XVIII-XXIII

XVIII

I woke up with a bloody awful headache. I was lying crumpled on the floor of Britannia's parlour. My mouth was dry, and my temples pounded, and my walking stick was nowhere to be seen. I very much doubt whether anyone reading this would believe me if I claimed to be some sort of total stranger to hangovers. I got my first hangover in 1976, a few days before my seventeenth birthday, and I have been having them with depressing regularity ever since.  This felt like a hangover, but on this occasion there was something missing. I hadn't actually had anything to drink.

I don't think that I am an alcoholic, but I will admit that I drink more alcohol than most people do in this day and age. One of the more depressing side effects of this is that, quite probably as a side effect of mixing large amounts of brandy with the various psychotropic chemicals which I am prescribed for my various illnesses, is that sometimes I do get blackouts. There are times that I wake up in the morning, not remembering what I had done the night before, and I have had to learn the discipline of having to reconstruct what happened out of fragmentary memories.

So I tried to do this now. The skill involves gathering all the available evidence, and trying to fill in the gaps. The trouble was that I couldn't remember anything. Also, without my walking stick I was not able to actually get up off the floor.  So I crawled across the grubby carpet like an arthritic newt, and then - to my horror - my trousers begun to come off.

I then realised that my clothes were feeling odd...it was as if I hadn't dressed myself properly that morning. It was almost as if someone else had dressed me.

As I crawled, inch by inch, the joints of my legs, and elbows, shooting pain across my body, I caught a glimpse of something moving outside the grubby window. It was Lysistrata, carrying what seemed to be a bundle of roadkill in her dumpy arms, and shuffling across the unkempt lawn. A thought came shooting, unbidden, into my befuddled brain that "I don't recognise you with your clothes on", and - in horror - I remembered some, but not all of what had transpired the previous evening.

Corinna and I have been together for over a decade now, and married for nearly eight years of that time. In that decade I have, and will always be, completely faithful to her, and the only woman apart from her to have seen me even partly dishabille was my doctor.

Until last night that is, as the shocking memory of me, Lysistrata, and Britannia Potts, as naked as the day we were born, chanting arcane rhymes, and screaming eldritch fury to the scarlet, lightning-flecked clouds above us as we summoned primal deities from fuck knows where, flooded across my cerebral cortex. I knew that I had done nothing for which I should have reproached myself. But it was a shocking memory, and one, when combined with my burgeoning realisation that it had been one of these two terrifying women who had dressed me after the ritual had concluded, made me feel that what I now realised was not a hangover, was the least of my problems.

Eventually I reached one of the armchairs, and levered myself up, and much to my relief I found my walking stick, and after eventually getting my breath back, I staggered to my feet.

The house was as silent as the grave. I looked around, and realised, guiltily, that I actually didn't know what to do next. I had only ever been here in Britannia's parlour, and in her late brother's study, and the drawing room full of junk, and I had no idea how to find my way around the rest of the house.  I was in dire need of a pee, but I had no idea how to find a lavatory, and I had grave reservations about exploring the tumbledown cottage unbidden. I also was in a quandry about whether I actually wanted to see either of my hostesses again this soon.

On one side, the rules of gentlemanly behaviour would suggest that it would be massively impolite to just sneak off and pretend the whole thing had never happened, which is what I so badly wanted to do.

On the other hand, for the first time in many years, I found myself in the embarrassing position of having been unexpectedly naked with two women the night before, and the male fight or flight mechanism was kicking in big time, and was telling me to do what human males have always done ever since a Cro Magnon male found himself unexpectedly getting his kit off in the cave of a Cro Magnon female, with whom he was not ready to comingle on a social level; to run like hell.

I felt in my trouser pocket. The car keys were still there.

Thank God.

I looked around again. Lysistrata was still out in the garden with two dead and rather mangled badgers under her arm. The only way that I knew out of the house would take me straight past her.

OK I had fancied her when I was about nineteen, but at the age of 55 I think that it was probably her who had dressed me in the wee small hours, and that level of intimacy did not sit comfortably with me. I rationalised to myself that it would probably not sit comfortably with her either, and that - as a gentleman - there was nothing that I could honourably do but sneak out into the back garden, and back to my car. preferably without running into Britannia Potts. And hopefully I would find a lavatory along the way, and if not, there was probably a convenient gooseberry bush in the back garden.

But which way was the back garden?

I looked around me again, and realised something strange. Something stranger than normal, I should say. It was a cold and windy day in early October, grey rainclouds scudded across the sky, and the naked branches of the decaying trees silhouetted skeletally against the sky. But somewhere, I was sure that I could hear birdsong.

I looked around once again, and saw a door in the corner of the room. It was slightly ajar, and I remembered that on the occasions I had been to tea with Britannia and Cymbelline over the years, Lysistrata had always made her entry through that door, so it was not an enormous leap of faith to suppose that it led to the kitchen. And where there was a kitchen there might well be a downstairs loo, and - even more importantly - a back door through which I could escape.

So I went in, and - to my great relief - found both. After answering my - by this time very urgent - call of nature, I approached the back door. I already knew that the weather outside was particularly grim even by my the standards of North Devon autumn, but I could still hear birdsong, and I could see bright summer sunshine pouring in through the half open back door.

I went outside, and was emerged. The front garden of the cottage was frankly a disturbing mess, which looked as if nobody had lifted a finger to tend it for decades, and the cottage itself was not much better. But this beautifully tended cobbled courtyard garden, was exquisite. It looked for all the world like one of the olde worlde paintings on jigsaw puzzles that my maternal grandmother had enjoyed doing in her dotage, and it was completely at odds with the rest of the place.

At the far end of the courtyard was a stile and a path which led into a woodland of such a Disneyesque fairytale quality that I expected to hear high twinkling sounds from a celeste, and some badly animated bluebirds swooping about trilling musically at each other.

There was a large, comfortable, stone bench against the cottage wall, looking straight at the stile, and - for the first time that day - I felt one of my most primal urges beginning to well up. I knew that this was one of the urges that I should not even attempt to fight, and so I limped over to the bench, lowered myself down, and reached into my pocket for two of my friends; Mr Benson and Mr Hedges.

Of all the drugs I have taken over the years, the one to which I am most addicted, in fact, the only one to which I have ever been truly addicted is cigarettes. I don't think that it is even nicotine or tar to which I am addicted, and am sure in my own heart of hearts, that it is whatever crap that B&H put into the tobacco to keep it burning, make it taste fresh, or whatever, that I am addicted to, because although I have given up smoking for different lengths of time over the years, nearly eight years once, I always come running back to my slavemaster. And if there was ever a day that I sorely needed a cigarette it was today.

So I sat back, luxuriating in the warmth of this unseasonably glorious sunlight and took a deep gasp of my cigarette, as I tried to decide what I was going to do next. But my cogitations hadn't got very far when I could see a small, chestnut brown, figure walk slowly out of the woodland, down the path, over the stile and slowly down the cobbled path towards me.

It was Panne.

XIX

The rest of North Devon was cold, grey and wet, covered with a slimy carpet of decayed leaves. But here, in the back garden of the tumbledown little cottage on one of the less frequented lanes between Woolsery and Bradworthy, it was a beautiful summer's morning, like something described by the pen of Enid Blyton. It was the sort of summer morning that I knew as a child, and which came less and less often as the innocence of childhood was replaced by the compromises, and moral grey areas of my adulthood, and which eventually disappeared for good, round about the time that I realised that my life was never going to work out the way that I had always wanted it to do.

I didn't know whether the place in which I found myself was what the world truly was like beneath all the artifice and shameful compromising of adulthood, or whether it was just the result of some magickal artifice that I didn't (and truly didn't want to) understand. But for the moment, my tired and battered body luxuriated in the glorious golden sunlight as I lazily watched two hummingbird hawk moths feeding from the most luxurious hollyhocks this side of The Story of Cherry Tree Farm.

The unseasonable sun beamed gently upon the fairytale garden as Panne walked slowly towards me.  If this actually had been a fairy tale, I reflected, there would have been a clearly defined beginning, middle and end to the story. But as I have discovered more and more as I get older, things in life are never clear cut.  I suppose that it could be argued that a person's life begins with their birth and ends with their death, but even that isn't really that clearly defined.

If you are writing the biography of someone, you usually talk about their parents and even their grandparents. In one music biography which I had to review about a quarter of a century ago, the first chapter went as far back as the protagonist's antecedents and their activities during The Crusades. And of course the story doesn't end with a person's death either. What happens during a person's life can, and does, reverberate across the centuries that follow. "Life is short, but the years are long. Not while the evil days cometh not."

As Panne walked slowly towards me, I tried to decide what I should do next.

On one level this was already a given; I was going to take her home with me, and then try to explain everything to my dear wife, who was already going to be somewhat perturbed, to say the least, because I had been missing for at least one night - I realised, with a guilty start that I actually had no idea how long I had been away from home, and that I was only assuming that it had only been for a single night.

But first, I was only too aware that I knew practically nothing about what was going on, and about the nature of the events into which I had become inadvertently embroiled, and into which it looked like I was just about to involve my beloved family. I had turned my back upon what I very much dislike calling 'psychic questing'  the best part of two decades ago. The quest for the Cornish Owlman had not been the only reason that my first marriage had collapsed, far from it, but it had certainly been a causative factor. And although my journeys down the left hand path had continued for a few years, by the end of 2000 I had lost so many people dear to me, and been through so many traumatic experiences to the detriment of my mental and physical health, that I decided - with  the help of a long ceremony performed by a witch, an old friend of mine in Leeds - to leave that part of my life behind for good. And since then, I always have.

But now I found myself deep in the middle of something that I truly didn't understand, and for which all my experience - such as it is - had done very little to prepare me. And I knew that, like it or not, I would have to get as many answers as I could.

By now Panne was standing right in front of me, his/her pelt glinting chestnut in the sun. I took his/her hairy little hands in mine and looked straight at her, and was both surprised, shocked, and saddened to see that there were tears rolling slowly down its cheeks, making the fur all matted and dark. I have never hugged a God before, but I put my arms round Panne mulling him/her to me. "I don't know why you ran away", I said in the quietest and calmest voice that I could manage. "I am going to take you home with me, and Corinna and I will look after you. But first you must help me."... It suddenly entered my head, that either due to high magickal protocols, or sheer common sense, I could not try to  find out too much at once. I didn't know how much Panne actually knew, but I could see that deity or not, (s)he was a frightened and tired little thing, and I doubted the wisdom of trying to find out too much at once.

"Just tell me one thing," I said calmly, still holding Panne's hands, and looking into his/her (It really doesn't sit right with me to refer to Panne as 'it') tearful eyes, I asked the one question that was foremost in my eyes. "Panne. Who are you?"

Still without saying anything, Panne leaned forward until his/her two little horns were once again touching my forehead. Once again I felt a searing pain across my temples, and an overwhelming wave of nausea, as my world suddenly turned black.

XX

"Oh for a muse of Fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention".

Shakespeare wrote that, and the words are said by the chorus in the play that I studied for my O levels back in 1976. I find myself wishing for the same thing because I am not sure how to describe what happened next. Not for the first time in my peculiar life I find myself in the position of trying to describe an experience for which no satisfactory words exist in the English language. This is a challenge which has stumped far greater writers than I, but I shall try and have a go anyway.

It was a bit like being in the audience of a play, except for the fact that my seat (for I remained sitting on the old garden bench throughout what happened) seemed to be on the stage itself. I was apart from the action, in that I was invisible to the actors, but I was right in the thick of the action, only that I was not. I could even pick up a little of the emotions exuded by the protagonists, but whether this was truly the emotions that they were feeling, or whether it was emotions that I was feeling as a reaction to the action I was watching I have no idea. And I don't suppose that it matters very much either.

The pain in the frontal portions of my cerebral cortex was even more debilitating and acute than it had been on the first occasion that Panne had put his/her horns onto my forehead and allowed me to catch a glimpse of wonderful things that left me with more questions than answers.

I was glad that I was sitting when this happened, because I would have surely fallen to the floor in shock and awe if I had been standing. I felt like someone had driven a red hot nail into my forehead and I could feel every one of the ridges of Panne's little horns burning indelibly into my flesh. It truly was, I remain convinced, the worst hurting that I have ever felt. The only good thing about it was that it didn't last very long, and the wondrous visions that replaced the pain were so extraordinary that the memory of the pain was soon washed away by the Waters of Lethe.

I probably shouldn't describe what I saw as 'wondrous visions'. I am afraid that it probably leads the hapless reader into expecting that I am going to describe some sort of glorious vision of Xanadu. Well, I am not. Not unless Kubla Khan's fabled summer palace was actually situated on the outer reaches of a rather rundown trading estate on the outskirts of Barnstaple.

Not for the first time in this story, a location seemed to have been taken straight out of my own memories, and twisted to suit the opportunistic needs of the storyteller whoever he or she was. Because, like Hawkmoor Hospital, this was a place that I knew very well. During spring of 1982 I came to this place on many occasions. Like on so many other occasions in my life it was a mixture of sex, cryptozoology and rock and roll that brought me there.

Let's get the cryptozoology out of the way first. At the end of the last Ice Age when the glaciers retreated, there was only a relatively short time before the land bridges which connected our islands to mainland Europe disappeared, and what are now known as the North Sea, and the English Channel, came into being.

Because there was only a relatively short window of opportunity, only a small number of the reptiles of mainland Europe reached the British Isles, and we resultantly have a very sparse herpetofauna. Two of our rarest reptiles are the smooth snake and the sand lizard, both of which are restricted to relatively small and specialised sandy areas on the south coast of England. However, there have been persistent rumours for years that both species can be found in a number of sites on the north coast of the South West peninsula. There are sand lizards on Braunton Burrows, just a few miles from Barnstaple, and so, when someone (the drummer in a local punk band) told me that they had seen bright green lizards sunning themselves on a sand heap on the outer edges of the aforementioned industrial estate, I wondered whether they could be a hitherto undiscovered colony of Lacerta agilis.

I also had more sordid reasons for wanting to be somewhere more secluded, where I could park my car, open the sun roof and bask, lizardlike, in the unseasonably golden sunshine. At the time I was somewhat involved with a slutty but good natured teenage girl called Samantha, and I had very good reasons for wanting somewhere where I could park my car in peace and quiet, and have an  uninterrupted afternoon. So the two of us went to explore the derelict edges of this rather unprepossessing Xanadu, singularly failed to see any lizard whatsoever, although my researches into human biology continued rather successfully.

But none of that is particularly important. It only goes to explain why and how I had quite an intimate (in several senses if the word) experience of the geography of this secret part of Barnstaple that I very much doubt whether one in a thousand of its residents knows exists. We explored, both in the car and on foot, every inch of the run down development, and - thirty three years later - I was seeing it again.

Although, back in 1982 when Samantha and I were exploring, we were the only people there; the owners having gone bankrupt some years before, and nobody caring enough about the place to do anything with it. The place I saw in my dream/vision/trance/psychodrama/whatever the fuck it was, was very much inhabited. There was a big double garage with the doors half hanging off that I remembered finely, because it had been outside this unpromising edifice that Samantha and I had finally parked my battered blue Toyota Corona and got down to the non-herpetological business of the afternoon. The double garage that I was seeing today in my mind's eye was very much inhabited. There was a double mattress on the floor and a couple of old army blankets and an eiderdown on top. Against the wall was a makeshift set of shelves made out of planks and books, and these were crammed with books. There was a Calor Gas stove in the corner, and a box of sundry household impedimenta next to it.

I looked around, and I could see that there were more derelict cars there than there had been upon my visit. And in most of the derelict cars there were blankets or other signs of occupation. And when I looked around at the neighbouring garages which bordered onto the double garage which held such sweet memories for me, I could see that each one had someone living in them, mostly blank eyed women who had the world weary expression worn by people who know that whatever life was going to throw at them, it was never going to get any better or worse for them than it was at this very moment.

The voice of that insufferable ass Lloyd Grossman came into my head, as I wondered who would possibly be living in my (I think I have already explained why I thought of the garage as mine) garage. Then I heard the sound of squeaky wheels and a wheelchair came slowly around the corner.

In the wheelchair was a burly, balding man with the remains of a head of light grey hair, and the ashy skin which comes from terminal cancer, and/or long term opiate abuse, often in conjunction with each other. He wheeled himself along tortuously, and when he pulled up outside the double garage in which I instinctively knew that he was living, he slowed up, dug with some difficulty into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a bottle of Oramorph.

For those of you not in the know, this following passage is taken directly from a NHS website:

Oramorph oral solution is a liquid containing the active ingredient morphine sulfate. Morphine is a type of medicine called an opioid painkiller. Opioids are strong painkillers that work by mimicking the action of naturally occurring pain-reducing chemicals called endorphins. Endorphins are found in the brain and spinal cord and reduce pain by combining with opioid receptors. Morphine mimicks the action of endorphins by combining with the opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord. This blocks the transmission of pain signals sent by the nerves to the brain. Therefore, even though the cause of the pain may remain, less pain is actually felt.

Morphine is used to relieve severe pain.

What that rather clinical little paragraph, and yes, the pun is intentional, doesn't say is that it is also a drug easily open to abuse. I know this from personal experience, having abused it myself on a number of occasions over the years.

It is a volatile and peculiar drug, and whilst it does indeed lull the inexperienced user into a place where he or she feels like they have just had a hot bath, a good meal and great sex, and are now wrapped in a swaddling shroud of warm pink cotton wool, some people also experience the most traumatic and severe hallucinations and delusions.

My father, for example, who was prescribed quite high doses of the drug during his final illness, went through a whole panoply of terrible hallucinations; he thought my mother was in the room with him, that the gardener was climbing in through the window to kill him, and that he was covered with scorpions who were about to rip off his genitals. Compared with that, my experiences were minor, but it remains a drug that I would not recommend to anyone, and one which should only be taken under strict medical supervision. Looking over the shoulder of the occupant of the wheelchair - someone whom I instinctively knew was called 'Eliphas' - as he unpacked a bag of medicine with the logo of the pharmacist at the local General Hospital, NDG, known colloquially as The Pilton Hilton, because of the district of the town in which it is situated, I could see that he had three types of cancer medicine. I recognised them from the days when I was a nurse.

I also saw that the bag held a Beretta 84F, an automatic handgun first manufactured in Italy in 1976, and commonly known as The Cheetah. I would rather not say from whence I recognised that.

XXI

I don't know how many of you reading this ever had a copy of Doom on their computer back in the late 1990s. I know that I  did. And my compadres and I spent many happy hours shooting at monsters, and once we worked out how to network our PCs, each other. It kept us happy for years. But one thing that I always liked to do, especially when stoned, was to use the  'No Clipping Mode' cheat IDSPISPOPD, and wander about 'behind the scenes', walking through walls impervious to attack and exploring the surprisingly complex landscape.

This was how I felt now. There was no doubt that I was inside the landscape that Panne had 'transported me to', for want of a better word (if I find one I shall let you know), but I was not part of it. I could explore it to a certain extent, but I could have no effect on what was happening in it. It was as if I was a player in Panne's personal video game, and someone had entered a 'no clipping' cheat for me, so that I could see everything that was going on, but not actually join in any of the gameplay.

I also appeared to have limited empathic powers. I could look at the characters and discover a certain amount about them, a bit like hovering your mouse above a character in one of the aforementioned video games, and being rewarded by a dialogue box which explained some vital facet of their character for the benefit of the player. Looking at the fat man in the wheelchair, I somehow knew his name was Eliphas, and that he was very angry. Looking at his medication I could surmise that he was being treated for a particularly aggressive form of cancer, and the fact that he was in possession of a small, serviceable, and totally illegal handgun, made me surmise that his outlook on life was not necessarily that of a straightforward and law abiding citizen.

As soon as I discovered that I could move around the room, I made a bee line for his bookshelf, because in life I have always found that you can tell a lot about people from the contents of their bookshelves. I could certainly tell a lot about Eliphas, because although there were only about forty books there, apart from a couple of technical books about chemistry, all the books were ones that could be found in certain parts of my ever expanding and rather peculiar library. The trouble is that whilst I will admit to owning books by the Marquis de Sade, Adolph Hitler, Aleister Crowley and Gerry Adams, I also own a lot more books by a lot of other people, which means what I think of as my "nasty shelf" is massively diluted. All that Eliphas had was my nasty shelf writ large with nothing to dilute it whatsoever.

There were books on the nastier end of ritual magick, the more violent end of politics, and the more apocalyptic bits of religious theory. Feeling disturbed by this I went through the wall into the next lock up garage and found nothing but some litre bottles of ammonia, and a box which said 'medical supplies'.

Deciding that I couldn't get any more information out of these two lockups, I drifted outside, and almost immediately bumped into Panne. Or rather into the human adolescent who I sensed would eventually metamorphose into the little goatfooted Godling, of whom I was getting so fond. The last time I had seen her she had been a little girl playing with her tricycle at some analogue of Hawkmoor Hospital, sometime during the 1970s. Now she looked as if she was eleven or twelve, but she had a feral glint in her eye that had been completely absent as a little girl.

She was small for her age, and had a slim, boyish body, and untidy shoulder length hair. But her eyes were frightening. They burned with a fierceness, which hinted at experiences that a preteen girl should never have had to go through in order to gain eyes like that. I followed her for a while, as she slunk around the small compound looking more like a half starved feral cat than a human, and I was following her when she eventually went to ground in a makeshift 'nest' made out of cardboard and cotton waste. There were several scrapped cars, mostly wheel-less scattered around the yard, and Panne had decided to make her nest in the back of a wrecked minivan.

I continued to look around, and I discovered that although I still didn't understand the 'controls' that allowed me to traverse around the yard, I became better at using them. In a burst of uncharacteristic lasciviousness, I went back (forward?) to the place on the outskirts of the yard where Samantha and I had spent our illicit afternoon in 1982. I suddenly realised with horror that I had no idea what year it was, so there was every possibility that the metallic blue Toyota with the two naked bodies in it might still be there. To my great relief neither the car or the occupants were there. I really don't think that it would do much good to the mental health of the 55 year old me to be confronted by the reverberations of the self-centred womanising of his 22 year old predecessor.

Just for old times sake, I even spent about half an hour looking to see if I could find any sand lizards, but just as in 1982 my search was fruitless. Then I realised that there was a way that I could find out what year it was, or at least what year it was after, and I made my way back to the main yard to check on the dates of the cars as extrapolated from the number plates.

I always remembered that in 1982 there was a band in Teignmouth called Y Reg symbolising that they were brand spanking new and up to the minute. So from that I should have no real difficulty in trying to extrapolate the dates of the wrecked cars in the yard.

I was right, it was a doddle. They ranged in date or about a decade from 1975, so the events I was observing could not have happened before the mid- 1980s, and I suspected probably not before at least the beginning of the next decade. That made sense, and I had a self-congratulatory glow of satisfaction in what would have been my chest if I had actually had any corporeal substance in this brave new world.

But then I did some mental arithmetic.

If the girl who would become Panne had been five or six when I first saw her in about 1975, she should have been in her early twenties by the time that the early years of the 1990s crawled around. But she wasn't. Fifteen years or so had elapsed but she was still to enter puberty. Something odd - in fact I think I should say that something even odder than that which was already happening - was beginning to happen.

Believe it or not, I had actually forgotten the fear and unease that I had first experienced when I entered the derelict yard, and was even beginning to enjoy myself. But now, the realisation that I couldn't even trust the space-time continuum, was brought back to me with a thump, and I felt more uneasy than ever.

XXII

There being no real point in worrying, I continued to explore, and I found - to my surprise - that there appeared to be an entire community of people living in this derelict builder's yard. They were the deadbeats, the rejects of society, the homeless, the scorned and the unwanted, but rather to my surprise, they were all living together seemingly happily. The yard was clean and tidy, and even though the homes for some of these people were rusted out cars, there were pots of flowers dotted around the place, and no sign of the squalour or depravity that one might imagine that such a community might engender.

Now, I am getting tired of typing that I cannot explain how and why I was able to move around this area, how I was able to see and observe everything that was going on, but still remain separate from it all, and how even time itself didn't seem to work in the way that it should be expected to do. Let's just take it as read. I have no way of explaining it all, so I will just tell you what happened, and - quite truly - if you don't believe me, or if you think I am lying, mad or on drugs then I don't really care. I am writing this down to get the sequence of events right in my head, for my own satisfaction, and I don't really give a hoot what anyone else thinks of the matter.

So I won't attempt to explain how it was all a bit like a computer game; how when I had discovered enough to satisfy me in one situation, I would move on somewhere else as if my magic. Well actually it was by magic, and I would discover another missing bit of the puzzle.

It appeared that Eliphas was like the unelected, self-appointed leader of the group. He was a peacemaker who adjudicated any squabbles between residents, dispensed justice occasionally, and generally acted as a cross between kindly village schoolmaster and Mafia Don. I also discovered that he wasn't called Eliphas, which didn't surprise me, and that he had adopted the name (I never did find out what he was really called) after Eliphas Levi, a French occult author and ceremonial magician. And a quick perusal of the internet whilst I was writing this told me, much to my surprise, that it wasn't his name either. "Eliphas Levi," the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into the Hebrew language.a French occult author and ceremonial magician.

Eliphas (the one in a wheelchair on the outskirts of Barnstaple) had become interested in Levi's three principles of magic, after being diagnosed with terminal, and very aggressive, cancer. Steve Jones, a witch from Yorkshire who holds the distinction of having become a Justice of the Peace, and therefore Britain's first pagan magistrate, told me once that the were three main reasons that people did magick; to get laid, get rich, or get even. But Eliphas was doing it for a fourth reason. He didn't care about dying. he had been in pain for years, but he had become very fond of his homeless parishoners (as he thought of them, hearkening back to the days when the Church of England guaranteed a scholar and a gentleman in every parish, rather than half a dozen ugly lesbians scattered throughout a team ministry) as well as feeling completely responsible for them. And he knew that without him the little community would sooner rather than later fall apart, and he didn't want that to happen. So turning his back on the book learning and scholarship which had sustained him throughout his life, he began to investigate alternatives.

Eliphas Levi was in many ways one of the founders of modern magickal theory, and although I have always suspected that he was really rather a charlatan on the quiet, much of his codification of the secret arts, followed in the lines that I think myself.

That the material universe is only a small part of total reality, which includes many other planes and modes of consciousness. Full knowledge and full power in the universe are only attainable through awareness of these other aspects of reality. One of the most important of these levels or aspects of reality is the "astral light," a cosmic fluid which may be molded by will into physical forms.

"One can only define the unknown by its supposed and supposable relations with the known."

"The divine ideal of the ancient world made the civilization which came to an end, and one must not despair of seeing the god of our barbarous fathers become the devil of our more enlightened children."

That human willpower is a real force, capable of achieving absolutely anything, from the mundane to the miraculous.

AXIOM 1: "Nothing can resist the will of man when he knows what is true and wills what is good."

AXIOM 9: "The will of a just man is the Will of God Himself and the Law of Nature."

AXIOM 20: "A chain of iron is less difficult to break than a chain of flowers."

AXIOM 21: "Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear YOU. Say to suffering, 'I will that you shall become a pleasure,' and it will prove to be such-- and even more than a pleasure, it will be a blessing."

That the human being is a microcosm, a miniature of the macrocosmic universe, and the two are fundamentally linked. Causes set in motion on one level may equally have effects on another.

"Man is the God of the world, and God is the man of Heaven."

As I have already explained, I seemed to be able to go pretty much anywhere I wanted in the dilapidated Builder's Yard. But there was one place I could not go. There was one little locked room at the back of Eliphas' lock up that was denied to me, and it was here I instinctively knew that Eliphas believed that he was going to uncover the secret that would give him a degree enough of immortality to be able to stay and look after his 'children' for as long as he was needed. But what it was.....I had no idea.

So I followed the lives of this merry band of outcasts; two teenage girl runaways, and a venerable old meths drinker with a long grey beard that made him look like Merlin (perhaps he was Merlin, nothing would surprise me much anymore, except that I suspected that I had already met Merlin on a number of occasions over the years, and that although looking superficially similar, they were completely different people). There were two middle aged tramps with wild staring eyes who never spoke to anyone except for each other, and who mostly seemed to converse in a strange idiolect that nobody else could understand, or bothered to try. There was a slight boy with Down's syndrome. he was called Michael, and I  realised with a shock that he had been a patient of mine back when. Had been a Nursing Assistan at a small hospital for what were then called Mentally Handicapped young adults in North Devon, thirty five years ago on my personal timeline. There was an elderly woman with an even more aristocratic accent than my late mother (and that is saying something) and - in her little den in the back of the old minivan was Panne, or at least the girl who would one day become Panne.

I followed their everyday lives, went with the two teenage girls and Michael as they went garbage raiding, taking all the barely spoiled food which was thrown away each day into dumpsters at the back of supermarkets, to be thrown away or salvaged by this disparate little band who were so far below being an underclass that they didn't even have a name.

A song came into my head, sung to the tune (vaguely) of The red Flag.

Oh garbage dump oh garbage dump

Why are you called a garbage dump

Oh garbage dump oh garbage dump

Why are you called a garbage dump

You could feed the world with my garbage dump

You could feed the world with my garbage dump

You could feed the world with my garbage dump

That sums it up in one big lump

When you're livin' on the road

And you think sometimes you're starvin'

Get on off that trip my friend

Just get in them cans and start carvin'

I realised with a shock that the song had been written by none other than Charlie Manson. Why did that murderous lunatic keep coming into my head? I asked myself, but could receive no discernible answer.

I went to Barnstaple library with Eliphas one day. he was in extraordinary pain but just wanted to read a short story by Doesteyeovsky, so wearing his best jacket, shirt and tie, he wheeled himself up the long road to the Central Library. He settled himself in comfort, and settled down to read the events that befall one Ivan Matveich when he, his wife Elena Ivanovna, and the narrator visit the Arcade to see a crocodile that has been put on display by a German entrepreneur.

After teasing the crocodile, Ivan Matveich is swallowed alive. He finds the inside of the crocodile to be quite comfortable, and the animal's owner refuses to allow it to be cut open, in spite of the pleas from Elena Ivanovna. Ivan Matveich urges the narrator to arrange for the crocodile to be purchased and cut open, but the owner asks so much for it that nothing is done. As the story ends Elena Ivanovna is contemplating divorce and Ivan Matveich resolves to carry on his work as a civil servant as best he can from inside the crocodile.

Laughing out loud, and taking surreptitious sips at a bottle of whisky to dull the pain, he was the happiest I have ever seen him, but as soon as the library staff discovered what was happening he was summarily ejected, and my heart bled for him as, with tears of rage, embarrassment and humiliation rolling down his cheek, he made his tortuous way back to the lock up and the only family  that he had.

That night there was a violent thunderstorm, and the inhabitants of the little family all huddled in their own shelters like frightened woodland creatures. As the rain beat down upon the corrugated iron roof of The lock up where Eliphas lay, drunk to hell, on a grubby mattress, screaming taunts and insults at an unfeeling, uncaring and completely oblivious universe, I sensed that something was different. Something drastic had changed and it was never going to be the same again.

XXIII

With hindsight I know that I cannot have been sitting on the bench in Britannia's garden for more than about ten minutes, but it seemed to me as though whole weeks elapsed, while I floated in limbo above the derelict builder's yard watching the lives of the people who lived there. The nearest analogy that I can give (and it is a very imperfect one) is something I do every day, as I sit in my comfortable old armchair typing away on my iPad and listening to whatever happens to be on my playlist on that particular day.

Opposite me is a 40inch fishtank, quite heavily planted, in which I have a selection of fish that would not have been out of place in one of the mountain ponds I used to explore when I was a child in Hong Kong. It contains a breeding colony of Chinese white cloud mountain minnows, some danios and a large black goggle-eyed goldfish called Chester. To my right, on top of the 1920s glass cabinet that Corinna brought with her when she moved in to live with me all those years ago, is my hifi, and next to it a two foot tank containing a small colony of Japanese fire bellied newts. Quite often during the day when I am meant to be writing deathless prose, I find myself staring at the tanks following the intricate day to day lives of the little creatures who live there. And so it was as I sat hunched on the bench in Britannia's garden, Panne's cute little horns pressed hard against my forehead. I don't know what state of consciousness I was in. I suspect that it wasn't a coma, a dream, or a hallucination, rather some thaumaturgically hypnogogic state for which there is no proper word in the English language. Certainly I am not going to try and invent one because there is no need. I have experienced it, and I seriously doubt whether I shall ever meet anyone else who has been through the same set of experiences, so apart from doing what I am doing now - writing my story down for my own satisfaction as much as anything - I will probably never have to describe what happened again.

I followed the day to day dramas of the little colony, shared their joys and sorrows in an abstract kind of way, but as the days progressed felt more and more disturbed by the change that I could see in Eliphas. His anger and bitterness were palpable, and I watched - helplessly - as a thoroughly decent man was overcome by pain, horror and bitterness and became a monster. As the cancer ate away at him he spent more time hidden away in the back room of his lock up; the one place that I could not follow him. And I became consumed with curiosity to see what on earth he could be doing out there.

I slowly began to realise that the different people living there had their own social roles. The two runaway teenaged girls, quite logically as they were the ones who appeared to be least alienated from the rest of the world, were the ones who went begging, shoplifting or garbage diving in search of food, whilst the older and more taciturn residents were the ones who scavenged across the scrubland and the little wood that lay on the opposite side of the fields behind the yard. There they would gather firewood, snare rabbits, and pick blackberries and hazelnuts. Following a couple of them one day I found that they even had a little kitchen garden, where they grew carrots, potatoes and cannabis, deep in the woods.  This wouldn't have happened in my younger days, I thought to myself. As a boy my friends and I roamed all across the woodlands, but with an increasingly sedentary and urbanised population who are becoming ever more divorced from the reality of the natural world, the woods were becoming the demesne of the wild animals, and feral people like my new friends from the derelict builder's yard, and they were able to tend their little crops in peace.

I was, of course, most interested in the little girl who would eventually become Panne. But in this phase of her existence she seemed to spend most of her time with Eliphas, who seemed to be as fond of her as I was of her later caprine incarnation. She would follow him around, even accompanying him up the long hard hill to the Pilton Hilton on the odd occasions that he would go there to receive treatment and more medication. He would slowly and tortuously wheel himself up and down the long hill to the hospital while Panne trotted happily alongside him like a little dog. As far as I could ascertain neither of them said anything to each other. In fact, as far as I could ascertain she never said anything to anyone, but they seemed content enough in their own peculiar existence.

As I followed various members of the strange little commune around, I realised that I could pick up some of their thoughts and feelings, in dribs and drabs at least. However, because I am basically a coward, I did my best not to do this because the stories I learned from each of them were so unutterably sad. The middle aged men had, like Eliphas, once had families and homes, but had lost them through a mixture of poor decision making, bad luck, and - in most cases - the cruelty and duplicity of other people. The teenaged girls had been abused, bullied and humiliated to a horrific degree usually by the very people whom one would have hoped would have been there to help and protect them. The catalogue of depravity and abuse that would enter my head every time I so much as let my psychic guard slip for a moment or two was unbelievable, and will - I am sure - stay with me for the rest of my life. One of the girls had essentially been whored out by her stepfather from about the age of eight in order to pay for his own chemical predelictions, and had turned to her stepfather's chemicals in order to numb the pain and terror of being raped and used by an endless parade of total strangers, and worse family friends, every night for years upon years. When she had finally summoned up the strength to tell the police her family was torn asunder by the shock, and her mother blamed her for it all and threw her out of the house. I couldn't bear to learn any more, so never did find out how she ended up under Eliphas's protection in the derelict yard on the edge of town.

The two characters who interested me most were - of course - Eliphas and Panne, but I could get nothing at all from Panne, and all the rest of Eliphas' thoughts were so cloaked in a miasma of hatred, anger and bitterness, that I knew I couldn't connect with his mind for very long and retain what was left of my own sanity. So I left well alone.

However, on one of his regular trips to the hospital, with little Panne trotting faithfully by his side, I was serendipitously there when he made a discovery that would change everything.

XVII

When my family first returned to North Devon in 1971 after an absence of nearly two decades, during which my parents fought gallant rearguard actions against the fall of the British Empire in Nigeria and Hong Kong, they quickly made friends with various members of the local gentry. In those days there was a remarkable range of minor aristocracy and interesting, though often impoverished, gentlefolk who lived in the area. Woolsery Manor, for example, which in later years was a hotel, then fell into disuse, and now as a derelict building has been bought by the bloke who started Bebo, was inhabited by the Count de St Quentin and his wife, a Swedish princess. They were very kind to me during my first year or two in the village, and encouraged me in my pursuits as an amateur naturalist, and wannabe poet.

They even had a private museum, which inspired me that one day I would have something similar of my own. It housed a remarkably arcane collection of disparate things including the foot of a mummified Egyptian priestess, and Marie Antoinette's christening slippers. I loved visiting them, and was very sad when they left the village for pastures new.

But there were other interesting people as well, so I was not entirely bereft. On an insignificant bend in the road, one of the most obscure lanes between Woolsery and the slightly bigger village of Bradworthy four or five miles away, there was (and is) a cottage even more tumbledown than my own. In it lived an elderly bachelor clergyman and his older spinster sister. The Rev Cymbeline Potts and his sister Britannia were a remarkable couple. Both retired from active duty, (although history didn't really relate whether Miss Britannia had ever had a proper job, or indeed any gainful employment except for looking after her brother) they seemed to do little else apart from frequent junk shops, jumble sales, and auction rooms in search of items to swell their ever growing collection of bric-a-brac.

Their collection encompassed everything from late Victorian militaria to long obsolete items of scientific and quasi-scientific equipment. They even had an epidiascope; a late Victorian equivalent to the overhead projector, which I used to play with for hours, projecting the images of my model aeroplanes onto the wall, and pretending that I was directing a remake of The Battle of Britain.

They were, in their own peculiar way, pillars of the local community, and every village fete saw the elderly couple running a tombola, or a stall where they would run a massively eccentric quiz, asking the village children a series of questions about English history that neither the children, or often their parents, had even the vaguest idea of what they were talking about. Miss Britannia would always be dressed as her cryptomythological namesake, complete with shield, robe and Graeco-Roman helmet, and their appearance always confused everyone mightily and brought joy to my adolescent heart.

Cunobeline (or Cunobelin, from Latin Cunobelinus, derived from Greek Kynobellinus, Κυνοβελλίνος) was a king in pre-Roman Britain from the late first century BC until the 40s AD. He is mentioned in passing by the classical historians Suetonius and Dio Cassius, and many coins bearing his inscription have been found. He appears to have controlled a substantial portion of south-eastern Britain, and is called "King of the Britons" (Britannorum rex) by Suetonius.

Cunobeline appears in British legend as Cynfelyn (Welsh), Kymbelinus (medieval Latin) or Cymbeline, as in the play by William Shakespeare. His name is a compound made up of cuno- (hound) and Belenos (the god Belenus).

This Cymbeline achieved legendary status in my eyes, but - although he was always very kind to me - he always seemed fonder of my little brother, and my younger, prettier friends. When a rumour went round the village that he was a convicted child molester, they cut him out of our lives completely. Or at least they thought that they did. I was a rebellious enough teenager to take the opposite viewpoint on anything that my parents did, and I had reasons of my own for suspecting that the story was not true....at least not completely so. A year or two later, when I was old enough to own a bicycle, and proficient enough upon the machine to travel around the district unscathed, I started to visit the elderly couple again, and revel in their collection of arcane junk. They always made me welcome, and asked after the rest of my family wistfully.

The Rev. Cymbaline never showed any signs of wanting to seduce me, and the only harm that I ever came to during my visits to their house was indigestion from Miss Britannia's terrible cooking. As I got older, and eventually passed my driving test, my visits to the odd couple became less frequent as I discovered girls and alcohol, and eventually left home, but I would still go and visit them whenever I came home.

In the late 1970s they acquired a maidservant; a taciturn and podgy girl in her late teens, with a hare lip and a serious speech impediment, who they called Lysistrata, although I very much doubt whether that was the name that her parents had given her. Each time I would drive up to visit them, she would answer the door with a grimace and - spraying me with saliva as she did so - would announce my arrival, and tell me that "The Master and the Mistress will see you now Sir". For some reason that I could never fathom out there was something incredibly sexy about this deformed and socially inept young woman, but my knowledge of social convention forbade me from taking the matter any further.

One day, whilst I was sitting with The Rev Cymbaline in the tiny drawing room, the subject of my parents came up, and he wistfully told me how much he missed seeing them, and asked me whether there was anything that I could do to repair the rift in their relationship. Sadly, and as tactfully as possible, I told the old man that my parents were disgusted by what they had found out about him, and that they were convinced that if they did so there would have been serious repercussions as far as my brother's safety would have been concerned.

He looked at me with the saddest eyes I have ever seen on any creature except for my dear bulldog cross boxer bitch Prudence, and said: "Things are often more complicated than at first they seem, dear boy. I wish your father would understand that".

I tried to explain that my parents found the complexities of my life too complicated to deal with, and I think he understood. We sat there in silence for about ten minutes, sipping brandy and looking sadly at each other, until Lysistrata shambled in, banged a grubby brass gong and announced that the mistress wished to see us in her parlour.

It was the last time I was alone with him. I returned to Dawlish, my girlfriend, and my own complex sex life, and a few weeks later it turned out that he went into the woods at the back of their cottage, and shot himself with an antique shotgun that he - of course - had never notified the authorities about. My parents went to the funeral, and in the aftermath tried to make friends again with Miss Britannia. But she just sniffed haughtily at them, pulled herself up to her full height of just over five feet and stormed out of the church, clutching her trident, and with her rusty helmet plonked back on her head. From then on, as far as I am aware, she never had contact with any of my family again, except on the odd occasions when I would pay a visit to the ever more tumbledown cottage full of junk, where she and Lysistrata eked out a living on State Benefits handed out by an ever more parsimonious government.

Slowly I began to realise that Miss Britannia Potts was a remarkable old lady. Feeling that she and her brother had been well and truly shafted by The Church of England, she turned her back on Mother Church, and began to investigate the old religion of her forefathers. She collected wild herbs which she dug with a silver athame at the full moon and grew them in her little garden, and over the years became a very wise woman, if you know what I mean.

I got married, moved to Exeter and dramatically fell out with my parents, and so for the next twenty years or so my visits back to North Devon were few and far between. However, on the few occasions that I visited my family, I would sneak off for an hour, drive along the network of tiny lanes towards Bradworthy and visit Miss Britannia and Lysistrata. Each time I visited they would look older and more decrepit, but still basically the same.

Ten years ago I returned to Woolsery to look after my dying father, and - against all the odds - the two of us, who had been figuratively at each other's throats for all our lives, were reconciled. On his deathbed, a few weeks before the end he said to me that he wondered whether he had been too harsh to the Rev Cymbaline. I answered noncommittally not wishing to sunder our newfound closeness by admitting that I had continued to visit the old parson and his sister for years, taking them gifts of groceries, and listening to their woes.

In passing, Dad told me that Miss Britannia was still alive, and still living with Lysistrata (the unspoken nuance being that their relationship was somehow unwholesome, whereas I had always considered them two orphans of the storm who had been thrown together by cruel happenstance). Miss Britannia still refused to speak to my Father, but could, he told me, occasionally be seen trudging through the lanes, Lysistrata at her side, still clutching her trident, and always wearing the increasingly rusty Graeco-Roman helmet.

After my Father died I went to visit them again, occasionally. But usually they just would not answer the door. On the odd occasions when they did, Miss Britannia would gaze at me with cloudy eyes over which the fog of Alzheimer's had long since settled, which only occasionally gave any indication that she knew what I was talking about, while Lysistrata, still wearing a tatty and grubby maid's uniform, crouched by the side of her chair glaring malevolently at me.

Britannia is an ancient term for Roman Britain and also a female personification of the island. The name is Latin, and derives from the Greek form Prettanike or Brettaniai, which originally designated a collection of islands with individual names, including Albion or Great Britain; however, by the 1st Century BC Britannia came to be used for Great Britain specifically. In AD 43 the Roman Empire began its conquest of the island, establishing a province they called Britannia, which came to encompass the parts of the island south of Caledonia (roughly Scotland). The native Celtic inhabitants of the province are known as the Britons. In the 2nd Century, Roman Britannia came to be personified as a goddess, armed with a trident and shield and wearing a Corinthian helmet.

The Latin name Britannia long survived the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th Century, and yielded the name for the island in most European and various other languages, including the English Britain and the modern Welsh Prydain. After centuries of declining use, the Latin form was revived during the English Renaissance as a rhetorical evocation of a British national identity. Especially following the Acts of Union in 1707, which joined the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, the personification of the martial Britannia was used as an emblem of British imperial power and unity. She was featured on all modern British coinage series until the redesign in 2008, and still appears annually on the gold and silver "Britannia" bullion coin series.

The age of the British Empire, the last few years of which I lived through, was well and truly past. The Empire on which the sun never set was reduced to just over a dozen tiny island possessions of little military or commercial importance. Britannia no longer rules the waves, but I am one of the few people who suspects that she is embodied by a lonely old woman living with a sociopathic maidservant on Disability Living Allowance, in a tumbledown cottage which stank unaccountably of yeast, and because her own world had crumbled around her ears she was stoically waiting for the end of the world for the rest of her species.

My visits there had become less and less frequent, and eventually I stopped going altogether. But I now knew what I had to do next. Despite everything that I felt, it was time for me to go and talk to Britannia.

XVI

I stared at the advancing policemen blankly. It has been over fifteen years since I had the boys in blue visit my house. That was back in 1997 after a young girl was killed in an inexplicable, and still unsolved murder, only a street away from where I had been living for many years, and where - in the aftermath of my own horrific divorce - my friend and partner in crime Graham Inglis spent much of his time. Being by far the weirdest and most non–conformist people in the little red brick estate, as well as the only single men, we were obviously going to be suspects. We were both quite happy to give DNA samples, having absolutely nothing to hide, but as we were questioned in some considerable detail about our activities that weekend, as said activities had involved Olympic levels of substance abuse, and a mildly debauched party, we were not particularly willing to share too many details with the rozzers.

But we were innocent. We knew that we were innocent, and eventually - despite my suspicions that the Birmingham Six, and the Guildford Four were just about to be joined by The Exwick Two - we were eliminated from the enquiry, and although it took me two years to get back the Gurkha kukri that I had hanging on my wall, we essentially left the affair without a stain on our characters.

But on this occasion what on earth could I have possibly done. I kept the implacable look of injured justice on my face as I struggled to stay calm, wracking my brains to try and think what the hell I could have done wrong! "Yes, Officer. can I help you?" I said in the grimly patrician manner that has saved my bollocks from the fire on many occasions, and which even now seems to alert the plods to the fact that - contrary to appearances - they were not dealing with some crusty traveller, but an old fashioned English Gentleman.

However, on this occasion, the boys in blue looked singularly unimpressed as they surveyed the piles of mildly esoteric bric-a-brac which lay heaped in piles across my tiny study. Their companion in the black overcoat, whom I was rapidly beginning to suspect was more than plain CID, if only because that acronym stands for Criminal Investigation Department, and I honestly couldn't think of anything even vaguely criminal for which I could have been pulled up.

He looked at me with steely grey eyes.  "I believe that you know a man called Daniel Miles," he said.

I slumped into my battered office chair. "What the fuck has he done NOW?" I asked.

I could see a flicker of humour pass for a fraction of an instant across his countenance. But it vanished almost immediately. "I don't think that there is any need for language like that, Sir", he replied, but I took a deep breath and said. "This is my house, and I will use any language I see fit here, officer. I will not be antagonistic and aggressive, but I am damned if I will temper my vocabulary to suit the sensibilities of an uninvited visitor. Now either arrest me, or sit down and we will discuss the matter like gentlemen..."

And much to my amazement, my high-handed attitude actually worked, and as he made no move to arrest me, I gestured to him to sit down. "I am afraid that I don't have enough chairs in here for your colleagues...", I started to say, but the ice was broken. He told the two uniformed policemen to go outside and sit in the car, and acquiesced like a lamb when I asked them to park up by the church rather than annoying my neighbours by blocking the lane outside.

They left. Graham was still hovering in the background, and I dispatched him for coffee and whisky. Much to my surprise the plainclothes policeman, who I suspected by now was almost certainly Special Branch, graciously accepted both. I didn't bother to ask him whether he was OK with me smoking, and lit one up anyway.

"You haven't answered my question," I said, sounding far more confident than I was feeling. "What the hell has that idiot Danny Miles done now?"

The policeman made himself comfortable and adjusted himself in his seat. "The trouble is, sir, that we don't know. We were hoping that you would be able to tell us."

I looked at him in silence. I would love to say that at this point I raised one eyebrow quizzically, but although my wife, my adopted nephew Max, and even my mother-in-law, can do this undoubtedly impressive facial contortion, I can do nothing of the sort. So I just scowled at him, and asked another question, although this time I was pretty sure that I knew the answer. "Why me?"

He had the good grace to look mildly embarrassed. "Well, sir, you have helped us with our enquiries on previous occasions..."

I snorted. "And I am sure that your records will have told you that I was found to be entirely blameless on each of those occasions," I barked angrily, because - unlike most citizens of this sceptre'd isle - I have attracted the attention of the security forces on at least three occasions over the past twenty years.

The first took place during the last year of the John Major administration, when the Conservative Government was reliant on the capricious and stormy political friendship of the Ulster Unionists to stay in power, and was getting more and more concerned that anti-government interests from Britain and Ireland would team up to try and bring the government to its knees.

Well it so happened that in the spring of 1995 I had a telephone call from a very drunk ex-Royal Marine sergeant who claimed to have been in charge of one of the detachments of Royal Marines, who, ten years earlier, had been hunting The Beast of Exmoor. He claimed that they had shot a big black cat, but as they had been on private land without permission they had buried the body and vowed to say nothing about it. However, because my informant was down on his luck he was prepared to take me to the body...for a consideration.

I was sceptical, especially when, in an attempt to establish his bona fides, he told me (in confidence) that he had been part of a detachment of Marines acting as bodyguards to the then Princess of Wales as she visited her "Fancy Man" in rural Devon. This was months before the relationship between Princess Diana and James Hewitt became public knowledge. I had discussed the claims about the Beast of Exmoor in writing and on local radio, and because I had vaguely known Hewitt when we were both schoolboys (he was an egregious little shit even then) the increasingly paranoid Conservative administration decided that I was obviously trying to destabilise the royal family, and - according to several sources, especially On the trail of the saucer spies, UFOs and Government Surveillance by my friend Nick Redfern - my phone line was tapped for several months.

A couple of years later, the taps were renewed when circumstantial evidence suggested that I was an IRA sympathiser (I wasn't but had friends who were) and even appeared in a drunken photograph taken at a gig by an Irish republican rock band, in An Poblacht. But again, the taps were removed eventually.

Most recently, in 2012, I shot a video for the title track of Merrell Fankhauser's Area 51 Suite. I'm rather proud of this. Not only is it the first pop video that I have directed which didn't feature either me, my band, or some mate of mine screaming avant garde nonsense, but I almost got arrested by Special Branch whilst making it. Although Area 51 is in Nevada, it was filmed in North Cornwall outside GCHQ, because of their impressive satellite dishes.

Worryingly for the state of the nation's security, the base security forces noticed the fat hippy with an expensive camera but failed to notice to relatively small teenagers (one dressed in an alien mask) and a large, bumbling dog with impressive jowls. The police were very nice to me when we spoke on the telephone, and I am pretty sure that I have avoided being sent to some secret interrogation facility on Diego Garcia, as they seemed to believe everything I said (which was good, considering that it was the pure and unadulterated truth).

So, I have attracted the nation of Britain's guardians of law and order on at least three occasions, and as I have written and spoken widely about my negative view of both the British and American governments (check out my book Island of Paradise for the really damning stuff) I am not at all surprised that I have a file on me, and that it remains open. But Danny? He is just an irritating small town conman, and - if I may steal Tim Good's phrase - of no defence significance whatsoever.

I said as much to the man from Special Branch, who was sitting back comfortably sipping my whisky. He looked at me quizzically for a few moments before saying. "But in your writings, Mr Downes, you have intimated that Mr Miles is quite capable of running a cult. Indeed, I believe he did so at one time, and you were a member." He picked up his attache case and got out a copy of my 2004 biography, in which I described some rather disturbing events during the autumn of 1981, when I was busy opening the doors of perception by the use of psilocybin, and Danny was playing mind games with the more gullible members of the North Devon alternative community.

He turned to the relevant chapter and read out loud:

I can't remember whose idea it was, but at the end of October someone suggested that we should follow in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda and indulge in a group psychedelic experience out of doors. The idea was to somehow contact the spirit of the sacred mushroom on the psychic plane, although it has to be admitted that most of those present (including me) thought of it more as a groovy and rather daring Halloween party. I was really looking forward to it until I discovered that in his wisdom Danny had decided to hold this experiment on Abbotsham Cliffs. In many ways this made a lot of sense. If there actually was a sacred mushroom spirit, it stood to reason that he would reside amongst the more tangible proofs of his existence, and as already stated, at the time at least, the best magic mushrooms in the area grew at Abbotsham Cliffs.

   

I was a little uneasy. Although ten years had passed and I had tried to put the matter out of my mind I had never entirely forgotten the events of June 1972. But, I rationalised wildly displaying a capacity for self-delusion that was remarkable even by my standards. That had been in the woodlands several miles along the cliffs. And it had been in summer. And we had been looking for the werewolf. This time we were engaged on a mystical quest for the spirit of the sacred mushroom. It was obvious that nothing nasty could possibly happen.

   

On Halloween night, seven or eight of us camped out on the flat land just behind Abbotsham Cliffs. There were three girls and four or five guys, all dressed in the punk styles that were then de rigeur. Cheerfully, we parked our cars in the lay-by, and in the late afternoon sunshine t was a cheerful party that walked the half-mile or so along the footpath to the cliffs. Although it was the end of October it was surprisingly warm, and the two elderly sheep grazing on the scrubland by the cliffs gave the place a delightfully bucolic air.

   

We built a large bonfire and as the final rays of the setting sun disappeared into the Bristol Channel, Danny, in his self appointed role of showman and shaman, came around and dispensed what he described as his “funky communion.” It was a potent mixture of gin, mushroom tea, peyote and LSD and was the precursor to one of the most horrific nights of my life. It was a night that I shall certainly never forget, and which I seriously suspect will be permanently etched on the psyches of everyone involved.

   

The evening started pleasantly enough, because although the chemical mixture that we had ingested was incredibly powerful, the mixture of the pleasantly sylvan surroundings, and what we hadn't yet learned to call “chill out” music issuing from what we hadn't yet learned to call a “ghetto blaster” kept everyone in a mellow and happy state of mind.

   

Danny started to read aloud from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and then began to recite Aleister Crowley's Hymn to Pan. None of us realised at the time, but Danny was (knowingly or unknowingly) manipulating the situation like a master. Although everyone was hallucinating heavily by this time, the three girls in particular seemed heavily affected and, encouraged by Danny, started to behave in a most uncharacteristic manner.

Despite their Mohicans and studiously torn clothes they were actually very reserved young ladies on the whole; but coaxed by Danny they started to become very affectionate and sensual. They danced rhythmically to the music and kissed and stroked each other, the guys in the group (including me) and particularly Danny.

   

One plump girl called “Sarah” [not her real name because I see her around Exeter sometimes, and she is now an eminently respectable, professional lady] who boasted the particularly unpleasant punk soubriquet of “Scab” even started to undress and dance semi-naked in the firelight.

   

It would be easy for me to pretend that some sort of totally far out hippy orgy then ensued, but it didn't. Most of the people who were there were too drunk, too stoned, and far too tripped out to perform sexually. I know I was, but again under coaxing from Danny, “Scab” and one of the guys coupled - I won't say `made love` because there was no love, emotion or tenderness - just animal rutting in the firelight as Danny chanted lines from Crowley and the rest of us looked on giggling inanely and waving our hands about to the rhythmic beat of the music.

   

Eventually everyone passed out, and that was when the fear came.

   

I have spent more of my life than I like to admit in alternate states of consciousness. Once upon a time I believed it was because I was exploring a genuinely alternative route to spiritual self-empowerment. 

Nowadays I believe that all that is rubbish. If there is such a thing as an interventionist God, and for me personally the jury is still out on that one, I am sure that he or she would not wish the objects of his/her creation to perform acts of supplication by poisoning themselves. Although the concept of trying to second guess a deity is a pretty dodgy one, the theories of trying to reach nirvana through substance abuse is a pretty dodgy one. I haven't taken psychedelics since that terrible night in 1981. These days when I go to a different place it is usually with alcohol, or prescribed tranquillisers and occasionally with the fruit of the poppy. And these days, when I take drugs it isn't to reach some magickal and non-existent nirvana - it is purely and simply to blot out the fear.

   

I am convinced that the fear first came to me on All Hallow's Eve 1981.

The policeman looked at me in silence for a few moments before continuing...

"We have received information that Mr Miles is involved with another cult of young people in North Devon, and this time the casualties are likely to be far more than just three elderly sheep. What do you know about it?"

I replied fairly honestly. I agreed with the policeman that the events taking place in the dank forests on the Cornwall/Devon border were both sinister and worrying. But as far as I could see the police were barking completely up the wring tree.

"Have you heard a song called 'Black Flags Rising'?" he asked, taking me completely aback.

I nodded that I had.

"We believe that this is a reference to the black flags flown by Islamist insurgents in the Middle East..." And he looked terribly shocked when I burst out laughing.

"Danny a radical Muslim? Nonsense..." I spluttered, and tried to explain that the black flags in the song were a reference either to Saruman's banners in Lord of the Rings, the Anarchist black flag, or to this line from a famous Irish rebel song...

"The black flag they hoisted, the cruel deed was over,

Gone was a man who loved Ireland so well,

There was many a sad heart in Dublin that morning,

When they murdered James Connolly, the Irish Rebel"

But this was all obviously too much for my unwelcome visitor, who obviously had no idea what on earth I was talking about.

"So you are saying that they are Irish Muslim anarchists, then sir?"

And I had to spend the next ten minutes trying to explain to the bloody man that I meant nothing of the sort, and that I was a seriously disabled music journalist and zoologist who spent his time breeding tropical fish and raising money for animal welfare projects, and that I was not the new Lord Haw Haw apologist for a band of fundamentalist Irish Muslims, and that I knew next to nothing about what Danny was doing and cared less.

Of course, I wasn't being entirely truthful. I knew more than I was admitting, but the more I thought about it the more I worried about the safety of poor Panne.  Truthfully I didn't care what happened to Danny, Mr Loxodonta, Lynnette or any of the others, and suspected that the world would quite possibly be a better place without them.

But I was not prepared to be the agent of their destruction if it also meant the destruction of a sweet little goatgod from the woods who had done nothing more to me than ask for my help and eat my wife's chocolate.

So I obfuscated, bluffed and carried out all the tricks of verbal prestidigitation that I knew how to do.

I knew that the policeman knew that I was hiding something, and I knew that he knew that I knew he did. But, thankfully,  even in our crumbling democracy, I knew that I was safe from being arrested on suspicion of treason, just yet, and so I continued to lie, and the policeman continued to probe until we both got tired of the charade and he went home, and I went upstairs to join Corinna and the dogs in bed.

However, unusually for me, I lay awake for hours with a million and one things going round my head. But by the time I finally went to sleep, just as the pale fingers of dawn were tracing filigree patterns across the early morning sky, I knew exactly what to do next.

I would have to do exactly what I had been told back in Norwich. I would have to go and see Britannia.