Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  There was a sudden gust of cold wind, and a flurry of snowflakes drifted around the beach. The photographer had just arrived and was offering his services to Birgitta and Charles, just as before.

  ‘You see?’ said Aurora. ‘A subconscious clue. You will tell me. It’s hard not to think about stuff when asked. Out in the cold somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Aurora took a step closer, and all of a sudden she was three times larger. I felt my chest tighten and for a fleeting instant I thought I would wake and be safely away from this, but Aurora took my ear between finger and thumb and squeezed so tightly I yelped.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘before I really get to work on you, last chance: tell me where the cylinder is.’

  She drew closer and her teeth seemed to sharpen into points. I was suddenly reminded of Sister Contractia, who filed her teeth for fun until Mother Fallopia told her not to.

  Despite the pain, I closed my eyes, concentrated, and shifted away from Aurora, away from the beach, away from the dream. I could feel myself momentarily aware of the apartment at HiberTech with two technicians looming over me, and then I was standing next to the blue Buick under the azure sky, the picnic laid out beside me, the oak tree around which the stones were piled. And sitting on top of them, Don Hector. Old, grizzled, tired. There were no hands around except his and mine, nor was there any Aurora. She’d have to find me.

  The old man caught my eye and I walked over, the sun feeling warm against my skin. He was eating a sandwich, and a glass of freshly poured Champagne stood on a nearby boulder, the fizz rising in the liquid. The detail was all there. Every texture, every smell, every sound.

  ‘Your dream or mine?’ he asked, waving a hand about him.

  ‘Yours,’ I said, ‘with maybe a hint of mine.’

  He smiled and patted the stones he was seated upon.

  ‘Do you know why these boulders are heaped around the tree?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering that for a while.’

  ‘Farmers ploughing their fields,’ he replied. ‘Whenever they snagged a boulder it was pulled up and discarded. Usually deposited to the side of the field, but if there was a tree, that would become the place. The heap of stones represents toil; a lichen-encrusted palimpsest of an agricultural way of life before mechanisation.’

  ‘I have the cylinder,’ I said, ‘but I need to know what to do with it.’

  ‘You have to get it to Kiki.’

  ‘I am Kiki.’

  ‘Then my mission is complete, my work is done.’

  ‘Yes, but what do I do now?’ I asked, ‘very little is clear to me right now.’

  He stared at me for a moment, then smiled.

  ‘Bring them all back,’ he said, ‘bring them home.’

  ‘Okay—but how?’

  ‘I think you already know. Good luck, Charlie.’

  Whump

  Don Hector was knocked violently from the pile of rocks and to the ground, where he lay quite still. I turned around to find Aurora holding a Thumper. She didn’t look very happy. No, wait, scrub that: she looked seriously pissed off.

  ‘Think I’ve never been in the Dreamspace before? Think you can outwit me? I have over fourteen hundred hours’ dreamtime, Wonky, and I’ve prised bigger secrets from stronger people’s heads than yours.’

  I wasn’t worried. I’d escaped from her once, I could escape from her again.

  ‘You killed Don Hector out in the real world, didn’t you?’

  ‘He’d lost sight of the good work we were doing,’ said Aurora with a half-smile, ‘and we felt he had swung from asset to liability. Asset good, liability bad,’ she added, in case I’d missed the main thrust of her argument.

  ‘Nightwalker retrieval was only the beginning,’ I said. ‘He’d perfected a risk-free Morphenox that could be synthesised cheaply and easily. He was going to go public. No secrets, Morphenox a universal right. Sub-beta, the Ottoman, the emerging Southern Alliance – everyone. A global hibernating village, equal in sleep, equal in dignity.’

  She stared at me for a few seconds before speaking.

  ‘So what? With no one to tell, it’s the same as you never finding out. Now, where’s the cylinder?’

  I concentrated hard and shifted again – this time to the abandoned Morpheleum, all mould and decay, stone arches, dirt and windblown leaves. Webster was in his orderly’s outfit, and Don Hector, back again, looked at me oddly, as though I shouldn’t be there. In truth, I wasn’t. I was actually on my own; all this was my invention. I was dreaming the dream, dancing my own steps. First person Active Control but no longer tied to a target dream. Freestyle.

  ‘Hullo, Wonky,’ said Webster cheerfully, ‘I hear you’ve been helping out Birgitta.’

  ‘I could have done a better job.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  He suddenly looked around, saw Don Hector, and a look of panic crossed his face.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Webster. ‘This is just what Aurora wants. Connecting Don Hector to me. Move somewhere else or wake up. Go, now, go!’

  But I was too late. Aurora was standing in the shaft of light that emerged through the roof above the altar, and looked oddly magisterial.

  ‘So it was Webster after all,’ said Aurora, looking at them both, then me. I tried to shift again, but Aurora had grabbed me by the arm and twisted it around so she had my wrist in a swan-neck. It was a trick to keep someone anchored, I guessed – flood their mind with pain so they couldn’t concentrate.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said. ‘You have a natural talent for dreaming; it took me years to do what you’re doing.’

  Aurora then lifted her head and spoke. Inter-dream operatives like her worked in pairs, I guessed – one in the Dreamstate and a monitor to listen to their sleeptalkings. I imagined Aurora on a bed somewhere close to me at HiberTech, mumbling in her sleep.

  ‘Don Hector’s contact was Webster after all,’ she said. ‘Find out where he lived and get someone over there.’

  I wriggled out of her hold; with the pain gone I could concentrate, and in an instant the small naked hands started to flood in through the open door, tossing, squirming and falling over one another in their haste to gain entry. They rushed towards Aurora but she took one look at them and they all melted into dry autumn leaves.

  ‘What’s this? Amateur hour? Now, before I start to bring all manner of horrors to bear: where – did – Webster – hide – the – cylinder?’

  ‘Don’t go there, Wonky,’ said Charles, but try as I might, I couldn’t help myself. I was suddenly in the lobby of the Cambrensis, sitting on the sofa, opposite Zsazsa, who looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire,’ she began, ‘where Mrs Buckley lives—’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, ‘and in July, peas grow there.’

  I heard the front door opening. It was Webster again. Different clothes, same face. It was all the dreams I’d had, jumbling into one another.

  ‘Don’t let Aurora find the cylinder,’ he said, looking around nervously, ‘don’t even think about it. In fact, don’t even think about thinking about it. Think Bonanza.’

  ‘Bonanza?’

  ‘Or Rawhide. It doesn’t matter. A brick wall, a prawn, Ed Reardon, Mott the Hoople, Green Rye, Yorkminster. Anything to block her out.’

  Aurora walked into the lobby, talking to her unseen monitor: ‘It’s the Cambrensis. The twisty-headed frostwit is leading us straight to it. This is my twenty-seven-hundredth incursion,’ she added, marching up to me. ‘You get to spot the runaways, the misdirectors, the randomisers, even the world-builders, shape-shifters and tangential digressers. You’re none of those. You’re just bouncing around, leaving a trail so broad an amateur could follow. Now: where’s the cylinder?’

  ‘The laundry room.’

  ‘You gave that up way too easily. Again: where’s the cylinder?’

  It’s hard not to think of the thing you’re trying hard not to think about. I tried to take us
elsewhere – back to the Gower, the Wincarnis, the Ponderosa ranch, the last Fat Thursday at the Pool, but it wasn’t easy, and a moment later we were inside Charlie Webster’s old room.

  ‘You see?’ said Aurora. ‘This could all be so painless. And you know what? I don’t even need you to tell me where it is. All you have to do is think it. And you will, eventually. Room 106,’ she said to her monitor, ‘get the team over there.’

  I concentrated hard on the first random thought that came into my head in order to block her out: the time Billy DeFroid found the nightwalker in the orchard back at the Pool. The apple trees were still without leaves, the dry-stone wall had partially collapsed under the weight of the drifts, and the remnants of snowmen, always the last to thaw, were still on the ground. The nightwalker was a man, middle-aged, close to starvation and mumbling.

  ‘Hidden up the chimney?’ said Aurora with a smile as the information popped annoyingly into my head. ‘Which side? Doesn’t matter, you’ve just thought it.’

  She relayed the intel to her monitor: ‘Up the chimney, left—’

  She stopped talking, looked at me, then took a step forwards and stared deeply into my eyes.

  ‘—cancel that. It’s in the ticket office to the funfair just behind the museum.’

  A second later and we were in the ticket office, the dusty floor strewn with fliers from last year’s attractions, the temperature minus twenty and only a meagre light reaching us through the snow-covered windows.

  ‘Bottom drawer of the desk,’ said Aurora with a smirk. I leant against the wall near the door, then slid down until I was sitting on the floor, arms around head.

  ‘I could be bluffing,’ I said in a despondent tone, shivering in the cold, my breath showing white, ‘perhaps it’s not there at all.’

  ‘It was a good try,’ she conceded, ‘I almost went with your Cambrensis story. That’s when experience counts. To know instinctively when someone is lying.’

  She laughed, relaxed, then sat on a handy chair. Out in the real world, HiberTech agents would be battling through the blizzard to converge on the ticket office.

  She pulled a hip flask from her pocket and took a swig.

  ‘I don’t drink out there any more,’ she explained, ‘but in here I can do as I wish. You don’t get drunk in dreams, not properly, more’s the pity.’

  She offered the flask to me but I shook my head and she replaced it in her pocket.

  ‘You’d have made a good dream analyst,’ she said in a quiet, conversational manner. ‘Your technique is clumsy and impetuous, but with a genuine flair.’

  ‘If I agree to work for you,’ I said, ‘will you retrieve Birgitta?’

  ‘I think that particular ship has sailed, Bucko. You should have negotiated when you had the chance. But heigh-ho, life’s full of disappointments. Or rather, your life is full of disappointments. Mine’s been unusually rich.’

  ‘What about Toccata?’ I asked, and Aurora’s unseeing left eye twisted around in its socket to stare at me.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever reconcile yourselves to the fact that you’re actually one person?’

  Both of her eyes suddenly glared at me in a dangerous manner, which gave the odd impression that she was staring at me in a completely normal manner. But then her left eye wandered off to stare at the ceiling, and she was back to her old self.

  ‘You need to stop listening to Shamanic Bob’s conspiracy theories,’ she scoffed. ‘Toccata and I the same person? Ridiculous.’

  I could see she was rattled, though.

  ‘When was the last time you saw her in the flesh?’ I persisted. ‘In fact, have you ever seen her in the flesh?’

  ‘No, but by that reasoning,’ she said slowly, ‘anyone who I’ve never met in the flesh might actually be me. There would be millions. What about you? Have you ever met Carmen Miranda? In the flesh, I mean?’

  ‘Well, yes, I have actually.’

  ‘Okay, that was a bad example. How about Dylan Thomas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why couldn’t you be him as well as being yourself?’

  ‘Because he’s dead?’

  ‘Okay, maybe that’s also a bad example. Look, it’s not my fault Toccata is such a coward that she avoids me at every—’

  She was interrupted by a knock at the ticket office door. Aurora narrowed her eyes.

  ‘Don’t try anything stupid, Wonky.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ I said, and it wasn’t – it was the shimmery Mrs Nesbit. But she wasn’t here to sell us targeted advertising, she was here to bring news from the outside world, and I already knew what it was. I’d asked Dr Gwynne to donate one of his Golgotha demolition charges to the ticket office, the firing pin booby-trapped to the lower drawer of the desk.

  ‘Three dead, one missing and that’s the second Sno-Trac destroyed this evening,’ said Goodnight through Mrs Nesbit. ‘We need to up the ante; if you don’t think you can handle it, instigate 110B. Everyone talks after that.’

  I turned to face Aurora, who, like all powerful people, was more annoyed about being outmanoeuvred than just losing. All of a sudden this wasn’t about a cylinder, it was about winning, and that made it personal.

  ‘I told you it wasn’t there,’ I said.

  ‘You fooled me,’ she said, ‘led me on that merry dance to the Cambrensis so I wouldn’t see that you were spinning a false narrative. I take it back: you’re very good. But this only delays the outcome, not changes it. We still need that cylinder, and now we play hardball. Ever wanted to know what it’s like to be eaten alive by nightwalkers?’

  ‘I’d have to answer no to that.’

  ‘They push their nails into the flesh of your stomach,’ she said, ‘and disembowel you while you’re still alive. It has a visceral terror to it that is quite unlike any other; we call it Night Terror 110b. This is how it works: I’ll have you eaten alive on the hour every hour, night after night, week after week for as long as it takes. You know what the record is? The most that anyone has ever endured?’

  ‘Twelve?’

  ‘Forty-seven. But we figured they didn’t know anything. It was that orderly. What was his name again?’

  ‘Webster.’

  ‘Right. He must have been made of fairly tough material to withstand that. We don’t often miss one. So, are you ready?’

  She didn’t wait for a reply and all of a sudden my feet were anchored to the ground by two blocks of clear ice. I saw a shadow move past the window of the ticket office, then another. I could hear the nightwalkers outside making soft whispering noises, the rattle of a Rubik’s cube, the soft murmur of Glitzy Tiara running through a shopping list for a meal she’d never make. I had felt the same when they had attacked me for real in the Cambrensis, a sort of dull, helpless terror that makes you hot and sweaty and nauseous. I shivered as the nightwalkers began to creep in through the door, some of them across the walls and one along the ceiling.

  ‘I’ll make a deal,’ I said.

  ‘We’re done negotiating, Charlie. The sooner you tell us where the cylinder is, the sooner this can all be over. And I mean over. There’s one of my agents waiting next door to smother your worthless wonky head with a grubby pillow as soon as I wake up and give the order. It won’t be quick, but it’ll be final. And you will tell us. They all do.’

  ‘Except Webster,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, okay, except Webster,’ she agreed in a tetchy manner. ‘We’ll up it to a hundred repeats in the future. Live and learn. So: be eaten alive once, twice, thirty times – you’ll still be dead at the end of it and we will have the cylinder. Your choice.’

  The nightwalkers started to move in again with unpleasant slathering noises and in a slow, calculated fashion. I tried to jump out to the fire valleys but I couldn’t. I’d overlooked that I was thin, and tired, and slightly narced. Aurora, by contrast, was about as fit as she could be. The first nightwalker was barely a couple of feet from me, all nails and teeth a
nd hunger, when The Notable Goodnight spoke again.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ she said through the medium of the shimmering Mrs Nesbit, and Aurora held up her hand. The nightwalkers stopped abruptly but continued to stare at me hungrily.

  ‘We’ve got a crew inside the Cambrensis and the HotPot hadn’t been shut down at all,’ said Mrs Nesbit. ‘There’s also about thirty nightwalkers inside.’

  Aurora looked at me.

  ‘Jonesy and Toccata,’ she said, reading my thoughts perfectly. ‘Pull out the nightwalkers and send them for immediate redeployment. No, wait. Safer to simply retire them – along with Birgitta and Webster. We can’t risk any of them being retrieved.’

  And in that moment, I broke. I thought about what I’d done with the cylinder, and Aurora picked up on it immediately.

  ‘Porter’s lodge, lower ground floor,’ she said in a triumphant tone, ‘behind the vermin grid on the ventilation duct.’

  She relayed the information to Goodnight, and Mrs Nesbit acknowledged the message, then asked Aurora if she was going to come out, retire Worthing and then get some rest.

  ‘I’ll see this through,’ she said. ‘I want Wonky to know what happens to people who annoy me. Besides, it will be fun. I’ll see you later.’

  Goodnight agreed, and the shimmery Mrs Nesbit vanished.

  ‘Well now,’ said Aurora, ‘that wasn’t so very hard, was it? If you’d told us earlier you might still be alive. Driving a golf cart and brain dead, but alive.’

  ‘Even if I lived another thousand years,’ I said, ‘I’d never come across a more obnoxious person than you.’

  ‘That’s a hard call to make,’ she said cheerily. ‘HiberTech is a big place, and I’m really only the muscle, the one who does the shitty jobs that need to be done. Who’s worse? The monster who does, or the monster who guides policy and gives the orders?’

  I was probably past caring at this point. Tears of frustration were running down my cheeks and freezing before they hit the ground. I’d failed – again. I looked up, and the nightwalkers continued their slow advance. There were about ten of them, and they all licked their dry lips as they stared at me. Some were missing body parts, all were in rags, and the stench of decaying flesh mixed with body odour and excrement was overpowering. I struggled to free my feet but couldn’t, and the nearest nightwalker lifted my bathrobe and placed a dirty fingernail on my stomach. I thumped it hard on the head, but it was like striking a bowling ball, and I did little except hurt my hand.