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.