You—why don't you look out of the window for a while.
My eyes are now shut. Incomprehensible speeds. What does that mean?
I can't breathe. The man with the gun...
There's no man with a gun, Ariel.
There is. The whole world is made only of men with guns. There's no one else in the whole world, just me and billions of men with guns. I feel sick.
Incomprehensible speeds. I can comprehend the speed of light. I can comprehend ten times the speed of light. The only thing I can't comprehend is infinite speed.... That's what Apollo Smintheus said, didn't he? Or did he just say that the train track was infinite? Anyway, what if we were moving at infinite speed? Although I can't really comprehend it (which is, I think, the point of "incomprehensible"), something travelling at infinite speed would actually seem to be at rest at every point that it travelled past. Something with infinite speed, travelling in a loop, should be able to be everywhere at once, surely? Maybe more than once: Who knows? So maybe I don't have to wait for my station. Maybe my station is simply there, outside, and I have to find it.
I don't want to look out of the window, but I do. Now my own fears are in sharp focus again. Everything I've ever written is on fire. Someone's rubbing my name out of every document in which it's ever appeared. I don't know where these images are coming from. They appear to be random, but maybe ... I try to think of Adam again and, as if I'd ordered the memory in the consciousness equivalent of the most efficient fast-food restaurant in the world, there he is, outside the window, fucking my mother. He's fucking my mother and saying to her: "Who's Ariel? I've never heard of anyone called Ariel." He seems to turn and see me watching them. Then he laughs. He pokes her in the ribs and points at me and they both laugh. "I don't have time for this now, Ariel," my mother says. "You're not the center of the universe, you know."
Cars, I think. Driving. Driving towards London from Faversham. Come on. I'm escaping from the priory; from the Project Starlight men. And then I see/feel it. I'm in my car and I'm zoning out into the fear. In the image through the train window I can see the men racing behind me in their black car, driving down the almost-empty motorway with the gray sky above and the snow lying in fields, on rooftops, and alongside the long, curving hard shoulders. I can see them behind me and I know this is the end. In a film, I'd shake them off. But they're going to run me off the road and no amount of gutsy driving or intelligence is going to save me. My life is going to end in a crunch of jagged metal, with my blood spurting onto the windscreen. I don't want to go there, to this place, but I have to. I have to get into that place from this one. My mind is open at that point, I instinctively know that. And the men aren't really there: That's just the fear.
At least—I hope it's just the fear.
How do I get off? Not knowing what else to do, I walk towards the doors.
The image is still the same one outside the windows. I focus on it, and then I press the button to open the doors. The train's still moving but the doors open and...
It's six A.M.—just gone—on the A2 and the sign is telling me that if I keep going I'll end up in London. That's not what I want. Or maybe it is? No. I need the M25 and then a road to Torquay, wherever that is. I glance in the rearview mirror: still no black car. There's another sign ahead of me pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven't lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me. Except ... One of them does mean something to me. It's the town where Patrick lives. But—oh shit. I'm having déjà vu. I remember being here before and taking that exit and getting Patrick to come and fuck me in the toilets for a hundred quid.
Except it wasn't déjà vu. It happened. It happened and then I went to Molly's school and then I got lost in the Troposphere and then I time-travelled back here, in a train full of fear and ... So much for paradoxes. I pull over to the hard shoulder and take out a cigarette. At the same time I check my purse to see if I still have the rest of Patrick's money. No. I've got the £9.50 I set out with and very little petrol. I light my cigarette and pull back onto the road. I'm going to Torquay. And I can't help smiling. I've no idea where I've actually been but—oddly—for the first time since I first went into the Troposphere, I don't feel at all mad. I feel absolutely fine about what just happened. I'm not a whore after all, I think as I drive off again. I got what I wanted without actually doing anything. Or did I actually do it and then overwrite it with something else? Oh, whatever. I put all thoughts of Abbie Lathrop—and the KIDS—out of my mind and, as I drive towards the M25, I try to make myself vow never to try Pedesis again.
It's just gone midday when I park in a big, anonymous car park next to Torquay Library, about 250 miles from the Shrine of St. Jude in Faversham. There's no snow in the southwest, but the sky is as gray and flat as the one back home, as if January has been reformatted in two dimensions and broadcast on a cheap black-and-white portable TV. The Troposphere always seems flat to me, but this is worse; I'm not sure that the real world, with its dirt and its people, is exactly where I want to be. But then I'm not sure the Troposphere is a good place for me, either. I still have half a tank of the petrol that I "forgot" to pay for, but now I need food, and coffee. There's a café just across from the library, next to a big slablike church of a denomination I don't recognize. I decide to go into the café before using the public Internet terminals that I hope are in the library. I'm going to search for local castles and see what I find. I remember Burlem's memory of the one in his town: the one he thought of as being like a giant's ring, ripped off, and left on a hilltop. If that doesn't locate it, I'll try something else, but I'm not sure what.
Even though I have my plan, I still sit in the car for about five minutes before I do anything. What a journey. I drove about two hundred miles before I stopped looking in my rearview mirror for the police (who I assumed would want to ask me questions about the petrol), and the Project Starlight men. Some time after that I lost track of where I was. I pulled into a town I thought was Torquay, but there was nothing at all to distinguish it from every other town I've ever seen in Britain, and I couldn't be sure that I'd actually reached my destination. There was a large roundabout with various signs to industrial estates, and a Sainsbury's supermarket off to the right. I pulled into the Sainsbury's car park and got out of the car for the first time since the petrol station on the M25. My legs felt shaky. I walked in and went straight up to the kiosk and bought a cheap packet of tobacco.