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!"