Early Riser

Fodder

I went and found Jonesy as soon as we got back.

‘Let me guess,’ she said, ‘Aurora wasn’t anywhere to be found?’

‘Not hard to figure. Can I ask you something?’

‘Shoot.’

I took Charles Webster’s missing persons flier from my back pocket and showed it to her.

‘So?’

‘He’s up at HiberTech, redeployed as one of their golf-cart drivers.’

‘And?’

‘He’s a missing person, yet turns up at HiberTech?’

She looked at me, then at the flier, then led me towards the records office, which was situated at the far end of the Consulate.

‘These are the Sector Twelve files,’ she said as we walked in. ‘Every person who ever arrived, every person who ever left. The ones who died, the ones who married, the ones who had children. Hibernation records, work records, special skills register, schools records, fertility reports, genetic screening, Dormitoria, car, dental and food records. The lot. Hang on a tick.’

She rummaged for a moment in a large and very battered grey filing cabinet, and then handed me Webster’s file. His address was the Cambrensis, room 106, his job HiberTech ‘Medical Orderly Grade II’. There was a copy of his birth certificate, several references from the Thomas Carlyle Dormitorium in Sector Fifty-eight North, a General Skills certificate pass confirmation and letters of recommendation from his previous employments as a bus driver, aquarium maintenance engineer and insurance salesman. There was also a ‘Partial Death’ certificate – HiberTech had logged him as having been delivered to their Sleep Sciences Division twelve weeks after he went missing.

‘He was signed across to The Notable Goodnight by Agent Hooke,’ I said, reading a copy of the chain-of-possession document. ‘Is that unusual?’

‘Not really,’ said Jonesy.

There was nothing about being married to Birgitta, but then I didn’t really expect there to be. Beyond my dream, the only evidence they might be the same person was that they both vanished, and could have the same first name. That was it. I sighed. Webster was just a guy I’d picked to clothe the empty face in my dream, nothing more, nothing less. He might not even have said ‘Gower’ at all – just a mumble, an artefact briefly bubbling to the surface.

‘Happy?’ said Jonesy.

‘It’s just my mild narcosis,’ I said, ‘overactive imagination. Oh, and I think you should probably know if you’re planning to bundle with Fodder: when we Winter embraced, he kissed me very gently on the ear.’

‘Yeah, I heard he does that.’

I yawned, and then apologised.

‘You’re looking tired,’ said Jonesy. ‘It’s best to take it easy the first couple of days. Come with me.’

I followed her out of records and into the office, where we found Fodder balancing a hunting knife on the tip of his finger.

‘Hey, Fod,’ said Jonesy, ‘will you show Wonky around town before nightfall? You both live at the Siddons, so it makes sense to end up there.’

‘Delighted,’ said Fodder.

‘You may want to keep an eye out for intruders,’ added Treacle, who was at the front desk. ‘We’ve had a couple of reports of a possible incursion of people or creatures unknown at the far end of town.’

I felt the cold wind slice into my exposed skin as we stepped outside. It had shifted around to the north and already flurries of snow were portending a heavier fall some time within the next forty-eight hours. Fodder, instead of taking one of the Sno-Tracs parked outside, strode off on foot.

‘No transport?’ I asked, following close behind.

‘Where practical I walk,’ he replied. ‘Once cocooned in a Sno-Trac, the senses are numbed. Out on the fringes you need a feel for the air, the wind, the environs. The Three Vs can strike at a moment’s notice.’

‘The Three Vs?’

‘Villains, Vacants and Volk. Hear that?’

We stopped. I listened intently but all I could hear was the faint whisper of ice crystals blowing across the drifts.

‘No.’

‘Exactly. There’s nothing there. But one day there will be – and you want to sense it or them before you can see them – or they can see you.’

‘I understand,’ I said, ‘you think there are Volk?’

‘I’ve seen some weird stuff,’ he said, ‘but nothing that makes me think the Gronk exists – which is a shame. I’d like Laura to win her bet.’

We trudged on, the snow swirling around us, the visibility barely thirty feet, the daylight dull, soft and directionless. Fodder put on a knitted hat shaped like a penguin, which looked faintly ridiculous. He might or might not have known this, but I’m firmly convinced no one in their right mind would point it out.

‘Treacle said something about an intruder report.’

‘We get them from time to time, but if it had been a credible sighting Jonesy would have made more of a hoo-hah. Megafauna are too smart to be out, but Winter nomads have been known to move through. We leave them be, and even scavengers are not particularly disliked, so long as they don’t enter buildings. Villains are something else entirely: no rules outside their own society and a strange mix of violent ruthlessness, decorum and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. There’s been an uneasy truce these past three years with Lucky Ned.’

‘What were the terms?’

‘Exclusion zones. We don’t go on to their patch if they don’t come on ours. It means admitting that there are areas that are no-go in Mid-Wales, but Toccata can work with that, she says.’

Fodder lapsed into silence and we joined the long straight road that led towards the gardens and the museum, the only sound the breath of our exertions and our feet as we tramped through the snow. I had a thought.

‘You have the right to Morphenox but don’t use it, do you?’

‘Is it that obvious that I don’t?’

‘You live in the Siddons,’ I said, ‘a Sub-beta payscale Kipshop – but you’re a Consul. I put two and two together.’

‘It’s an honest place to sleep. The soft rasp of natural snoring is comforting, like rain on a tin roof. Morphenox dulls the subconscious,’ he added, ‘and steals your dreams. I like to dream.’

‘And do you?’

‘Every night, always the same. The Ottomans used to hit us with their Gigawatt Highrollers. I’m in the forward OP in a six-by-six Bedford softside, reporting on incoming size and velocity. There’s no moisture so the pulse rings are visible only as faint ripples in the hot air, a couple of hundred yards wide. I report on a stonker that’s coming our way but it’s faster and tighter than the rest, and by a thousand yards out it starts to cone. By the time it reaches me the torus has a spin so tight that implosive collapse is inevitable. No time to run – pointless anyway – and then my eardrums burst and I’m waking in the sand, alone, with the sun already overhead and the Bedford upside down two hundred yards away. I’ve lost my foot and most of my clothes and part of my skin is blasted off. Worst of all, I can feel the moisture leaching out of my body. My eyes crisp over, my tongue feels like leather, my skin blisters and then cracks, like mud on a dry lake bed.’

‘You want to dream that?’

‘It stops me dreaming about the really unpleasant stuff. Nightmares are catharsis; they purge the mind to make the day bearable.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not wanting to think what his other dreams might be. ‘Do you dream of anything else? Like… blue Buicks, for instance?’

He turned to look at me with a quizzical expression.

‘We looked into what Moody and the others claimed,’ said Fodder. ‘Personally, I’ve dreamt nothing, but then I live on the eighteenth floor; it’s the ninth floor of the Siddons that’s full of bad dreaming.’

He was right, come to think of it: everyone who had dreamed of the blue Buick seemed to have come from the ninth.

We continued on the journey, Fodder pointing out places of interest. Which Dormitorium was which, why I should avoid the porter at the Captain Mayberry, where the electrical sub-station, phone exchanges and cold refuge points were situated. He imparted the knowledge without fanfare, and occasionally punctuated the observations with local lore: a serial sneak thief here, an incident with Lucky Ned’s gang there – and shockingly, the harbouring undertaken by Olaf Yawnersson, who kept two Tricksy nightwalkers alive for almost three years.

‘He did the honourable thing when we discovered them hidden in his basement,’ said Fodder. ‘But despite considerable investigation he left no evidence of his depraved acts. The Cold Way Out was probably the best thing for him.’

But most of all, Fodder told me to memorise the town precisely. ‘Your aim,’ he said, ‘is to know Sector Twelve like the swirls on your own wintercoat, and be able to navigate the streets when a combination of blizzard, gale-strength winds and darkness reduces visibility to zero – without the fixed line.’

‘Without?’

‘It’s the first thing Villains would cut. Rely on the line, and you’ll be utterly lost without it.’

As if to demonstrate the wisdom of his statement, there was a sudden squall that reduced visibility to less than ten feet. I instinctively moved closer to Fodder, who, instead of clipping on to the line as Winter Best Practice dictated, simply extended his baton and used that to feel his way. He put out a hand for me to hold and I did so, his massive hand both warm and surprisingly soft.

To navigate through the town we used the gas lamps, each one a useful beacon to focus upon before pushing on to the next. They were burning even though it was still day, the light-valves fooled by the heavy overcast. There was a gas lamp by the ornate iron gates outside the museum, and the small tongue of flame flickered as gasps of cold air found their way into the lamp-head.

‘It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Fodder, pausing briefly to stare admiringly at the wavering light, the railings, the stonework and statue draped in snow.

‘Sort of desolate,’ I said, ‘in a magnificent kind of way.’

‘A beauty that both preserves and kills,’ he murmured thoughtfully, then pointed towards the museum, which we could see only as a grey shape in the snowstorm.

‘Danny Pockets is in there,’ said Fodder. ‘His specific job is to defend the building against intruders. Dull, but essential.’

‘Communal Food Store?’

‘Bingo. Winter pantry is under considerable strain due to the winsomniacs, and any theft would spell disaster. Let’s go and have a look.’