V

Anyone who has ever been in truly excruciating pain without the benefit of analgesics will know what I mean when I say that for a few seconds after Panne’s horns rested upon my forehead I felt a brief lightning flash of electric blue pain, and then momentarily lost consciousness, but then – a few moments later – I woke up, and I was in the last place that I could ever have expected.

I was standing outside the main ward block of Hawkmoor Hospital, just outside Bovey Tracey, and it appeared to be sometime in the mid 1970s.

Now, this is where it gets weird. I like to pride myself on being a reasonably good writer, but here – quite literally – words fail me. I have always been mildly irritated when I read a novel in which a passage like this appears, but quite truly I cannot find words in the English language for what happened to me next.

As anyone who has read my inky fingered scribblings here and elsewhere will be aware, that over the years my central nervous system has not been a stranger to chemical stimulation. I am not one of these people who struts around the place figuratively wearing a T Shirt saying “I take Drugs Me” any more than I go around proclaiming my taste for sex, curry, alcohol, or the books of Robert Heinlein, but I have – at various times in my life – indulged in various drugs. Those days are largely over, but I remember the experiences vividly, and none of them were anything like this. I took psychedelic drugs (LSD and magic mushrooms) for a few months over thirty years ago, and have not touched them since, but even in the depths of my most profound excursions through the doors of perception I always knew what I was experiencing were hallucinations. What I experienced the other night was completely real!

The nearest analogy that I can give is what happened to me about seven years ago when Corinna and I were involved in a serious car crash when I was driving our new Jaguar on the M25 and a car jack-knifed into us after being hit by a lorry and we spiralled out of control. For a few moments, as I desperately remembered what my father had taught me when I was learning to drive, I tried to right the car, but we hurtled into the crash barriers in the middle of the motorway and I truly thought that we were both about to die. During those moments I felt remarkably calm, but my life did flash before my eyes, or at least selected scenes from it did. And this was what was happening now, Except that it wasn’t my life. It was someone else’s.

Peculiarly, however, bits of my own experience were interspersed within the narrative, which was more like a cross between a particularly lucid dream and watching a film in 3D except without those stupid cardboard glasses that always make my nose itch. Initially I panicked, but unlike when I thought that my wife and I were about to die in a tangled maelstrom of flesh and bone on the M25, I knew that there was nothing I could do about it, and so I decided to treat the experience as if I was watching a film. So, with the slight figure of a woodland godling bending over me with his/her horns pushed against my forehead, I sat back in my chair, reached for my brandy, and decided to see what happened. As I did so, Archie jumped onto my lap, burrowed his way under my blanket and went to sleep.

Hawkmoor Hospital was opened in 1913 as part of a national programme to build hospitals and sanatoriums for the treatment of tuberculosis. It became part of the NHS in 1948, but within a few years was well on its way to being redundant as new antibiotic treatments made TB as a widespread disease in Britain largely a thing of the past. It then slowly became used as a unit for residential care of long term Mentally Handicapped adults, which is what it was when I went there a few times during the summer of 1984. Its days were already numbered; the Thatcherite programme of ‘Care in the Community’ which was doomed to failure because – on the whole – the community not only didn’t care, but didn’t give a fuck, and the hospital was already scheduled for closure.

At the time I was a Student Nurse working towards my RHMH qualification, and I was doing a placement with the Torbay Mental Health Community Team, who were pivotally involved with the management of the hospital during its final years. According to the Internet, by 1984 there were over a hundred patients living there, but I don’t think I ever saw more than a couple of dozen – severely mentally and physically disabled, sat in a row of wheelchairs in a room reeking of pine disinfectant positioned in front of a TV with the volume off for hours on end.

I found the whole place really upsetting and said so, which did not make me popular with the Community Charge Nurse in charge of my education at the time, so I was dismissed peremptorily, and told to make myself scarce. This I did, and I spent the next hour or so exploring what had once been a charming period sanatorium straight out of the pages of Agatha Christie. One could easily imagine Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings furtively sneaking about the place, avoiding the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli and searching for clues.

At the top of the hill was a handsome, but horridly run down, building which had once been some kind of pavilion. Much to my surprise, whilst pootling around on the internet while I was supposed to be working on something else, I found a photograph of the building in an article on Hawkmoor Hospital in one of the pdf magazines published by the Devon Historical Society. I remember it as being bigger, longer and more magnificent, both from my memories of my visits there thirty tears ago when it was used as a storeroom for broken and unserviceable hospital equipment and my experience of the other night, but it is certainly the same building, and mildly reminiscent of the Cricket Pavilion back at my rather shabby provincial alma mater. And just like the aforementioned Cricket Pavilion, when I went snooping around it back in 1984 it was showed every evidence of being used regularly by the locals as a place to indulge in sexual fumblings and smoke cigarettes.

The other night, however, I saw it restored to full function, with patients in wheelchairs enjoying themselves in the sun, and nurses in crisp blue uniforms bustling around with busy looks on their faces. Various people in mufti were also to be seen doing their own inimitable thing, and from the haircuts and footwear I would hazard a guess that the year was sometime post Ziggy and pre-Sex Pistols, approximately 1975.

Although I assumed that I was seeing the spectacle through Panne’s eyes, I saw a small girl on a tricycle with a teddy bear riding pillion. She was pootling up and down the path outside the front of the pavilion and as none of the other people who were obviously either resident or working there were paying her any attention it appeared as if this personable little girl with the bright pink dress and the teddy bear was an accepted part of the landscape.

This intrigued me. Even in the early 1980s when I first started working for the NHS, the once proud beacon of democracy, and – arguably – the only good thing to result from the Second World War was crumbling beneath the weight of bureaucracy and administration, and although it was many years before the Health and Safety Executive started to make this country impossible to live in, small children were not allowed to play unsupervised in the grounds of psychiatric institutions.

This intrigued me. I had to be seeing this little girl for some reason. What could it be? By an effort of will I discovered that I could change my vantage point and ‘follow’ her along the path as she happily rode her tricycle, and carried out a long) and presumably one sided) chuntering conversation with her teddy bear. So I followed her as best I could trying to find out who she was and what she was doing there. I had by suspicions about the former, but the latter was a complete enigma.

Strangely the fact that I was sitting in my armchair, underneath a blanket, cuddling a very cowed Jack Russell and swilling brandy like it was going out of fashion with the horns of a naked and hairy half goat half androgynous human pressed to my forehead didn’t phase me anything like as much as the fact that there was a small child playing happily forty years in the past in the middle of a residential hospital.

I zoomed in on the child and realised, not really to my surprise, that the little girl was Panne. Or rather she was part of what would eventually become Panne at some time in the future. I opened my mouth to speak but although brandy was perfectly able to go in, words seemed unable to come out. It was like one of those dreams when you try so hard to speak or shout, but find yourself unexpectedly and inexplicably mute.

So I tried to “think” the question. Maybe I could communicate with Panne in another way. And suddenly the scene changed again. Changed completely. And this time it was another devastating surprise. Because although I was still at Hawkmoor, but this time I was looking at a 24 year old version of myself. And I was completely alone.

I was reliving the events of the summer of 1984 when I was exploring the semi-deserted grounds of the hospital after having annoyed my supervisor so much that I had been cut loose to fend for myself for an afternoon rather than spending it attending a series of dull, but informative meetings to gain brownie points towards my nursing qualification.

However, here I have to say that I only have the vaguest memory of actually going to Hawkmoor Hospital at the time. Nothing important happened during my visit and it did not therefore impinge on my memory at all. So I am not sure whether what happened next actually happened at the time in 1984, or only happened to be in ur-space the other night, or whether these events had any objective reality at all.

The law forbidding staff in NHS institutions from smoking on the premises had yet to be brought in, but I was aware that I had already blotted my copybook more than I should have done, and as I wanted nothing more than to sit down, have a cigarette and read my dog-eared copy of The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein, I found myself furtively exploring the rear of what I had begun to think of as The Pavilion. The ground was littered with cigarette ends and as I approached, two surprisingly able-bodied looking patients each wearing the shameful stigmata of pre-frontal leucotomy shuffled away embarrassedly, adjusting their clothing as they did so. This was not a very wholesome place to be, but I continued my walk. I came to a pair of big French Windows, and looked in to see a pile of battered hospital beds, some Bristol Maid medication trolleys that had passed their best, and – in a corner – a battered red child’s tricycle and a dusty teddy bear.

I gasped. Panne pulled away from me with a start, and Archie started to bark. I was back in the present day, and sat alone in my armchair, there was no sign of Panne, and only a chocolate wrapper on the carpet gave any hint that (s)he had ever been there at all.

IV

I got another one of Danny Miles’ stupid bloody “communiqués” in my e-post this morning, and it irritated me so much that I decided that I really had to break silence.

There is a well-known syndrome in both fact and fiction that someone to whom strange and inexplicable things happens refuses to tell anyone because they didn’t want to appear to be losing their sanity. This doesn’t apply to me. No-one has ever considered me to be sane, nor have I ever pretended that I was. All sorts of strange things have happened to me throughout my life, and I have usually written about them. The only reason that I have not been doing so over the events of the past few weeks, is that I don’t care. I have far more important things going on in my life at the moment than Danny Miles and his damn fool attempts at being a Black Panther, and even the fact that a strange Halfling from the depths of the forest has taken to visiting me in the middle of the night in search of chocolate pales into insignificance in comparison with my main concern of the moment. A few weeks ago I became a Grandfather for the first time, and the doings of the rest of the omniverse really do not matter a damn in comparison with that.

So I have been doing my best to emulate a proverbial ostrich; I have been sticking my head in the sand and ignoring everything else while I try to grok the biggest and most momentous thing ever to have happened to me.

I have never made any secret of the fact that I am bipolar. I am also not that far away from being a Paranoid Schizophrenic, and I also have a fair parcel of neuroses and personality disorders sprinkled here and there as well. Physically I am a fairly uncontrolled diabetic, I have a heart condition, arthritis and a number of other things wrong with me. I am also overweight, drink heavily, smoke more cigarettes than I admit to my doctor and occasionally partake in more exotic diversions, so both my physical and mental condition is pretty ropey.

I have tried to kill myself, twice. The last time was fifteen years ago and I don’t think I shall try and do it again. Russell Hoban described it best in Turtle Diary:

“It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide. I had been thinking of it right enough, often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in the back of my mind. But I’d never do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. no place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the laundrette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of what I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy…”

Over the last decade and a half I have acquired an ever expanding extended family, and the main reason that I don’t think that I will try and kill myself again is because of them, and especially because of my wife whom I love very much indeed. But the thought of it is always huddled like Hoban’s sick ape at the back of my consciousness, and I have never much cared whether I lived or died, as long as my departure from this world is not as unpleasant, painful; and undignified as most people’s seems to be. That is why I still drink, smoke and do other things potentially injurious to my health. Because my particular sick ape tells me that it won’t really make much difference whether I do or I don’t. But now things have changed. I have a reason to live. I want to see my granddaughter Evelyn grow up.

This is the biggest change in my mindset for decades, and I am trying to get my head around it, which is why Danny Miles’ damn fool nonsense has not really made much of an impact on me over the past few weeks. However, now I begin to think of it, the events of the past few weeks really do need to be written down whilst they are still fresh in my head.

The night that Panne turned up in my sitting room was the beginning of it all. (S)he had come through two locked doors without disturbing either of my dogs. Archie, the smallest and most volatile of them had been sitting on my lap as I vaguely scratched his tummy whist reading, listening to music and vaguely worrying about the journey to Norfolk which we would be undertaking a week or so later to be there for when Olivia gave birth.

The fact that even when (s)he appeared before us, Archie didn’t rush about excitedly, barking like a mad thing, but lay respectfully at her feet and silent as the grave was weird enough, but it was his/her completely banal request for chocolate that floored me. I smiled at him/her and went into the Dining Room which doubles as my wife’s office and broke about six squares of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut off a big bar that I knew that she had secreted next to her scanner. I went to the Court Cupboard that Lady Christine Hamlyn had given to my Grandmother as a Christening present back in 1898, and grabbed a bottle of brandy, the cheapest that Asda could provide, that I had bought at the supermarket the previous day, and went back into the Sitting Room.

Panne was still there; motionless and silent, with Archie supine at his/her feet. I passed her the chunk that I had pinched from my wife’s chocolate bar, and poured myself an enormous brandy and coke, lit myself a cigarette and wondered what I was going to do next.

I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that there was what appeared to be a naked Godling covered with hair standing in front of me eating my wife’s chocolate. I remembered Mr Beaver’s advice from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe:

“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

But I didn’t have a hatchet. Or rather I did – it was in the fireplace awaiting its task of cutting up kindling if the winter of 2014-5 is cold enough to warrant more log fires than we needed last winter. But Panne was between me and the fireplace, and my mobility is so severely impaired these days, that even had I wanted to I wouldn’t have been able to outfox her and get to the fireplace in time and grab it. And even if I had wanted to I wouldn’t have done it. I instinctively knew that Panne was good, or at the least morally neutral, and – even if I had been in possession of my hatchet – I was never going to use it to attack a creature that appeared to be a very sweet, slim fifteen year-old girl, albeit one covered in hair, with cloven hooves on her feet, and cute horns curling out of her forehead.

So I took a drag on my cigarette, gulped down a huge mouthful of brandy and diet coke, took a deep breath, and – for the first time – summoned enough courage up, and spoke to her.

“You know who I am, Panne. But who are you?”

Time seemed to stand still. She looked straight at me, and I gazed into her deep yellow eyes with the caprine vertical pupil, as she stared back at me in silence.

Then she slowly stepped towards me and – even more slowly – bent down towards me. For a few moments I stared back in horror, thinking that she was going to kiss me. I was still very aware that she may have been covered in hair, and may have had hooves and horns and the amber coloured eyes of a wild goat, but still in part appeared to be a naked teenage girl, and furthermore one who was (in some arcane way) allied to Danny Miles, who I have known for well over thirty years, and wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him.

I started to protest, but she put one finger over her lips in the internationally recognised symbol for silence, bent nearer and rested her two horns on my forehead.

Then everything changed forever.