Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  Every hour I was experiencing something new, every hour I was wishing I wasn’t.

  The cylinder

  * * *

  ‘… The wax cylinder was the first true sound recording and playback device, and had survived over a hundred years owing to its ubiquity and the fact that it did not require electricity to operate. Given that academics often stayed up in the Winter to finish their work, it was not unusual for a secretary to be confronted with up to a hundred cylinders waiting for them at Springrise, all to be transcribed and then skimmed for reuse …’

  – The Elegant Simplicity of WinterTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng

  I clicked on the emergency light and went straight through to the bathroom, rummaged through the medicine cabinet for some iodine and then dabbed it on the bite marks, of which I had many. I’d been lucky that their hunger had come on relatively slowly. If they’d attacked me en masse as I’d walked in, I’d have been too tired and cold to defend myself. Whilst I self-administered as best as I could, I heard unpleasant noises from the lobby, where it sounded as if their hunger had been appeased on one of their own. If they’d eaten the weighty Eddie Tangiers, they’d be quiet maybe eight hours. Glitzy Tiara, ninety minutes, tops.

  Still sore but having found no bites to be life-threatening, I walked back into the porter’s living area and looked around. The walls were covered with bookshelves and display cases that contained numerous specimens from the animal and plant kingdoms. Porters were never simply glorified hoteliers, they were generally people who welcomed a monk-like existence, and spent their spare hours on contemplation or studies.

  There was a salt-water hippo skull hanging from the ceiling and a baby glyptodon skeleton in the process of being articulated. There was also a Dictaphone, all brass and rosewood with a large copper horn for playback. I switched on the desk lamp, wound the clockwork motor fully and slipped the cylinder onto the machine. I flicked the lever, waited for the cylinder to spin up and then gently placed the needle on the groove, half expecting to hear Don Hector’s voice, and a long explanation of what he’d found, and every single one of my questions answered.

  I didn’t. Not even a tiniest bit. It was Don Hector’s voice all right, but what he was saying made no sense at all – a long and seemingly random collection of apparently unconnected words interspersed with numbers and Greek letters, all spoken in an even monotone. It lasted five and three quarter minutes and was, I presumed, some kind of code. It was only after the discordant collection of words had faded that I heard another noise – a gentle murmur from outside. I walked over and quietly opened the door a couple of inches. As I’d suspected, there was a nightwalker outside. It was Rubik’s Cube Girl, but she’d stopped doing the puzzle and was standing stock still in apparent Torpor. She wasn’t the only one. They were all there, perhaps thirty or so, filling the entire corridor. All standing still, unblinking, tightly yet equally spaced from each other, all missing a thumb. I was about to close the door when the nightwalker blinked, and that was unusual. Firstly because nightwalkers in Torpor don’t blink, and secondly, because they’d all blinked – in unison.

  I cautiously reached my arm out through the door and pushed her hard on the sternum. She took a step back to steady herself. If she’d been in Torpor, she would have fallen over, knocked the next and they’d all be over, one after the other in a comedy fashion, like skittles. But the thing was, they all took a steadying step backwards.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, and they whispered back in unison, like a lispy echo: ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Simple Simone says,’ I said slowly, ‘“Put your hands on your head”.’

  They all obediently put their hands on their head.

  ‘Simple Simone says: “Put your hands by your side”.’

  They all put them down again.

  ‘Stand on one leg.’

  They ignored the order. Simple Simone hadn’t told them to, see. I smiled, for the first time in a while.

  ‘Simple Simone says: “Tell me your name”.’

  They answered as one, but each with their own. I only heard a few in the mass of different words. Rubik’s Cube Girl was Rebecca and Glitzy Tiara, positioned off to her right, was Betty, who now had tears rolling softly down her cheeks.

  ‘How are you feeling right now?’ I asked, and there followed a mix of responses – frustrated, trapped, lost, adrift.

  They stood there for a moment longer, but then the magic faded, and they moved out of the trance and drifted off down the corridor, as vacant as ever. I had no idea of the meaning of Don Hector’s words on the cylinder, but whatever it was, it had an effect on nightwalkers. The recording might not retrieve the nightwalkers, but it was a step in the right direction.

  I went into the kitchenette, mixed some muesli with long-life milk and a large spoonful of peanut butter and walked to the window. I could hear the wind whipping around the building outside, rattling the shutters and trying to find a chink in the building’s Winter armour. I needed a plan, and after some careful thought figured one out: I’d go and see Hugo Foulnap, who was on duty at the museum. The reason was simple. Aurora had suggested he was Campaign for Real Sleep and if this was true and he was hiding as Danny Pockets in Sector Twelve, then I could make two assumptions: that there was an ongoing RealSleep operation and he, Jonesy, Toccata and the shambling occupants of the Cambrensis were a big part of it.

  I found some fresh warm clothes in the wardrobe, replaced the flashcube on the camera so I was armed with more flashes, then cautiously opened the apartment door and peered out into the empty corridor. I crept back upstairs without being molested, found a heavy parka, pulled on some snow boots, shoved the camera in my bag and consulted the fixed line schematic that was screwed to the wall between the inner and outer doors of the Cambrensis. The museum was on the other side of the road and about a quarter of a mile away. In daylight and without weather, about a five-minute stroll. I would have to do it in less than thirty and not lose my way if I wanted to keep all my fingers and toes.

  I took a deep breath, then opened the outer door.

  If I thought the weather had been bad before it was twice as bad now. The icy wind was howling past the door, the view a mass of angry swirling snow. I fired up the lamp with the last thermalite, then clipped myself onto the fixed line. I paused to tell myself that this was the best course of action, Gronk or no Gronk, and set off into the storm. My lantern afforded me really only moral support but by staying close to the wall I could minimise the buffeting from the wind, and although the snow was now almost three feet deep in drifts and the going slow, I made progress. Within ten minutes I was at the bridge, from where I would have to cross the road without the fixed line. I was less cautious than perhaps I should have been; after leaving the line and taking two paces towards the opposite parapet, the full force of the wind lifted me off my feet.

  I think I remember tumbling for a while, then being wedged head first in the snow. To make matters worse the snow guard inside my parka then ripped, and the wind-blown snow rushed up inside the back of my coat and wrapped itself around my neck and chest. I momentarily stopped breathing with the sudden chill and could actually feel myself begin to lose core temperature. It started with an uncontrollable shiver, then a chattering of teeth, then a sense of calm mixed with resignation, loss and waste. I wanted badly to dream, to be back on the beach in the Gower, beneath the orange-and-red parasol of spectacular size and splendour with Birgitta being Birgitta and me being Charles. But I couldn’t, and slowly, with an annoying drab certainty, I felt myself slipping away.

  But I didn’t die. Not yet.

  Night in the museum

  * * *

  ‘… The Minister for Culture had to threaten to slit his own throat on the steps of Parliament House before the Regional Antiquities Repatriation Act was made into law. Simply put, it allowed for centralised collections to be returned to the
region, village or hamlet where they were discovered. It was localisation at its very best …’

  – Museums Quarterly, November 1973 edition

  ‘What kind of dopey halfwit goes out in weather like this?’

  It was Hugo Foulnap. He was staring at me with the same sort of look you afford someone who has been repeatedly told not to play with lighter fuel and matches, and who has just set themselves on fire. He was out of the shock-suit – probably because invasion during the storm was unlikely – and was staring at me with a sense of curious fascination. We were in a white-tiled warmroom, presumably within the museum, although according to my last memory I had yet to even get to the wrought-iron gates. I was completely naked and immersed in a roll-top bath filled with warm water.

  ‘This kind of dopey halfwit,’ I said, pointing at myself.

  ‘Run into a spot of bother?’

  He indicated my body, which was covered with all the bruises, scratches and tooth marks I’d gained when I was nearly nightwalker lunch, all now stained by dabs of iodine on my pale wintercoat, which made me look a little like a purple Dalmatian. I pointed to the bite mark on my face.

  ‘See that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Carmen Miranda.’

  ‘Is that how she does autographs these days?’

  ‘Pretty much. She was at the Cambrensis.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Foulnap. ‘Cold in there? Empty and shuttered?’

  ‘No,’ I said after a pause, ‘no, it’s not.’

  We stared at one another for a while.

  ‘How are the toes?’ he asked, and I stared at them uneasily. They had a marzipanish look to them and were hurting badly, so I thought probably not that good.

  ‘I may lose one or two.’

  ‘To match your finger?’

  I looked down and noticed for the first time that my right pinky had vanished below the knuckle, the wound hardly bleeding and the exposed fleshy part looking like a cut of uncooked silverside. I felt underwhelmed as I stared at the loss – it was as though this were somehow inevitable. I thought for a moment. Outside, in the snowdrift, upside down, as I was slipping away, I’d heard the laugh of a young girl.

  ‘Where did you find me?’

  ‘I heard a thump on the outer door,’ replied Foulnap, ‘and there you were. Your finger must have caught in the wire when you fell. They come off surprisingly easily in the cold.’

  ‘It was the Gronk.’

  ‘Yes; assisted by unicorns, the tooth fairy and the ghost of Owain Glyndwr, I shouldn’t wonder. Here.’

  He handed me a large mug of tea laced with condensed milk and Nutella.60 If you’d offered it to me in the Summer I’d only have drunk it as a dare, but right here and now I thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted. Within half an hour I was warm enough to climb out of the bath and get dressed.

  ‘The Open Network has been chattering constantly for the past hour,’ said Foulnap, hanging up my damp towel. ‘We heard you’d been harbouring Birgitta, Jonesy was bumped off by a mystery girl from HiberTech who was then herself killed – and you’d been taken off to HiberTech. Is that anywhere near correct?’

  I told him yes – and that Hooke had been taken by the Gronk on the way to HiberTech while I’d sought refuge out in the Cambrensis.

  ‘A lot of Gronk this evening. Who was the mystery girl from HiberTech?’

  ‘An old friend of mine from the Pool back in Swansea. She was on one of HiberTech’s Fast Track Management schemes. It didn’t work out for her.’

  ‘They rarely do.’

  Foulnap stared at me for a moment, deep in thought.

  ‘Why did you leave the Cambrensis in this weather, Worthing?’

  ‘To come and see you.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Answers.’

  He stared at me again, trying to make up his mind.

  ‘That’s the hardest thing about all this,’ he said, ‘knowing who to trust. Can I trust you?’

  ‘Can I trust you?’ I said in return. ‘When we met in Cardiff you were attempting to farm a nightwalker.’

  ‘Were we? Were we really?’

  ‘Yes, I …’

  My voice trailed off. I’d been so convinced of that particular narrative I’d never for one moment stopped to reappraise the situation. About Mrs Tiffen, and Foulnap not wanting her to go to HiberTech, then Jack Logan cajoling and threatening me to simply drop it.

  They weren’t going to farm Mrs Tiffen at all – they were trying to protect her. My legs suddenly felt so weak I had to sit on a handy chair. Logan had told me to forget all about Mrs Tiffen, and I, the naive fool that I was, drunk on good intentions, ignored him – and he died. Not at my hand, but certainly because of my intransigent stupidity. I closed my eyes and felt the heavy burden of guilt fall across my shoulders. I had a feeling it wouldn’t lift for a long time, if at all. The Gronk had been circling me for a while now. If Ned Farnesworth and Hooke were the starter and main, I was to be the dessert. Perhaps she’d spared me so I could discover my unworthiness all on my own, and self-season my soul with the tangy taste of guilt. Perhaps the Gronk took my finger to mark me out, like choosing lobsters in a tank. Perhaps that’s what Gronks do.

  ‘Was Logan going to kill me?’ I asked. ‘When he was walking me out of the John Edward Jones back in the fire valleys?’

  Foulnap sat down next to me and laid a hand on my arm.

  ‘He would’ve explained it all to you on the train to Sector Twelve, and trusted you’d come across. No one who figures out HiberTech’s criminality ever stays long with the status quo. It was just our dumb luck that Aurora chanced along when she did.’

  ‘So Logan was RealSleep?’

  ‘More than that – he was Kiki.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘It’s annoying and tragic and a waste,’ said Foulnap once I’d digested this particular nugget, ‘but you don’t come out so bad in all of this – you were simply trying to do the right thing with an incomplete understanding of the situation.’

  ‘That’s very generous, but I should have listened to you both.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Foulnap, ‘but perhaps we should have seen you for what you were earlier, and brought you into our confidence. We just don’t know who to trust.’

  I ran my fingers through my hair. Sector Twelve had lived up to its reputation.

  ‘So,’ I said finally, ‘what would you have done with Mrs Tiffen if not farmed her?’

  ‘The more complex tricks they can do, the less complete the neural collapse, the easier it might be to effect a retrieval. We’ve not managed it yet, but it can be done.’

  I asked him how he knew and he showed me his left thumb, or rather, he didn’t show me his thumb – it was missing.

  ‘For five weeks I was a nightwalker,’ he said. ‘I returned because I’d been dumped, but against HiberTech’s strict policy, I’d not been thumped. I woke up with a spade of lime over me in the landfill. I think we live inside our deepest memories when hibernating, with cyclical returns to the upper Dreamstate to maintain a connection with the mind. Morphenox suppresses this link and, on rare occasions, damages it so severely that it locks the victim in the lower Dreamstate. When I was a nightwalker the only thing I really felt were the dreams. Loud, expansive, overpowering, like I was trapped in deep memory loops – with the real world appearing to me as vague and nebulous as long-forgotten dreams in the real world. I didn’t remember anything too specific as regards what I’d been doing when a deadhead, but I have a pretty good idea: I passed a human tooth two days after waking, complete with a gold filling. First time I’d ever turned a profit taking a dump.’

  He paused.

  ‘But that’s enough about me. Why do HiberTech want you so badly?’

  He’d trusted me, so it was time for me to trust him.

  ‘Because I’ve been Active Control first person – both Don Hector and Webster – and I know where the cylinder is.’

  Foulnap raised an eyebrow.

  �
�You’re shitting me?’

  ‘No, I am certainly not shitting you.’

  ‘Then you’d better come with me.’

  We walked out of the warmroom and down the corridor towards the central atrium, where the Airwitzer was for the moment abandoned. I could hear the storm rattling the heavy shutters, and a low moan was emanating from where the wind blew across the downpipes on the roof. We took the main stairs upwards, then a left on the top corridor towards a sign marked ‘conservation’. Foulnap stopped at a door, rapped twice, muttered the password ‘Fresh Water Walrus’ and I heard a draw-bolt pulled back.

  I recognised the man who opened the door. It was the medic from back at the John Edward Jones in Merthyr, the one who wore scrubs and smelled of antiseptic and whose aunt wasn’t his aunt. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Charlie is a friendly,’ said Foulnap.

  ‘Yeah? Last time we met a good man died.’

  ‘A misunderstanding. Charlie’s been Active Control first person.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ said the medic, his manner abruptly changing from suspicion to curiosity.

  ‘Nope,’ said Foulnap. ‘Don Hector and Webster.’

  The medic stepped closer and peered at me intently.

  ‘We don’t know anyone who’s been Active Control and is still sane,’ he said. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘More real than real,’ I said, ‘all the senses ramped up to eleven. I can see why the dreamers want it. Better than life. Or at least, better than their life.’

  The medic mouthed ‘wow’ and stared at me some more.

  ‘This is Dr Theophilus Gwynne,’ said Foulnap, stepping in. ‘He was, until his tragic, untimely and very faked death three years ago, a junior member of HiberTech’s Sleep Sciences Division.’