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no not those. What's happening? I'm getting out of here.'
    Periwig did revvings of the engine and then stared out of the windscreen. 'Where am I?' he said. 'I don't recognize this place. I'm lost. The bus is lost.'
    There came a dreadful rattling and banging at the shut glass shutter. Periwig ducked his head.
    'Where are we?' shouted Big Bob Charker. He didn't have the mic any more. 'Get us back to Bren…' he paused. 'To Brentham, no to Brentside, no to Brenda, no to help! I'm lost! We're all lost. The bus is lost, help, help, help!'
    Periwig Tombs stuck his foot down. He didn't know what was going on. What was happening to him or what was happening to Big Bob. But he suddenly felt very very afraid. Outside all the world was strange. The shops and houses, the lorries and cars. All were suddenly alien. Suddenly strange and unknown. His powers of recognition were blanking off. A car was a car and then it was not. Then it was just an odd-coloured shape. The road ahead was tarmac no more, now it was only grey matter.
    'Aggh!' Periwig Tombs took his foot off the clutch. The bus was parked in second gear. The handbrake stretched and snapped and the old bus rumbled forward.
    'What's this?' went Periwig, regarding the steering wheel in his hands. 'Black thing, coiled round? Spade? Spode? Snail? Snake?
Snake'?
Aaagh!
Snake\'
    Periwig covered his face with his hands. The bus began to gather speed.
    The tourists on the top deck were unaware that anything untoward was occurring, other than that the rather odd commentary had ceased. They cheered as the bus scattered several pedestrians and had a passing parson off his pushbike.
    'Look at that parsnip,' said the lady in the straw hat. 'No, I don't mean parsnip. Paspatoo. No, pasta. No, parrot. No, not parrot.'
    'Where am I?' wailed Big Bob. 'What am I doing here?'
    'Get it off me,' wailed Periwig Tombs. 'No get
what
off me? Wssss gggging nnnnnnn?'
    Up the High Street went the wayward bus, gathering speed all the time. Motorists hooted and swerved to either side. Cars mounted pavements, scattering further pedestrians. The bus now mounted a pavement too, bringing down a lamppost.
     
    In the Plume Cafe, Derek said, 'You really won't find much to interest you here, Ms Sirjan. If you want to know the secret of Brentford, I'll tell it to you. It's inertia. There's nothing more powerful than inertia. Things that are standing still are the hardest things to get moving.'
    And then Derek glanced out of the window.
    And then Derek flung the table aside and flung himself upon the body of Kelly Anna Sirjan.
    It wasn't a sudden rush of lust.
    It was something else.
    Kelly toppled backwards from her chair. Derek grabbed her and dragged her aside.
    The tour bus, engine screaming, and tourists screaming too, ploughed into the front window of the Plume Cafe, demolishing all that lay before it.

3
    It was joy, joy happy joy no more.
    All across Brentford alarm bells started to ring.
    At the cottage hospital. Where the doctors and nurses on duty were joyously playing at doctors and nurses. As doctors and nurses will so often do, if business is slack and there is an R in the month.
    At the fire station. Where the lads of Pink watch, Lou Lou, Arnie Magoo, Rupert, Gibble and Chubb, were forming a human pyramid in the station yard. As firemen will so often do when they've run out of things to polish and the weather's sunny enough.
    At Brentford nick. Where the boys in blue were sitting in the staff canteen discussing the Hegelian dialectic, that interpretive method whereby the contradiction between a proposition and its antithesis can theoretically be resolved at a higher level of truth. As policemen will so often do when not fighting crime.
    And finally at the offices of the
Brentford Mercury,
where Hildemar Shields sat fiercely scowling. He was told simply to 'hold the front page'. As editors so often are.
    These alarm bells had been precipitated into fevered ringings by calls made by Derek on his mobile