Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

I put his parka over my woncho, then pulled on his gloves and hat. I turned and my foot knocked against Hooke’s Cowpuncher, so I picked it up and racked a fresh thermalite into the battery chamber. I paused for a moment, and felt a tug on the safety wire, as though someone was testing the line. And then, with a sudden jerk, the cable was pulled violently from my hand.

I dropped to my knees, and while scrabbling with increasing desperation in the snow for the safety line, I heard a child’s laughter through the swirling whiteness. It had taken Hooke but was still hungry for the unworthy and I, having done nothing to prevent my friend Lucy’s demise and with the loss of Logan and twenty-four winsomniacs still weighing on my conscience, had the strongest conviction that I would be next. I very slowly took Laura’s camera out of my bag and held it on top of the Cowpuncher. I paused, waited until I heard another giggle, then fired and pressed the shutter a moment later.

A momentary funnel of wet air opened in the snowstorm, briefly illuminated by the camera flash. I could see all the way to the trees behind a fence swaying in the wind and part of a parked car, and in the foreground I could see, or thought I could see, a beach ball . I think I yelled, then racked the fourth and final thermalite into the chamber, rewound the camera and fired again. This time there was nothing extra to be seen and the snowstorm once more closed in upon me. I knelt there, taking in great gulping mouthfuls of air, trying to relax, trying to stop my heart from pounding. Despite the cold I could feel sweat prickling down my back even though my lips, cheeks, fingers and feet were beginning to feel the hard nip of impending frostbite. I dropped the now-empty Cowpuncher and attempted to find the cable once more but my hands were numb, and scrabbling in the snow gave them less feeling, not more.

There was nothing to do but walk in any direction and hope to find a wall with a fixed line on it. I stumbled forward for ten or so paces but didn’t find a wall – I found a door. Old, Gothic, belted steel on oak. I wiped the snow off the signboard with my forearm.

It was the Geraldus Cambrensis .

The lock turned easily against my Omnikey and I pushed open the heavy door, squeezed inside and then heaved it shut. As the latch clicked, the storm dramatically subsided to a humming rush of wind. I opened the inner door and stepped inside. I’d expected the interior of the Cambrensis to be cold and dark, as everyone had told me the HotPot had been shut down, but it hadn’t and it wasn’t. The temperature inside was a healthy eighteen degrees – the internal heating system was working perfectly. I pulled the socks from my hands, kicked off my shoes and sank both hands and feet into the tepid water of the defrost basin. I could feel my extremities ache as the blood returned to circulation, and within twenty minutes the tingling had stopped and I knew I was in the clear. I put on some dry socks and a pair of house slippers, then held up my lantern so I could see.

I’d seen the lobby before. It was the one that I’d seen in my dream, when I was bouncing around in Webster’s Dreamstate. Stairs behind, the remains of sofas on the lobby floor, central reception desk. I moved forward and noted that empty food cans and wooden crates were lying around. Probably in the rush to abandon the place, although now, given the safe temperature in here, I couldn’t see why it had been abandoned. I had a sudden and very worrying thought that there might be a radiation leak that no one was ’fessing up to, but the large Geiger counter behind the reception desk was indicating a level that, while broadly safe, would probably require that residents were Winter only and above the age of thirty, just in case.

The house lights were off and, although gloomy, it was not pitch black. Someone had taken the time to feed the plankton in the tubes and a thin blue-green bioluminescence suffused the interior of the building.

There was a noise from upstairs. Like something being knocked over.

‘Hello?’

My voice sounded timid in the silence, and the dryness of my throat caught me off guard. I was more on edge than I’d imagined. No one answered and I figured it was probably hiburnal rodents. From the smell in the air, there might be a long-dead resident or two for them to feed on. I took the stairs cautiously to the first floor, as I had done in my dream – and experienced the most curious feeling of double déjà vu. It all looked extremely familiar, as if I’d walked this way many times before. The corridor, the decor, the heavy woven wall-hangings, everything .

I heard another noise, this time behind me, the soft drag-clump-drag-clump of a nightwalker.

‘Hello?’

In reply there was a faint whisper and the creak of a board above my head. I held my breath as a figure entered the periphery of the soft glow from my lantern, perhaps ten yards down the corridor. It was the nightwalker Eddie Tangiers, dressed in light blue overalls, shambling towards me. Jonesy hadn’t retired him at all. Annoyingly, this was also the precise moment the battery in my lantern ran out and plunged me into darkness. With my eyes not yet accustomed to the meagre glow afforded by the tubes, I was effectively blind. I quickly fitted a second thermalite but was not overly worried. The drag-clump-drag-clump had not altered pace.

When the light began to illuminate the scene I almost yelled as I found myself face to face with another nightwalker whom I’d not heard approach. She was staring at me with a single milky eye and her face was old and lined, with high arched eyebrows and a large mouth. But it was the fruit hat, now dented and worn and missing most of its bananas that gave her away.

‘Chicka-chicka-boom-chic,’ she said, her voice a husky monotone.

‘I’ve seen you looking better, Ms Miranda,’ I replied.

She seemed to gaze at me for some moments, then moved her hips left and right, and shambled off to follow the first nightwalker along the corridor and back beyond the periphery of the light. She and Tangiers wore matching overalls and were either not hungry or had not yet discovered cannibalism.

‘When I love, I love,’ came Miranda’s voice from the darkness, then silence. I moved off down the corridor, now guided by nothing more than the memory of Webster’s dream. I found room 106, paused, then pushed open the door. The room had the same pine linenfold panelling, the same single bay window with a fire escape, the same large chimney. On the wall was a lighter patch of faded wallpaper in the shape of a star – the place where the wall-clock had once hung, again, as in Charles’ dream.

I felt hot and sweaty and confused and tired but half suspected, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all of this could still be explained as my memory unfolding simultaneously as I walked, like a locomotive laying its own tracks. But there was one test I could perform, something that would decide once and for all if I was dreaming my own dreams, or dreaming someone else’s.

I stepped forward and reached up the chimney as far as I could. At first I felt nothing, but then the lip of a ledge, and inside that my fingers touched something that yielded, and after some squirming and stretching – Webster had been almost four inches taller than me – I removed a cylindrical cardboard tube that was dusty and stained. I opened the tube and pulled out a shiny blue-black hard wax cylinder, the fine grooves shining in the light. I stared at it for a moment, not knowing what to think. Happy or sad? Didn’t know. All I knew was that it had been placed there by Charles Webster, was valuable enough for HiberTech to destroy six people for, and Don Hector, through Charles, had been trying to get it out to Kiki and RealSleep for at least three years.