Early Riser

Something rotten in the winter

I took the paternoster to the ninth floor, unlocked the door to my apartment and chucked my jacket over the back of the sofa. I slid a cylinder at random onto the phonograph and pretty soon the restful melody of the Suite Bergamesque filled the air. I walked to the kitchen area and brewed myself a cup of tea, ate a bag of cashews and made a large peanut butter and jam sandwich. I then picked a packet of Jaffa cakes and three Club Oranges from the basket, placed the tuck in my pockets and quietly opened the door. Unsurprisingly, there was no one about but I removed my slippers anyway and padded in my socks around the corridor. I stopped outside Birgitta’s room, paused to check the coast was clear, then unlocked the door and slipped inside.

The room was pretty much as I had seen it that morning: full of paintings, but with anything organic either chewed or eaten: all the spare food, most of the cardboard and even the candles, soap and the rubber off a spatula. Before Lloyd had released Birgitta into the basement she had consumed what little protein she could find – even the curtains looked chewed.

I moved cautiously through to the bedroom. Birgitta was sprawled awkwardly on the bed, quite still. I checked her pulse and found she was merely in Torpor. Emotionally and intellectually brain dead she might be, but the stewardship part of her hypothalamus was functioning perfectly.

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.