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.

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.

XI

My father was a strange man; quick to condemn, and very much shut inside a world of his own making. But as I get older, I realise that the same could be said of us all. My teens were spent listening to rock music, drinking beer and smoking cannabis,whereas his were spent drinking gin and being torpedoed by German U Boats. Such things do - I imagine - tend to fuck up one's outlook on life.

But my father was remarkably judgemental. I remember him claiming that a clip from The Muppet Show of Miss Piggy singing a duet with Kris Kristofferson on 'Help me make it through the night' was promoting bestiality, how Alvin Stardust was a communist (I never did get that one), and how Mott the Hoople's 'Roll Away the Stone' was somehow mocking the resurrection of Our Lord, when the stone was rolled away from his tomb on the first Easter Sunday. Stuff like that sounds ridiculous to modem ears, but I am sure that some of the things that I say in front of my young relatives sound just as irritatingly archaic to their ears.

However, despite being a judgemental old sod, my father was at hear a decent and a Godly man. Every Christmas, when I was a boy in Hong Kong, he would open our doors to a motley collection of people who wee the dispossessed of the Colonial Service, and always contacted the Captain of any American or British warships then currently moored in Hong Kong harbour and invited a couple of their most junior ratings to spend Christmas Day with us, always specifying that it should be the ones who had left home most recently, and were therefore bound to be homesick, and most likely to appreciate someone else's home and hearth for the day.

We cordially disliked each other for much of our lives, but became friends during the last eight months of his life, and when he died I was sitting by his bedside holding his hand. I know that he came to terms with much of what I do, and how I have elected to spend my life during those last months, but I am equally sure that he would have strongly disapproved of much of what I do these days. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that despite having been a devout churchman all his life, he would probably have approved of my burgeoning relationship with Panne.

For over the next few weeks, Panne seemed to have taken up residence in the aquarium supplies cupboard in the corner of my office. A few days after her arrival I beckoned her out into the garden, and carried out a little ceremony which I first learned about in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. It took place right at the beginning of the book when Dan and Una, two Edwardian children first met Puck the hedge goblin. Puck carried out a little piece of ancient magick called seizin...

'It's an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seized of your land—it didn't really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.' He held out the turves, and continued...

'Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,' began Puck, in a sing-song voice. 'By right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.'

When Corinna first moved into my house in North Devon nearly eight years ago, we had a few problems with the less tangible inhabitants of the property. We had a few problems with some of the tangible ones as well, but that is another story entirely. There has been a house where we live since the original grant of the manor about fifteen hundred years ago, and historians have told me how the cottages along Back Street (which marked the back line of the Manor grounds) were built to house the workmen who built the Manor, the pub and the church (not necessarily in that order), and so we are one of the oldest inhabited locations in the area. Whatever you believe about the nature of ghosts, I am convinced that they exist. One cannot live in Myrtle Cottage for too long without encountering them.

However, my mother had died in 2002, and it was five years before the next Mrs Downes arrived, and I made the unforgivable error of not introducing Corinna to the ghosts, so one night at Christmas, about eighteen months after she had first moved in, by which time the poltergeist activity in the house and various other bits of bad shit that I won't go into here had become almost unbearable.

So, I took Corinna and the broadsword that I bought her for her fiftieth birthday out into the garden and performed a rite of seizin with her, granting her the right to come and go anywhere she wanted upon my property without let or hindrance, and essentially telling the ghosts who already lived here that she was now the co-owner of a third of an acre of damp rural England, containing a lot if trees and a tumbledown cottage. It must have worked, because she has had no problem since, and the other shit that was bedevilling us has largely got better.

So I did something similar with Panne. As my Mother would have said, I felt "in my water" that (s)he was a creature whose intentions were good (if I may paraphrase Eric Burdon) and I felt mildly guilty that she seemed to have confined herself voluntarily to one small cupboard in the corner of my office. So I formally gave her permission to come and go as she wished, and to wander over my little estate and do what she wanted there as long as she caused no damage or hurt to anyone or anything living here. She, not the be smiled at me shyly, and then slunk away into the trees at the other side of the circular lawn, which is the only one of the formal lawns which has survived the transition between my Father's tenure here and my own.

There have always been ghosts in my house. There is a tall lady wearing a long grey dress who has occasionally been seen walking along the path which runs from my office door to the back door. the nomenclature here causes a fair amount of confusion because we don't actually have a proper front door. My mother believed for some reason that having a front door which opened out onto the street was vulgar, and so my father blocked it up. The Grey Lady, as both my Father and I have dubbed her, seems oblivious to our existence, as does the man in the tall hat who is seen in the landing and the little boy who sometimes sits in the doorway between the sitting room (I refuse to follow in my mother's footsteps and call it a Drawing Room) and what used to be a Dining Room, and hopefully will be once again once I have finally raised the money to build Corinna a Garden Office.

Less benign is the poltergeist who sometimes does his percussive stuff on the stairs, but these days he is no more annoying than Graham when he is very drunk and listening to Hawkwind bootlegs, and the two ghost cats that scamper about on occasion startling visitors in the corridor which leads to what I refuse to call the East Wing, though I suppose it is. the most unsettling of the resident spectres in the house is something that Corinna and I have dubbed The Shapeshifter, which walks along the same path as the Grey Lady, but assumes the form of one of the people or animals living in or visiting the house. I first noticed this particular apparition during my father's final months when I was sitting by the window in what is now Corinna's and my room, when I saw what looked like my dog Tessie walking along the path. As she was very old and was nearly blind she was not allowed out at night, so I shouted angrily down the intercom at Graham, telling him to close the back door, just as Tessie ambled into my Dad's bedroom looking fir her evening digestive biscuit.

Over the years several if us, but mostly Corinna and me have encountered The Shape Shifter, and it has impersonated various family members including my eldest stepdaughter. So I am reasonably used to living with spirits, and so was far less worried about allowing Panne the run of the place than you might otherwise have thought.

This was a very busy time for me. My beloved younger stepdaughter Olivia, now living in Norfolk, was just about to make me a Grandfather, and there were lots of arrangements to be made and plans to formulate. So, whilst I occasionally saw a brief glimpse of a little goatfooted forest Godling out of the corner of my eye - sometimes peeking out of the bushes, sometimes entering or leaving the cupboard in my office that she seemed to have adopted as a home base, and sometimes even playing with the dogs in a crazy joyous game of catch as catch can over by the lower aviary, I paid her little attention, and I forgot about Danny Miles entirely.

This was probably, as it turned out, not the best move I could have made.

X

Oh the universe is a strange place. But you don't need me to tell you that I am sure. I have been telling you the story of my totally unexpected relationship with a band called Xtul, and their Minister for Information, Danny Miles, whom I have known for over thirty years and have done my best to ignore for most of that time. However, because my time is limited, and my space within the various places that I have been telling this story is even more so, I had only got as far as the second week in September when we got close to the end of the year, and the band broke silence and released a particularly scabrous slice of undanceable sound collage, and labelled it their Christmas single. So I had to write about that, and then we came to the big Christmas double issue, and so I had no time to write any more, and we are still stuck back in mid-September, with a story to tell that I had planned to get done and dusted before Christmas.

But that's the way the world is, and so I am left here, as the rest of the Kingdom is dealing with a surfeit of mince pies, trying to pick up the pieces of the narrative. I am not going to back pedal and tell the story again, because the previous episodes are all readable on the band's website, and I am just going to try and pick up where I left off....

Apparently Danny returned to the forest about a week later. As he drove  along the A39 towards the Cornish border he telephoned the number he had been given. Skullfuck answered, and Danny explained who he was and what he wanted. "It was all so bloody normal" he complained. "It was like telephoning your bank manager to make an appointment, back in the days when you actually had a bank manager, and not a load of young people in bright yellow T Shirts trying to sell you mortgages and life insurance". But nothing could make it that normal, because nothing could take away the fact that he was on the telephone to a feral biker with an obscene name, and the person with whom he was trying to make an appointment was a wheelchair bound half-man half-elephant chimera surrounded by psychotic children with machine guns and pig masks. Even Nat West hasn't changed to that degree.

He drove down the little lane that led off the main road towards the hamlet of Meddon, and once again he was stopped by armed teenage girls wearing pig masks. But this time he was expecting them, and got into the boot of his own car voluntarily, and made no attempt to struggle against his captors.

Again, after a relatively short journey, they arrived at their destination. Skullfuck was there to help him out of his confinement, and he ushered him along the path through the forest to the army surplus pavilion where Mr Loxodonta (for that is the name given by the elephant-headed cripple) seemed to spend his time. This time around Danny managed to take in more of his surroundings. The green canvas walls were draped with a mixture of cheap looking oriental and Indian tat which Danny described as the sort of stuff that you could pick up "for a couple of bob" on market stalls. Loxodonta didn't invite him further into the tent, which appeared from the outside to be the size of a marquee, and with a number of other rooms, that Danny couldn't see.

Mr Loxodonta was obviously waiting for him, and with a politely old-fashioned gesture he motioned to Danny to sit down in a canvas backed director's chair  facing him.

By the way, just in case you don't already know what Loxodonta means, African elephants are elephants of the genus Loxodonta (from the Greek words loxo (oblique sided) and donta (tooth)). The genus consists of two extant species: the African bush elephant and the smaller African forest elephant. Loxodonta is one of two existing genera of the family, Elephantidae. Fossil remains of Loxodonta have been found only in Africa, in strata as old as the middle Pliocene. Mr Loxodonta has been known to claim the Given Name of Eliphas, and as the other genus of elephants is Elephas, that seems to make some sort of twisted sense, but - of course - there is a long tradition of the use of that name within magical circles, including Eliphas Levi, and at least one major character in the Harry Potter Universe.

"What have you got for me?" Asked Mr Loxodonta gravely, and Danny gave what he described as a totally "fuck off presentation with graphs, and projections and all that shit" which appeared to please the probiscodean cripple, who asked a number of questions, before telling Danny that not only was he now the Minister for information, but that he was on the payroll, and that he wasn't going to kill him "just yet".

I asked what he meant about a payroll, and Danny explained that as he was leaving with his first bundle of objectives (which mostly seemed to be about convincing me that Xtul were viable musicians, and to get them regular mentions in the magazine which I edit, something that we all know that he achieved without too much difficulty) Skullfuck gave him an ATM card which seemed to have access to potentially unlimited funds. "but how much can I take out?" He asked. Skullfuck shrugged back. "As much as you need".

Danny was confused. "Who decides how much I need?" He questioned. "You do," came the answer.

"But what if I take too much?" He stuttered, and was not truly surprised by the answer that if he did, his new elephantine master would send his girls after him, and that they would kill him.

"Oh dear," said Danny.

All this had taken place in the late spring and through the long and surprisingly  warm summer of 2014 Danny had gone back to the woodland camp every few weeks, whilst simultaneously setting up, with the help of two of Mr Loxodonta's hacker girls, a sophisticated online presence that he refused to describe to me in any more detail. "It's more than either your or my life is worth, man.... And anyway you don't need to know".

Despite having been to the woods over half a dozen times, the people the Children of the Three still treated him with a certain amount of suspicion. The way he described it, Skullfuck was firmly in charge of the humans there, and was the only male human that he had met. The rest were all girls, and apart from the two that he had met whilst hitchhiking, they all wore pig masks. He was now aware that the first two had been just a sophisticated honey trap, although he had no idea how they could possibly have known that he was going to be driving along the A39 that spring day when it was a last minute decision on his part, and he didn't know himself until he did it.

"But you keep on calling them 'The Children of the Three"....who are the three?" I asked. I was pretty sure I knew who two of them were, but I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, with Danny being the horse.

He confirmed my suspicions.

"I've told you all that I know about Mr Loxdonta...." (Actually, he hadn't, but I didn't know that at that point) "....and you met Panne the first night I came to see you.

But the third one is a mystery. I occasionally caught glimpses of a tall woman in a silver suit, but always out of the corner of my eye, and only for a split second. And it was always terrifying. As Skullfuck was the only person who would talk to me I asked him, but he just shrugged and told me that it was none of my business and that I would know soon enough.

Panne let it out by mistake once that all three of them had once been human, although they weren't anything like human anymore, and that brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about. Panne has disappeared!"

And he looked at me accusingly. I stared back guiltily, and summoned up the reserves of skill that I had learned back during the 1970s when I became quite good at lying to my headmaster at Bideford Grammar School.

"How the hell should I know?" I lied through my teeth, not for a moment thinking that a consummate con man like Danny could be fooled by a mere amateur like me. Amazingly he was....

"Well, according to Skullfuck the only time she had ever left the compound was the time that she came here with me..." But I could see that he was beginning to doubt himself. Danny has always had such a high opinion of his own importance - after all, he had been personally chosen by deities to do their dirty work for them - that he couldn't imagine that any of this Unholy Trinity would ever want to visit someone as ordinary as me for any reason imaginable. The idea that the little forest Godling came to see me for chocolate, and maybe a little affection, was completely beyond his comprehension.

They say that it is impossible to cheat an honest man, and so as Danny is one of the least honest men that I have ever met, pulling the wool over his eyes was a reasonably straightforward task.

About five minutes later, after cadging a final cigarette from me, he left after exacting a promise from me that I would contact him if Panne actually turned up at the CFZ. Completely mendaciously I agreed, determining quietly to myself that I would do no such thing.

Just as I heard the resonating clang of him tossing the gate shut behind him, I heard a rustling sound from a cupboard beneath one of my fish tanks; a cupboard far too small to hold anything apart from a couple of boxes of aquarium paraphernalia. I knew exactly what it was, and called out, "It's OK he's gone", and the slight figure of  Panne emerged from a tiny space that could not possibly have held her.

She looked at me in silence, and I passed her the last of my wife's chocolate.

IX

The tired, shrivelled husk of a man sat at his computer staring blankly into the screen waiting for inspiration to arrive when the message flashed up. 

If Xtul is just a story it is a very good one.
If Xtul is for real it is the end of life as we know it.

There was a clickable link, so the man clicked it. A strange dirge-like song in 5/4 time started to play through his computer speakers and an unearthly, horrible voice sang:

The only gods you seem to want AROUND are the ones YOU THINK ARE
GONNA make your WRETCHED LIFE SEEM better
there is no room in your psyche for a BONA FIDE Old Testament type psychotic blood letter
you didn't know YOU were doing it but YOU still created us in your own image
and you ended up with something that you never will be able quite to envisage
Soon he became bored and switched the music off, and resumed his search for internet pornography.

Meanwhile in a small village in North Devon a musician who calls himself 4th Eden was preparing to go to bed. Much to his surprise there was a knock at the door. He answered it and two young female children wearing dungarees and pig masks and brandishing knives burst into his front room.

Behind them was a tall, voluptuous woman wearing a silver catsuit. She appeared to have a grinning rictus skull instead of a head.

While the two children grabbed him, the tall woman approached him and thrust a key drive into his hand. “Make a Master Recording of this!” she ordered. 4th Eden whose real name is Martin told me afterwards that despite the undoubted horror of the situation, it all made a strange kind of sense to him, so he fired up his laptop and spent the next four hours tweaking, and polishing the eldritch music that he found on it.

As the first rays of dawn lit up the winter sky, he finished his task, gave the wav file back to the tall woman who nodded her thanks and then, together with the two young girls left the room. Martin was completely dazed, and spent the next few hours sat in his favourite armchair afraid to go to sleep.

Later that day I was sitting in my study working on the latest issue of The Gonzo Weekly when Danny Miles sheepishly walked in. He handed me a key drive and explained that - at last - Xtul were ready to release their first proper single.
Earlier in the year they had released a two track single - The Song of Pan backed with a hastily cobbled together remix called A Cry in the Darkness which I had cobbled together in my home studio. Later in the early summer another song called Mr Loxodonta was leaked onto YouTube, but now it seems that the three Woodland Deities and their frightening coterie of genius level runaway schoolkids had decided that it was time to put out a proper single.

The key drive contained master copies and videos for two songs. Danny explained to me how Discordia, the self-proclaimed Goddess of chaos had paid a visit to my mate Martin in what Frank Sinatra called ‘The Wee Small Hours’ and forced him at knifepoint to master the single.
I was furious. Martin is a mate of mine and I said as much to Danny.

“Yes, we know” he said. “That’s why they went to him”.

I found this whole concept monumentally chilling. Were none of my friends and family safe any more from these bloody lunatics? Apparently not. Even Danny was beginning to have a hunted feral look about him. It seemed that mere humans did not benefit from prolonged exposure to these psychopathic creatures, whatever, or whoever they would eventually turn out to be.

Danny told me that Xtul wanted me to put together “a zip file of goodies” that could be downloaded from the Xtul website during the week leading up to the Winter Solstice. 

I agreed to put it together on the proviso that none of my other friends, or loved ones would ever again have nocturnal visitations from knife wielding psychotics.

I put together a pdf of all the stories that I had written about the Xtul story to date, and also added the three tracks that had previously been released by the band as extras, and - basically because I felt that we owed the poor bastard something to give some little recompense for his ordeal of the previous evening - I also included a 4th Eden track called A Winter’s Dance which seemed to fit the sonic mood, if not the apocalyptic sentiments of the two new songs from Xtul.

I then uploaded them to the Xtul website, and sat back to see what would happen. Would anyone bother to listen to them? Would anyone watch the videos on YouTube? But above all a far more important question troubled my dreams that night.

Would there prove to be any substance in these vague apocalyptic threats that these people, or rather these “Things” as the late Ivan T Sanderson would have no doubt described them, had made, and continue to make.

What was going to happen in 2015? Would the whole thing fizzle out, or - in the words of Danny Miles’ uncharacteristically slick prose - would this truly be the end of life as we know it?

VIII

“An Elephant???”

I looked at him feigning shock and awe (if I can borrow a term). In fact I was nowhere near as overawed as I had pretended, because I had already got quite emotionally involves with a strange lost little goat person from (presumably) those very same woods and if those woods could produce Panne, the idea of a half man, half elephant in a wheelchair was no real paradigm shift.

I have never been a very convincing liar, and I am a terrible actor, so instead of carrying on pretending to be shocked and awed, I lit yet another cigarette, made a mental note to light a candle to St Bernardino of Siena who is not only the Patron Saint of lung problems, but looks - in a painting by Jacopo Bellini from about 1450 - more than a little like Andy, the current lead guitarist with The Pink Fairies who is a vague chum of mine, and asked:

“So what did you do then?”

“Give me one of those fucking things..” he gestured towards my rapidly depleting pack of B&H.

Now I was shocked. I have known Danny for about a third of a century. Not only have I never seen him smoke, but he has always been vehemently annoying in his opposition to the habit.

I passed him a cigarette, lit it for him, and whilst he coughed and spluttered, I made encouraging noises and tried to get him to continue with his story.

“He looked at me for what seemed like hours, but was probably less than a minute, and asked ‘Give me one good reason why I should not kill you immediately?’”

He dragged on the cigarette, which despite everything seemed to be calming him down, and continued…

“Well, although I am sure that he knew perfectly well what I had really wanted from the two girls, I couldn’t really admit that, so I told him that I was a music journalist who was incredibly impressed by the music that the two girls had played me, and wanted to know more”….

This seemed to have been the right answer. At least, the bestial elephantman had not smote him down immediately, so sensing his tactical advantage, Danny gabbled on. He was involved with a community record company which was being set up, he lied, and both with that and with his unique relationship with the editor of Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine he wanted to get involved and help bring this remarkable music to a wider audience than it had at the moment.

As the audience to which he was referring was presently about thirty runaway teenage cultists living in surprisingly Spartan conditions in the middle of the woods, this quest would not be a difficult one to fulfil.

Both his “involvement with a community record company which was being set up” and his “unique relationship with the editor of Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine” were of course down to the fact that he had known me, and been an on-off thorn in my side for over thirty years.

“But we are nowhere near being Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine”, I blustered, but for once Danny seemed sure of his facts.

“Back in February the BBC quoted: ‘The NME website gets 1.4m users per week, while the digital edition of the magazine sells 1,307 copies a week, and thousands of people attend NME live events and concert tours’.” He said proudly, and looked me in the eye with the face of someone who is particularly proud of his own cleverness.

“Well yeah, we do get more readers than that most weeks”, I admitted, “but you are nothing at all to do with the magazine, and while I am editor you won’t be…”

“Details, details” he spluttered, and continued with his story…

“For some reason the elephant man whose name was – by the way – Mr Loxodonta – seemed quite impressed by all this bullshit of mine, and I began to think that I might be able to get away with it all, and live to fight another day”.

One of Danny’s most annoying characteristics has always been to talk in clichés, but I let him get away with it, as he continued his story.

“So I bullshitted like I have never bullshitted before” he said proudly, “and you know how I can bullshit!”

He looked at me as if this was an accomplishment of which he should be justly proud. In my opinion it probably isn’t, but I smiled wanly at him and nodded for him to continue…

“So I told Mr Loxodonta that what he needed was a Business Plan, and how he needed to market his cult for all that it was worth”

This was probably true. Cult leader Charles Manson has been in prison since 1969, but his records are still remarkably popular despite the fact that they are bloody awful and that the only USP that they have is that they sound mildly disturbing only because of what and who he is.

Danny continued:

“I gave him all sorts of ideas, and promised to come up with a cogent business plan and some ideas for how to market this stuff. It helps, I think, that unlike most music made by cults and cultists, this music is really pretty damn good”

I nodded, actually truthfully being able to agree with him for once. The music truly is pretty damn good.

“He asked me if I would like to be their publicity officer. I didn’t answer but thought really hard. Then I remembered your mate Mick Farren who died last year. He was the head honcho of the UK White Panthers, so I decided to steal one of his ideas.

‘No man; I told him. ‘ I want to be your Minister for Information’”.

Apparently this struck some kind of chord with Mr Loxodonta who nodded as enthusiastically as a half man half elephant sat in a wheelchair can do. It seems that on the numerous occasions in the past thirty years that Danny has stayed in my spare room or wherever has doubled as my ever-growing personal library has borne fruit…for him at least. Because I am a ridiculously voracious bibliophile, some would say packrat, and despite regular pruning and weeding sessions I still have over 5000 books on a variety of subjects including Forteana, magick (of various hues), politics (also of various hues), music and animals.

It turned out that over the years Danny had read a lot of these books, and had cherrypicked information that he was now regurgitating to Mr Loxodonta like a mother pigeon feeding her offspring.

Thinking completely off the cuff in a stream of consiousnesss way that I have to admit that I grudgingly respected, he took the idea of regular ‘Communiques’ delivered anonymously to various media outlets from The Angry Brigade (an anarchist group active in London during the mid-1970s), the idea of Art Terrorism from The Situationist Movement (with a hint of Banksy), more odds and ends from Mick Farren and the leader of the American White Panthers John Sinclair, and then wrapped the whole thing into a business model based on Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s conceptual band The Gorillaz..

“Their records are fucking great man, but they are cartoon characters and everyone knows that. What if you had progressive hip hop – I’m not gonna call it fucking ‘Urban’ cos its not fucking ‘Urban’ – made by actual double A class fucking Gods! Gods that have real powers and should scare you shitless! Gods that can smite you to dust! Can you think of a better fucking incentive to buy their record?”

I have to admit, that much though I abhor his method of speech, and the way that he said ‘Fuck’ more and more often as he became more excited, and the fact that all the best bits of this were things that I should have come up with myself years ago, he had a point.

Then it seemed things really started to happen. Mr Loxodonta made it known that he was in favour of these plans and that he wanted Danny to go away and think about these suggestions and come back with some cogent plans. He was given a telephone number to ring next time he wanted to get in touch, the bin bag was put over his head (gently this time) and he was (also gently) put back into the trunk of his car and driven back to a layby a few hundred yards from the A39.

It was the huge and (if you didn’t know that he was actually a pussy cat – I knew him back when he was called Jeremy, and I wondered whether he still collected stamps) terrifying figure of Skullfuck, who lifted him out of the boot of his car, dusted him down and helped him into the driver’s seat.

“You’ve been lucky today” he said, and strode back into the forest as Danny took a deep breath and continued his journey back up the A39 towards the link road, the M5 and his long-time boyfriend Basil in the Somerset Levels.