XII

Corinna and I were still in bed at about 8:30 on Monday morning when the telephone rang. It was my younger stepdaughter Olivia who had just gone into labour. We leapt out of bed, rousted Mother out of the library where she has been living for the past year or so, and grabbed our bags. The news was hardly unexpected; what I believe is called her 'due date' had been on the previous day, so our bags were packed and we were literally ready to leave at a few minutes notice. Our old Vauxhall Astra which we had bought for seven hundred quid at the beginning of the year was ok for trundling around the lanes of North Devon in, but we didn't like the idea o trusting it to a journey of something in excess of 800 miles, so we had booked a hire car for the week, and were able to travel up to Norwich in relative comfort.

We shouted to Graham, telling him to look after the animals, and left the house in a rush. This was to be our first Grandchild, and I was terrified. I think that Corinna was not far off it, and I have no idea what mental state poor Oliia was in. So it was nit the most pleasant drive that I have ever undertaken, and the fact that I couldn't smoke in the car, and that we were too much in a hurry to get to our destination to be able to indulge in the luxury of pitstops that weren't absolutely necessary, made it even less enjoyable.

I cannot remember who it was that said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but I was a nurse about thirty years ago. I wasn't even a proper nurse, but one who specialised in the care of at were then called the Mentally Handicapped, and so the only thing that I knew about obstetrics was what happened when things went horribly wrong. Even then my knowledge was thirty years out of date and half forgotten. Being prone to paranoia (my consultant psychiatrist once intimated that I was really only a short way away from paranoid schizophrenia) I was fearing the worst, and had managed to work myself up into what my dear, late, mother would no doubt have described as a 'right tizzy'. However, knowing that Corinna was likely to be in a worse one (Olivia and her unborn baby being flesh of her flesh, after all), I kept schtum, and as always when I keep schtum I need something to distract me and stop me going stark staring mad.

I had my iPad with me. I have always been slightly scathing of the sort of people who are always accompanied by their trusty tablet computer, but since getting an iPad free with Corinna's new phone last summer, I am embarrassed to say that I have become on of those people, and so - to keep my mind off the horrors which I had convinced myself were waiting for us - I played continual games of Tetris, and that other game when you have to match up brightly coloured jewels. But then, a considerable way up the M5, at Michael Wood services just north of Bristol, something peculiar started to happen.

I had actually forgotten all about Panne in our haste to leave. After all (s)he was just another of the shades and phantasms who inhabit my little slice of Gramaraye, and I have lived with them on and off since I was eleven, and before that I lived in Hong Kong,which may be commonly seen as the biggest outpouring of unbridled capitalism outside Las Vegas, but when I was a child was still the land of living ghosts and fox fairies, and as far as I know still is. OK Panne is the only one of my spectral co-inhabitants to eat chocolate (as far as I am aware) but (s)he seems harmless enough, and - as far as you can trust a hairy forest Godling to do anything - I trusted Panne not to do anything untoward or destructive. However, Panne was the only member of the other-realm to ever come to me for help, even in such an abstract way as (s)he did, and I felt mildly guilty at having left her alone without saying goodbye.

I have a set of runes on my iPad. i was taught about runecraft by a very wise woman many years ago, and so, as we drove up north of Bristol on the M5 I did a little runeworking in my head to apologise to Panne for having left her in the lurch, then the overwhelming worry of the day came back to the front of my consciousness, and I quickly forgot about the little Godling.

However, when we pulled into the Michael Wood services something very peculiar happened. I have been interested in British butterflies since the mid 1960s, and I have seen most species. However, I have never seen a brown hairstreak. This is one of the last of the British butterflies to emerge, being on the wing in July, August and early September. This is the largest hairstreak found in the British Isles. It is a local species that lives in self-contained colonies that breed in the same area year after year. This species can also prove elusive, since it spends much of its time resting and basking high up in tall shrubs and trees. The female is particularly beautiful, with forewings that contain large orange patches, and was once considered to be a separate species known as the "Golden Hairstreak". This species is found in the southern half of England and Wales, and also around the Burren in Ireland. In England its strongholds are in West Sussex, Surrey, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, North Devon and South Devon. Strongholds in Wales are in Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire. In Ireland it is primarily found in the Burren limestones of Clare and South-east Galway. The northernmost sites are found in North Lincolnshire.

As far as I have been able to ascertain there are no known colonies in Gloucestershire. Also, for the species to still be on the wing in the middle of September would be extraordinarily unlikely, even with the deviant weather patterns which global warming has thrust upon us. But there, fluttering about a flowering bush by the edge if the car park at Michael Wood services was a pristine male specimen of Thecla betulae. I emailed a brief account of it to Adrian at the Bug Alert website, although privately I would not have been surprised if no-one apart from Mother and I had seen it. Mother has the innocence that comes with advanced age, and I was pretty well convinced that our encounter with this pretty little forest butterfly as nothing more than a gift and a message from a pretty little Forest Godling to let me know that (s)he quite understood why I had gone away without letting her know, and that she would keep a beneficent eye on the dogs, cats, birds and other animals who share my (and now Panne's) abode.

Uplifted though I was, I could not shake off my inherent paranoia that something horrible was about to happen. And the further we got away from home the stronger these feelings became. It was almost as if we were all under Panne's protection, but that the geographical area of that protection was limited. Of course, part of this was that the further we carried on driving, the longer Olivia had been in labour, and the nearer to the moment of truth we were getting. And weird things were beginning to happen as well.

As far as I had been aware, Xtul consisted of three beings of indeterminate origin living with a coterie of young followers, and a retired biker in an isolated stretch of woodland on the North Devon/Cornwall border. And as far as i was aware, the only conduits that Xtul had with the outside world were me and that insufferable arse Danny Miles. So, how then was the band's name, and - more chillingly - slogans associated with them spraypainted on various of the concrete bridges traversing the M5, the M42 and the M6. Slogans like "Black Flags Rising" which I knew was the name they had chosen for their debut album (some of which I had even mixed) when it finally came out. because Mother is well int her mid eighties we had to stop off more often than we probably would have done otherwise, and every time we stopped off at a Motorway Services and I was suddenly within range of WiFi coverage again, than I began to get some disjointed and rather unpleasant IMs through on my iPad.

These were particularly disturbing because I didn't believe that they were coming from Danny Miles. Aft out heart to heart about ten days before he had explained to me in fairly precise detail how he had fed Mr Loxodonta with a complex farrago of bits and bobs of Charles Manson, John Sinclair and the Process Church of the Final Judgement in order to come up with a disparate mishmash of pseudopsychic psychobabble that would sound impressive, but which actually signified absolutely nothing.

Then the messages started to come through even when we were on the road and apparently not within range of any wifi network whatsoever. "No Sense Makes Sense" said one oft repeated message, "From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment" read another. "Pain's not bad, it's good. It teaches you things. I understand that", and over and over again "dying is easy". I knew that these were all quotes from Charlie Manson, but who was sending them to me and why.

About half way between Coventry and the end of the M6 there is a motorway services whose name I can never remember, and as soon as we pulled in, I made a mumbled excuse and disappeared in search of a telephone box. I telephoned Danny, and as soon as he answered, screamed down the phone at him: "What the fuck do you think you are doing to me you arsehole! My stepdaughter is about to have a baby, and your tomfoolery is the last thing that I need!!

Danny sounded shocked, and asked me what I was talking about in a very plausible manner. i told him about the messages that I was receiving every few minutes on my iPad, and the slogans that were appearing with ever increasing frequency on the concrete motorway bridges that we drive beneath.

There was a stunned silence on the other end of the line. "C'mon Danny. Fucking say something. What the fuck is going on." I asked. there was a nudge in my ribs. I turned round to see a middle aged Matron in a Salvation Army uniform staring at me and prodding me below my ribcage. "Is there any need for language like that?"

I looked back at her blankly. "Yes, madam, I think that there probably is" I said.

XI

My father was a strange man; quick to condemn, and very much shut inside a world of his own making. But as I get older, I realise that the same could be said of us all. My teens were spent listening to rock music, drinking beer and smoking cannabis,whereas his were spent drinking gin and being torpedoed by German U Boats. Such things do - I imagine - tend to fuck up one's outlook on life.

But my father was remarkably judgemental. I remember him claiming that a clip from The Muppet Show of Miss Piggy singing a duet with Kris Kristofferson on 'Help me make it through the night' was promoting bestiality, how Alvin Stardust was a communist (I never did get that one), and how Mott the Hoople's 'Roll Away the Stone' was somehow mocking the resurrection of Our Lord, when the stone was rolled away from his tomb on the first Easter Sunday. Stuff like that sounds ridiculous to modem ears, but I am sure that some of the things that I say in front of my young relatives sound just as irritatingly archaic to their ears.

However, despite being a judgemental old sod, my father was at hear a decent and a Godly man. Every Christmas, when I was a boy in Hong Kong, he would open our doors to a motley collection of people who wee the dispossessed of the Colonial Service, and always contacted the Captain of any American or British warships then currently moored in Hong Kong harbour and invited a couple of their most junior ratings to spend Christmas Day with us, always specifying that it should be the ones who had left home most recently, and were therefore bound to be homesick, and most likely to appreciate someone else's home and hearth for the day.

We cordially disliked each other for much of our lives, but became friends during the last eight months of his life, and when he died I was sitting by his bedside holding his hand. I know that he came to terms with much of what I do, and how I have elected to spend my life during those last months, but I am equally sure that he would have strongly disapproved of much of what I do these days. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that despite having been a devout churchman all his life, he would probably have approved of my burgeoning relationship with Panne.

For over the next few weeks, Panne seemed to have taken up residence in the aquarium supplies cupboard in the corner of my office. A few days after her arrival I beckoned her out into the garden, and carried out a little ceremony which I first learned about in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. It took place right at the beginning of the book when Dan and Una, two Edwardian children first met Puck the hedge goblin. Puck carried out a little piece of ancient magick called seizin...

'It's an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seized of your land—it didn't really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.' He held out the turves, and continued...

'Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,' began Puck, in a sing-song voice. 'By right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.'

When Corinna first moved into my house in North Devon nearly eight years ago, we had a few problems with the less tangible inhabitants of the property. We had a few problems with some of the tangible ones as well, but that is another story entirely. There has been a house where we live since the original grant of the manor about fifteen hundred years ago, and historians have told me how the cottages along Back Street (which marked the back line of the Manor grounds) were built to house the workmen who built the Manor, the pub and the church (not necessarily in that order), and so we are one of the oldest inhabited locations in the area. Whatever you believe about the nature of ghosts, I am convinced that they exist. One cannot live in Myrtle Cottage for too long without encountering them.

However, my mother had died in 2002, and it was five years before the next Mrs Downes arrived, and I made the unforgivable error of not introducing Corinna to the ghosts, so one night at Christmas, about eighteen months after she had first moved in, by which time the poltergeist activity in the house and various other bits of bad shit that I won't go into here had become almost unbearable.

So, I took Corinna and the broadsword that I bought her for her fiftieth birthday out into the garden and performed a rite of seizin with her, granting her the right to come and go anywhere she wanted upon my property without let or hindrance, and essentially telling the ghosts who already lived here that she was now the co-owner of a third of an acre of damp rural England, containing a lot if trees and a tumbledown cottage. It must have worked, because she has had no problem since, and the other shit that was bedevilling us has largely got better.

So I did something similar with Panne. As my Mother would have said, I felt "in my water" that (s)he was a creature whose intentions were good (if I may paraphrase Eric Burdon) and I felt mildly guilty that she seemed to have confined herself voluntarily to one small cupboard in the corner of my office. So I formally gave her permission to come and go as she wished, and to wander over my little estate and do what she wanted there as long as she caused no damage or hurt to anyone or anything living here. She, not the be smiled at me shyly, and then slunk away into the trees at the other side of the circular lawn, which is the only one of the formal lawns which has survived the transition between my Father's tenure here and my own.

There have always been ghosts in my house. There is a tall lady wearing a long grey dress who has occasionally been seen walking along the path which runs from my office door to the back door. the nomenclature here causes a fair amount of confusion because we don't actually have a proper front door. My mother believed for some reason that having a front door which opened out onto the street was vulgar, and so my father blocked it up. The Grey Lady, as both my Father and I have dubbed her, seems oblivious to our existence, as does the man in the tall hat who is seen in the landing and the little boy who sometimes sits in the doorway between the sitting room (I refuse to follow in my mother's footsteps and call it a Drawing Room) and what used to be a Dining Room, and hopefully will be once again once I have finally raised the money to build Corinna a Garden Office.

Less benign is the poltergeist who sometimes does his percussive stuff on the stairs, but these days he is no more annoying than Graham when he is very drunk and listening to Hawkwind bootlegs, and the two ghost cats that scamper about on occasion startling visitors in the corridor which leads to what I refuse to call the East Wing, though I suppose it is. the most unsettling of the resident spectres in the house is something that Corinna and I have dubbed The Shapeshifter, which walks along the same path as the Grey Lady, but assumes the form of one of the people or animals living in or visiting the house. I first noticed this particular apparition during my father's final months when I was sitting by the window in what is now Corinna's and my room, when I saw what looked like my dog Tessie walking along the path. As she was very old and was nearly blind she was not allowed out at night, so I shouted angrily down the intercom at Graham, telling him to close the back door, just as Tessie ambled into my Dad's bedroom looking fir her evening digestive biscuit.

Over the years several if us, but mostly Corinna and me have encountered The Shape Shifter, and it has impersonated various family members including my eldest stepdaughter. So I am reasonably used to living with spirits, and so was far less worried about allowing Panne the run of the place than you might otherwise have thought.

This was a very busy time for me. My beloved younger stepdaughter Olivia, now living in Norfolk, was just about to make me a Grandfather, and there were lots of arrangements to be made and plans to formulate. So, whilst I occasionally saw a brief glimpse of a little goatfooted forest Godling out of the corner of my eye - sometimes peeking out of the bushes, sometimes entering or leaving the cupboard in my office that she seemed to have adopted as a home base, and sometimes even playing with the dogs in a crazy joyous game of catch as catch can over by the lower aviary, I paid her little attention, and I forgot about Danny Miles entirely.

This was probably, as it turned out, not the best move I could have made.

X

Oh the universe is a strange place. But you don't need me to tell you that I am sure. I have been telling you the story of my totally unexpected relationship with a band called Xtul, and their Minister for Information, Danny Miles, whom I have known for over thirty years and have done my best to ignore for most of that time. However, because my time is limited, and my space within the various places that I have been telling this story is even more so, I had only got as far as the second week in September when we got close to the end of the year, and the band broke silence and released a particularly scabrous slice of undanceable sound collage, and labelled it their Christmas single. So I had to write about that, and then we came to the big Christmas double issue, and so I had no time to write any more, and we are still stuck back in mid-September, with a story to tell that I had planned to get done and dusted before Christmas.

But that's the way the world is, and so I am left here, as the rest of the Kingdom is dealing with a surfeit of mince pies, trying to pick up the pieces of the narrative. I am not going to back pedal and tell the story again, because the previous episodes are all readable on the band's website, and I am just going to try and pick up where I left off....

Apparently Danny returned to the forest about a week later. As he drove  along the A39 towards the Cornish border he telephoned the number he had been given. Skullfuck answered, and Danny explained who he was and what he wanted. "It was all so bloody normal" he complained. "It was like telephoning your bank manager to make an appointment, back in the days when you actually had a bank manager, and not a load of young people in bright yellow T Shirts trying to sell you mortgages and life insurance". But nothing could make it that normal, because nothing could take away the fact that he was on the telephone to a feral biker with an obscene name, and the person with whom he was trying to make an appointment was a wheelchair bound half-man half-elephant chimera surrounded by psychotic children with machine guns and pig masks. Even Nat West hasn't changed to that degree.

He drove down the little lane that led off the main road towards the hamlet of Meddon, and once again he was stopped by armed teenage girls wearing pig masks. But this time he was expecting them, and got into the boot of his own car voluntarily, and made no attempt to struggle against his captors.

Again, after a relatively short journey, they arrived at their destination. Skullfuck was there to help him out of his confinement, and he ushered him along the path through the forest to the army surplus pavilion where Mr Loxodonta (for that is the name given by the elephant-headed cripple) seemed to spend his time. This time around Danny managed to take in more of his surroundings. The green canvas walls were draped with a mixture of cheap looking oriental and Indian tat which Danny described as the sort of stuff that you could pick up "for a couple of bob" on market stalls. Loxodonta didn't invite him further into the tent, which appeared from the outside to be the size of a marquee, and with a number of other rooms, that Danny couldn't see.

Mr Loxodonta was obviously waiting for him, and with a politely old-fashioned gesture he motioned to Danny to sit down in a canvas backed director's chair  facing him.

By the way, just in case you don't already know what Loxodonta means, African elephants are elephants of the genus Loxodonta (from the Greek words loxo (oblique sided) and donta (tooth)). The genus consists of two extant species: the African bush elephant and the smaller African forest elephant. Loxodonta is one of two existing genera of the family, Elephantidae. Fossil remains of Loxodonta have been found only in Africa, in strata as old as the middle Pliocene. Mr Loxodonta has been known to claim the Given Name of Eliphas, and as the other genus of elephants is Elephas, that seems to make some sort of twisted sense, but - of course - there is a long tradition of the use of that name within magical circles, including Eliphas Levi, and at least one major character in the Harry Potter Universe.

"What have you got for me?" Asked Mr Loxodonta gravely, and Danny gave what he described as a totally "fuck off presentation with graphs, and projections and all that shit" which appeared to please the probiscodean cripple, who asked a number of questions, before telling Danny that not only was he now the Minister for information, but that he was on the payroll, and that he wasn't going to kill him "just yet".

I asked what he meant about a payroll, and Danny explained that as he was leaving with his first bundle of objectives (which mostly seemed to be about convincing me that Xtul were viable musicians, and to get them regular mentions in the magazine which I edit, something that we all know that he achieved without too much difficulty) Skullfuck gave him an ATM card which seemed to have access to potentially unlimited funds. "but how much can I take out?" He asked. Skullfuck shrugged back. "As much as you need".

Danny was confused. "Who decides how much I need?" He questioned. "You do," came the answer.

"But what if I take too much?" He stuttered, and was not truly surprised by the answer that if he did, his new elephantine master would send his girls after him, and that they would kill him.

"Oh dear," said Danny.

All this had taken place in the late spring and through the long and surprisingly  warm summer of 2014 Danny had gone back to the woodland camp every few weeks, whilst simultaneously setting up, with the help of two of Mr Loxodonta's hacker girls, a sophisticated online presence that he refused to describe to me in any more detail. "It's more than either your or my life is worth, man.... And anyway you don't need to know".

Despite having been to the woods over half a dozen times, the people the Children of the Three still treated him with a certain amount of suspicion. The way he described it, Skullfuck was firmly in charge of the humans there, and was the only male human that he had met. The rest were all girls, and apart from the two that he had met whilst hitchhiking, they all wore pig masks. He was now aware that the first two had been just a sophisticated honey trap, although he had no idea how they could possibly have known that he was going to be driving along the A39 that spring day when it was a last minute decision on his part, and he didn't know himself until he did it.

"But you keep on calling them 'The Children of the Three"....who are the three?" I asked. I was pretty sure I knew who two of them were, but I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, with Danny being the horse.

He confirmed my suspicions.

"I've told you all that I know about Mr Loxdonta...." (Actually, he hadn't, but I didn't know that at that point) "....and you met Panne the first night I came to see you.

But the third one is a mystery. I occasionally caught glimpses of a tall woman in a silver suit, but always out of the corner of my eye, and only for a split second. And it was always terrifying. As Skullfuck was the only person who would talk to me I asked him, but he just shrugged and told me that it was none of my business and that I would know soon enough.

Panne let it out by mistake once that all three of them had once been human, although they weren't anything like human anymore, and that brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about. Panne has disappeared!"

And he looked at me accusingly. I stared back guiltily, and summoned up the reserves of skill that I had learned back during the 1970s when I became quite good at lying to my headmaster at Bideford Grammar School.

"How the hell should I know?" I lied through my teeth, not for a moment thinking that a consummate con man like Danny could be fooled by a mere amateur like me. Amazingly he was....

"Well, according to Skullfuck the only time she had ever left the compound was the time that she came here with me..." But I could see that he was beginning to doubt himself. Danny has always had such a high opinion of his own importance - after all, he had been personally chosen by deities to do their dirty work for them - that he couldn't imagine that any of this Unholy Trinity would ever want to visit someone as ordinary as me for any reason imaginable. The idea that the little forest Godling came to see me for chocolate, and maybe a little affection, was completely beyond his comprehension.

They say that it is impossible to cheat an honest man, and so as Danny is one of the least honest men that I have ever met, pulling the wool over his eyes was a reasonably straightforward task.

About five minutes later, after cadging a final cigarette from me, he left after exacting a promise from me that I would contact him if Panne actually turned up at the CFZ. Completely mendaciously I agreed, determining quietly to myself that I would do no such thing.

Just as I heard the resonating clang of him tossing the gate shut behind him, I heard a rustling sound from a cupboard beneath one of my fish tanks; a cupboard far too small to hold anything apart from a couple of boxes of aquarium paraphernalia. I knew exactly what it was, and called out, "It's OK he's gone", and the slight figure of  Panne emerged from a tiny space that could not possibly have held her.

She looked at me in silence, and I passed her the last of my wife's chocolate.