II

This is the busiest time of my year. In mid August each year I promote the CFZ Weird Weekend, and a motley mix of scientists, academics and oddball researchers descend upon North Devon. I have had quite a lot of problems with this year’s event due to some intransigence and internal politics on the behalf of the local community centre where we have held the event for the past eight years. On top of that, I have been having some serious problems with some of my associates who have been running me ragged and robbing me blind, and so as a result of the stress and my ridiculous work levels, I have been keeping very strange hours. Often I am awake all night and only get too bed for fitful sleep at round about dawn, and so it was on the night that I had my latest strange visitors.

Corinna and Mother had gone to bed, and I was sitting in my study working on an article about yellow legged tortoiseshells. It is possibly symbolic of the strange times in which we are living that at the time that I write this we are undergoing an interesting invasion from Eastern Europe.

In 1953 a single specimen of an eastern European butterfly called the Scarce or Yellow Legged Tortoiseshell was caught in Kent. Another specimen was found dead in the Shetlands in November last year. But now, following a huge invasion of western Europe, they have turned up in some numbers in eastern England. There is now speculation that they might breed here.

I said to Corinna that as my stepdaughter Olivia lives in Norfolk she should give the forthcoming baby the middle name of Xanthomelas in honour of this extraordinary invasion, and she just looked at me with barely disguised disdain.

I am a fairly heavy drinker, and I was sitting typing with Archie the Jack Russell asleep on my lap, and a bottle of cheap bourbon by my side. I was also listening to the first solo album by Damon Albarn, which is my favourite record of the year so far and I was fairly deeply engrossed in what I was doing, so I didn’t hear the door open. I just looked up and there was Danny Miles grinning at me knowingly. He was accompanied by a slight figure in a long black hooded robe, with the hood pulled down so I couldn’t see its face.

“’Lo Jon” he said. I grunted in reply. I was not in the mood for dealing with any more of his bullshit. I was enjoying the music and the whisky and was engrossed in my task, and didn’t want to hear any more of his nonsense about demi-Gods performing hiphop. “What do you want?” I grunted rudely.

“There’s someone I want you to meet”, he said. “Say hello to Panne”, and the robed figure spoke to me shyly in the voice of a young teenage girl, “Hello Jon”.

I was still unimpressed. “Look man” I said to him, rudely ignoring his companion. “I don’t wanna be rude to either of you, but I am not in the mood for this. I have got lots of work to do, and I don’t want to be distracted… by anyone”.

Danny looked at me smugly. “I know that you found the story that I told you hard to believe, so I thought that I should try and convince you”. He gestured to his companion. “Take your robe off Panne”.

She did as he asked, and with horror I saw that she was wearing nothing underneath it.

I am nearly 40 years too old to be having naked teenage girls in my rooms, and I reacted with horror! I have told you before how I have never liked or trusted Danny Miles, and how he was already attempting to blackmail me into helping him with his insane schemes. Back in the late 1990s, after my divorce from Alison, I was having an affair with a married woman who was not only notorious in her own right, but was then married to a well known and very influential businessman in the computer games industry. Danny had already intimated that he would make this affair public, if I did not help him with his project.

What he didn’t know was that not only did Corrina - my second wife - know all about it, but that the lady in question was now divorced from her influential husband and married to someone else. We still send each other Christmas greetings on Facebook and occasionally swap Leonard Cohen bootlegs, but that is the extent of our relationship these days.

They say that when you are close to death your entire life passes before your eyes in slow motion, and as Corinna and I nearly died in a car crash on the M25 about seven years ago, I can confirm that this is actually true. As I stared at the naked figure before me, exactly the same thing happened. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Danny had decided to take advantage of the current socio-political situation following the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile and the conviction a few weeks back of Rolf Harris; he had brought a naked girl into my study in order to attempt to blackmail me further. It is exactly the sort of thing that the bastard would have done. Then I realised something: the person before me was indeed unclothed, and had the slight figure of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl. But she was covered in silky brown fur, she had two cloven hooves where she should have had feet, and two – rather cute, I have to admit – tiny horns peeking out from the curly hair on her forehead.

Then my inner zoologist kicked in, and I noted – clinically – that she (I still thought of her as female) had no external secondary sexual characteristics, and that the shape of her face, shoulders and forearms were such that whatever she was….she was certainly not human.

“Fuck!” I said, and took a deep swig from my whisky and coke.

I

I HAVE KNOWN Danny Miles for nearly all my adult life, and whilst I don’t like him very much (and never have, if I must tell the truth) it does seem that our destinies are somehow peculiarly linked. In many ways we are very similar; he is the part of my psyche which is unbelievably promiscuous, completely feckless and commodifies people to an insane extent. I am the part of his psyche who worries about things, drinks too much brandy, actually achieves things apart from mischief making, and has a conscience (although doesn’t always pay it much attention). About the only thing that we have in common is that we both want to change the world, albeit in completely different ways and for completely different reasons.

I am never particularly surprised when he turns up in my life, and so when he re-appeared a few weeks ago in the guise of the ‘Minister of Information’ for a group called Xtul I took it in my stride., It so happened that this time I knew a bit about – if not what he was talking about – what he was pretending to talk about. I also knew from whence he had lifted his influences.

Danny has always been a magpie, stealing ideologies from all and sundry. When I first met him back in the early 1980s, he had taken bits of the philosophy of Timothy Leary, mixed it with large chunks of Charlie Manson, and a pinch of Crowley and dressed it up in the then current peacock fashion styles of the New Romantics, and fused it all together to start a peculiar psychedelic sex cult. I was sucked in hook, line and sinker for a few months and even now my sleep (usually fairly calm due to the enormous amounts of chemicals my Doctor prescribes me) is sometimes shattered by lightning flashes of memory as I relive nights in the middle of a thunderstorm, dancing naked together with a group of other like-minded idiots - under the full moon, off my tits on psilocybin. Something that I really wouldn’t recommend to anybody reading this.

But now he was back, and once again stealing ideologies from anyone he cared to. All the bits about Minister for Information where from John Sinclair’s White Panther Party in the 1960s who, in turn, had stolen them from Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party. The idea of sending cryptic communiqués out anonymously was stolen piecemeal from The Angry Brigade, a relatively obscure British terrorist group of the early 1970s, and even the name Xtul had a long and somewhat sinister provenance.

It so happened that, totally by chance, I knew quite a bit about all three of these subjects. Ands I also knew that Danny did.. because most of his information had come from me in the first place. So after my first contact with him on the matter of Xtul a few weeks ago, and a couple of impressive looking Communiques which turned up in my email inbox but which, when one looked hard enough were purely sound and fury which signified nothing at all, I wasn’t particularly surprised when he turned up at my front door.

I was working in my lab late one night. Well, actually, I was. In 1800 there was a fire that burned down two very old cottages on the outskirts of Woolsery. Five years later a single, large cottage was built on the ruins, utilising bits of the ruins which were intact and at least 300 years old. In the 1950s a bit was built on the side, and in the 1970s another extension. My family have lived here since 1971, and I still do today. On the end of the house is an ancient lean-to that originally housed potatoes. It is my office, study, recording studio, editing suite, and yes…laboratory. And I was working in the potato shed late one night when my eyes did behold a terrible sight. It was Danny Miles dressed in a peculiar paramilitary uniform flanked by two tall figures wearing dark, hooded robes.

Here we go again, I thought.

He opened the door and the three of them walked in without knocking. I often sleep very badly, and so it was about 3:00am and Mother had gone to bed about three hours before. An hour or so later, Corinna (my lovely, and long suffering wife) went to bed, followed by the small gaggle of carnivores who always accompany her (two cats, a terrier and what seems at first to be a small pygmy hippo which upon closer investigation is a bulldog x boxer bitch called Prudence). There were various fish, and amphibians, doing their own inimitable thing in their tanks which are scattered about the building, there were Corinna’s pet rats, and of course there were the various ghosts with which the house is infested, but I was the only primate still awake.

They came in to my study uninvited; the two robed figures stood implacably by the door, and – as far as I am able to remember – said nothing at all during the whole time they were with me, and Danny (unsurprisingly for anyone who has ever met him) started to talk – nineteen to the dozen – as soon as he entered.

Once again he was talking about a band called Xtul. He had played me a few songs by them before, and sent me a few more via Dropbox, and I thought that they were truly excellent. Danny really didn’t have to blackmail me into writing about them. But approaching things in a conventional style, like asking a music journalist to write about a new band just isn’t his style. He had something on me (he was privy to information about me that he thought nobody knew, although that wasn’t actually the case) and was determined to use it as leverage to use me for his own nefarious ends.

I couldn’t be bothered to argue the toss with him, (it was pointless to explain that her husband never did find out, and that she went on to marry someone else well over fifteen years ago) and so I sat him down and did my best to find out some more information about this peculiar band Xtul. It so happened that I knew a bit about a certain quasi-Satanist occult group who apparently took legal action against Ed Sanders, author of the Charlie Manson biog ‘The Family’ saying that their inclusion in the book has brought the Satanist occult group into disrepute. They had lived in a Mexican coastal village called Xtul for a while, and I wondered whether there was any connection between this and this mysterious musical ensemble? Or whether, as was perfectly possible, Danny had just nicked the title from somewhere because it sounded good.

He told me a little bit more about them. Apparently there were three of them – Mr Loxodonta, Mistress Discordia, and Panne - and none of them were human anymore. When he started talking up a farrago of occult nonsense about how each of them had been turned into Gods and/or Daemons by events of an incalculable cosmic majesty my brain started to go to sleep. I remembered only too well how a harmless practical joke played by two Wildlife Officers upon a spectacularly inept UFO Research Group, once sucked into the vortex which is Dany Miles and spat out again, became a sinister conspiracy theory that nearly got my arrested by Special Branch, and involved an escaped murderer, several occult rituals, and the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and drugs. If you don’t believe me, check out a little thing I wrote fifteen years ago called The Blackdown Mystery. It is mildly amusing, and whilst I made some of it up (mostly to take the piss out of Nick Redfern) it does provide a valuable object lesson in how not to take Danny Miles too seriously.

I have taken what he said cum grano salis ever since. Three Gods, with a coterie of hooded followers who happen to play guitars, piano and bass? Three malevolent Gods with no reason to perceive humanity with anything but contempt and anger? Three Gods (one male, one female, and one gender neutral) who happen to form a progressive hip hop band? I didn’t believe a word of it!

O

THE STORY OF XTUL

It says a lot, I think, about the calibre of the young people who spend some of their leisure hours working with the animals at the CFZ, that when confronted by something unquestionably strange they don’t bat an eyelid. The other afternoon I was unwell (something which happens with depressing frequency these days) and I had retired to bed. One of our volunteers, a twelve year old girl, was sitting in my study trying to count the relative numbers of Endler’s livebearers and knife livebearers in the tank on my desk, when a cacophony of canine contumely heralded the arrival of a visitor to my door.

She remarked to me afterwards that it was strange that she didn’t hear the gate open, and that Mark Raines, who was working in the garden didn’t notice these visitors arrive. They were two tall thin bearded men wearing long, black, hooded robes. They didn’t introduce themselves, just demanded to see me. When told that I was asleep, ill in bed, they gave her an envelope containing a key drive, and without speaking, walked along the path to the gate, and left.

When I woke up later, my volunteer had gone back to her family for tea, and I only heard the story second hand. I opened the envelope, put the key drive into the computer (which, with the benefit of hindsight was a remarkably stupid thing to do, because it could have contained any number of unimaginably horrid computer viruses) and was totally aghast at what I found.

It was a letter and a number of sound and video files. The letter was from someone called Mister Loxodonta, who identified himself as a member of a collective called Xtul. It started off conventionally enough, but then it turned out that Mister Loxodonta was (or at least claimed to be) a terminally ill half naked man with the head of an elephant who sometimes wrote in conventional prose, but had the offputting habit of launching into regular metred rhyming couplets, of the sort that my late mother called “tum te tum te tumty tum” and the even later Rudyard Kipling was wont to indulge in.

My name is Mr Loxodonta
And when your mind begins to wander
Into places that you know
You really shouldn’t let it go
In the gaps between your dreams
Where you hear the idiots scream
That’s basically where I can be found
Playing games with light and sound

My name is Mr Loxodonta
I’ll find you when you don’t want to
Explore realms of world as myth
And pantheistic multiperson
Solipsism 101,
The games of chance have just begun
I’m dying but it doesn’t matter
My alter-ego just gets fatter

Apparently there are five or six of them, but only three are named:

• Mister Loxodonta
• Dora Discordia
• Panne

From the badly scrawled drawings, and fantastickal photoshop constructs that I have been sent, Dora Discordia is a statuesque blonde lady with a skull for a head, and Panne is a schoolgirl dressed as a goatman, or perhaps a goatman who has taken on some of the characteristics of a schoolgirl.

Then later that evening I got an email. It was from an old acquaintance (I won’t say ‘friend’ because although we have known each other for a third of a century so far, I don’t think either of us has ever liked the other very much. His name is Danny Miles/Danny Myles/Danny Myers (choose whichever name suits you and him best at the time). I first met him in 1981, and the circumstances of our meeting are chronicled in my 1999 book The Blackdown Mystery.

I first met Danny Miles at an obscure North Devon rock festival during the late summer of 1981. In those days I was an innocent and not very streetwise fellow in my early twenties, and I still believed that world peace could be achieved by the ingestion of various noxious substances whilst sitting in muddy fields listening to musical ensembles make whooshing noises on (what seem to me now) to be very primitive synthesisers.

I was, I believe, watching Hawkwind playing a spectacularly inept version of Master of the Universe, and like most of the rest of the audience, who were cold, muddy and uncomfortable, pretending that I was enjoying myself whilst in reality I was in dire need of both a lavatory and a nice cup of tea and totally unwilling to avail myself of the horribly rudimentary versions of either facility that had been laid on for our “comfort” by the euphemistically named “organisers” of the event. About a hundred yards to my right were the serried ranks of the local Hells Angel fraternity who were encamped en masse like an iron clad phalanx of doom. It was only twelve years after Altamont, and even in the bucolic wastelands of rural Devon, they felt that they had something to live up to. Unfortunately, for me at least, they had decided to set up camp immediately between the area where I had set up my tiny tent and parked my car and the main exit, and several of the nastiest and meanest looking of them were patrolling the area armed with pool cues and what I think were hollowed out pickaxe handles that had been filled with molten lead. I was therefore somewhat marooned, and feeling uncomfortable, isolated, alone and more than a little frightened.

Suddenly, in the middle of what appeared to me to be a sea of greasy black leather jackets, emerged a delicate, fey looking figure, wearing an extraordinary array of satins and silks in a variety of peacock colours. It looked for all the world as if one of the gaily coloured inhabitants of one of Arthur Rackham`s fairy paintings had suddenly been transported into the middle of a field of leather-clad Neanderthals. The figure tripped gaily towards me, and appeared to my addled brain to be floating like a surreal, and rainbow-hued butterfly above the sea of mud and motorbikes. As it got closer I could see that it was a youth, hardly old enough to shave with an angelic halo of light brown hair surrounding a face that was covered with intricate paintings of butterflies and lotus flowers. He came and sat next to me and my companions.

Much to my amazement everyone else who was with me seemed to take this apparition in their stride. “`Lo Danny”, one of them grunted cheerfully, “`ow are y`doing?”. Another friend asked him what the hell he had been doing wandering blithely through the middle of the taciturn, unfriendly and potentially dangerous crowd of bikers. “Ahhhhh they`re harmless.” he said, in an Irish accent that he seemed to be able to turn on and off at will, “and anyway they wouldn`t hurt me...I am legion, I am many”.

His name was Danny Miles, and for reasons known best to himself he had recently adopted the nom-de-guerre of `Legion the Cosmic Dancer`. I got to know him reasonably well over the next few years, and he would occasionally drift into my life, causing chaos for a few weeks and then disappear as simply as he had arrived. During the years when fashions were led by Culture Club and the New Romantics, Danny was in his element. He paraded his omnisexuality for all to see like some magnificent, (if slightly deranged) bird of paradise and flirted outrageously with boys and girls alike. As the decade of Thatcherism advanced and my life became more normal, and I drifted into my disastrous marriage and the twin pitfalls of a job and a mortgage I saw less of him, but he would still turn up once in a while, and we would sit up long into the night drinking wine, gazing at the stars and talking about nothing in particular as I dreamed dreams of my lost youth. Danny never seemed to either grow any older or to settle down.

My first wife disliked him intensely, and I don’t think my second wife has ever met him. He has turned up in my life on various occasions over the past thirty years, but I have only heard from him occasionally (and not seen him) since the turning of the millennium when he turned up at my house unexpectedly talking nonsense about succubi and clutching a gift basket of blueberry muffins for me; a gift which he then proceeded to eat entirely himself.

But like a bad penny, he has turned up again. According to his peculiar email, which he dubbed “A Communiqué from the Xtul Underground”, he (dubbing himself Xtul’s ‘Minister for Information’ was letting me in upon “The Summer of the Great Secret” and had decided that it was my “Holy Mission” to help propagate the “Message of the Neo-Godz in the Vineyardss of Madness”, which seems to mean helping him with a Facebook page for (what appears to be) a rather interesting little band operating in much the same territory as the late lamented KLF.

I have cautiously agreed for a number of reasons.

• Firstly, I like the music
• I like the challenge – this reminds me of one of the peculiar magickal art games like THE CASE that I played with Doc Shiels
• Danny knows where the bodies are buried (in my case at least) and it would be unwise for me to cross him
• My life has been getting a little dull recently, and if there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that life with Danny is never dull

So onwards and upwards. Let us see what this summer will bring.