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set in the door and I managed to stagger over to it and pull myself onto my knees to look out. But it was hard to see anything. The world was spinning faster now, tilting from side to side. I just made out a series of letters in red neon, but it seemed to take me for ever to work out the three words they formed:
THE FRENCH CONFECTION
    The van turned a corner and I lost my balance. Before I fell, I caught a glimpse of a blue star … on a flag or perhaps on the side of a building. Then the sound of the van’s engine rose up again and swallowed me. The floor hit me in the face. Or maybe it was me who had hit the floor. I no longer knew the difference.
    The journey took an hour … a month … a year. I no longer had any idea. What was the stuff they had given me? Whatever it was, it was taking over, killing me. I could feel it happening, an inch at a time. The van stopped. Hands that no longer belonged to bodies pulled us out. Then the pavement slapped me in the face, there was another scream from the engine and suddenly I knew that we were alone.
    “Tim…?” I gasped the word. But Tim was no longer there. He had turned into some horrible animal with sixteen eyes, tentacles and…
    I forced myself to concentrate, knowing that it was the drug that was doing it to me. The image dissolved and there he was again. My brother.
    “Nick…” He staggered to his feet. All three of them. Things weren’t back to normal yet.
    The sky changed from red to blue to yellow to green. I stood up as well.
    “Must get help,” I said.
    Tim groaned.
    We were back in the centre of Paris. It was late at night. And Paris had never looked like this before.
    There was the Seine but the water had gone, replaced by red wine that glowed darkly in the moonlight. It was twisting its way underneath the bridges, but now that I looked more closely, I saw that they had changed too. They had become huge sticks of French bread. There was a sudden buzzing. A Bateau Mouche had suddenly sprouted huge blue wings and legs. It leapt out of the water and onto one of the bridges, tearing a great chunk out with a hideous, hairy mouth before spiralling away into the night.
    The ground underneath my feet had gone soft and I realized I was sinking into it. With a cry I lifted one foot and saw that the tar had melted and was dripping off my trainer. Except the tar was yellow, not black.
    “It’s cheese!” I shouted. And it was. The entire street had turned into cheese – soft, ripe, French cheese. I gasped for air, choking on the smell. At the same time, the cheese pulled me into it. Another few seconds and I would be sucked underneath the surface.
    “Nick!” Tim called out.
    And then the cheese was gone as he pointed with an arm that was now a mile long. There was a snail coming down the Boulevard. No … not one snail but a thousand of them, each one the size of a house, slithering along ahead of the traffic, leaving a grey, slimy trail behind them. At one corner, the traffic lights had gone red and all the snails were squeaking at each other, a fantastic traffic jam of snails. At the same time, I heard what sounded like a gigantic burp and a frog, the size of a bus, bounded across my vision, leaping over a building. But the frog was missing its legs. It was supporting itself on giant crutches.
    The world twisted, heaved, broke up and then reformed with all the pieces in different positions: a jigsaw in the hands of a destructive child.
    Suddenly we were surrounded by grinning stone figures, jabbering and staring at us with empty stone eyes. I recognized them: the gargoyles from Notre Dame. There must have been a hundred of them. One of them was sitting on Tim’s shoulder like a grey chimpanzee. But Tim didn’t seem to have noticed it.
    Light. Car lights. Everywhere. A horn sounded. I had stepped into the road – but it didn’t matter because the cars were the size of matchboxes. They were all Citroëns. Every one of them. And they were being followed by