Free Holloway Falls by Neil Cross Page A

smirking at girls on Bondi beach.
    But Derek Bliss was not dead. And Derek Bliss was not in Australia.
    Derek Bliss was back to get him.
    His mind was blank. He sat there, clicking the file open, clicking it closed.
    Eventually, he hit REPLY.
    derek , he tapped, is that you?
    He listened to the squeal and pop of the modem.
    But although he checked his inbox every few minutes for several hours, there was no further communication.

7
    On the morning of the massacre in America, Shepherd confessed his precognitive nature to Lenny.
    In the early light, with the news reports still coming in, Lenny didn’t laugh. He’d pulled on a pair of tracksuit trousers, and padded blearily about the kitchen, making tea. His torso was naked and it was cold. From the laundry basket under the stairs he removed a dirty bath towel and wrapped himself in it like a cloak. He hugged his knees to his chest. His naked feet were pallid and hairy. He was gaunt and unshaved, and his eyes were circled deep blue, as if bruised. His hair stuck up and out in all directions.
    Like Dr Scobie before him, he had to accept the facts. Something terrible had happened in America.
    Shepherd obviously wasn’t a deliberate fraud. Lenny had seen the state he was in. It had been a pretty Linda Blair moment.
    But was Shepherd an unknowing charlatan? Lenny had studied this stuff. Most apparently psychic phenomena, he said, were connected to the normal function of human memory. Memory contextualized experience, framing it within a person’s understanding and expectation. Psychics tended to play down errors in their predictions and greatly to amplify small accuracies. They probably didn’t even know they were doing it. You remember the times you just missed the bus, but not the times you just caught it. Chronic gamblers remembered the long-odds winner and forgot the many sure-fire failures. That was just the way the mind worked. Stuff happened: the mind filled in the gaps and inconsistencies. People who believed in ghosts saw ghosts. The rest saw shadow and reflection.
    He set his feet on the cold, grubby tiled floor and began to roll a cigarette. He looked like a refugee.
    When we lifted the receiver before the phone rang, he said, it was because our responsive, animal brain acted more quickly to a stimulus than our conscious mind. We only became aware of hearing the phone after we’d picked it up. But it did ring first, and at some level we did hear it. Dream states, migraine or epilepsy could lead to visionary experience. The presence of God (or the Devil) could be invoked in a laboratory with a couple of grand’s worth of electrical equipment.
    Just because you were really seeing weird stuff, it didn’t mean you were seeing weird stuff that was real.
    Coincidence was another possibility. Statistical laws could be wildly counter-intuitive. What looked extremely unlikely might in fact be mathematical certainty. It was staggeringly improbable that a randomly selected individual would win the Lottery that week—but it was a practical certainty that somebody would win it. All Shepherd remembered was waking and saying: ‘Something terrible has happened in America.’ At any given time, there were millions—maybe billions—of people asleep all over the world. Enough bad things happened in America for somebody’s dream, somewhere, to correspond to one occurrence of it—just as somebody had to be dreaming of Diana the night her car slammed into a tunnel wall like a meteorite. (Lenny put the unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth and clapped his hands, to illustrate the impact.) Perhaps Shepherd had merely framed a conventional nightmare within his expectation of precognition.
    Or perhaps Shepherd was a precognitive psychic.
    Lenny wanted to know why that prospect should be discounted. Because there was no such thing? Who was to say?
    Unrepeatability didn’t equal impossibility. And absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.
    Solidity was a functional