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 Even then my knowledge was thirty years out of date and half forgotten.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.

VII

I don't know how many of you have ever been kidnapped at knifepoint by a beautiful girl over thirty years younger than you, whom you had been hoping to seduce, had a bin bag unceremoniously plonked on your head, been bundled at gunpoint into the boot of your own car by pre-teen terrorists wearing pig masks, and driven lickety-split down a bumpy country road. I certainly haven't, so any comments that I make upon the subject have to be purely conjectural. However, this is exactly what Danny Miles claimed had happened to him, one morning in late autumn when he sat in my office looking scared to death. Although he tried to make light of it, the experience had obviously terrified him, and even the process of reliving this all was difficult and cathartic for him.

I have never been particularly good at writing speech down, and in this particular case Danny, who is usually self-assuredly voluble, was nothing of the sort. He muttered and stuttered, slurred his words and kept on stopping in the middle of sentences and even in the middle of words, upon which I had to gently prompt him into continuing. The only time in my life that I have ever found myself interviewing somebody who was as neurotically reticent as this before was way back in the autumn of 1995 when my first wife and I interviewed a young man to whom I later gave the nom de guerre of 'Gavin' who had (five or six years before) had an encounter with the "thing" (as Ivan T Sanderson would have called it) that is generally referred to as The Owlman of Mawnan. He had been suffering from a sort of short term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder brought on - or so I surmised - by the trauma of having to re-live, under questioning, one of the nastiest and most emotionally horrific experiences of his young life. I recognised the same, or at least very similar, symptoms in Danny, and - whilst his story was so bizarre, as to be bordering on the unbelievable - I was sure that Danny, at least, believed the absolute truth of what he was telling me.

The car trundled on down the bumpy road, and eventually turned off into something even more bumpy which Danny surmised was some kind of cart track, and after about twenty minutes (or so he estimated) the car shuddered to a halt. The doors opened, and Danny could hear the sound of muffled voices and laughter, but remained locked in the boot for what seemed like an eternity. "Then I fell asleep" he muttered shamefacedly. "Under the circumstances I know that it seems insane, but I was very tired and whatever reserves of strength I had, just ran out!"

His sleep was rudely awakened minutes or hours later, when the boot of his Astra opened suddenly and, still with the bin bag over his head, he was pulled out of the car to his feet. His captors roughly jerked the bin bag off his head, and - although the sudden influx of bright daylight was almost too much to bear - he did his best to take in as much of his surroundings as he could, and found (not altogether to his surprise) that his car was parked on a rough cart track which was entering a small woodland clearing. Around the sides of the clearing, half-hidden by trees, were some large khaki tents of the sort that are usually advertised in Army Surplus stores as 6-8 berth, and a number of young people were wandering around. They were all wearing pig masks, and some were clutching guns.

Over to his left was an open fronted marquee, again khaki canvas, and shrouded in camouflage netting. Inside was a long trestle table, and sat at the table were more young people, all wearing rubber pig masks tapping away industriously at laptops. Danny opened his mouth to speak but Sable kicked him hard in the shin and told him to shut up. They led him a little way into the deep wood, where there was a canvas chair. Roughly they sat him down, and Sable and Araminta turned and left. Without a backwards glance they were gone.

Danny was left alone with the two children, still silent as the grave, still wearing rubber pig masks and still carrying what appeared to be AK47s which were far too big for them.

You could almost feel sorry for Danny at this point. With more than the usual human capacity for self-delusion, he had managed to convince himself that the two girls he had picked up hitchhiking along the A39 were going to take him to a paradise full of bare-breasted flower children living in squalor. What he actually found was something akin to a neat and tidy military encampment full of fully clothed children brandishing guns, and engaged on some complex computer-related activity. He had hoped for free love and drugs, and had blundered into a nightmare full of paramilitary pig children with guns.

A tall dark figure strode through the wood towards him. Long haired, leather-jacketed and booted, he was well over six foot tall, and - according to Danny - had the musculature, gait and bearing of a gorilla. Now, gorillas are peaceful, gentle, knuckle walkers and mostly vegetarian, but rather than remonstrate with Danny about his pitiful lack of knowledge of the physiology of the higher primates, I let this one be, and assumed that the person who was swaggering towards them up the woodland path towards them was completely human. Anyway, I had my suspicions about whom he might turn out to be.

As he got closer, Danny could see that he was an enormous biker, bare-chested under his leather jacket, and with a distinctive tattoo of a skull with a wreath of roses across its cranium on his barrel chest. My suspicions were confirmed. I didn't think that there could be many people in the Westcountry with the unlovely soubriquet of 'Skullfuck', and this bloke only had the name because I had given it to him.

Thirty plus years ago, when I was a Student Nurse at the Royal Westcountry Hospital in South Devon, and living at the nurses’ home at an old, tumbledown, and rather beautiful art deco house called Staplake, in Starcross, I used to drink at a pub called The Dolphin Inn in the neighbouring village of Kenton. It was a nice little pub, and I used to drink there because I could happily chat away to the landlord about tropical fish, politics and all sorts of other things that have always amused and interested me. For some reason that I have never understood, Kenton has always been home to a sizeable biker community, and - over the years - I became friends with some of them.

A bloke called Pete, mildly hippyish and a bit of a Jack the Lad also drunk there, and one night he invited me and a bevy of the local bikers back to his flat for 'a drink and a smoke' which invariably meant cider and Afghan black. We all tumbled into my car, and I drove unsteadily (because I had ingested five or six pints already, and had originally planned to spend the night in my car in the pub car park). We drove up a windy lane, and we could see the way before us illuminated in the moonlight. Driving across a little humpbacked bridge which crossed a silvery stream, which babbled in the moonlight, we headed up a hill, and at the peak of the hill was an enormous Gothic mansion which appeared out of the darkness like something out of the 1963 film of The Haunting. "This is it," said Pete cheerfully, and directed us to a small car park by a side entrance.

It turned out that the mansion was owned by his grandfather, and that Pete was in charge of having it converted to luxury flats. However, the process was scheduled to take at least another three years, and in the meantime, Pete was quite happy to play at being Lord of the Manor. He led us in through the side entrance where we found the sort of hippy crash pad that I have seen on innumerable occasions over the years. If you can imagine a spacious but grubby area containing (in no particular order) a poster of Che Guevara, another of Jimi Hendrix as painted by Martin Sharp, several cardboard boxes containing (in total) several thousand LPs in dog eared covers, makeshift bookshelves made from planks and bricks and containing a selection of the de rigueur hippy tomes like The Lord of the Rings, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, some joss sticks burning in plant pots, two well fed and indignant looking tabby cats, and dozens of unwashed mugs and plates. The atmosphere smelt mildly of cat pee, masked partially by the smell of incense and stale hashish, and I immediately felt at home.

The two bikers turned out to be working with Pete, whilst simultaneously signing on. They were brothers, and the youngest was contemplating getting his first tattoo. At the time both Pete and I were very much into The Grateful Dead, and he rummaged through his grubby LP collection and got out a copy of the band's self named album from 1971. The cover is iconic.

"The skull and roses design was composed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, who added lettering and color, respectively, to a black and white drawing by Edmund Joseph Sullivan. Sullivan's drawing was an illustration for a 1913 edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Earlier antecedents include the custom of exhibiting the relic skulls of Christian martyrs decorated with roses on their feast days. The rose is an attribute of Saint Valentine who according to one legend was martyred by decapitation. Accordingly, in Rome, at the church dedicated to him, the observance of his feast day included the display of his skull surrounded by roses. This was discontinued in the late 1960s when Valentine was removed from the Roman Catholic canon along with other legendary saints whose lives and deeds could not be confirmed. Kelley and Mouse's design originally appeared on a poster for the September 16 and 17, 1966 Dead shows at the Avalon Ballroom. Later it was used as the cover for the album Grateful Dead. The album is sometimes referred to as Skull and Roses (or Bertha)."

Another name for the album is 'Skullfuck' (a vulgar term for oral sex), and it is a matter of record that the band wanted this unlovely moniker for the album, but that their record company put their foot down and (quite sensibly) refused. "Why don't you have this for your tattoo?" Pete suggested. having ingested far more alcohol and hashish than was wise, I was slurring my words massively when I muttered, "If he does, he is gonna have to change his name to 'Skullfuck'!" He did get the tattoo, and the nickname that I gave him whilst trying to be clever and showing off my exemplary knowledge of Bay Area psychedelic rock music stuck. With this new revelation from Danny it seemed that, thirty something years later it was still sticking.

Now, when I was living at Staplake, during the time immediately before I got engaged to Alison who I married in 1985 and stayed with for the next eleven years, Skullfuck and Pete were reasonably regular visitors, as was Danny, but it seemed that they had never met, or if they had, Danny was (as usual) been so wrapped up in his own self-importance that he had no memory of anyone who didn't actually impinge into his own peculiarly insular little world.

I decided that on this occasion that discretion would prove to be the better part of valour. I had no idea where this peculiar journey was going to end up taking us.

But I didn't trust Danny further than I could throw him, and Skullfuck and I had shared quite a bit of history for a few years following our first meeting, and I would like to think that if our paths crossed again, that he would be kindly disposed towards me.

So I kept my council, and asked Danny what happened next.

"Well, he didn't seem very clever," said Danny sneeringly at me. I knew Danny's sad history and said nothing. "He kept on asking me who I was, and what I was doing there. And as I thought that it wouldn't be a very good idea to admit that I had only been interested in the two chicks, I told him that it was because of the music. And it seemed as if that was exactly the right thing to say," he said.

One of the big buzz words of our early 21st Century social economy is 'Identity Theft', and Danny didn't bat an eyelid as he brazenly explained how and why he had proceeded to steal MY identity.

He wasn't even slightly apologetic as he explained how he told Skullfuck how impressed he had been with the music that the girls had played him in the pub. How he, himself had worked in the music business for many years, and could tell a hit record when he heard one, and how he wanted to help make these people stars!

The trouble is, that none of this was true. Apart from a few years as a male escort in the early 1980s around the time that I first met him, he had never worked as anything. He had never been employed in any industry, having led a charmed life drifting from one disaster to another, and leaving debts wherever he trod. I, however, much against my better judgment had never actually turned him away in the third of a century that I had known him, and had worked intermittently on the fringes of the music industry for many years. Currently I am editing a weekly online music magazine and doing the odd bit of contract work for my old mate Rob Ayling at Gonzo Multimedia, and am in the process of starting up my own community orientated record company together with a mate called Martin Eve.

Although we hadn't seen each other for years, Danny had kept vague tabs on how my life had been progressing, and as he got more enthusiastic talking to Skullfuck, he stole more and more of my personal back story and made it his own. He explained how he had got unique powers and skills as a polemicist, a publicist and a student of rock and roll history, and if anyone could manipulate the 21st Century media into making this unique band of musicians into stars, it was him.

“What were they called, by the way?”

“Xtul,” grunted Skullfuck.

I gulped; my past was really coming back to haunt me this time.

I believe that in the current vernacular, what Danny was doing is known as 'Social Engineering', - the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. A type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or system access, it differs from a traditional "con" in that it is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme. He soon engineered the situation to one where he was asking the questions and the poor hapless biker before him was not only giving Danny the answers, but was treating him like an honoured guest rather than a prisoner, and Danny was soon manipulating the poor fool into doing exactly what he wanted.

Skullfuck told Danny much the same as the two girls had some hours early. This woodland was the home for a group of people who were trying to save the earth, and who lived together as 'The Children of the Three'. He confirmed that 'The Three' were Gods who had come to change the world forever. But he added two other pieces to the jigsaw. The two girls had been sent out specifically to find someone with a car, use their womanly whiles to fascinate the driver, and bring him back to the wood. They were then supposed to kill him and steal the car, but things hadn't quite worked out that way.

Danny was so shocked, not only by his recent brush with death but at quite how badly he had misjudged the situation, that he didn't really take the second bit of information on board. The three members of Xtul, the people responsible for some of the most amazing music he had ever heard, were the Gods themselves.
"I didn't believe for one moment that these people were Gods. They were just people who were better at social engineering than me, and had better computer skills than I had," he blustered, going on to tell me that for the first time he not only thought that he was going to get out of there alive, but that he felt he could "make a few quid" out of the situation. So he struck while his figurative iron was hot. By rights he should have been buried in a shallow grave deep in the woods with a bullet in the back of his head. But he had turned the tables on his captors through his own extreme cleverness, and it was Danny that was now calling the shots.

"I want to meet one of the Gods," Danny demanded, and by this time poor Skullfuck was so confused that he was regarding Danny as a cross between Brian Epstein and that irritating bloke with the smug smile on Pop Idol, and nodded his consent. Motioning to the two pig headed children with guns that they were no longer needed, he escorted Danny deep into the woods where a small log cabin had been built. "Come In!" Thundered a voice from inside, and Danny went in.

"And you are not going to fucking believe this man,” he said. "In that cabin deep in the woods was a man in a wheelchair. He was wearing a neat and obviously expensive dark grey suit. And wait for this......he had the head of a fucking elephant on his shoulders!"

VI

i looked at Danny aghast, and not for the first time in the thirty three years that I have known, and been infuriated by the bloody man, I realised quite how shallow he has always been. the motivating factors in his life have always been sex, money and power over people weaker than himself. I don't think that I have ever disliked him quite s much as I did then. I gulped at some more coffee, lit another cigarette and asked him to continue.

of course he started to talk about the two nubile young hitchhikers again, but I managed to head him off that subject with some difficulty, and tried to find out some more about these peculiar people who wee living as a family out in the deep woods. "Of course I didn't believe that these three people were Gods, they had to be just ordinary people who were better at social manipulation than the people who followed them. Its amazing what a few conjuring tricks and some masks will do to impress a bunch of stoned homeless hippies" he blustered, and for a moment I actually believed him.

"At least that is what I thought at first" he admitted, looking surprisingly shamefaced. "I found out a bit more later and was forced to change my mind, but at that stage I just wanted to get closer to the girls, if y'know what I mean", and once again he winked at me in a horrid manner and became the sleazy cocksman that I have learned to despise for all those years.

Realising that Danny's thoughts were once again verging towards the carnal, and wanting to find out what the hell this was all about, whilst still being only too aware that I had a long and difficult day ahead of me, and Danny's tomfoolery was just going to compound the problems i had to face. So I did my best to bring him back on track without actually grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and banging his head repeatedly against the wall. I am nit a violent man, but I am afraid that Danny Miles brings out the worst in me.

Back at The Westcountry Inn, Danny had apparently told the two girls, whose names - he informed me - were Sable and Araminta, that he wanted to meet the other members of what they described as 'The Children of The Three' and asked whether this could be arranged. Araminta, slightly nervously made a phone call on her mobile, and spoke to someone called 'Skullfuck' who she later described as the Sergeant at Arms. i pricked up my ears at this; back in my mis-spent youth, soon after I Had met Danny for the first time, I knew a biker in the South Devon village of Kenton with just this unlovely soubriquet. Surely there couldn't be that many people called 'Skullfuck' living in the Westcountry. Realising that if this was indeed someone that I used to know then I had an ace up my sleeve that Danny might not know about. Many years of dealing with the bloody man has taught me that when dealing with Danny Miles one needs as many cards in one's deck as possible, so I filed the information away for future reference, took another drag on Messrs Benson And Hedges's finest, and asked Danny to continue.

About half an hour later, Araminta's phone rang, and she muttered a conversation whilst making the odd furtive sideways glances at Danny, and giggling nervously. then, when the call was over, she lent over to Sable and whispered in her er. The two girls squealed delightedly, and dragged Danny to his feet. They danced around him, showering him with kisses as they did so, and then delightedly pulled him out into the car park to his car.

Danny asked me whether I knew the area at all. Of course I did. back in 1978 my father taught me to drive along these very lanes, nd long the min rod which led from Clovelly down to Bude. In more recent years I had explored quite a few of these back lanes at night with Corinna and one of our students, who was doing a project about the nocturnal fauna of this part of Devon, but although we were dutifully logging the badgers and foxes that we saw, we were really hoping that we would have an encounter with one if the big cats that are more and more commonly reported in the region.

I explained this to Danny, and he told me how the two girls, by now twitching with almost palpable excitement had instructed him to drive back in the direction of Kilkhampton for a few miles, until they came cross. Blind turning on the left. They drove down this little lane, and were now surrounded by the tall grey green pine trees of the Forestry Commission. Showing admirable restraint and far more common sense than I was used to from him, Danny was only driving at about twenty five miles per hour down what my Father used to describe as a 'Devon Dual Carraigeway', an unkempt road with grass growing down the centre leaving a separate 'carriageway' for each wheel. this was a good thing, because suddenly two dark figures stepped out of the undergrowth about twenty feet in front of the car, the two girls screamed "Stop!!!" In unison, and Danny slammed his foot on the brake, and they screeched to a halt, and Sable, who was in the back seat behind him, giggled manically, produced a hunting knife from up her sleeve, and held it to his throat.

The two figures who had stepped out of the bushes in front of them approached the car, and Danny saw to his horror that they were wearing grubby black dungarees, their faces were covered by realistic rubber pig masks, and they were carrying what looked suspiciously like semi automatic rifles which seemed far too big for them. It was only then that Danny realised that by their stature they could not have been more than ten or eleven years old.

Danny was frogmarched out of the car, a black bin bag was put over his head, one of the pig children took the keys from the ignition, opened the boot of the car and his four captors unceremoniously bundled Danny into it, slamming it shut a few centimetres above his head.

"Bloody Hell" I said, whilst - for the first time in about thirty years - actually feeling mildly sorry for Danny Miles.