Early Riser_ The new standalone - Jasper Fforde Page 0,51

about sixteen storeys – diminutive by modern standards – and the only sign of life was a single porter’s oil lamp outside the main entrance.

‘The Geraldus Cambrensis,’ said Aurora. ‘Built in 1236, it’s the oldest continuously-occupied Dormitorium in Wales. Worth a visit to the area on its own.’

We continued up the hill.

‘Do you get much mischief out here in the Winter?’ I asked.

‘Skirmishes with Villains are the most dramatic,’ said Jim Treacle. ‘Lucky Ned operates in the area but prefers quiet thievery rather than frontal assault – there’s a truce, apparently, brokered by Toccata. They’ve been doing some kidnapping, but not from the Sector, as per the terms of the truce.’

‘For ransom or domestic service?’ I asked, recalling Dai Powell’s experience.

‘Domestic service. Cooking and cleaning and housework and so forth. We also have pseudo-hibernatory sneak thieves,’ continued Treacle, ‘never less than two stowaways and Snuffling and Puffling is not unknown. There’s a serial roomsneaker who’s been dubbed “The Llanigon Puddler” and usually a motley collection of winsomniacs and nightwalkers, but other than that, not much.’

‘It’s the boredom and the weather that get to you here,’ added Aurora, ‘especially when the temperature plunges, the snowfalls are thicker than soup and the wind chucks up drifts the size of mammoths. Even in a Sno-Trac it can take an age to get around, and a blizzard can strand you for weeks. Been in a white-out? Scary stuff. You a brave person?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

We walked on another hundred yards in silence.

‘This is me,’ said Treacle as we reached a crossroads next to a large and slightly dilapidated billboard advertising ‘Ashbrook Garage – All makes of cars repaired, Land Rovers a speciality’. Treacle handed me his card. There wasn’t a phone number, just the time he’d be in the Wincarnis.

‘In case you need some ready cash. If you’re in a jam, call Treacle. I buy indulgences, too – Favours, Debts and so forth – so repayment doesn’t have to be like for like.’

I said that I’d be leaving almost straight away, but I’d bear that in mind.

He grinned and then headed towards a Dormitorium that was signposted Howell Harris.

‘Watch out for him,’ said Aurora once he was out of earshot. ‘A bondsman’s only motivating factor is cash. But he does take bribes, which makes him usefully compliant.’

We set off again, took a left at the advertising hoarding, walked past a petrol station, also closed and shuttered, and then took a right into what I think had once been the parkland of a stately home. We walked along a slight incline, past Summer residences, the shutters up. We were now on the other side of the valley from HiberTech, and although the facility was visible as a collection of sparkling lights, it was impossible to make out the shape in the darkness. As I was pondering this, an owl fell from the sky to the road beside us and twitched its wings feebly in the snow. Of the seven bird species on the Albion Peninsula that were hiburnal, owls weren’t one of them.

We walked further into the sleep district, where around us the Dormitoria rose out of the ground like a forest of giant toadstools. Each was larger than the Cambrensis, but all the traditional shape: circular, minimal windows, steep conical roof.

As we moved past the sunward towers and to the cheaper north-side buildings beyond, I noticed the quality of the Dormitoria become steadily worse. Six structures were no more than rubble to the third floor and two or three were merely empty concrete circles on the ground, the capped HotPot deep below still just active enough to keep the slab above from freezing. But just as I was beginning to think that Aurora would be putting me up in something no better than a Winterstock shed, she stopped and nodded towards a large Dormitorium that had loomed out of the snow-swirled gloom in front of us.

‘Welcome,’ she said, ‘to the Sarah Siddons.’

The Sarah Siddons

* * *

‘… The profession of nightwatchman from which the porter had evolved was by long tradition filled by eunuchs. Although no longer mandatory, the Worshipful Guild of Nightwatchmen clung doggedly to the practice, and still enjoyed popular support: sixteen weeks pacing corridors was a job that most thought better to entrust to someone who had unequivocally committed themselves to the calling …’

– Handbook of Winterology, 6th edition, Hodder & Stoughton

The Siddons was at least thirty storeys high and unusually broad, a sure sign of a once-desirable residence.