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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.