She was starting to feel a bit muzzy. Despite the gloom of an encroaching twilight, colours were starting to look brighter, and the walls of the rather drab basement room in which she was ensconced, were simultaneously closing in and receding. She put a hand up in order to brush her somewhat shaggy hair away from her eyes. Yes, she was hot. Pulse up, too. Yet her mind felt strangely cool, crystalline.

Take this nice pill, her benefactor had said. You will have this amazing, cool adventure, right through the looking glass. Just like you-know-who in the story.

Yes, well... She could never have said that she had actually liked the man, who had originally befriended her when she had been sheltering under the bridge, away from the constant drizzle and damp, when she had had nowhere to live: no-one else had been kind to her, no, no-one at all. But Max had been different indeed: he had bought her pasties and hot drinks, or shared her chips with her, gave her cigarettes whenever she had cadged for them.

Eventually, he had offered to let her live in the spare room of his flat.

She had never really been sure of what he had wanted from her, being very aware of that old adage, that there was never any such thing as a free lunch. He certainly did not seem to be interested in such niceties as regular rent money from her.

So then, it had to be sex. Maybe he was one of those ageing perverts she had been warned about in the past. However, in all the time she had been with him, he had never groped her, never taken advantage of her, at least not like that. He was a respectable, kindly man of middle years, lonely perhaps, but wanting to do good in his own small way.

What he wanted from her, came out in other ways. Like the way he was always WATCHING her. As time went on, she could feel his eyes on her, with every gesture she made, every little mannerism: she could feel him watching her as she ate, or slept, or even as she washed. It was still not as though he had ever tried to touch her, of course. Once however, she had been rather more perturbed than usual, when she had found him in the hallway, hovering outside the door by the keyhole, after she had emerged from the shower.

You are afraid, he had once told her during one of their late-evening chats. You are afraid of the deeper emotions. Of revealing your true nature to another, of allowing anyone else to get really close to your innermost being...

Then on one other evening like this, he had confided in her, told her of his life-long project, of his current research. Of his experiments with drugs and magic, in his Quest for the elusive Self, which in turn might allow for full, authentic disclosure to take place between two fully-fledged adults, without the usual defences that most people put up to safeguard their vulnerable souls.

Of course, she agreed to try it. After all, it might be fun, and she might learn something, something which might unlock the mysteries of her personality and allow her to evolve not just spiritually, but somehow alter her luck regarding her outer life for the better. This was why she was standing alone in Max's dingy basement room, nursing a Stanley life in her other hand; not that she expected anyone to take advantage of her whilst she was under the influence of anything, but you never did know...

Gradually she became aware of a tightness in the back of her throat, the sense of something stretching itself on the peripherals of her awareness both within and without her being, awakening, beginning to stir and uncoil...

Then when she looked at the walls, she realised with a sudden jolt of recognition, that things were really beginning to happen, and that it was certainly not just 'all in the mind.'

For the walls were no longer walls. They were no longer solid and inanimate, as walls were supposed to be. In a quite sickening way they had begun, as a seething mass of many separate parts, began to move. In fact, out of what had once been walls, a whole mass of wormy protuberances were now, slowly unfolding, now writhing in an unholy mass of glistening tentacles.

These tentacles and vermiform appendages were not moving at random. There was a focus to their undulating movements. They were without doubt moving, however inchoately and seemingly languidly, towards her.

The worm-like things could have been snakes, but a detached part of her mind did realise that they did not resemble snakes exactly, nor indeed worms, although their insinuating crawling movements suggested both. The things appeared to have no eyes or no mouths, just engorged, shiny heads that seemed to be reddish and raw, as though another skin had been peeled away from them. She did know in fact, she knew exactly what they were. Some people seemed to imagine because of her somewhat unworldly demeanour, that certain areas of education had passed her by.

They were willies. She was locked in a subterranean cell of a room, in the half dark, with a thousand or so hallucinogenic things, all of which appeared to be absolutely intent on honing, inching towards her, all of them presumably with less of the best intentions towards her well-being.

Yet there was worse. A prickling at the back of her skull now reminded her in full force of the unease she had felt, for much of the time she had remained within the company of Max. The old sense of being constantly watched and scrutinised was now intensifying, even as the swollen heads of the snake-things appeared to be closing all the more on her. She was sure that just out of the reach of the corners of her own eyes, each one of them scrutinising her, her minutest of reactions, with the intensity of a laser-beam.

She was starting to feel very exposed, barefoot and clad as she was. Her ragged cotton blouse and skirt would not be able to protect her from much for that long, she was sure.

It began to seem as though the snake-things were actually feeding off the attention she was giving them, to say nothing of her terror, as they appeared to grow ever more tumescent before her very eyes, their colour darkening to ever more livid shades of rose and purple. The heads of those nearest to her appeared to sweat small globules of pearlescent mucus, catching the poor light which came from the submerged windows and weak lamplight from within.

Now, she started to feel something brush against her shoulder. Wild-eyed she swung round, in time to swat away a bloated shape that had just started to rest itself against her upper arm. Then she began to feel a persistent tugging at her ankle. Not wanting to, she looked down and with a sinking realisation, saw that another snake-thing had started to wrap itself round her lower leg, like a poisonous ivy tendril insinuating itself around a helpless young sapling. She tried to kick against it, but somehow this seemed to accelerate the process. Another of the things immediately plopped itself towards her other foot, it then more confidently began to slip in a spiral fashion around her other calf.

The creatures by so doing, had succeeded in trapping her knees, she realised. This meant that she would no longer be able to hunch up her body, or close her legs against the intrusion of the snake-things. A new realisation now imposed itself on her unwilling senses - that another snake-thing, with careful sensitivity, had just started to inch its way along her inner thigh, further and further up...

She felt herself beginning to yield and to soften at this gossamer sensation, almost to invite and to crave the gliding touch of the creatures, as the first of them began to ease its way into her groin, into the most intimate and delicate areas of her innermost being. Was this in fact, what Max really had been after, after all?

Perhaps in the end, this realisation came to be the trigger. That moment, when all those submerged feelings of unease during her sojourn with Max, suddenly burst from her, in the form of a sudden, white-hot rage, as she recognised the full extent of his betrayal.

How DARE these filthy, Freudian monstrosities, dare to invade her body!! You filthy, repulsive, middle-aged creep, I would like to kill you, kill you, KILL YOU!!! If only I was stronger, more effective, less stupid and naïve, if only just for once I could fight back against my tormentors, if only, if only, if only.

Then she remembered that she still had the Stanley knife.

Yes! It was still there, in her hand, untainted by the warped perceptions of her trip, it was still there, as real as it had ever been. Just a modest Stanley knife, though lord knows, sharp enough... in her mind's eye, the knife had suddenly become an entire scythe of righteous, metallic strength.

With a sudden inhalation of exuberant fury, she raised her arm and slammed it down, across one of the nearest snake's heads to her. With a sickly plop it landed at her feet, limp, harmless now. She observed that there were just one or two drops of pinkish blood at its base, where it had been severed.

Her arm raised again, and manically she lashed at one or two more of the snake-things. In her excitement, she missed one or two, but as her movements became more practised, she became more calculated. She soon got into the rhythm of it. Some of the heads became a little mangled in the process, but most she managed to lop off quite easily, like asparagus tips. With one sweeping movement she succeeded in freeing both her legs, then she found that she could thrash at even the more obscure parts of the room.

As though sensing defeat, many of the snake-heads now began to recede and to diminish, to burrow back into the shade. The crisis was now clearly over.

Only one more incident at this stage remained etched on her mind, for quite some time to come. One particularly large head had caught her line of vision, as she was completing her victory over the snake-things. She had jumped again, on seeing that this head, unlike all the others, had had one single, unblinking eye in the centre of its head. It had gazed at her mournfully, steadily, before she had pushed the tip of the blade into its baleful centre. In fact, she was sure she had recognised that one single eye, before she had put it out. It had borne a remarkable resemblance to one of a certain bespectacled pair of eyes, which had recently been rather single-mindedly focussed upon a particular kind of prey.

This is for you Max, she had murmurred as she pushed ruthlessly into its gelatinous centre, which gave with a faint squelch. Telling him.