The Midden (5 page)

'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.

By ten o'clock Timothy had swung off the motorway onto side roads across a rolling upland of
little towns and villages, wooded valleys and tumbling rivers. Here, acting on the instructions
of his automatic pilot, he slowed down for corners and braked where necessary and swept up hills
and onto moors where sheep miraculously crossed the road just ahead of him or just behind and
there were few signs of habitation. Somewhere ahead of him lay safety from the demons in his
skull and somewhere ahead was a paradisiacal land where there was infinite happiness. The images
were ever-changing but the same message of escape in alternate forms sustained him for the drive.
On and on he went into a world he had never known before and would never be able to find again.
And all the time Timothy Bright remained unconscious of his actions and his surroundings. His
hand on the throttle twisted this way and that, slackening the speed on the bends and
accelerating on the straights. He didn't know. His inner experiences dominated his being. At some
point during the night his bodily sensations joined forces with the mental images to convince him
he was on fire and needed to take his skin off to escape being burnt. He stopped the bike in a
wooded area by a stream and stripped off his clothes and hurled them down the bank before
mounting the Suzuki again and riding on into his internal landscape entirely naked. Ten miles
further on he came to the Six Lanes End where it joined the Parson's Road to the north. Timothy
Bright shot across the intersection and took the private road belonging to the Twixt and Tween
Waterworks Company. With a fine disregard for its uneven surface he shot the Suzuki up it. Cattle
grids rattled briefly beneath him and he was up onto Scabside Fell beside drystone walls and open
grassland. Ahead of him a great stone dam held back the waters of the reservoir. It was here that
the night ride ended.

As he accelerated on what looked to him like the blue, blue sky an elderly sheep that had been
sleeping on the warmth of the road grew vaguely aware of a distant danger and rose to its feet.
To Timothy Bright it was merely a little cloud. The next moment the sheep was airborne and
hurtling with the motorbike over the deepest part of the reservoir. In another direction Timothy
Bright, still sublimely unconscious of his surroundings, shot through the air and landed in a
coppice of young fir trees on the far bank. As he drifted limply through them and landed on the
pine needles underneath, he knew no fear. For a while he lay in the darkness until the conviction
that piggy-chops had begun drove him to his feet and out of the coppice. Now he was a bird, or
would have been if the ground hadn't kept getting in the way. Three times he fell over on the
tarmac and added to the damage he had already suffered. And once he got his foot stuck in the
iron bars of a grid which he mistook for a giant clam. But this time the total disassociation
produced by the Toad had begun to wear off. Having escaped from the terrible grip of the clam he
felt strangely cold.

He had to get home, though the home he had to get to had no clear identity. Home was simply
where a house was, and ahead of him he could see a building outlined against the sky. In the
half-world between mental agitation and partial perception he made his way towards it and found
himself confronted by a solid stone wall and some iron gates. It was exactly what he wanted. He
tried the gates and found them locked. Something dark was on the other side and might be looking
at him. That didn't matter. Nothing mattered except getting into a warm bed. Timothy Bright
grasped the wrought-iron gates and began to climb. He was going to fly from the top. On the other
side a large Rottweiler waited eagerly. Trained from its infancy to kill, it was looking forward
to the opportunity.

At the top of the gate Timothy Bright hesitated momentarily. He was a bird once again and this
time he definitely intended to fly. Letting go of the spikes around him, he stood for a second
with his arms outstretched. For a moment he was very briefly airborne. As he plunged downwards
the Rottweiler, like the sheep on the dam, had a vague awareness of danger. Then 190 lb of yuppie
dropped on it from a height of ten feet. As the great dog's legs buckled beneath it and the deep
breath it had taken was expelled from its various orifices together with portions of its dinner,
the dog knew it had made a mistake. Its jaws slammed together, its teeth locked on themselves and
it was desperately short of breath. With a final effort to avoid suffocation, it tried to get its
legs together. Splayed out on either side of its body, they wouldn't come. Only when Timothy
Bright rolled to one side did it manage to break free. But the Rottweiler was a broken beast.
With a plaintive whistle and a hobble it slunk round the corner of the house to its kennel.

Timothy Bright lay a little longer on the cobbled forecourt. He too had had the breath knocked
out of him though to a lesser extent than the Rottweiler, but the urge to go to bed was stronger
than ever. He got unsteadily to his feet and found the front door which flickered under a light
in front of him. He turned the handle and the door opened. The hall light was on. Timothy moved
towards the darkened stairs and climbed them with infinite weariness. Ahead of him there was a
door. He opened it and went inside and found the bed. As he climbed into it someone on the far
side stirred and said, 'God, you stink of dog,' and went back to sleep. Timothy Bright did
too.

In the conference dining-room at the Underview Hotel in Tween the Chief Constable, Sir Arnold
Gonders, presided over a celebratory dinner for the Twixt and Tween Serious Crime Squad.
Ostensibly the dinner was being held to mark the retirement of Detective Inspector Holdell, who
had been with the Squad since it had first been set up. In fact the real celebration had to do
with the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions in London not to proceed with the trial
of twenty-one members of the Squad for falsifying evidence, fabricating confessions, accepting
bribes, the use of unwarranted violence, and wholesale perjury, which crimes had sent several
dozen wholly innocent individuals to prison for sentences as long as eighteen years while
allowing as many guilty criminals to sleep comfortably at home and dream of other dreadful crimes
to commit.