Early Riser

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by Jasper Fforde


  I was sitting atop a rough stack of boulders that had been piled against the tree in a haphazard manner. The stones were large and of a bluish sandstone, smooth and flat and now an artificial island around the trunk. All about me the deep blue sky was punctuated by puffy clouds, and the surrounding grass stretched away in every direction to the horizon.

  This felt, like the Birgitta dream that immediately preceded it, utterly real. Every detail was there about me – the texture in the bark, the veins in the leaves, the yellow bursts of lichen upon the rocks. The only evidence I had that this wasn’t real was that I knew it wasn’t. Nothing else. If that was so, then I could understand how Moody and Watson might have confused the two.

  I looked at my hands. They still weren’t mine. But they weren’t Charles’ either.

  They were old. A good seven decades, wrinkled, covered with liver spots and trembling. I felt weak, too, and the left side of my body had a sort of fuzzy dullness to it. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly given his presence in all our lives, I was now dreaming I was Don Hector. His oldness, his dignity, his manner. But I wasn’t wholly him, I was partly him. Me, dreaming I was him, or him, dreaming he was me – I could only be sure I wasn’t Don Hector as he’d died two years before.

  I laughed out loud. Not simply at the bold invention of my mind, but the clarity. If this was what dreaming was like, then I had missed a phenomenon of considerable entertainment and distraction. Sure, the extra energy spent in their subconscious creation would require additional pounds at Slumberdown, but from what I could see, it would be worth it. This was a new, exciting reality.

  This was escape.

  I inhaled deeply and the sweet scent of Summer filled my lungs, the subtle odour of warm grass and meadowsweet. I looked around to see if Clytemnestra wasn’t also somewhere about, hanging over me with her dagger, and was relieved to find that she wasn’t. But something else was, something that had been predicted along with the oak and the boulders.

  The blue Buick.

  The car was from the more reserved and elegant era of American automotive design, before the dominance of fins and chrome. It wasn’t new, and far from pristine. Rust speckled the chrome bumpers, poorly repaired crash damage had wrinkled the offside front wing and the driver’s window was jammed half down and discoloured milky-white. Next to the Buick a picnic was laid out on a red blanket, a bottle of wine in a cooler, a folding chair. Beyond the car, about a half-mile away, I could see, sitting quite by itself on the unceasing carpet of green a Morpheleum, a temple to the god Morpheus. Old, abandoned, but looking incongruous, yet somehow safe.

  I could make an intelligent guess as to how these two dream scenarios had been created in my mind. First of a woman whom I’d met and liked and mixed with her paintings and my holidays in the Gower, and secondly, the dream I had been told about, mixed with the inescapable omniscience of Don Hector and HiberTech. I already had the broad parameters; my mind had filled in the rest like so much builder’s plaster. It was quite a feat – no wonder dreams burned energy.

  I was about to step from the boulders when I stopped. Birgitta, Moody and Porter Lloyd had all warned me: stay on the rocks.

  Intrigued, I stepped down to one of the lower stones and prodded the soil with an inquisitive toe. Almost immediately a hand shot out of the ground and closed around my ankle with a vice-like grip. I cried out in horror, swayed and almost fell off the rocks, then recovered and pulled back as hard as I could, my fingernails splitting and cracking where I grasped the stone. And then, after we had tussled for a few seconds the hand abruptly let go and swiftly sank from view while I retreated to the highest point of the rock-pile. Notwithstanding the fact that I knew that none of this was real, I sat shaking, breathing in short gasps. I then noticed that there were more hands – dozens if not hundreds – and watched with an increasing sense of horror as they moved slowly around the tree, as attackers might circle a hopeless last defence. Occasionally they would halt to fuss with a tussock of grass, sniff the air and occasionally squabble before carrying on with their patrol. I knew now what Moody had meant when he spoke in horrified tones of the hands.

  No, wait, back up a moment. Upon reflection, I couldn’t have known what Moody had been frightened of. He’d only made mention of ‘hands out to get him’. I must have simply invented the scenario to fit in with the trees and the rocks. The outline was the same, the dream was different.

  And then, quite suddenly, a woman’s sharp voice from behind me cut into my trail of thought, and that was strange, because there’d been no one there when I last looked.

  ‘We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire,’ came the woman’s voice in a slow, persuasive tone, ‘where Mrs Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there.’

  I turned. There was a woman standing next to the Buick, and she was staring at me with a folksy smile, had grey hair tied up in a bun and was wearing a white blouse and a red dress around which was tied a kitchen apron. It was Mrs Nesbit, as she appeared in the endless corporate logos, film and TV commercials – but not the current Mrs Nesbit actress: this was a much younger Zsazsa LeChat, from eight Mrs Nesbits ago. She looked as though she was unaware of her surroundings, and there was a sense of shimmering otherness about her – as though she were not part of the dream, but somehow trespassing within it.

  I’d added a younger Zsazsa to the dream, too.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  There was a short blast of static and she spoke again. But although the voice appeared to be coming from Mrs Nesbit, the words didn’t match the movements of her mouth. She was the one from where the voice was emerging, but she wasn’t the one speaking. It was Mrs Nesbit, and it wasn’t, just as I was both myself and Don Hector, all at the same time.

  ‘Deputy Worthing?’ she said, and her voice seemed to sear a hole into my mind like a red-hot needle. I felt myself lift out of the Dreamstate as the pain brought me perilously close to waking, and for a moment I could see the faint outline of Clytemnestra, the open door to the living room and the bedside clock before I fell back into the Dreamstate.

  ‘Steady, Charlie, we need you asleep. Now: who do you think you are?’

  ‘I think I’m . . . Don Hector.’

  ‘Presumptuous of you, wouldn’t you say? Describe the Buick.’

  ‘It’s blue, the colour of the sky,’ I said, ‘it’s not new and has various damaged parts, a bit of rust, an AA badge on the grille, off kilter.’

  Mrs Nesbit smiled again. She was looking at me, but her eyes were unseeing. What I was witnessing, she could not. She seemed more brightly coloured than the surroundings, and had a thin sparkly aura that ran all around her.

  ‘Tell me about your childhood.’

  ‘Pool from birth,’ I said, ‘insurance write-off. I wasn’t adopted on account of my noggin and biting off Gary Findlay’s ear.’

  ‘Not you – the other you. I want to know about Don Hector.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m only dreaming I’m him.’

  But there was something, as there was when I was Birgitta’s husband. Vague, nebulous, but there, crouching in the back of my mind like a perching osprey: on a kid’s trike when I was very young, going as fast as I could on the carpeted corridor of a large country house, trying to escape something – grief, I think.

  ‘I was on a trike,’ I said. ‘It’s a week past Springrise, and I can recall a sense of maternal absence. I can feel the loss.’

  And I could, an angry lump of emptiness that wouldn’t leave my chest. The same sort of lump I felt at the Pool when prospective parents passed unblinking on their hurried way to the other kids, the ones not made distinctly and beautifully unique by a touch of asymmetry.

  ‘Good – you’re in. Now listen carefully. Is there a cylinder anywhere close by?’

  ‘What sort of cylinder?’

  ‘A wax cylinder.’

  ‘With music on it? There’s lots in
the apartment.’

  ‘No; in the dream. We need the cylinder – and you need to find it. Explore the recesses of Don Hector’s mind.’

  I looked around. The only thing in sight other than the oak tree and the picnic and the car was the Morpheleum, sitting on the horizon.

  ‘There’s a temple to Morpheus. About half a mile away.’

  ‘Good. Try and get there. Using the Buick offers the best chance, we’ve learned.’

  ‘You’ve tried it?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  I looked at the empty space between myself and the car. It was barely ten paces away, but as I watched, a hand surfaced momentarily between myself and the Buick, then sank out of sight.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘The hands?’

  ‘Yes, the hands. They’ll get me.’

  ‘They’ll always get you, Charlie. Trying to drive to the temple, not being able to. Anything to stop you finding the cylinder, stop you reaching the Morpheleum. But the cylinder is in there somewhere. The temple is a good start. The clock is running – I suggest you start driving, and fast.’

  I elected to do as she said, but then noticed with a feeling of dread that the hands were not simply severed hands, but small hand-like creatures, the wrist domed over with skin like a healed stump, and not looking like part of a human at all. I put my own hand in my pocket, pulled out a rabbit’s-foot key ring and made a dash for the Buick.

  I couldn’t run as fast as I wanted. I was weak, and my feet felt draggy. Within a few paces I could sense the hands grasp the hem of my trousers, and from here they started to climb my legs, making me heavier, impeding my progress. I made it to the car and tried to get in but the weight and volume of the hands made it impossible to move, let alone drive. I kicked and pushed and tore at the hands but even if I dislodged one, two more would stream out of the earth to take their place. I heaved myself into the driver’s seat and slipped the key into the ignition. The oil and generator lights flicked on and the car’s engine burst into life. Without a foot to work the clutch, I simply pushed the gear lever into first. The gearbox clunked, the car lurched and the engine stalled. I shouted as a wave of hands erupted from the soil, flowed into the car in a flood and covered my face and then dragged me outside. I had a fleeting glimpse of the shimmery Mrs Nesbit before I was pulled beneath the ground, the taste of soil in my mouth, the earth above me pressing heavily on my chest and a sense of enveloping darkness. I tried to yell but my mouth was full of dry soil and—

  * * *

  * * *

  — a voice. But not Mrs Nesbit’s.

  ‘What are you still doing here?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’ll rephrase that: what in all that’s cold and dead and putrid are you still doing here?’

  Jonesy

  ‘ . . . Skill erosion due to hibernational mortality could be disastrous to complex manufacturing, infrastructure and management systems, so almost every job was devised with SkillZero protocols in mind. Anyone who achieved an 82% pass or higher in General Skills could run anything from a fast food joint to a Graphite Reactor . . . ’

  – Handbook of Winterology, 6th edition, Hodder & Stoughton

  I didn’t recognise the voice, but figured it was a Deputy sent by Chief Logan to make sure I didn’t lapse into full hibernation, always a risk with first-time Winterers. I was grateful to be back in Cardiff. Spending my first assignment in Sector something-or-rather at the Sarah Whatsit Dormitorium hadn’t sounded like a huge barrel of fun, although I couldn’t as yet remember how I’d managed to get back.

  On the Railplane, I expect.

  ‘You with me, Worthing?’

  ‘I’m with you,’ I croaked, my throat dry, my vocal cords stiff with disuse.

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘No.’

  I felt myself groan. My head felt like mud, my eyes were gummed tight shut and I really only had one thought in my head: that I desperately, urgently, painfully wanted to go back to sleep.

  ‘There was a striped towel,’ I said, as memories started to return, firing randomly around inside my mind like lottery balls, ‘and a beach ball. A child, a girl, laughing. A woman in a swimsuit, a wrecked liner – the Argentinian Queen.’

  ‘It’s called Arousal Confusion,’ came the woman’s voice from the darkness. ‘You won’t know shit for a couple of minutes and you’ll talk utter bollocks.’

  ‘She took a Polaroid,’ I said, ‘and the orange-and-red parasol was of spectacular size and splendour.’

  ‘As I said,’ remarked the voice, ‘utter bollocks. Your mind has been dormant, and your memory is still remapping. Until it does, you’ll be all over the shop. Can you remember your name?’

  I lay for a few minutes in the blackness, my eyes still gummed shut, and waited for my thoughts to gather.

  ‘Charlie Worthing,’ I said as soon as the fact popped into my head, ‘BDA26355F. I’ll be twenty-three on the ninth after Springrise and I’m resident at room five-oh-six at the Melody Black, Cardiff.’

  ‘Better, but still nonsense,’ said the voice, ‘but to go back to my initial enquiry: you told Laura and Fodder you were leaving on the last train. So: what are you still doing here?’

  I had to think really hard. There had been talk about taking a Sno-Trac somewhere. Nope, it had gone again.

  ‘Okay,’ came the voice, ‘I think it’s time to draw back the curtains.’

  She placed something damp in my palm and I gently massaged the hard sleep-crust that had sealed my eyes tight shut. I pulled at my top eyelid, the crust broke with an almost-audible snik, and in an instant my vision returned – garish and distorted to begin with, but as my long-dormant cortex kicked into life, the world pulled itself into some semblance of order.

  I saw Clytemnestra first, exactly the same as I’d seen her last. But with Clytemnestra came the unwelcome news that I had not returned to Cardiff.

  ‘The Sarah Siddons,’ I sighed, ‘Sector Twelve.’

  ‘It grows on you like mildew and needy cousins,’ said a woman who was sitting on a chair next to the bed. ‘We call it “The Twelve” or more usually “The Douzey”. You may get to enjoy it. It’s not likely, but you might.’

  She had mousy-brown hair cut short, was dressed in the off-white Winter combat fatigues usually favoured by Consuls, Footmen and the military, and was looking at me with a bemused smile. She was either a very healthy forty or a horribly unhealthy twenty, had faintly Southern features and above her name badge wore a pair of silver storks. She carried a pair of Bambis on her hips and, like Fodder, had a D-ring sewn into her shock-vest.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, blinking away the gumminess from my vision.

  ‘I’m Vice-Consul Bronwen Jones,’ she said. ‘Everyone calls me Jonesy. Bit obvious for a nickname and I’m not dead keen on it. I wanted something more along the lines of “IceMaiden” or “BlackWidow” or “FrostCrumpet” but you don’t get to choose these things.’

  ‘FrostCrumpet?’

  ‘That was always a third choice,’ she admitted, ‘not my favourite either.’

  ‘I used to be called “Wonky”,’ I said, hoping to ingratiate myself with the thinnest of shared experiences, ‘I’m hoping that doesn’t stick.’

  ‘It will now.’

  She offered me her left hand for me to shake. Her right was mostly missing, and what remained had healed raggedly: Winter patch-me-ups always ended up looking worse.

  A kettle started whistling somewhere and Jonesy got up and vanished into the next room while I stretched, my muscles quivering with the effort and instantly tightening into a crampy spasm. I tried several times to get up with varying levels of success, and could stand unaided by the time Jonesy reappeared with two mugs. It was hot chocolate, sweet and thick, and as I drank I felt my core temperature rise. The clouds in my head began to part more rapidly, and with
this, unwelcome memories returned. Aurora had thumped Logan so hard he’d been embedded into a wall, I’d been marooned in Sector Twelve and was spending a few nights in the Sarah Siddons before I was to drive myself out. I also had an uncomfortable feeling that I might have dreamed myself back into the Gower from a memorable holiday when I was a kid, mixed up with several paintings and the artist whom I’d inexplicably named Birgitta, which was kind of odd as the only Birgitta I’d known was a bitey spaniel with smelly ears once owned by Sister Placentia.

  All of this was worrying. Not the dream itself, which was undeniably enjoyable yet random nonsense, but the very act of dreaming. Only Sub-beta payscalers actually dreamt. If it got out that I was a dreamer, I would be finished socially and, worse, I’d have taken on the risks of the Winter Consul Service for nothing. Until I figured out what was what, no one could know.

  I stretched my muscles and felt them cramp again almost instantly.

  ‘Take it easy to begin with,’ said Jonesy as she opened the shutters, ‘slow wins prizes.’

  A grey light flooded the apartment. I sat up in bed, pushed back the bedclothes and had my third big shock of the morning.

  I was thin. Really thin.

  Jonesy raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Sailing a bit close to the wind?’ she asked, staring at my scrawny body. ‘It’s a brave or foolhardy person who heads into their first Winter without contingency. Don’t let Toccata find out. She takes reckless disregard of the BMI seriously. Actually,’ she added after a moment’s thought, ‘she kind of takes everything seriously. Even taking seriously she takes seriously.’

  For the moment, Toccata’s opinion didn’t really matter. It would later – big time – but not right now. I had only one question.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Slumberdown plus twenty-seven.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Plus twenty-seven. You’ve been out four weeks.’

 

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