Free Vail by Trevor Hoyle

chalked on one of the underpasses:
Welcome to the Concrete Bowel
. From this I conjectured that we were indeed inside it, rattling and lurching onwards and inwards at a rate of knots. The lights strung above the motorway flickered faultily; some had gone out altogether, their protective covers hanging agape like plastic jaws. Sloughed-off tyres were strewn across the three lanes and shards of glass sparkled crazily as our headlights sent feeble swathes over the ink-black tarmac.
    Most of the other traffic had gone, – except for an occasional black limousine which swept silently past, the faces behind the curved tinted glass lit greenly from below by the subdued glow of instruments in sunken casings. Such personages had urgent expense-account business to attend to in distant parts of the kingdom and couldn’t afford not to travel at all hours of the day and night, gliding swiftly and surely towards personal gratification and self-fulfilment. In one of these hermetically-sealed containers, at midnight or thereabouts, I glimpsed the etched hawklike profile of Vince Hill, the popular balladeer and cabaret entertainer.
    Silence and darkness behind me in the interior of the van. No
Thank you for the birds that sing
to comfort Bev in her wretched hallucinogenic slumber. I could see no activity in the black slice of mirror and dared not glance over my shoulder for fear of sending us crashing into a steel balustrade or concrete abutment. The three lanes had merged into two. Unlit signs zipped by, fragments of names and numbers smearing themselves across my retina. I had no idea where I was going and, to tell the truth, no longer cared. For all I knew we could have been dropping down a shaft into the centre of the earth. I indulged this illusion for a little while, enjoying the sensation that all was beyond my control and I could sit back with a mad happy smile on my face, knowing that gravity had taken over and it was useless to fight it. The molten core beckoned enticingly, seething fingers of fire reaching up greedily like slow-motion lightning. A hot blast scorched my face, singeing my eyebrows and moustache. I fought for breath. Were we on fire?
    Looking to the east I searched for the dawn but the bastard was nowhere to be found.
    The dawn never did come. Neither Mira nor Brown commented on the fact, or non-fact, so I reckoned it politic to do the same. Plus I had my hands full driving and my eyes were never still, looking for a sign that said
London
or
The South
or simply →.
    (It’s always the same, isn’t it? Signs galore lead you
into
somewhere but nary a one tells you how to get
out
. It’s as if they fiendishly want to keep you there, endlessly circling purgatory with the fuel gauge nudging zero and your bladder fit to burst.)
    Brown had made the observation that by entering Spaghetti Junction we would confuse the authorities as to which direction we were taking; what he hadn’t said was that it would confuse us also. Maybe we were now travelling towards Bristol, say, instead of London, or back north up the M6, or just going round and round the same endless piece of two-lane tarmacadam. Without landmarks it was impossible to tell.
    (And without the dawn equally impossible to know whether we were moving forward in time or repeating the same minute, moment, and therefore ourselves,
ad nauseam.)
    There is a theory that with each passing nano-second another universe splits itself off from our existing universe and takes a new direction in time and space. A nano-second later another universe splits itself off from this second universe into a third, which also takes a new direction; and a nano-second after that the third universe splits itself off and takes yet another, fourth, direction. So on and so on. And each of these separate multiplying universes in turn split themselves off, nano-second by nano-second, into other universes, which continue splitting and separating every nano-second of recorded