Glastafari

Having clocked-on for a night shift of re-birthing, Ariadne soon got wind of her second arrival. As before, she looked up, searching the cloud of Nag Champa that hung about the top of her tipi like a smelly weather front.

“Who’s there?” she asked, prompting Star and Nick to break free from their meditations.

“Goat Boy?” she asked, sensing a male energy, getting this timeless image of a lonely Mongolian goat herd, short and stocky and clad in sheep skin, his weathered features belying his younger years.

“What do you want Goat Boy?” she asked, sensing frozen tundra, and the jingle jangle of a distant ram.

“Please me?” She said, growing cautious. “How?”

A simple enough question, but Goat Boy’s response caused Ariadne’s eyes to widen and her heart to race. Goat Boy wanted to please her alright, but not in a way that any simple Mongolian goat herd should know.

“You want me to strap you to a what!?” Ariadne gasped, beginning to blush.

“Huh?” said Star, looking across at Nick from the band Solar Warrior. Something about Goat Boy was definitely getting Ariadne’s goat.

This was new, Ariadne thought - Astral perverts. The cosmic equivalent of some lost soul sniffing your knickers. She would have to have a word with her spirit guide, her agent in the afterlife. Goat Boy was the second misfit that had come her way in so many hours.

But Goat Boy was anything but your average Mongolian peasant. Just above Ariadne’s head, the sadly missed comic genius Bill Hicks, the coolest guy ever to have come out of Texas, hadn’t been able to resist breathing life into that old dark stand-up favourite, ‘Randy Pan the Goat Boy’; about as far away from the love and light conceits of the new age philosophy as you could possibly get. The End of Time it may have been, but who said you couldn’t go out with a few laughs?

“Goat Boy is here to please you,” he repeated, in a deep masterful tone, letting out a wicked cackle.

“How?” said Ariadne, nervously and unwisely.

“Strap me to your head board,” said Hicks. “Throw your legs over my shoulders. And I will wear you like a feed bag.” He hadn’t had quite so much fun since the time that he’d spat in David Letterman’s beer.

Like Strummer, he’d also been hanging out on Planet Happy Clappy, getting more and more wound up by the state of things back home, particularly post 9/11 and the so-called War Against Terror. He now knew the truth about a lot of shit. For one thing that no high rise in the history of architecture had ever fallen in total free fall without the help of controlled explosions.

On the clean-cut Pleiades Bill had cut an awkward shape, making his way through those corridors of dazzling white marble dressed entirely in black; a little dark angry poet. All around, startlingly blue Pleiadian eyes would look over, imploring, “Let it go, Bill. Move on. Get in touch with your inner-child.”

To which Bill would often shout back, “Yeah, and you need to get in touch with your outer fucking adult!”

One thing that a spell on Planet Happy Clappy was supposed to stop was the blame game. Guilt tripping of any kind was considered to be a major obstacle in your path to becoming a higher being. It was probably why, no matter how despicable the evil alien scum behaved, the Pleiadians could never bring themselves to point the finger, or indeed interfere on any truly useful level like bombing those bug-eyed fuckers to pieces.

On the Pleiades Bill Hicks had been taught to let go of everything, especially his cock, to forgive everything and everyone, to imagine his inner consciousness as this “warm gentle breeze wafting across a beautiful spring-like meadow”, to hug pillows with pictures of Donald Trump on them, to lose the anger and in so doing harmonise himself with the universe.

But Bill had practically run his entire adult life on vitriol. Angry outbursts were his stock in trade.

There had been a huge debate among the Inner Council as to whether he should have been allowed on in the first place. ‘Too hot to handle,’ some had said. ‘Could prove disruptive.’ The last thing that the Pleiadians needed to hear was what a bunch of complete pussies they were. Bill was having none of that hippy bullshit.

“Oh we’re the Pleiadians. We’re so clean cut. We’re so tanned and beautiful,” he’d taunt. “Seig Heil! Seig Heil”

As far as he was concerned, that sugar coated planet of bleached blonde surfer dudes and prom queens, was cultural death warmed up. They were no more effective in countering the spread of evil alienation than those Nazi apologists at the UN.

He had of course kept his hand in, running comedy workshops and continuing to tighten up his delivery. But there was absolutely no-way that those grinning idiots in the Seven Sisters could ever appreciate his material.

“Oh wow Bill! The earth sounds like such an interesting place. We really must visit someday.”

He was being indulged and tolerated, and this made him mad. So, he had fought back in the only way that he knew how.

Like Joe, he had been dying to get back to Earth. Especially since he had learned of an evil alien plot to mess with Glastonbury Festival. He never performed there, but Radiohead did in 1997, playing ‘The Bends’, the title track of the album that they dedicated to Hicks just after he died.

Unlike Strummer though, he had no mandate to come and interfere with human destiny. So, he’d done the cosmic equivalent of sneaking out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night; something he had often done in his early years of stand-up. He didn’t quite know what he was going to do when he arrived but making things up as he went along was his forte.

* * * * *

Deep beneath Glastonbury Tor, Daryl the dealer was also making things up as he went along, stumbling practically bent double along one of the Duke of Somerset’s long forgotten bling tunnels looking for a way out; the underlying reason why his latest drug run to Pilton had gone so terribly wrong, completely beyond him. Just how long he’d been there, he couldn’t say, but judging by his rumbling tummy it must have been several hours. At the forefront of his mind was the terrible fear that he’d never escape this subterranean hellhole, that he’d remain there for the rest of his days, slowly turning rat feral, and drowning in a sea of slimy dankness.

He’d gotten so used to the monotony of crawling along in the musty darkness, so focused on keeping his head down, that he’d almost missed it - a chink of light, coming through a tiny crack in the wall; a hairline fracture of luminosity that was barely discernible.

He moved towards it, stealing himself to face the source. Rarely had he ever felt such an overwhelming sense of excitement. No drug experience on Earth could match that feeling of exhilaration. If he’d landed in Singapore with a kilo of coke in his hand luggage, he couldn’t have been more amped.

Carefully, he pressed his eye up to crack, nestling his cheek bone against the cold clammy surface of the tunnel wall.

“Fuck me!” he blurted out.

Not even a lifetime of listening to drug-addled psychobabble from University drop-outs, could have prepared him for what he saw through that tiny fissure. For there, on the other side, doused in the brightest golden light like God’s own Mission Control, there appeared to be a vast cavern filled with desks. Each desk was festooned with funky looking instruments, each wall lined with screens and panels covered in switches and flashing diodes, and scattered throughout the entire crazy scene, there were scores of what looked like little green men, extra-terrestrials, scurrying about doing stuff, flicking switches, turning dials, pointing stumpy “phone home” fingers at holographic screens.

It reminded Daryl of a drug squad sting that he’d just narrowly avoided on Glastonbury’s opening night. Inspired by a cartoon once found on the side of a clipper lighter, some bright spark cop had hit upon the idea of tracking down and nicking all the dealers on site by dressing up as aliens and carrying round a placard that said, ‘TAKE ME TO YOUR DEALER’, in the hope that it would tickle some space cadet’s tits into revealing who had been dishing out the disco biscuits. It had proved quite a successful ruse, entrapping about half a dozen people. But Daryl, who had taken great discomfort from being pointed out by his former, then invariably shit faced clientele, had rumbled the scheme just in time and made his escape. Though, whoever these little fellas were beyond the wall, they certainly weren’t the drug squad.

As he stood there pressing his bruised and battered face up against the mine shaft wall, his mind going, “What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fuck!” over and over, someone, or something, whispered in his ear.

* * * * *

Chief Inspector Ash’s mind was also having a WTF moment. Whatever gets you through the night was far from alright, especially if Channel Four films you taking it. He’d been laid out for two hours while the rest of the expedition got to grips with the double-glazing equivalent of a crashed UFO, Somerset’s version of the Roswell Incident; everyone racking their brain to come up with something sensible to explain away and normalise this freaky phenomenon.

Of course, if they had come up with the inside of a vast goldfish bowl, they wouldn’t have been far wrong; for indeed it was in a way, making them a school of gormless goldfish, continually bashing their noses against a gigantic wall of improbability, unable to fathom out who or what had put them there, or who or what was ‘out there’ looking in, no doubt at that very moment pointing at the Chief and saying, “He looks a bit green about the gills.”

A series of scientific experiments were being carried out to try and ascertain the exact nature of the thing. They had thumped it, kicked it, thrown things at it, felt along it high and low, and tried to dig under it. PC’s Wilson and Stevens even stood on each other’s shoulders to see how high it went. But it was higher, longer, deeper and tougher than any person could penetrate, climb or bypass without serious machinery or weaponry, far and away bigger than any obstacle Ash’s expedition could handle.

Greenpeace’s Dr Meyer took her own readings, but there was simply nothing to read, apart from the thick smear of blood that Ash had left hanging in mid-air. There was nothing really to video, not even a reflection, which was especially weird. She’d heard of the greenhouse effect, but this was ridiculous. Whatever it was, it was definitely man made. Nature was cruel, but it wasn’t sociopathic.

One thing was for sure, it posed a major threat to the status quo, to the established order of things, to the peace, to low flying aircraft; a major threat to pretty much everything, especially Glastonbury Festival.

“What are we going to do about her?” asked Ash, bunged up, with two heavy runlets of nosebleed smeared across the lower half of his face,

“Channel Four?” said Bumstead, casting a furtive glance at Sasha Lush, who was looking totally shagged out, smearing on the last of her lip seal, and preparing to deliver the latest in a long line of surreal pieces to camera.

“She’s seen everything,” Ash continued, dabbing his nose with a wet hankie. “I need hardly tell you what a discovery like this would do to the festival. There’d be widespread chaos and anarchy.”

“Sir, there already is widespread chaos and anarchy,” said Bumstead.

“Yes, I know that,” said Ash. “But this could make matters a whole deal worse. What if the Ministry of Defence are behind this, and this is just some kind of top secret test gone wrong?”

“Or right,” said Bumstead darkly.

“I think rather wrong, don’t you?” said Ash, not wishing to entertain the idea of State wickedness.

“Yeah, but the MOD do all their stuff on Salisbury Plain,” Bumstead explained.

“Look, we can’t have her spilling the beans to all and sundry and creating panic,” said Ash, grabbing hold of Bumstead’s shirt and pulling him closer. “We’ve got to find a way to silence her.”

“They’d never believe her anyway,” said Bumstead, watching Lush fiddle about with her microphone.

“She’s got the video,” Ash explained. “She must have filmed me running into that thing. She also filmed me…” He tightened his grip, his eyes flashing like crazy. “She also filmed me… That video mustn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands!”

* * * * *

Clash man Keith was beginning to think that his punk God portend had also fallen into the wrong hands. No-one, not even the most strung out acid casualty, was buying Strummer’s alien rap.

“Hey man. Like dude. Insensitive yeah?”

He had never felt so alone, so dubious, and in-appropriate. Just as he was about to give up and collapse into a spiky leathery heap of punky roadkill, he caught it, faint but unmistakable; Strummer’s voice, crooning like a burst blister. The haunting strains of Armagideon Time - the finest Clash / Reggae combo. The moment ‘White Youth… Black Youth’ found another solution. And like the good children of Hamelin, he found himself being guided along. It had to be a sign.

He turned onto the main drag and headed down towards the Jazz Field, all the while the music growing louder and louder, the battle to maintain his footing in a sea of refugees, getting harder and harder. He found himself standing beside a block of toilets. A block of toilets? The penny dropped. Weren’t these the very same toilets where he’d been propositioned by Strummer’s ghost all those hours before? His eyes quickly scanned the row of filthy doors, seeking out the one, the exact one with the huge scuff mark; that piss splattered gateway to the best of times and the worst. There it was, his faithful turd tardis, home to the freakiest dump imaginable.

Could it be that Strummer had stuck around and not run out on White Riot as he had done with The Clash back in 1983, but stuck around to kick alien butt, to save Glastonbury Festival? Not only that but help fix the band. The only thing in Keith’s life that had ever made sense.

And then, just as he took a step towards the door, the music stopped. Everything seemed to stop. He looked down. It was ‘Engaged’.

“Oi! shouted a nearby queue. “This lady was next.”

His heart racing, his hand trembling, he tried the door, convinced that it would just swing open despite being engaged, sweep past that familiar broken mirror and vomit covered sink, past the used sanitary towel, and come to rest against the bare knees of his childhood hero. A pair of drainpipes no doubt bunched around his ankles. Who else could it be but the leaner-meaner hey-de Strummer, back to lure him in once again with that cheeky toothless grin?

“Hi Keith, man. Take the weight off...”

But instead of the three-quarter fingertip frock coat, the crisp white shirt fastened at the neck with a gambler’s boot-string, and the Brothel Creepers, the toilet door came to rest on something shiny, something rubbery and stretchy. Two giant lifeless black eyes stared up at him from a blank and bulging face. Whatever it was, it was sitting on the loo. Suddenly, a grey and spindly indignant hand grabbed onto the edge of the door and slammed it in his face.

“Fucking hell!” Keith gasped.

“Just a minute,” the thing gasped back.

It was talking to him. It spoke good English and sounded like a girl.

“The lock’s busted. I won’t be long.”

It sounded almost embarrassed.

“Sorry,” said Keith instinctively, feeling disappointed that Strummer had blown him out, but also shocked to discover what looked like one of his despicable aliens taking a dump.

“Shit!” he gasped through clenched teeth. “Shit!”

Through the port-a-loo door he could sense much fumbling. Instinctively, he retreated back several steps. Could it be that it was about to emerge?

“Oi!” shouted the nearby queue again. “Are you deaf? This lady was next.”

He had cornered one of the evil aliens in the loo. There would never be a better time to capture it and prove to the world what the hell was going down. But he clearly needed some backup.

He spun round to face the queue of strangers, a more wretched collection of individuals you are unlikely to encounter anywhere outside of a UNHCR refugee camp, each of them looking like they were at death’s door, each clinging to a tiny sliver of toilet roll for survival. Each looking mighty pissed off at Keith.

“Look, I know this sounds totally weird. But Joe Strummer’s ghost told me that a bunch of nasty aliens finds all of this entertaining,” he told them, gesturing towards a nearby pool of vomit. “Now, we’ve got one of them cornered in there.” he continued, glancing over his shoulder, his eyes flashing and twitching like the crazy disciple he had become. “This is our only chance.”

Suddenly, the toilet door swung open. Keith and the entire wretched queue looked over.

“Our only chance,” Keith repeated, taking a step forward.

“No you fucking don’t!” said the lady who was next, sinking her claws into his spiky jacket. “Get to the back!”

And before Keith could even begin to say, “You don’t understand”, he found himself being overpowered by a seething mass of righteous indignation, and jostled and kicked away, just managing to snatch the briefest glimpse of what looked like a young woman, as she emerged from the toilet and disappeared behind a wheelie bin, carrying something grey and floppy under her arm.

* * * * *

Crop circle maker Fliss had been sitting in one of the Glastonbury toilets for what seemed like hours, cocooned in the rubbery membrane of one of the alien costumes that she’d nicked from the police compound, trying out different poses in the turd Tardis mirror. Her plan? To infiltrate the police dressed in one of their alien outfits, and snatch her brother Pete to safety.

But how to look authentic? How to ‘cop’ that alien feel? How to blend in, and act just like a false flag operative would, with just the right amount of 50’s B-movie sci-fi? The tiny mirror wasn’t giving much away, and regular hammering on the plastic door by a steady stream of touch cloths, wasn’t helping either.

Getting busted in on by a punk rocker was the final straw, and so she’d decided to call it quits, quickly pulling down the mask, and throwing a poncho over the costume. But she wasn’t able to get far from the cubicle, before she felt a hand on her shoulder, and spun round to see the punky looking guy from before.

“It wasn’t me,” she protested her innocence, shuddering at the memory of that disgusting lavatory. “I found it like that.”

To Keith, she looked anything but an evil Alien, but she was definitely wearing the skin of one.

“What’s under there?” he asked, pointing at the poncho.

“Erm? My waterproofs,” Fliss replied, thinking fast. He didn’t look like a cop, but he was certainly acting like one. “I came prepared for a muddy one.

It seemed plausible enough. Either she was a very good actor, or she had indeed come prepared.

“Why do you ask?” she asked, bravely.

POW! Their eyes locked, pupil on pupil; both trying desperately not to flee, each stone-clad expression imprisoned in the gaze of the other, each facial muscle wrestling on the cliff edge of imminent betrayal. And then, just as suddenly and simultaneously, both sets of eyes snapped shut, resigned to the inevitable.

* * * * *

“Daryl?”

The voice belonged to an American. A man. A deeply droll and depressed sounding man, whose deadpan delivery sounded like a character from an American sit-com, the embittered barfly type in a dockside dive at 4am, hunched over the counter spinning funny broken home truth after home truth.

“My name is Bill Hicks. And I’m dead now,” said Hicks, preparing to push Daryl the Dealer’s face into the cold putrid slime of knowing.

“Somehow, and fuck knows why,” he began, the Tor’s dank darkness lending his voice a London Dungeon feel. “You Daryl, appear to hold the future of Glastonbury festival, and all who live in her, in your hands. Let’s just let that sink in for a while.”

Hicks knew all about being the bearer of bad tidings. He’d made a career out of it, sugar coating terrible truths with stand-up comedy. In a sense, he and Daryl were both in the business of altering states of mind, operating along a spectrum that ran from temporarily lifted and enlightened, through mildly insulted and enraged, to permanently damaged and entirely killed. But it was Daryl’s headspace that was about to be rushed and tripped out forever.

“You are the chosen one, Daryl, the one the laws of universal chaos have deemed fit to stumble upon the ultimate truth, the kind of curiouser and curiouser rabbit hole of revelations that make all other truths look about as convincing as the Easter fucking Bunny. This is the biggest deal you’re ever likely to handle, the heaviest consignment of Classified you are ever likely to swallow. So, I want you to listen pretty damn carefully to what I am about to say.”

Okay, so the trippy fissure had its own commentary track, thought Daryl. He was used to strange voices in the dark. He had never heard of Hicks, but his comic genius had no doubt been playing at a number of squat parties that he’d helped to poison over the years.

“If you were to travel 40 million light years from Earth, towards the first quadrant of the southern hemisphere,” Hicks began. “You will eventually come to the constellation “Reticulum”, and the twin Suns Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli..”

Daryl had hated science at school, even chemistry, his mastery of which amounted to little more than the dial settings on a microwave. He could handle basic maths and simple measurements though, but not apparently if you were too shit-faced to notice when things went a little under.

“This is where the Grays come from,” said Hicks. “Named after their skin tone, which many former abductees describe as grey, but.. I would say that stale semen with a hint of jaundice is probably a more accurate description; especially apt when you consider that they’ve been stealing and consuming human gism for millennia.”

“Take another look through that crack Daryl,” Hicks commanded. “You see those short, completely bald, cum coloured beings, with the huge slanted black eyes? They’re the Grays. The big version. There’s a little version too. But I’ll come to them in a bit.”

Daryl took another peep. Two of the stubby little devils were standing close-by, winking and blinking at one another.

“As you can see, they communicate telepathically,” Hicks explained. “Which means that if you passed two of them on the street you wouldn’t have a clue what they were going on about. Or, at first sight, whether or not they were going on about anything at all. Although Gray etiquette does demand a slight narrowing of the eyes at the end of a sentence, and a full-on blink when done. So there are a few clues. But even so, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with one of these guys. And if you ever were, it would be very unwise to roll your eyes at one of them, as it’s the Gray equivalent of, “Go fuck yourself!”

“While the big Grays can be trusted to do some high-tech stuff, the little grays are more like the deep space equivalent of your British White Van Man. They’re odd job aliens - fly-tipping radioactive waste, smuggling abductees, and fixing leaking pipes for the various other alien scumbags that live throughout the galaxy. Especially their main bosses, the Drako.

“If you look about the room you should be able to spot at least one of these Drako reptilian types. You can’t miss them.”

Daryl looked about. Towards the back of the space, one particular alien stood out from the rest. This two-legged critter was about seven feet tall, and looked like an extra from a very dodgy early episode of Dr Who, like you would imagine a gecko would look if it had seriously over done it with the body-building formula.

“The Drako are from the Drako constellation out towards the Northern Star,” Hicks explained. “Drako is Latin for dragon, the missing thirteenth sign of the Zodiac. And their particular planet is called Drakonis.”

This greenish brown scaly looking creature had a conical shaped head, with two bony ridges riding back across the brow, two massive flame-coloured eyes with vertically slit pupils, a wide lipless ‘fly trap’ mouth, no ears, and a tiny nose. Hard as it may seem, but the Drako actually made the grays look cuddly in comparison.

“Drako love to feed off low vibrational human energy, feelings such as terror, hatred and lust,” Hicks continued. “For relaxation they use the Earth as one giant television set, it being a little known fact that this planet is in fact ninety per-cent crystal; allowing all that human misery and suffering to beam out into the far reaches of space, where it can be soaked up by what is essentially a race of alien couch potatoes, millions of viewers, or rather ‘soakers’, who enjoy nothing more than to spend their evenings getting off on human trauma and misery, their equivalent of Netflix, while snacking on bargain buckets of fried abductee.”

Daryl could see that every holographic screen inside that alien cavern did indeed carry loads of human trauma and misery. ‘Glastonbury Live’ had become ‘Glastonbury Dead’, beaming out recent catastrophic events from within the festival. There were close-ups of karmic carnage and mayhem, apocalyptic long-shots of stampeding punters, slow-motion blows to the festival spirit - crushed clowns, ravaged ravers, folk being burnt up like a row of cheap joss sticks. There was a shot of some kind of senior cop running straight into the lens, his nose exploding on impact. It was widespread widescreen wickedness served up in High Definition for alien pleasure. One of the greatest shows on earth was being slowly torn apart right before Daryl’s bloodshot eyes.

“One thing all Drako truly hate is good vibrations,” said Hicks. “Everyone getting on with each other, making space for one another, sharing shit - laughter, trust, love, whale music, sweat lodges, people reading the fucking Secret. They absolutely loath that shit. So, some bright spawn-sucker came up with the idea to turn Glastonbury Festival and all the nauseous vibes it generates, into this one huge reality TV show; a kind of ‘Big Brother’ meets ‘Glastonbury Live’ meets ‘Dawn of the Dead’.”

On a nearby screen, Daryl could see what appeared to be two young free spirit lovers getting blasted into a zillion flakes of lurid green dandruff.

“Because in the world of TV, Daryl, something always has to meet something else. And the Drako couldn’t think of anything more entertaining than for Glastonbury Festival to meet its own worst fucking nightmare.”