VIII

“An Elephant???”

I looked at him feigning shock and awe (if I can borrow a term). In fact I was nowhere near as overawed as I had pretended, because I had already got quite emotionally involves with a strange lost little goat person from (presumably) those very same woods and if those woods could produce Panne, the idea of a half man, half elephant in a wheelchair was no real paradigm shift.

I have never been a very convincing liar, and I am a terrible actor, so instead of carrying on pretending to be shocked and awed, I lit yet another cigarette, made a mental note to light a candle to St Bernardino of Siena who is not only the Patron Saint of lung problems, but looks - in a painting by Jacopo Bellini from about 1450 - more than a little like Andy, the current lead guitarist with The Pink Fairies who is a vague chum of mine, and asked:

“So what did you do then?”

“Give me one of those fucking things..” he gestured towards my rapidly depleting pack of B&H.

Now I was shocked. I have known Danny for about a third of a century. Not only have I never seen him smoke, but he has always been vehemently annoying in his opposition to the habit.

I passed him a cigarette, lit it for him, and whilst he coughed and spluttered, I made encouraging noises and tried to get him to continue with his story.

“He looked at me for what seemed like hours, but was probably less than a minute, and asked ‘Give me one good reason why I should not kill you immediately?’”

He dragged on the cigarette, which despite everything seemed to be calming him down, and continued…

“Well, although I am sure that he knew perfectly well what I had really wanted from the two girls, I couldn’t really admit that, so I told him that I was a music journalist who was incredibly impressed by the music that the two girls had played me, and wanted to know more”….

This seemed to have been the right answer. At least, the bestial elephantman had not smote him down immediately, so sensing his tactical advantage, Danny gabbled on. He was involved with a community record company which was being set up, he lied, and both with that and with his unique relationship with the editor of Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine he wanted to get involved and help bring this remarkable music to a wider audience than it had at the moment.

As the audience to which he was referring was presently about thirty runaway teenage cultists living in surprisingly Spartan conditions in the middle of the woods, this quest would not be a difficult one to fulfil.

Both his “involvement with a community record company which was being set up” and his “unique relationship with the editor of Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine” were of course down to the fact that he had known me, and been an on-off thorn in my side for over thirty years.

“But we are nowhere near being Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine”, I blustered, but for once Danny seemed sure of his facts.

“Back in February the BBC quoted: ‘The NME website gets 1.4m users per week, while the digital edition of the magazine sells 1,307 copies a week, and thousands of people attend NME live events and concert tours’.” He said proudly, and looked me in the eye with the face of someone who is particularly proud of his own cleverness.

“Well yeah, we do get more readers than that most weeks”, I admitted, “but you are nothing at all to do with the magazine, and while I am editor you won’t be…”

“Details, details” he spluttered, and continued with his story…

“For some reason the elephant man whose name was – by the way – Mr Loxodonta – seemed quite impressed by all this bullshit of mine, and I began to think that I might be able to get away with it all, and live to fight another day”.

One of Danny’s most annoying characteristics has always been to talk in clichés, but I let him get away with it, as he continued his story.

“So I bullshitted like I have never bullshitted before” he said proudly, “and you know how I can bullshit!”

He looked at me as if this was an accomplishment of which he should be justly proud. In my opinion it probably isn’t, but I smiled wanly at him and nodded for him to continue…

“So I told Mr Loxodonta that what he needed was a Business Plan, and how he needed to market his cult for all that it was worth”

This was probably true. Cult leader Charles Manson has been in prison since 1969, but his records are still remarkably popular despite the fact that they are bloody awful and that the only USP that they have is that they sound mildly disturbing only because of what and who he is.

Danny continued:

“I gave him all sorts of ideas, and promised to come up with a cogent business plan and some ideas for how to market this stuff. It helps, I think, that unlike most music made by cults and cultists, this music is really pretty damn good”

I nodded, actually truthfully being able to agree with him for once. The music truly is pretty damn good.

“He asked me if I would like to be their publicity officer. I didn’t answer but thought really hard. Then I remembered your mate Mick Farren who died last year. He was the head honcho of the UK White Panthers, so I decided to steal one of his ideas.

‘No man; I told him. ‘ I want to be your Minister for Information’”.

Apparently this struck some kind of chord with Mr Loxodonta who nodded as enthusiastically as a half man half elephant sat in a wheelchair can do. It seems that on the numerous occasions in the past thirty years that Danny has stayed in my spare room or wherever has doubled as my ever-growing personal library has borne fruit…for him at least. Because I am a ridiculously voracious bibliophile, some would say packrat, and despite regular pruning and weeding sessions I still have over 5000 books on a variety of subjects including Forteana, magick (of various hues), politics (also of various hues), music and animals.

It turned out that over the years Danny had read a lot of these books, and had cherrypicked information that he was now regurgitating to Mr Loxodonta like a mother pigeon feeding her offspring.

Thinking completely off the cuff in a stream of consiousnesss way that I have to admit that I grudgingly respected, he took the idea of regular ‘Communiques’ delivered anonymously to various media outlets from The Angry Brigade (an anarchist group active in London during the mid-1970s), the idea of Art Terrorism from The Situationist Movement (with a hint of Banksy), more odds and ends from Mick Farren and the leader of the American White Panthers John Sinclair, and then wrapped the whole thing into a business model based on Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s conceptual band The Gorillaz..

“Their records are fucking great man, but they are cartoon characters and everyone knows that. What if you had progressive hip hop – I’m not gonna call it fucking ‘Urban’ cos its not fucking ‘Urban’ – made by actual double A class fucking Gods! Gods that have real powers and should scare you shitless! Gods that can smite you to dust! Can you think of a better fucking incentive to buy their record?”

I have to admit, that much though I abhor his method of speech, and the way that he said ‘Fuck’ more and more often as he became more excited, and the fact that all the best bits of this were things that I should have come up with myself years ago, he had a point.

Then it seemed things really started to happen. Mr Loxodonta made it known that he was in favour of these plans and that he wanted Danny to go away and think about these suggestions and come back with some cogent plans. He was given a telephone number to ring next time he wanted to get in touch, the bin bag was put over his head (gently this time) and he was (also gently) put back into the trunk of his car and driven back to a layby a few hundred yards from the A39.

It was the huge and (if you didn’t know that he was actually a pussy cat – I knew him back when he was called Jeremy, and I wondered whether he still collected stamps) terrifying figure of Skullfuck, who lifted him out of the boot of his car, dusted him down and helped him into the driver’s seat.

“You’ve been lucky today” he said, and strode back into the forest as Danny took a deep breath and continued his journey back up the A39 towards the link road, the M5 and his long-time boyfriend Basil in the Somerset Levels.

VII

I don't know how many of you have ever been kidnapped at knifepoint by a beautiful girl over thirty years younger than you, whom you had been hoping to seduce, had a bin bag unceremoniously plonked on your head, been bundled at gunpoint into the boot of your own car by pre-teen terrorists wearing pig masks, and driven lickety-split down a bumpy country road. I certainly haven't, so any comments that I make upon the subject have to be purely conjectural. However, this is exactly what Danny Miles claimed had happened to him, one morning in late autumn when he sat in my office looking scared to death. Although he tried to make light of it, the experience had obviously terrified him, and even the process of reliving this all was difficult and cathartic for him.

I have never been particularly good at writing speech down, and in this particular case Danny, who is usually self-assuredly voluble, was nothing of the sort. He muttered and stuttered, slurred his words and kept on stopping in the middle of sentences and even in the middle of words, upon which I had to gently prompt him into continuing. The only time in my life that I have ever found myself interviewing somebody who was as neurotically reticent as this before was way back in the autumn of 1995 when my first wife and I interviewed a young man to whom I later gave the nom de guerre of 'Gavin' who had (five or six years before) had an encounter with the "thing" (as Ivan T Sanderson would have called it) that is generally referred to as The Owlman of Mawnan. He had been suffering from a sort of short term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder brought on - or so I surmised - by the trauma of having to re-live, under questioning, one of the nastiest and most emotionally horrific experiences of his young life. I recognised the same, or at least very similar, symptoms in Danny, and - whilst his story was so bizarre, as to be bordering on the unbelievable - I was sure that Danny, at least, believed the absolute truth of what he was telling me.

The car trundled on down the bumpy road, and eventually turned off into something even more bumpy which Danny surmised was some kind of cart track, and after about twenty minutes (or so he estimated) the car shuddered to a halt. The doors opened, and Danny could hear the sound of muffled voices and laughter, but remained locked in the boot for what seemed like an eternity. "Then I fell asleep" he muttered shamefacedly. "Under the circumstances I know that it seems insane, but I was very tired and whatever reserves of strength I had, just ran out!"

His sleep was rudely awakened minutes or hours later, when the boot of his Astra opened suddenly and, still with the bin bag over his head, he was pulled out of the car to his feet. His captors roughly jerked the bin bag off his head, and - although the sudden influx of bright daylight was almost too much to bear - he did his best to take in as much of his surroundings as he could, and found (not altogether to his surprise) that his car was parked on a rough cart track which was entering a small woodland clearing. Around the sides of the clearing, half-hidden by trees, were some large khaki tents of the sort that are usually advertised in Army Surplus stores as 6-8 berth, and a number of young people were wandering around. They were all wearing pig masks, and some were clutching guns.

Over to his left was an open fronted marquee, again khaki canvas, and shrouded in camouflage netting. Inside was a long trestle table, and sat at the table were more young people, all wearing rubber pig masks tapping away industriously at laptops. Danny opened his mouth to speak but Sable kicked him hard in the shin and told him to shut up. They led him a little way into the deep wood, where there was a canvas chair. Roughly they sat him down, and Sable and Araminta turned and left. Without a backwards glance they were gone.

Danny was left alone with the two children, still silent as the grave, still wearing rubber pig masks and still carrying what appeared to be AK47s which were far too big for them.

You could almost feel sorry for Danny at this point. With more than the usual human capacity for self-delusion, he had managed to convince himself that the two girls he had picked up hitchhiking along the A39 were going to take him to a paradise full of bare-breasted flower children living in squalor. What he actually found was something akin to a neat and tidy military encampment full of fully clothed children brandishing guns, and engaged on some complex computer-related activity. He had hoped for free love and drugs, and had blundered into a nightmare full of paramilitary pig children with guns.

A tall dark figure strode through the wood towards him. Long haired, leather-jacketed and booted, he was well over six foot tall, and - according to Danny - had the musculature, gait and bearing of a gorilla. Now, gorillas are peaceful, gentle, knuckle walkers and mostly vegetarian, but rather than remonstrate with Danny about his pitiful lack of knowledge of the physiology of the higher primates, I let this one be, and assumed that the person who was swaggering towards them up the woodland path towards them was completely human. Anyway, I had my suspicions about whom he might turn out to be.

As he got closer, Danny could see that he was an enormous biker, bare-chested under his leather jacket, and with a distinctive tattoo of a skull with a wreath of roses across its cranium on his barrel chest. My suspicions were confirmed. I didn't think that there could be many people in the Westcountry with the unlovely soubriquet of 'Skullfuck', and this bloke only had the name because I had given it to him.

Thirty plus years ago, when I was a Student Nurse at the Royal Westcountry Hospital in South Devon, and living at the nurses’ home at an old, tumbledown, and rather beautiful art deco house called Staplake, in Starcross, I used to drink at a pub called The Dolphin Inn in the neighbouring village of Kenton. It was a nice little pub, and I used to drink there because I could happily chat away to the landlord about tropical fish, politics and all sorts of other things that have always amused and interested me. For some reason that I have never understood, Kenton has always been home to a sizeable biker community, and - over the years - I became friends with some of them.

A bloke called Pete, mildly hippyish and a bit of a Jack the Lad also drunk there, and one night he invited me and a bevy of the local bikers back to his flat for 'a drink and a smoke' which invariably meant cider and Afghan black. We all tumbled into my car, and I drove unsteadily (because I had ingested five or six pints already, and had originally planned to spend the night in my car in the pub car park). We drove up a windy lane, and we could see the way before us illuminated in the moonlight. Driving across a little humpbacked bridge which crossed a silvery stream, which babbled in the moonlight, we headed up a hill, and at the peak of the hill was an enormous Gothic mansion which appeared out of the darkness like something out of the 1963 film of The Haunting. "This is it," said Pete cheerfully, and directed us to a small car park by a side entrance.

It turned out that the mansion was owned by his grandfather, and that Pete was in charge of having it converted to luxury flats. However, the process was scheduled to take at least another three years, and in the meantime, Pete was quite happy to play at being Lord of the Manor. He led us in through the side entrance where we found the sort of hippy crash pad that I have seen on innumerable occasions over the years. If you can imagine a spacious but grubby area containing (in no particular order) a poster of Che Guevara, another of Jimi Hendrix as painted by Martin Sharp, several cardboard boxes containing (in total) several thousand LPs in dog eared covers, makeshift bookshelves made from planks and bricks and containing a selection of the de rigueur hippy tomes like The Lord of the Rings, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, some joss sticks burning in plant pots, two well fed and indignant looking tabby cats, and dozens of unwashed mugs and plates. The atmosphere smelt mildly of cat pee, masked partially by the smell of incense and stale hashish, and I immediately felt at home.

The two bikers turned out to be working with Pete, whilst simultaneously signing on. They were brothers, and the youngest was contemplating getting his first tattoo. At the time both Pete and I were very much into The Grateful Dead, and he rummaged through his grubby LP collection and got out a copy of the band's self named album from 1971. The cover is iconic.

"The skull and roses design was composed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, who added lettering and color, respectively, to a black and white drawing by Edmund Joseph Sullivan. Sullivan's drawing was an illustration for a 1913 edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Earlier antecedents include the custom of exhibiting the relic skulls of Christian martyrs decorated with roses on their feast days. The rose is an attribute of Saint Valentine who according to one legend was martyred by decapitation. Accordingly, in Rome, at the church dedicated to him, the observance of his feast day included the display of his skull surrounded by roses. This was discontinued in the late 1960s when Valentine was removed from the Roman Catholic canon along with other legendary saints whose lives and deeds could not be confirmed. Kelley and Mouse's design originally appeared on a poster for the September 16 and 17, 1966 Dead shows at the Avalon Ballroom. Later it was used as the cover for the album Grateful Dead. The album is sometimes referred to as Skull and Roses (or Bertha)."

Another name for the album is 'Skullfuck' (a vulgar term for oral sex), and it is a matter of record that the band wanted this unlovely moniker for the album, but that their record company put their foot down and (quite sensibly) refused. "Why don't you have this for your tattoo?" Pete suggested. having ingested far more alcohol and hashish than was wise, I was slurring my words massively when I muttered, "If he does, he is gonna have to change his name to 'Skullfuck'!" He did get the tattoo, and the nickname that I gave him whilst trying to be clever and showing off my exemplary knowledge of Bay Area psychedelic rock music stuck. With this new revelation from Danny it seemed that, thirty something years later it was still sticking.

Now, when I was living at Staplake, during the time immediately before I got engaged to Alison who I married in 1985 and stayed with for the next eleven years, Skullfuck and Pete were reasonably regular visitors, as was Danny, but it seemed that they had never met, or if they had, Danny was (as usual) been so wrapped up in his own self-importance that he had no memory of anyone who didn't actually impinge into his own peculiarly insular little world.

I decided that on this occasion that discretion would prove to be the better part of valour. I had no idea where this peculiar journey was going to end up taking us.

But I didn't trust Danny further than I could throw him, and Skullfuck and I had shared quite a bit of history for a few years following our first meeting, and I would like to think that if our paths crossed again, that he would be kindly disposed towards me.

So I kept my council, and asked Danny what happened next.

"Well, he didn't seem very clever," said Danny sneeringly at me. I knew Danny's sad history and said nothing. "He kept on asking me who I was, and what I was doing there. And as I thought that it wouldn't be a very good idea to admit that I had only been interested in the two chicks, I told him that it was because of the music. And it seemed as if that was exactly the right thing to say," he said.

One of the big buzz words of our early 21st Century social economy is 'Identity Theft', and Danny didn't bat an eyelid as he brazenly explained how and why he had proceeded to steal MY identity.

He wasn't even slightly apologetic as he explained how he told Skullfuck how impressed he had been with the music that the girls had played him in the pub. How he, himself had worked in the music business for many years, and could tell a hit record when he heard one, and how he wanted to help make these people stars!

The trouble is, that none of this was true. Apart from a few years as a male escort in the early 1980s around the time that I first met him, he had never worked as anything. He had never been employed in any industry, having led a charmed life drifting from one disaster to another, and leaving debts wherever he trod. I, however, much against my better judgment had never actually turned him away in the third of a century that I had known him, and had worked intermittently on the fringes of the music industry for many years. Currently I am editing a weekly online music magazine and doing the odd bit of contract work for my old mate Rob Ayling at Gonzo Multimedia, and am in the process of starting up my own community orientated record company together with a mate called Martin Eve.

Although we hadn't seen each other for years, Danny had kept vague tabs on how my life had been progressing, and as he got more enthusiastic talking to Skullfuck, he stole more and more of my personal back story and made it his own. He explained how he had got unique powers and skills as a polemicist, a publicist and a student of rock and roll history, and if anyone could manipulate the 21st Century media into making this unique band of musicians into stars, it was him.

“What were they called, by the way?”

“Xtul,” grunted Skullfuck.

I gulped; my past was really coming back to haunt me this time.

I believe that in the current vernacular, what Danny was doing is known as 'Social Engineering', - the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. A type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or system access, it differs from a traditional "con" in that it is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme. He soon engineered the situation to one where he was asking the questions and the poor hapless biker before him was not only giving Danny the answers, but was treating him like an honoured guest rather than a prisoner, and Danny was soon manipulating the poor fool into doing exactly what he wanted.

Skullfuck told Danny much the same as the two girls had some hours early. This woodland was the home for a group of people who were trying to save the earth, and who lived together as 'The Children of the Three'. He confirmed that 'The Three' were Gods who had come to change the world forever. But he added two other pieces to the jigsaw. The two girls had been sent out specifically to find someone with a car, use their womanly whiles to fascinate the driver, and bring him back to the wood. They were then supposed to kill him and steal the car, but things hadn't quite worked out that way.

Danny was so shocked, not only by his recent brush with death but at quite how badly he had misjudged the situation, that he didn't really take the second bit of information on board. The three members of Xtul, the people responsible for some of the most amazing music he had ever heard, were the Gods themselves.
"I didn't believe for one moment that these people were Gods. They were just people who were better at social engineering than me, and had better computer skills than I had," he blustered, going on to tell me that for the first time he not only thought that he was going to get out of there alive, but that he felt he could "make a few quid" out of the situation. So he struck while his figurative iron was hot. By rights he should have been buried in a shallow grave deep in the woods with a bullet in the back of his head. But he had turned the tables on his captors through his own extreme cleverness, and it was Danny that was now calling the shots.

"I want to meet one of the Gods," Danny demanded, and by this time poor Skullfuck was so confused that he was regarding Danny as a cross between Brian Epstein and that irritating bloke with the smug smile on Pop Idol, and nodded his consent. Motioning to the two pig headed children with guns that they were no longer needed, he escorted Danny deep into the woods where a small log cabin had been built. "Come In!" Thundered a voice from inside, and Danny went in.

"And you are not going to fucking believe this man,” he said. "In that cabin deep in the woods was a man in a wheelchair. He was wearing a neat and obviously expensive dark grey suit. And wait for this......he had the head of a fucking elephant on his shoulders!"

VI

i looked at Danny aghast, and not for the first time in the thirty three years that I have known, and been infuriated by the bloody man, I realised quite how shallow he has always been. the motivating factors in his life have always been sex, money and power over people weaker than himself. I don't think that I have ever disliked him quite s much as I did then. I gulped at some more coffee, lit another cigarette and asked him to continue.

of course he started to talk about the two nubile young hitchhikers again, but I managed to head him off that subject with some difficulty, and tried to find out some more about these peculiar people who wee living as a family out in the deep woods. "Of course I didn't believe that these three people were Gods, they had to be just ordinary people who were better at social manipulation than the people who followed them. Its amazing what a few conjuring tricks and some masks will do to impress a bunch of stoned homeless hippies" he blustered, and for a moment I actually believed him.

"At least that is what I thought at first" he admitted, looking surprisingly shamefaced. "I found out a bit more later and was forced to change my mind, but at that stage I just wanted to get closer to the girls, if y'know what I mean", and once again he winked at me in a horrid manner and became the sleazy cocksman that I have learned to despise for all those years.

Realising that Danny's thoughts were once again verging towards the carnal, and wanting to find out what the hell this was all about, whilst still being only too aware that I had a long and difficult day ahead of me, and Danny's tomfoolery was just going to compound the problems i had to face. So I did my best to bring him back on track without actually grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and banging his head repeatedly against the wall. I am nit a violent man, but I am afraid that Danny Miles brings out the worst in me.

Back at The Westcountry Inn, Danny had apparently told the two girls, whose names - he informed me - were Sable and Araminta, that he wanted to meet the other members of what they described as 'The Children of The Three' and asked whether this could be arranged. Araminta, slightly nervously made a phone call on her mobile, and spoke to someone called 'Skullfuck' who she later described as the Sergeant at Arms. i pricked up my ears at this; back in my mis-spent youth, soon after I Had met Danny for the first time, I knew a biker in the South Devon village of Kenton with just this unlovely soubriquet. Surely there couldn't be that many people called 'Skullfuck' living in the Westcountry. Realising that if this was indeed someone that I used to know then I had an ace up my sleeve that Danny might not know about. Many years of dealing with the bloody man has taught me that when dealing with Danny Miles one needs as many cards in one's deck as possible, so I filed the information away for future reference, took another drag on Messrs Benson And Hedges's finest, and asked Danny to continue.

About half an hour later, Araminta's phone rang, and she muttered a conversation whilst making the odd furtive sideways glances at Danny, and giggling nervously. then, when the call was over, she lent over to Sable and whispered in her er. The two girls squealed delightedly, and dragged Danny to his feet. They danced around him, showering him with kisses as they did so, and then delightedly pulled him out into the car park to his car.

Danny asked me whether I knew the area at all. Of course I did. back in 1978 my father taught me to drive along these very lanes, nd long the min rod which led from Clovelly down to Bude. In more recent years I had explored quite a few of these back lanes at night with Corinna and one of our students, who was doing a project about the nocturnal fauna of this part of Devon, but although we were dutifully logging the badgers and foxes that we saw, we were really hoping that we would have an encounter with one if the big cats that are more and more commonly reported in the region.

I explained this to Danny, and he told me how the two girls, by now twitching with almost palpable excitement had instructed him to drive back in the direction of Kilkhampton for a few miles, until they came cross. Blind turning on the left. They drove down this little lane, and were now surrounded by the tall grey green pine trees of the Forestry Commission. Showing admirable restraint and far more common sense than I was used to from him, Danny was only driving at about twenty five miles per hour down what my Father used to describe as a 'Devon Dual Carraigeway', an unkempt road with grass growing down the centre leaving a separate 'carriageway' for each wheel. this was a good thing, because suddenly two dark figures stepped out of the undergrowth about twenty feet in front of the car, the two girls screamed "Stop!!!" In unison, and Danny slammed his foot on the brake, and they screeched to a halt, and Sable, who was in the back seat behind him, giggled manically, produced a hunting knife from up her sleeve, and held it to his throat.

The two figures who had stepped out of the bushes in front of them approached the car, and Danny saw to his horror that they were wearing grubby black dungarees, their faces were covered by realistic rubber pig masks, and they were carrying what looked suspiciously like semi automatic rifles which seemed far too big for them. It was only then that Danny realised that by their stature they could not have been more than ten or eleven years old.

Danny was frogmarched out of the car, a black bin bag was put over his head, one of the pig children took the keys from the ignition, opened the boot of the car and his four captors unceremoniously bundled Danny into it, slamming it shut a few centimetres above his head.

"Bloody Hell" I said, whilst - for the first time in about thirty years - actually feeling mildly sorry for Danny Miles.

VB

Whatever I did after that it would be an anti-climax, so I polished off the brandy and Archie and I trotted off to bed to join Corinna and Prudence (Corinna being my wife and Prudence being a large, ungainly animal whose antecedents included bulldog and boxer, and who looks more than a little like a pygmy hippo). The excitement and the brandy proved too much for me and I was asleep within minutes, dreaming of a normal world, where normal things happened and I was not privy to the complex emotional history of a strange half human Godling who had ventured out of the deep woods in search of chocolate.

The next day I awoke with a mild hangover and got on with my daily business. The events of the evening before had been so strange, that I really didn’t feel able to talk about them with anyone, not even my wife, so when Danny Miles burst into my office in a state of what I believe the authoresses of historical ‘bodice ripping’ dramas would call ‘High Dudgeon’ I was not best pleased. As anyone who has read these memoirs so far will probably realise, I am not best pleased when Danny Miles turns up in my life at the best of times, but when he burst in through the door, yammering at the top of his voice and waving his arms about, before I had even finished my breakfast, and when my second cup of coffee had not yet dispelled the faint fronds of a hangover, it was really beyond the pale.

“What the fuck do you want?” I asked grumpily.

“What have you done with Panne?” he screamed at me with panic in his eyes.

I have learned quite a few lessons in diplomacy over the years, and I decided that it would be best if I adopted a position of what I believe the security services call ‘plausible deniability’.

“I haven’t done anything with her. What the hell are you talking about?”

“She has disappeared” he said, ashen faced, “and all hell has broken loose”.

Much against my better judgement I sat him down, entreated my darling Mother-in-law who was carrying out her own arcane morning activities with a dustpan and brush to make me another cup of coffee and give Danny one as well, and as I blithely ignored my vague resolution not to smoke in the mornings, I lit a cigarette and did my best to try and find out what on earth this was all about.

Danny was not the most articulate of people at the best of times. His strengths lay in getting people to do stuff for him whilst he took a load of drugs and played the part of some metaphysical Mr Fixit. In all the years that I have known him I have never before seen him in a state of panic, but when one considers the derivation of the word, somehow this seemed quite appropriate.

“The word panic derives from the Greek πανικός, "pertaining to shepherd god Pan", who took amusement from frightening herds of goats and sheep into sudden bursts of uncontrollable fear. The ancient Greeks credited the battle of Marathon's victory to Pan, using his name for the frenzied, frantic fear exhibited by the fleeing enemy soldiers.”

Slowly I got the story out of him. Although he has been portraying himself as Xtul’s Minister for Information, he is basically nothing of the sort. This didn’t surprise me overmuch. It has been many years since I was actually impressed by anything that Danny Miles said or did.

He was actually a fairly lowly go-between who had no real idea of who the three members of Xtul actually was, let alone their true nature, where they actually came from, or what they were doing.

He had got involved with them by accident, and – following his usual modus operandi – was just exploiting the situation as best he could in an entirely opportunist manner.

He was even cagier than usual about how he had got involved with them, but from what I could gather, at some point at the end of last year he had been driving up from Cornwall to visit his old friend and sometime lover Basil at his home which was in a hut deep in the Somerset Levels.

He picked up two girls who were hitchhiking along the A39 in torrential rain. Knowing him as well as I unfortunately do, I am sure that his motivation was purely venal, but whether his intentions we consummated or not he did not reveal, and I really didn't care. He was quite prepared to go off on some pulchritudinous tangent, describing how the two girls were "soaked to the skin, leaving little to the imagination" but I did my best to shit him up, and return him to the matter at hand.

It turns out that the unlikely trio stopped off at the Westcountry Inn for lunch, and according to his description, they were all over him "like a rash", considering him as "their hero" for having rescued them from the torrential downpour. I hate to admit, however that I doubted it. Whereas it is an indisputable fact that when he was younger, Danny had some indefinable magic which seemed to appeal across the board to young women who fell for his peacock prettiness, his silks and satins, and his air of debauched elegance. But he was a third of a century older, and whilst time has not been particularly kind to me, I have no pretensions as to being any kind of Love Machine, being quite happy in my self-imposed exile as some kind of middle aged hippy academic, with a wife, a mother-in-law, two stepdaughters, an infant granddaughter, two houses, mortgage and a couple of dogs.

Danny, however, was about five years younger than me, and had attained his half century unencumbered by responsibility, and still seemed to be trying to attain some personal Nirvana via the medium of casual sex and substance abuse. Now, I will admit that this was exactly what I was doing about seventeen years ago, but this phase only lasted a few years with me, in the aftemath of my particularly unpleasant divorce, and was over by the time I was about a decade younger than Danny is now. With the benefit of hindsight (good old hindsight) I can see that this was not a particularly dignified way for me to spend my time, but in my defence, I was only in my late thirties, and my life had just - very spectacularly – fallen apart. Danny (by now in his early fifties) sported a 'smart casual' haircut of the sort which looked tacky back in the late 1980s and merely looked ridiculous now. His rapidly greying hair was far thinner than he was prepared to accept, and his clothes were whatever the male equivalent of 'mutton dressed as lamb' is.

Although Danny had only one, mildly unsavoury motive in mind, he did his best to worm himself into the confidence if these two hapless young women, so he attempted to feign some sort of interest in their lives. And so when they told him that they were hitch-hiking across the country in order to meet up with the rest of their so-called 'Spiritual Family' who lived in a community where clothes and guns were optional, somewhere deep in the woods somewhere in North Devon, he suddenly started to show interest.

I have known Danny for a long time, but have always been ware of the unfortunate fact that he has had somewhat of a Charles Manson fixation ever since I have known him. This is something that I can understand, because back when I was about eighteen I had one too. It was the summer of 1978 and due to a concatenation of unfortunate incidents I found myself living with my cousin Pené and her first husband, in a house owned by the Devon and Cornwall Police in Plymouth.

That summer the Manson biopic Helter Skelter was shown for the first (only?) time on British TV and I was completely blown away. I was eighteen, unemployable, sexually confused, and completely lost, and I suddenly found something that appealed to me. Despite the fact that Manson and all of his main followers were (and still are) incarcerated or dead didn't put me off. The idea of an unruly tribe of social malcontents living a life of dune buggies, drugs and nudity in the sunshine of California's Death Valley, was completely irresistible to me.

Amusingly, the very next day after watching the second part of the film on BBC2,I was in Plymouth City Centre looking for a job. Well, I was supposed to be looking for a job. After having dutifully paid a visit to the Job centre, to find there was neither anything there that I wanted to do, or - if I am gonna be completely honest bout it - nothing available that I was able to do, I was wandering bout the City Centre with £1.50 in my pocket, trying to decide whether I was going to go to the pub, or have something to eat, when a smartly dressed young man approached me. "Do you want to turn your life around?" he asked.

Irritated, and assuming that he was trying to sell me some sort of religious experience, I turned round to him, and was just about to tell him to "fuck off" when I saw that he was accompanied by. Girl who looked just like Sadie Mae Glutz. She was massively beautiful, and underneath her semi transparent blouse she was not wearing a bra.

"Do you want to eat?" He asked. I was insanely hungry, and hoping that he was not speaking metaphorically, I nodded in the affirmative, whilst doing my best not to ogle the Susan Atkins lookalike.

"Susan Denise Atkins (May 7, 1948 – September 24, 2009) was a convicted American murderer who was a member of the "Manson family", led by Charles Manson. Manson and his followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in California, over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969.

Known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz or Sexy Sadie, Atkins was convicted for her participation in eight of these killings, including the most notorious, the "Tate/LaBianca" murders. She was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to life in prison. Incarcerated from October 1, 1969 until her death – a period exactly one week short of 40 years – Atkins was the longest incarcerated female inmate in the California penal system, having been denied parole 18 times"


The two peculiar young people took me for a long walk into the suburbs where they ushered me into an unimpressive suburban house where I found about fifteen young people, all attractive(ish) and all eating lentil stew. “This is Brother Jonathan” my new friend announced and the assembled company rose to greet me.

My introduction to the world of living in a cult was not a success. I cant remember whether they were The Moonies or The Scientologists, but they were very earnest and talked a lot about meditation and abstinence, when all I wanted to know was where the guns were. At e the meal I started to drop heavy hints about drug fuelled orgies, and was peremptorily shown the door

All this was a long time ago. I was young and psychotic at the time, and was so well balanced that I had a chip on both shoulders. I felt that I had been treated appalingly badly by 'straight' society, and that there must be something better out there. To a horny, unbalanced, and socially challenged teenager the idea of a love and terror cult had certain irrisistible qualities, although I doubt whether I would have enjoyed it much if I had actually joined one. A. Ore probable out ome is that I would have irritated the leadership of the cult as much as I did those 'straights' that I despised so much, and wouldprobably have ended up in an unmarked shallow grave somewhere on Dartmoor. But even thirty six years later I could understand why Danny had found the stories that his two nubile hitchhikers had told him so irresistible.

"So what happened then?" I asked with interest, momentarily forgetting that Danny was a near psychopathic nuisance who had commited the unforgiveable sin. Of bursting into my study before I had finished my breakfast, read my post, and perused my daily dose of Bad Machinery which, as my family knows, is an almost capital crime in my eyes

From what Danny told me, the Amusing irony about how the events of that rainy late autumn lunchtime transpired was that he had taken them into The Westcountry Inn planning to spend as little money as possible and seduce one or both of them. What actually happened was that he ended up maxing out his credit card on an exceedingly expensive lunch for three, and being seduced - both intellectually and emotionally - by his two young companions.

They told him how the three leaders of the group ("although we don't eeally have leaders y'know man, but they are Gods so we have to do what they tell us, especially Mr Loxodonta") had bought a piece of woodland in the middle of the deep woods. I knew from my own experience that there are quite a few online agencies which sell land like this which cannot be built on, and - indeed - I have often toyed with Idea of buying a lot myself in order to manage it as a nature reserve, and have a little bit of England to which I could retreat whenever the real world got too irritating.

The three leaders then, apparently, brought their divine powers into play and did something that would be difficult for a mere mortal, but not impossible, as Danny pointed out especially if one was an experienced computer hacker. Apparently they had paid a visit to the London offices of the Land Registry, and done something to their computer records, so as to all intents and purposes their ten acre parcel of trees no longer existed, and as it was surrounded by deep and tangled fir plantations, which had been planted in the early years of the 20th Century, just before, and during the early part of WW1, before Lord Lovat had become the first Chairman of the nascent Forestry Commission, and the owner had been killed at Pascendale where he drowned in a sea of mud, nobody actually knew who it was that owned the forest, so the trees could never be cut down. So this unruly band of raggle taggle gypsies lived safely impregnable on a remote slice of land that was untraceable by any normal, and most abnormal processes.

Here the three gods lived in seclusion with their ever growing band of neo flower children. They spent their days making music and lying around doing nothing very much. The two girls suspected that the three gods had some mysterious purpose in mind, but they didn't know what it was. And they certainly made music. They had some on a MP3 player.

"It was really good" said Danny.

"And when I heard about the cult family, and listened to the music some more, and looked at the two girls, I thought, 'I want a bit of that'"

And he leered at me in a most unsavoury manner and winked at me conspiratorially.

A PAVILLION AT HAWKMOOR HOSPITAL