My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.
Whist travelling to the south-west of England, I stopped in the ancient city of Chester where I encountered a demonic presence. I confronted this spirit in the riverside Groves. The following morning I was conveyed downstream in a spectral boat, where I found the residual traces of the demon dragging a man into the water. I rescued the man by inviting and absorbing the demon into my own soul before meeting three strange observers...
‘I was feeling rather down, well I won’t bore you with the details...’ Mr Yardley, the man I had plucked from the embrace of the Death Goddess stated before proceeding to bore us with the details.
The casual reader may detect some indifference or callousness on my part to Mr Yardley’s predicament. Such an interpretation could not be further from the truth. My self and, I concede, the three representatives of the Dead, were all deeply concerned with human suffering; I in particular am all too familiar with the despair caused by a devotion to material goods, the pursuit of sensation for its own ends, the obsession with status and power, the need to observe displays of subservience and the attendant vices of pomposity, vanity, pride...
At that moment it was the acute awareness of how these behaviours and urges rain all manner of misery upon humans that allowed us to hold Yardley at arm’s length: we cannot wallow in the minutiae of an individual’s trauma – we were not trying to extract money from the wretch – our aim is to liberate all those who languish in the coils of a despair not of their own making; we strike against the forces of the ego and the id!
Anyhow, it transpired that the man was in the depths of a deep gloom and we concluded that the demonic entity I had cast downstream attuned to his mood and drew him into the water.
‘I was tying to drown myself; I have been battling depression for some years now and this morning I woke to find that I had lost the car keys; we were due to visit our daughter who has left her university course and moved in with a nightclub grime rapper...’ Mr Yardley went on whilst I tried to explain the real reason why he had headed for the water.
‘Silence you, that life has passed and a new life opens before you, a life free from worry over cars and universities and the dirt and debris of everyday life, your concerns will be with the battle between the celestial order and the blank powers of the abyss which seek to leak within it!’ Parkin snapped, his eyes bulging somewhat.
Mr Yardley did not look too enthused by the prospect of exchanging minor irritations for cosmic terrors but Parkin continued regardless, ‘we shall use our lives, our wealth, our power to serve the earth and the souls which inhabit it; the spirits of the dead must exist without interference, they shall not be a backdoor through which the abyss seeps into our world!’
Parkin then looked at me and stated with some satisfaction, ‘it appears that his excellency was, as always, correct; we have found a gifted medium.’
Gereint, the young, bare-chested man had retreated uphill, where he was engaged in some obscure contortions. Lance, the lean, bearded man, glared at me whilst Parkin continued, ‘you conquered the beast within, along with the fear and the rage and violence which it breeds; Gereint there,’ he indicated the youth, ‘has also done that, although he will regress into that state when the situation demands it; you however, have absorbed a demonic entity into yourself and stand before us in control of your faculties, truly, the moon is beneath your feet and you are crowned with the rising sun!’
I am not partial to praise, only to the acknowledgement of the majesty of the divine within us all so when Parkin went on to state that I was a ‘free spirit’ who could ‘walk among the misty mountain winds’ and ‘a moonlit solitary walker’, I began to form the opinion that I was not in the company of charlatans.
When Parkin deigned, eventually, to describe the order to which he and his companions belonged, I listened with growing interest and approval:
‘We are the Dead; we have returned to the state of the unborn; whilst the living are manufactured by social and economic pressures, we, the Dead, are untouchable; the living are manufactured by changing circumstances, even as they are infiltrated by agencies that seep into their deepest, darkest lizard brains. There is a destructive power, from beyond our cosmos that in slipping through the cracks and fissures of time and space and consciousness, feeds on the minds of the populace and in particular upon the energy of spirits that linger after death; the purpose, rather the instinct of this power, is to allow their world, a formless sea of blankness, to spill into our own.’
I have a great respect for formless seas of blankness, although I have never considered a career in the Civil Service or indeed any other branch of government. What I disapprove of is the need for different spheres of existence to colonise others – balance is desirable to enable an appreciation of the transcendent ideal.
‘It is not a coherent organisation that we face, it erupts especially whenever flotsam and jetsam dabble in the occult - it seeks to seep through their invocations. Such dabblers are often not part of a conscious conspiracy, it is their most basic, lizard part of their brains which serves as a portal, they do not understand they are puppets of darkness – note I said darkness not shadow – indeed I should have said blankness again, as dark and shadow are products of, or defined by, light; the advantage we have is that we know our enemy, we have the light of consciousness...and now, as his Excellency predicted, we have you. You shall be our medium walking between the worlds.’
I asked who ‘his Excellency’ but before Parkin could answer, Geraint roused himself from his performance to announce from the hilltop, ‘they are at Eccleston Ferry!’
‘I’ll get the Peugot,’ Lance, cried as his lean frame bound away over the hill.
‘Marvellous, the chase is afoot, let us hope we find our lizards basking in the sun,’ Parkin said, an expectant smile breaking across his face.
