Early Riser

The Geraldus Cambrensis

The lock turned easily against my Omnikey and I pushed open the heavy door, squeezed inside and then heaved it shut. As the latch clicked, the storm dramatically subsided to a humming rush of wind. I opened the inner door and stepped inside. I’d expected the interior of the Cambrensis to be cold and dark, as everyone had told me the HotPot had been shut down, but it hadn’t and it wasn’t. The temperature inside was a healthy eighteen degrees – the internal heating system was working perfectly. I pulled the socks from my hands, kicked off my shoes and sank both hands and feet into the tepid water of the defrost basin. I could feel my extremities ache as the blood returned to circulation, and within twenty minutes the tingling had stopped and I knew I was in the clear. I put on some dry socks and a pair of house slippers, then held up my lantern so I could see.

I’d seen the lobby before. It was the one that I’d seen in my dream, when I was bouncing around in Webster’s Dreamstate. Stairs behind, the remains of sofas on the lobby floor, central reception desk. I moved forward and noted that empty food cans and wooden crates were lying around. Probably in the rush to abandon the place, although now, given the safe temperature in here, I couldn’t see why it had been abandoned. I had a sudden and very worrying thought that there might be a radiation leak that no one was ’fessing up to, but the large Geiger counter behind the reception desk was indicating a level that, while broadly safe, would probably require that residents were Winter only and above the age of thirty, just in case.

The house lights were off and, although gloomy, it was not pitch black. Someone had taken the time to feed the plankton in the tubes and a thin blue-green bioluminescence suffused the interior of the building.

There was a noise from upstairs. Like something being knocked over.

‘Hello?’

My voice sounded timid in the silence, and the dryness of my throat caught me off guard. I was more on edge than I’d imagined. No one answered and I figured it was probably hiburnal rodents. From the smell in the air, there might be a long-dead resident or two for them to feed on. I took the stairs cautiously to the first floor, as I had done in my dream – and experienced the most curious feeling of double déjà vu. It all looked extremely familiar, as if I’d walked this way many times before. The corridor, the decor, the heavy woven wall-hangings, everything.

I heard another noise, this time behind me, the soft drag-clump-drag-clump of a nightwalker.

‘Hello?’

In reply there was a faint whisper and the creak of a board above my head. I held my breath as a figure entered the periphery of the soft glow from my lantern, perhaps ten yards down the corridor. It was the nightwalker Eddie Tangiers, dressed in light blue overalls, shambling towards me. Jonesy hadn’t retired him at all. Annoyingly, this was also the precise moment the battery in my lantern ran out and plunged me into darkness. With my eyes not yet accustomed to the meagre glow afforded by the tubes, I was effectively blind. I quickly fitted a second thermalite but was not overly worried. The drag-clump-drag-clump had not altered pace.

When the light began to illuminate the scene I almost yelled as I found myself face to face with another nightwalker whom I’d not heard approach. She was staring at me with a single milky eye and her face was old and lined, with high arched eyebrows and a large mouth. But it was the fruit hat, now dented and worn and missing most of its bananas that gave her away.

‘Chicka-chicka-boom-chic,’ she said, her voice a husky monotone.

‘I’ve seen you looking better, Ms Miranda,’ I replied.

She seemed to gaze at me for some moments, then moved her hips left and right, and shambled off to follow the first nightwalker along the corridor and back beyond the periphery of the light. She and Tangiers wore matching overalls and were either not hungry or had not yet discovered cannibalism.

‘When I love, I love,’ came Miranda’s voice from the darkness, then silence. I moved off down the corridor, now guided by nothing more than the memory of Webster’s dream. I found room 106, paused, then pushed open the door. The room had the same pine linenfold panelling, the same single bay window with a fire escape, the same large chimney. On the wall was a lighter patch of faded wallpaper in the shape of a star – the place where the wall-clock had once hung, again, as in Charles’ dream.

I felt hot and sweaty and confused and tired but half suspected, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all of this could still be explained as my memory unfolding simultaneously as I walked, like a locomotive laying its own tracks. But there was one test I could perform, something that would decide once and for all if I was dreaming my own dreams, or dreaming someone else’s.

I stepped forward and reached up the chimney as far as I could. At first I felt nothing, but then the lip of a ledge, and inside that my fingers touched something that yielded, and after some squirming and stretching – Webster had been almost four inches taller than me – I removed a cylindrical cardboard tube that was dusty and stained. I opened the tube and pulled out a shiny blue-black hard wax cylinder, the fine grooves shining in the light. I stared at it for a moment, not knowing what to think. Happy or sad? Didn’t know. All I knew was that it had been placed there by Charles Webster, was valuable enough for HiberTech to destroy six people for, and Don Hector, through Charles, had been trying to get it out to Kiki and RealSleep for at least three years.

I replaced it in the tube and, my curiosity aroused, decided that it would be best to play it back and see what was on it. I needed a phonograph so retraced my steps, and passed the nightwalker Glitzy Tiara on the landing as I headed towards the porter’s lodge on the lower ground floor. There were more nightwalkers in the lobby and I moved cautiously amongst them. Some of them whispered words and phrases, one of them was constantly shuffling a pack of cards, and a fifth was holding two Rubik’s cubes: with her left hand she scrambled, with her right hand she solved. The crates and cans of food littered around also indicated to me that they were being harboured, almost certainly by Jonesy and Toccata, and on an industrial scale. Jonesy had indicated that she, too, thought nightwalkers were still sentient and it was likely Toccata thought the same. Despite my feeling vindicated, the notion flew in the face of conventional medical and scientific thought. Rigorous tests had been run and the conclusion had been unanimous: nightwalkers were irrecoverably brain dead. But if their consciousness was complete yet displaced to somewhere impossible to detect, and HiberTech knew about it, then the current nightwalker policy of redeployment, retirement and then being parted out for spares would be murder. No, wait, considerably worse than murder.

As I was passing the reception desk my lantern went out a second time. I had one thermalite remaining so instead simply waited for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness.

The cylinder was key. RealSleep desperately wanted it, and HiberTech would do anything to stop them getting it. I started to see vague shapes as my eyes became used to the darkness, and while they did I could hear the nightwalkers walking past me in the gloom, whispering as they did so, which is a truly unnerving experience. Once, one brushed against me and nibbled me on the arm, and I suddenly wondered how often anyone fed them, and how long they would have to not be fed before they started to feed on one another – or me. The answer, I soon realised, was right about now. I hadn’t fully been aware as my eyes became used to the dim light, but they had grouped around me in the semi-dark and I felt their hands touching me. I tried to push them away but as soon as I moved past two and wrested myself from the grip of a third, another three or four pairs of hands grabbed me and I felt a sharp pain as one of them bit me hard on the side of my head. I yelped, but the noise only invigorated them, and I felt them grip me tighter. I gave up on the soft approach and struggled, shoved and punched, but their numbers were too great and I was pushed to the ground, the nightwalkers murmuring and groaning in an increasingly aggressive fashion in the dim greeny-blue light. This was, I knew, how it worked. An attack began slowly, then rapidly escalated in aggression to a frenzy. I felt several bony fingers try to lift up my shirt to get at my stomach. I was beyond shouting, and just kicked and struggled as hard as I could, the sound of their hungry murmurings growing in my ears. I had come so far, and ultimately – for nothing. The cylinder, worthless to the nightwalkers, would pass to whoever stumbled upon my remains.

Uselessly, I pulled my shoulder bag closer to me and closed into a ball, then had an idea. I ignored the bites and scratches, reached into my bag and pulled out Laura’s camera. I pointed it in their general direction and pressed the shutter.

The flashbulb fired, and in the stagnant gloom of the lobby it was as though a door had momentarily been opened into the Summer. The effect was impressive, and instantaneous. The nightwalkers paused, their minds momentarily scrambled. This wasn’t a trick I’d learned in the Academy, this was a trick I’d learned from Lloyd, two days before.

The nightwalker’s confusion was short lived but long enough for me to wind on the camera and fire the flash again. In the bright white light I could see their bewildered expressions and wasted no time in pushing my way through the tangle of confused bodies. I ran down the steps to the lower ground floor, found the porter’s lodge and slammed and bolted the door after me, my heart racing, my hands shaking.

Every hour I was experiencing something new, every hour I was wishing I wasn’t.