He stared at me for a moment, blinked twice then handed me an after-dinner mint.

‘What do you make of this?’

‘It tastes just like an After Eight mint,’ I said, suddenly realising how hungry I was.

‘To the casual observer, yes. But in reality it’s an after-dinner mint mint – to eat after you’ve eaten your after-dinner mint. I call it an After After Eight.’

‘Do people like after-dinner mints that much?’

Josh looked thoughtful for a moment, then said quite simply: ‘I do.’

‘Here,’ said Foulnap, handing me a coffee and a plate of shortbread, which I ate hungrily.

‘So, Josh,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘tell Worthing here what you told us.’

‘Not much to tell,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know the precise details, only that Project Lazarus aims to have everyone on Morphenox.’

‘That’s been a stated aim for over thirty years,’ I said.

‘This goes one step beyond. Morphenox-B will be marketed as a slightly cheaper alternative, but carries a higher-than-normal propensity for sleepers to become nightwalkers. Quite aside from the greatly increased revenue on drug sales, there will be a large resource ready to be redeployed and rented out as a hugely profitable and uncomplaining workforce. Nightwalkers will be collected directly from Dormitoria and taken straight to redeployment centres so there can be no chance the truth will come out.’

We were all silent for a few moments.

‘How do you know this?’ I asked.

‘Receptionists know everything,’ he said simply, ‘and d’you know, all of this is so fundamentally wrong. I have little expectation that I’ll live to see the Spring, but if I can help bring down Greedy Pharma, I’m so going to take it.’

He fell silent, then suddenly piped up: ‘Might this make me RealSleep’s Employee of the Week? I’ve been the EOTW for sixty-two weeks running, and it would be a shame to break my record.’

Foulnap said he would see to it personally, and we left Josh to his somewhat eclectic thought processes. We settled in another part of the room, while outside the wind blew around the museum’s rotunda with low moans, whistles and shrieks.

‘So,’ said Foulnap once we were seated, ‘I know you don’t have the cylinder on you, so we need to formulate a plan to retrieve it. But first: tell us your story from the very beginning.’

‘I’m not sure I know where to start.’

‘You’ll know the beginning easily enough; it’s when it all started going weird.’

Night in the museum 2

‘ . . . The invention of the Somnagraph by Thomas Edison would not have been possible without the Somnaécritaphone, invented thirty years previously by M. Gaston Tournesol. With Tournesol’s device, the content of a dream could be logged as a series of dots on a sheet of carbon-coated tin. Tournesol was working on a method to read the dots when he died in the harsh Winter of 1898  . . . ’