Glastafari

The riot had soon burnt itself out; one of the Jesus Army having witnessed Earnest’s ascension into no-man’s land, assisted by an alien, the Krishna Movement having decided to move back to their temple to consult with the ‘divine pastimes’, and a large contingent of the Barmy Army having got rounded up and thrown in the clink. Everyone else had moved on up the Main Drag for a spot of looting; the sudden prevalence of dream catchers, novelty wigs and tie dye pants, soon dampening any lingering will to cause trouble.

Inside the cop shop’s Interview Room Two, Inspector Bumstead was trying to set up a new and comprehensive trade agreement with a variety of vested interests and spheres of influence - gangsters and soccer thugs mainly, with one or two of the more ‘entrepreneurial’ security guards. Also present, Beer Gut Barry, straight from a cooling off period in the cells.

“Let me start by just laying my cards out on the table,” Bumstead said, pulling out his semi automatic and plonking it down on the desk. It was product placement, a window display advertising Respect and Obedience. In a land where guns are extremely rare, a Special Offer that few, if anyone, could resist.

He hadn’t wasted any time. The Chief Inspector’s total collapse had given him free reign to handle things his way - the snug at the Frog and Lettuce way. Whatever the hell that impenetrable wall of Double Glazing meant in the wider scheme of things, it had left Bumstead answerable to no-one, with no checks and balances, watchdogs and media spotlights to mess with his plans. It was survival of the fittest, and his semi-automatic made him ‘well fit’.

He knew all about the State’s contingency plans, and how they entertained the necessity to reach out to the Underworld and far right groups ‘when the time came’, and that time was most definitely upon them. Until they established contact with the outside world, and the outside world told him otherwise, he had to assume the worst-case scenario, that this was all that was left of the outside world. And he couldn’t afford to have top gangsters and Neo-Nazi types like Beer Gut Barry working against him.

Beer Gut Barry had recognised the make of the gun immediately. It had recently featured on the front cover of ‘Survivalist Monthly’. He also recognised the significance of the gesture. Bumstead had basically just pissed up the table leg.

Apart from the Inspector’s dishevelled uniform and the hooligan’s more than generous girth, both men were cut from the same cloth, and operated along the same lines - fear and intimidation. Both had sworn allegiance to the Crown and passed out at flag parades. Bumstead at the College of Policing back in the day, and Beer Gut Barry when he’d once got paralytic drunk at an English Defense League march in Dover.

“Difficult choices have got to be made,” Bumstead continued, puffing out his chest. “Harsh realities faced. I am therefore declaring a State of Emergency, and I’m calling upon you all to help me run things around here, to keep the peace.”

He took out a large bag of cocaine and tossed it across the table.

“As I was saying,” he said, smirking and pointing down at the offering. “Help me to keep the peace, for a piece of the action.”

* * * * *

Of course, the landowner, Mathew Beavis, hadn’t been invited to this little get-together. He was stuck outside, trying desperately to speak to someone in authority. But a culture of secrecy had descended on the Avon and Somerset Police Force, and it seemed like no-one was prepared to speak to him anymore, not about the riot, nor the Inspector’s little insane John Wayne routine. He didn’t even know if his former friend, the Chief Inspector, was dead or alive.

For the first time in a long and difficult career as a festival promoter, he had found himself cut out of the loop. A loop that Inspector Bumstead and his new gangster and hooligan pals were now preparing to fit around the neck of his beloved Worthy Farm.

“Let me in!” he shouted through a tiny hatch in the cop shop fence. “This is my farm. I have a right to know what’s going on.”

That’s the thing with a State of Emergency. The normal rules no longer applied. All rights to property could be torn up. Free speech and civil liberties thrown by the wayside. Everything put on this strictly need to know basis.

“Why won’t you listen to me?!” he pleaded, as the tiny hatch snapped shut in his face; the days of having his finger on the pulse, of knowing everything about the festival that he had nurtured all these years, now apparently over.

* * * * *

Over at the Tor, our four refugees from the prison breakout could be seen flitting about on Soaker prime time like flies on a window sill. God moved in mysterious ways, but Jesus Freak Earnest had never seen him stumbling about completely off his face before. This Glastonbury glass ware was more like the hand of Salvador Dali, than that of the Almighty. Like everyone else who had ever come into contact with this gigantic shower door, he had soon found himself doing ‘the box’, up and down and around. Tapping it. Kicking it. Smearing stuff on it. Not knowing quite what to make of it. Finally, leaning his cross up against it, and turning to once again take in the complete ruination of the surrounding countryside.

“Oh God,” he sighed. “What have you done?”

This was way too Old Testament for his liking.

Close by, Fliss and Keith were both climbing out of their alien costumes, arguing once again about cops and aliens; Fliss’s once credible false flag theory beginning to wither away under the Glastonbury looking glass.

“This is what they mean when they say, “out of this world”,” said Keith, rapping his knuckles against solid air. “The cops wouldn’t even be able to clean this thing, let alone fit it.”

But he still couldn’t see how any despicable alien race could find it entertaining.

“This is totally random,” he said, executing some kind of classic Marcel Marceau manoeuvre.

Fliss’s brother Pete had gone to sit beside Daryl the Dealer, both looking like they’d been pulled through a hedgehog backwards; both not known for saying much, but sharing the remains of an old scrunched-up roll-up that Pete had found inside the lining of his smelly jacket.

“He’s right,” said Daryl after the longest silence, pointing towards Keith.

“Huh?” said Pete, taking a last blast on the rollie, before flicking it into a tuft of scorched grass.

“All this,” said Daryl, sweeping a bruised arm across the devastated landscape. “Down there,” he winced, pointing towards the ground; slowly facing up to his new-found responsibility as the chosen messenger. “Aliens.”

* * * * *

“Aliens.”

For our increasingly troubled Head of Dark Entertainment, Larr, no amount of holographic replays could conjure up an alternative meaning for that particular combination of human words and gestures. The wretched soul who had just been plucked from the bowels of the earth had clearly seen something he shouldn’t have done.

“Aliens.”

Suddenly feeling vulnerable and peeped at, a state of being usually reserved for lesser mortals, Larr ordered some of her Gray security guards to search the studio walls for a possible chink in her armour. How could that scruffy human have possibly seen them, hidden so far beneath the ground?

It had been a particularly bad morning for our Mistress of Gore. Despite managing to gather in another half point audience share over night, more and more human contestants had begun to turn up on her doorstep unannounced. Way too close for comfort.

Not only that, but she had just heard that her two oldest brood, Vlad and Antigen had gone missing from their home on Drakonis, taking the family saucer with them. Basically, doing what any self-respecting troubled teen would do once their parent’s scaly back is turned, that is to whizz across the Universe in search of some distant ‘happening’ within which to take vast amounts of drugs with loads of other troubled teens.

The despicable alien scum who had trapped Glastonbury under the microscope didn’t have it all its own way. There were exceptions to the Drako society rules, genetic abnormalities and throwbacks, subcultures, assorted deviants, waifs and strays to contend with. Young lizards who just wanted to have a good time, same as in any society. Bad brood, they called them, and two of Larr’s bad brood had gone on the razzle, and she didn’t have the faintest idea where they were.

They called themselves Moffs, because they were attracted to ‘The Light’. To Drakonian society they were the ultimate manifestation of moral incline, a constant and bitter disappointment to Larr, their evil dragon of a mum. They liked to ‘share things’, especially ‘opinions’, and to show this thing called ‘empathy’. They espoused the virtues of one on one interaction, something they referred to as ‘Quality Time’. They romanticised a very distant past, the Age of Being Reasonable they called it, when their particular alien nation hadn’t yet been poisoned and twisted by total alienation.

They’d once attended a fundraiser for a subversive anarchist campaign group called ‘The White Dot’, a reference to the days when broadcasters pulled the plug on their schedules and actually went to bed.

Hard to imagine, eh? Programming was once book ended by a simple and incredibly boring White Dot, that would hum its sickly glow for hours until sunrise. Nothing said, “You are a sad fuck, and you really need to get to bed” quite like waking up on a sofa in the early hours, bathed in that sickly irritating glow, with a crisp packet clamped to the side of your face. The White Dot stood for audio/visual sobriety, of having other priorities. In many respects, it was the antipathy of Glastonbury Dead and the gruesome gluttonous culture it pandered to; the ultimate finger to their mother, Larr’s, chosen profession.

So, while her back was turned, Vlad and Antigen had nicked the family saucer and found their way to the latest Party Planet, their version of Castlemorton, an escape from the genetic cluster fuck that Drakonian society likes to call home. And they weren’t alone. There were young scaly backs and spindly antennas and massively dilated compound eyes from all over the Universe, kids like them who just wanted to have a good time. And unlike Glastonbury Festival, this party was free and definitely happening.

It would be so easy to dismiss them both as wasted drugged-up youth, but Vlad had the equivalent of five O’Levels and three A’levels and Antigen was part way through a University degree in Drako history when he decided that it was all “just a load of bullshit”, preferring instead to spend his life on the move, finding out about life and the Universe, and meeting like minded folk from across the Galaxy.

But more about them later. For now, their dragon of a mum was taken up with a more immediate matter. Several humanoids were preparing to disappear underground. Bound for where exactly, she couldn’t say, although judging by what the previous scruffy visitor had apparently unearthed, there was a distinct possibility that another far too close for comfort encounter was coming her way fast.

* * * * *

Spike and Wesley had entered the Tor, accompanied by PC’s Wilson and Stevens, and the cameraman; a huge relief to discover that Daryl the Dealer’s hole in the ground wasn’t a useless bolt-hole after all. Each man crawling one behind the other through the cramped and damp darkness of the Duke of Somerset’s long abandoned bling tunnel, looking for a way beneath the Glastonbury green house effect.

Always the military tactician, Spike had built a chain of communication along the tunnel, staggering each of his team at fifteen-yard intervals, beginning with Sasha Lush’s cameraman just inside the entrance, then PC Wilson, PC Stevens, and last but one, Wesley. With Spike preparing to leave him behind and go it alone.

“According to my reckoning,” gasped Spike, struggling to catch his breath. “We are beyond the tower.” He said, flashing his head torch up at a particularly dodgy-looking section of roof.

“Which means that unless this thing is thicker than we imagine, we have found a way through,” he wheezed, probing the oppressive darkness up ahead.

“Nice!” said Wesley.

But by Spike’s reckoning they still had about half a rugby field’s worth of tunnel to go, and that’s if they were lucky. Presumably there would still be a wall of soil and rock to get through before reaching the outside world again. And even if they did manage to break on through to the other side, God only knew how they were supposed to get 130,000 plus people to exit the festival site that way.

Up above, Sasha Lush stood beside Dr Suzie Meyer and Earnest constantly calling down to her cameraman for updates. She was like a desperate miner’s wife waiting at the pit shaft for news, while her man risked his life for television gold far beneath the surface.

“Roy, make sure you keep saving the battery!”

It had been Suzie’s idea to go down to check things out. She’d had a hunch that Daryl the Dealer was holding out on them; something fellow classmates had often felt about him at school. It had also been her idea to use Earnest’s crucifix as a cross beam, from which to suspend the climbing rope, tying knots at regular intervals for better grip. But as for joining the expedition, Spike had pulled the usual macho bollocks, flatly refusing on the grounds of safety. This, despite the fact that Suzie had had years of experience tunnelling into power stations and beneath construction sites.

At the vanguard of this subterranean mission was Mr Macho Bollocks himself, Spike, who’d finally gone on ahead, leaving Wesley behind in the darkness, the roof looking more and more precarious, the effort to breath more and more strained. After ten yards or so, Spike stopped to test the line, calling out, “Wesley, can you hear me?”

“Yes!” came Wesley’s hollow holler. “I can here you.”

“I hear you,” PC Stevens replied, further back, passing on the message. “Wilson.. Can you hear me, mate?”

“Roger,” PC Wilson piped up another fifteen yards back, continuing the audio connection all the way back to ground control. “Mr Cameraman, can you hear me?”

Roy the cameraman held back a few seconds to record some clean sound, checking his audio dial as Wilson’s booming echo prodded the six mark.

“Yeah, I hear you,” he eventually shouted back. “Sasha, can you hear me?” He called up to his reporter, sounding like his voice was at the bottom of a well.

Sasha Lush leaned in. “Hello Roy.. We hear you loud and clear.”

And back it went. A pass the audio parcel, all the way back to Spike, by which time Wesley had already loaded Daryl the Dealer’s lost pipe with some quality kiff spliff from the Mountains of Riff and was preparing to spark it up.

Reassured that the chain of communication was indeed working, Spike continued to crawl on into the heart of that clammy labyrinth. Fifteen yards. Twenty. If his torch beam hadn’t dipped to a weak amber due to drained batteries, he may never have seen it. A definite chink of light on the side of the tunnel. The luminous crack equivalent of discovering some never before seen glowing sea creature, 20,000 leagues under the sea. It was remarkable. Awe-inspiring.

Slowly, he twisted his head torch fully off, and went in for a closer inspection, half expecting the slither of light to turn into a startled bug and scuttle away. But it didn’t. It just grew, as his eye went closer. It was a tiny crack fringed with bright yellowy light. Artificial light. Where it emanated from, he couldn’t say. But he just had to find out. There had to be some kind of space beyond the tunnel wall, like a room or a cavern. So he took a peep, his cheek pressed up against the cold earth. The one eye taking a few seconds to adjust to the fierce light that was bursting through, finally coming to rest on what appeared to be a large shiny black plate, hovering close-by on the other side. It seemed to have the same feel and texture as a large blob of crude oil, or the eye of a shark. Whatever it was it was most certainly unusual, totally out of place like the piercing light that betrayed it. It was trembling ever so slightly, as if alive. Then it suddenly blinked.. as if alive.

* * * * *