Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘Don’t make us do anything you might regret,’ said Mrs Nesbit, who was now in the temple and casting a bluish glow onto the stonework, ‘because we can make our dreams into your nightmares.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you could make that your mission statement and company motto.’

‘Bravely spoken,’ said Mrs Nesbit, ‘but we’ll have the last laugh. You’re almost out of dreamtime. We’ll speak again.’

She vanished abruptly, and my ear twitched as I heard the scratch of a shoe against stone. Partially hidden in the shadows was a man dressed in a medical orderly’s uniform of a collarless white jacket with a flap buttoned diagonally up the front. I recognised him immediately: Charles Webster, my confident and distinctly unwonky sleep-avatar.

I had been him only two minutes before, now I was looking at him.

‘Don Hector?’ he asked in a nervous voice.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘I’m a friend of Kiki.’

I beckoned him closer and gave him a plain cardboard tube, the same one that Webster would hide up the chimney, moments before being arrested. It was all backwards, but dreams, I learned, were rarely linear.

‘Look after the cylinder as you would your life,’ I said, ‘and get it to Kiki. We’ll not speak again.’

Webster understood the gravity of the situation and swiftly departed. Within a few minutes there were criss-crossing flashlights outside and The Notable Goodnight entered, followed by Hooke and several other people I presumed were HiberTech Security. They were one step behind both of us. Right now, Webster was on his way to hide the cylinder.

‘Where is it?’ said Goodnight, striding towards me. ‘What have you done with it? Who did you give it to?’

I gave her a smile, then the middle finger.

‘All our work,’ implored Goodnight, ‘everything we stood for, everything we built. Please, Don Hector, do the right thing.’

I smiled. Don Hector didn’t have to justify his/my actions to anyone.

‘We’ll squeeze it out of him,’ said Agent Hooke. ‘He might resist out here, but not in his dreaming mind. We’ve drawn worse secrets out of better people than him.’

‘Blue Buick,’ I said.

‘What?’ asked Goodnight.

‘I said, “blue Buick”. Because it’s all you’ll get from me. A picnic I once had, on my own, in a field overlooking the Wye where there’s this glorious oak that has large stones piled up around the trunk. I used to sit and read, the car parked close by, some wine in a cooler, cheese. That’s what’s in my mind, and that’s all I’m going to dream about. I’ll be adding a few guardians of my own, too. Severed hands like hairless mole-rats, just in case you decide to go in, or send others in your place. You’ll get nothing from me.’

‘Take him,’ said Goodnight, but I was already gone – back to the pile of boulders around the oak, the blue Buick parked close by, the picnic half eaten. I knew the dream was about to end as the carpet of rippling hands flooded towards me, across the ground, over the boulders. I didn’t struggle as they ran up my body. I didn’t care when their combined weight toppled me and I felt a tooth break as I hit the rock below me; didn’t care as I felt myself being pulled through the gaps in the stones; didn’t care as I felt myself once more suffocating beneath the soil, the damp earth pressing heavily on my chest. I didn’t care because—

My eyes flickered open, my temples throbbed, my mouth felt dry. For the briefest of moments I thought I was once again safely back in the Melody Black , but no. Clytemnestra was staring down at me with a look that was beginning to feel increasingly oppressive, and next to her, the portrait of me wearing Birgitta’s husband’s body seemed also to have changed – he was looking less like someone in love, and more like someone with severe wakestipation.

I stretched, downed the glass of water I’d left for myself, then swung my legs out and lowered my feet to the soothingly cold boards of the floor. Regardless of the weirdness, I’d enjoyed the dream. It looked as though I had created a narrative that had all the ingredients of a thriller: a good-looking young couple in love and working for a shadowy organisation, an agent in peril, a missing recording cylinder, an interrogation, loss, betrayal. And all with me centre stage. Perhaps this was subconsciously what I saw for myself, my dream-fuddled mind generating a sense of excitement and drama that so far had been absent from my utterly conventional life. If I had another life, I’d dedicate it to non-Morphenox slumber, with all the dreams that come – and the attendant dormelogical risks. Perhaps Shamanic Bob and his dreamers had something after all.

There was a knock at the door. I guessed it must be Aurora, and I was correct. Her left eye was staring off and up to the right, while the right fixed me with a keen sense of clarity. The abrasively offensive Toccata part of her was gone; she was back to her more ebullient self. I actually felt quite relieved to see her.

‘I was passing,’ she said cheerily, ‘and I wanted to check you were okay.’

I didn’t know what to say, so said what I was thinking.

‘I didn’t realise you and Toccata were—’

Aurora glared at me with such a look of hurt, anger and confusion that I stopped mid-sentence.

‘I was about to say,’ I began again, ‘that I was unaware you and Toccata were… so alike .’

She stared at me for a while, her good eye unblinking while her unseeing left eye twisted in its socket in a disturbing manner.

‘We are not alike,’ she said finally, ‘not even the slightest bit. Does that woman think we are?’

‘Well, no,’ I replied, truthfully enough.

‘Exactly. And that’s the way we’re going to keep it. Understand?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

I filled the empty pause that followed by offering her coffee.

‘You have some?’ she asked. ‘The real stuff, I mean?’

‘Sadly not,’ I replied with some regret. ‘Nesbit Value Brand.’

She shrugged, told me it couldn’t be helped and then walked in, quietly closing the door behind her. She took off her coat, dumped it on a nearby chair and jumped up to sit on the kitchen counter.

‘What do they call this?’ she said, tapping the work surface.

‘A peninsula, I think.’

I was no expert on kitchen furniture and was still confused over Aurora and Toccata’s insistence that they were two people.

‘Free-standing, it would be an island.’

She nodded thoughtfully.

‘I have one that connects from one side of the kitchen to the other,’ she said. ‘Would that be a kitchen isthmus?’

‘I’d say a counter.’

‘That’s what I thought. Isthmus would be more logical, though, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose, yes. Milk?’

‘You have some?’

‘Only powdered,’ I said, staring into the empty fridge.

‘That’ll do. Hey, listen: I heard you told the Chief we’d bundled.’

She said it as if it were possibly the funniest – and unlikeliest – thing she’d ever heard.

‘I had to say something ,’ I replied. ‘She knew we’d met in the Wincarnis when I said we hadn’t, so I needed a good reason for lying.’