XVI

I stared at the advancing policemen blankly. It has been over fifteen years since I had the boys in blue visit my house. That was back in 1997 after a young girl was killed in an inexplicable, and still unsolved murder, only a street away from where I had been living for many years, and where - in the aftermath of my own horrific divorce - my friend and partner in crime Graham Inglis spent much of his time. Being by far the weirdest and most non–conformist people in the little red brick estate, as well as the only single men, we were obviously going to be suspects. We were both quite happy to give DNA samples, having absolutely nothing to hide, but as we were questioned in some considerable detail about our activities that weekend, as said activities had involved Olympic levels of substance abuse, and a mildly debauched party, we were not particularly willing to share too many details with the rozzers.

But we were innocent. We knew that we were innocent, and eventually - despite my suspicions that the Birmingham Six, and the Guildford Four were just about to be joined by The Exwick Two - we were eliminated from the enquiry, and although it took me two years to get back the Gurkha kukri that I had hanging on my wall, we essentially left the affair without a stain on our characters.

But on this occasion what on earth could I have possibly done. I kept the implacable look of injured justice on my face as I struggled to stay calm, wracking my brains to try and think what the hell I could have done wrong! "Yes, Officer. can I help you?" I said in the grimly patrician manner that has saved my bollocks from the fire on many occasions, and which even now seems to alert the plods to the fact that - contrary to appearances - they were not dealing with some crusty traveller, but an old fashioned English Gentleman.

However, on this occasion, the boys in blue looked singularly unimpressed as they surveyed the piles of mildly esoteric bric-a-brac which lay heaped in piles across my tiny study. Their companion in the black overcoat, whom I was rapidly beginning to suspect was more than plain CID, if only because that acronym stands for Criminal Investigation Department, and I honestly couldn't think of anything even vaguely criminal for which I could have been pulled up.

He looked at me with steely grey eyes.  "I believe that you know a man called Daniel Miles," he said.

I slumped into my battered office chair. "What the fuck has he done NOW?" I asked.

I could see a flicker of humour pass for a fraction of an instant across his countenance. But it vanished almost immediately. "I don't think that there is any need for language like that, Sir", he replied, but I took a deep breath and said. "This is my house, and I will use any language I see fit here, officer. I will not be antagonistic and aggressive, but I am damned if I will temper my vocabulary to suit the sensibilities of an uninvited visitor. Now either arrest me, or sit down and we will discuss the matter like gentlemen..."

And much to my amazement, my high-handed attitude actually worked, and as he made no move to arrest me, I gestured to him to sit down. "I am afraid that I don't have enough chairs in here for your colleagues...", I started to say, but the ice was broken. He told the two uniformed policemen to go outside and sit in the car, and acquiesced like a lamb when I asked them to park up by the church rather than annoying my neighbours by blocking the lane outside.

They left. Graham was still hovering in the background, and I dispatched him for coffee and whisky. Much to my surprise the plainclothes policeman, who I suspected by now was almost certainly Special Branch, graciously accepted both. I didn't bother to ask him whether he was OK with me smoking, and lit one up anyway.

"You haven't answered my question," I said, sounding far more confident than I was feeling. "What the hell has that idiot Danny Miles done now?"

The policeman made himself comfortable and adjusted himself in his seat. "The trouble is, sir, that we don't know. We were hoping that you would be able to tell us."

I looked at him in silence. I would love to say that at this point I raised one eyebrow quizzically, but although my wife, my adopted nephew Max, and even my mother-in-law, can do this undoubtedly impressive facial contortion, I can do nothing of the sort. So I just scowled at him, and asked another question, although this time I was pretty sure that I knew the answer. "Why me?"

He had the good grace to look mildly embarrassed. "Well, sir, you have helped us with our enquiries on previous occasions..."

I snorted. "And I am sure that your records will have told you that I was found to be entirely blameless on each of those occasions," I barked angrily, because - unlike most citizens of this sceptre'd isle - I have attracted the attention of the security forces on at least three occasions over the past twenty years.

The first took place during the last year of the John Major administration, when the Conservative Government was reliant on the capricious and stormy political friendship of the Ulster Unionists to stay in power, and was getting more and more concerned that anti-government interests from Britain and Ireland would team up to try and bring the government to its knees.

Well it so happened that in the spring of 1995 I had a telephone call from a very drunk ex-Royal Marine sergeant who claimed to have been in charge of one of the detachments of Royal Marines, who, ten years earlier, had been hunting The Beast of Exmoor. He claimed that they had shot a big black cat, but as they had been on private land without permission they had buried the body and vowed to say nothing about it. However, because my informant was down on his luck he was prepared to take me to the body...for a consideration.

I was sceptical, especially when, in an attempt to establish his bona fides, he told me (in confidence) that he had been part of a detachment of Marines acting as bodyguards to the then Princess of Wales as she visited her "Fancy Man" in rural Devon. This was months before the relationship between Princess Diana and James Hewitt became public knowledge. I had discussed the claims about the Beast of Exmoor in writing and on local radio, and because I had vaguely known Hewitt when we were both schoolboys (he was an egregious little shit even then) the increasingly paranoid Conservative administration decided that I was obviously trying to destabilise the royal family, and - according to several sources, especially On the trail of the saucer spies, UFOs and Government Surveillance by my friend Nick Redfern - my phone line was tapped for several months.

A couple of years later, the taps were renewed when circumstantial evidence suggested that I was an IRA sympathiser (I wasn't but had friends who were) and even appeared in a drunken photograph taken at a gig by an Irish republican rock band, in An Poblacht. But again, the taps were removed eventually.

Most recently, in 2012, I shot a video for the title track of Merrell Fankhauser's Area 51 Suite. I'm rather proud of this. Not only is it the first pop video that I have directed which didn't feature either me, my band, or some mate of mine screaming avant garde nonsense, but I almost got arrested by Special Branch whilst making it. Although Area 51 is in Nevada, it was filmed in North Cornwall outside GCHQ, because of their impressive satellite dishes.

Worryingly for the state of the nation's security, the base security forces noticed the fat hippy with an expensive camera but failed to notice to relatively small teenagers (one dressed in an alien mask) and a large, bumbling dog with impressive jowls. The police were very nice to me when we spoke on the telephone, and I am pretty sure that I have avoided being sent to some secret interrogation facility on Diego Garcia, as they seemed to believe everything I said (which was good, considering that it was the pure and unadulterated truth).

So, I have attracted the nation of Britain's guardians of law and order on at least three occasions, and as I have written and spoken widely about my negative view of both the British and American governments (check out my book Island of Paradise for the really damning stuff) I am not at all surprised that I have a file on me, and that it remains open. But Danny? He is just an irritating small town conman, and - if I may steal Tim Good's phrase - of no defence significance whatsoever.

I said as much to the man from Special Branch, who was sitting back comfortably sipping my whisky. He looked at me quizzically for a few moments before saying. "But in your writings, Mr Downes, you have intimated that Mr Miles is quite capable of running a cult. Indeed, I believe he did so at one time, and you were a member." He picked up his attache case and got out a copy of my 2004 biography, in which I described some rather disturbing events during the autumn of 1981, when I was busy opening the doors of perception by the use of psilocybin, and Danny was playing mind games with the more gullible members of the North Devon alternative community.

He turned to the relevant chapter and read out loud:

I can't remember whose idea it was, but at the end of October someone suggested that we should follow in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda and indulge in a group psychedelic experience out of doors. The idea was to somehow contact the spirit of the sacred mushroom on the psychic plane, although it has to be admitted that most of those present (including me) thought of it more as a groovy and rather daring Halloween party. I was really looking forward to it until I discovered that in his wisdom Danny had decided to hold this experiment on Abbotsham Cliffs. In many ways this made a lot of sense. If there actually was a sacred mushroom spirit, it stood to reason that he would reside amongst the more tangible proofs of his existence, and as already stated, at the time at least, the best magic mushrooms in the area grew at Abbotsham Cliffs.

   

I was a little uneasy. Although ten years had passed and I had tried to put the matter out of my mind I had never entirely forgotten the events of June 1972. But, I rationalised wildly displaying a capacity for self-delusion that was remarkable even by my standards. That had been in the woodlands several miles along the cliffs. And it had been in summer. And we had been looking for the werewolf. This time we were engaged on a mystical quest for the spirit of the sacred mushroom. It was obvious that nothing nasty could possibly happen.

   

On Halloween night, seven or eight of us camped out on the flat land just behind Abbotsham Cliffs. There were three girls and four or five guys, all dressed in the punk styles that were then de rigeur. Cheerfully, we parked our cars in the lay-by, and in the late afternoon sunshine t was a cheerful party that walked the half-mile or so along the footpath to the cliffs. Although it was the end of October it was surprisingly warm, and the two elderly sheep grazing on the scrubland by the cliffs gave the place a delightfully bucolic air.

   

We built a large bonfire and as the final rays of the setting sun disappeared into the Bristol Channel, Danny, in his self appointed role of showman and shaman, came around and dispensed what he described as his “funky communion.” It was a potent mixture of gin, mushroom tea, peyote and LSD and was the precursor to one of the most horrific nights of my life. It was a night that I shall certainly never forget, and which I seriously suspect will be permanently etched on the psyches of everyone involved.

   

The evening started pleasantly enough, because although the chemical mixture that we had ingested was incredibly powerful, the mixture of the pleasantly sylvan surroundings, and what we hadn't yet learned to call “chill out” music issuing from what we hadn't yet learned to call a “ghetto blaster” kept everyone in a mellow and happy state of mind.

   

Danny started to read aloud from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and then began to recite Aleister Crowley's Hymn to Pan. None of us realised at the time, but Danny was (knowingly or unknowingly) manipulating the situation like a master. Although everyone was hallucinating heavily by this time, the three girls in particular seemed heavily affected and, encouraged by Danny, started to behave in a most uncharacteristic manner.

Despite their Mohicans and studiously torn clothes they were actually very reserved young ladies on the whole; but coaxed by Danny they started to become very affectionate and sensual. They danced rhythmically to the music and kissed and stroked each other, the guys in the group (including me) and particularly Danny.

   

One plump girl called “Sarah” [not her real name because I see her around Exeter sometimes, and she is now an eminently respectable, professional lady] who boasted the particularly unpleasant punk soubriquet of “Scab” even started to undress and dance semi-naked in the firelight.

   

It would be easy for me to pretend that some sort of totally far out hippy orgy then ensued, but it didn't. Most of the people who were there were too drunk, too stoned, and far too tripped out to perform sexually. I know I was, but again under coaxing from Danny, “Scab” and one of the guys coupled - I won't say `made love` because there was no love, emotion or tenderness - just animal rutting in the firelight as Danny chanted lines from Crowley and the rest of us looked on giggling inanely and waving our hands about to the rhythmic beat of the music.

   

Eventually everyone passed out, and that was when the fear came.

   

I have spent more of my life than I like to admit in alternate states of consciousness. Once upon a time I believed it was because I was exploring a genuinely alternative route to spiritual self-empowerment. 

Nowadays I believe that all that is rubbish. If there is such a thing as an interventionist God, and for me personally the jury is still out on that one, I am sure that he or she would not wish the objects of his/her creation to perform acts of supplication by poisoning themselves. Although the concept of trying to second guess a deity is a pretty dodgy one, the theories of trying to reach nirvana through substance abuse is a pretty dodgy one. I haven't taken psychedelics since that terrible night in 1981. These days when I go to a different place it is usually with alcohol, or prescribed tranquillisers and occasionally with the fruit of the poppy. And these days, when I take drugs it isn't to reach some magickal and non-existent nirvana - it is purely and simply to blot out the fear.

   

I am convinced that the fear first came to me on All Hallow's Eve 1981.

The policeman looked at me in silence for a few moments before continuing...

"We have received information that Mr Miles is involved with another cult of young people in North Devon, and this time the casualties are likely to be far more than just three elderly sheep. What do you know about it?"

I replied fairly honestly. I agreed with the policeman that the events taking place in the dank forests on the Cornwall/Devon border were both sinister and worrying. But as far as I could see the police were barking completely up the wring tree.

"Have you heard a song called 'Black Flags Rising'?" he asked, taking me completely aback.

I nodded that I had.

"We believe that this is a reference to the black flags flown by Islamist insurgents in the Middle East..." And he looked terribly shocked when I burst out laughing.

"Danny a radical Muslim? Nonsense..." I spluttered, and tried to explain that the black flags in the song were a reference either to Saruman's banners in Lord of the Rings, the Anarchist black flag, or to this line from a famous Irish rebel song...

"The black flag they hoisted, the cruel deed was over,

Gone was a man who loved Ireland so well,

There was many a sad heart in Dublin that morning,

When they murdered James Connolly, the Irish Rebel"

But this was all obviously too much for my unwelcome visitor, who obviously had no idea what on earth I was talking about.

"So you are saying that they are Irish Muslim anarchists, then sir?"

And I had to spend the next ten minutes trying to explain to the bloody man that I meant nothing of the sort, and that I was a seriously disabled music journalist and zoologist who spent his time breeding tropical fish and raising money for animal welfare projects, and that I was not the new Lord Haw Haw apologist for a band of fundamentalist Irish Muslims, and that I knew next to nothing about what Danny was doing and cared less.

Of course, I wasn't being entirely truthful. I knew more than I was admitting, but the more I thought about it the more I worried about the safety of poor Panne.  Truthfully I didn't care what happened to Danny, Mr Loxodonta, Lynnette or any of the others, and suspected that the world would quite possibly be a better place without them.

But I was not prepared to be the agent of their destruction if it also meant the destruction of a sweet little goatgod from the woods who had done nothing more to me than ask for my help and eat my wife's chocolate.

So I obfuscated, bluffed and carried out all the tricks of verbal prestidigitation that I knew how to do.

I knew that the policeman knew that I was hiding something, and I knew that he knew that I knew he did. But, thankfully,  even in our crumbling democracy, I knew that I was safe from being arrested on suspicion of treason, just yet, and so I continued to lie, and the policeman continued to probe until we both got tired of the charade and he went home, and I went upstairs to join Corinna and the dogs in bed.

However, unusually for me, I lay awake for hours with a million and one things going round my head. But by the time I finally went to sleep, just as the pale fingers of dawn were tracing filigree patterns across the early morning sky, I knew exactly what to do next.

I would have to do exactly what I had been told back in Norwich. I would have to go and see Britannia.

XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be careful this is only a game"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV

I was horrified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a long wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the came another message from the same source:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.