Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Jasper Fforde 2018

The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781444763614

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For

Rhulen Marya Ivy Anna Fforde-Gorringe

Made in Australia but inspired by Wales

and who knows a thing or two about hibernation

The Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

The Nursey Crime Series

The Big Over Easy

The Fourth Bear

Shades of Grey

The Dragonslayer Series

(for young adult readers)

The Last Dragonslayer

The Song of the Quarkbeast

The Eye of Zoltar

Survivability has increased during hibernation since the introduction of Dormitoria, efficient weight-gain regimes and Morphenox, but superstition and fear remain. The Hib is about rest and renewal as much as about dodging the Winters worst, and we did our bit to make the oily tar of longsleep seem warm and friendly

from Seventeen Winters , by Winter Consul Lance Jones

Mrs Tiffen could play the bouzouki. Not well, and only one tune: Help Yourself by Tom Jones. She plucked the strings expertly but without emotion while staring blankly out of the train window at the ice and snow. She and I had not exchanged an intelligent word since we first met five hours before, and the reason was readily explained: Mrs Tiffen was dead, and had been for several years.

Its going to be a mild winter, said the grey-haired woman sitting opposite Mrs Tiffen and me as the train pulled out of Cardiff Central. Average low of only minus forty is my guess.

Almost balmy, I replied, and we both laughed, even though it wasnt funny, not really, not at all.

After some thought, I had concluded that the woman was most likely an actor, part of the extensive Winter Thespian Tradition. Audiences were small, but highly appreciative. Summer players had to make do with the diluted respect of the many whilst Winter Players commanded the adoration of the few.

The train stopped briefly at Queen Street, then rumbled slowly north. It could have gone faster, but Wales has a dB sound limit in operation eight days either side of the Winter.

Have you been overwintering long? I asked, by way of conversation.

Ive not seen a Summer for almost three decades, she said with a smile. I remember my first venue: Hartlepool, Winter of , the Don Hector Playhouse. We were performing King Lear as the support act to the Chuckle Brothers during their one and only Winter tour. Their gig was packed almost three hundred people. Never seen that happen before except with the Bonzo Dog Band or Val Doonican, but then they made the Winter season a kind of trademark, like Mott the Hoople and Richard Stilgoe in the old days and Paul Daniels and Take That today.

Few Summer acts chose to brave the cold the Winter could be a hard taskmaster. The 1974 Showaddywaddy Welsh tour was a good case in point: the band were first trapped by Hunger-crazed nightwalkers in their Aberystwyth hotel, then lost half their number to an ice storm. Over the next two months their manager was kidnapped and ransomed by Lucky Ned Farnesworth, three roadies lost their feet to frostbite, and their bassist was allegedly taken by Wintervolk. Aside from that, the surviving members thought it was one of their most successful tours ever.

Never realised how strongly the silence could drag upon ones psyche, said my companion, breaking into my thoughts, and how the solitude can become physically painful. I once went seven weeks without seeing a single soul, stranded in the Ledbury Playhouse during a protracted coldsnap in . Colder than the Gronks tit and for four weeks a blizzard. Even the Villains hunkered down, and nightwalkers froze on their feet. Come the melt the rigor kept them upright they didnt start falling until theyd thawed down to their shins. For those not with the calling, the absence of humanity can be debilitating. She paused for a moment before continuing. But yknow, in some strange way, I love it. Good for achieving a sense of clarity .

Long-time Winterers were well known for expressing their views in this manner a dark love of the bleakness, and how conducive the solitude was to deep philosophical thought. More often than not, those that extolled the Winter virtues so fulsomely did so right up until the moment they left an overly apologetic note, stripped themselves naked and walked outside into the sub-zero. It was called The Cold Way Out.

Lobster, said Mrs Tiffen without relevance to anything, still playing the bouzouki. Help Yourself, again, for perhaps the two hundredth time.

Returning from the depths of hibernation was never without risk. If the minimal synaptic tick-over that took care of nominal life functions was halted, youd suffer a neural collapse and be Dead in Sleep. If you ran out of fats to metabolise into usable sugars, youd be Dead in Sleep. If the temperature fell too far too quickly, youd be Dead in Sleep. Vermin predation, CO build-up, calcitic migration, pre-existing medical condition or a dozen or so other complications Dead in Sleep.

But not all neural collapses led to death. Some, like Mrs Tiffen who was on Morphenox it was always the ones on Morphenox awoke with just enough vestigial memory to walk and eat. And while most people saw nightwalkers as creepy brain-dead denizens of the Winter whose hobbies revolved around mumbling and cannibalism, we saw them as creatures who had returned from the dark abyss of hibernation with most of everything left behind. They were normally rounded up before everyone woke, usually to be redeployed and then parted out, but stragglers that slipped the net could sometimes be found. Billy DeFroid discovered one snagged on some barbed wire in the orchard behind St Granatas three weeks after Springrise. He reported it to the authorities but not before taking its wristwatch, something he was still wearing when he died.

Seven down, said the actor, having to raise her voice to be heard above Mrs Tiffens bouzouki, slow to pen a plumbers handbook?

Im not good with crosswords, I shouted back, then added: I hope the bouzouki playing isnt troubling you unduly?

The thespian smiled.

Not really, she said, at least it keeps numbskulls out of the carriage.

She was right. Today was Slumberdown Minus One, the last full day before the Winter officially began. The train was busy with Mothballers and overwinterers, trying to get to their relevant Dormitoria or work as status dictated. Several passengers had tried to join us in our compartment but after taking one look at Mrs Tiffens glassy nightwalker stare they hurried on past.