Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

I concentrated hard on the first random thought that came into my head in order to block her out: the time Billy DeFroid found the nightwalker in the orchard back at the Pool. The apple trees were still without leaves, the dry-stone wall had partially collapsed under the weight of the drifts, and the remnants of snowmen, always the last to thaw, were still on the ground. The nightwalker was a man, middle-aged, close to starvation and mumbling.

‘Hidden up the chimney?’ said Aurora with a smile as the information popped annoyingly into my head. ‘Which side? Doesn’t matter, you’ve just thought it.’

She relayed the intel to her monitor: ‘Up the chimney, left—’

She stopped talking, looked at me, then took a step forwards and stared deeply into my eyes.

‘—cancel that. It’s in the ticket office to the funfair just behind the museum.’

A second later and we were in the ticket office, the dusty floor strewn with fliers from last year’s attractions, the temperature minus twenty and only a meagre light reaching us through the snow-covered windows.

‘Bottom drawer of the desk,’ said Aurora with a smirk. I leant against the wall near the door, then slid down until I was sitting on the floor, arms around head.

‘I could be bluffing,’ I said in a despondent tone, shivering in the cold, my breath showing white, ‘perhaps it’s not there at all.’

‘It was a good try,’ she conceded, ‘I almost went with your Cambrensis story. That’s when experience counts. To know instinctively when someone is lying.’

She laughed, relaxed, then sat on a handy chair. Out in the real world, HiberTech agents would be battling through the blizzard to converge on the ticket office.

She pulled a hip flask from her pocket and took a swig.

‘I don’t drink out there any more,’ she explained, ‘but in here I can do as I wish. You don’t get drunk in dreams, not properly, more’s the pity.’

She offered the flask to me but I shook my head and she replaced it in her pocket.

‘You’d have made a good dream analyst,’ she said in a quiet, conversational manner. ‘Your technique is clumsy and impetuous, but with a genuine flair.’

‘If I agree to work for you,’ I said, ‘will you retrieve Birgitta?’

‘I think that particular ship has sailed, Bucko. You should have negotiated when you had the chance. But heigh-ho, life’s full of disappointments. Or rather, your life is full of disappointments. Mine’s been unusually rich.’

‘What about Toccata?’ I asked, and Aurora’s unseeing left eye twisted around in its socket to stare at me.

‘What about her?’

‘Do you think you’ll ever reconcile yourselves to the fact that you’re actually one person?’

Both of her eyes suddenly glared at me in a dangerous manner, which gave the odd impression that she was staring at me in a completely normal manner. But then her left eye wandered off to stare at the ceiling, and she was back to her old self.

‘You need to stop listening to Shamanic Bob’s conspiracy theories,’ she scoffed. ‘Toccata and I the same person? Ridiculous.’

I could see she was rattled, though.

‘When was the last time you saw her in the flesh?’ I persisted. ‘In fact, have you ever seen her in the flesh?’

‘No, but by that reasoning,’ she said slowly, ‘anyone who I’ve never met in the flesh might actually be me. There would be millions. What about you? Have you ever met Carmen Miranda? In the flesh, I mean?’

‘Well, yes, I have actually.’

‘Okay, that was a bad example. How about Dylan Thomas?’

‘No.’

‘Then why couldn’t you be him as well as being yourself?’

‘Because he’s dead?’

‘Okay, maybe that’s also a bad example. Look, it’s not my fault Toccata is such a coward that she avoids me at every—’

She was interrupted by a knock at the ticket office door. Aurora narrowed her eyes.

‘Don’t try anything stupid, Wonky.’

‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ I said, and it wasn’t – it was the shimmery Mrs Nesbit. But she wasn’t here to sell us targeted advertising, she was here to bring news from the outside world, and I already knew what it was. I’d asked Dr Gwynne to donate one of his Golgotha demolition charges to the ticket office, the firing pin booby-trapped to the lower drawer of the desk.

‘Three dead, one missing and that’s the second Sno-Trac destroyed this evening,’ said Goodnight through Mrs Nesbit. ‘We need to up the ante; if you don’t think you can handle it, instigate 110B. Everyone talks after that.’

I turned to face Aurora, who, like all powerful people, was more annoyed about being outmanoeuvred than just losing. All of a sudden this wasn’t about a cylinder, it was about winning, and that made it personal.

‘I told you it wasn’t there,’ I said.

‘You fooled me,’ she said, ‘led me on that merry dance to the Cambrensis so I wouldn’t see that you were spinning a false narrative. I take it back: you’re very good. But this only delays the outcome, not changes it. We still need that cylinder, and now we play hardball. Ever wanted to know what it’s like to be eaten alive by nightwalkers?’

‘I’d have to answer no to that.’

‘They push their nails into the flesh of your stomach,’ she said, ‘and disembowel you while you’re still alive. It has a visceral terror to it that is quite unlike any other; we call it Night Terror 110b. This is how it works: I’ll have you eaten alive on the hour every hour, night after night, week after week for as long as it takes. You know what the record is? The most that anyone has ever endured?’

‘Twelve?’

‘Forty-seven. But we figured they didn’t know anything. It was that orderly. What was his name again?’

‘Webster.’

‘Right. He must have been made of fairly tough material to withstand that . We don’t often miss one. So, are you ready?’

She didn’t wait for a reply and all of a sudden my feet were anchored to the ground by two blocks of clear ice. I saw a shadow move past the window of the ticket office, then another. I could hear the nightwalkers outside making soft whispering noises, the rattle of a Rubik’s cube, the soft murmur of Glitzy Tiara running through a shopping list for a meal she’d never make. I had felt the same when they had attacked me for real in the Cambrensis , a sort of dull, helpless terror that makes you hot and sweaty and nauseous. I shivered as the nightwalkers began to creep in through the door, some of them across the walls and one along the ceiling.

‘I’ll make a deal,’ I said.

‘We’re done negotiating, Charlie. The sooner you tell us where the cylinder is, the sooner this can all be over. And I mean over. There’s one of my agents waiting next door to smother your worthless wonky head with a grubby pillow as soon as I wake up and give the order. It won’t be quick, but it’ll be final. And you will tell us. They all do.’

‘Except Webster,’ I said.

‘Yes, okay, except Webster,’ she agreed in a tetchy manner. ‘We’ll up it to a hundred repeats in the future. Live and learn. So: be eaten alive once, twice, thirty times – you’ll still be dead at the end of it and we will have the cylinder. Your choice.’

The nightwalkers started to move in again with unpleasant slathering noises and in a slow, calculated fashion. I tried to jump out to the fire valleys but I couldn’t. I’d overlooked that I was thin, and tired, and slightly narced. Aurora, by contrast, was about as fit as she could be. The first nightwalker was barely a couple of feet from me, all nails and teeth and hunger, when The Notable Goodnight spoke again.