Free Falling Sideways by Tom Holt

somehow it isn’t really proper sleep in those tank things, if you know what I mean. Don’t bother making the bed,’ she added, ‘I’ll be asleep as soon as I hit the pillow.’ A moment later she was in the bedroom. ‘Well,’ she called out, ‘actually, if there’s a spare pillowslip handy—’
    Fortunately, David knew precisely where to find a clean pillowslip. It was still in its cellophane, pristine from the shop. He pulled off the little card. (‘For David, happy birthday, love, Mummy’), ripped off the wrapping at the third attempt and took it through into the bedroom. Philippa Levens was looking round with a curious expression on her face, like a child at the zoo peering into the chimpanzee cage. He changed the pillowslip.
    â€˜Thanks ever so much,’ she said, with a heart-melting you-can-go-away-now smile. ‘See you in the morning.’
    Lying awkwardly on the sofa (the headrest bit into his neck like a shire-horse’s collar) he stared up at the ceiling and tried to figure at least some of it out. It was like trying to make up a composite jigsaw out of leftover pieces from four entirely different sets, blindfold, wearing thick woolly mittens: some bits seemed to slot together, but no amount of ingenuity or imagination would get them to connect with anything else. Not that it seemed to matter any more; it was as if he’d walked barefoot across the desert and climbed the mountain on his knees to reach the cave of the Prophet, only to be told to go away and come back in half an hour after the Master had finished watching Neighbours . He grabbed the cushion and stabbed it a couple of times with his elbow, but that didn’t seem to make it any softer.
    There’s bound to be a perfectly simple explanation . . . He thought about that for a moment. Yes, there was one extremely simple explanation that would account for pretty well everything he’d seen, done or had done to him in the last twenty-four hours: at last, after years of teetering on the brink of delusional insanity, he’d finally taken that one small step. Accept that – and everything else slotted neatly into place. Try and work round it, and he faced the impossible task of cooking up a theory that explained Honest John and his serendipitous kinsmen, the light being on in the sitting room, Philippa Levens’s perfect command of modern idiomatic English (and she’d known his name, too – sort of). Couldn’t be done, even if you widened the parameters to include reincarnation and witchcraft. Trouble was, he didn’t feel particularly crazy. (Ah yes, pointed out his inner voice, but the really crazy ones never do. By the way, are you aware that you’ve started hearing voices in your head? Told you . . .)
    Of course, with all this strange and terrible stuff swirling round in his head like lint in a Dyson vacuum cleaner, there was absolutely no danger of him falling asleep—
    He opened his eyes and immediately assumed he was dreaming; but when a whole second passed and still the huge silver trombone hadn’t sidled up to him and eaten him, he opened his mind to other possibilities—
    â€˜I said, excuse me,’ Philippa Levens repeated, shaking him rather more vigorously by the shoulder. ‘Ah, you’re awake. Look, I’m dreadfully sorry to disturb you, but it’s gone a quarter to seven.’
    A quarter to seven. Six-forty-five a.m.
    As far as the first ten hours of each day were concerned, David was a convinced agnostic; he was prepared to accept that they might very well exist, in some form, in a dark and neglected corner of space-time, but he had so little personal experience of them that he didn’t feel justified in forming a coherent opinion on the matter. ‘Really?’ he groaned.
    â€œYes. So if you’re going to be waiting outside the Spar shop when it opens, don’t you think you ought