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Got an odd taste too,' said Timothy, and inhaled.
    It was clearly a bad mistake. The tobacco was far too strong to be treated like a cigarette.

He stared in a most peculiar way in front of him, then took the pipe out of his mouth and stared

at that too. Something was obviously happening that he didn't fully understand. The 'fully' was

entirely unnecessary. Timothy Bright didn't understand a thing. He took another puff and thought

about it. The first impression that he was inhaling from the chimney of some crematorium had

entirely left him. Timothy Bright smoked on.
    He was in a strange new world in which nothing was what it seemed and familiar things had

turned into fantastic and ever-changing shapes and colours. Nothing in this world was impossible;

things moved towards him and then suddenly veered away or by some most extraordinary involution

turned inside out and returned to their original shape. And the sounds were ones he had never

heard before. The TV voices echoed in his seemingly cavernous mind and there were moments when he

was standing, a puny figure, underneath the apse of his own skull. There were other voices in

this great dome which was curved bone around, voices that reverberated like sunken thunder and

ordered him to flee, to move, to run away while there was still time and before the great pig

with the cut-throat razor came to exact vengeance on him. Timothy Bright obeyed the voices of his

own inclinations and ran. He ran past Henry, ran wide-eyed and unseeing out into the garden to

his Suzuki and a moment later that magical thing had left Pud End with a final spurt of gravel

and was away down the country lane towards whatever he had to do and away from the pig with the

razor.
    Behind him Henry and his uncle stood on the croquet lawn and stared after him in awe.
    'Good Lord,' said Victor as the sound of the bike died away. 'Was it my imagination or did he

actually have some aura surrounding him?'
    'I didn't see an aura,' said Henry, 'but I know what you mean. He's driving without lights,

too.'
    'At an incredible speed,' said Victor, trying to suppress the hope that was beginning to

burgeon in his mind. Then they both looked up at the full moon.
    'Of course, that may account for some of his actions,' Victor said. 'What in God's name is

that muck made of?'
    'Just some sort of toad,' said Henry. 'And I don't know that anyone is entirely sure. I

suppose the nerve-gas scientists know exactly, but for all I know it may vary from toad to toad.

I'll have to ask my biological chemist friend.'
    'Well, I suppose we ought to have a drink,' said Victor. 'Either to celebrate or mourn, or

possibly both. What a relief to have him out of the house.'
    They went inside and turned off the television. 'I feel a bit guilty ' Henry began but his

uncle stopped him.
    'My dear boy, the damned fool helped himself to something that did not belong to him and

there's the end of the matter. Doubtless in two hours time he will reappear and prove as noxious

as he did just now.'
    But Timothy didn't. He was already far to the north, travelling up the motorway at enormous

speed and ignoring the rules of the road as if they did not exist. In what was left of Timothy's

mind, they didn't. They had been replaced by a sense of the possible that defied all normal

practice. He was not even aware of the motorway as such. What little mental capacity for analysis

he had ever possessed had quite left him. He was on automatic pilot with the skill to ride a

desperately fast motorbike without knowing in the least what he was doing. In short, with the

Toad coursing through his bloodstream and doing extraordinary things to his synapses, Timothy

Bright had regressed to the mindlessness of some remote, pre-human ancestor while retaining the

mechanical skills of a modern lager lout. It would have been incorrect to say he was clean out of

his mind, which was the observation of two traffic cops