Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

By relating various incidents and circumstances in which my gift brought me specific information, I may have given the impression that it made itself evident only sporadically, whenever I concentrated on a particular person or object, or that it worked in reaction to events in my own life. But this was not the case. In fact, the crucial problem of my youth was that the psychic part of my mind was operating almost constantly, and I could not control it.

Craine skipped down a ways.

But at school I could not withdraw, and my emotional troubles began in earnest. For the first time in my life I found myself obliged to sit for hours on end in the same room with twenty or more other people.

Picture the scene: The teacher is reading a story and the class is attentive, waiting to hear the outcome. One boy, however, sits staring fixedly at the teacher’s face. He already knows the outcome of the story and cannot realize the others do not. Why is the teacher reading the story when everyone knows what will happen and there is no truth in it anyway? None of it ever happened.

The boy sits in silence because he has to—but his mind is buzzing. Today as every day it whirls in confusion, filled with incomprehensible and often frightening images, sounds, smells, tastes, impressions, and sensations. He sees his classmates not only as they are now, but as they have been and as they will be in the future. And he sees their parents, friends, relatives—people he has never met—and he knows them, too.

He knows that one of his friends will fall and break his arm. The mother of another friend is very ill but does not know it…

Again Craine skipped, jumping past the text, moving to the next quotation.

It began with a sense of disorientation, of dizziness, almost nausea, that suddenly congealed into physical pain that took my breath away. It was like an electric shock—suddenly every joint, every muscle ached. I hunched forward, almost fell, and could not straighten up. In my mind I saw beyond reality. I remained aware of my surroundings—Mallee and Berbers, the modern buildings, the traffic, passersby—but I could also “see” a different town. Different streets, old buildings, unpaved, narrow, haphazard streets and lanes …

Then in my mind I saw a priest. Very old, bent, stooped, arthritic, crippled. He stood before us and was as real to me as Mallee and Berbers. In his arms he held an old metal box, a chest, perhaps two-by-one-by-one-foot deep. Then he began walking away, hobbling, shuffling, limping along one of those old lanes with his crippled gait.

I followed, shuffling as he shuffled, bent and pain-wracked as he was—and ran straight into a stone wall. I stopped. The old priest disappeared. I went around the wall, and he was there, shuffling along, leading me.

Craine looked up, checking with a part of his mind to see if Rush had come to his carrel—he had not—but mainly thinking, half in a daze, about other things: Two-heads Carnac, Dr. Tummelty’s interest in psychics, his own strong sense that he’d read all this before somewhere. Suppose he had not. Suppose, like the man who had written this, he simply “knew,” somehow, had read the book without ever seeing it. That was nonsense, of course; he knew that, in a way. But for the moment he let himself forget what he knew. It was a fact that psychics had sometimes been helpful in discovering bodies, even reenacting killings so that the police could work out who had done them. There was one in particular, some famous Dutchman …

With a start, he realized that he had read the book. It was M. B. Dykshoorn’s biography, of course. Disgust leaped up in him—an emotion too violent, he realized even as it came, to be merely disgust. Fierce disappointment, then. Yes, that was it, yes. Craine grinned, angry. Ah, the tricks of the mind, or rather heart! Poor Gerald Craine wanted to be a psychic, yes. Wanted to save Elaine Glass without the usual nuisance—not even believing she needed saving, in fact; knowing full well … His mind snagged, and only after a moment did he know what had snagged it. He had seen something, surely not a memory: a man standing in the dark, among trees. He could smell them now, and felt again the simultaneous terror and guilt, as if he were himself both the killer and the victim. He jerked his eyes down to the book and read:

The next morning at the town hall I found everyone in a rare state of excitement, for Mallee had come up with a remarkable discovery. On his map the day before he had charted the route I had taken on my psychic walk through the town. Because I had kept bumping into buildings and having to go around them in order to “follow” the old priest, my path bore little relation to the plan of the modern town. But when they overlaid my route on a map of the town as it had been at the time of the Iconoclasm—the year 1566—they discovered that my walk would have taken me through the streets of the town exactly as it was then—four hundred years earlier!

There were pages of comment. Dykshoorn, like many clairvoyants of our time … The next quotation from Dykshoorn read:

… I am convinced that if I have a definite psychic impression that something will happen, it will happen and cannot be avoided. Neither I nor any of the people involved can intervene to prevent its occurrence. If I see that a person will have an automobile accident, for example …

Pages later, Craine read:

Because of this deep emotional involvement, psychopathic murders are easier for me to work out than crimes committed in cold blood, where the killing is only incidental to the purpose of the crime. I never investigate killings by members of organized crime, for