Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

Aurora told me that back in her civvy days she used to be a Sleepy-D, and that she wasn’t doing anything for the next hour.

‘We could have a coffee at the Wincarnis,’ she said.

I glanced at my watch. Jonesy wasn’t expecting to meet me until midday.

‘Do we have time for me to retrieve Birgitta?’

‘All the time you want.’

I crawled underneath the car and looked into Birgitta’s violet eyes, hoping for some sort of recognition, but she simply stared at me blankly.

‘I love you, Charlie,’ she whispered.

‘I love you, too,’ I whispered back, my heart thumping. I knew I meant it, too – and not when I’d been her husband, but for myself, now. Yes, it was dumb, illogical and, admittedly, a little creepy, but who wouldn’t? She was smart, driven, talented, and, as a bonus, exceptionally pleasing to the eye. Everything, in fact, except being alive – and that she didn’t love me back, and couldn’t and wouldn’t, not ever.

‘Kiki needs the cylinder,’ she said, kind of mirroring Mrs Nesbit’s demand for the cylinder in my dream. I fed her two Snickers then helped her out from under the car. Once out, she stood there, rocking on the balls of her feet, eyes scanning randomly around the basement until she found me, then locked hard on to my eyes. For a brief moment I thought she was there – but then her eyes wandered off again, and the moment was gone.

‘So,’ I said once we’d attached dog leads to the nightwalkers and headed for the exit ramp, ‘the panga in a scabbard on your back. Is that actually practical?’

‘Not really,’ said Aurora, demonstrating how, if heavily dressed, it was almost impossible to reach in a hurry, ‘but it’s very in at the moment. Oh, word of advice: don’t use a panga on nightwalkers. It’s really messy.’

Glitzy Tiara mumbled about multi-pack toilet roll and the wisdom of ‘Buy One Get One Free’ deals while Eddie Tangiers attempted, while we walked, to bundle with each vehicle we passed and, once, a concrete building support. It might have been funny if it wasn’t kind of sad.

‘I’ve got some plasters and iodine in the truck,’ said Aurora, for Tangiers’ activities were not damage-free.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s gotta hurt.’

Aurora’s transport was an ex-military command car painted in light sand camouflage, the wheels to the height of my chest. She pushed the fresh snow off the windshield while I tied the nightwalkers’ leads to the back of the truck. We climbed aboard, the vehicle started with a hiss of compressed air, and as we drove towards the centre of town at a slow walking pace, I tried to make sense of what had just happened. There was no rational explanation as to how Birgitta could say the very same thing in life that I’d dreamed about the previous night. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t make sense. Logic would demand that you dream about things that you’d already witnessed – dreams follow reality, not the other way round.

‘How are you on HotPots?’ asked Aurora as we took a right at the billboard.

‘Nothing beyond General Skills training.’

‘The Cambrensis ’ HotPot had an unexplained overheat a week ago,’ she explained, gesturing towards the Dormitorium as we drove past.

‘Luckily, the fuel rods dropped into the pond when it cooked up and shut itself down. Toccata ordered the Cambrensis abandoned. One of the rehoused residents was Carmen Miranda.’

‘What, with the fruit hat and everything?’ I asked.

‘The very same.’

‘But Carmen Miranda must be – ancient .’

‘She credits the Samba for her longevity,’ said Aurora, ‘but I think it’s more likely a statistical quirk of the ageing process.’

‘Wow,’ I said, surprised that she should be still alive, and, odder still, living out here. ‘What’s she doing now?’

‘Not much,’ said Aurora. ‘When they opened her door they discovered that she’d walked. Jonesy had to retire her.’

The tyres crunched on the rutted, refrozen snow as we passed the railway station and then finally reached the main square, where Aurora parked her vehicle, the three Vacants still tied to the back.

The town square appeared larger in full daylight, and unchanged these past four weeks aside from more snow and ice. We’d parked next to the bronze statue, and I could see now that it was a preacher, set on a sandstone plinth. He was holding a prayer book and in mid-oration, his features obscured by a concretion of snow that had turned to ice, thawed then refrozen, so the figure appeared to be both melting and weeping. Below the statue a man sat huddled in a foetal position, his blue-white arms clasped around his knees.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘Howell Harris,’ said Aurora, ‘a preacher who lived near here. There’s a Dormitorium named after him. Died last century some time. Should be a statue of Don Hector, really – or Gwendolyn the – what are we up to now?

‘Thirty-eighth, I think. Not the statue – the frozen guy.’

‘Oh,’ said Aurora, ‘him. That’s Jedediah Bloom, Sector Footman.’

‘What did he do?’ I said, looking closer.

‘We caught him trying to smuggle drugs out of HiberTech, and that’s a mandatory Frigicution – even if it was only to supply the winsomniacs.’

I stared at Bloom, thinking it was a bit harsh, even so.

‘I was off-duty at the time,’ said Aurora, probably thinking the same as I, ‘and Hooke was acting Head of Security. He has very many fine qualities but the notion of proportionality is not one of them.’

I kneeled down and stared at the cadaver with an odd sense of morbid curiosity. Bloom was frozen quite solid. His pallid blue-grey skin was flecked with snow, and every single follicle of his winterdown was standing hard out in a last-ditch effort to forestall the inevitable. He was covered with a dusting of snowflakes, which made him look fluffy, and his milky eyes were wide open and staring off into the middle distance, his expression placid. Near the end you start to feel warm, hallucinate, and then lose all fear.

‘He looks like he died only last night,’ I said.

‘He did,’ said Aurora, ‘as fresh as frozen peas.’

I hastily stood up, the recentness of his death somehow making the event seem more shocking. Bloom was the grim reality of Frigicution.

‘That’s the thing about the Winter,’ said Aurora, ‘it takes the lawless the same as it takes the diseased and the underweight and the elderly. Society’s spring cleaner, hoovering up the substandard before they become a burden.’

Aurora walked toward the Wincarnis, and I followed. Above the door, the Edwardian woman on the Restorative Tonics sign was still grinning out at the Winter, her cheery smile and bright enamelled colours undiminished by season or cold.

Shamanic Bob looked up from the reception desk from where he had appeared to be dozing.

‘Back to ride the night train to Dreamville?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘How are you and your odious bunch of sleep-shy?’ asked Aurora. ‘Thinned out much?’

‘I’ll pass on your good wishes,’ said Shamanic Bob sarcastically.

We walked into the bar. At one table were a foursome playing Scrabble but they remained oblivious to our arrival. I recognised the receptionist named Josh from HiberTech, but not the others. The only other customers in the room were the drowsy named Zsazsa, who was more intriguing now her younger self had starred in my dream, and a dozen dozing dreamers, who paid us no attention at all.