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. The façade had been rendered and then scored to emulate Portland stone, with a decorative doorway that represented yawning night-satyrs and snow-nymphs. It was impressive but shabby, and not assisted by the location: light industrial units had been built on the cheaper land this far from the centre of town, and the area looked run down and depressed.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Aurora, ‘a bit of a dump. When built, it enjoyed full sun and wasn’t obscured at all, but more modern dorms have been built in front of it over the years.’

Once we’d hung up our outclothes and swapped our snow boots for slippers, I looked around. Someone had made an attempt to reinvigorate the scruffy interior, but it hadn’t really worked. Mismatched carpet and threadbare modernist furniture only made the once-impressive lobby look cheap and neglected, and the numerous coats of clumsily-applied paint stole the subtlety from the plasterwork. I sniffed the air. As in the John Edward Jones back in Merthyr, there was the subtle yet unmistakable odour of slumber in the air – gummy sweat and the eggy whiff of hibernation mixed with semi-stale air breathed out past unbrushed teeth.

The porter was waiting to receive us. He was impeccably dressed, quite bald and wore small, gold-framed spectacles upon a face that seemed as close to a sphere as a human head is ever likely to get. I was suddenly put in mind of Bunsen Honeydew from the Muppets, and chuckled. He stared at me and narrowed his eyes.