Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  The porter poured out a cup. It was dark and tarry and seemed to come out in lumps. He placed down the coffee jug and handed me a battered menu.

  ‘Everything but the scrambled eggs is off.’

  I stared at the menu anyway, a sumptuous array of culinary alternatives. While having no basis in reality, it was still an enjoyable read. If circumstance hadn’t made choice redundant, I probably would have gone for the eggs Benedict, devilled mushrooms or kedgeree with mango chutney.

  ‘I’ll have the scrambled eggs,’ I said, handing the menu back.

  ‘A wise choice,’ said Lloyd, and walked briskly away.

  I looked outside. The sky was a sheet of drab off-white, the colour of boiled string, and the dull tone merged into the snow heaped upon the roofs so perfectly it was difficult to see where the roofline ended and the sky began. I could see a nightwalker wandering across the road about a hundred yards away, walking in an uncertain manner with a stick, yet wearing an impressive ballgown – with a distinctive fruit hat perched upon their head. If it was Carmen Miranda, Jonesy couldn’t have thumped her hard enough.

  ‘It’s Charlie Worthing, isn’t it?’ came a familiar-sounding voice. I turned and found myself looking at Zsazsa. It was odd seeing her here and real and old, when I’d just seen her in my dream, younger, and as one of the classic Mrs Nesbits. I got to my feet as politeness dictates and before I could speak she’d pulled me into a Winter embrace. She smelled of inexpensive perfume and tolerably clean laundry – with just a hint of lemon marmalade.

  She released me, smiled and sat down opposite without being asked. Her complexion was clear, her skin soft, but her conker-coloured eyes were dark-rimmed with lack of sleep and bore within them a sense of deep melancholy.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ I said. ‘It’s a little lumpy and not really coffee at all, but it’s warm and dark coloured, and probably non-toxic.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, pushing an empty cup forward.

  We fell silent for a moment or two.

  ‘I’ve never met a Mrs Nesbit in the flesh before,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’ve never met a drowsy before.’

  It seemed a stupid thing to say, but it was better than sitting there, struck dumb by awkwardness.

  ‘Despite the stories, our honeyed words, extensive inventory of memorised poems and inspired lute-playing more often see to slumber than the intimate approach. Did you hear that the Cambrensis went cold?’

  I nodded.

  ‘The majority of residents were bed-swapped en sommeil, but eighteen needed to be eased back down into the abyss. Most of them responded well to lullabies, but a few needed more intimate means. Men, women, other – in the fog of wake it doesn’t really matter. You’d have to do it, if we didn’t.’

  I must have looked shocked, for she added:

  ‘The Consul recruitment office doesn’t shout about that part of the work; it puts people off, although given the horrors of the Winter, it’s the least of one’s worries. I like to see our Winter Easement work as an invaluable aid to the well-being of the Wintering community. And just so you know,’ she continued, ‘“drowsy” is not really an appropriate term. It demeans the noble profession. Sleepmaiden or Sleepmaster is better, or if you’re into your French, Dormiselle and Dormonsieur. Actually, even Sleepworker is more acceptable. Is it true you killed Lucky Ned?’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Lloyd.’

  Perhaps telling him all about it might not have been such a good idea.

  ‘I think the Winter took Ned,’ I said.

  She put her head on one side and stared at me for a few moments.

  ‘The Winter takes a lot from everyone, and only ever returns meltwater and bodies.’

  I mused on what she had said.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘The first is free, the second on account – the third, you pay cash.’

  ‘You’re living in the Siddons,’ I said. ‘Are you having any recurring dreams?’

  She was about to take a sip of her coffee, but then stopped and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You mean the blue Buick dream that’s blowing around the ninth floor like an unwelcome fart?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘precisely that sort of dream.’

  She leaned forward.

  ‘I live on the nineteenth floor – half of it, actually, sort of a penthouse – so I haven’t had the dream, but I’ve heard all the details. And I know precisely how Mrs Nesbit got to be in it. I can sell you that information.’

  ‘She’s there because dreamers were told she’s in it,’ I said. ‘The blue Buick, oak trees, hands, boulders, Mrs Nesbit. The dream was seeded by incautious gossip.’

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice.

  ‘Shimmery, was she? Looked as though she didn’t belong there? Words and lip movements out of sync?’

  ‘Look,’ I said, now used to the reverse nature of my dream memory, ‘I’m a touch narced and my memory is rebuilding retrospectively. All that stuff is in the dream because you said it just then.’

  She frowned at me.

  ‘I’ve never heard of that happening.’

  ‘It’s like being in a permanent state of déjà vu.’

  Zsazsa looked around to make sure we were alone. Fodder was on the other side of the room and Lloyd nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Do you have a pen and paper?’

  I nodded and laid them on the table.

  ‘The Mrs Nesbit in the dream, she said something, as she did to all the others. A sentence, a test line, a quote. We’re both going to write it down. Okay?’

  I agreed as there was nothing to lose, and wrote: ‘We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs Buckley lives.’

  When we had both written, we swapped them over. Hers was the same as mine. Word for word. I stared at her, then at the sentence she’d written down.

  ‘Trust in your memory, Charlie, trust in yourself. Now, here’s the deal: I can tell you how Mrs Nesbit got to be in those dreams. But information has a price.’

  I was still staring at her note. I felt hot and sweaty, and once more the image of the blue Buick started to bleed into the space around me. Soft and indistinct to begin with and then with the pile of rocks, more solid, more defined. The oak tree started to appear, too, as the dappled light began to play on the tables in the dining room. As the illusion unfolded I had the bewildering fear that the encroaching vision wouldn’t stop, that it would wash over me and I would stay locked in the Dreamstate for ever. I gazed at what few scraps of reality remained – the table, the coffee pot, Zsazsa – and concentrated on them lest I lose them, too.

  But to no avail.

  Within a few seconds they had vanished and Mrs Nesbit had arrived, wanting to know where the cylinder was. She was shouting now, demanding, coercing. Louder and louder until I was about to draw my Bambi and attack her, when someone else appeared.

  ‘Birgitta?’

  She was right there in front of me, eternally unchanged, dressed in her dungarees and the man’s shirt, holding the brushes, hair carelessly tied up. She smiled, told me she loved me, and I, in return, told her I loved her too. There was a pause, the waves crashed on the beach, and there was a gurgle of a child’s laugh as the beach ball bounced past.

  ‘Charlie? Are you okay?’

  I looked at Birgitta and she suddenly appeared older, more careworn, and in an instant she wasn’t Birgitta at all but Zsazsa, and I was back in the dining room with the Dormiselle staring at me. My hand was still gripped around the butt of the Bambi, my thumb on the safety but thankfully I hadn’t drawn the weapon – or worse. I had been seconds away from attacking an entirely imaginary foe. I carefully released my hold on the Bambi, palms damp with sweat.

  ‘Shit,’ I said, now knowing precisely what had taken Moody and Suzy. The blue Buick dream had swept over them, too, in a suffocating alternative reality, and they’d tried to kill the hectoring Mrs Nesbit, and been killed themselves. But I had a secret weap
on: Birgitta. She’d just saved my life, and quite possibly Zsazsa’s as well.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Zsazsa again.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, the return from the event almost as rapid as the descent.

  I took a drink of water and stared at Zsazsa.

  ‘So how did you know about Mrs Buckley and the remote farm in Lincolnshire?’

  She cocked her head on one side and stared at me.

  ‘Information has a price, my young friend. Two thousand euros.’

  We haggled for almost five minutes, and settled on eight hundred euros, a dozen Snickers, three Cornettos and a Favour. We shook hands on it, and she began.

  ‘It was when I was still a Mrs Nesbit, over thirty years ago. You’re too young to remember.’

  ‘True,’ I said, ‘but you’re still familiar.’

  ‘I’m glad of that. NesCorp Holdings gave a lot of funding to HiberTech in those days, so I often travelled over here for press junkets, announcing some new discovery or other. I was the face of Morphenox during its initial roll-out, and I was always treated very well.’

  She looked around and lowered her voice.

  ‘On one of these trips Don Hector took me aside and asked if I would assist with some high-level research work. I said I would – you don’t turn down someone like Don Hector – so I signed reams and reams of non-disclosure contracts and they had me stand in a room. Lots of light, the air kind of alive with static – then they had me recite some of the usual Mrs Nesbit bullshit: products to buy, tips for the busy homemaker, how to balance your chores in the kitchen with wanting to be down the pub, advice on weight gain, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Before we did all this, I’d been asked to do a sound check and I used the “remote farm in Lincolnshire” line as I always do. Ripple-dissolve thirty years on and Suzy Watson, Roscoe Smalls and Moody all had their dream with Mrs Nesbit saying the same thing – before the hectoring started in a voice that wasn’t mine.’

  She stopped talking. I’d had exactly the same thing.

  ‘Did this high-level research project have a name?’

  ‘It was part of something called Dreamspace.’

  Shamanic Bob had mentioned something by that name, but hadn’t gone into any detail.

  ‘What was Dreamspace meant to do?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but the technician said I was going to be their first “Dream Avatar”, whatever that is. And that’s my lot. I’ll expect payment as soon as you have it.’

  She stood up as Lloyd approached the table, thanked me for the coffee and moved back to her table.

  The porter placed my scrambled eggs in front of me and then left. I tried the eggs. The low points were colour, taste and consistency, with warmth the only redeeming feature. True to Aurora’s demand, it was a double portion, which given the low quality of the food was not quite as good a deal as I’d hoped. But my mind, as usual, was on other matters. I reread the piece of paper Zsazsa had given me.

  We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs Buckley lives.

  This was, I realised, the first piece of true evidence that there was a viral dream. But quite why it was featuring a line of dialogue from a decades-old sound test, I had no idea. I was still as much in the dark now as I was when I arrived – in fact, I was probably more confused.

  ‘Hey,’ came a voice close behind.

  Jonesy

  * * *

  ‘… The temperature during a Welsh Winter fluctuated between a few degrees above zero and polar snaps that could freeze the mercury in the thermometers. The lowest temperature recorded in Wales was at Llandudno in 1976 – a marrow-freezing minus 78C …’

  – Handbook of Winterology, 4th edition, Hodder & Stoughton

  Jonesy sat down opposite and sniffed the coffee pot gingerly.

  ‘By St Etienne,’ she said, pulling a face, ‘what they say about the Siddons coffee is true. Kip well?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘on the whole, yes, I think so.’

  ‘Good. What’s that you’re eating?’

  ‘It’s an indeterminate foodstuff masquerading as scrambled egg.’

  Jonesy picked up a spoon and prodded the grey mass gingerly. It wobbled as though irritated by the intrusion. She pulled a face, but helped herself to a spoonful anyway.

  ‘I bumped into Aurora on the way over,’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  ‘Are you insane?’ she said. ‘Truly, I mean, out-of-your-head insane? Toccata’s going to have your tongue out.’

  ‘We didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Then why did she tell me you did?’

  ‘She’s using it to annoy the Chief.’

  Jonesy stared at me for a while, unsure if I was telling the truth or not.

  ‘Let’s get to work,’ she said finally, ‘and look, I don’t care one way or the other if the big A is using you to scratch an itch, but think very carefully of actions, Wonky. They have a dismaying tendency to be followed by consequences, and sometimes quite bad ones.’

  I followed her out of the Winterlounge and, once booted and suited, we stepped outside and walked to her Sno-Trac. The temperature had fallen since the previous evening and the air was as crisp as a wafer. There was barely a breath of wind, the sky was a deep azure and ice crystals on the snow glistened like diamonds in the sunshine.

  ‘I thought there was a storm coming in,’ I said.

  ‘There is. Six hours from now you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face.’

  I started the Sno-Trac and drove off in the direction of the Consulate.

  ‘We’ve got a problem,’ said Jonesy. ‘How many people did you tell about Lucky Ned?’

  My heart sank.

  ‘I might have … mentioned something to Lloyd.’

  ‘Here’s some advice: if you’ve got a secret that you want everyone to know about, confide in a porter. There are just over seventy porters in the sector looking after nearly two hundred Dormitoria, who are now so familiar with Bonanza, Dynasty and Crossroads that they act them out in their spare time for fun. When they’re not doing that, they’re on the Open Network, gossiping, and last night you were the hot topic. Half think that you’re an idiot to kill Ned, as retribution will surely rain upon all our heads, a little under half think that you did the right thing but were out of your tiny stupid mind, and of the remainder, three people couldn’t give a toss so long as Gaer Brills comes last in The Great Albion Sleep Off – and one was convinced that the Gronk has returned to feed on the shame of the unworthy.’

  ‘Was the last one Jim Treacle?’

  ‘Good try. No. It was Laura. How can one Novice get into so much trouble so quickly? When I began in the mobile infantry nothing exciting happened to me for weeks.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I lost sixty soldiers under my command.’

  ‘Your fault?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but they were all my responsibility, so it amounts to the same thing.’

  She fell silent and wiped off some condensation that had formed on the interior of her window.

  ‘Aurora was asking me where Glitzy Tiara and Eddie Tangiers ended up,’ I said. ‘She said she checked the night pit and they weren’t there.’

  Jonesy stared at me.

  ‘They’re in the snow at the back of the car park. I couldn’t be arsed to walk them to the night pit. What does she think I did with them?’

  ‘She’s of the opinion that you and the Chief are running some sort of farming scam that used to include Logan.’

  ‘I’m glad you brought that to me,’ she said, after staring at me in silence for a while, ‘and in return, here’s something that might interest you.’

  She dug a sheet of notepaper out of her top pocket and passed it across. I read it briefly while driving along. On the paper were six names, but the only one I recognised was Charles Webster.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘I was bored and in the records office. It turns
out that Webster wasn’t the only employee from HiberTech who went missing at that time – every single name on that list ended up either redeployed or vanished. And get this: all had been working at the Sleep Sciences Division. Interesting?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘What’s your explanation?’

  ‘Not sure. A purge, perhaps – they suspected someone of industrial espionage but didn’t know who it was, so went through the lot. I’ll bet good money Hooke was involved.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You heard Hooke was chucked out of the intelligence services for overenthusiastic interrogation?’

  I nodded.

  ‘The story goes that he spearheaded the military wing of HiberTech’s Dreamspace-Derived Information Extraction Technique. Quite effective, apparently, going in to people’s dreaming minds to extract intel, but with a downside: the subjects were rendered little better than nightwalkers by the process.’

  ‘And you think he did this to Webster and the others?’

  ‘HiberTech are not a pleasant company, Wonky. If they’re employing people like Hooke, trebly unpleasant. You were interested in Webster, so I thought you should know.’

  I thanked her and we drove past the Ashbrook advertising hoarding and then the Cambrensis. Jonesy’s story would make a lot of sense if my dreams were real: HiberTech didn’t know who Don Hector gave the cylinder to, so they interrogated everyone they suspected. I shivered, and pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind. Dream then reality; not the other way round.

  I parked the Sno-Trac next to the statue of Howell Harris and Jonesy told me to keep the engine running.

  ‘You’re to go on patrol with Fod,’ said Jonesy. ‘Wait here.’

  She climbed out the back of the Sno-Trac and went to have a word with Fodder, who was standing outside the Consulate. While I waited I fiddled with all the controls on the dashboard. The main headlamps, H4S radar, hydraulic snowplough. Most of my Sno-Trac time was on simulators, but it wasn’t as if driving a Trac was hard – the controls were identical to those of every other road vehicle, from car to tank to coach to lorry to the biggest dumper truck. SkillZero protocols insisted upon it. ‘Drive one, drive all’ was the slogan.