II

This is the busiest time of my year. In mid August each year I promote the CFZ Weird Weekend, and a motley mix of scientists, academics and oddball researchers descend upon North Devon. I have had quite a lot of problems with this year’s event due to some intransigence and internal politics on the behalf of the local community centre where we have held the event for the past eight years. On top of that, I have been having some serious problems with some of my associates who have been running me ragged and robbing me blind, and so as a result of the stress and my ridiculous work levels, I have been keeping very strange hours. Often I am awake all night and only get too bed for fitful sleep at round about dawn, and so it was on the night that I had my latest strange visitors.

Corinna and Mother had gone to bed, and I was sitting in my study working on an article about yellow legged tortoiseshells. It is possibly symbolic of the strange times in which we are living that at the time that I write this we are undergoing an interesting invasion from Eastern Europe.

In 1953 a single specimen of an eastern European butterfly called the Scarce or Yellow Legged Tortoiseshell was caught in Kent. Another specimen was found dead in the Shetlands in November last year. But now, following a huge invasion of western Europe, they have turned up in some numbers in eastern England. There is now speculation that they might breed here.

I said to Corinna that as my stepdaughter Olivia lives in Norfolk she should give the forthcoming baby the middle name of Xanthomelas in honour of this extraordinary invasion, and she just looked at me with barely disguised disdain.

I am a fairly heavy drinker, and I was sitting typing with Archie the Jack Russell asleep on my lap, and a bottle of cheap bourbon by my side. I was also listening to the first solo album by Damon Albarn, which is my favourite record of the year so far and I was fairly deeply engrossed in what I was doing, so I didn’t hear the door open. I just looked up and there was Danny Miles grinning at me knowingly. He was accompanied by a slight figure in a long black hooded robe, with the hood pulled down so I couldn’t see its face.

“’Lo Jon” he said. I grunted in reply. I was not in the mood for dealing with any more of his bullshit. I was enjoying the music and the whisky and was engrossed in my task, and didn’t want to hear any more of his nonsense about demi-Gods performing hiphop. “What do you want?” I grunted rudely.

“There’s someone I want you to meet”, he said. “Say hello to Panne”, and the robed figure spoke to me shyly in the voice of a young teenage girl, “Hello Jon”.

I was still unimpressed. “Look man” I said to him, rudely ignoring his companion. “I don’t wanna be rude to either of you, but I am not in the mood for this. I have got lots of work to do, and I don’t want to be distracted… by anyone”.

Danny looked at me smugly. “I know that you found the story that I told you hard to believe, so I thought that I should try and convince you”. He gestured to his companion. “Take your robe off Panne”.

She did as he asked, and with horror I saw that she was wearing nothing underneath it.

I am nearly 40 years too old to be having naked teenage girls in my rooms, and I reacted with horror! I have told you before how I have never liked or trusted Danny Miles, and how he was already attempting to blackmail me into helping him with his insane schemes. Back in the late 1990s, after my divorce from Alison, I was having an affair with a married woman who was not only notorious in her own right, but was then married to a well known and very influential businessman in the computer games industry. Danny had already intimated that he would make this affair public, if I did not help him with his project.

What he didn’t know was that not only did Corrina - my second wife - know all about it, but that the lady in question was now divorced from her influential husband and married to someone else. We still send each other Christmas greetings on Facebook and occasionally swap Leonard Cohen bootlegs, but that is the extent of our relationship these days.

They say that when you are close to death your entire life passes before your eyes in slow motion, and as Corinna and I nearly died in a car crash on the M25 about seven years ago, I can confirm that this is actually true. As I stared at the naked figure before me, exactly the same thing happened. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Danny had decided to take advantage of the current socio-political situation following the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile and the conviction a few weeks back of Rolf Harris; he had brought a naked girl into my study in order to attempt to blackmail me further. It is exactly the sort of thing that the bastard would have done. Then I realised something: the person before me was indeed unclothed, and had the slight figure of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl. But she was covered in silky brown fur, she had two cloven hooves where she should have had feet, and two – rather cute, I have to admit – tiny horns peeking out from the curly hair on her forehead.

Then my inner zoologist kicked in, and I noted – clinically – that she (I still thought of her as female) had no external secondary sexual characteristics, and that the shape of her face, shoulders and forearms were such that whatever she was….she was certainly not human.

“Fuck!” I said, and took a deep swig from my whisky and coke.