Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  The hard part had been getting her unseen up the stairs, the most unpleasant task the removal of her thumb. I turned up the heating then sat on the bed and waited. About twenty minutes later her eyelids flickered open.

  ‘I love you, Charlie,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, ‘but not this Charlie, your Charlie. I was beguiled by the hope that you meant me, but you didn’t. It was another Charlie. It was a … nominative coincidence.’

  I fed her the sandwich and the chocolate and then gave her a pint of water to drink. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to retire her that morning, so merely sidestepped the issue in order to keep all options open. Trouble is, my options hadn’t increased since this morning, they’d narrowed. I’d thought Birgitta and I had a connection, but we hadn’t. As Aurora had explained, I’d simply joggled her into my dream retrospectively. It was only a matter of time before she was discovered, and no amount of talking would get me off the hook. Harbouring was harbouring, no matter who did it, or the motivations. I would have to do now what I should have done that morning.

  Jonesy was right: the first is always the hardest.

  I held Birgitta’s head gently in one arm, set my Bambi to the test setting and pressed the weapon against the back of her head, just where the spine connects to the skull. I paused, then felt uncommanded tears well up in my eyes. It was fortunate they did; I moved to wipe them away and Birgitta shifted to reveal the corner of a sketchbook under the blankets on her bed. I gently released her and pulled back the covers. She had been drawing, and recently: that morning, after I brought her back to her room.

  ‘Kiki needs the cylinder,’ she said.

  On the first page of the notebook was a sketch of the blue Buick as I’d seen it down in the basement, the oak tree near by, the pile of stones heaped around the trunk. There were the remains of a picnic near the car, and in the distance, a Morpheleum. There was a figure, too, sitting on the stones: Don Hector, looking dejected, while around the stones were hundreds of hands sticking out of the ground, waiting to get him.

  I shivered uncontrollably. It was the dream that I’d had, the dream that Birgitta must have had, too. Which can’t work unless the dream was viral – or this too was obeying the retrospective memory theory. I turned over the pad to reveal another sketch, this time depicting a scene under an old car. Someone in the picture was trying to reach for a flashlight they’d dropped, the light revealing the profile of a face that was, in Birgitta’s past words: ‘of inspiring intrigue’. It was me. But it wasn’t just me, it was the recent memory of me. This morning, when we’d met under the Buick. Birgitta had lost almost everything, but retained the complex eye-to-hand coordination of the artist she once had been.

  ‘I fooled myself I’d met your husband,’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘over at HiberTech. Guy named Webster. Has a beard and drives a golf cart. One of the redeployed.’

  She looked blankly about, but made no hint of either understanding what I had said, or of even being conscious of her surroundings. I handed her a pen several times, but the only time she grasped on to it, she let it drop almost immediately. She was drawing from memory – a human photocopier. A complex trick, but a trick nonetheless. I felt a sense of hopelessness rise within me. Even if I could slip her past Toccata’s policy of retiring all nightwalkers and somehow explain satisfactorily why she was still alive, HiberTech would just disassemble what remained of her mind and redeploy her as a menial worker, a mindless drone. I don’t think she would have wanted that. No, I had to do what I should have done that morning.

  I went into the kitchen to fetch her more water, but when I came back there was another picture on the pad: a man in a golf cart with a beard. Not from life, as the golf cart was different, as was the corridor. But that didn’t matter right now. There was something more important going on.

  She had processed what I’d said.

  ‘Shit,’ I said, ‘you can understand me.’

  I snapped my fingers in front of her face but she didn’t so much as blink.

  ‘There will always be the Gower,’ she said in a quiet voice.

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said, sitting down next to her, ‘my name is Charlie Worthing, I’m a Novice Consul – well, Deputy now, I guess – and to everyone else you’re simply a Tricksy nightwalker and as good as dead, but I know that you’re not. Can you even begin to explain to me where you think you are right now?’

  This time, I waited for her reply. She did nothing for fifteen minutes, then picked up the pen and rapidly drew another sketch. It was of the beach in the Gower, the wreck of the Argentinian Queen, an orange-and-red parasol of spectacular size and splendour. There was the little girl, too, running after a beach ball, and Birgitta was dressed as she was now, sketching. The pictures of the Buick dream and me and her under the car were all laid upon the sand. As soon as she’d finished she stopped and stared at the floor, exhausted by the activity. I stared for some time at the sketches, and at her.

  She was alive in there, dreaming herself in the Gower. Her mind was functioning. I stared into Birgitta’s eyes and tried to catch sight of her trapped inside, but there was nothing. She looked across my shoulder, at the corner of the room, the curtains, back again. She caught my gaze eventually and her bright violet eyes locked hard onto mine for a few seconds.

  ‘Birgitta?’ I said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘I love you, Charlie.’

  I sighed, trying to figure out what all this meant on a broader scale. The actor I met on the train might have been correct when she said her husband was still alive, and Mr Tiffen’s complex subterfuge to protect his wife would make complete sense if he believed the same. There was Olaf Yawnersson, too, here in the Douzey, who had harboured a couple of nightwalkers for over three years, without evidence of any crime. Perhaps he too saw something that convinced him that his nightwalkers weren’t truly dead. There had been other, anecdotal stories of family members being convinced of their cannibalistically brain-dead loved one’s inner consciousness, but all had been denied by HiberTech and the nightwalkers were then either parted out, retired, used for experiments or redeployed. If what these people believed was true and HiberTech knew about it, then their actions would be nothing short of, well, heinous.

  ‘Kiki needs the cylinder.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ I said, ‘if I even knew what that meant.’

  I fed Birgitta several more Jaffa cakes then sat her in the tub and scrubbed out the grime that had turned her tortoiseshell wintercoat into a matted mess. She sat impassively in the tub as I washed her as you might a dog or an infant, and didn’t murmur as I clipped off her matted head-hair, then rubbed lice oil into her scalp and changed the bandage on her thumb. I then dressed her in clean clothes and tidied up, made sure there was plenty of paper and pens within easy reach and told her I would be back to give her breakfast.

  Once I’d locked the door firmly behind me, I returned to my room, made a cup of Nesbit-brand cocoa, then took off my clothes and settled into bed. It wasn’t late, but I was tired. I picked up my notebook with the intent to fill in my journal but then thought I had better not in case of prying eyes, so just laid back and gazed at Clytemnestra, who stared back at me with her unalterable pigment-based psychopathy.

  I had survived my first full day in Sector Twelve but only just. I was suffering Hibernational Narcosis that presented as a déjà-vu memory reversion. This, enough as it was, was not the sum total of my problems: I had lied to Toccata about my relationship with Aurora, possible RealSleep activist Hugo Foulnap was masquerading as a Consul with Toccata’s knowledge, and I’d discovered it was feasible nightwalkers weren’t quite as dead as it seemed. Given that The Notable Goodnight had asked me if I’d seen any learned behaviour from Mrs Tiffen, they’d probably figured it out too. Quite how this fitted in with Project Lazarus I wasn’t sure – if it did at all – but rolling out universal rights to Morphenox would increase the quantity of nightwalkers, and if they could be redeployed to do more
than just simple tasks, this could be a potentially valuable workforce asset for HiberTech.

  But all my problems seemed trivial in the light of the most important task facing me: keeping Birgitta alive, safe, warm, well fed and away from prying eyes. Perhaps if I got her to Springrise and took her to the press, all would be well. Then Morphenox and the nightwalker phenomenon could be scrutinised, questions could be asked, Birgitta studied. But that bred a bigger problem. Food. Ninety-one days of food. If I let Birgitta get hungry, she’d revert to cannibalism, and I’d be first on the menu. I tried to think of a credible scheme whereby I could access the well-guarded pantry and snaffle some food, but before long my trail of optimistic thought dried up. Her discovery was not a question of if, but when. And when she was discovered, that was me done for good. Prison, out of a job and worse, far worse, the lasting disapproval of Sister Zygotia. I’d end my days as a community Footman, wandering the Winter on a capped ten euros per hour, waiting for my luck to finally turn sour.

  I needed escape, and when I found it two hours later, it was trebly welcome. It relieved my fatigue, removed me from my troubles, and returned me to Birgitta. Not to the living nightwalker Birgitta locked in her room, whom I would protect with my life and reputation, but the dream Birgitta lodged within my subconscious.

  On the Gower.

  Again.

  Dream again

  * * *

  ‘… Study of glaciers revealed year on year advancement, but few politicians ever wanted to get behind the notion of climate change, and policy lagged accordingly. The inconvenient truth was that at current estimates and without a coherent strategy, everything North of the 42nd parallel would be ice sheet in two hundred years …’

  – Surviving Snowball Earth, by Jeremy Wainscott

  It felt as though a bar or block had lifted in my mind and that my dream cogs, long gummed with disuse, had finally found a way to move. I dreamed of the white-softened town, the snow pure and unsullied after a recent fall. I saw Jonesy dressed as the front half of a pantomime horse and surrounded by her collection of thumbs, all sixty-three of them, then Mother Fallopia glaring at me severely, standing over a sleeping Birgitta, amongst dozens of paintings of Charlie Webster also looking at me severely.

  And then I was outside and could see Aurora moving amongst the drifts entirely naked, her body hair a light mousy colour, no more than an inch long except where it thinned to the naked strip of skin that ran along her spine in the shape of a poplar leaf, the linea decalvare so beloved of classical painters. She turned and was suddenly Toccata, sitting at a table with me on a large platter, basted in honey glaze and with an apple in my mouth.

  But while these were all a little odd, they were just plain, standard dreams. I knew they were dreams and they were dismissed as such. I had been waiting, as though labouring through endless trailers and adverts at the cinema, knowing that finally, with a burst of sound and light, the main attraction would begin and I could settle down, and relax, and enjoy.

  And it did – with a joyous blur of colour and light, away from the lower subconscious and into the exaggerated reality of the higher Dreamstate.

  We were back in the Gower, the Argentinian Queen on the beach by the shoreline, the blue paintwork showing through the rust, cable stays loose and swinging in the breeze. Everything was precisely as it had been before, like watching a movie for the second or third time – predictably familiar and unwavering in the precision of its repetition. The sand, the sun, the large orange-and-red parasol of spectacular size and splendour, Birgitta in her one-piece swimsuit the colour of freshly unfurled leaves. She looked at me, pushed her hair behind her ear, smiled, and everything at that moment was perfect once more. All was Summertopia, and nothing could shake the sense of overwhelming bliss. The child ran past with the beach ball and the peal of laughter, and that was her cue. The same words, the identical inflection.

  ‘I love you, Charlie.’

  ‘I love you, Birgitta.’

  And despite the disjointed Dreamstate I found myself in and the impossibility of the situation out in the real world, I did. Not for what I could see in front of me on this lazy weekend a decade in the past, but here and now, secure in the knowledge that I was loving her in a protective way, deep within the dreary midwinter of Sector Twelve and the shabbiness of the Sarah Siddons. Hiding her, looking after her needs, attempting to find a way forward into something that might resemble survival and justice.

  I looked at my hands again and touched my symmetrical head, the rasp of stubble against my fingertips. I felt my nose: straight, aquiline, distinguished.

  ‘I like being Charles,’ I said.

  ‘You’re Charles now, my Charles,’ said Birgitta with a delightful giggle. ‘Try not to think about the facility and HiberTech Security. Just today and tomorrow, forty-eight hours. You and me. What Dreams May Come.’

  It was the same line. Repeated word for word.

  ‘What Dreams May Come,’ I replied, then, by way of experiment, added: ‘While Krugers with Lugers take potshots at hotshots.’

  Birgitta frowned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘… is enough to make mammoths with a gram’s worth of hammocks feel down with a clown from Manchester Town.’

  I then did a cartwheel in the soft sand. I hadn’t done one for a while and saw stars for a moment, but when I looked at Birgitta again she had an expression of such abject confusion that I felt quite concerned.

  ‘You’re Charles now, my Charles?’ she said in an uncertain tone.

  ‘I am for the moment.’

  ‘You and me? What … Dreams May Come.’

  I’d changed the dream. Not just lines, but actions. And I’d changed Birgitta’s responses, too.

  ‘What Dreams May Come,’ I said.

  ‘Happy snap?’ said the photographer. ‘Proper tidy you’ll look and as—’

  ‘—reasonably priced as they come?’ I said. ‘Was that what you were going to say?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the photographer, looking at Birgitta, who shrugged. I knew that I was now leading the dream, and not just being a passenger within it.

  ‘We’ve not much time,’ I said, feeling the shadow of the blue Buick dream fast approaching our beach idyll. ‘I want to see more of you and me, away from the beach. When and where did we meet for the last time?’

  The smile dropped from her face.

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you, Charlie, you already know.’

  It was true, I did. It was in the Cambrensis, a week prior to Slumberdown, three years before. But just then, the little girl approached with the beach ball and the gurgle of laughter but she didn’t pass by this time; she stopped and stared at me.

  ‘Be careful, Charlie,’ she said. ‘If you look into someone else’s dreams, all you ever find are nightmares.’

  And she ran off with her beach ball.

  I readied myself, then jumped to another dream, a dream-within-the-dream. I didn’t know I was able to do this, but I could. Like finding you can play the piano when you’re eighteen but somehow you always knew – astonishing and expected, all at the same time.

  I was outside a dark, cheerless Dormitorium, dismal and forbidding in age-darkened stone. The dream, like the dream I’d just left, was hyper-realistic, distinguishable from reality only because I knew it wasn’t. I’d seen this building before, out in the real world. It was the Geraldus Cambrensis.

  I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glazed panel of the door and saw Charlie Webster staring back at me. He looked harder, more weary, older, stressed. I pushed open the door, wondering where my subconscious was taking me.

  The style of the interior was from the thirteenth century, when only the clergy and aristocracy used Dormitoria and slumber was inextricably linked with death, renewal and religion. A curved staircase led up behind the lobby towards the central void, but modern sofas were positioned either side of the central desk, where the porter was doing some paperwork. Zsazsa was reading a copy of the Ludl
ow Vogue while sitting on one of the sofas, while on the other I could see Agent Hooke partially hidden behind a newspaper. There was a third figure in a phone booth to one side, which looked as though it was either Aurora or Toccata, but impossible to say which.

  ‘Good evening,’ said the porter.

  ‘Good evening,’ I replied. ‘Any messages?’

  The Consul Charlie part of me didn’t know him, but the Birgitta’s Charlie part of me did.

  ‘Just one,’ he replied, and handed me a note from my pigeonhole.

  There will always be the Gower

  It wasn’t the porter’s writing. It was Birgitta’s, and meant only one thing: they were on to me, and I should get to the safe house without delay, stay quiet, await instructions.

  I thanked the porter, turned, but instead of making my escape as Birgitta had suggested, I trotted up the stairs to the first floor. I heard the rustle of a newspaper being folded and footsteps on the stone floor below, but I did not quicken my pace. If I could hear Agent Hooke, he would be able to hear me.

  The building was demonstrably ancient, gloomy and in a poor state of repair. Buckets had been scattered around to catch the leaks in the vaulted corridor, and large blooms of mould had erupted across the damp plaster. I moved on around the curved corridor, entered room 106 and cautiously locked the door behind me.

  The room was not large, had an arched ceiling rendered in plaster and was panelled in pine linenfold, some of which had been repaired poorly, and in haste. There was a single sash window which opened on to a fire escape and, upon the wall, a clock set inside a multi-spiked star with its hands frozen at 10.55. There were no books, no personal ornaments, no pictures, no photographs. Webster seemed to me either a man without a past, or a man eager not to have one.

  Without thinking, I reached into the leather satchel slung from my shoulder, and removed a round cardboard tube of the sort used to carry music or Dictaphone cylinders. It was the recording cylinder that I’d been told to get to Kiki. But I didn’t know who Kiki was, nor how to get it there, nor where I’d got it. I was part Charles Webster, not all of him; I was only witnessing a small window into his life. I crossed to the fireplace and pushed the cylinder onto a handy ledge high up inside the chimney. This done, I took a match to the note the porter had given me and watched it burn to ash.