Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘Must have been a glitch,’ said Hooke.

  ‘No,’ I said, pointing at the bottom of the screen, ‘I think it’s behind us.’

  The H4S scanner was mounted on the top of the Sno-Trac and gave a 360-degree view of the surroundings. It was now picking up a trace directly behind, and moving slowly left to right.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Hooke, and drove backwards as fast as he could. I felt a thump and then a judder as we hit something, and he stopped.

  ‘We got it, whatever it was. Bear, I think.’

  ‘Why would a bear not hibernate? That never happens.’

  ‘First time for everything. I’m—’

  He’d stopped talking because the electrical power in the Sno-Trac had died, and with it the lights, H4S and engine. The only thing still working was the AM wireless, the dial a dull orange. It was tuned to the Winter Network, and now the engine was off we could hear the music – a crackly rendering of ‘Getting to Know You’. The implication of a Rodgers and Hammerstein track wasn’t lost on Hooke, and he went to switch the wireless off, but the knob broke off in his fingers.

  ‘The plastic must have been fatigued by the cold,’ I said, but if I thought this situation was in any way good, I was mistaken. The auxiliary heater had died with the power outtage and Sno-Tracs were not well insulated. Without heating they’d match the exterior temperature in less than ten minutes.

  ‘Bad time to have a breakdown,’ said Hooke, checking all the trips. After cracking a light-stick, he pressed the starter and the compressed air turned the engine but without a restart, and that’s when we felt the vehicle lurch violently to one side. We exchanged looks.

  ‘It’s dragging us backwards,’ I said. ‘You must have snagged her.’

  ‘Not for long,’ he replied, his temper up. He selected low reverse, let out the clutch and then pressed the air starter. The compressed air hissed into the engine, turned the motor over without a start but it moved the Sno-Trac regardless, jerkily, and in reverse; he was attempting to run over what was pulling us. There was another lurch, the vehicle lifted as it went over an obstruction, then fell to the ground again and stopped hard; we’d struck a wall or something. Hooke pushed the gear selector into first and pressed the starter again but there was only a faint hiss as the compressed air tank ran out – we were going nowhere.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Hooke, grabbing the Cowpuncher. ‘Me and it need to get some face time.’

  He opened the rear door and the cab was suddenly full of wind-borne snow.

  ‘Safety line,’ I reminded him, shivering with the sudden cold, and he nodded, grabbed the safety cable, clipped it to his belt and dropped out of the cab and into the blizzard.

  Once the door had shut, the snowflakes that had blown into the cab settled and turned to water in the warm interior. The ratchet on the steel safety reel began to pay out, matching Hooke’s cautious walking speed. After about a half-minute it stopped. And then, softened by the storm, there was a distant thud – Hooke had deployed the Cowpuncher. A second or two later and there was a howl of noise as the safety reel paid out at a furious rate. Within ten seconds the entire fifty-yard length had gone and the reel came to a juddering halt. The tensioned wire bit into the drum and door surround, bent the mounting spindle and jerked the entire Sno-Trac sideways. The cable stayed taut for a second, then went slack.

  I sat there for a few minutes with the wind buffeting the Sno-Trac, the temperature falling. My breath was now showing white in the chill air, and the moisture in the cab was beginning to freeze on the inside of the windscreen and instrument panel. This was not good news: in the rush to leave the Siddons, I’d left my heavy coat, gloves, hat and overboots behind. If I didn’t do anything, in a couple of hours I’d be solid until the thaw.

  Just as I was trying to figure out my best option the lights flickered back on as electrical power returned. I jumped into the driver’s seat, checked the Trac was in neutral, turned on the ignition and then pushed the air starter. Nothing. The H4S had powered up again, and the creature was visible only as a whispering collection of greenish spots on the screen in front of me, reinforced by every sweep of the scanner. The trace moved, took a pace forward, then stopped, and by the time the scanner came around again, it had gone. There was just me, the blizzard and an immobile Sno-Trac.

  I shivered again and realised that notwithstanding the apparent safety of the vehicle, I needed to make a move now while I was still warm enough to do so. I rummaged in the back of the Sno-Trac and found a pair of socks, a flat cap and a spare woncho. I put the woncho over my head and pulled the hat down as far as I could, then slipped the woolly socks on my hands to use as gloves. I took the emergency lantern from its place on the bulkhead, pushed in a thermalite and switched it on. There was a soft fizz and the cabin was flooded by a warm orange glow. I looked at the temperature gauge and wind speed, and figured I had perhaps ten minutes to find shelter or I’d be next in line for a multiple finger transplant. Leave it twenty minutes and I could upgrade the loss to that of a foot, nose or hand. Half an hour and I’d probably be dead.

  I popped the door release and was once more buffeted by the wind and the snow. I lowered myself to the ground, the wind tugging at the woncho and cutting into my cheeks, while small flakes of snow sneaked through my clothing to thaw on my warm flesh. The ground yielded soft underfoot; there was about eighteen inches of snow. The lantern made little headway in the blizzard so in the absence of any better ideas I wrapped Hooke’s safety cable in the crook of my arm and followed it away from the Sno-Trac. Now in the full force of the wind, I crouched lower as I walked to minimise the effect of the gale, which at every step threatened to push me off balance.

  I followed the cable for thirty or so paces and was relieved to see a flicker of light, but it turned out to be only a street lamp, the small gas flame battling to stay alight. Another minute of slow trudge took me to the end of the cable, which was attached to Hooke’s over-trousers, which were neatly folded in a pile along with everything else he’d been wearing, his boots placed on top. Hooke was close by, his head twisted around to the left and a lump showing through on his neck where it had been broken. He wore a look of surprise on his rapidly chilling features, his eyes and mouth wide open. Like Lucky Ned, his little finger was missing. It was the Gronk, and she was taking souvenirs.

  I put his parka over my woncho, then pulled on his gloves and hat. I turned and my foot knocked against Hooke’s Cowpuncher, so I picked it up and racked a fresh thermalite into the battery chamber. I paused for a moment, and felt a tug on the safety wire, as though someone was testing the line. And then, with a sudden jerk, the cable was pulled violently from my hand.

  I dropped to my knees, and while scrabbling with increasing desperation in the snow for the safety line, I heard a child’s laughter through the swirling whiteness. It had taken Hooke but was still hungry for the unworthy and I, having done nothing to prevent my friend Lucy’s demise and with the loss of Logan and twenty-four winsomniacs still weighing on my conscience, had the strongest conviction that I would be next. I very slowly took Laura’s camera out of my bag and held it on top of the Cowpuncher. I paused, waited until I heard another giggle, then fired and pressed the shutter a moment later.

  A momentary funnel of wet air opened in the snowstorm, briefly illuminated by the camera flash. I could see all the way to the trees behind a fence swaying in the wind and part of a parked car, and in the foreground I could see, or thought I could see, a beach ball. I think I yelled, then racked the fourth and final thermalite into the chamber, rewound the camera and fired again. This time there was nothing extra to be seen and the snowstorm once more closed in upon me. I knelt there, taking in great gulping mouthfuls of air, trying to relax, trying to stop my heart from pounding. Despite the cold I could feel sweat prickling down my back even though my lips, cheeks, fingers and feet were beginning to feel the hard nip of impending frostbite. I dropped the now-empty Cowpuncher and attempted to find the cable
once more but my hands were numb, and scrabbling in the snow gave them less feeling, not more.

  There was nothing to do but walk in any direction and hope to find a wall with a fixed line on it. I stumbled forward for ten or so paces but didn’t find a wall – I found a door. Old, Gothic, belted steel on oak. I wiped the snow off the signboard with my forearm.

  It was the Geraldus Cambrensis.

  The Geraldus Cambrensis

  * * *

  ‘… Night lights were these days low-consumption LEDs, but many porters clung to the obsolete but more satisfying bioluminescent tubes. The light would often move from greeny-blue to yellowy-orange depending on the plankton’s mood and temperature. They needed fortnightly feeding and this could be time-consuming in a large Dormitorium, but many porters thought it worth the extra work …’

  – The Elegant Simplicity of WinterTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng

  The lock turned easily against my Omnikey and I pushed open the heavy door, squeezed inside and then heaved it shut. As the latch clicked, the storm dramatically subsided to a humming rush of wind. I opened the inner door and stepped inside. I’d expected the interior of the Cambrensis to be cold and dark, as everyone had told me the HotPot had been shut down, but it hadn’t and it wasn’t. The temperature inside was a healthy eighteen degrees – the internal heating system was working perfectly. I pulled the socks from my hands, kicked off my shoes and sank both hands and feet into the tepid water of the defrost basin. I could feel my extremities ache as the blood returned to circulation, and within twenty minutes the tingling had stopped and I knew I was in the clear. I put on some dry socks and a pair of house slippers, then held up my lantern so I could see.

  I’d seen the lobby before. It was the one that I’d seen in my dream, when I was bouncing around in Webster’s Dreamstate. Stairs behind, the remains of sofas on the lobby floor, central reception desk. I moved forward and noted that empty food cans and wooden crates were lying around. Probably in the rush to abandon the place, although now, given the safe temperature in here, I couldn’t see why it had been abandoned. I had a sudden and very worrying thought that there might be a radiation leak that no one was ’fessing up to, but the large Geiger counter behind the reception desk was indicating a level that, while broadly safe, would probably require that residents were Winter only and above the age of thirty, just in case.

  The house lights were off and, although gloomy, it was not pitch black. Someone had taken the time to feed the plankton in the tubes and a thin blue-green bioluminescence suffused the interior of the building.

  There was a noise from upstairs. Like something being knocked over.

  ‘Hello?’

  My voice sounded timid in the silence, and the dryness of my throat caught me off guard. I was more on edge than I’d imagined. No one answered and I figured it was probably hiburnal rodents. From the smell in the air, there might be a long-dead resident or two for them to feed on. I took the stairs cautiously to the first floor, as I had done in my dream – and experienced the most curious feeling of double déjà vu. It all looked extremely familiar, as if I’d walked this way many times before. The corridor, the decor, the heavy woven wall-hangings, everything.

  I heard another noise, this time behind me, the soft drag-clump-drag-clump of a nightwalker.

  ‘Hello?’

  In reply there was a faint whisper and the creak of a board above my head. I held my breath as a figure entered the periphery of the soft glow from my lantern, perhaps ten yards down the corridor. It was the nightwalker Eddie Tangiers, dressed in light blue overalls, shambling towards me. Jonesy hadn’t retired him at all. Annoyingly, this was also the precise moment the battery in my lantern ran out and plunged me into darkness. With my eyes not yet accustomed to the meagre glow afforded by the tubes, I was effectively blind. I quickly fitted a second thermalite but was not overly worried. The drag-clump-drag-clump had not altered pace.

  When the light began to illuminate the scene I almost yelled as I found myself face to face with another nightwalker whom I’d not heard approach. She was staring at me with a single milky eye and her face was old and lined, with high arched eyebrows and a large mouth. But it was the fruit hat, now dented and worn and missing most of its bananas that gave her away.

  ‘Chicka-chicka-boom-chic,’ she said, her voice a husky monotone.

  ‘I’ve seen you looking better, Ms Miranda,’ I replied.

  She seemed to gaze at me for some moments, then moved her hips left and right, and shambled off to follow the first nightwalker along the corridor and back beyond the periphery of the light. She and Tangiers wore matching overalls and were either not hungry or had not yet discovered cannibalism.

  ‘When I love, I love,’ came Miranda’s voice from the darkness, then silence. I moved off down the corridor, now guided by nothing more than the memory of Webster’s dream. I found room 106, paused, then pushed open the door. The room had the same pine linenfold panelling, the same single bay window with a fire escape, the same large chimney. On the wall was a lighter patch of faded wallpaper in the shape of a star – the place where the wall-clock had once hung, again, as in Charles’ dream.

  I felt hot and sweaty and confused and tired but half suspected, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all of this could still be explained as my memory unfolding simultaneously as I walked, like a locomotive laying its own tracks. But there was one test I could perform, something that would decide once and for all if I was dreaming my own dreams, or dreaming someone else’s.

  I stepped forward and reached up the chimney as far as I could. At first I felt nothing, but then the lip of a ledge, and inside that my fingers touched something that yielded, and after some squirming and stretching – Webster had been almost four inches taller than me – I removed a cylindrical cardboard tube that was dusty and stained. I opened the tube and pulled out a shiny blue-black hard wax cylinder, the fine grooves shining in the light. I stared at it for a moment, not knowing what to think. Happy or sad? Didn’t know. All I knew was that it had been placed there by Charles Webster, was valuable enough for HiberTech to destroy six people for, and Don Hector, through Charles, had been trying to get it out to Kiki and RealSleep for at least three years.

  I replaced it in the tube and, my curiosity aroused, decided that it would be best to play it back and see what was on it. I needed a phonograph so retraced my steps, and passed the nightwalker Glitzy Tiara on the landing as I headed towards the porter’s lodge on the lower ground floor. There were more nightwalkers in the lobby and I moved cautiously amongst them. Some of them whispered words and phrases, one of them was constantly shuffling a pack of cards, and a fifth was holding two Rubik’s cubes: with her left hand she scrambled, with her right hand she solved. The crates and cans of food littered around also indicated to me that they were being harboured, almost certainly by Jonesy and Toccata, and on an industrial scale. Jonesy had indicated that she, too, thought nightwalkers were still sentient and it was likely Toccata thought the same. Despite my feeling vindicated, the notion flew in the face of conventional medical and scientific thought. Rigorous tests had been run and the conclusion had been unanimous: nightwalkers were irrecoverably brain dead. But if their consciousness was complete yet displaced to somewhere impossible to detect, and HiberTech knew about it, then the current nightwalker policy of redeployment, retirement and then being parted out for spares would be murder. No, wait, considerably worse than murder.

  As I was passing the reception desk my lantern went out a second time. I had one thermalite remaining so instead simply waited for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness.

  The cylinder was key. RealSleep desperately wanted it, and HiberTech would do anything to stop them getting it. I started to see vague shapes as my eyes became used to the darkness, and while they did I could hear the nightwalkers walking past me in the gloom, whispering as they did so, which is a truly unnerving experience. Once, one brushed against me and nibbled me on the arm, and I sudden
ly wondered how often anyone fed them, and how long they would have to not be fed before they started to feed on one another – or me. The answer, I soon realised, was right about now. I hadn’t fully been aware as my eyes became used to the dim light, but they had grouped around me in the semi-dark and I felt their hands touching me. I tried to push them away but as soon as I moved past two and wrested myself from the grip of a third, another three or four pairs of hands grabbed me and I felt a sharp pain as one of them bit me hard on the side of my head. I yelped, but the noise only invigorated them, and I felt them grip me tighter. I gave up on the soft approach and struggled, shoved and punched, but their numbers were too great and I was pushed to the ground, the nightwalkers murmuring and groaning in an increasingly aggressive fashion in the dim greeny-blue light. This was, I knew, how it worked. An attack began slowly, then rapidly escalated in aggression to a frenzy. I felt several bony fingers try to lift up my shirt to get at my stomach. I was beyond shouting, and just kicked and struggled as hard as I could, the sound of their hungry murmurings growing in my ears. I had come so far, and ultimately – for nothing. The cylinder, worthless to the nightwalkers, would pass to whoever stumbled upon my remains.

  Uselessly, I pulled my shoulder bag closer to me and closed into a ball, then had an idea. I ignored the bites and scratches, reached into my bag and pulled out Laura’s camera. I pointed it in their general direction and pressed the shutter.

  The flashbulb fired, and in the stagnant gloom of the lobby it was as though a door had momentarily been opened into the Summer. The effect was impressive, and instantaneous. The nightwalkers paused, their minds momentarily scrambled. This wasn’t a trick I’d learned in the Academy, this was a trick I’d learned from Lloyd, two days before.

  The nightwalker’s confusion was short lived but long enough for me to wind on the camera and fire the flash again. In the bright white light I could see their bewildered expressions and wasted no time in pushing my way through the tangle of confused bodies. I ran down the steps to the lower ground floor, found the porter’s lodge and slammed and bolted the door after me, my heart racing, my hands shaking.