Early Riser

Starving in the basement

‘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-catcher’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 and 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.

As I was pondering her looks, the paradox of her acting out my dream, the almost unthinkable reality that it was I who had supplied her with the Morphenox and that she would now have to be retired, I heard a shuffling noise close by. I flicked the flashlight around and could see two chunky male legs from mid-shin down, presumably Eddie Tangiers, the newcomer Lloyd had warned me about. I made to roll out the opposite side but noticed there was a nightwalker this side, too – a female, wearing bunny slippers.

As I watched, a bony set of fingers clasped the bottom edge of the car’s rear mudguard and an expressionless face peered in at me upside down. She was somewhere in her twenties, had a pale complexion, was missing an eye and wore a tiara stuck in her rumpled blond hair. I was concerned to be surrounded and outnumbered by three people who regarded me only as today’s one major food group, but there were two things in my favour: first that they were slow, and second, that they were very, very stupid.

‘I guess the marriage is off,’ I said, noting that Glitzy Tiara had an engagement ring around a grimy finger. She reached an arm towards me. I pulled back, avoided Birgitta and looked to the other side of the car, where Eddie Tangiers was now attempting to grab my ankle with a muscular arm. This was more problematical. He looked weighty, strong, and had no functioning part of his brain to feel pain, mercy or reason. A thump from my Bambi would send him sprawling but the shock wave might rupture a fuel tank or, much worse, bounce off a tyre and render me unconscious, something that could potentially ruin my day.

Tangiers caught hold of my ankle and began to pull. I grabbed the Buick’s rear axle to steady myself and kicked his hand, but all I managed to do was to bark my shin against the base of a suspension arm. I pulled the Bambi from my holster while Birgitta clung tightly to my forearm, teeth snapping. I fumbled with the safety and—

Whump

The air was suddenly full of loose dust, and I was momentarily blinded. Initially, I thought that I had accidentally discharged the Bambi, but I hadn’t; it was still cold. Irrespective, Tangiers had let go of my leg and was now lying in a heap on the bonnet of the car opposite, his mind momentarily scrambled by the concussion. I blinked and looked out. Another pair of feet had appeared by the side of the car but they were moving not with the slow shuffle of a nightwalker, but with full motor control. A Winterer. The thump had come from them.

‘Helloooo!’ came a chirpy woman’s voice. ‘Are we having heaps of fun down there?’

‘I’ve been in happier predicaments,’ I said in as confident a manner as I could, ‘and look, I know this sounds kinda daft, but I’m a Deputy Consul and I’ve got this under control.’

‘Under control? Hah!’ came the voice, then, more quietly: ‘Wait a moment – is that Charlie?’

I said that it was.

‘It’s Aurora. Would you give me a hand with this fella? He’s at least a hundred and twenty kilos, and every single one of them wants me for lunch.’

The situation called for teamwork.

‘There’s another one with a tiara off to your left.’

Whump

The thump was directed away from me this time, and only a small amount of dirt fell from beneath the car. Beyond the front of the Buick I could see Glitzy Tiara being deposited in front of the Austin Maxi opposite, an untidy tangle of badly grazed arms and legs. I rolled out from under the car and stood up. Aurora looked pretty much the same: unseeing left eye, a shabby Winter chic look but with the addition of a panga[51] in a scabbard on her back.

‘Thanks for that,’ she said cheerily. ‘So, why did you come back?’

‘Come back? I never left.’

‘So what have you been doing for the past four weeks?’

I sighed.

‘I… fell asleep.’

She hid a smile.

‘You’re kidding?’

‘No. Spark out. My alarm clock failed.’

‘You’re a twit, Worthing, but listen, it does happen. Jack Logan was renowned for it when a Novice. Overslept and missed a stake-out by a week.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Whatever happened to Jack Logan?’

I stared at her. She was asking me in a where are they now? sort of way.

‘You… killed him?’

‘So I did,’ she said, snapping her fingers, ‘what a to-do. Toccata wasn’t happy, I can tell you. I am so glad I wasn’t the one who had to tell her.’

I think I wanted to move the conversation on.

‘No one knew where I was until Jonesy came looking. Weren’t you going to fax my office explaining how I was getting back?’

Aurora thought for a moment.

‘I told Agent Hooke to do it. Did it not get there?’

‘It seems not.’

‘I’ll ask him about it. Shit,’ she said, poking my frame with an inquisitive finger, ‘there’s almost nothing left of you at all.’

I told her I’d be on all-day breakfasts for a week, but in the literal meaning of the phrase, and she said she’d do what she could to gain me extra rations. After that we got on with more pressing matters: the male nightwalker was now getting to his feet in an uncertain manner. Deadheads don’t stun as easily or for as long as those with full mental capacity. Less upstairs to scramble, Logan had said. But with the two of us it didn’t take much to bind his wrists, and once this was done, Aurora tied him to the bumper of a nearby VW Beetle, where he tugged constantly to try and get away, like a dog eager to worry a squirrel.

‘Have you met Eddie Tangiers?’ asked Aurora, in the same way you might introduce someone at a cocktail party.

‘Well, no,’ I said, faintly embarrassed, for Tangiers was not just well built, handsome and physically very Alpha, but was entirely naked – and displaying a tumescence of considerable size and rigidity.

‘Tangiers was a Tier One sire,’ she said, ‘and was in the Twelve plying his trade when he became stranded. When Eddie was alive, he had pretty much only one thing on his mind – now it’s all he’ll ever have on his mind. If you have some phials and liquid nitrogen on you, we could make a packet – this guy is sitting on a fortune.’

I must have looked shocked for she pulled a face.

‘It’s a joke, Worthing. You need them out here like you need food and warmth. His only use now will be for quoits practice or as a hatstand. Step to your left.’

While we had been talking, Glitzy Tiara had picked herself up and was shambling towards us, her pinched face streaked with dirt, her shoulder dislocated by the fall. Aurora stepped forward and popped her shoulder back in with a technique that was as expert as it was nonchalant, then tied her up a safe distance from Tangiers.

‘Job done,’ said Aurora with a grin. ‘Snickers?’

‘Thank you.’

Aurora produced several chocolate bars from an inside pocket, gave one to me and then fed two each to the nightwalkers, wrapper and all.

‘Glitzy Tiara wants to talk,’ I said, for the female nightwalker was mouthing words in between bites of chocolate.

‘You’re right,’ agreed Aurora. ‘Shall we find out what?’

She produced a water bottle from her bag and poured a little down the nightwalker’s throat. Glitzy Tiara coughed, then swallowed, and with her throat now wet I could tell she had a raspy Carmarthen accent. She must have been talking since the moment her higher brain functions evaporated, for her voice box was ragged and worn.

‘Tinned passata, grated mozzarella… bread flour,’ she said. ‘Peppers all colours, anchovies.’

‘Sounds like pizza night,’ said Aurora. ‘Want some more Snickers? It was a sponsorship deal. I’ve got hundreds of them in the truck.’

‘Go on, then.’

She handed me a pack of five.

‘I guess I owe you my thanks again,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s partly my fault you’re still here. I should have done a follow-up.’

‘A Romanesco cauliflower,’ murmured Glitzy Tiara, ‘and some oolong tea.’

‘Doesn’t sound like she’ll be heading for the local JollyMart, does she?’ said Aurora. ‘Is that one anything to do with you?’

Aurora pointed to where we could see Birgitta’s feet emerging from under the Buick. They were moving in a helpless sort of manner.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she tried to bite me when I wasn’t looking.’

‘Does she do tricks?’

‘She eats dead people.’

‘Hardly a trick, is it?’ Aurora remarked, squatting down and looking under the car.

‘No,’ I conceded, ‘more like a survival instinct.’

‘Hang on,’ said Aurora, ‘I think this is Birgitta.’

‘Manderlay,’ I said without thinking. I hadn’t heard or read the name anywhere; I just knew it. It was also confusing but somehow not surprising that I knew she had served in the Ottoman, that her favourite colour was yellow ochre, she liked dogs, William Thackeray and walking in the Peak District, and her birthday was the first 9th after Springrise, same as me.

‘It’s a shame,’ said Aurora, staring at the shambling ruin that had once been Birgitta.

It was something considerably more than a shame.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said, ‘I’m sure Birgitta was Beta payscale. Someone must have sold her their Morphenox. Someone… who might not have needed it this Winter.’

She looked pointedly at me as she said it, and I hoped the heat in my cheeks didn’t show.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ she said, ‘I won’t tell a soul, although if you hadn’t sold it to her, she’d not be a deadhead.’

I really didn’t want or need this pointing out.

‘I didn’t sell her my Morphenox,’ I said, truthfully enough.

‘Oh? Well, it doesn’t matter one way or the other, really.’

She pulled out her Bambi and pointed it at Birgitta. Non-Tricksy nightwalkers were often summarily retired when found.

‘No!’ I said, a little too hastily. ‘I mean, I’ll take care of it. It’s something I should get used to.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Aurora, reholstering the Bambi.

‘Why are you here in the basement?’ I asked, eager to change the subject. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

She nodded towards the Vacants.

‘Gathering up some nightwalkers for HiberTech. Project Lazarus always needs Tricksy subjects, so I came to have a look. The breeder will probably get farmed, but Glitzy Tiara they’ll take. I’ll get them over there smartish, too, before Toccata intervenes. She has old-fashioned ideas about what we do in the facility, and just retires them all and then claims standard bounty by presenting the left thumb to Vermin Control.’

Aurora made to move off, but then stared at the large blue automobile for a moment.

‘Wait a moment. This is a blue Buick, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘The one that Watson and Moody were babbling about?’

‘And several others, too, yes.’

She paused, looked at the car, then at the remains of the nightwalkers, then at the rabbit’s-foot key ring I was still holding in my hand.

‘What’s your interest in this car, Worthing?’

I had to think. I knew almost no one in Sector Twelve. Birgitta regarded me as you might an ambulatory dinner, Jonesy and Fodder were loyal to Toccata and Lloyd was a porter, whose first priority was the continued smooth running of the Dormitorium. Laura had her head filled with myths and fables and Treacle was little more than a jailbird and a baby-peddler. I needed a friend. Aurora had saved my life – twice – and on that basis alone was about as good a friend as I was ever likely to get.

‘It’s complicated,’ I said with a sigh, realising that I’d have to tell Aurora things I could never tell anyone, ‘because although I’ve never set foot in this car park, I’ve seen the blue Buick and the rabbit’s-foot key ring before.’

She raised the eyebrow over her non-seeing eye.

‘In my… dreams.’

My shoulders slumped as a sweep of memories came back, but this time it was textures only – the leaves, the splays of lichen on the rocks, the granular appearance of the soil, the rust on the Buick bumpers, the crackled paint on the car body. I thought of Birgitta on the beach to clear it out, and with the gurgling laugh of the child with the beach ball, the flashback evaporated.

‘I so need a Dormeopath,’ I said in a useless sort of voice.

Aurora told me that back in her civvy days she used to be a Sleepy-D, and that she wasn’t doing anything for the next hour.

‘We could have a coffee at the Wincarnis,’ she said.

I glanced at my watch. Jonesy wasn’t expecting to meet me until midday.

‘Do we have time for me to retrieve Birgitta?’

‘All the time you want.’

I crawled underneath the car and looked into Birgitta’s violet eyes, hoping for some sort of recognition, but she simply stared at me blankly.

‘I love you, Charlie,’ she whispered.

‘I love you, too,’ I whispered back, my heart thumping. I knew I meant it, too – and not when I’d been her husband, but for myself, now. Yes, it was dumb, illogical and, admittedly, a little creepy, but who wouldn’t? She was smart, driven, talented, and, as a bonus, exceptionally pleasing to the eye. Everything, in fact, except being alive – and that she didn’t love me back, and couldn’t and wouldn’t, not ever.

‘Kiki needs the cylinder,’ she said, kind of mirroring Mrs Nesbit’s demand for the cylinder in my dream. I fed her two Snickers then helped her out from under the car. Once out, she stood there, rocking on the balls of her feet, eyes scanning randomly around the basement until she found me, then locked hard on to my eyes. For a brief moment I thought she was there – but then her eyes wandered off again, and the moment was gone.

‘So,’ I said once we’d attached dog leads to the nightwalkers and headed for the exit ramp, ‘the panga in a scabbard on your back. Is that actually practical?’

‘Not really,’ said Aurora, demonstrating how, if heavily dressed, it was almost impossible to reach in a hurry, ‘but it’s very in at the moment. Oh, word of advice: don’t use a panga on nightwalkers. It’s really messy.’

Glitzy Tiara mumbled about multi-pack toilet roll and the wisdom of ‘Buy One Get One Free’ deals while Eddie Tangiers attempted, while we walked, to bundle with each vehicle we passed and, once, a concrete building support. It might have been funny if it wasn’t kind of sad.

‘I’ve got some plasters and iodine in the truck,’ said Aurora, for Tangiers’ activities were not damage-free.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s gotta hurt.’