Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘You don’t understand. She’s harsh, but she’ll back up her team one hundred per cent. Besides, I’d already been warned three times.’

‘He had, you know,’ said Laura. ‘She’s very big on spelling, too. Often holds a surprise bee to try and catch us out. I got “Algonquin” wrong and she wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks.’

‘What did you want to know about anyway?’ asked Fodder.

‘Viral dreams. Something about a blue Buick.’

Fodder stared at me for a moment.

‘Jonesy and I investigated this a couple of weeks back,’ he said, ‘but decided on no further action. There was this woman named Suzy Watson. Pleasant girl. Single, late twenties. She slept during the late Summer like Moody and Roscoe and awoke two weeks ago. Only this time she was different. Withdrawn, and haunted by a… haunted by a…’

‘…headless horseman?’

‘No.’

‘Nightmaiden, Gronk, bondsmen, what?’

‘A dream,’ said Fodder.

‘Oh.’

I’d never given dreams much consideration before, not having had one since I went on Juvenox aged eight. What was there to know, beyond that which was obvious? An anachronistic and outmoded pursuit that signified little and did nothing except sap one’s carefully accrued weight during hibernation.

‘She wasn’t on Morphenox?’ I asked.

‘No; they’re all Beta Ceiling payscale in Railway Infrastructure Support – they don’t qualify.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It’s contentious,’ said Fodder. ‘Anyway, she wakes up feeling off-kilter, complaining about this dream, and then instead of improving, she gets worse . She has the dream again, night after night, and before long it takes her over. She becomes withdrawn and suspicious, then starts to have waking hallucinations. Pretty soon it’s all she talks about and eventually, she goes into Mrs Nesbit’s and attacks random customers with a machete. She kills one guy and hospitalises two more. Someone calls us as it’s a sleep-related incident, and Toccata tells her to drop the machete. She doesn’t, so she thumps her.’

‘Dead?’

‘When Consul Toccata thumps, she thumps to kill.’

‘Is it true she eats nightwalkers just for fun?’ I asked.

‘It’s rumoured,’ said Laura, ‘and that she garnishes them with mint jelly to make them more appetising.’

‘After Suzy Watson, there was Roscoe Smalls,’ continued Fodder, ‘who babbled on about blue Buicks and boulders and Mrs Nesbit – then took the Cold Way Out. We found him huddled under the statue of Gwendolyn VII [37] Despite the universal adoption of surnames, the Welsh royal family still use the matronymic system. The Crown Princess is always Gwendolyn, which makes naming every ruler since 1183 really easy. outside the museum, frozen solid. He’s still there. Then Moody got it. He had it worst of all.’

‘Hooke whacked him dead just now,’ I said. ‘He was yelling about Mrs Nesbit and blue Buicks. What did all that mean?’

‘Not sure,’ said Fodder, ‘but to us it looked like a mixed bag of Sleepstate Paranoia, Hibernational Narcosis and Waking Night Terrors – probably fed by an escalating conversational feedback loop.’

‘Panicky Sub-betas are nothing new,’ said Laura. ‘One Winter it’s about heating, the next it’s about vermin, then dreams, then spiders, then someone thinks they’ve heard a nightmaiden or that the Gronk’s after them. That’s the problem with natural sleepers. They spook real easy, and once one of them has seen or heard something weird, they all have to. But common sense prevails: you can’t catch dreams.’

I’d studied this phenomenon in the Academy. Panic could spread during the Winter like wildfire, especially amongst the Sub-beta payscalers, who were notorious chatterers. Feedback loops, echo chambers, circular reinforcement. All could play a part in escalating the utterly imaginary to the level of reality, sometimes with fatal consequences.

‘They all had a dream of such fearsome reality that it flooded from their subconscious and invaded their waking hours,’ said Fodder. ‘The dream grew, it took them over. It devoured them .’

‘I’m not being impudent or anything, but why was this deemed worthy of “no further action”?’

‘Yes, agreed, weird,’ said Fodder, taking no offence at my questioning, ‘but it wasn’t unprecedented. In fact, when it comes to weird stuff, viral dreams hardly make the Sector Twelve top ten.’

‘Where’s Toccata on the list?’

‘Five or six. Shrimp, will you run Deputy Worthing off a copy of the report?’

Laura nodded and trotted off, a bounce in her step.

‘Thanks for telling me all that,’ I said, conscious that Consulates were under no obligation to share information. ‘Did Toccata think there was anything in viral dreams?’

‘She said she thought they were narcosis-induced night terrors, as did we.’

‘So why do you think Toccata contacted Logan about it?’

Fodder shrugged.

‘You’d have to ask her – which I don’t recommend. She might have wanted to intrigue Logan to get him out here, or just to piss off Aurora. The pair of them have a complicated relationship. Do you like marshmallows?’

‘Yes.’

‘Here,’ he said, and offered me one from a bag.

Laura returned with the report, which wasn’t large, and marked, as Fodder had said, ‘No Further Action’. It wouldn’t be much of an epitaph for Moody, I thought.

I thanked them both and was buzzed out of the shock-gates to make my way back to the railway station. It had started to snow once more, but lazily – large flakes spinning slowly down out of the darkness.

The thawed and refrozen area where Moody had met his end was now covered by a light smattering of snow, and already someone had partially mended the crack on the window of Mrs Nesbit’s with some silicon filler. I hurried on past, my time in Sector Twelve mercifully almost at an end. The Winter was wilder than I’d thought, and everything I had learned from the Consuls in Cardiff and the Academy had been pretty much overturned. There were the rules we were taught, and there were the rules we did our job by. The two were related, but as distant cousins rather than siblings. I needed to be back as a Novice, in Cardiff, doing laundry and photocopying. Away from HiberTech, RealSleep, Sector Twelve, Aurora, night-terrors and dreamers.

But that wasn’t going to happen. There was another shock in store when I reached the station. The platform was empty. The Cardiff train had gone.

I tried to dispel my panic with denial.

‘The Merthyr train,’ I said to the stationmaster when I found her in a tiny office that smelled of coal-smoke, old socks and baking, ‘just gone for coal and water or something, yes?’

She looked at me, then at an oversized pocket watch she carried in her undersized pocket.

‘I let it go fifteen minutes early,’ she said in a curt manner. ‘They were in a hurry to get back through the Torpantu.’

‘You said I had two hours.’

‘I misspoke. But you can always take the next train. It’s at Springrise plus two, 11.31, all stops to Merthyr, light refreshments available, off peak, Super Saver not valid – but no bicycles.’