Owing to the limitations of the MySpace medium I have been forced to post this dispatch in two installments. I apologize in advance to those of you whose p.c's force you to scroll from left to right in order to follow the text but sadly I have yet found a way of licking this problem. For those of you who'd prefer to avoid the eyestrain a cleaned up version of the earlier postings are available at: -
www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/

This dispatch was further delayed by the death of my uncle David Elton-Miller
who passed peacefully at home on the night of the full moon - July 18 2008.
Dave was a former Special Air Services officer who saw action in Kenya during the Mau-Mau and innovated the use of the boot knife and ankle holster as part of the standard issue SAS kit after finding himself trapped in a tree by his parachute straps and being unable to reach the rifle stowed in his pack when enemy soldiers passed directly beneath him. After being demobbed he settled in Devonshire where he ran a pottery works in Lustly Cleave for several years and became an acknowledged expert in the local iron age remains and faery lore.

Dave's maxim and most celebrated utterance was: - " The criteria of intelligence is the adaptability to circumstantial environment.". He was the only uncle I had and I shall miss him dearly - R.S. Junly 25 2008



CEREMONIES

"I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall not put down at all . I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Akklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the way to do them, for peculiar reasons...Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more delightful than others – there are the White ceremonies, and the Green ceremonies and the Scarlet ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best, but there is only one place where they can be performed properly, though there is a very nice imitation which I have seen done in other places. Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn't understand anything about it. I was very little when I first knew about these things…"
Arthur Machen – 'The White People'

1. Breathing in

At the time of the murder I was halfway through a telephone conversation with Rob at 'Transcend Media', trying to work out a mutually acceptable time to drop off the tapes from the Shepherd's Bush gig. The show had run like clockwork with Carl riding high, batting out two whole sets that comprised a sort of potted history of the 'Fields of the Nephilim' reaching all the way back to 'Preacher Man' –the very first single I had ever been involved with and evoking a flurry of memories. The Empire was a pleasingly old school venue somewhat more in keeping with the proceedings than the cloying atmosphere of the dying Astoria where the band had resurfaced last summer after a prolonged sabbatical. Some things improve with age and so it was with Carl who had emerged like a black butterfly from his fin-de-siecle chrysalis to finally become the man Himself, the living breathing embodiment of the larger than life hieratic figure he had at first only pretended to be.



The shifting line up had lead to the footage from the Astoria and Helldone gigs being shelved as the band found its feet but the sets were smoother and fuller now. The audience too had changed and while some cadres were sorely missed the ranks had if anything swollen since the previous season with new faces who brought with them strange new customs to supplant the ceremonies of old. The human pyramids that had first appeared in the nineties were still de rigeur but the shoal of inflatable fish passed eagerly across the heaving mosh pit were a new addition , taking the place of the fistfuls of flour that settled in our hat brims back in the nineties.



Something to do with Carl's outstretched hands, I was told, although at face value the connection between Nemo and the Nephilim would seem a bit of a reach. The proverbial 'one that got away.' Still, a cult is defined by its rituals and it is the task of an anthropologist to observe and document those rites without bias or subjective judgement, especially when those traditions are still growing, still alive and healthily evolving before our eyes and lenses. Scrambled into action at short notice the Shadow Theatre irregulars performed admirably providing enough cover to work around the fish if necessary. Along with last year's highlights and a few other li'l surprises I'm hoping we'll finally get the green light to go that extra mile into making the long awaited DVD into somethin' more than just your regular common or garden concert video.
 

Since the advent of digital technology the post-production personnel seem to absorb more of the budget than all of the other departments put together. As a matter of fact I was just on the 'phone to Rob, trying to rough together a plan when someone decided to stick a knife in the chick who had been yelling something on the far side of the square. The street was filled with the usual listless punters and hawkers crying their wares, this being Portobello road – the home of the Shadow Theatre's UK headquarters – and I have a well developed habit of screening out the constant throb of background sound, vaguely timing myself to its rythyms and enjoying its vitality without picking up on its specifics or getting emotionally involved unless strictly necessary.

The chick had been putting out a stream of alcohol laced abuse in a strident, somewhat hectoring West Indian accent and now her voice rose an octave or two. Cupping the receiver a li'l closer to my ear I raised my own voice to compensate. I'd been planning to hop a train to Hitchin, knock back a pint or two with Carl and discuss the way forward but other, more urgent business had come up as it is want to do on Fridays, a pressing personal matter that for all the best will in the world simply refused to take a back seat. It was after all Friday – July 18th 2008 – and a full moon – which probably went a long way towards explaining those weird vibes at street level. I always get a li'l restless this time of month as long term readers will be aware and in the end I'd been forced to make a painful executive decision and postpone my parley with the preacher man 'til monday by which time the moon would be safely on the wane and my therian characteristics less to the fore. Of course I should've told Rob up front that having to make occasional allowance for the moon comes with the territory when hiring werewolf labor but I doubt he would've understood. Besides there was no way anyone was gonna be lookin' at those digi-masters over the weekend and there was Shadow Theatre business afoot…

The screams grew louder, a series of shrill, anguished cries that tapered off into an unhealthy rattle.There didn't seem to be any point in mentioning what was going on outside to Rob and what I'd been hearing didn't really settle in until a beat or two after I'd already hung up. Crossing to the window I saw a bemused ring of onlookers gathering on the far side of the square, their eyes turned towards what I took to be the source of the disturbance. They seemed frozen, impassive as mannequins or figures on a stage awaiting a cue, seemingly oblivious to the posse of kids who steamed through and past them like a school of bike bound barracuda, hands collectively rising to tug at hoods and caps as they disappeaed beneath the railway bridge to lose themselves the trackless headwaters of the Goldborne Road. The woman who had been making a fuss had stopped now and the vendors resumed their business, the pulse of life returning as the various onlookers began to drift sheepishly away. I lit a last smoke, double checking my kit before making tracks, deciding to throw in a copy of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror' for good measure as well as an extra pair of dry socks and a travel worn paperback edition of Arthur Machen's early tales. It was lookin' a li'l grey out there and I figured the extra socks might come in handy. With Blighty floundering through another greenhouse summer and the home counties sliding inch by inch into the swamp its all a man can do at times to keep his head and his feet dry, let alone hope to find peak viewing conditions for a July moon and it was July already – or so I was told…

By the time I hit the street the first coppers had begun to arrive, a pair of red faced foot soldiers in Kevlar vests huffing and puffing as they jogged nervously across the square, looking for the action that had already happened ten minutes ago. Two more rozzers were interviewing the lady who runs the restaurant/gallery space downstairs who was just telling them that she hadn't seen a thing. I could have chimed in to say it had been kids less than half my age but instead I nodded sympathetically and headed for the tube. I could have said at least one of 'em was white, another mixed race or Asian but I doubt it would have helped, nor had I actually seen which one had done the deed, only that a deed had been done.
At any rate I was going to have to to step lightly if I was going to make my connection. The 11.45 to Cardiff waits for no man…

2. The Secret Glory of Arthur Machen

Mankind in its arrogance knows little of the earth. Even as we plumb the dying oceans and the nearer reaches of space a rambler in the Welsh valleys might still feel a chill as the shadows lengthen and the airy silence presses in, a silence that is not a silence at all but an intricate symphony of subliminal sound, the white noise of things growing and dying. This quickening of the heart, one part terror, one part exhilaration in the face of nature at its most sublime is panic in its primal sense, what our forefathers knew as the proximity of the pagan deity Pan, the hieratic embodiment of the earth's fecundity, misunderstood and maligned by the people of the Book as the horned essence of evil itself.


The poet and mystic Arthur Machen came of age in those remote backwoods. Born in 1863 he spent his formative years at Llandewi Rectory in Gwent where one solitary summer afternoon he took an unfamiliar path through the hills and encountered something that touched his soul and chafed against his Christian upbringing, something that he struggled for the rest of his life to put into words.

Adrift in London he found employment as a journalist and translator, honing his craft by laboriously translaring the torrid prose of Casanova's 'Memoirs' before taking on a commission to compile a definitive catalogue of occult literature. This daunting part-work marked the beginning of his true education and his earliest surviving tales such as 'The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita' indicate a precocious fascination with all things esoteric.



His first novella, 'The Great God Pan' appeared in 1894 to reviews of unparalleled hostility, deemed '…the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable yet seen in English' by the Westminster Gazette and summed up by the Manchester Guardian as '…an incoherent nightmare of sex.' Machen's debut concerns a working class waif named Mary and her wealthy benefactor who grooms her to become a guinea pig in a grotesque experiment in early brain surgery. Under the scalpel she experiences a vision of the vast and formless deity of Nature only to awaken as a drooling idiot. She is found to be pregnant and before dying gives birth to a daughter who matures into a beautiful, voraciously seductive avatar of Chaos, a pagan antichrist who proceeds to cut a vengeful apocalyptic swathe through stuffy fin-de siecle London.

Following through with 'The Novel of the White Powder' and its companion piece 'The Novel of the Black Seal' Machen introduced one of his most cherished themes, the survival of the folkloric 'little people', the children of Danu who are supposed to have disappeared into the Welsh hills but live on in a kind of transdimensional 'otherworld' from which they continue to exert an obscure and baleful influence over human affairs. The sudden decline of his young wife, Amy, recently diagnosed with cancer, spurred the creation of 'The White People', one of Machen's finest stories and an acknowledged masterpiece of supernatural fiction, an unsettling first person narrative depicting a child on the cusp of puberty and her fatal communion with the inhabitants of faeryland.

Machen's tale would inspire countless writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King but the genre he helped create held no further interest for him. A real life 'horror of the soul' took hold of him and working in a grief stricken frenzy he completed his first novel, 'The Hill of Dreams', deconstructing his opiate laced prose and returning to the half remembered landscapes of his youth to create a thinly veiled account of his own pursuit of the mysteries. The opening passage concerning an amorous tryst with an elemental woodland spirit is described with the lucidity of first hand experience, a conviction that places his work in a wholly different class from his imitators.

Eschewing the sensationalism of 'yellow' fiction Machen won critical respect but set himself on the road to ruin by alienating his readership. Turning to the occult for solace he was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn on the 21st of November 1899, taking the name Frater Avallaunius and might have abandoned literature entirely had it not been for the Great War and the controversy sparked by the appearance of his hastily penned potboiler 'The Bowmen'. The tale of the ghostly archers of Agincourt coming to the aid of the retreating tommies was retold by a nurse on the Western front to cheer her wounded charges and repeated orally from one soldier to the next until it found its way back to the British papers as a statement of fact. In an echo of modern UFO hysteria Machen's attempts to set the record straight lead to public accusations that he was involved in a convoluted conspiracy to cover up the 'real truth'.

The 'affair of the angels' puzzled Machen but above all gave him hope, a renewed belief in the power of faith that he saw increasingly embodied in the symbolic quest for the Holy Grail, the lost link between man and nature and the balm to both his and the world's pain. His various discourses on Anglo-Saxon Grail lore, collected in 1925 under the title 'The Secret of the Sangraal' give only a partial insight into the obsessive research that consumed his remaining years. 'The Great Return' (1915) concerns the miraculous reappearance of the sacred relic in an isolated Welsh village while his final masterpiece 'The Secret Glory' (1922) is a sustained attempt to reposition the quest in a contemporary post-war context. In Paradise Lost (1:780) when the peasant stumbles across the elves at their midnight revels Milton describes how 'at once with joy and fear his heart rebounds' and it is in the reconciliation of these two conflicting yet paradoxically complementary emotions that Arthur Machen principally concerned himself, his collected fiction charting the stations of an inner journey from the fear and inhibitions of his Anglican childhood to the joy and wonder of his final acceptance of nature and the yearnings of his own pagan soul.

Machen lived out his impoverished, declining years in Amersham where the locals in the King's Arms still remember his inexhaustible supply of baffling anecdotes. He died quite peacefully in 1947 at the age of 84.

                                                        

…'As he awoke there was a glinting that might have been the flash of sunlight and the branches rustled and murmured. He held out his hands and cried to his visitant to return; he entreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart and he ran blindly, dashing through the wood.'

                                     

3.Breathing Out

London passes.
The river passes.
The city passes.
Then come open spaces, trees and more trees and the first green fields.
What remains of old England spread out beneath the lowering, lustureless skies.
They wont let you smoke on the trains anymore but at least the trains are faster now when they run at all. They put so many chemicals in the filter tips these days you'd have to be crazy to smoke 'em anyhow and skinning up in a public compartment was never really an option. So I reread part of 'The Dunwich Horror' instead, at least the parts that concerned me before returning to my meditations on Machen, musing on how strange it was that he had produced almost all of his best work in one year - 'The White People', 'The Hill of Dreams' and a lengthy non-fiction work entitled 'Hieroglyphs', a sort of esoteric 'theory of everything' akin to Poe's 'Eureka' that the author himself placed great personal store in yet failed to find publication in his lifetime and which continues to leave even his most ardent fans cold to this day - I895, I think it was – the same year his wife passed away. And after that…nothing. Nothing for almost twenty years, until the Great War and the affair of 'The Bowmen'.

At first the voices around me are the clipped tones of white collar workers beating their retreat to the clotted home counties, quietly discussing the credit crunch and their prissy all too English sexual hang ups. Then as you reach the Severn estuary and places west the office workers drain away, the voices of the other passengers changing as they slip a rung or two down the economic ladder, the tone growing more raucous, the humor more ribald, the dress sense palpably shabbier, the hair-do's more ill-advised until with a whiff of cheap aftershave and greasy chip oil the all but incoherent p.a system announces that you have come at last to the land of the Red Dragon, the blighted, rain streaked kingdom of Wales.

Arthur Machen was born in Caerleon although you'd be hard pressed to know that as no plaque exists to mark his passing, let alone a statue or street name despite the fact he is beyond question one of the greatest authors of the uncanny to have ever lived and breathed on this not so fair green earth. In fact 'The White People' may well be the single scariest story ever written – at least according to H.P.Lovecraft who wheels out the superlatives in his ground breaking essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature.' Unlike H.P.L. however Machen had a highly developed social conscience evident in the grotesque fate of his working class Mary at the hands of the patrician surgeons in the 'Great God Pan' or the snippy treatment of the young village girl ( 'who was quite poor' ) by the courtiers in 'The White People' yet for some reason the powers that be still find it far easier to idolize Dylan Thomas and Richard Llewelynn as stalwart scions of Welsh culture than risk giving serious consideration to something so palpably destabilizing, so inherently edgy, let alone pause long enough to figure out what the man was really on about…

The land of the Red Dragon has always struggled against the red cross of Saint George and the stifling double whammy of English cultural and economic imperialism and the years since the industrial revolution have not been kind to the green hills and winding valleys of Machen's youth. The land has been raped, mortgaged, strip mined, remorgaged and raped again, turning some of the most beautiful country on God's Earth into a post industrial wasteland that in turn inspired a slew of dystopian cinematic futures.

                                            

West of Cardiff the Llanwern steelworks give way to the refininery towers, slag heaps and reprocessing plants of Port Talbot and the BP petrochemical plant at Baglin Bay. The view from the end of the M.4 by night is said to have inspired the opening images of Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner' and Terry Gilliam claims to have come up with the idea for 'Brazil' after hearing the eponymous song on his car radio while driving through Baglin Bay and being struck by the stark contrast between the swooning, romantic ballad and the grim, grey vista that surrounded him. Not having a fraction of the budget available to either picture I settled on simply going on location to Port Talbot rather than trying to recreate it, the scrap heaps and refinery towers forming the heavily filtered skyline of 'Hardware's anonymous 21st century metropolis. Even the locals have gotten in on the joke, christening a local nightclub 'The Zone' after Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' . In fact I have fond memories of the venue having photographed the witchy all-girl and sadly now defunct metal band 'RockBitch' there some years ago but that, as they say, is another story…

                                            
 
The cumulative effect of this despolation on the mass psyche of the zone's inhabitants has yet to be fully understood but it can be no mere coincidence that the area sports the highest suicide rates in the United Kingdom. On 19 febuary 2008 Jenna Parry was found hanging in the woods near the village of Cefn Cribbwr, some five miles from Bridgend, the last stop on the line before you reach Port Talbot itself. The 16 year old was the 17th teenager to top themselves within 13 months. Not only was this latest 'suicide cluster' remarkable for the comparative youth of the victims but , at least among a number of the dead, there were established relationships , familial, social and virtual that caused authorities to suspect the existence of some form of 'Suicide Club' operating through the conduit of the social networking sites, specifically Bebo and MySpace. ( *see 'Bridgend deaths: Police warn of Bebo Suicide Cult ' The Independent – 27 January – 2008 ) The local authorities finally wised up to just how bad the state of malaise had become and in a vain attempt to boost morale poured funds into planting rows of trees, artfully landscaping the verges of the freeway so that you can no longer kick back, turn up the Vangelis music on the stereo and get the full benefit from the last few miles of the M.4 as once was our want although if you pull off at the Baglin Bay exit at just before 3.00 am, the usual hour for dumping the forges the effect is still impressive enough even now. There is a ragged gypsy encampment that has sprung up in the exclusion zone around the B.P plant where the M.4 finally peters out in a welter of concrete roundabouts and the trainlines curve inland to Neath where I disembarked, stocking up on a pint of water, a packet of chocolate biscuits and a very large bag of nightlights before asking directions to the local bus station. I was perhaps a li'l undersupplied for the rough territory I was headed for but I was on the tightest of tight schedules and had to limit myself to the bare essentials – a couple of books and a waterproof military sleeping bag.

More wary daytrippers venturing into those hills, especially at that hour are prone to equipping themselves with tents or flashlights which is of course why they never see anything like Machen's woodland elementals to begin with. Some say the faeries left not with the coming of Christianity but the coming of electric light and there may be some truth to this. They didn't leave of course but people simply lost the ability to see them. To notice them mayhap you have to be able to see without looking, kinda like viewing those holographic 'Magic Eye' images that were briefly all the rage in the early nineties. It involves detaching the vision from the object by focusing beyond it and allowing the mind to rest. On a moonless night the aim when walking in the dark is not to franticly look for the path but to defocus the eyes and wait for the shape of things to emerge. Rest long enough and the rocks, trees and hedges will slowly reveal themselves. The modern world is filled with noise, artificial light and activities which stimulate the senses rather than allowing them to rest – the very opposite required for seeing. On a mission such as the one I found myself on this night a flashlight would have not only been unnecessary, it would have been out of the question. Bad sportsmanship to say the least…

I rode a rickety local bus as far as the tiny and rather nondescript village of Gllyneath where I shouldered my pack and struck out on foot. towards the great black hump of Craig-y-Ddinas...
                                                     

Some believe the last of the Tuatha Danaan, the 'children of Danu', the mythic first folk who were supposed to have raised the standing stones before the coming of the Celts or the Mylesians vanished into a door in this great prehistoric rock. The surrounding hills are certainly hollow enough, honeycombed with abandoned mine shafts some of which open onto natural galleries in what is widely known by the spelunking community to be Britain's largest and least explored limestone districts. Over the years a plethora of subterranean mythology has accrued about the area ranging from the usual anecdotes concerning buried treasures guarded by sleeping knights and laborers in the pits hearing phantom miners, commonly known as'tappers', hammering and chiselling in hidden galleries to more contemporary shaggy dog stories concerning hidden UFO bases and the clandestine use of the shafts for storing nuclear or other more exotic forms of waste.

                            

A narrow track on the left hand side of the rock winds steeply upwards, threading its way past the mouths of the first set of shafts before curving down towards the junction of the Melte and Hepste rivers and the overgrown ruins of the gunpowder factory that predictably blew itself up more than a century ago now. It seems somehow curiously apposite that the only commercial activity the valley has ever been put to was the production of high explosives. The stubby walls of the gunpowder works are the last sign of human habitation before you reach the bunkhouse above the Clynwynn Falls – a good five miles as the crow flies. No great distance for a determined rambler you might imagine but the river winds and winds again and the mossy cliffs fall away more steeply on either side of the faltering path, the valley below lost in an undulating green canopy, beech and oak and hazel and ash and yew intertwining until you can no longer tell the one from another, the wild woods rising rampart upon rampart into the distances beyond. Unless you know this place like the back of your hand it might take you a full day or more to cover that kind of ground.

For a moment I wished I could break out the chocolate biscuits or throw myself down in the wet grass, to revel in the moment like Tarkovsky's stalker returned once more to his beloved 'Zone', to at least roll a smoke but business was business and I was running late. Consulting my pocket watch I took a second deeper breath before propelling myself down the path towards the woods.

                            

3. A brief history of the Shadow Theatre

"...And I went on, and at last I found a certain wood which is too secret to be described, and nobody knows of the passage into it, which I found out in a very curious manner, by seeing some little animal run into the wood through it. So I went after the animal by a very narrow dark way, under thorns and bushes, and it was almost dark when I came to a kind of ope place in the middle. And there I saw the most wonderful sight I have ever seen, but it was only for a minute, as I ran away directly, and crept out of the wood by the passage I had come by, and ran and ran as fast as ever I could, because I was afraid, what I had seen was so wonderful and so strange and beautiful. But I wanted to get home and think about it..." - Arthur Machen 'The White People'

I first set eyes on the valley in the summer of '86. I was fresh out of Africa and had no idea what I was getting into, no convenient peg on which to hang the experience…

Greg Copeland, the cameraman who shot the first Nephilim videos had just met the Welsh lass who was to become his first wife and on one particularly sunny she bundled him and his slacker friends, namely yours truly and my buddy Anton Beebe ( grandson of the man who directed the original 'Flash Gordon' serial ) into her car for a guided tour of places west. We played 'Rust never Sleeps' by Neil Young – just the A-side- again and again on the tape deck until it got old and when no-one could stand it anymore Judith dropped Anton and myself at a local viewspot before spiriting Greg off to have her way with him. I was perhaps ill prepared for what became two days and two nights in the wilderness, equipped with little more than a sketchbook and a cigarette lighter.

                  

But none of that mattered. Not at first…besides the sun still shone in those days and summers were long and warm and bright – at least that's how I remember 'em…

I sat down on the edge of the great red veined rock beside the falls, breathing in, letting the sound of the river fill me, calm me. It was a kind of meditation I guess. They didn't have any decent ( and by 'decent' I mean psychedelic ) drugs back in sunny South Africa or if they did I never figured out how to get my hands on 'em. Nonetheless I'd had a few 'turns' as a younger teenager, occasionally triggered by running, climbing or otherwise hyperventilating , a sort of naturally occurring altered state of consciousness albeit nothing quite as blatently shamanic as what happened to me that afternoon.

                            

I remember the sound of the river most of all and the deeper, subtler rythms within it , like the rush of blood in my capillaries, the thunder of the falls melding with the beat of my heart, my body seemingly melting into the rock until I could no longer tell one from another. The stone was soft and warm like flesh, the churning beat of the falls becoming the throb of tom toms, a spiralling voodoo symphony that seemed to be coming from some other world entirely. I rememember convincincing myself that the world was a box, the sky its lid and that strange, insistent drum solo was emanating from the crack between the two. Then with a gasp I fell forward out of my body into the crack…

I remember another sound beneath the rush of white noise. A sound like a scream, thin and high at first but gaining volume, deepening into a roar. For a moment I thought I might be dead, that I must have fallen from the cliff.  I breathed in, pulling back into my body, the light fading, the trees becoming trees once more. I slapped my hand against the rock to make it real again, a pulsing, revving shriek filling my world. I opened my eyes as a stealth jetfighter went hotrodding overhead, probably an American Raven barrelling over from Lakenheath, banking slightly as it followed the curve of the river, a rippling sonic boom catching up an instant later as it climbed away into the setting sun. Then I heard Anton yelling too. He had been lying quietly on a ridge overlooking the falls, watching the same golden afterglow and must have been roused from his revery as sharply. I started towards the sound of his voice, scampering barefoot over the rocks. As I approached the top of the ridge I noticed what looked like steps and above them a row of seats hewn from solid stone. Anton was huddled in one of the throne like chairs, staring into the gathering gloom. He had stopped yelling now but still looked pretty phased, gazing past me, attention focussed on the glen below.
"The hell is this place ?"
"It's the Shadow Theatre."

                       

He said it with such certainty I didn't doubt him although I had no idea what he actually meant. Following his eyeline I saw the valley below formed a natural amphitheatre with the flat rock at the top of the falls providing a kind of stage. Then as if on cue two figures appeared in the clearing beneath us like characters in a play. I blinked, realizing it was Greg and Judith, feeling somewhat relieved they had come back to pick us up after all. Waving to get their attention I started down the hill only to bring myself up short as I caught the sound of their voices. They seemed to be having some sort of argument and realizing they hadn't seen me I decided to hang back and let them get it out of their system – but their voices only grew louder. I couldn't make out the individual words over the rush of white noise, only anger. There was a rattle of stones.At first I thought she'd slipped and Greg was bending to help her back to her feet. Then I saw his arm rising and falling, something glinting in his hand. Was that a rock ? A knife even ?
I stood frozen in my tracks, still trying to work out what I was seeing, not knowing if I should try to step in or turn tail. Greg seemed to be beating her against the rocky ground,  a frenzied strength to his asault that I could barely square with the Greg I knew. Then he lifted her in his arms and her body seemed to come apart, shredding into a mass of brightly coloured scarves and I realized it wasn't a woman at all but some sort of macabre rag doll.
"Fucksake…"
Greg paused, looking up at me as if he had known I was watching all along and I realized it wasn't Greg at all but someone taller and stronger who had been expertly mimicking his body language. I felt a sudden chill, the short hairs rising on the back of my neck.
"Who are those people ?"
" The Shadow Theatre ? Didn't I tell you.." 'Greg' did a backward summersault, flick flacking away into the gathered gloom and Anton giggled : " They're incredible. I've been watching them all afternoon…"
I settled myself into one of the stone chairs, relieved at having an explanation to hang on to even if it were no explanation at all. I reached for my tobacco trying to decide whether we were audience members or victims but the seat was comfortable enough at least.
"What else did you see ?"
"I saw you. Just now. On the edge of the cliff.…"
"No. That was real. That happened. Or at least I think it happened …"
"You were dancing on the edge of the cliff and then a plane flew over and flew into the crack…"
"You saw that ?"
"  The Raven 111 ?…"
"No. The crack. I mean the aeroplane was real…"
"It was all right there. Like the door in the hill…"
" What door ?"
"That door.." He nodded towards the eerie effulgence that radiated silently from the jumble of rocks behind us. At first I had thought the light was some weird reflected afterglow from the setting sun but then I began to grow less certain.
"They're really going for it down there! Partying down …"
Something flickered overhead and we heard what sounded like the pop of fireworks from the valley floor as the evening show got under way, a phalanx of what appeared to be armoured war machines advancing from the gloom.
"How do they fuckin' do that ?"
"I don't know. But they're really good at it…"
" They're amazing ! Just watch…"
"I don't want to just watch. I want to join 'em ! You think they'd let me audition ?"
"I thought you already had. I saw you down there. To be honest I thought you'd arranged this whole thing …"
I settled back in my chair, front row, centre, firing up a reefer as a strange and terrible saga of future warfare unfolded before us. " I don't know who those guys are or what we're lookin' at but I was made for that show… "

Later I had to come to terms with the fact that we had apparently 'hallucinated' the entire show although what triggered those 'hallucinations' remained a mystery . I told myself it was something to do with the valley's acoustics, the hiss of white noise, the convoluted manner in which the steep gorge twists and turns causing the light from the sun or moon to enter from unexpected, potentially disorientating angles, the shifting leaves and sparkling water setting up countless complex and oddly suggestive 'diffusion patterns', phosphorescence released by decaying fungi, energy stored and then spontaneously released by the crystalline rock formations or the magnetic field of the river somehow effecting our brainwaves. Subterranean waters. Sun spots. I don't know. Anything to try and get around the idea that there really were 'little people' living in that hollow hill playing tricks on our minds. Besides weird things just happened around Anton. He was prone to 'black outs', naturally occurring trance states that he could slip in and out of without warning, trembling and falling silent, eyes glazing as if he wasn't realy there at all only to return to fuller consciousness a moment later with some typically ridiculous observation. Maybe I was just spending too much time around him and had started seeing whatever the hell it was he'd been seeing all along, each of us serving to reinforce the others misperceptions to produce a textbook 'shared hallucination'.


                                                


So I came back and next time I brought reinforcements…

Mr Horn, my long standing ally and cameraman was next, then Kate my equally long suffering first girlfriend and a couple of old army buddies at least one of whom was already a member of the International Magic Circle, a juggler and practising stage magician in his own right. We figured that if whatever it was that lived down there was going to confuse us then we were just going to confuse it right back and answer it trick for trick. Perhaps on some level I was still auditioning, trying out for a company that didn't exist or at least didn't advertise in 'Spotlight' or 'Stage and Screen'. Whatever the hell we were doing we were learning fast, picking up on what we saw and imitating it, adding dots, details and curlicues of our own.The sheer cliffs that had guarded the valley since time out of mind ensured our privacy, providing us with the perfect psychedelic adventure playground which we duly made our own. Undisturbed by the outside world we acted out all the dramas, illusions and fancies the natural amphitheatre seemed to demand.

       

I had studied stage magic myself while still in high school and based some of what we did on the work of the obscure conjuror Charles Nightingale who had toured Bitain and Ireland between the wars under the stage name 'Coleman Collins',playing opposite his partner, the chanteuse Rosa Forte and such vanished luminaries as Francis LeRoy the 'devil in evening dress', Bosco the Great Northern Wizard and Mr. Peet and his Wanderin' Boys. Their grande farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire on August 27 1924 was so gaudy no-one came out alive, not even the audience although some believe Collins faked his death by substituting another body for his own in a spectacular 'coup de theatre' before escaping to a new life in America. The details of those all but forgotten 'crimes against reality' are scarcely relevant now other than the fact they provided a jumping off spot for my own work in the mid eighties and early nineties. Some say the test of a true magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life. Uncle Cole however was adamant that "the test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life"- an epithet I took to heart....

Its difficult to describe what I thought I was doing at the time other than to say it was at best a kind of dance – a duet with death or the unknown or whatever the hell it was down there. It would make a move so I'd make a move back and if we were on the money it'd come back with what we referred to simpy as a 'response'. The responses came in all kind of shapes and sizes, improving on our efforts, gently mocking us, constantly forcing us to raise the stakes. At best it was a form of wordless communication, what the 80's UFO brigade might might have referred to as 'landing protocols'. Normally the 'faery folk' or whatever the hell you want to call 'em take flight at the first sign of outsiders so I figured it was our job to draw them out instead, to confuse 'em and hold their attention, to appeal to their natural sense of mischief. Of course you should never assume any audience is friendly, let alone an audience of invisible woodland elementals…

                   
 
In the summer of 1987 we ferried in a team of dancers and crack lighting technicians to shoot the promotional material for the single 'Blue Water' , devising an elaborate cable car rig to literally fly the generators and heavier equipment over the treetops and down to the valley floor. Perhaps it was a step too far and it is a matter of record that we were rewarded for our hubris by running into one of the biggest hurricanes the United ( ? ) Kingdom had ever seen. Global warming hadn't yet been established as a fact of British life so like so many other things we ended up blaming it on the little people, deciding that perhaps we had been a just a li'l out of line in trying to involve genuine 'elementals' in what was still only a music video when you got right down to the nitty gritty.

                                         

A midsummer night's dream ? The Nephilim in faeryland...

                  

Secrets of the Shadow Theatre



                   
Above left: The end of the rope for Carl's 'preacherman' persona
And right: Self and Carl back in the day. Could this be the origin of that gag about the 'one that got away' ?

Beating a hasty retreat we did our best to reconstruct the valley floor using some of the leaves and broken branches blown down by the hurricane, finishing off the promo in the relative safety of a desserted warehouse. While the end result is amusing enough it remains only a shadow of the epic originally envisaged.




After that I grew wary of taking cameras or electric lights into the valley and there are few images to attest to what followed. We did our best work there, five or six shows in a good year and all of it perforce went unrecorded.
                                          

Above and below: Rare images of an exploding life size wolf effigy smoking a Cuban cigar and wearing a nice white suit from Cordings that we blew up one solstice dawn to commemorate the assassination of the Chechen premier - the so-called 'wolf of Grozny'. It was one of the first pyrotechnic effigies I built and extremely dangerous ! A piece of shrapnel flew out of it just after taking the initial photo and hit the rock behind us, ricocheting right out of the valley...

                                    

In 1989 the valley was put on the market by the farmer who owned all the land north of the Hepste River. One hundred thousand pounds sterling would have made it our own forever but that kind of money was utterly beyond my reach at that time. I had barely enough to feed myself and more often than not ended up couch surfing or sleeping under tables in unsuspecting production offices. I tried in vain to put together a consortium of 'interested parties', taking prospective backers on guided tours of the Zone, including on one particularly memorable moon an Iranian stockbroker connected to the west London property Mafiosi who had recently bought Fulham Broadway and a young surgeon turned speed dealer who had just come off a double shift at the Royal Free Hospital…

The broker ended up reclining laconically in one of the stone seats at the top of the bluff, gazing at the pale, moonlit figures moving in the glade below muttering all the usual phrases to himself about it being the 'most amazing thing' he'd ever seen whilst the terrified surgeon ended up with his back against the cliff wall, threatening to kill anyone who came near him. You could never really tell how the valley might effect people although the broad rule of thumb tended to be that folk who were too fixed in their views or clung too closely to the notion of the universe being essentially mechanistic and hence explicable by science tended to have the harder time of it. Accordingly we left the surgeon to his own devices and he seemed perfectly okay in the morning although I never saw him again after we dropped him off back in the city. I think his name was Peter…

I never did get that deal together any more than I could come up with a viable commercial logic to underpin the purchase to begin with. Accordingly the valley became part of the Craig –y-Ddinas Forest Park and a few years ago was officially declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site having been found to apparently be one of 'Britain's last unspoiled landscapes' to quote the free guidebook that came with my copy of the Saturday 'Guardian' which was frankly one of the worst things that could possibly have happened to the place. If I had taken over the land I'd have stocked it with wolves but now that it's officially up there with Snowdonia and the Lake District its been targeted by the sort of unscrupulous entrepreneurs who turn a fast buck by taking 'problem children', executives on weekend bonding exercises and other 'gifted' individuals through its winding gorges, usually in matching crash helmets, wetsuits and safety harnesses that make them look like walking talking sex toys or strings of living, long chained DNA threading their way laboriously upriver. And of course, the valley being what it is, the daytrippers began to die in droves. At first I kept the newspaper clippings but then I stopped bothering.

"…Jason and three other teenagers jumped into the river for a dip. The others got out but Jason was swept away. He was found 100 yards away by an outdoor-pursuits leader who pulled him ashore but he was already dead. Police and health and safety officials are investigating. Bryn Davies, the principal of the college, said the course which can last up to 12 weeks was designed to 'instill self belief and motivation' for youngsters aged 16 to 18 who are not sure what career they want to follow. Jason had started the course on Monday…" – The Independent – Saturday – Sept 10 2001

And after that little sign posts began to appear and itsy-bitsy fences designed to prevent folk from plunging headlong off cliffs or plummeting to their deaths in the falls and rapidly Britain's last, great unspoiled landscape stopped being quite so unspoiled and the little people, if they existed, drew back even further into the hills.                                                    
                                                                         

I have never had any fear of the so-called 'supernatural' any more than I fear the darkness. I have simply never perceived it as a threat to me. Its people that are the problem. Human-bloody-beings every time ! Even as a child I felt more at ease in the dark, knowing I could hide there where the adults couldn't find me, that I was safe in the woods on my own where nothing could hurt me. The moment you take someone with you it changes everything. I learned not to take cynics, die hard sceptics or folks who were too set in their views but there were plenty of so-called 'neo-pagans' who claimed to make obeisance to the gods and goddesses of the woods and fields who melted into lumps of quivering jello when they got up close and personal with wild nature and felt themselves gripped by that same sudden inexplicable terror Machen describes so eloquently. Panic in its original sense. The feeling you get when you're swimming just off the reef and spot the outline of a shark or a dorsal fin briefly cutting the water. The sun is as bright and the water as warm as it was moments earlier but the sudden revelation of ones true position in the scheme of things tends to take the pleasure out of the experience and send even the stoutest soul lunging for the safety of the beach. Accordingly you can never really tell who's going to spin out or turn on you when the going gets weird so to hedge my bets I never took anyone the same way twice. Sometimes I went as far as blindfolding folk from the moment we turned off the freeway or spinnin' 'em around once we'd gotten into the woods. And even now, even in the 21st century once its past a certain hour and the shadows start to deepen between the trunks you can still count on a degree of privacy…

After 'Blue Water' and the freak flashfloods that almost killed us during the shooting of 'Hardware's opening sequence near Efoud in the Sahara desert Carl became understandably wary of going on location with me and in the mid-nineties Anton was diagnosed with a potentially life threatening disease of the thyroid gland that went some ways towards explaining his black outs which had grown more frequent and severe in the interim. Although he has since been successfully treated he no longer sees 'littlle people' or if he does he no longer speaks about it.

In 1994 I turned Paul Carlin, the editor of 'Dust Devil' and 'Voice of the Mon' onto the place and he insisted on bringing his younger brother Grant with him on the return visit.It was a full moon and ideal viewing conditions with at least three physical phenomena plainly identifiable to all of us shaking up the proceedings. On the way up to the valley a bolt of lightning struck an abandoned shed which began to burn, emitting a bright plume of orange flame. The bolt made an ear splitting crack, the grass was very green and the sun was shining and the rain falling all at once. Later a cold, heavy wall of mist rolled in, filling the gorge and the moonbeams streaming through the trees turned the whole valley into a shifting maze of light and shadow....

                                                              

At some point in the early hours of the morning one of the trees seemed to stop touching the ground entirely and fell crashing into the gorge, ripping and wrending as it tumbled, bringing down other trees and boulders with it. I was in the shadow theatre in my usual seat and fortunately Paul and Grant were at a safe distance but we all froze in terror for an instant, the ground trembling beneath us as the debris impacted with the rock that served as our stage area, knowing we might easily have been crushed like bugs had our timing been just a li'l different.

I was doing a lot of work with fireworks at the time, probably working out residual issues from the Afghan engagement and responded by launching another volley of rockets which yielded a last 'response'. Just before dawn a long, sparky stream of light appeared in the brightening sky that looked for all the world like return fire. It must have been a meteorite or some other form of space junk burning up on re-entry but whatever it was went on falling and sparking and burning long enough for all three of us to look up from our various vigils and independently note its passing. There seemed something melancholy about it, as if it were the valley's way of saying goodbye…

                      

Grant was quiet the next morning, scarcely uttering a word on the way back up to London and a few days later I heard he'd run into some difficulty after trying to ride his bicycle through a church door. Apparently there was a sign on the door reading 'Goods entrance only' and believing it meant 'Gods entance only'  he rode into it full tilt, expecting to pass through into some other dimension. Instead the impact buckled the frame of his bicycle and caused Paul and his wife to hit the panic button.The word was that he'd been…well…a li'l funny ever since his trip to the valley. Apart from anything else he now seemed to believe he could walk through walls…

Various shrinks screwed with Grant's head over the years, experimenting with various forms of medication to try and bring him back to something like 'normal' but as I had never met Grant before his 'breakdown' I have no clear idea what 'normal' was supposed to be. Along the way he started to produce drawings of his experience, initially as a kind of therapy, detailed charcoal images of the valley, complete and perfect to the last detail, the last rock and tree like data retrieved from the black box of his own private plane crash. God knows how many times he asked me to take him back to the place but I turned a deaf ear. The damage had been done however. Paul held me responsible for what happened and still refuses to speak to me. If ever evidence was needed that whatever the hell we'd found down there needed to be left alone this was it ! Rumours started to fly that I was playing fast n' loose with people's minds, indeed their souls according to those of a more religious bent. There had been a gradual hardening of the arteries in the pagan scene as the freaks codeified their woolly worship into rituals in what I came to see as a gradual drift towards the right during the late eighties and early to mid nineties. Slander and malicious gossip clung to my Cuban heels and I began to feel I was perhaps getting a little old for the game.

                                                         

To be continued...