Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘What’s flesh-eating cold slime?’

  ‘It’s probably best not to think about that.’

  We stopped at the kerb, where an orange Cosmo was parked. He unlocked it and climbed in, then wound down the window.

  ‘We’re done for now. I’m hitting the sack for six weeks, and will see you again at two weeks before Slumberdown. Report to the Cardiff Consulate; we’re based right next door to the Melody Black Dormitorium – you can get an apartment there. Before that, have a couple of days off. Go to the Gower, see a movie. You might want to finish any long books you’ve started, wrap up prolonged games of postal chess and deal with any outstanding issues that you think you might regret leaving open.’

  ‘Is it that likely I won’t survive?’

  ‘Simply a precautionary measure,’ said Logan. ‘Where possible, I try to ensure I never lose a Novice in the first season. Cheerio.’

  The statement didn’t totally fill me with confidence, but at least I was away from St Granata’s, Morphenox rights intact. I watched as he pulled off into the traffic and was lost to view down the road.

  I turned around and looked at the old building that had been my home for the past twenty-two years. I thought of wandering in, telling everyone my news and then going out for an extended gorge-crawl at all the local eateries on the seafront – kebab, fish and chips, burger, tofu, kebab – then collapsing, belly distended, armpits bulging, groaning with indigestion at three in the morning, happy and penniless.

  But that was no longer an option. My entrance into this Winter would be as something I’d never been before: light.

  Cardiff nights

  * * *

  ‘… Early pulse weapons had required a compressed air reservoir to function, but all modern units use a thermal battery which comprises a detonator to fire the heat source which in turn liquefies the electrolyte in order to generate the high electrical output required. The amperage generated is considerable, but limited to a fraction of a second …’

  – A Guide to PVC (Portable Vortex Cannon) Weapons

  ‘Wow,’ said Lucy Knapp when we met over coffee and buns six weeks later. The buns were Chelsea and quite good, the coffee tasted of gritty mud. I’d invited her into the Cardiff Sector House, more to impress her than anything else. She looked around the open-plan offices, identical in layout to every other Consulate in the land, part of the SkillZero protocols. The twin portraits of Don Hector and Princess Gwendolyn XXXVIII looked down upon us in the large entrance vestibule, while the barographs15 hummed quietly to themselves, the traces indicating that the weather was, despite appearances, actually improving.

  ‘Wow,’ she said again once we were seated in the rec room. ‘Charlie Worthing, the Novice to Jack Logan. Who’d a thought it?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘How has it felt staying thin when everyone you know gets fat?’

  ‘I stopped seeing them after a while.’

  ‘Always the same.’

  It was them who stopped seeing me, in truth. As everyone swelled to their target weight to tackle the Winter, all they saw in me was poor health and tragedy. After a month they stopped calling. All, that is, except Lucy. She’d welcomed me to the broad overwintering family, and was full of praise and sound advice.

  ‘A good breakfast is key,’ she said, ‘and well-fitting boots, merino socks and a reliable supply of snacks. Adequate naps are always useful, a tube of Après-Froid – and never underestimate the value of agreeable wallpaper.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You’d be surprised how calming a well-decorated room can be. Soft furnishings in pastel tones can be helpful, too, and a collection of soothing chamber music – but on wax cylinder rather than vinyl or tape. Electricity can be tiresomely unreliable and batteries useless in the cold.’

  She asked me how the Winter Consuls were treating me, and I said that I was doing their cooking, washing and ironing.

  ‘It was the same with my first Winter with HiberTech,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a form of hazing. In the military you’re dumped thirty miles away in your underwear in the snow, in civvy street it’s washing up and knitting. Mind you, it’s good for team-building, and you’ll find it improves your ironing.’

  ‘My ironing doesn’t need to improve.’

  ‘Everyone’s ironing can do with improving.’

  She then thought for a moment and asked me to ‘keep my eyes open’. I asked her for what, and why, and she replied that as a representative of HiberTech, she had a duty to maintain a good network of intelligence – and I was the only person in the Consuls she knew that she could trust.

  ‘What’s not to trust about a Consul?’ I’d asked.

  She told me: ‘Lots’ but didn’t elaborate, and the conversation had swiftly moved to other matters.

  ‘May the Spring embrace you,’ I said, giving her a hug before we parted.

  ‘And embrace you, too,’ she said.

  I didn’t see Logan again until ten days before Slumberdown. The days were now short, the temperature below zero, the snows long established. For the last week there hadn’t been a breath of wind, the snow heaped precariously on even the most steeply pitched of roofs. Every now and then I heard a muffled thud as a half-ton of snow slid off and onto the streets below. Drowning isn’t the only way water can kill you.

  I was leaning on the broad tracks of the Sno-Trac, heart thumping, nervous as hell, looking as professional as I could in my snug-fitting Winter Consul’s uniform. Aside from my domestic duties within the Consulate I’d spent two weeks at the Consul Training Academy learning basic survival skills and various modules on the physiology of sleep, dreams, Villains, climate, wind-chill, the H4S radar set and even Wintervolk. The tutors had looked me up and down and there had been muttered conversations behind my back regarding preparedness. Most Novices got a whole Summer to train.

  The door to the Ivor Novello Dormitorium opened and Logan stepped out, paused, then took a deep breath of the chill morning air. He looked refreshed, and was surprisingly lean – the month’s fat contingency I was carrying wasn’t something he was willing to carry himself.

  ‘Welcome back, sir,’ I said. ‘Sleep well?’

  He looked me up and down with a quizzical expression.

  ‘Your new Novice,’ I reminded him, knowing that the mind can take a while to remap after hibernation, ‘I’m—’

  ‘—don’t tell me.’

  He concentrated hard, then clicked his fingers and grinned.

  ‘Charlie Worthing. The kid with the memory over at Pru’s. Yes?’

  ‘Yes, sir. You never did tell me what you wanted my memory for.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I never did.’

  We climbed into the Sno-Trac.

  ‘Do you have my briefing notes?’

  I started the engine with a hiss of compressed air then handed him the binder. Logan flicked through the contents as we drove through the empty, snow-draped streets, the drifts piled high against the buildings. In the binder were updated guidance notes from HiberTech as regards nightwalker policy, a list of alerts, missing persons and most-wanteds.

  ‘Well, how about that,’ he said, ‘the bounty on Lucky Ned has been raised to ten thousand euros.’

  ‘Lucky’ Ned Farnesworth was one of the more daring members of the Winter off-grid community. He was an unapologetic male supremacist and also indulged in theft, murder, and kidnapping. He was also fond – obsessively, some say – of collecting stamps. Wise philatelists lodged their collections in vaults during the Winter.

  ‘Ten thousand? Is that enough to have his own people turn him in?’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  As an example to others, Villains stuffed snitches and turncoats with snow while still alive, a form of retribution that, whilst barbaric, did lend itself to artistic interpretation: the body could be posed in almost any position before it froze solid. Emulating David was quite popular, with anything by Rodin a close second. Once, a squabble between two dynastic groups of Vil
lains resulted in the vanquished being made into a very lifelike tableau of The Last Supper. It was a popular tourist attraction until they thawed, and for a short time became a best-selling picture-postcard.

  We parked up outside the Cardiff Sector House and were buzzed in through the shock-gates where the team were waiting to greet their Sector Chief: Pryce, Klaar, Thomas, Price, Powell, Williams. There would be eight Consuls covering Cardiff including myself and Logan. As little as ten years ago there would have been twenty staff. Budget cuts hit everywhere.

  The first day Logan spent settling in and getting up to speed with what was going on, especially as regards long range cold weather forecasts and Dormitoria thermal serviceability. I’d spent the previous six weeks with the team and had learned some of their foibles, both good and bad. It was indeed true they had me doing their domestic errands, but in exchange they regaled me with stories that were designed to both frighten and enlighten: about blizzards thicker than milk that lasted for weeks, of the trees cocooned in ice looking as though shrink-wrapped in glass. Of rain that fell frozen as jewels with a sweet tinkle of chimes upon the rocks, of temperatures so low that mercury solidified in the thermometers and those foolish enough to venture out could be frozen solid in minutes. They told me of snowflakes the size of dinner plates, drifts seventy-foot deep burying villages for weeks on end, of snow-sculptures carved by wind into shapes so jagged and perverse and beautiful they appeared as though hewn by gods.

  I listened to each story with a mixture of wonder, fear and incredulity. But despite the Winter’s worst excesses, no one who spoke of it did so without a degree of affection.

  On the second day we rounded up a confused-looking woolly rhinoceros from the Co-op’s car park, and drove it out west beyond the Megafauna fence.16 Once that was done, we processed the winsomniacs, who ranged from those with genuine medical contra-hibernation conditions all the way through to the morally reprehensible sleep-shy: the malingerers, lazy-arses and drug-addled dreamers. Winsomnia was regarded as a national problem, with a national solution – spread them around to share the food and heat burden equally. We packed three off to St David’s and another four to Presteigne, then received six from Oswestry.

  ‘I know,’ said Logan when I pointed out the pointlessness of it all, ‘let City Hall have their fun.’

  On the third morning Logan and I went to the ranges, a low building situated on the other side of the river, opposite a bowling alley and KFC outlet, both closed for the Winter. We were there to see how good I was with a Bambi, but we ended up going through almost every weapon there was – from the palm-sized Plinker, which has about the power of a straight punch,17 all the way up to the Thumper, used primarily for riot control. With one of those on full choke you could knock a dozen people flying from twenty feet.

  ‘A nightwalker can take several large hits before they go down,’ said Logan. ‘Less in the noggin to scramble, apparently. Ever meet one?’

  I told him about the Vacant my old friend Billy DeFroid found caught on the barbed wire in the orchard, and Logan patted the top pocket where his back-up weapon would have been.

  ‘A Snickers twin pack,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised how quick comfort food can reorientate their moral compass. I’ve seen a hunger-crazed man-eater subdued to the mildness of a capybara in only eight Tunnock’s Teacakes.’

  ‘They should use it in their advertising.’

  ‘I think they do. Try the Cowpuncher.’

  I replaced the Thumper and picked the next weapon from the cabinet, pushed home a larger power cell, pulled the stock hard into my shoulder, flicked off the safety, then squeezed the trigger. There was a momentary high-pitched whine, then—

  Whump

  The sound made my ears pop and the empty forty-gallon oil drum we’d been practising on was hurled to the other side of the range, badly dented.

  ‘Although nightwalkers are often cited as the most disturbing part of the Winter,’ said Logan, taking the weapon from me, ‘half of all deaths among the unseasonably awake are caused by panic.’

  ‘Waking night terrors,’ I said.

  ‘It’s why we never dismiss nightmaidens, Tonttu, Gronk and other Wintervolk as simply Winter myths and legends. To the unseasonably awake half out of their mind with fatigue, imaginary terrors can be just as dangerous as real ones.’

  ‘Sister Umbilica told me the Gronk feeds off the shame of the unworthy.’

  ‘Sister Umbilica says a lot of things,’ said Logan, not being as dismissive of the tale as I’d thought. Physical evidence of any Wintervolk hovered firmly around the zero mark but the Gronk – by far and away the least believable – was conversely taken the most seriously.

  ‘You think there is a Gronk?’ I asked.

  ‘As I said, dismiss nothing.’

  I nodded sagely. The mythical Gronk had many peculiarities, not least a strange mix of a love of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and obsessive domesticity – most bizarrely manifested in an apparent desire to fold linen. As a diversionary tactic, superstitious sleepers often left a basket of unfolded laundry outside their house over the Winter, just in case.

  ‘Do you think I could try the Schtumperschreck?’ I asked, pointing to the largest weapon in the cabinet. It was originally designed for heavy demolition work and could easily flip a small car, although that close in you’d probably dislocate a shoulder in the attempt.

  ‘Actually, better not.’

  ‘Okay. But hang on,’ I said, pointing at a large grey object the size of a rugby ball sitting in the bottom of the weapons cabinet, ‘is that a Golgotha?’

  The Thermalite Industries 18-B ‘Golgotha’ was originally developed for blowing railway cuttings through mountains,18 but once the military heard about it, they begged and begged until they got their own version.

  ‘Yes, it is, and no, you can’t touch it. Hang on,’ he added, digging in his pocket, ‘I need to give you something.’

  He handed me an Omnikey made of gunmetal on a leather lanyard. It would be expected never to leave my person, and misuse or loss would carry the penalty of instant dismissal and a prison term.

  ‘Nothing is closed to you, now, Charlie. Not a door, not a car, not a safe, not a single padlock. Use that power wisely.’

  I stared at the Omnikey curiously. It had my name engraved on it, and my Citizen number.

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  The following day we were inventorying Winter pantry,19 which is measured in person-days. For the number of people we expected to have awake over the Winter, we had more than enough. Other sectors were less diligent over stores, so pantry was often placed in a vault, and guarded. Grand Theft Pantry remains the only crime to which lethal force might be legally applied, and even this was controversial. Four years ago someone was killed for stealing a packet of shortbread fingers and there was one helluva stink.

  Two days after that someone murdered Consul Klaar over in Barry.

  She died outside Nightgrowls, a late-to-sleep hangout. Although any force we wielded was mandated non-lethal, by long convention criminals were more likely to suffer an ‘inadvertent fatal application of non-lethal force’ than to be detained alive, so in consequence, offing Winter Consuls was seen as not just a reciprocal arrangement, but a form of sport. Klaar was well known for corruptly playing one criminal gang off against another and her inevitable demise was revealingly disproportionate in its savagery.

  I peered into Klaar’s half-track, took one look at her remains and then deposited most of my lunch into a nearby snow drift.

  ‘Vomiting is a waste of protein,’ said Vice-Consul Pryce, a short man, partial to sarcasm and chocolate peanuts. ‘In the spirit of practicality, you may want to bag it for later.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Mixed into a goulash you’d never know,’ he said with all seriousness.

  ‘Look, thanks for the advice, but I’m not going to eat my own vomit.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve not been hungry enough. When you are, y
ou’ll eat carrion, lichen, cardboard, someone else’s vomit, anything. Ever heard of Toccata, Chief Consul Sector Twelve?’

  Almost everyone had heard of Toccata. She was rumoured to have a policy of rarely taking wrongdoers alive and Deputy Consuls died under her command at eight times the national average. There was also a rumour she’d seen the Gronk – up in the fire valleys where the snow never settles and the air is full of sulphurous fumes, as though the devil herself had made landfall.

  ‘I heard she ate a nightwalker in order to survive a particularly bleak Winter,’ I said.

  ‘Two, I heard,’ said Pryce, ‘and that she now has a taste for it.’

  ‘C’mon,’ I said, expecting a leg-pull.

  But he seemed deadly serious.

  ‘There are times when survival dictates extreme measures. Some say the Bard wrote Sir John Falstaff into so many of his plays for that express purpose – someone unseasonably portly for the Winter Players to feast upon if things got bad.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘Who knows? But Winter Cutlets should always be a consideration, when the hunger pangs hit, pantry is empty and hibernation isn’t an option. Oh, and speaking of Toccata, don’t mention her to the Chief. They had a thing going a few years back. He’s still a little raw over it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He fell in love.’

  ‘Really? He doesn’t look the kind.’

  ‘Oh, he’s the kind all right. But then she split on him and, well, as I say, he’s still a little raw.’

  Coincidentally, Toccata had recently called the office, looking to speak to Logan. I told Pryce about it and he raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Personal?’

  ‘Professional. Something weird going on in Sector Twelve.’

  ‘So what’s new? There’s always something weird going on in Sector Twelve.’

  There were few leads regarding who killed Klaar. A recent snowfall had wiped all the tracks, but Logan sent a couple of Consuls to speak to the friendlies to find out which gang had the bigger grudge.

  ‘What happens now?’ I asked as Logan and I drove back to the Consulate.