“It’s cheese!” I shouted. And it was. The entire street had turned into cheese—soft, ripe, French cheese. I gasped for air, choking on the smell. At the same time, the cheese pulled me into it. Another few seconds and I would be sucked underneath the surface.

“Nick!” Tim called out.

And then the cheese was gone as he pointed with an arm that was now a mile long. There was a snail coming down the boulevard. No . . . not one snail but a thousand of them, each one the size of a house, slithering along ahead of the traffic, leaving a gray, slimy trail behind them. At one corner, the traffic lights had gone red and all the snails were squeaking at one another, a fantastic traffic jam of snails. At the same time, I heard what sounded like a gigantic burp and a frog, the size of a bus, bounded across my vision, leaping over a building. But the frog was missing its legs. It was supporting itself on giant crutches.

The world twisted, heaved, broke up, and then re-formed with all the pieces in different positions: a jigsaw puzzle in the hands of a destructive child.

Suddenly we were surrounded by grinning stone figures, jabbering and staring at us with empty stone eyes. I recognized them: the gargoyles from Notre Dame. There must have been a hundred of them. One of them was sitting on Tim’s shoulder like a gray chimpanzee. But Tim didn’t seem to have noticed it.

Light. Car lights. Everywhere. A horn sounded. I had stepped into the road—but it didn’t matter because the cars were the size of matchboxes. They were all Citroëns. Every one of them. And they were being followed by cyclists. The Tour de France had come early. All the cyclists were smoking cigarettes.

Tim was clutching a streetlamp. Now he was wearing a striped jersey and a beret and there was a string of onions hanging from his side. “Je suis,” he said. “Tu es, il est . . .”

I opened my mouth to reply.

Crash! Crash! Crash!

I saw it before he did. Perhaps he didn’t see it at all. Even now, with the drug pumping through my body, I knew that it wasn’t real, that I was hallucinating. But it made no difference. As far as I was concerned, everything I saw was real. And if it was real, it could kill me. It could step on me. It could crush me.

The Eiffel Tower! On our first day in Paris we had crossed the city to visit it. Now the Eiffel Tower was coming to visit us. There it was, walking across Paris, swinging one iron foot, then the next, moving like some sort of giant, four-legged crab. One of its feet came down in a pancake stall. Wood shattered. Pancakes flew in all directions. Somebody screamed.