Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘There isn’t any.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a mournful expression, ‘we watered it down and told the winsomniacs it was tomato soup.’

  We fell silent for a moment, but Jonesy, I realised, was never quiet for long. She liked to chatter in order, I think, to fill the dead air, and the Winter was full of dead air. I learned that she was a first-generation settled Guestworker, an outsider of mixed-hemisphere parents. Her mother had been an Argentinian maid who had fallen in love and slept over. Scandalous at the time, but little thought of today.

  ‘I joined the Service after several tours in the Ottoman,’ she said, then fell silent for a moment. ‘Lost some people out there under my command,’ she said, ‘lost some good people.’

  ‘Is that why you’re in Sector Twelve?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s all about payback, I think,’ she said, as if not fully sure herself. ‘Could have retired, but working under Toccata is never dull. Besides, I may actually do some good. It’s not risk-free, but honourable conduct rarely is.’

  Once breakfast was done, Jonesy said she had some errands to run and she’d meet me at midday to go and see Toccata.

  ‘You could make up some really good “Do you remember whens”,’ she said, ‘reminiscences of our early life together, y’know?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could.’

  ‘Try now.’

  ‘I’m not good at off-the-cuff invent—’

  ‘Did you like your breakfast? The one I made for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let’s hear the story of how we met.’

  She stared at me in a dangerous fashion. The breezy, chatty Jonesy was really only one part of her – the saner part.

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said, trying to think of something original and failing, ‘we were – um – cast as … the front and back halves of a pantomime horse.’

  ‘Trippy,’ said Jonesy, more intrigued than I’d hoped, ‘and why would that have happened?’

  ‘Part of a … Winter talent show?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘We don’t get along at first—’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because you insisted I was the back half?’

  ‘Totally plausible. Carry on.’

  ‘But because the show must go on and the “equestrian gavotte” requires synchronised footsteps, we sort of forget our differences, practise together in private and then emerge victorious … and in love.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ she said, beaming all over.

  ‘Really? I thought it sounded particularly corny.’

  ‘The best relationships always begin like a bad rom-com in my experience. I’ll find a tartan travel rug and a picnic set for the Sno-Trac,’ she added, now quite enthused by the whole idea. ‘You’re washing up breakfast, but you can argue with me about it if you want – sort of like “I did it last time”.’

  ‘You made breakfast,’ I said, ‘it would only be fair.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ she said, mildly disappointed.

  Jonesy got up, pulled on her coat and opened the front door.

  ‘I’ve left a basket of food on the kitchen counter. I’ll meet you outside at midday.’

  She then wished me a pleasant day, told me to not force my first shit out as I’d definitely regret it, and that there was a package outside in the corridor.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her retreating form as she moved along the curved corridor, and she waved a hand without looking back.

  The parcel was large and flat and wrapped in brown paper and string. I brought it inside, cut the string with my pocket knife to find it was a painting, a portrait, of me. I rested the painting on the bookcase, then stepped back.

  It was the picture I had commissioned from the painter. But it wasn’t wholly original. It was the same painting I had seen in her studio four weeks before, the one of her faceless husband. But it was no longer her husband and no longer naked. It was me, with my features and a black one-piece swimsuit painted over. She’d even added white pumps over his previously naked feet, and a blue-and-white striped towel for me to sit on.

  There was something very disturbing about the painting. It wasn’t because she had recycled a canvas of her obviously-missed husband for a stranger she barely knew, but this: she’d painted me on the Gower, as in my dream, and, more bizarrely, it looked for all the world as though she had painted me from her viewpoint, there on the beach. In the dream she had said she loved me, and this was a painting of me, hearing her say it. Which sort of defied logic: it should have been the other way round. Reality, then dream. I stared at the painting for a good ten minutes, trying to figure it out, but getting nowhere. In any event, I thought the likeness was good. I now owed her five hundred euros, which on reflection was money I could ill afford, but at least it would give me an opportunity to talk to her again.

  I walked around the room several times, managed two press-ups and sat for a while on the bed feeling fatigued and itchy, then fetched the portrait of me and placed it next to Clytemnestra, in order to soften her psychopathic glare. I then went and made myself some tea, had another shower, and stared out of the window.

  After an hour of this I grew bored and restless so decided to go and see Porter Lloyd. I pulled on my uniform, threw my bag around my shoulder and departed, but stopped at the painter’s door as I walked around the corridor. I scribbled a note of thanks and my address so she could invoice me come Springrise, and was going to pop it through the letterbox when I stopped. The name under the bell was Birgitta, and I felt a sudden pang of confusion. I hadn’t known her name. She’d not told me. I’d heard it in the dream. I took a deep breath, supposed that I must have seen it without registering it, and, still confused, walked downstairs.

  Starving in the basement

  * * *

  ‘… The 1815 “Victoire” calendar was the one followed by all members of the Northern Fed, and listed the 118 days of Winter as a single month centred around the Winter solstice. The remaining 252 days were grouped into an efficient nine months of 28 days each, with a leap year every nineteen to make up for orbital discrepancy …’

  – The History of Celestial Timekeeping, by Brian Gnomon

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ said Porter Lloyd when I found him at reception, ‘I had no idea you were still up there.’

  ‘I hadn’t taken the Sno-Trac,’ I said, ‘so you must have known I was still here.’

  ‘I don’t like to go in the basement much,’ he said, ‘so wouldn’t know if it was here or not. How late for work were you?’

  ‘Four weeks,’ I said, ‘probably some kind of record.’

  He gave a short laugh, and I joined in, feeling stupid. I then asked about the night I thought Clytemnestra had peeled herself out of the painting.

  ‘That was the first night,’ said Lloyd, ‘I didn’t see you after that. I can only apologise again. I work with the information I’m given.’

  I looked out of the window at the weather, which was overcast but clear. I suddenly had a daring thought: I didn’t have to hang around to see Toccata at all. Technically I didn’t take orders from her – I was based out of Cardiff.

  ‘I think I’d better be leaving,’ I said. ‘Sno-Trac in the basement, you say?’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you.’

  Lloyd took a long dog-catcher’s stick and a press photographer’s flashgun from under the desk, the kind that accepts flashbulbs the size of ping-pong balls. We crossed the lobby and passed through a small door, then took the stairwell into the bowels of the Dormitorium. It was noticeably warmer when we reached the second sub-basement as we were closer to the HotPot, and the copper heat-exchanger pipes made odd gurgling noises as valves automatically opened and closed. The iron stair rail, I noted, was warm to the touch.

  ‘Quite hot down here,’ I said.

  ‘Cold snap on its way,’ explained Lloyd, ‘the rods are out in anticipation.’

  ‘Expecting trouble?’ I asked, indicating the flashgun and dog-catc
her’s pole he was carrying.

  ‘The Sarah Siddons is only at sixty per cent occupancy,’ he confessed, ‘so I take on “basement lodgers” for a fee.’

  ‘Basement lodgers?’

  ‘Nightwalkers from the Dormitoria this end of town. Other Porters find them and park them with me until HiberTech or the Consuls get involved. I’ve got six, all told. Unusually high, I know. Morphenox isn’t totally without faults, is it?’

  He was making comment on the fact that only those on the drug ever walked. For every three thousand or so who felt the Spring sunshine on their faces, one would be a nightwalker, and no one considered those odds anything less than acceptable.

  ‘I’ve been feeding them a turnip and three Weetabix a day, so – fingers crossed – they haven’t yet resorted to eating one another.’

  I hadn’t thought for one moment I was going to have to run the gauntlet of potentially cannibalistic nightwalkers, and told him so.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘even a child could outrun them. Just make sure you’ve no chocolate or Oxo cubes in your pockets. They can smell them a mile off; drives them nuts.’

  We arrived at a steel door which had six names chalked upon it, along with the dates they were locked in. Lloyd dug a flashbulb from his jacket pocket and pushed it into the reflector bowl.

  ‘I trigger it manually,’ he explained. ‘The bright light scrambles the remnants of their brain long enough to get away if needed.’

  He rapped his knuckles against the last name on the door.

  ‘Watch out for Eddie Tangiers. Big guy, strong as an ox – I lured him in here only a week ago. Used a trail of fruit gums, if you’re interested. Not quite as effective as marshmallows, but less bulky to carry – and more economic.’

  ‘Good tip. Thanks. How will I know him?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll know him: kind of big, kind of dead, kind of needs to be avoided. Good luck. The Sno-Trac will be on your left, fifty yards in.’

  After pausing to listen at the door, Lloyd pulled back the spring-loaded door bolt, opened the door and then fired the flashgun. There was a bright flash in which happily a nightwalker was not revealed, and a waft of warm air greeted us from the semi-gloom, and with it the smell of decomposition. Lloyd hurriedly ejected the spent bulb and pushed in another from his pocket.

  ‘One or two are definitely greeners,’ he said, wrinkling his nose. ‘Maybe I didn’t feed them enough Weetabix. ’

  I stepped in and snapped on my flashlight. A meagre light filtered down the light-wells by which I could see the general layout of the basement: doughnut-shaped around the central core, with sturdy brick vaulting to support the building above. Serried ranks of cars, motorbikes, trucks, haywains and agricultural equipment, most covered by dustsheets, were parked in two rows with access along the inside radius. I paused for a moment, but Lloyd didn’t; I heard the door clang shut and his footsteps retreated rapidly back up the stairs.

  I found the Sno-Trac with ease, but it wouldn’t be going anywhere. Someone had left the compressed air tank open and the air had leaked out – there was nothing to start the engine. I paused for thought and then decided to exit by way of the ramp and then have a scout around outside whilst I figured out my options.

  I trod silently along the rows of vehicles. Not because I didn’t want the deadheads to know I was here, I just wanted to hear them first. About a third of the way around the basement and with the exit just visible on the far side, I came across the first nightwalker but it was now little but bones, picked clean.

  ‘One down, five to go,’ I murmured to myself and moved on, shivering within a cold sweat despite the warmth, a pulse thumping in my neck. The second and third nightwalkers I found close by, nothing more than a jumbled heap of bare bones and gristle, wedged between two cars. It wasn’t unusual to find them grouped together. Nightwalkers, when resting between feeding, usually gathered around a point of focus. A skylight, a heater duct, or something that made a soothing noise, like a wireless tuned to static, a water wheel, wind chimes, a caged bird. It suddenly struck me that there were none of these in the basement. Only cars covered in sheets, brick walls, vaulted ceilings and electricity cables carried on rusty trunking.

  An uneasy feeling welled up inside me. The car they had gathered around was larger than the others. Larger and smoother and—

  I grasped the sheet and drew it off.

  It was the blue Buick.

  I stared at it with a sense of growing confusion. It was the same car I’d dreamed about. But it wasn’t just the same make, colour and model – it was exactly the same car – missing hubcaps, AA sign askew, rusty bumpers, front damage, driver’s window jammed half down. I shivered and rubbed my temples, looked away, then back, then touched it. The car was real. I’d dreamed about something I’d never seen.

  I ran my fingertips across the bonnet, feeling hot and panicky. There were no hands, no Mrs Nesbit, no oak, no boulders, just the car. I trod silently to the driver’s side and opened the door. There was a musty, long-stored smell inside, like the bottom of an infrequently aired closet. There was little to be found except a tin of Mrs Nesbit travel sweets and several unpaid parking tickets, but in the door pocket I found the vehicle documents. The name on the registration papers was Don Hector, which added to my consternation. I checked behind the sun visor and the keys fell into the footwell.

  There was a rabbit’s-foot key ring attached. I’d dreamed that, too.

  I took a couple of startled steps back and experienced a hot, uncomfortable feeling as the dream returned, aggressively invading my consciousness. I could see the dappled light of an oak tree’s spreading boughs appear on the concrete floor as quite suddenly the Buick before me transformed into the Buick in the dream, while around me on the concrete floor were the hands, alive, writhing like small skin-covered spiders.

  ‘The hands!’ I gasped with a shudder of revulsion, then realised that I was sounding like Moody. On an impulse I called out. Not to Sister Zygotia or Lucy or Jonesy or Aurora, but to Birgitta. I didn’t expect this to have any effect, but it did: all of a sudden the field and trees and hands had vanished and I was back in the stuffy closeness of the garage.

  I waited a few moments to get my breath back and for my heart to stop thumping.

  It’s Hibernatory Narcosis, idiot.

  The most dangerous side effects of anomalous inter-Winter rousing were never physiological, but psychological: narcosis in its mildest form was a sense of tingling or numbness, which then ran the gamut from feeling drowsy, to feeling drunk, to hallucinations where scraps of momentarily unsuppressed dreams caused reality ambiguity that could result in paranoia, dissociative behaviour and, in extreme cases, violence to oneself and others.

  But it wasn’t all bad: on the plus side, I knew that thinking of Birgitta could bale me out of any hallucinations. It was a handy trick. I’d use it again. But on the down side, I was experiencing a similar narcosis to that of Watson, Smalls and Moody. And aside from the whole Birgitta dream, which they never mentioned, I was seeing things they had been seeing. Perhaps not in precisely the same way, but close enough – and it hadn’t done them any good.

  I peered around the empty car park. It was gloomy and cheerless, with only the occasional drop of water splashing on the ground to punctuate the silence. My flashlight had dropped from my grasp and rolled under the car, where it was illuminating the left rear tyre. It was out of reach so I lay upon the concrete to squeeze under the Buick. I stretched out and touched the flashlight with my fingertips but it rolled away and the light fell upon another nightwalker, dead under the car. It was a woman with dark, matted hair.

  I crawled under farther, grabbed the flashlight and was about to wriggle out when I felt a vice-like grip tighten around my upper arm. I jumped in fright and swung the flashlight around. I had been wrong: the nightwalker under the car was far from dead. Her teeth were yellow, her clothes filthy and her fingernails rough and broken. She gazed at me with a disconcerting absence of humanity an
d in the way an expectant hungry child might stare at an ice cream. Lloyd’s fears had been well founded: three Weetabix and a turnip a day had not been enough. I was also, I noted, in no immediate danger of being bitten. One of her dungaree straps had snagged around the car’s jacking point.

  I was about to back out when she produced a low whispery growl, somewhere deep in her ragged throat. I stopped, but not because she’d spoken. Nightwalkers often knew a few words; it was so commonplace it wasn’t seen as a trick worth noting. No, the reason I stopped was because the short sentence was chillingly familiar.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘I … love you.’

  I stared into the violet eyes with a mixture of horror, surprise and loss – and I knew exactly who it was.

  ‘Birgitta?’

  She didn’t respond, and I poked her cheek with my flashlight to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. It was her: thinner than when I’d seen her last, and considerably less full of life. I put out my hand to touch her but she snapped at my fingers and grasped my forearm so tightly I could feel her fingernails puncture the skin.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said again, ‘I … love you.’

  ‘No,’ I said, as the full relevance of her words struck home, ‘no, no, not possible.’

  It had happened again: first her name, then the car, then the rabbit’s-foot key ring, then her saying she loved Charlie as she had in the dream. It wasn’t meant to work that way. It couldn’t work that way.

  Reality, then dream. Cause, then effect.

  She snapped her teeth at me again. I had some Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut on me, which she ate without preamble, along with my last shortbread finger and half a Wagon Wheel I was keeping for emergencies.

  ‘Is this why you’re under the Buick?’ I asked. ‘Drawn to it by the dream?’

  The questioning was pointless, as Birgitta was now well beyond the capacity for intelligent conversation. But oddly, beneath the grime and matted hair, dirt and cobwebs, her eyes were precisely as I remembered them – violet, and of extraordinary clarity and brightness.