Early Riser

Charlie Webster

‘So before I even start getting to work on you,’ said Toccata, ‘whose details are about to come back via the fax?’

There didn’t seem much point in lying – they’d find out soon enough.

‘You’ll know him as Charles Webster.’

‘Webster the orderly at HiberTech?’

I nodded, and Jonesy and Toccata looked at one another. They were surprised, or perhaps shocked, or perhaps both. I could feel my eye start to puff up where Toccata had hit me earlier, but resisted the urge to touch it.

The fax machine began to hum and we waited without speaking until the message had fed out of the printer. Jonesy picked it up before I could see and showed it to Toccata.

‘How did those idiots at HiberTech Security miss this?’ said Toccata. ‘They let a known RealSleep agent right into the heart of their organisation.’

‘That’s actually quite amusing,’ said Jonesy.

‘Yes, it is,’ agreed Toccata, and they both stared at me for some time in silence.

‘Can you feel that empty pause, Wonky?’ said Toccata. ‘It’s where you tell us why you were investigating Charles Webster. How you knew he wasn’t who he said he was. Let’s hear it.’

It felt like I was in front of Mother Fallopia, being harangued about some dumb prank we’d played back at the Pool. I knew one thing, though: I couldn’t tell them I’d seen it all in a dream.

‘Because,’ I began, ‘Birgitta had said she was married to someone named Charlie and I was trying to figure out… figure out… think, think… probate.’

‘Probate?’

‘Yes, probate. Who to give all her paintings to when she died.’

Toccata stared at me, her one eye unblinking. It was a heavy stare like treacle, which seemed to pour heavily down my neck and pool in my armpits.

‘What are you, her executor or something?’

‘It’s a hobby,’ I said, ‘sort of like that TV programme where they look for relatives who have been left stuff. What’s it called?’

‘Heir Hunters?’

‘That’s the one. Heir Hunters.’

‘You’re lying again,’ said Toccata, ‘but I’ve no idea why. Birgitta married to Webster, you say?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, flushing a deep shade of crimson.

Jonesy had pulled her file as I had been stammering out my pathetic attempt to extricate myself from the jam.

‘If they were,’ she said, ‘it was off grid – which might point towards her being Campaign for Real Sleep, too. He must have been made of pretty stern stuff to not give her up, and Hooke must have gone seriously to town to reduce him to little more than a nightwalker.’

‘Hooke’s an animal,’ agreed Toccata. ‘No one I know has ever withstood a prolonged Dreamspace attack.’

I think I knew that, too, through the memory I shared with Webster: that Birgitta had been RealSleep too, and that, yes, Webster didn’t give her up and instead of legging it off-sector she had stayed, her cover burned, in a scuzzy out-of-the-way corner of nowhere, waiting for an instruction that might never come out of loyalty to the cause she loved. Hoping, perhaps, to make a difference if the need arose.

‘Okay, then,’ said Jonesy, turning to Toccata, ‘but what do we do?’

Toccata sucked her lip and tapped the fax that had just come in.

‘They’ll probably have cc-ed this to HiberTech Security,’ she said, ‘but unlike us, they don’t know Webster’s connection to Birgitta.’

‘We should check her room,’ said Jonesy, ‘in case there is anything incriminating to be found there.’

The words didn’t register at first. I had to ask her to say them again.

‘I said,’ she repeated in a testy fashion, ‘that we should check Birgitta’s room. It might throw up something of interest.’

It would throw up a lot more than just something of interest. It would throw up Birgitta, exactly where I’d left her: clean and tidy and fed and oh-so-obviously harboured.

‘Any objections, Wonky?’

I tried to look like the sort of person who wasn’t about to be professionally, legally and socially destroyed before the hour was out.

‘Me? None at all.’

‘I can’t make up my mind about you,’ said Toccata, staring at me intently, head on one side, her lone eye unblinking. ‘Most Novices we get are either burned-out ex-military with a thousand-yard stare, gung-ho idiots or saddos who might as well have Kill Me Now printed on their forehead. You’re not any of those. But I can’t figure out if you’re a clever person pretending to be thick, a thick person pretending to be clever, or just a chancer stumbling through the Winter without any sort of plan or thought at all.’

‘Can I vote for option “C”?’ I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

‘But one thing we do know,’ added Toccata, ignoring me, ‘is that we can’t let you out of our sight.’

‘Ah,’ I said; my only plan – running away when their backs were turned, but details not yet worked out – was now tattered and broken. ‘Can I ask a question?’

‘A question?’ said Toccata. ‘Of course – actually, no. Be quiet and do as you’re told or I’ll make good on the tongue-coming-out promise. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.’

In less than a minute I was driving Jonesy towards the Siddons in the falling snow, Toccata having elected to stay in the Consulate. The light was muted by the coming storm, and aside from the occasional street light that glowed a yellowy-orange, the sky had an angry blackness about it. I was fifteen minutes away from arrest, and no amount of talking would get me out of the charges that would undoubtedly follow.

‘After all those years we spent together,’ said Jonesy, finally finding something to say as we drove past the wrought-iron gates to the museum, ‘you might have taken me into your confidence. Just shows that even when you pretend to think you know someone, you actually don’t pretend to know them at all.’

‘Can we have a break on the whole invented histories deal?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely not. For one thing the only way through the Winter is continuity, and for the other, I don’t back out of a long and happy make-believe union just when things start getting rocky.’

A squall hit the Sno-Trac and the vehicle seemed to shake down to its smallest rivets. I instinctively throttled back to a slow crawl, and increased the speed of the wipers.

‘This is nasty,’ I said, attempting to distract myself from Birgitta’s impending discovery, ‘a blizzard.’

‘This isn’t a blizzard,’ she replied, ‘this is just crystallised water with a smattering of wind. When you open the door and know that going out is certain death, that’s a blizzard.’

We continued on, the weather steadily worsening until by the time we had pulled up outside the Siddons, the visibility was down to less than ten yards.

‘Are we in a blizzard now?’

‘Nope,’ said Jonesy, ‘but we take precautions as if we were. You’re leading.’

I broke a light-stick, clipped it to my coat, then moved to the back of the Sno-Trac and grasped one end of a steel cable that fed off a drum mounted near the rear exit and attached it to the loop on my belt. I pulled down my goggles and opened the door, allowing the wind and weather to blow inside. I paused and climbed out but it wasn’t a time to dally; I let go of the vehicle and stepped out into the blinding void.

I’d practised this many times in a fog chamber – there was one the size of two football pitches at the Academy – but doing it for real was quite different: the noise and wind-blown snow added a raucous hostility that I hadn’t expected, and despite the lack of visibility in a fog chamber, it doesn’t have the disorientating effect of the snow constantly moving about you. I held my hand out in front of me and walked in the direction in which I hoped the Siddons would lie.

It took thirty-two-and-a-half paces to reach one of the statues that adorned the entrance. I was close enough to see it was a sleep-nymph, and I moved to the right until I found the door, then transferred the cable to the hefty eyelet bolted to the masonry. I tugged the cable twice, waited for Jonesy to emerge from the swirling emptiness, and once we were inside I shut the front door against the blizzard. The noise and wind ceased abruptly and the snowflakes, released from their wind-borne activity, floated gently to the floor.

Porter Lloyd and two cadaverous-looking winsomniacs were holding blankets and mugs of hot chocolate when we opened the inner door. Only they weren’t waiting for us.

‘Oh,’ said Lloyd, ‘Worthing. Thanks for the custom. Most grateful.’

‘Custom?’

He pointed to the door of the Winterlounge, where I could see several winsomniacs warming themselves around the coal fire. Shamanic Bob was amongst them and waved a weak greeting. They must have left almost the moment I told them about the blue Buick dream.

‘How many?’

‘Eight have checked in out of the thirty-two who left the Wincarnis,’ replied Lloyd, ‘and the way things are looking, I won’t expect many more. That was quite ruthless, if you don’t mind me saying, sir. Didn’t expect it of you.’

It was a surprise to me, too.

‘I never expected them to move across in this.’

Jonesy, however, was not in a stop-and-chat sort of mood.

‘Consulate business, Mr Lloyd. We’ll see ourselves up.’

She headed off towards the paternoster lift. I thought of waiting in the lobby, but other than stealing her Sno-Trac and running off into the blizzard – again, details not yet fully worked out – I couldn’t see any plan of action. Perhaps I could brazen it out.

‘You’re a dark horse,’ said Jonesy as the lift took us slowly upwards, the pipes gurgling ominously. ‘You’ve just ethically thinned twenty-four winsomniacs. Happy with yourself?’

‘No, not really – but I thought everyone hated them?’

‘We do,’ she said, ‘or we say we do. But a life’s a life, and all this bunch want to do is dream away their years in relative happiness. It’s not criminal, it’s a mental sleep issue. How did you get them to move?’

‘I told Shamanic Bob about the Active Control blue Buick dream washing around the Siddons.’

She turned and stared at me, brows knitted.

‘Who said the Buick dream was Active Control?’

‘Dunno,’ I said, suddenly realising I’d said too much, ‘I just heard.’

She stared at me some more, and her manner seemed to change.

‘I don’t know whether you’re lying or not, Wonky. But if there’s any Active Control dreaming going on in the Siddons, that changes everything.’

‘It does?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it does. Active Control can only be initiated by HiberTech using a Somnagraph, and the only reason they’d want to undertake dream control experiments in the Siddons is… well, nothing good.’

We stepped off the paternoster at the ninth and walked along the corridor, the only illumination the glimmer that seeped down the light wells, while outside the storm heaved and sighed around the building.

Jonesy unlocked the door to Birgitta’s apartment and stepped inside, sweeping her flashlight around the room. I remained outside, heavy with nausea. I’d reconciled myself to Birgitta’s discovery by now, and my thumping heart had been replaced by a hot sense of utter dejection.

Jonesy popped her head back outside the door.

‘Come and help me search,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing unusual in here that I can see.’

‘There isn’t?’ I asked, quickly adding, in a less surprised voice: ‘I mean, there isn’t?’

‘No. Why, what were you expecting me to find?’

‘Nothing,’ I replied, wondering if Birgitta had escaped, been taken by Lloyd or – outside chance – had simply been a hallucination, part of the narcosis. Intrigued, I followed her into Birgitta’s apartment.

‘Oh, hang on a mo,’ said Jonesy, ‘I lied when I said there was nothing unusual in here. There’s Birgitta. And she’s alive, missing a thumb. Care to explain?’

There was a sudden, nasty, hollow silence. Birgitta was sitting on the bed, staring blankly around, her food finished, several sketches lying on the bed. I couldn’t see what they were at this distance. Perhaps more of my – our – dream. Don’t know. Didn’t matter. Not any more.

‘Good Lord,’ I said with inexpertly wrought mock-surprise. ‘That’s… incredible. She must have – I don’t know – escaped from the pit behind the Siddons.’

‘Oh, please,’ said Jonesy. ‘Can’t you see the game’s up? You’re making things worse, if that’s possible – which it isn’t.’

‘It happened once down at the Pool,’ I said, still in some sort of continuous denial feedback loop. ‘Sister Oesterious. They didn’t hit her hard enough. Covered in fish heads when she came back, she was – and the same with Carmen Miranda, of course.’

It was an off-the-cuff remark as I didn’t have a strategy, I was just flanneling wildly in the vague hope that providence would deliver me from my current dilemma.

Which it kind of did.

‘Carmen Miranda?’ said Jonesy, suddenly looking concerned.

‘Yes,’ I said, seizing on the initiative. ‘You said you’d thumped her, but I saw her wandering down the road. She had a fruit hat on and a gown and everything.’

‘Always a star,’ mused Jonesy, ‘when did you see her?’

‘This morning.’

‘Well,’ she said, looking out of the window, where there was little to see but a wall of whirling snowflakes, ‘perhaps her homing instincts will have kicked in. Now: I want your badge and your Bambi.’

‘Look,’ I said, handing them over, ‘if we’re talking due process: yes, I thought I’d retired Birgitta, but if Miranda’s still alive then this sort of thing happens. Besides, what evidence do you have that I am anything but an innocent party in all this?’

‘Let me see,’ said Jonesy. ‘First, you’re an exceptionally bad liar. I mean exceptionally. Transparent, almost. Second, you— no, we’ll skip reasons two to seven, because reason eight is quite enough all on its own: Birgitta drew this of you.’

She held up one of Birgitta’s sketches. It was me, with her, here in the bathroom of her apartment. She had drawn it from memory, but it might easily have been from life. The picture was of me washing her hair while she sat naked in the tub, just before I’d given up her long black tresses as a lost cause and cut them off. In the picture, Birgitta didn’t look vacant, she looked frustrated. Perhaps that’s what her inner emotion was right now.

I felt my eyes well up as the true and utter uselessness of the position became clear, and how poorly I had fared in my efforts to keep her safe. I’d protected her for the grand total of nineteen hours and seventeen minutes.

Not even a single day.

‘Can you explain this?’ said Jonesy, showing me the sketch again.

‘It’s not what it looks like.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘You know what it looks like to me?’ she said. ‘It looks like someone tending to someone else’s needs. Someone who can’t look after themselves. It looks a lot like empathy, Wonky. What say you?’

‘What?’

‘Empathy. Big on empathy, are you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised by her understanding, ‘that’s exactly what it is. Empathy.’

‘I love you, Charlie,’ said Birgitta.

‘She’s not dead,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I couldn’t kill her because she’s still in there. It’s not a neural collapse brought on by Morphenox – which, yes, I did supply her with – it’s a state of displaced consciousness. She can process memories.’

‘I can see that,’ said Jonesy, staring at the sketches, ‘and it’s not the first I’ve seen.’

‘I love you, Charlie.’

‘I have to answer or she repeats herself,’ I said. ‘I love you, Birgitta.’

Birgitta relaxed, and began to sketch again. Jonesy looked at me, then at Birgitta.

‘How long were you thinking of keeping her?’

I shrugged.

‘I don’t know. Until Springrise, I guess. I didn’t really have a plan, more an objective. Events move fast in the Winter,’ I added, remembering what Logan had told me, ‘and you need flexibility to ensure the plan doesn’t get in the way of the goal. Am I under arrest?’

‘You are,’ she said, ‘in order to remain under our protection.’

‘It’s that important?’

‘It’s crucial. I don’t know of a single Tricksy nightwalker who can do what Birgitta can do. The Notable Goodnight will be especially interested.’

‘So that’s why we’re taking her to HiberTech?’

‘No, that’s why we’re not taking her to HiberTech.’

‘You’re going to thump her?’

‘No, we don’t do that.’

‘What about your sixty-three nightwalker retirements? What about Glitzy Tiara and Eddie Tangiers?’

‘Smoke and mirrors, Wonk. Nothing is what it seems in the Douzey. Does Lloyd know about Baggy? Put it this way: has he tried to blackmail you?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll assume not. Anyone else know about her?’

I shook my head.

‘We keep it that way. Feed her these so she stays quiet, and say and do nothing while I have a look around.’

She handed me two Tunnock’s Tea Cakes from her jacket pocket and I fed Birgitta while Jonesy searched the room. She took a half-hour to do so, and was beyond thorough. If Birgitta was smart, she wouldn’t have left any evidence connecting her to Webster. She was smart, but like Charles, she couldn’t bring herself to dispose of the only picture of them together. Jonesy found it inside the hem of a curtain, the stitching unpicked and replaced by Velcro.

‘Bingo,’ she said, and showed it to me. It was the Polaroid, the same as the one from my dream, the one the photographer had taken all those years ago, the one that Birgitta had admonished Charles for keeping, the one she’d said she’d destroy. I stared at the picture stupidly, trying once again to reconcile the real with the imagined.

‘It’s Rhosilli beach on the Gower,’ I said, swallowing down a sense of rising confusion. ‘The picture was taken when Birgitta and Charles spent a weekend together, cocooned in the flat above the garage at her mother’s in Oxwich. They fed heartily upon the love they felt for one another, and on the way home they stopped for cockles and laver bread at Mumbles Pier, the wireless playing “Groove Me” as a lifeboat was retrieved. They said they loved one another, and they meant it: A tightening in the chest; a sense of euphoric oneness.’

‘How can you know all that?’ asked Jonesy.

I held my head as the frustration welled up inside me.

‘I don’t know how I know it,’ I said, ‘don’t know if I dreamt the Polaroid, or if I’m placing it in my memory now, or… dreaming about something I couldn’t know about. Look over there.’

I pointed to Birgitta’s painting on the wall, the one of the beach in the Gower, with the wreck, and the orange-and-red parasol of spectacular size and splendour, below which were the two figures.

‘I dreamt I was there as Charles, with Birgitta, just as you see in that painting. But then details in the dream come true, and I can’t tell if I can see stuff that happened to other people or if I’m patching holes in my memories with whatever is to hand.’

I could feel myself shaking and wanted all this to be over – in whatever fashion it could. Roscoe Smalls had taken the Cold Way Out when the blue Buick came calling. He hadn’t been supremely brave or a miserable coward. He’d just wanted out of it, in any way he could.

She asked me to outline the dreams, which I did as quickly as I could.

‘So let me get this straight,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘You met Don Hector in the blue Buick dream?’

‘I was him in the blue Buick. He had a rattle in his chest, his vision felt faded, and there was a sense of a numbness down his left-hand side. He spoke French more naturally than he spoke English, and he found solace in a place he used to go with the Buick: an oak tree with the trunk piled high with stones. When they came to take him he told them they’d get nothing even if they tried to get into his dreams. He’d relinquish only the blue Buick moment and said he’d leave a night terror – hundreds of disembodied hands – to put anyone off trying to read him.’

‘Nasty. Anything else?’

‘Yes – Don Hector gave the cylinder to Webster.’

‘The cylinder? Webster was given the cylinder?’

I nodded.

‘And you know this because—?’

‘Of my dream, yes.’

‘Daughter of a dog,’ she said, leaning against the door frame, ‘we thought the Buick was just another Sub-beta recurring night terror. Not actually active. And you said that there was a Mrs Nesbit dream-avatar with The Notable Goodnight’s voice demanding you find the cylinder?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what does it mean?’

‘It means,’ she murmured, ‘they don’t yet have it.’

She looked at me and thought for a second or two. ‘What room you in?’

I pointed to the other side of the Dormitorium. ‘901.’

‘Who lives next door to you?’

‘On one side, Moody – until he got thumped. The other side is unused.’

‘It won’t be. There’ll be a large box, a flight case or a—’

‘—steamer trunk?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘a steamer trunk would do it. This is what we’re doing: you’re telling no one what you just told me, no one except Toccata. Understand?’

‘I don’t understand at all, but yes, I agree.’

‘Good.’

She pocketed the Polaroid of Birgitta and Charles, then picked up the phone, speed-dialled the Consulate and asked to be put through to the Chief.

‘It’s Jonesy,’ she said after a pause. ‘The Buick dream was active, Wonky has been third-person Don Hector and get this: Webster was given the cylinder – and the nasties over at HiberTech don’t have it yet.’

She listened for a moment, then stared at me.

‘Because Wonky dreamt it – and much else besides.’

There was a pause. Jonesy said we’d be back in half an hour, put the phone down and then turned to me with some urgency.

‘We’re leaving now.’

‘And Birgitta?’

‘I know a safe place she can go; we’ll drop her off on the way. Congratulations: you’ve just been promoted from liability to asset.’

‘Because I harboured Birgitta?’

‘Because you’re dreaming the right dream. Because you’ve been in the Dreamspace, because Aurora thinks she owns you, because you’re going to continue to make her think that. But you’re not, because you’re on our side now.’

‘Which side is that?’

‘The right side. Once we get back to the office, we’ll tell you everything.’

‘You’ll tell me why I’ve been having these dreams?’

‘Everything.’