'By the way, Uncle,' Henry said as they finished in the kitchen, 'I'd most strongly advise you not to touch any of that Perth Special tobacco. I know it's your favourite, but Timothy has been smoking it and...' He hesitated for a moment.
'And what?' said Victor.
'It may be a bit adulterated, Uncle V. I mean...Well, I just think '
But Victor Gould interrupted him. 'Say no more. I think and hope I understand. And don't think for a moment I blame you. By the way, where did you find the cyanide?'
Henry laughed. 'Nothing as bad as that, I promise. It's just something I was given in Australia. I don't know exactly what it does because I don't use stuff like that but it's like a rather more powerful form of...Are you sure you want to know?'
'Perhaps not,' said Victor. 'I think I'll go and meditate in my study for a bit.'
He went back across the lawn to the summerhouse and sat in his favourite chair and thought how very pleasant it was to have a really amiable and intelligent nephew like Henry to help him cope with the crisis. And crisis was what having to cope with Timothy Bright amounted to. It was one of the mysterious aspects of human psychology that a family that could produce Brenda who, for all her faults in Victor's opinion, saintliness was one of them was intelligent and civilized, while at the same time spawning a creature like Timothy. Perhaps he was putting it the wrong way round and the peculiarity lay in the production of Brenda in a family composed otherwise of idle, snobbish and self-centred morons. Presently Victor Gould dozed off with the thought that he couldn't care less what Henry had put in his tobacco. If it got rid of the dreadful Timothy it couldn't be all bad.
In front of the TV set Timothy Bright was wondering what they were going to have for dinner. It was still early, of course, but he felt like a drink. If Henry hadn't been there in the room with him he would have gone over to the corner cupboard and helped himself, but with Henry there he somehow felt awkward about it. Instead he reached for the tobacco tin and began to fill his pipe as a way of showing he could do anything he liked if he really wanted to.
Opposite him Henry tried not to look. He had had no idea how much Toad to put in and only a very vague notion of its effect. He had never been into hallucinogenics and had only brought the bufo sonoro back to give to a friend who was doing research into mind-bending chemicals. All he had been told in Brisbane was that Toad was about the strongest LSD-type drug you could find and gave one hell of a trip. And a trip was just what Timothy Bright deserved. On the other hand he didn't feel inclined to sit there and watch what happened. Definitely not. He got up and was about to go out when Timothy lit the pipe.
'I say,' he muttered, 'this baccy's a bit off, isn't it? Got a bloody odd smell.'
'It's Uncle Victor's Special blend,' Henry said. 'It may be a bit different.'
'You can say that again. 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 when the Suzuki clocked up 170 mph on their radar and they made the decision not to chase him on the grounds that they would only get involved in a particularly grisly retrieval operation requiring an infinite number of body bags. To Timothy Bright such a likely end never occurred. He was in the very centre of an enormous disco with flames and shadows dancing round him and terrors twining and unwinding in an intricate pattern of lights that were sounds and musical notes that transformed themselves into colours and endless necklaces of lights, before detaching themselves from the cat's eyes in the road and becoming the faces of Mr Markinkus and Mr B. Smith. If the Suzuki could have gone much faster at this point Timothy would have ensured that it did. He was now in the grip of demented terror which reached one almost insufferable climax only to have it succeeded by another. Underneath him the miles slid by unnoticed. Car and lorry rearlights swam towards him and were avoided like so many images on an arcade game with, to other drivers, a quite terrifying ease.