The Sleepers

I’m not supposed to be working the nightshift, but Llwyd missed his wife’s birthday last month, after the coraniaid incident, which meant we were all pulling doubles, and he had been in the dog house ever since. I agreed to cover his evening shift, so that he could creep home for Valentine’s Day with a cheap bunch of flowers and an even cheaper box of chocolates and try to win back some brownie points, even though Management (the type with the capital M) were very clear that shift swapping of any kind was not permitted. But the AFCU is always dead, no pun intended, on a midweek evening in February, so I didn’t anticipate any problems. The snow started just before dusk and caught us by surprise. No one can get in to relieve me, and I cannot get out, so it looks like I am pulling a double shift, perhaps even longer than that, if they cannot dig me out in the morning either.

I sigh long and deep as I stare out of the window at the snowdrifts piling up outside. It has already buried my old Ford Focus, waiting forlornly out in the car park alone, until it is nothing more than an amorphous white lump.

The Anthropomorphic Folklore Containment Unit is large and cold. Like all municipal buildings, it is underfunded and left largely to the neglect of time. The beige walls are peeling, the old radiators clunk and gurgle and the strip lighting fizzes and crackles like a bonfire on the ceiling every time I walk underneath it. The permanently sticky lino floor echoes my footsteps back at me as I make my rounds.

Normally I’m strictly a behind-the-desk kind of girl, but we were all trained for perimeter checks at induction. One of the Managers came in with a bright grin, checking my name off of his clipboard, Ah, you must be Ceridwen, wheeling in an old boxy telly, twenty years past its prime. The video had a distinct eighties vibe, with glaring colours and jangling pop music, incongruously cheerful as they explained exactly what you should do if one of the sleepers stored here awoke. Awakenings are rare, thankfully, but now, as I parade past the drawers which lock the sleepers in, I can’t help but think that they are not rare enough.

The light in the silent building bounces back from the dark windows outside, and I cannot help but feel stifled and watched as I proceed down the empty corridors, making sure everyone still slumbers.

You owe me one for this, Llywd. It was just like him to choose the one night of the year there is a freak weather storm to lumber me with his evening shift. I hope he is at home, cuddled up in the grateful arms of his wife and blessing all his lucky stars that he managed to escape this one.

The occupants in this corridor still dream, so I turn down the next one. It homes the tier two sleepers. They are anthropomorphised, but no one would ever mistake them for humans. The coraniaid, for instance, are squat little dwarfish people, buzzing with magic and mayhem. The old kings called them a plague. I suspect the current prime minister would label them a terrorist threat if the AFCU ever failed its mission badly enough to make him aware of them.

We keep the lights turned dim down this corridor, all noise hushed to a minimum, trying to reduce the risk of waking light sleepers. The strip lighting does not crackle into life at my approach, so I turn my torch on instead. Its halo of light bobs and weaves with every footstep, alighting on the scars of our all too recent altercations here. The dents in the paintwork, the scratches on the floor, that fractured window, against which the snow still falls, even now.

I linger by one of the large metal doors lining the walls, and my fingers brush the brass nameplate, dimpling over the word coraniaid etched into place. The door is looking distinctively more battered than it had done before the incident, with scuff and scrape marks denting the sturdy metal door. There are now deep scratches around the frame, a testament to the struggle we had faced to get those little folks back into their unit. I shiver, trying to quash the memories and the guilt. I am successful at neither.

The anthropomorphised ones are always the worst. Our friends over at the CFCU have to deal with the grim and Cŵn Annwn and Cerberus, of course, but they are, at the end of the day, just big dogs. They are only classified as tier five, scarcely even worth containing at all, we often joke. Management does not agree. All sleepers must be carefully monitored. All sleepers must be contained.

I have been thinking about transferring over to the Canine Folklore Containment Unit for a while now, even before the coraniaid had awoken and escaped. It doesn’t feel right, somehow, keeping these sentient creatures encapsulated in their perma-sleep. Management had explained with painstaking detail at our induction why the world was no longer a safe place for them to roam freely, how it was as much to protect the folklore creatures as it was to protect the mortals, that we captured and contained these myths. It had sounded plausible at the time, buffed up to a glossy shine by buzzwords and sound bites, carefully honed by years of repetition. But doubts, like damp, have a way of seeping insidiously across one’s thoughts, slowly at first, and then with a growing intensity. At least with the canines, the sleepers didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t know what was happening to them. The anthropomorphic ones knew. They fought, and struggled and wanted to be free.

They are too dangerous to be allowed out, and it’s not like we’re killing them…They’re not being hurt…but I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the niggling suggestion that, despite the government-stamped official-sheen of the operation, the uniforms, the acronyms, the pension pot and union meetings, we’re not exactly the good guys here.

My fingers brush against the brass plate again, and I pull away sharply, superstitiously afraid that the echoing resonance of my own doubts might rouse the creatures within from their slumbers again.

No one knows for sure what wakes the creatures. We only know that it is our job to put them back to sleep.

I hurry down the next corridor and back to the communal area for a well-earned tea break, even though there is no one left here to gossip with over the biscuit barrel. The blizzard is building up steam now. I stare out of the staff room window at the chunks of snow still pouring from the sky, piling up against the windows and doors with a malevolent enthusiasm. The health and safety poster chides me from the pinboard, and someone has written a reminder for Arawn’s birthday drinks on the whiteboard next to it. It seems strangely distant, like a message from another world, out of place here in the silent, waiting dark.

The thought scratched at the back of my mind, that this must be what the sleepers feel like, trapped and helpless in this wretched old ruin. The old chairs of the staff room are threadbare and morose, spitting out chunks of dented foam through their scratchy woollen covers and the urn on the counter has long since ceased its humming. I heat up my coffee again in the microwave, and the ping echoes around the empty walls. I cannot stay here. I should not be here. I ignore the whispered warnings at the back of my mind and cradle the mug in frozen fingers, trying futilely to stay warm. The night is not half over and I am already bored, so I leave the dismal comfort of the staff room and start to make another circuit of the corridors.

Outside of the communal area, I hesitate. Opposite the double doors which lead to the sleepers’ corridors is a narrow staircase I have never climbed, for it is strictly off-limits. I stare at it. Rebellion itches at me in the half gloom of the energy-saving light-bulbs. Only Management are allowed on the upper floors, and I am definitely not Management material, see my rule-breaking shift swaps for exhibit one, and my nebulous questioning of the AFCU’s morality as exhibit two. Neither polished up my resume for promotion. But I am the only one here at the moment, and the AFCU budget does not stretch to internal CCTV. It barely affords the worn-out grainy system at the gates, which scans in every car which arrives and leaves. The snow is the only reason I am alone here. Normally, we run shifts in packs of three of four, more at solstices, equinoxes and other holy days, when we are expecting trouble. I’m never going to get another chance.

I hesitate for one moment more and then feeling decidedly maverick, I edge my way up the winding flight of stairs. The motion-sensor lights fizz and hum with my movements as I arrive in the upper corridor, sending the narrow halls into dazzling brightness. For one paranoid moment, I am afraid that someone will see the tell-tale shimmer of the lights through the windows, but no one can possibly be out there now. They won’t be able to see through the blizzard, even if they are.

There is carpet on this corridor, in deference to the status of its occupants. It’s only those squares of rough carpet that come in cheap for self-assembly, but still…It mutes the sound of my footsteps as I creep disobediently along the row of shut doors.

The first corridor I find is empty offices, neat filing cabinets, ergonomically designed swivel chairs, water-marked cup-ringed desks, occasional sticky-notes or loose papers set around the desktops. The next row is conference rooms and a Management staff room (markedly better than the plebeian one downstairs). It is a little dull, truth be told, and, feeling decidedly disappointed, I am about to turn back to the safe and well-trod route I am supposed to stick to when another door at the end of the corridor catches my eye. Its brass plate is faded and dented, the tarnish dulling slightly, but the words are still legible. Tier One: Anthropoid sleepers.

I swallow. I have never known what was in tier one before. Rumours circle around about dragons and giant arachnids, but Llwyd has always been dismissive. He says creatures that dangerous wouldn’t consent to sleep. The Management would just put them down completely.

Anthropoid…Sleepers that could pass for humans. That cannot be so bad, can it? Not so very dangerous that it needs to be tier one? But then the truth hits me hard. They will hide out there amongst the mortals too easily. If they escape, we might never get them back.

I know I ought to walk away, but it is impossible to leave my curiosity unfed now. I turn the handle.

Behind the door is another staircase, as steep as an attic ladder and so narrow that I can barely squeeze my way through. Although I am not given to claustrophobia, as a rule, the air becomes tight and heavy in my chest and I find I am struggling to breathe. I crest the staircase into an equally thin corridor, lined with doors on both sides, all with brass plates. More sleepers? Up here? I feel a shudder running across my skin. Why would the Management hide them here?

There are no electric lights up here, no motion sensors to herald my coming as if even the slightest light will wake these anthropoid sleepers…whoever they are. I fumble for my torch and click it on. The beam swings wide and lands on the nearest brass plate, and I freeze. Llwyd Ap Cil Coid.

I remember teasing Llwyd about his preposterously pretentious name when we first became friends. He said he had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather and so on ad infinitum, until you reached his first recorded ancestor, who was named after some legendary welsh magician. We had laughed and dismissed the legend, but I cannot help but wonder now if it is true. Is Llwyd’s ancestor a sleeper, and, more to the point, does Llwyd know?

My thoughts dart wildly from unlikely theory to unlikely theory. Is Llwyd here under false pretences, trying to get his ancestor free? Perhaps it was no coincidence that the coraniaid awoke during Llwyd’s shift? A diversion? A practice?

I stumble backwards, my stolen knowledge heavy in my hands, and I drop the torch. As I bend to pick it up, the ray falls upon the next brass plate. Gwyn Ap Nudd. My stomach clenches. I know Gwyn. He’s the one who campaigned so hard for the staff room’s coffee machine, the one who always makes the lame puns, and laughs too loudly at his own jokes.

Are all AFCU officers descended from sleepers? Yet, even as the thought crescendos in my head, I know it is not true. I already know the truth, even before my flashlight falls upon the next brass plate. Ceridwen.

My fingers fumble for the handle before I even know what I am doing, and as they close around the brass doorknob, the memories start pouring back in, unlocked from the suppression they have been coated under. The Management awakening us, heroes and villains of old, human, or, at least, human-shaped. Picking through our memories like a strawberry patch, erasing and suppressing all the strands of who we once were, unravelling the tapestry of our lives until we were just so much tangled string. Coating us with new stories instead, false lives, implanted memories. We, they explain before they change us forever, will be uniquely suited to catching sleepers, as unknowing sleepers ourselves. Dressing us up in little uniforms and sending us out into the mortal world, closely monitored, capturing our own kind, working against our own people.

I try to pull my hand away, but it seems stuck to the handle, seared in place, the skin burning to the brass. The door falls inwards, dragging me with it, and the perma-sleep which always waits for us in these vaults, thick and heavy as the snowdrift outside, begins to coat me inexorably. The last thing I know is my torch falling to the corridor outside and blackness clawing at me, dragging me under once more as my eyes drift shut.

I sit, trying not to fidget in the uncomfortable plastic chairs they have perched around the interview table, preening smartly in my new uniform. It is second-hand, of course. Everything in the AFCU – I think the abbreviation delicately in my mind, the syllables still foreign with that waxy newness to them –  is second-hand, yet the uniform fits so well, it’s almost as if it were made for me. I sit up straight, though I have been waiting for my new supervisor to arrive for twenty minutes. I want to make a good impression.

The door opens and a Manager (with a capital M) comes in with a bright smile and an old telly. He checks the clipboard before him.

“Ah, you must be Ceridwen, the new girl.” He smiles brightly. “We’ve just got a short induction video for you to watch. It’s a little dated, I’m afraid, but it shouldn’t take long, and then we can give you the welcome tour.”