XV

The next three days were quite possibly the longest, and the most emotionally charged of my adult life. I have no biological children of my own, but after getting together with Corinna in the spring of 2005 I soon began to love her two daughter a if they were my own. By the time that we got married two and a bit years later, I was thinking of them AS my own, and to be honest I don't think that I could love either of them any more than I do, even if they had been my own flesh and blood.

Although I was terribly excited at the prospect of becoming a grandfather for the first time, I was also acutely conscious of the fact that I was the only person in the family who had a qualification in any of the medical sciences, and as my nursing qualification was to look after handicapped people, the only obstetrics that I knew anything about we abnormal ones, and although I tried to continually remind myself that the human race had been successfully giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years with a fair amount of success, I was only too aware of what could go wrong. The text from Aaron which had cheered and encouraged the others, had done the complete opposite to me, and I was frankly terrified. However I didn't want anyone else to know that so I kept my own council, and went outside for as many cigarettes as I truthfully thought that I could get away with.

Just outside the main entrance of the hospital was a huge, stainless steel doughnut shaped sculpture. There was an engraved brass plaque below it explaining what it was meant to symbolise, but it was so encrusted with pigeon shit as to be illegible. I assume that because it was positioned outside the main entrance to that part of the hospital which housed the Maternity Wing, that the huge doughnut was meant to symbolise the female reproductive tract, but even to my mind that seemed a little crass, and laid it open to all sorts of amusing nomenclature of which the Latin Cloaca Maxima was the least offensive.

It was also the place where all the smokers of the hospital patient community congregated. There was a thing that resembled the racks on the bicycle sheds at my old alma mater but which held heavy duty wheelchairs, there were a couple of the large freestanding ashtrays like the one that they used to have in the old dole office at Magdalen Road in Exeter back in the days that the powers that be believed that it as more than their lives were worth to deny cigarettes to the great unwashed. The presence of these ashtrays, which were overbrimming with soggy fag ends, was incongruous as there was also a notice proclaiming that Norwich Hospitals were a smoking free zone. And every time that I went out there, even when it was pissing down with rain, there were patients in their dressing gowns, some with fairly major disabilities and some heavily pregnant puffing away on their rollups. 

The constant stream of apocalyptic messages from 'Lynnette' were beginning to wear away at the fragile barriers of my mental health: 'Xtul Lives Xtul Rules', 'No Sense Makes Sense', 'In my mind's eye I see fires in your cities' and 'healter skelter is coming down fast'! The stream of Xtul propaganda and misquoted pearls of wisdom from The Gospel according to Charlie kept on coming, and at one point I was having a hard time deleting them off my iPad as fast as they were coming in.

I chainsmoked, and tried to use music to boot out the increasingly tormented and tumultuous sensory input, but as I could only get hold of two albums from my Dropbox account, that weren't actually by Xtul, and they were a collection of Irish rebel songs sung by a tenor in a voice tremulous with emotion, to the accompaniment of an accordion player, a mandolinist, and a bodrhan player who were struggling to stay in time and in tune, and a bootlegged copy of Scott Walker's almost entirely unlistenable 'Bish Bosch' album, this was not really a successful experiment. Then my headphones packed up, and I found myself watching the hustle and bustle of a busy general hospital at night through a haze of cigarette smoke whilst Epizootics blared out as loudly as I dared from the speakers of my little tablet.

This served as a suitably surrealchemical backdrop to my increasingly frantic prayers.

I believe in God, but in a truly pantheistic way. To me, God is the universe and everything in it. "Thou art God" said St Foster to St Michael in SIASL. But as St Michael replied...who isn't. But the fact remains that I believe in a deity, even though I find it hard to explain my conception of the nature of the deity. But as I very much dislike organised religion, and will describe myself as a Christian Anarchist vaguely after the fashion of St Francis, and even then only if pushed, and believe that worship can only be as part of a 1:1 relationship between the supplicant and the deity, I don't really talk about my beliefs in such matters. But I do pray, although I don't think that I have ever prayed as hard in my life as the night that I sat out in mild drizzle beneath the foggy sky asking that my darling stepdaughter and her baby girl would both  come through the experience of childbirth unscathed.

The biggest cultural event of late 2014 had been Kate Bush's return to live performance, and - totally unwittingly - I found myself mirroring one of her songs and trying to make a deal with God. If Olivia and the baby were OK, I told the Almighty, would h/she please take my life instead of theirs. But once again there was no answer.

Then suddenly I noticed that I was no longer alone. If I was the sort if writer who write fairy stories, this would be the point that there would be a clatter of little hooves, and little Panne would have trotted out from behind the giant stainless steel doughnut to tell me that everything was going to be OK. If I was the sort of writer who wrote messianic fantasy stories, this would be the moment that the sky would open, and that a voice of the apocalypse would speak to me out of the riven clouds to tell me something important for good or for ill. But nothing of the sort happened. What dir, however happen, was that I heard a squeak of a wheelchair, and looked around to see three extraordinary and apparently ill matched people there besides me.

In the wheelchair was a middle aged man with long, matted hair. He was wearing a long white bloodstained nightshirt which completely failed to hide the fact that he had no legs. And the wheelchair was being pushed by a tiny man with an ancient, wizened face and an enormously fat woman. All three of them were smoking and a halo of tiny insects appeared to be flying around the head of the man in the wheelchair, who was lolled to one side, and was muttering continuously. All throughout the evening the procession of expectant mothers had been punctuated with a few amputees and other people who seemed not to have been dealt a very good hand of cards by a beneficent providence.  I assumed that there was some sort of post operative physiotherapy department or something of that sort which shared a hospital entrance with the Maternity Department, and as statistically more people have babies than have limbs surgically removed, it would explain why there were more smokers out there in the drizzle by the enormous steel vulva than there were amputees.

Under other circumstances I would have been intrigued enough to try and find out what these three strange people were doing here, and who they were.

The simple fact that there appeared to be a slowly spreading bloodstain on the front of the wheelchair man's body itself merited investigation, and the fact that more and more tiny insects; mostly diptera and pyralid moths were circling his head should have intrigued me as both a fortean zoologist and an entomologist. But it didn't. I was simply so steeped in terror at not knowing what was happening upstairs in Delivery Suite C12 that I just didn't give a toss about anything else.

Then the man in the wheelchair began to speak, and in a cold, lifeless voice as solemn as a marble gravestone and as still as a corpse, he spoke words that I knew very well indeed:

"And a message flashed in the sky by the sun,

Be careful this is only a game"

And the fat woman then leered at me with the sort of smirk that looked just like when a small girl pretends to be an adult, puts on makeup and does what she thinks is a sexy voice, but which just turns out to be mildly disturbing:

"Listen to him, he knows what he is saying"....

Just then my iPad beeped again. I looked down just in case it was a message from Aaron or Corinna about Olivia's progress. But it was another message from Lynette.

Without bothering to read it, I typed an answer: "Fuck off you mad bitch!", wondering why I hadn't thought of doing that before. Then I looked up to speak to my three strange companions. It had only been about thirty seconds, but they were gone, and there was no sign that they had ever been there, except for three half smoked cigarettes on the ground, and a cloud of small insects in the air.

I finished my cigarette and went back inside the hospital and limped down the corridor to the canteen where Corinna, Mother, Shosh and Gavin had set up camp in a small semicircle of comfortable armchairs around a round table. I sat down, joining them, and a few minutes later Corinna received a text from Aaron. Olivia had finally given birth and I was now a grandfather.

Whispering up unspoken prayers of thanksgiving to every deity I could think of, I joined in the general festivities which were still going on twenty minutes or so later when an exhausted looking Aaron turned up to fill us in on what had happened. It turned out that my worst fears had been justified and that it had been a difficult and painful birth, but that both Mother and baby Evelyn were fine and completely out of danger.

The next forty eight hours went by in a blur. We took Aaron back to the house he shared with Olivia, and then went to my brother-in-law's house thirty miles away where we stay d the night on his floor. I am mildly feral, and the idea of sleeping on a floor wrapped in a blanket and using my old leather jacket as a pillow didn't phase me one instant.

After another day at the hospital, during which we went up to see Olivia on the Maternity Ward, and I met my granddaughter for the first time, we went back to my brother-in-law's house where we slept a second night on the floor.

The next day Olivia and the baby were discharged and we drove her home, and then left them to it, as we drove back to Oakham in Rutland, and then back to Devon. It was half way back to Devon that I realised that since I had written back to Lynnette telling her to fuck off, I had received no further IMs from the Xtul camp, not indeed from anyone else who wasn't family or friends congratulating us on  having attained grandparenthood.

The journey home was uneventful, and we arrived home to a maelstrom of wagging tails and joyful barks from the dogs. Once we had got all our things in from the car, I was sitting in my study drinking a cup if tea, smoking a meditative cigarette, and reading the last few day's post when my old friend and business partner Graham came into the room.

Graham and I have been friends for a quarter of a century, and have worked together on various projects for nearly as long, and he probably knows me as well as does any other person on this planet with the possible exception of Corinna and my cousin Pene. I asked him whether there was anything that I needed to know about the various animals in the CFZ, or about anything else that might have transpired during our absence.

"Not really", he replied, "but there was one weird thing. This evening at about dusk I was in the garden and what looked like a young girl came up to me. I say looked like, because she was wearing a long black cloak and I could not see her face at all. She gave u a message. She asked me to tell you that she had to go away, but that you need to go to Britannia to ask why. I suppose that is something to do with your mortgage. That's with Britannia isn't it?"

I suddenly felt an extreme rush of guilt. I had forgotten all about Panne, and even before I looked in her cupboard I knew that she was gone. But before I could think, or even say anything there was a thunderous knock on the door. I shouted "Come In!" And to my shock there were two uniformed policemen and a sinister looking man wearing a long, dark, overcoat standing on the doorstep....

XIV

I was horrified.

By this time every few minutes my iPad would make a bleeping noise and either a piece of vaguely disturbing text, or - worse - a collage consisting of a photograph of one of the latest atrocities in the Middle East with a quote from Charlie Manson plastered on it. This was not very high tech stuff, each collage would only have taken a couple of minutes with Photoshop, but it was undeniably disturbing. And these were the last things that I wanted to look at when I was trying to commune with my maker, and the little hire car sped across the flat lands of East Anglia towards Norwich where my youngest stepdaughter was about to make me a Grandfather.

Like any other person with any knowledge of the world stage, I had been following the events in the Middle East with a feeling of mounting distress. each day in the news we were confronted with stories of the sort of atrocities which one thought had been left behind centuries ago, and that - I for one - never thought that I would see again. Burnings, floggings, mutilations and crucifixions - how on earth could things like this happen in the 21st Century. On top of that how could SOMEONE, (and although all the available evidence pointed towards this being the Xtul 'Ministry of Information', I wasn't too sure) defy all the laws of physics, the internet and - let's face it - everything else in order to beam disturbing messages straight to my iPad from across the aether.

And who was going to take quotes from a long incarcerated serial killer, fiddle about with them, and try to tie them in with the current sociopolitical events in the Middle East? Again, the available evidence pointed to Danny Miles, but why would he? The week before he had spent several hours with me in my study, bumming my cigarettes and drinking my coffee, and I truly believed that what he had told me had basically been the truth. I know that he had a distressing obsession with the life and works of the aforementioned serial killer, and some of this stuff had his metaphorical fingerprints all over it. But why bother? He had already told me of his involvement with this group (whoever or whatever they were), and surely he could not have thought that this stuff was going to impress me.

And surely even for Danny, trying to tie in a semi-mythical progressive hiphop band with the appalling predations of ISIL in the Middle East was beyond the bounds of good taste. Here, however, it should be pointed out that this is probably the first time that anyone has ever used the words Danny Miles and Good Taste in the same sentence. I couldn't believe that even Danny would have bothered to try and pull  the psychohistoric wool over my eyes only a week or so after telling me all that he knew about the cult and their activities.

All the instant messages were signed 'Lynette' and although I had no idea who this 'Lynette' actually was, I had a pretty good idea who she was pretending to be. Over to Wikipedia:

"Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme (born October 22, 1948) is an American would-be assassin best known for attempting to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975. A member of the infamous "Manson family", she was sentenced to life imprisonment for the attempted assassination and was released on parole on August 14, 2009, after serving 34 years."

After her release from Prison, she had - allegedly at least - gone to live in a town called Marcy in New York State. However, a website called the Federal BOP Inmate locator failed to find her when I tried to look her up, later that evening. She would now be 66, and as far as I can ascertain, nobody knows anything about her activities for the past five years, or if they do, they are not  telling. A quick look at Facebook reveals several Lynnette or Squeaky Frommes one of whom claims to live in Marcy and to have studied at Columbia University, but as I know only too well, despite the fact that it is allegedly illegal, it is quite easy to open a Facebook account and call yourself whatever you want.

Personally I thought that it was highly unlikely that this long term disciple of Charlie M had suddenly started a campaign of sending enigmatic and disturbing messages to a disabled part time journalist, who by this time, was driving round and round the outskirts of Norwich trying to battle the one way system and find the main hospital.

There was a loud dinging sound from Corinna's telephone. I grabbed it. Corinna was driving and would want to know what the message was, and if it was some obscure psychobabble from a serial killer whom I felt perfectly deserved to have been locked up in durance vile since 1969, I wanted to make sure that I got to it before she did. But I needn't have worried; it was my elder stepdaughter wanting to know where we were. And it so happened that just as I was punching in her telephone number into the telephone keypad, I saw a signpost pointing to the hospital.

"Next right!" I shouted, just as Shosh picked up the telephone, and then had to explain to her that I hadn't been shouting at her - a complicated explanation which continued as we entered the car part, drove to the disabled parking bay by the front entrance and waved a greeting to her and her husband Gavin who were sitting by a particularly peculiar piece of modern sculpture waiting for us.

Then my iPad 'pinged again'. It was another message from Lynnette.

"Are you ready for the end of the world?"

Deciding not to dignify that question with an answer, because the only possible answers could be YES or NO, and either of them would be bound to open up a level of dialogue with this bloody woman that I, at this time at least, was unwilling to enter, I just switched the iPad off, hugged Shoshannah and went into the hospital foyer to get our bearings.

Thus began - what, if you will excuse me lapsing into cliche, I can only describe as - a long night of the soul; one of the most tortuous and stressful periods of time that I have ever spent. It only lasted about six or seven hours, or at least the first phase did, but it was the longest six or seven hours that I have ever spent.

The first thing that we did was - if you do not mind me reverting to my family background in the military - establish a bridgehead in the hospital canteen. We then sent a text to Olivia's partner Aaron to tell them that we had arrived and sat down to wait for an answer.

It was a long wait.

Eventually we received a brief answer from Aaron acknowledging the message, but not imparting any further information. there is a quote from Robert Heinlein (I think it is in Farnham's Freehold, but I cannot find my battered and dog-eared copy) saying something to the effect that babies and kittens arrive in the small hours of the morning after a long wait. The Dean of Science Fiction was a much wittier and better author than me, and so my misuse of his bon mot is perforce going to be an anticlimax. But I grasped the essence of it and steeled myself for a long evening. I spent about ten minutes wandering about getting my bearings, but I found the disabled toilets, registered the car as being OK to be in the disabled bay with two jolly nice fellows on the reception desk, and then returned to the others and their basecamp in the canteen, and wondered what to do next.

I switched my iPad on again and logged into the hospital wifi network. Opening my email client I found that I had hundreds, which - as it had been something like seven hours since I had last checked my emails - was no real surprise. They were the usual collection of electronic flotsam and jetsam that I tend to get in my inbox, and I was relieved to see that none of them were from Lynnette or anything to do with Xtul. I sorted through the motley collection, and deleted all the obvious phishing scams, the people trying to sell me Viagra, the softcore pornography, and the letters from people claiming to be my 'Brother in Christ' and discovered a handful of interesting cryptozoological articles which I reposted on the CFZ blogs, and some emails from friends wishing us all good luck and sending their love to Olivia.

I emailed my long term partner in crime, Graham Inglis, back home in Woolsery where he was keeping the home fires burning and looking after the animals. I told him that we had arrived safely, that Olivia was in labour and her waters had broken, and that I would telephone him when I had any further news, and pressed 'Send and Receive'.

The message to Graham went off safely, and there was one new message in its stead.

It was from Danny Miles and read: "You probably won't believe me but those messages from Lynnette are nothing to do with me. be careful of her .... She is very dangerous. And don't believe all that you see. They are messing with your head!"

They certainly were, but as there was nothing I could do about it, and I certainly wouldn't be so cruel as to add to the stress levels that Olivia's mother, sister and brother-in-law were already feeling, I did a Captain Oates. "I'm going out for a cigarette", I said.  "I may be some time"....

XIII

I would like to pretend that I am some sort of iconoclastic smash the system type of dude, but - truly  - I am nothing of the sort. No matter how hard I try, how scruffy I get, or how long I grow my hair, I am still a respectable English gentleman of the old school, which is exactly why I spoke to the woman from the Salvation Army in the way I did. I like to think that my breeding and savoir faire showed through at that moment, because just as she had spoken to me, I was looking around vacantly and I saw the message "Xtul Lives, Xtul Rules, doesn't in Jon?" scrawled surprisingly neatly in violet magic marker above the telephone.

Admittedly all sorts of people knew that we were travelling to Norfolk that day; I had put it on the CFZ blog, for example. But nobody outside the three of us in the hire car knew that we were going to be stopping off at that particular Motorway Services. And nobody apart from me, and possibly my ex-wife knew that the blurb on the back of the 1980s paperback edition of Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov had always irritated me. It was an over the top screed which had no real  emotional empathy with the story. It started "Foundation Lives, Foundation Rules!" After all these years even typing it out for the purposes of this narrative is mildly irritating.

However, I was not about to try and explain all this to a late middle-aged lady God botherer, so I apologised again, muttered something about being stressed because my stepdaughter was in labour and went outside for a cigarette. When I came back in I had a mild diabetic moment, exacerbated by the huge amounts of diet coke that I always seem to imbibe during long car journeys. So I went into the disabled loo, and there written on the door was a very similar message. I was beginning to get seriously spooked.

We ate an expensive and relatively unappetising snacky thing and resumed our journey down the M6 towards East Anglia. And on nearly every bridge was spray-painted an easily recognisable four letter word beginning with X.

This is the point in the story where most authors would probably  say that they were beginning to doubt their own sanity, but I have never been under the misapprehension that I am even slightly sane. I have been diagnosed bipolar for over twenty years, and about ten years ago I was told by a consultant that I was only a couple of inches away from Paranoid Schizophrenia as well, and so, although I was not going to be so stupid and vainglorious as to doubt my own sanity, I was beginning to doubt the evidence of my own eyes.

Did these messages have any objective reality? Or were they just messages from my subconscious telling me a whole slew of things about which I was only too painfully aware; that I was in over my head in a peculiar situation mostly not of my own making, and that my understanding of the affair, and about everything that  had happened, was completely overshadowed by the stress that I felt knowing that the young woman I love very much indeed was about to give birth to my first granddaughter.

I like travelogues, and I have written quite a few of them of my own over the years, but although I would love to do a Heart of Darkness to you at this point, it is quite beyond my skills as a wordsmith to extract Conradesque prose from an account of a journey from the end of the M6,  up to Peterborough, and up to Norwich. I have always loved the English countryside and have been carrying on a love affair  with it since I was a small boy, but motorways are motorways, and A roads are A roads, and although often Corinna and I enliven long journeys by making a list of bird species seen, or playing silly word games,  this occasion was too solemn to be enlivened in such a manner, and so we travelled on in silence, ignoring the autumn countryside, each lost in our own thoughts.

We got the occasional text message from Olivia's elder sister Shoshannah, who lives in Staffordshire, and had therefore several hours start on us. By the time we were skirting the manifestly unattractive town of Corby, famous for being home to my ex publisher, and hometown to King Boy D, she was already driving hell for leather through the outskirts of Norwich on her way to the hospital. Olivia's partner Aaron (who is, by the way not only a bloody good chap but the bass player in a band called Azolas, who play heavy metal with skill and gusto) was sending text messages to Shoshannah who passed the content on to us. Olivia’s waters broke sometime whilst we were on the A14 and the stress levels in the car rose up another notch or two.

Then there was a tell tale pinging noise from my iPad, and I thanked the Elder Gods of technology that both my darling wife, and darling mother-in- law didn't know enough about technology to realise that I shouldn't have been able to receive Facebook messages as we were speeding along a trunk road deep into the heart of East Anglia. Feigning a nonchalance that I didn't feel, I picked up the tablet, pushed in the button thingy at the bottom, and opened Facebook. The message was from someone called Lynette, and it was simple. "Look out of the window" it read. I did so, and then saw, stencilled in spraypaint on the side of a wooden barn, the Xtul logo in perfect Abbadon ttf font.

Then the came another message from the same source:

"...this time Helter Skelter truly is coming down fast", and I knew exactly what it meant. It was a bowdlerised line in a song by The Beatles, and - depending on who you believe - it was either a complex conspiracy scenario invented by a man called Vincent Bugliosi  with the sole intention of framing an innocent hippie called Charlie for a series of crimes that he didn't commit, or it was something much more intense and frightening.

According to this scenario in later years Charles Manson became inspired by a belief in "Helter Skelter," a term taken from The Beatles' song of the same name, which signified an apocalyptic race war he believed would arise between blacks and whites. As well as the music of The Beatles, Manson's scenario was also inspired by the New Testament's Book of Revelation. His first known use of the term was at a campfire gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968, at their base at Myers Ranch near California's Death Valley. By February 1969, Helter Skelter had developed into a scenario in which Manson and the Family would create an album which they believed would trigger the conflict and inspire America's white youths to join the Family. He believed that black men, deprived of white women, would commit violent crimes in frustration, resulting in murderous rampages and a swiftly-escalating conflict between racial groups.

According to the scenario which Vincent Bugliosi, who turned 80 a month before we drove to Norfolk, used to convict Manson of a series of crimes led by the Tate/LaBianca murders, these killings were intended by Manson to spearhead a race war that would destroy the vast majority of the human race and leave Charlie and his Family of the Infinite Soul Inc in control of the destiny of humankind.

The political situation in the Middle East had been deteriorating for some years, and by the middle of 2014 vast swathes of the area were under the control of homicidal madmen.

The insanity had started to spread to the UK, the US and even Australia, with beheadings, bombings and shootings beginning to happen apparently at random.

The words 'Race War' were beginning to be used by serious political analysts, rather than just angry nutjobs on the fringes of society. I have no idea whether these claims of an imminent conflict between races on the streets of my own country are true or not, but I am afraid. No, I am terrified, that if the culture of fundamentalism, which is currently holding sway across much of the Middle East, does spread in earnest to the UK, and the US (and remember that this was some months before the horrific events in Paris in January 2015) that Helter Skelter would indeed be coming down fast.

Then I realised, with horror, who Lynette was, or at least whom she pretended to be. But what the hell had this got to do with Xtul? What the hell did this have to do with the little goatfooted Godling presently residing in the cupboard where I keep my tropical fish equipment, and what the hell did it have to do with me?

I don't think I have ever felt quite so alone in my life. I love my wife and usually I can discuss anything that I want with her, but what sort of bastard would I be to add to the unbelievable amount of tension that I knew was coursing through her veins, with her youngest daughter in the most physically and emotionally vulnerable position that she had ever been since Corinna herself had been in the same position and had given birth to her twenty five years before?

How could I add to that by telling her that I was beginning to worry that I had become tangentially involved with a death cult who were working to manipulate people’s interpretation of events on the world stage to bring about the end of the world as we knew it, oh yes and, "by the way honey, there is a hairy Godling, half girl and half goat, living in my office, and she has been eating your chocolate!"

So I kept my own counsel, prayed quietly for the safe delivery of Olivia's baby, and as the late afternoon sun lazily pierced the branches of the trees on either side of the road, we drove in silence towards Norfolk.