Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

Lloyd took a long dog-catcher’s stick and a press photographer’s flashgun from under the desk, the kind that accepts flashbulbs the size of ping-pong balls. We crossed the lobby and passed through a small door, then took the stairwell into the bowels of the Dormitorium. It was noticeably warmer when we reached the second sub-basement as we were closer to the HotPot, and the copper heat-exchanger pipes made odd gurgling noises as valves automatically opened and closed. The iron stair rail, I noted, was warm to the touch.

‘Quite hot down here,’ I said.

‘Cold snap on its way,’ explained Lloyd, ‘the rods are out in anticipation.’

‘Expecting trouble?’ I asked, indicating the flashgun and dog-catcher’s pole he was carrying.

‘The Sarah Siddons is only at sixty per cent occupancy,’ he confessed, ‘so I take on “basement lodgers” for a fee.’

‘ Basement lodgers?’

‘Nightwalkers from the Dormitoria this end of town. Other Porters find them and park them with me until HiberTech or the Consuls get involved. I’ve got six, all told. Unusually high, I know. Morphenox isn’t totally without faults, is it?’

He was making comment on the fact that only those on the drug ever walked. For every three thousand or so who felt the Spring sunshine on their faces, one would be a nightwalker, and no one considered those odds anything less than acceptable.

‘I’ve been feeding them a turnip and three Weetabix a day, so – fingers crossed – they haven’t yet resorted to eating one another.’

I hadn’t thought for one moment I was going to have to run the gauntlet of potentially cannibalistic nightwalkers, and told him so.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘even a child could outrun them. Just make sure you’ve no chocolate or Oxo cubes in your pockets. They can smell them a mile off; drives them nuts.’

We arrived at a steel door which had six names chalked upon it, along with the dates they were locked in. Lloyd dug a flashbulb from his jacket pocket and pushed it into the reflector bowl.

‘I trigger it manually,’ he explained. ‘The bright light scrambles the remnants of their brain long enough to get away if needed.’

He rapped his knuckles against the last name on the door.

‘Watch out for Eddie Tangiers. Big guy, strong as an ox – I lured him in here only a week ago. Used a trail of fruit gums, if you’re interested. Not quite as effective as marshmallows, but less bulky to carry – and more economic.’

‘Good tip. Thanks. How will I know him?’

‘Oh, you’ll know him: kind of big, kind of dead, kind of needs to be avoided. Good luck. The Sno-Trac will be on your left, fifty yards in.’

After pausing to listen at the door, Lloyd pulled back the spring-loaded door bolt, opened the door and then fired the flashgun. There was a bright flash in which happily a nightwalker was not revealed, and a waft of warm air greeted us from the semi-gloom, and with it the smell of decomposition. Lloyd hurriedly ejected the spent bulb and pushed in another from his pocket.

‘One or two are definitely greeners,’ he said, wrinkling his nose. ‘Maybe I didn’t feed them enough Weetabix. ’

I stepped in and snapped on my flashlight. A meagre light filtered down the light-wells by which I could see the general layout of the basement: doughnut-shaped around the central core, with sturdy brick vaulting to support the building above. Serried ranks of cars, motorbikes, trucks, haywains and agricultural equipment, most covered by dustsheets, were parked in two rows with access along the inside radius. I paused for a moment, but Lloyd didn’t; I heard the door clang shut and his footsteps retreated rapidly back up the stairs.

I found the Sno-Trac with ease, but it wouldn’t be going anywhere. Someone had left the compressed air tank open and the air had leaked out – there was nothing to start the engine. I paused for thought and then decided to exit by way of the ramp and then have a scout around outside whilst I figured out my options.

I trod silently along the rows of vehicles. Not because I didn’t want the deadheads to know I was here, I just wanted to hear them first. About a third of the way around the basement and with the exit just visible on the far side, I came across the first nightwalker but it was now little but bones, picked clean.

‘One down, five to go,’ I murmured to myself and moved on, shivering within a cold sweat despite the warmth, a pulse thumping in my neck. The second and third nightwalkers I found close by, nothing more than a jumbled heap of bare bones and gristle, wedged between two cars. It wasn’t unusual to find them grouped together. Nightwalkers, when resting between feeding, usually gathered around a point of focus. A skylight, a heater duct, or something that made a soothing noise, like a wireless tuned to static, a water wheel, wind chimes, a caged bird. It suddenly struck me that there were none of these in the basement. Only cars covered in sheets, brick walls, vaulted ceilings and electricity cables carried on rusty trunking.

An uneasy feeling welled up inside me. The car they had gathered around was larger than the others. Larger and smoother and—

I grasped the sheet and drew it off.

It was the blue Buick.

I stared at it with a sense of growing confusion. It was the same car I’d dreamed about. But it wasn’t just the same make, colour and model – it was exactly the same car – missing hubcaps, AA sign askew, rusty bumpers, front damage, driver’s window jammed half down. I shivered and rubbed my temples, looked away, then back, then touched it. The car was real. I’d dreamed about something I’d never seen.

I ran my fingertips across the bonnet, feeling hot and panicky. There were no hands, no Mrs Nesbit, no oak, no boulders, just the car. I trod silently to the driver’s side and opened the door. There was a musty, long-stored smell inside, like the bottom of an infrequently aired closet. There was little to be found except a tin of Mrs Nesbit travel sweets and several unpaid parking tickets, but in the door pocket I found the vehicle documents. The name on the registration papers was Don Hector, which added to my consternation. I checked behind the sun visor and the keys fell into the footwell.

There was a rabbit’s-foot key ring attached. I’d dreamed that, too.

I took a couple of startled steps back and experienced a hot, uncomfortable feeling as the dream returned, aggressively invading my consciousness. I could see the dappled light of an oak tree’s spreading boughs appear on the concrete floor as quite suddenly the Buick before me transformed into the Buick in the dream, while around me on the concrete floor were the hands, alive, writhing like small skin-covered spiders.

‘The hands!’ I gasped with a shudder of revulsion, then realised that I was sounding like Moody. On an impulse I called out. Not to Sister Zygotia or Lucy or Jonesy or Aurora, but to Birgitta . I didn’t expect this to have any effect, but it did: all of a sudden the field and trees and hands had vanished and I was back in the stuffy closeness of the garage.

I waited a few moments to get my breath back and for my heart to stop thumping.

It’s Hibernatory Narcosis, idiot.

The most dangerous side effects of anomalous inter-Winter rousing were never physiological, but psychological : narcosis in its mildest form was a sense of tingling or numbness, which then ran the gamut from feeling drowsy, to feeling drunk, to hallucinations where scraps of momentarily unsuppressed dreams caused reality ambiguity that could result in paranoia, dissociative behaviour and, in extreme cases, violence to oneself and others.

But it wasn’t all bad: on the plus side, I knew that thinking of Birgitta could bale me out of any hallucinations. It was a handy trick. I’d use it again. But on the down side, I was experiencing a similar narcosis to that of Watson, Smalls and Moody. And aside from the whole Birgitta dream, which they never mentioned, I was seeing things they had been seeing . Perhaps not in precisely the same way, but close enough – and it hadn’t done them any good.