Dormeopath. Tell me as much or as little as you want.’

  I paused to gather my thoughts, and told her how the blue Buick dream had been circulating around the Sarah Siddons. How I hadn’t thought much about it; how I thought it was simply a Sub-beta dream panic.

  ‘That’s our view and that of the Consuls,’ said Aurora, ‘although we didn’t know there actually was a blue Buick parked up in the garage. What sort of dreams were you having?’

  ‘Not dreams as I imagined them to be,’ I began. ‘Half-remembered artefacts, disjointed and vague – but strong, vivid and full of detail. I know this sounds silly, but I dreamed I was Don Hector, with his feelings and his memories.’

  ‘Go on.’

  I recounted everything in as much detail as I could, but purposefully omitted the Birgitta dream because it seemed strangely private, and an odd amalgam of my own childhood holiday memory and Birgitta’s painting. I only told Aurora about the blue Buick, thinking I would apply any advice across to the other dream.

  ‘Why am I dreaming about rocks, cars and disembodied hands?’ I asked.

  ‘Search me,’ she said, ‘and on the face of it this is all batshit crazy, but this is my take: the parts of the dream you were told about are easy to explain, simple auto-suggestion. They mentioned it, you dreamt it. You saw stuff, knew about Zsazsa, it was included. The rest of the dream was you just filling in the gaps.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said, ‘but what about the rabbit’s-foot key ring and the car being precisely the same? I dreamt those and later I’m finding they have a basis in reality.’

  ‘I’m going out on a limb here, but all I can suggest is that the recall of your dream is still in a state of delayed suggestion. Memory remains plastic after waking, and it’s possible everything you think was in the dream might not actually have been in the dream at all.’

  ‘You mean,’ I said slowly, ‘the details of my dream have been joggled in retrospectively? The rabbit’s foot and the detail on the Buick weren’t in the dream?’

  ‘The mind needs to remap on waking,’ she said, ‘and reinforce the millions of neural pathways. Slumber is pretty well understood from a physiological point of view; it’s how personality and memory recover from the doldrums of synaptic tick-over that is hibernation’s greatest mystery. So what I’m thinking is that it’s possible for more recent memories to fill the place of absent, older ones. A fair description would be a severe case of déjà vu. Not just a feeling that something has happened before, but a certainty that it has – and in that certainty, doubt, confusion, fear, paranoia.’

  ‘So even dreaming myself as Don Hector might not have happened? I only created that in my head when I knew the car was his?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, it’s a plausible explanation.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, mulling it over.

  ShamBob entered the lounge and put down a large plate of chips in front of Zsazsa, then moved towards us with two coffees.

  It was real coffee and I inhaled the mellow fragrance gratefully.

  ‘It wasn’t all déjà vu,’ I said, still with questions. ‘The blue Buick, for one. What was that doing in the garage?’

  Aurora had to consider this carefully.

  ‘The car could have been there for years. Suzy Watson might have chanced upon the Buick and she constructs a nightmare around it during her Dreamstate. She tells everyone including Moody, they relate the dream to you – bingo.’

  ‘But that precise model?’

  ‘You only heard it was blue and a Buick from Suzy,’ said Aurora, ‘the reality was—’

  ‘—added when I actually saw it. Okay, I get it now.’

  I thought of Birgitta. If this were true, the plasticity of the dream would have created the scenario with her, too. Her second name would have been chalked up on the basement door, and the vision in the leaf-green swimsuit could have been created when I imagined her equivalent look in the painting she did of me. Even telling me she loved Charlie might only have happened for the first time under the car, and it would be directed at her husband, not me.

  I lapsed into silence.

  ‘Hard to accept, I know,’ she said, ‘but narcosis is like that. This is intriguing, so tell me if you have any other dreams. But here’s a tip: if you value your career, tell no one else about the dream.’

  ‘I haven’t, and don’t intend to.’

  She smiled, opened her hands and stretched them towards me. I placed mine between them and she clasped them tightly, the shorthand of the Winter embrace. It was firm, trusting and, unlike the full embrace, actually felt warm. As we clasped, I noted that a functioning eye wasn’t all she’d lost. She was missing her ring finger – from both hands.

  The alarm on her watch buzzed at her plaintively.

  ‘That’s me out of here,’ she said, stifling a yawn while her unseeing eye blinked rapidly, ‘and one other thing: you’ll be seeing Toccata pretty soon and she and I have something of a . . . strained relationship. It’ll be better for us both if this meeting remained private. As far as you’re concerned, I rescued you from the nightwalkers in the car park, and we parted company outside the Siddons – yes?’

  This didn’t
sound good, and Aurora sensed my reticence.

  ‘I need an oath on this, Charlie. I saved your butt twice, remember.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘oath.’

  ‘Good. Now, I don’t want to seem underhand or insulting but Toccata’s a poisonous, untrustworthy, self-serving little reptile – with a severe personality disorder and a disquieting capacity for cannibalism.’

  ‘That sounds underhand, insulting – and slanderous.’

  ‘It’s fair comment. I’ll leave Birgitta for you to deal with. There’s a pit behind the Siddons where you can thump her and dump her. It’s normal to sprinkle on some lime for when the thaw sets in. Here’s another tip: get her to walk there herself. It’ll save you a lot of heavy lifting. Oh, and don’t forget her thumb to claim the bounty.’

  I tried to swallow, but found I couldn’t.

  ‘Right,’ I croaked, ‘good tip, thank you.’

  ‘No problem. By the way, did you see Hugo Foulnap again?’

  ‘No, but then I’ve been asleep.’

  ‘Of course. Well, keep an eye out and if you see him, talk to me first. Oh, and give Toccata a message from me: “Queen’s knight takes bishop, hope you are devoured by slime in your sleep”. Got it?’

  ‘Queen’s knight takes bishop . . . and the other stuff. Yes, got it.’

  She smiled, and quite without warning leaned forward, placed a soft hand around my neck and kissed me full on the mouth. I was taken aback, but before I could say or do anything she was up and out of the door. I looked around the lounge to see if anyone had observed us and saw ShamBob cleaning some coffee cups in an indiscreet manner.

  I touched my lips where Aurora had kissed me. It hadn’t been a misplaced peck; she had parted her lips slightly upon contact and I’d tasted her warm mouth on mine. She smelled of clean laundry, Aveda conditioner and Ludlow scent, and her shirt had been only loosely buttoned. When she leaned forward I had seen the top of her left breast, and clearly visible amidst the soft down of her wintercoat, there was a birthmark the shape of Guernsey.