Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘Not since I was eight.’

She looked at me for a moment.

‘Suzy Watson was recently gathered into the night,’ said Aurora, ‘why not hers? The positive energy of a young sleeper will drive the bad dreaming from the room.’

‘O-kay,’ said the porter.

‘Why did you ask if I’d dreamed?’

‘No reason. Worthing here will also need to hire your Sno-Trac,’ she said to Lloyd. ‘We’ll get it back to you as soon as we can. And this next bit’s delicate: we’re hoping to keep Worthing’s presence as something not to be broadcast any wider than between ourselves. Worthing here was partially to blame for Jack Logan’s death and you know what Toccata’s like.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t really— ’

‘I heard about Logan on the Open Network, too,’ interrupted Lloyd, ‘a great loss. Might be wiser keeping quiet. Do you need anything else?’

I thought for a moment.

‘I’d like to fax my office back in Cardiff, tell them I’m delayed.’

‘Leave that to me,’ said Aurora. ‘I’ll say you’ll be back in three days, five at the outset. I have to report about Jack Logan anyway – and absolve you of any wrongdoing. Least I can do. Get a good night’s sleep – the first few days in the Winter can be tough.’

I thanked her and she wished me well, gave us both a cheery wave, and was gone.

Once the front door had clicked shut, Lloyd had me sign for the Sno-Trac keys.

‘It’s in the basement,’ he said. ‘Do you want to take it now?’

‘Aurora didn’t think travelling at night wise,’ I said.

‘True,’ said Lloyd, suddenly looking a little uncomfortable, ‘but, well, things in Sector Twelve have a way of getting complicated very quickly. You might think the risk of a night journey less than a stay in Sector Twelve.’

‘You think I should get out?’

He looked to left and right and lowered his voice.

‘Entirely a matter for you.’

I considered it seriously, until I looked outside. The wind was getting up and visibility, while not yet zero, could make driving very tricky – and I had no desire to be stuck in a Sno-Trac somewhere between nowhere and nowhere.

‘I’ll see how it looks in the morning.’

‘Very well.’

Lloyd picked my room key off the board and we walked towards the lift. As we crossed the semi-circular lobby under the watchful eye of the ever-present portraits of Gwendolyn XXXVIII and Don Hector, I peered into the dark, wood-panelled Winterlounge, and could see a half-dozen individuals scattered around either reading, playing board games or talking quietly. All of them boasted the beautifully corpulent curves of healthy Autumn weight, and were languid in movement and manner.

‘That’s a lot of yawners,’ [45] Someone ‘on the cusp of heading off down into the Hib’. I said to Lloyd. ‘What’s keeping them up?’

‘This viral dream stuff has spooked the residents, and none of them want to go to sleep in case they dream the Buick dream and then go the way of Watson, Smalls and Moody. Mind you, this bunch are fighting a losing battle anyway.’

As if to punctuate his statement, the most healthily bloated of the sleep-ready residents yawned. When you get to that size and the ambient cools to fifteen degrees Celsius or below, it takes a Herculean [46] As in the sixth labour of Hercules: ‘Remain awake as the Winter takes your comrades under its wing’. effort to stave off the slumber.

The paternoster lift started up as soon as we stepped in and slowly hauled us upwards with a gurgling of water from the auto-ballast. There were no doors on the elevator and the view of the corridors as we drifted upwards was dull, but uniform. Offerings to Morpheus were at the foot of most doors, along with fair dreaming candles freshly lit. There were a lot of them, too – the corridors were alive with hundreds of little lights, flickering in the faint breeze that occasionally wafted through the building.

There was nothing like this in the Melody Black back in Cardiff, but that was Alpha payscale and Morphenox – without pharmaceutical means to mitigate the fat-burning ferocity of the Dreamstate, the residents of the Siddons had retained their superstitious beliefs. Those of us on Morphenox no longer needed a deity to enter our dreams and watch over us, for the drug had rendered the god redundant. Veneration had moved from the spiritual to the pharmaceutical – and if what Lucy had suggested was true, all of this might be gone by next Winter.

‘Tell me,’ I said as Lloyd and I passed the third floor at a speed that was probably only marginally faster than taking the stairs, ‘do the yawners in the Winterlounge really think they’re going to catch the viral dream?’

‘They do – and I kind of agree with them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve dreamt scraps of the dream too. Hands, an oak tree, scratched boulders, the blue Buick. But this is what’s weird: when I compared my dream with Moody and Smalls, there were other similarities, details we’d never discussed that were the same. Something is going on.’

‘Why didn’t you go nuts the way of Moody, Roscoe and Suzy?’ I asked. ‘Any ideas?’

‘No idea at all. But as I say, I only got scraps. I have this feeling that I dream more than I remember, and that I never left the rocks. If you do dream, you’d be advised to do the same.’

‘But I don’t dream.’

‘I know that, but if you do. This is our floor.’

We stepped off the lift, which carried on for a couple of seconds before the delicate balance system sensed it was no longer under load, and stopped.

‘Okay, then,’ he said, clapping his hands together, ‘in an emergency I’m in 801, below you, one floor down. Oh, and since HiberTech are footing the bill, will you make good use of room service?’

I said I would. He wished me goodnight and stepped onto the ‘down’ side of the paternoster, which gurgled for a moment, then sank with him out of sight.

Room 901 was halfway around the corridor on the southern side of the building, opposite the stairs. Pictures of a young woman had been laid at the bottom of the door along with condolence cards. I’d taken over a dead person’s room or bed or even shoes or best friend before – we all have – but this time it felt odd, and I shivered.

I pushed the door open against a small pile of mail. Most were cartes de bon hiber from people who did not yet know Suzy Watson was dead, and the rest were bills and fliers. I placed them on a chair, then looked around. The room was of the standard ‘pizza slice’ layout, and while the fittings and fixtures, carpets and wallpaper were not exactly ancient, they were certainly past their best. I went into the kitchen area. The fridge was empty except for some milk that had gone beyond yoghurt and was now entering a state unknown to science, and a few shrivelled somethings that defied easy identification. There was a picture of Don Hector on the wall and next to the television was a phonograph with a large collection of cylinders. I looked through them. They were a mixture of old favourites – Dark Side of the Moon , Rumours , Ziggy Stardust – mixed with jazz and a little Puccini.