XVIII-XXIII

XVIII

I woke up with a bloody awful headache. I was lying crumpled on the floor of Britannia's parlour. My mouth was dry, and my temples pounded, and my walking stick was nowhere to be seen. I very much doubt whether anyone reading this would believe me if I claimed to be some sort of total stranger to hangovers. I got my first hangover in 1976, a few days before my seventeenth birthday, and I have been having them with depressing regularity ever since.  This felt like a hangover, but on this occasion there was something missing. I hadn't actually had anything to drink.

I don't think that I am an alcoholic, but I will admit that I drink more alcohol than most people do in this day and age. One of the more depressing side effects of this is that, quite probably as a side effect of mixing large amounts of brandy with the various psychotropic chemicals which I am prescribed for my various illnesses, is that sometimes I do get blackouts. There are times that I wake up in the morning, not remembering what I had done the night before, and I have had to learn the discipline of having to reconstruct what happened out of fragmentary memories.

So I tried to do this now. The skill involves gathering all the available evidence, and trying to fill in the gaps. The trouble was that I couldn't remember anything. Also, without my walking stick I was not able to actually get up off the floor.  So I crawled across the grubby carpet like an arthritic newt, and then - to my horror - my trousers begun to come off.

I then realised that my clothes were feeling odd...it was as if I hadn't dressed myself properly that morning. It was almost as if someone else had dressed me.

As I crawled, inch by inch, the joints of my legs, and elbows, shooting pain across my body, I caught a glimpse of something moving outside the grubby window. It was Lysistrata, carrying what seemed to be a bundle of roadkill in her dumpy arms, and shuffling across the unkempt lawn. A thought came shooting, unbidden, into my befuddled brain that "I don't recognise you with your clothes on", and - in horror - I remembered some, but not all of what had transpired the previous evening.

Corinna and I have been together for over a decade now, and married for nearly eight years of that time. In that decade I have, and will always be, completely faithful to her, and the only woman apart from her to have seen me even partly dishabille was my doctor.

Until last night that is, as the shocking memory of me, Lysistrata, and Britannia Potts, as naked as the day we were born, chanting arcane rhymes, and screaming eldritch fury to the scarlet, lightning-flecked clouds above us as we summoned primal deities from fuck knows where, flooded across my cerebral cortex. I knew that I had done nothing for which I should have reproached myself. But it was a shocking memory, and one, when combined with my burgeoning realisation that it had been one of these two terrifying women who had dressed me after the ritual had concluded, made me feel that what I now realised was not a hangover, was the least of my problems.

Eventually I reached one of the armchairs, and levered myself up, and much to my relief I found my walking stick, and after eventually getting my breath back, I staggered to my feet.

The house was as silent as the grave. I looked around, and realised, guiltily, that I actually didn't know what to do next. I had only ever been here in Britannia's parlour, and in her late brother's study, and the drawing room full of junk, and I had no idea how to find my way around the rest of the house.  I was in dire need of a pee, but I had no idea how to find a lavatory, and I had grave reservations about exploring the tumbledown cottage unbidden. I also was in a quandry about whether I actually wanted to see either of my hostesses again this soon.

On one side, the rules of gentlemanly behaviour would suggest that it would be massively impolite to just sneak off and pretend the whole thing had never happened, which is what I so badly wanted to do.

On the other hand, for the first time in many years, I found myself in the embarrassing position of having been unexpectedly naked with two women the night before, and the male fight or flight mechanism was kicking in big time, and was telling me to do what human males have always done ever since a Cro Magnon male found himself unexpectedly getting his kit off in the cave of a Cro Magnon female, with whom he was not ready to comingle on a social level; to run like hell.

I felt in my trouser pocket. The car keys were still there.

Thank God.

I looked around again. Lysistrata was still out in the garden with two dead and rather mangled badgers under her arm. The only way that I knew out of the house would take me straight past her.

OK I had fancied her when I was about nineteen, but at the age of 55 I think that it was probably her who had dressed me in the wee small hours, and that level of intimacy did not sit comfortably with me. I rationalised to myself that it would probably not sit comfortably with her either, and that - as a gentleman - there was nothing that I could honourably do but sneak out into the back garden, and back to my car. preferably without running into Britannia Potts. And hopefully I would find a lavatory along the way, and if not, there was probably a convenient gooseberry bush in the back garden.

But which way was the back garden?

I looked around me again, and realised something strange. Something stranger than normal, I should say. It was a cold and windy day in early October, grey rainclouds scudded across the sky, and the naked branches of the decaying trees silhouetted skeletally against the sky. But somewhere, I was sure that I could hear birdsong.

I looked around once again, and saw a door in the corner of the room. It was slightly ajar, and I remembered that on the occasions I had been to tea with Britannia and Cymbelline over the years, Lysistrata had always made her entry through that door, so it was not an enormous leap of faith to suppose that it led to the kitchen. And where there was a kitchen there might well be a downstairs loo, and - even more importantly - a back door through which I could escape.

So I went in, and - to my great relief - found both. After answering my - by this time very urgent - call of nature, I approached the back door. I already knew that the weather outside was particularly grim even by my the standards of North Devon autumn, but I could still hear birdsong, and I could see bright summer sunshine pouring in through the half open back door.

I went outside, and was emerged. The front garden of the cottage was frankly a disturbing mess, which looked as if nobody had lifted a finger to tend it for decades, and the cottage itself was not much better. But this beautifully tended cobbled courtyard garden, was exquisite. It looked for all the world like one of the olde worlde paintings on jigsaw puzzles that my maternal grandmother had enjoyed doing in her dotage, and it was completely at odds with the rest of the place.

At the far end of the courtyard was a stile and a path which led into a woodland of such a Disneyesque fairytale quality that I expected to hear high twinkling sounds from a celeste, and some badly animated bluebirds swooping about trilling musically at each other.

There was a large, comfortable, stone bench against the cottage wall, looking straight at the stile, and - for the first time that day - I felt one of my most primal urges beginning to well up. I knew that this was one of the urges that I should not even attempt to fight, and so I limped over to the bench, lowered myself down, and reached into my pocket for two of my friends; Mr Benson and Mr Hedges.

Of all the drugs I have taken over the years, the one to which I am most addicted, in fact, the only one to which I have ever been truly addicted is cigarettes. I don't think that it is even nicotine or tar to which I am addicted, and am sure in my own heart of hearts, that it is whatever crap that B&H put into the tobacco to keep it burning, make it taste fresh, or whatever, that I am addicted to, because although I have given up smoking for different lengths of time over the years, nearly eight years once, I always come running back to my slavemaster. And if there was ever a day that I sorely needed a cigarette it was today.

So I sat back, luxuriating in the warmth of this unseasonably glorious sunlight and took a deep gasp of my cigarette, as I tried to decide what I was going to do next. But my cogitations hadn't got very far when I could see a small, chestnut brown, figure walk slowly out of the woodland, down the path, over the stile and slowly down the cobbled path towards me.

It was Panne.

XIX

The rest of North Devon was cold, grey and wet, covered with a slimy carpet of decayed leaves. But here, in the back garden of the tumbledown little cottage on one of the less frequented lanes between Woolsery and Bradworthy, it was a beautiful summer's morning, like something described by the pen of Enid Blyton. It was the sort of summer morning that I knew as a child, and which came less and less often as the innocence of childhood was replaced by the compromises, and moral grey areas of my adulthood, and which eventually disappeared for good, round about the time that I realised that my life was never going to work out the way that I had always wanted it to do.

I didn't know whether the place in which I found myself was what the world truly was like beneath all the artifice and shameful compromising of adulthood, or whether it was just the result of some magickal artifice that I didn't (and truly didn't want to) understand. But for the moment, my tired and battered body luxuriated in the glorious golden sunlight as I lazily watched two hummingbird hawk moths feeding from the most luxurious hollyhocks this side of The Story of Cherry Tree Farm.

The unseasonable sun beamed gently upon the fairytale garden as Panne walked slowly towards me.  If this actually had been a fairy tale, I reflected, there would have been a clearly defined beginning, middle and end to the story. But as I have discovered more and more as I get older, things in life are never clear cut.  I suppose that it could be argued that a person's life begins with their birth and ends with their death, but even that isn't really that clearly defined.

If you are writing the biography of someone, you usually talk about their parents and even their grandparents. In one music biography which I had to review about a quarter of a century ago, the first chapter went as far back as the protagonist's antecedents and their activities during The Crusades. And of course the story doesn't end with a person's death either. What happens during a person's life can, and does, reverberate across the centuries that follow. "Life is short, but the years are long. Not while the evil days cometh not."

As Panne walked slowly towards me, I tried to decide what I should do next.

On one level this was already a given; I was going to take her home with me, and then try to explain everything to my dear wife, who was already going to be somewhat perturbed, to say the least, because I had been missing for at least one night - I realised, with a guilty start that I actually had no idea how long I had been away from home, and that I was only assuming that it had only been for a single night.

But first, I was only too aware that I knew practically nothing about what was going on, and about the nature of the events into which I had become inadvertently embroiled, and into which it looked like I was just about to involve my beloved family. I had turned my back upon what I very much dislike calling 'psychic questing'  the best part of two decades ago. The quest for the Cornish Owlman had not been the only reason that my first marriage had collapsed, far from it, but it had certainly been a causative factor. And although my journeys down the left hand path had continued for a few years, by the end of 2000 I had lost so many people dear to me, and been through so many traumatic experiences to the detriment of my mental and physical health, that I decided - with  the help of a long ceremony performed by a witch, an old friend of mine in Leeds - to leave that part of my life behind for good. And since then, I always have.

But now I found myself deep in the middle of something that I truly didn't understand, and for which all my experience - such as it is - had done very little to prepare me. And I knew that, like it or not, I would have to get as many answers as I could.

By now Panne was standing right in front of me, his/her pelt glinting chestnut in the sun. I took his/her hairy little hands in mine and looked straight at her, and was both surprised, shocked, and saddened to see that there were tears rolling slowly down its cheeks, making the fur all matted and dark. I have never hugged a God before, but I put my arms round Panne mulling him/her to me. "I don't know why you ran away", I said in the quietest and calmest voice that I could manage. "I am going to take you home with me, and Corinna and I will look after you. But first you must help me."... It suddenly entered my head, that either due to high magickal protocols, or sheer common sense, I could not try to  find out too much at once. I didn't know how much Panne actually knew, but I could see that deity or not, (s)he was a frightened and tired little thing, and I doubted the wisdom of trying to find out too much at once.

"Just tell me one thing," I said calmly, still holding Panne's hands, and looking into his/her (It really doesn't sit right with me to refer to Panne as 'it') tearful eyes, I asked the one question that was foremost in my eyes. "Panne. Who are you?"

Still without saying anything, Panne leaned forward until his/her two little horns were once again touching my forehead. Once again I felt a searing pain across my temples, and an overwhelming wave of nausea, as my world suddenly turned black.

XX

"Oh for a muse of Fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention".

Shakespeare wrote that, and the words are said by the chorus in the play that I studied for my O levels back in 1976. I find myself wishing for the same thing because I am not sure how to describe what happened next. Not for the first time in my peculiar life I find myself in the position of trying to describe an experience for which no satisfactory words exist in the English language. This is a challenge which has stumped far greater writers than I, but I shall try and have a go anyway.

It was a bit like being in the audience of a play, except for the fact that my seat (for I remained sitting on the old garden bench throughout what happened) seemed to be on the stage itself. I was apart from the action, in that I was invisible to the actors, but I was right in the thick of the action, only that I was not. I could even pick up a little of the emotions exuded by the protagonists, but whether this was truly the emotions that they were feeling, or whether it was emotions that I was feeling as a reaction to the action I was watching I have no idea. And I don't suppose that it matters very much either.

The pain in the frontal portions of my cerebral cortex was even more debilitating and acute than it had been on the first occasion that Panne had put his/her horns onto my forehead and allowed me to catch a glimpse of wonderful things that left me with more questions than answers.

I was glad that I was sitting when this happened, because I would have surely fallen to the floor in shock and awe if I had been standing. I felt like someone had driven a red hot nail into my forehead and I could feel every one of the ridges of Panne's little horns burning indelibly into my flesh. It truly was, I remain convinced, the worst hurting that I have ever felt. The only good thing about it was that it didn't last very long, and the wondrous visions that replaced the pain were so extraordinary that the memory of the pain was soon washed away by the Waters of Lethe.

I probably shouldn't describe what I saw as 'wondrous visions'. I am afraid that it probably leads the hapless reader into expecting that I am going to describe some sort of glorious vision of Xanadu. Well, I am not. Not unless Kubla Khan's fabled summer palace was actually situated on the outer reaches of a rather rundown trading estate on the outskirts of Barnstaple.

Not for the first time in this story, a location seemed to have been taken straight out of my own memories, and twisted to suit the opportunistic needs of the storyteller whoever he or she was. Because, like Hawkmoor Hospital, this was a place that I knew very well. During spring of 1982 I came to this place on many occasions. Like on so many other occasions in my life it was a mixture of sex, cryptozoology and rock and roll that brought me there.

Let's get the cryptozoology out of the way first. At the end of the last Ice Age when the glaciers retreated, there was only a relatively short time before the land bridges which connected our islands to mainland Europe disappeared, and what are now known as the North Sea, and the English Channel, came into being.

Because there was only a relatively short window of opportunity, only a small number of the reptiles of mainland Europe reached the British Isles, and we resultantly have a very sparse herpetofauna. Two of our rarest reptiles are the smooth snake and the sand lizard, both of which are restricted to relatively small and specialised sandy areas on the south coast of England. However, there have been persistent rumours for years that both species can be found in a number of sites on the north coast of the South West peninsula. There are sand lizards on Braunton Burrows, just a few miles from Barnstaple, and so, when someone (the drummer in a local punk band) told me that they had seen bright green lizards sunning themselves on a sand heap on the outer edges of the aforementioned industrial estate, I wondered whether they could be a hitherto undiscovered colony of Lacerta agilis.

I also had more sordid reasons for wanting to be somewhere more secluded, where I could park my car, open the sun roof and bask, lizardlike, in the unseasonably golden sunshine. At the time I was somewhat involved with a slutty but good natured teenage girl called Samantha, and I had very good reasons for wanting somewhere where I could park my car in peace and quiet, and have an  uninterrupted afternoon. So the two of us went to explore the derelict edges of this rather unprepossessing Xanadu, singularly failed to see any lizard whatsoever, although my researches into human biology continued rather successfully.

But none of that is particularly important. It only goes to explain why and how I had quite an intimate (in several senses if the word) experience of the geography of this secret part of Barnstaple that I very much doubt whether one in a thousand of its residents knows exists. We explored, both in the car and on foot, every inch of the run down development, and - thirty three years later - I was seeing it again.

Although, back in 1982 when Samantha and I were exploring, we were the only people there; the owners having gone bankrupt some years before, and nobody caring enough about the place to do anything with it. The place I saw in my dream/vision/trance/psychodrama/whatever the fuck it was, was very much inhabited. There was a big double garage with the doors half hanging off that I remembered finely, because it had been outside this unpromising edifice that Samantha and I had finally parked my battered blue Toyota Corona and got down to the non-herpetological business of the afternoon. The double garage that I was seeing today in my mind's eye was very much inhabited. There was a double mattress on the floor and a couple of old army blankets and an eiderdown on top. Against the wall was a makeshift set of shelves made out of planks and books, and these were crammed with books. There was a Calor Gas stove in the corner, and a box of sundry household impedimenta next to it.

I looked around, and I could see that there were more derelict cars there than there had been upon my visit. And in most of the derelict cars there were blankets or other signs of occupation. And when I looked around at the neighbouring garages which bordered onto the double garage which held such sweet memories for me, I could see that each one had someone living in them, mostly blank eyed women who had the world weary expression worn by people who know that whatever life was going to throw at them, it was never going to get any better or worse for them than it was at this very moment.

The voice of that insufferable ass Lloyd Grossman came into my head, as I wondered who would possibly be living in my (I think I have already explained why I thought of the garage as mine) garage. Then I heard the sound of squeaky wheels and a wheelchair came slowly around the corner.

In the wheelchair was a burly, balding man with the remains of a head of light grey hair, and the ashy skin which comes from terminal cancer, and/or long term opiate abuse, often in conjunction with each other. He wheeled himself along tortuously, and when he pulled up outside the double garage in which I instinctively knew that he was living, he slowed up, dug with some difficulty into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a bottle of Oramorph.

For those of you not in the know, this following passage is taken directly from a NHS website:

Oramorph oral solution is a liquid containing the active ingredient morphine sulfate. Morphine is a type of medicine called an opioid painkiller. Opioids are strong painkillers that work by mimicking the action of naturally occurring pain-reducing chemicals called endorphins. Endorphins are found in the brain and spinal cord and reduce pain by combining with opioid receptors. Morphine mimicks the action of endorphins by combining with the opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord. This blocks the transmission of pain signals sent by the nerves to the brain. Therefore, even though the cause of the pain may remain, less pain is actually felt.

Morphine is used to relieve severe pain.

What that rather clinical little paragraph, and yes, the pun is intentional, doesn't say is that it is also a drug easily open to abuse. I know this from personal experience, having abused it myself on a number of occasions over the years.

It is a volatile and peculiar drug, and whilst it does indeed lull the inexperienced user into a place where he or she feels like they have just had a hot bath, a good meal and great sex, and are now wrapped in a swaddling shroud of warm pink cotton wool, some people also experience the most traumatic and severe hallucinations and delusions.

My father, for example, who was prescribed quite high doses of the drug during his final illness, went through a whole panoply of terrible hallucinations; he thought my mother was in the room with him, that the gardener was climbing in through the window to kill him, and that he was covered with scorpions who were about to rip off his genitals. Compared with that, my experiences were minor, but it remains a drug that I would not recommend to anyone, and one which should only be taken under strict medical supervision. Looking over the shoulder of the occupant of the wheelchair - someone whom I instinctively knew was called 'Eliphas' - as he unpacked a bag of medicine with the logo of the pharmacist at the local General Hospital, NDG, known colloquially as The Pilton Hilton, because of the district of the town in which it is situated, I could see that he had three types of cancer medicine. I recognised them from the days when I was a nurse.

I also saw that the bag held a Beretta 84F, an automatic handgun first manufactured in Italy in 1976, and commonly known as The Cheetah. I would rather not say from whence I recognised that.

XXI

I don't know how many of you reading this ever had a copy of Doom on their computer back in the late 1990s. I know that I  did. And my compadres and I spent many happy hours shooting at monsters, and once we worked out how to network our PCs, each other. It kept us happy for years. But one thing that I always liked to do, especially when stoned, was to use the  'No Clipping Mode' cheat IDSPISPOPD, and wander about 'behind the scenes', walking through walls impervious to attack and exploring the surprisingly complex landscape.

This was how I felt now. There was no doubt that I was inside the landscape that Panne had 'transported me to', for want of a better word (if I find one I shall let you know), but I was not part of it. I could explore it to a certain extent, but I could have no effect on what was happening in it. It was as if I was a player in Panne's personal video game, and someone had entered a 'no clipping' cheat for me, so that I could see everything that was going on, but not actually join in any of the gameplay.

I also appeared to have limited empathic powers. I could look at the characters and discover a certain amount about them, a bit like hovering your mouse above a character in one of the aforementioned video games, and being rewarded by a dialogue box which explained some vital facet of their character for the benefit of the player. Looking at the fat man in the wheelchair, I somehow knew his name was Eliphas, and that he was very angry. Looking at his medication I could surmise that he was being treated for a particularly aggressive form of cancer, and the fact that he was in possession of a small, serviceable, and totally illegal handgun, made me surmise that his outlook on life was not necessarily that of a straightforward and law abiding citizen.

As soon as I discovered that I could move around the room, I made a bee line for his bookshelf, because in life I have always found that you can tell a lot about people from the contents of their bookshelves. I could certainly tell a lot about Eliphas, because although there were only about forty books there, apart from a couple of technical books about chemistry, all the books were ones that could be found in certain parts of my ever expanding and rather peculiar library. The trouble is that whilst I will admit to owning books by the Marquis de Sade, Adolph Hitler, Aleister Crowley and Gerry Adams, I also own a lot more books by a lot of other people, which means what I think of as my "nasty shelf" is massively diluted. All that Eliphas had was my nasty shelf writ large with nothing to dilute it whatsoever.

There were books on the nastier end of ritual magick, the more violent end of politics, and the more apocalyptic bits of religious theory. Feeling disturbed by this I went through the wall into the next lock up garage and found nothing but some litre bottles of ammonia, and a box which said 'medical supplies'.

Deciding that I couldn't get any more information out of these two lockups, I drifted outside, and almost immediately bumped into Panne. Or rather into the human adolescent who I sensed would eventually metamorphose into the little goatfooted Godling, of whom I was getting so fond. The last time I had seen her she had been a little girl playing with her tricycle at some analogue of Hawkmoor Hospital, sometime during the 1970s. Now she looked as if she was eleven or twelve, but she had a feral glint in her eye that had been completely absent as a little girl.

She was small for her age, and had a slim, boyish body, and untidy shoulder length hair. But her eyes were frightening. They burned with a fierceness, which hinted at experiences that a preteen girl should never have had to go through in order to gain eyes like that. I followed her for a while, as she slunk around the small compound looking more like a half starved feral cat than a human, and I was following her when she eventually went to ground in a makeshift 'nest' made out of cardboard and cotton waste. There were several scrapped cars, mostly wheel-less scattered around the yard, and Panne had decided to make her nest in the back of a wrecked minivan.

I continued to look around, and I discovered that although I still didn't understand the 'controls' that allowed me to traverse around the yard, I became better at using them. In a burst of uncharacteristic lasciviousness, I went back (forward?) to the place on the outskirts of the yard where Samantha and I had spent our illicit afternoon in 1982. I suddenly realised with horror that I had no idea what year it was, so there was every possibility that the metallic blue Toyota with the two naked bodies in it might still be there. To my great relief neither the car or the occupants were there. I really don't think that it would do much good to the mental health of the 55 year old me to be confronted by the reverberations of the self-centred womanising of his 22 year old predecessor.

Just for old times sake, I even spent about half an hour looking to see if I could find any sand lizards, but just as in 1982 my search was fruitless. Then I realised that there was a way that I could find out what year it was, or at least what year it was after, and I made my way back to the main yard to check on the dates of the cars as extrapolated from the number plates.

I always remembered that in 1982 there was a band in Teignmouth called Y Reg symbolising that they were brand spanking new and up to the minute. So from that I should have no real difficulty in trying to extrapolate the dates of the wrecked cars in the yard.

I was right, it was a doddle. They ranged in date or about a decade from 1975, so the events I was observing could not have happened before the mid- 1980s, and I suspected probably not before at least the beginning of the next decade. That made sense, and I had a self-congratulatory glow of satisfaction in what would have been my chest if I had actually had any corporeal substance in this brave new world.

But then I did some mental arithmetic.

If the girl who would become Panne had been five or six when I first saw her in about 1975, she should have been in her early twenties by the time that the early years of the 1990s crawled around. But she wasn't. Fifteen years or so had elapsed but she was still to enter puberty. Something odd - in fact I think I should say that something even odder than that which was already happening - was beginning to happen.

Believe it or not, I had actually forgotten the fear and unease that I had first experienced when I entered the derelict yard, and was even beginning to enjoy myself. But now, the realisation that I couldn't even trust the space-time continuum, was brought back to me with a thump, and I felt more uneasy than ever.

XXII

There being no real point in worrying, I continued to explore, and I found - to my surprise - that there appeared to be an entire community of people living in this derelict builder's yard. They were the deadbeats, the rejects of society, the homeless, the scorned and the unwanted, but rather to my surprise, they were all living together seemingly happily. The yard was clean and tidy, and even though the homes for some of these people were rusted out cars, there were pots of flowers dotted around the place, and no sign of the squalour or depravity that one might imagine that such a community might engender.

Now, I am getting tired of typing that I cannot explain how and why I was able to move around this area, how I was able to see and observe everything that was going on, but still remain separate from it all, and how even time itself didn't seem to work in the way that it should be expected to do. Let's just take it as read. I have no way of explaining it all, so I will just tell you what happened, and - quite truly - if you don't believe me, or if you think I am lying, mad or on drugs then I don't really care. I am writing this down to get the sequence of events right in my head, for my own satisfaction, and I don't really give a hoot what anyone else thinks of the matter.

So I won't attempt to explain how it was all a bit like a computer game; how when I had discovered enough to satisfy me in one situation, I would move on somewhere else as if my magic. Well actually it was by magic, and I would discover another missing bit of the puzzle.

It appeared that Eliphas was like the unelected, self-appointed leader of the group. He was a peacemaker who adjudicated any squabbles between residents, dispensed justice occasionally, and generally acted as a cross between kindly village schoolmaster and Mafia Don. I also discovered that he wasn't called Eliphas, which didn't surprise me, and that he had adopted the name (I never did find out what he was really called) after Eliphas Levi, a French occult author and ceremonial magician. And a quick perusal of the internet whilst I was writing this told me, much to my surprise, that it wasn't his name either. "Eliphas Levi," the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into the Hebrew language.a French occult author and ceremonial magician.

Eliphas (the one in a wheelchair on the outskirts of Barnstaple) had become interested in Levi's three principles of magic, after being diagnosed with terminal, and very aggressive, cancer. Steve Jones, a witch from Yorkshire who holds the distinction of having become a Justice of the Peace, and therefore Britain's first pagan magistrate, told me once that the were three main reasons that people did magick; to get laid, get rich, or get even. But Eliphas was doing it for a fourth reason. He didn't care about dying. he had been in pain for years, but he had become very fond of his homeless parishoners (as he thought of them, hearkening back to the days when the Church of England guaranteed a scholar and a gentleman in every parish, rather than half a dozen ugly lesbians scattered throughout a team ministry) as well as feeling completely responsible for them. And he knew that without him the little community would sooner rather than later fall apart, and he didn't want that to happen. So turning his back on the book learning and scholarship which had sustained him throughout his life, he began to investigate alternatives.

Eliphas Levi was in many ways one of the founders of modern magickal theory, and although I have always suspected that he was really rather a charlatan on the quiet, much of his codification of the secret arts, followed in the lines that I think myself.

That the material universe is only a small part of total reality, which includes many other planes and modes of consciousness. Full knowledge and full power in the universe are only attainable through awareness of these other aspects of reality. One of the most important of these levels or aspects of reality is the "astral light," a cosmic fluid which may be molded by will into physical forms.

"One can only define the unknown by its supposed and supposable relations with the known."

"The divine ideal of the ancient world made the civilization which came to an end, and one must not despair of seeing the god of our barbarous fathers become the devil of our more enlightened children."

That human willpower is a real force, capable of achieving absolutely anything, from the mundane to the miraculous.

AXIOM 1: "Nothing can resist the will of man when he knows what is true and wills what is good."

AXIOM 9: "The will of a just man is the Will of God Himself and the Law of Nature."

AXIOM 20: "A chain of iron is less difficult to break than a chain of flowers."

AXIOM 21: "Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear YOU. Say to suffering, 'I will that you shall become a pleasure,' and it will prove to be such-- and even more than a pleasure, it will be a blessing."

That the human being is a microcosm, a miniature of the macrocosmic universe, and the two are fundamentally linked. Causes set in motion on one level may equally have effects on another.

"Man is the God of the world, and God is the man of Heaven."

As I have already explained, I seemed to be able to go pretty much anywhere I wanted in the dilapidated Builder's Yard. But there was one place I could not go. There was one little locked room at the back of Eliphas' lock up that was denied to me, and it was here I instinctively knew that Eliphas believed that he was going to uncover the secret that would give him a degree enough of immortality to be able to stay and look after his 'children' for as long as he was needed. But what it was.....I had no idea.

So I followed the lives of this merry band of outcasts; two teenage girl runaways, and a venerable old meths drinker with a long grey beard that made him look like Merlin (perhaps he was Merlin, nothing would surprise me much anymore, except that I suspected that I had already met Merlin on a number of occasions over the years, and that although looking superficially similar, they were completely different people). There were two middle aged tramps with wild staring eyes who never spoke to anyone except for each other, and who mostly seemed to converse in a strange idiolect that nobody else could understand, or bothered to try. There was a slight boy with Down's syndrome. he was called Michael, and I  realised with a shock that he had been a patient of mine back when. Had been a Nursing Assistan at a small hospital for what were then called Mentally Handicapped young adults in North Devon, thirty five years ago on my personal timeline. There was an elderly woman with an even more aristocratic accent than my late mother (and that is saying something) and - in her little den in the back of the old minivan was Panne, or at least the girl who would one day become Panne.

I followed their everyday lives, went with the two teenage girls and Michael as they went garbage raiding, taking all the barely spoiled food which was thrown away each day into dumpsters at the back of supermarkets, to be thrown away or salvaged by this disparate little band who were so far below being an underclass that they didn't even have a name.

A song came into my head, sung to the tune (vaguely) of The red Flag.

Oh garbage dump oh garbage dump

Why are you called a garbage dump

Oh garbage dump oh garbage dump

Why are you called a garbage dump

You could feed the world with my garbage dump

You could feed the world with my garbage dump

You could feed the world with my garbage dump

That sums it up in one big lump

When you're livin' on the road

And you think sometimes you're starvin'

Get on off that trip my friend

Just get in them cans and start carvin'

I realised with a shock that the song had been written by none other than Charlie Manson. Why did that murderous lunatic keep coming into my head? I asked myself, but could receive no discernible answer.

I went to Barnstaple library with Eliphas one day. he was in extraordinary pain but just wanted to read a short story by Doesteyeovsky, so wearing his best jacket, shirt and tie, he wheeled himself up the long road to the Central Library. He settled himself in comfort, and settled down to read the events that befall one Ivan Matveich when he, his wife Elena Ivanovna, and the narrator visit the Arcade to see a crocodile that has been put on display by a German entrepreneur.

After teasing the crocodile, Ivan Matveich is swallowed alive. He finds the inside of the crocodile to be quite comfortable, and the animal's owner refuses to allow it to be cut open, in spite of the pleas from Elena Ivanovna. Ivan Matveich urges the narrator to arrange for the crocodile to be purchased and cut open, but the owner asks so much for it that nothing is done. As the story ends Elena Ivanovna is contemplating divorce and Ivan Matveich resolves to carry on his work as a civil servant as best he can from inside the crocodile.

Laughing out loud, and taking surreptitious sips at a bottle of whisky to dull the pain, he was the happiest I have ever seen him, but as soon as the library staff discovered what was happening he was summarily ejected, and my heart bled for him as, with tears of rage, embarrassment and humiliation rolling down his cheek, he made his tortuous way back to the lock up and the only family  that he had.

That night there was a violent thunderstorm, and the inhabitants of the little family all huddled in their own shelters like frightened woodland creatures. As the rain beat down upon the corrugated iron roof of The lock up where Eliphas lay, drunk to hell, on a grubby mattress, screaming taunts and insults at an unfeeling, uncaring and completely oblivious universe, I sensed that something was different. Something drastic had changed and it was never going to be the same again.

XXIII

With hindsight I know that I cannot have been sitting on the bench in Britannia's garden for more than about ten minutes, but it seemed to me as though whole weeks elapsed, while I floated in limbo above the derelict builder's yard watching the lives of the people who lived there. The nearest analogy that I can give (and it is a very imperfect one) is something I do every day, as I sit in my comfortable old armchair typing away on my iPad and listening to whatever happens to be on my playlist on that particular day.

Opposite me is a 40inch fishtank, quite heavily planted, in which I have a selection of fish that would not have been out of place in one of the mountain ponds I used to explore when I was a child in Hong Kong. It contains a breeding colony of Chinese white cloud mountain minnows, some danios and a large black goggle-eyed goldfish called Chester. To my right, on top of the 1920s glass cabinet that Corinna brought with her when she moved in to live with me all those years ago, is my hifi, and next to it a two foot tank containing a small colony of Japanese fire bellied newts. Quite often during the day when I am meant to be writing deathless prose, I find myself staring at the tanks following the intricate day to day lives of the little creatures who live there. And so it was as I sat hunched on the bench in Britannia's garden, Panne's cute little horns pressed hard against my forehead. I don't know what state of consciousness I was in. I suspect that it wasn't a coma, a dream, or a hallucination, rather some thaumaturgically hypnogogic state for which there is no proper word in the English language. Certainly I am not going to try and invent one because there is no need. I have experienced it, and I seriously doubt whether I shall ever meet anyone else who has been through the same set of experiences, so apart from doing what I am doing now - writing my story down for my own satisfaction as much as anything - I will probably never have to describe what happened again.

I followed the day to day dramas of the little colony, shared their joys and sorrows in an abstract kind of way, but as the days progressed felt more and more disturbed by the change that I could see in Eliphas. His anger and bitterness were palpable, and I watched - helplessly - as a thoroughly decent man was overcome by pain, horror and bitterness and became a monster. As the cancer ate away at him he spent more time hidden away in the back room of his lock up; the one place that I could not follow him. And I became consumed with curiosity to see what on earth he could be doing out there.

I slowly began to realise that the different people living there had their own social roles. The two runaway teenaged girls, quite logically as they were the ones who appeared to be least alienated from the rest of the world, were the ones who went begging, shoplifting or garbage diving in search of food, whilst the older and more taciturn residents were the ones who scavenged across the scrubland and the little wood that lay on the opposite side of the fields behind the yard. There they would gather firewood, snare rabbits, and pick blackberries and hazelnuts. Following a couple of them one day I found that they even had a little kitchen garden, where they grew carrots, potatoes and cannabis, deep in the woods.  This wouldn't have happened in my younger days, I thought to myself. As a boy my friends and I roamed all across the woodlands, but with an increasingly sedentary and urbanised population who are becoming ever more divorced from the reality of the natural world, the woods were becoming the demesne of the wild animals, and feral people like my new friends from the derelict builder's yard, and they were able to tend their little crops in peace.

I was, of course, most interested in the little girl who would eventually become Panne. But in this phase of her existence she seemed to spend most of her time with Eliphas, who seemed to be as fond of her as I was of her later caprine incarnation. She would follow him around, even accompanying him up the long hard hill to the Pilton Hilton on the odd occasions that he would go there to receive treatment and more medication. He would slowly and tortuously wheel himself up and down the long hill to the hospital while Panne trotted happily alongside him like a little dog. As far as I could ascertain neither of them said anything to each other. In fact, as far as I could ascertain she never said anything to anyone, but they seemed content enough in their own peculiar existence.

As I followed various members of the strange little commune around, I realised that I could pick up some of their thoughts and feelings, in dribs and drabs at least. However, because I am basically a coward, I did my best not to do this because the stories I learned from each of them were so unutterably sad. The middle aged men had, like Eliphas, once had families and homes, but had lost them through a mixture of poor decision making, bad luck, and - in most cases - the cruelty and duplicity of other people. The teenaged girls had been abused, bullied and humiliated to a horrific degree usually by the very people whom one would have hoped would have been there to help and protect them. The catalogue of depravity and abuse that would enter my head every time I so much as let my psychic guard slip for a moment or two was unbelievable, and will - I am sure - stay with me for the rest of my life. One of the girls had essentially been whored out by her stepfather from about the age of eight in order to pay for his own chemical predelictions, and had turned to her stepfather's chemicals in order to numb the pain and terror of being raped and used by an endless parade of total strangers, and worse family friends, every night for years upon years. When she had finally summoned up the strength to tell the police her family was torn asunder by the shock, and her mother blamed her for it all and threw her out of the house. I couldn't bear to learn any more, so never did find out how she ended up under Eliphas's protection in the derelict yard on the edge of town.

The two characters who interested me most were - of course - Eliphas and Panne, but I could get nothing at all from Panne, and all the rest of Eliphas' thoughts were so cloaked in a miasma of hatred, anger and bitterness, that I knew I couldn't connect with his mind for very long and retain what was left of my own sanity. So I left well alone.

However, on one of his regular trips to the hospital, with little Panne trotting faithfully by his side, I was serendipitously there when he made a discovery that would change everything.