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.