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 Even then my knowledge was thirty years out of date and half forgotten.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.