Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

The apartment was spacious, warm and in good order. Two rooms, carpeted, all mod cons. Oddly, I kind of missed Clytemnestra and the charming grottiness of Siddons 901. I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and checked my collection of bite marks in the mirror, only one of which seemed to have an infection. I squeezed the pus from the wound, cleaned it with some vodka I’d found in the mini-bar and then changed all the dressings. I had a shower, found a bathrobe, climbed into bed and considered my position. The default plan was to simply stay awake as long as I could and deny HiberTech my sleeping mind, but on reflection that might not be the best strategy. I would eventually fall asleep after two days or more, but I’d be in a poor state to resist what they had planned. The best idea would be to go to sleep now , while I was still strong, my mind unmuddied by fatigue.

So I switched off the light and stared at the ceiling, trying to get to sleep. It took an hour to do so. I felt the room darken, there were a couple of flashes, an all-consuming glossy darkness, and—

I heard the gulls cackle before I saw them, punctuated by the boom of the incoming tide and a wind that whistled through the cable-stays that secured the funnels of the Argentinian Queen . I inhaled deeply of the salt-laden air, the freshness of the breeze, the gently rotting seaweed on the storm-shore. I opened my eyes and was back on Rhosilli beach in the Gower, the wreck before me, high and dry on the huge expanse of sand. The dream was exactly the same as it had been for the past few nights.

More real than real, but for one thing: I wasn’t Birgitta’s Charlie, I was me Charlie, still in my bathrobe, covered in bite marks, dotted with blobs of iodine. It was the same dream, but instead of being first person Active Control, I was third person Active Control – this, I presumed, was Dreamspace.

Charles and Birgitta were beneath the parasol talking in low voices, and every now and again they would laugh, and touch one another, and kiss. I can’t pretend that I didn’t feel some sort of jealousy, for I did – a dull ache in my chest.

There was a gurgle of laughter and the young girl chased her beach ball, while Birgitta and Charlie exchanged their vows of affection, as before, as always, again.

‘I love you, Charlie,’ said Birgitta.

‘I love you, Birgitta,’ said Charlie.

A voice broke into my thoughts.

‘Where is this place?’

I turned to find Aurora staring at me. She was dressed in a flowery blouse and a white skirt over a stripy swimming costume. She looked tanned and well, with longer hair less streaked with grey and a fuller body which made her look a good deal healthier than the lean overwinterer I had come to know. I guess in Dreamspace you can idealise yourself. She was still armed, a Bambi at her hip, while her unseeing left eye flicked around in its socket.

Aurora looked around curiously, as though she’d blundered into a newly undiscovered cupboard in her kitchen, and was trying to figure out its function.

‘The Gower Peninsula,’ I said, ‘a glorious weekend, fondly recalled. A place to visit when in pensive mood, an escape from the real world, something to flash upon the inward eye.’

‘Very romantic,’ replied Aurora. ‘I remember that parasol. This is a dream from one of the orderlies we interrogated after the cylinder went missing. What was his name again?’

‘Charles Webster.’

She clicked her fingers.

‘Right. Webster. Nothing came of it, I recall. So why are we here?’

‘This is the dream you’ve been projecting into my sleeping mind these past few nights at the Sarah Siddons ,’ I said, ‘through the wall from 902.’

‘Nope, you got a fresh Don Hector dream recording all to yourself,’ she replied. ‘We replace them because they wear out after five or six playings – tend to get scratched and lose their detail.’

I shrugged.

‘All I know is that I dreamt I was Webster in the Gower, then went to the blue Buick from here.’

She frowned, then a flash of understanding moved across her face.

‘With a jump and a tear?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘with a jump and a tear.’

‘That’s a first,’ she said, genuinely impressed. ‘We record dreams on wax cylinder because Edison’s invention has never really been improved upon. But there is another, more practical reason. Do you want to try and guess what it is?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘It’s this: each cylinder records about eight minutes of dream. A single night’s recording can produce upwards of twenty cylinders. We kept Don Hector’s – there are about seven hundred dreams of his in storage – but we can’t keep them all, so the dreams we record from people of no consequence are—’

‘—erased,’ I said.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Aurora. ‘Whoever was on erasing duty that day didn’t do such a good job and left the remains of one of Webster’s dreams on the start of the cylinder.’

I understood, then. Everything I knew of Birgitta and Charles I’d gained from a half-inch of shiny blue grooves at the head of a single wax cylinder. Without random chance to bring me and this cylinder together, meeting Birgitta under the car would have been only intriguing, at best, and I’d likely not have intervened when Aurora was going to retire her. Without her becoming my dream-woman, she’d be dead.

‘I’ll make sure this cylinder is trashed once we’re done,’ said Aurora. ‘Now, you know why I’m here?’

‘You want to know where the cylinder is.’

‘Full marks. Are you going to tell me?’

‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘You’re a bad liar, Charlie. I’ve been working the Dreamspace since before you were squirted out of the turkey baster, and I’m good at it. When dreams are your own, you have agency over them, but right now we’re equal actors in another’s dream. I can mould it the way I want it to go, I can mould you the way I want you to go. I can pull something from your subconscious that you don’t want revealed, and I can even have your mind sweated out of you, so you end up like that dopey orderly, no better than a nightwalker. What was his name again?’

‘Webster.’

‘Thank you. So… Where was I?’

‘Something about sweating my mind out of me so I ended up like Webster?’

‘Yes – good only for driving a golf cart. So, here’s the deal: tell us where the cylinder is and we’ll retrieve Birgitta and you get to go back to the land of the living. How about it?’

I looked around at the beach, the Argentinian Queen and the parasol of spectacular size and splendour.

‘If I didn’t take the deal when offered by Goodnight, what makes you think I’ll take it with you? Besides, I don’t know about any cylinder.’

There was a sudden gust of cold wind, and a flurry of snowflakes drifted around the beach. The photographer had just arrived and was offering his services to Birgitta and Charles, just as before.

‘You see?’ said Aurora. ‘A subconscious clue. You will tell me. It’s hard not to think about stuff when asked. Out in the cold somewhere?’

‘I don’t know.’

Aurora took a step closer, and all of a sudden she was three times larger. I felt my chest tighten and for a fleeting instant I thought I would wake and be safely away from this, but Aurora took my ear between finger and thumb and squeezed so tightly I yelped.