As if to punctuate his statement, the most healthily bloated of the sleep-ready residents yawned. When you get to that size and the ambient cools to fifteen degrees Celsius or below, it takes a Herculean effort to stave off the slumber.

The paternoster lift started up as soon as we stepped in and slowly hauled us upwards with a gurgling of water from the auto-ballast. There were no doors on the elevator and the view of the corridors as we drifted upwards was dull, but uniform. Offerings to Morpheus were at the foot of most doors, along with fair dreaming candles freshly lit. There were a lot of them, too – the corridors were alive with hundreds of little lights, flickering in the faint breeze that occasionally wafted through the building.

There was nothing like this in the Melody Black back in Cardiff, but that was Alpha payscale and Morphenox – without pharmaceutical means to mitigate the fat-burning ferocity of the Dreamstate, the residents of the Siddons had retained their superstitious beliefs. Those of us on Morphenox no longer needed a deity to enter our dreams and watch over us, for the drug had rendered the god redundant. Veneration had moved from the spiritual to the pharmaceutical – and if what Lucy had suggested was true, all of this might be gone by next Winter.

‘Tell me,’ I said as Lloyd and I passed the third floor at a speed that was probably only marginally faster than taking the stairs, ‘do the yawners in the Winterlounge really think they’re going to catch the viral dream?’

‘They do – and I kind of agree with them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve dreamt scraps of the dream too. Hands, an oak tree, scratched boulders, the blue Buick. But this is what’s weird: when I compared my dream with Moody and Smalls, there were other similarities, details we’d never discussed that were the same. Something is going on.’

‘Why didn’t you go nuts the way of Moody, Roscoe and Suzy?’ I asked. ‘Any ideas?’

‘No idea at all. But as I say, I only got scraps. I have this feeling that I dream more than I remember, and that I never left the rocks. If you do dream, you’d be advised to do the same.’

‘But I don’t dream.’

‘I know that, but if you do. This is our floor.’

We stepped off the lift, which carried on for a couple of seconds before the delicate balance system sensed it was no longer under load, and stopped.

‘Okay, then,’ he said, clapping his hands together, ‘in an emergency I’m in 801, below you, one floor down. Oh, and since HiberTech are footing the bill, will you make good use of room service?’

I said I would. He wished me goodnight and stepped onto the ‘down’ side of the paternoster, which gurgled for a moment, then sank with him out of sight.