Glastafari

White Riot came bounding onto the NME stage like a pack of lolling whippets, eager to burn up every second of their allotted slot. Strummer Keith grabbed the microphone. Ken flashed him a wary look. Since returning from his trip to the loo, Keith had gone a little strange. Everything about him had become a slogan, every other word was ‘revolution’. He’d been downright abrasive and argumentative and had even tried to get off with the drummer’s girlfriend.

“Let me start by saying that there is absolutely no fucking way that the real Clash would’ve played this stage,” he said, kicking the mike chord to one side with one of Keith’s DM’s. “Not with all this In-security, and half your ticket money going to the pigs.”

“For fuck’s sake!” shouted Ken, drowned out by a huge cheer that went up from a block of Clash faithful just in front of the stage.

White Riot were merely a tiny piece of lettuce in this colossal doorstep of an NME Stage evening line-up, a miniscule chunk of Branston Pickle to spice up the cheesy headliners. Slagging off the festival was a really dumb move.

In Strummer’s passenger seat, Keith mumbled something about Black Grape, who Strummer had fronted at Glastonbury ’99, but Strummer wasn’t listening.

“But seeing as I’ve got something to say, and I’ve come a fuck of a long way to say it,” Strummer laughed. “Here goes.” He gave a quick nod to the band and screamed, “London’s Burning!” into the microphone, “London’s Burning!”

Down below, it was like a scene from Titanic; hundreds of people wildly splashing about in the dark, looking for a lifeboat.

And, with a younger fitter body, and a fresh set of vocal chords to flex his lyrical muscle, Strummer was the closest to his prime he’d been for years.

But Ken (aka Mick Jones) didn’t appreciate the old faithfuls being reworded. ‘I’m so bored with the U… S… A…’ suddenly became “I’m so bored with Is… Ree… Al.”

’Yankee soldiers are always on the TV…

Cos killers in America work seven days a week.’

became

“Israeli soldiers are always on the TV…

Cos killers in the Palestine work seven days a week.”

But Strummer had waited a long time for this. The idea that someone could trap the spirit of The Clash under glass, frozen, unalterable, like a museum piece, or a Karaoke bar option on Brighton peer, was anathema to him. Of course, he was going to bring things up to date.

“I’m so bored with Is… Ree… Al.

I’m so bored with Is… Ree… Al.”

But he was running out of time. Political sloganeering aside, he had an altogether different kind of message to convey; something that would not sit well with his Godfather of Punk image. So, just before the start of ‘White Riot’ he decided to just go for it and tell it straight.

“Glastonbury festival is about to be controlled by a despicable alien race, hell bent on destroying every last one of you for entertainment purposes. I know that it sounds like a lot of complete tin foil hat bollocks, but it’s true. And in the coming days, each and every last one of you has got to learn to pull together and fight back using love, humour, and alternative technologies.”

Down in the mosh pit, one of the ‘Punks Not Dead’ brigade seemed to be feeling the final nail in his coffin, “What the fuck did he say!?”

For Keith, the in-flight entertainment was proving way too weird. It was fair enough that he’d been possessed by the spirit of a dead punk rock legend, but now it appeared that the dead punk rock legend had himself been possessed by the spirit of Flower Power. Strummer’s rap did indeed sound like a lot of complete hippy bollocks.

“What the fuck!”

The ‘Punks Not Dead’ brigadista could now feel himself being lowered into the ground. He was now clawing desperately at the lid of his coffin, sensing a light scattering of earth. Inside, his soul was screaming, “No! No!” but no one seemed to be listening.

It was a sentiment echoed by Ken, who couldn’t believe that Keith, someone who had played such a major part of his life for so many years, who had shared the successes and the failures, the best of times and the worst out on the road, who’d drunk his beer, dunked their chips in his ketchup, and slept on his floor, could betray him in such a cruel and public manner.

“Never forget,” continued Strummer. And this was the bit that he had had most difficulty with. “Never forget that the angels walk among you. And they will endeavour to guide your path throughout these difficult times. Love, laughter and light.” And then, without missing a beat, Strummer was back on track, tearing off the lid of the Brigadista’s coffin, pumping punk rock’s vital signs with his blistering voice.

“White Riot.. 1.. 2.. 3.. 4..! White riot, I wanna riot. White riot, a riot on me own.”

And with that Strummer was gone, leaving Keith to pick up the pieces of a mid-scissor kick, leaving Ken to seriously re-consider Keith’s future with the band, and leaving the Punks Not Dead Clash faithful to go absolutely barmy.

* * * * *

And speaking of people going barmy. As White Riot were finishing their highly unusual slot on the NME stage, England and Germany had gone to penalties in the final of the World Cup, and thousands of Barmy Army fans had gone to a gigantic screen near the Glastonbury main stage to watch it Live.

It had been a bruising match, with a vast scrum of fans lurching and stumbling about in the mud, tripping on acid and broken umbrellas, and getting continually thumped about by a tidal wave of filthy bodies; everyone trying desperately to survive the ultimate mosh pit.

“Robertson now. Only nineteen. And the future of England lies at his feet,” said the commentator. “Pray that it’s not a repeat of Cameroon.”

And of course, at that bruised and battered stage of the proceedings, most of the crowd were no doubt wishing that this was a repeat of Cameroon. At least then they would have been down the pub, knocking back several pints with their mates, and not soaked to the skin and covered in crap. But this was the final, and England was one kick away from proper stuffing the Germans.

On the goal line the German keeper began swaying side to side like a frisky crab, as Robertson rotated the ball on the spot, wiping a scuffmark from the tip of his boot with a finger of spit, before retreating to take the kick.

Silence then from the England half of the stadium. Cat calls and whistles from the German half.

“Robertson then, for the match and a place in World Cup history.”

In the mosh pit, arms and shoulders were being gripped tightly. All eyes focused on Robertson as he began his approach with a characteristic hop like a frightened gazelle. He flung his arms to one side, stabbed his eyes at the top left-hand corner like a dagger on a map of North Africa, and launched the kick.

* * * * *

Four hundred miles away, and twenty thousand feet above the Atlantic, Flight BA157 had been reduced to a few tell-tale flashing lights, as it made its nighttime run from New York. While inside one of its restrooms, a businessman was trying to take an in-flight dump. His last chance before Heathrow.

He was only too aware of the social stigma attached to spending too much time ‘Engaged’, and long-haul flights were the worst, giving the term ‘cabin pressure’ a whole new meaning. The so-called War on Terror had only made matters worse. The man was now convinced that everyone else would be convinced that he was in fact a hijacker, at that very moment trying to discharge a suspect package in the toilet; which was, when you think about it, exactly what he was trying to do.

In recent years, he’d taken Julie Andrews’ advice about whistling ‘a happy tune’, choosing instead to hum Jonnie Mathis’s ‘When a child is born’, a tune that was no doubt playing on the radio that fateful day when his mother had first attempted to wean him off the potty.

“Hmmm-Hmmm... Hmmm-Hmmm... Hmmm... Hmmm-Hmmm... Hmmm-Hmmm.”

In the cockpit, a strange light had come to the attention of the flight crew. This was sickly green in colour and it looked far from hopeful, closing in from all sides, growing in intensity and filling up the night sky. The Captain mumbled something about light pollution, but even as the words escaped his lips he knew that it just couldn’t be. In over thirty years of flying he hadn’t met this before.

And from the relative insecurity of his cubicle, as he hummed and heaved along to Jonnie Mathis, the businessman, like billions of other people around the world, simply had no idea what was about to go down.

* * * * *

“There’s a ruck at the Main Screen,” shouted Wesley, through the security port-a-cabin door.

“They’ll be a ruck in here in a minute if I can’t get this fucking TV to work,” snapped Spike, bashing the side of the portable, a huge plaster slapped across the bridge of his nose. It hadn’t been a good day for Spike; first the dance tent, and now this, England’s one chance of glory engulfed by a blizzard of white noise.

“Bro it’s coming on top,” Wesley continued, tucking a huge Maglite into the inside pocket of his regulation puffer jacket. “Some fool’s gone and ripped the juice on the World Cup.”

But if only it was that simple; a little local difficulty. Obviously, a major problem for the guys in the projector tower, who were being rocked back and forth like a loose tooth, coming under a constant barrage of missiles, their huge beautiful screen, which had so recently held the dreams of Empire and all the ingredients of a perfect Glastonbury moment, now covered in mud pies, torn down in the dark, and trampled under-foot.

* * * * *

Far away from the maddened crowd, Fliss and Pete had also been doing a fair bit of trampling of their own. Their 360-degree three-dimensional representation of a DNA strand had taken shape wonderfully. They’d nailed all the truly tricky stuff earlier on. It was now just a case of dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, or, as Fliss liked to call it, “spreading the ease and patting the breeze”.

Suddenly there was a loud thud, followed by a groan, then the sound of someone or something falling into the wheat, followed by silence.

“Pete? Pete?” Fliss whispered loudly. “Are you OK?”

There was no reply. Her heart started to race. Her eyes misted over. She felt a hectic throb either side of her temples.

“Pete?” She hissed. “Pete, are you alright?”

Still nothing. She searched the ground for Pete’s string. It was slack, lifeless. Something had gone terribly wrong. Perhaps the mysterious Black Watch had finally caught up with them. Perhaps he was being throttled at that very moment, his windpipe crushed, his eyeballs bulging out.

Throwing all caution to the wind, she crashed through the crop circle, an honour usually reserved for farmers and sightseers, and found Pete lying face down. He was covered from head to foot in a shiny black residue - blood.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” she gasped, falling to her knees, and cradling his head.

But almost immediately quite a different instinct kicked in, elbowing aside the maternal with something just as powerful. In the fleeting seconds after seizing hold of her brother’s lifeless form, Fliss got this potent whiff of... Well, shit actually. But amidst all the drama, she’d quickly filed the smell away in a drawer marked ‘Probably Manure’. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She sniffed what she thought was her bloody hand.

“Uurgh!” she gagged. Pete was covered in poo, the human variety. Someone had bludgeoned him to death with a colostomy bag. But then she heard a moan. Pete was alive!

“Pete, its Fliss. There’s been an accident.”

But neither she nor Pete would ever be able to fully appreciate the freaky nature of that accident. For in the seconds before Pete had collapsed, a passing 747 inbound from New York had decided to open up its bay doors and take an almighty dump; a Jacuzzi’s worth of freezing cold toilet discharge.

Next to the drawer marked ‘Probably Manure’ Fliss had filed away another thought, ‘Getting Light’. But now, as she helped Pete to his feet and looked up at the sky, she realised that this was more like, ‘Getting Weird Light’.

She quizzed the sky once more. Maybe it was a laser show? But it couldn’t be. This was vast, oppressive, and it seemed to be feeding off the cloud cover, consuming the very sky, sucking the night-time moisture like an airborne virus, all the while, growing and growing. Yellowy-green tendrils of energy had begun to burst through the cloud cover, tickling the ground like tangled strands of static hair.

With both of them now in such a terrible state, the last thing that they needed was a close encounter, with some high-ranking alien diplomat choosing that moment to extend the hand of friendship, with Fliss’s hand covered in shite.

Perhaps it was they who had dumped on their crop circle; some kind of inter-galactic art attack, ET’s version of slashing a portrait of Myra Hindley, or jumping about on Tracey Emin’s bed.

Far in the distance it was as if the landscape had begun to burst apart at the seams, revealing a huge canal of molten light, straight as an arrow and probably six feet across. It was as if someone had thrown the switch on the ancient track ways, plugged into the very stuff of Ley hunter myth and legend, and was marking out the intricate network of sacred geometry with a river of fire, an immense curtain of light shooting up to the freaky heavens, punching out the pre-historic grid, until everything appeared to be this one immense wall of flame.

Fliss was beginning to wonder whether their corn circle had somehow flicked a fifth dimensional trip switch, turned on God’s own Christmas decorations; a billion times brighter than the Blackpool sea front, only without the “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

About a quarter of a mile down the lane, she was relieved to see that she wasn’t the only one who was getting this, that this wasn’t just some kind of acid flashback. A group of motorists had stopped to gawp. And they were about to be joined by another vehicle.

* * * * *

Daryl the Dealer had a vehicle pass and a guy waiting for him in Pilton. As his van rattled away from the site he cursed himself for yet again being suckered-into Europe’s largest mud-fest. Still, a rainy Glastonbury had meant loads of puffing, and he had already cleaned-up on a weight; hence the early morning dash. But the narrow lane leading from the site appeared to be blocked.

“Fucking hippies,” he cursed, ripping open the cab door and bounding up to the vehicle in front. The engine was still running, and the lights were on, but no one was home. He walked on, expecting to find the driver straining to shunt some hippy monstrosity out of the way, probably buckling under the weight of all those bits of sheep’s skull and driftwood and mangy feathers.

He passed an old ambulance, a hippy convertible. These days only capable of ferrying acid casualties and dogs called Gandalf. Someone had painted in the letter ‘R’, making it a ‘Rambulance’, but this fridge freezer on wheels was rambling no-where fast. The occupants had evidently stopped to stare at something in the heavens, joined by several others, who clearly didn’t have a dealer date to go to in Pilton, and a tiny window of opportunity to return to the site before the bulk of the Walking Dead were fully up and about.

“Listen man, my Granny’s sick and she desperately needs her medicine,” the dealer said, pushing in front of the line of strangers. But no one was listening, not even the Earth Mother type, who you would have thought would have instantly bought into the concept of a sick Granny. All she seemed to do was to raise her chin and squint that little bit harder.

“I have never seen such magnificent colours,” she purred.

“Oh, here we go,” thought Daryl, preparing to lose it big time.

“Wonderful. Wonderful,” the Earth Mother continued. Whereupon she started to sing, “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. The Age of Aquarius. Aquarius! Aquarius!”

They didn’t stand a chance. There was no way that pure evil, or whatever it was that was running this show, could pass up an opportunity like that. The tar shell of the road, which had smothered the ancient track way for over a hundred years, suddenly burst open, showering the on lookers with white hot hardcore, engulfing them, burning them up like a row of cheap joss sticks, scattering their ashes like twisted confetti.

Fliss let out an almighty scream, forcing Pete to come to his senses. Only his senses were jam packed with hectic stuff. Sight - freaky. Smell - dodgy. Touch - painful. Sound - Fliss screaming.

“Fliss? I don’t feel so good,” he moaned.

“Run Pete! Run!” said Fliss, grabbing him by the arm.

She remembered seeing the alternative site on their climb up to the top of Hairpin Hill. In past years they would have stopped by around now for a celebratory spliff. But right now, as they stumbled down the tramline towards the site, all she could think of was getting as far away from that ‘thing’ as possible. She didn’t know if they’d make it, or what they’d do when they arrived, but one thing was for sure; she didn’t want to handle this alone.

* * * * *

Down at the alternative site, Earnest was just finishing his third bowl of veggie-slop. He was now in his element; warm, stoned and surrounded by good company. This was every bit as good as the festival proper.

Nearby, someone was trying to build a ‘lung’, a wonderful piece of DIY drug paraphernalia that involved a large coke bottle and a bread bag, while opposite, two guys were discussing dogs.

“If the jaws lock there’s only one way to get them to release,” explained the one guy. “You’ve got to stick your finger up its arse.”

“Why would I want to do that?” protested the other. “I’d lose my fucking hand!”

Earnest had been watching the sky turn weird for some time, putting it all down to the chronic, thinking how hundreds of years ago somebody could have no doubt built an entire religion around such a freaky light show, loading on the doom, screwing plenty of hard-earned crops and poultry out of a terrified population.

“I’m not saying hold it there for five minutes,” continued the crusty Barbara Woodhouse. “One quick poke is all you need, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”

Earnest felt a cold shiver between his shoulder blades and leaned forward as if to read the small print - ‘Your life may be at risk if you fail to act soon’ it seemed to be saying. He looked around. The sky above the festival site appeared to be unaffected, as if some kind of huge atmospheric army was gathering at the gates of the city.

Suddenly, two figures came running into the site, one covered in mud, the other screaming, almost colliding with a couple of space cadets, for whom the light show had become one of the most beautiful things that they had ever seen; the perfect end to a perfect night. The space cadet guy was about to get his end away. The space cadet girl was going to open up to him like a delicate desert flower. It was undoubtedly the best mushroom chai that they had ever had, and the last thing that they needed was for someone to come crashing into their trip losing it big time. Turning her back on the commotion the girl space cadet turned to her lover, gently brushing the hair from his face, searching his eyes for re-assurance.

“How can anything so beautiful wish to harm us?” she asked.

Oh boy! For the evil showman this was just getting better and better. A split second after Fliss and Pete came crashing through, a bolt of lightning stabbed at the lovers, blasting them into a zillion flakes of lurid green dandruff, while the ground began to split apart, sending huge pine trees crashing down in all directions.

“The fence!” shouted Earnest, grabbing Fliss by the arm and dragging her and Pete towards his cross. “Come on, I know a way.”

“You must be joking!” screamed Fliss, thinking that this Jesus Freak somehow expected them to kneel-down in front of this thing and pray for forgiveness.

“Yeah right! Jesus Saves, but not on my wages.”

“I’ll give you a bunk up,” continued Earnest, inter-locking his fingers.

“Yeah, I bet you will,” snapped Fliss.

“Wake up girl!” shouted Earnest, slapping her across the face. “You are going to die unless you get the fuck out of here, right now! Come on. Use me and the cross.”

Pete was in a very weird space indeed. He’d long since lost the plot. Now it appeared that his sister was being slapped around by Jesus. A few seconds later, the circumstances continued to torture his logic, when Fliss suddenly launched herself at the cross, using Jesus as a stepladder. In a matter of seconds she was straddling the fence.

“Come on Pete!” she screamed, stretching her arms out. “Come on!”

Rocks of molten lava were now landing at Pete’s feet. A wall of fire was advancing down the hill, burning everything in its path. It wasn’t quite how he’d imagined the Gates of Heaven, and Jesus appeared to have all the charm of an East End bouncer, but Fliss seemed to know what she was talking about. So, he went for it, mustering up what little strength he had left, and clambered over the cross like a bastard.

Earnest spun round, just in time to see Fliss hauling Pete over the fence by his belt.

“Come on,” she yelled out. “Jesus, come on.”

But Earnest waved her on. He simply couldn’t leave his cross. It had been his faithful companion for ten years. Without it, he was just another yoghurt weaver. And perhaps, just perhaps, all that wandering had been leading up to this one simple heroic act - saving two smelly strangers from the Fires of Hell.

“Save yourself,” he said, and turned to face his tormentor. Gathering up his last breath of air before the onslaught of merciless heat tore it from his lungs, he whispered, “ !”

* * * * *

Daryl the Dealer found himself in a whole world of pain. In the fleeting seconds before the English countryside tore itself along the dotted line, he’d managed to bundle himself over a hedge and scramble as far away as he could from the curtain of fire, dodging waft after waft of searing heat like the truncheon blows of Hell. Frantically he slapped the back of his head, brushing huge embers from his shoulders, while all the while trying desperately to shake off an extremely inappropriate soundtrack that had somehow latched onto his mind, going over and over in his head.

“It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius… The Age of Aquarius… Aquarius… Aquarius…”

No-one wanted to die like this. Not like this. To the soundtrack to ‘Hair’.

“Aquarius… Aquarius…”

Onwards he stumbled, careering through streams and ditches, tripping over rocks and ridges, working muscles that had already grown sore from trudging round the muddy festival site in pursuit of clientele. All around him huge patches of grass had begun to catch alight.

“It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius… The Age of Aquarius…”

This just couldn’t be what those damn hippies had had in mind. And he caught an image of Charlie Manson on backing vocals, a murderous glint in his eyes.

“Aquarius… Aquarius…”

The Devil most certainly didn’t play the best tunes.

He carried on for what seemed like ages, choking on dense clouds of smoke, sensing rivers of fire all around. Suddenly he spotted the Tor, brooding above the apocalyptic landscape like a lonely chess piece. Sanctuary. Church going had never sounded so good. He wasn’t to know that the Tor had no doors or roof and would be about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. He crashed through another hedge and fell to his knees, crawling across a narrow lane and then over a wooden stye.

There was only the steep mound to go. He seized clump after clump of grass, slowly hauling himself up, all the while sensing the tearing roots. The Castle loomed closer and closer with every grasp. Upwards and upwards he went, for what seemed like forever, choking and wheezing.

Finally, the top. Dealer takes Castle, barely visible in the smog. Wiping the tears from his eyes, he turned to face the cataclysm. There in the distance, momentarily peeking out from behind a vast wall of smoke, he could just make out the festival site. Not laid to waste, not lit up by the glow of thirty thousand roasting flysheets, but seemingly intact. Glastonbury festival was somehow holding out against the apocalypse.

A huge wall of flame was now racing up the hill towards him, urged on by mighty stabs of lightening and a blistering wind. It would only be a matter of a few seconds before it reached the summit. And then, as he prepared to muster what little energy he had left to drag his weary bones towards the gaping entrance to St. Michael’s, named after the archangel principally responsible for kicking Satanic butt, he saw it, some little distance off - a huge burning cross, apparently hovering in mid-air. Perhaps the very last, last thing that you want to see when you’ve just spent your entire adult life selling ground-up glass and drain cleaner to troubled teenagers.

* * * * *

Up at the Sacred Field, inside a ring of stones, a drumming circle, which had been merrily slapping and tapping away in the stone circle for hours and hours and fucking hours, had ground to a halt, its tribal messengers transfixed by the pyrotechnics, their ghoulish silhouettes of dreads and bangles and gawping profiles playing chim-chimney across the surface of the standing stones. People had been warning for decades that all that continual banging away was pissing ‘the ancestors’ off big time, confusing the elders, keeping them awake with throbbing nonsense. Perhaps ‘the ancestors’ had finally snapped? Perhaps this was their way of banging on the ceiling with a bloody great broom handle?

Perhaps this was just another explosive offering from the Mutoid Waste Company, the people who loved to angle-grind tanks and turn Mig jets into art installations? Perhaps if you stuck your head over the fence you’d find a troop of crusties spitting fire and juggling chainsaws?

Of course, for many a Head, the doors of ‘perhaps-shun’ had been well and truly torn off the hinges. So many states had been altered, so many bloodstreams pumped full of narcotics. So many people had been ‘up’ for hours surfing wave after hallucinogenic wave; entire skyscrapers of twisted consciousness tumbling through their brains like Tetris, crazy thought processes stacking up, slotting in, jutting out and disappearing, all the while feeding off the incessant freak show that lunged out from every tent flap. Whatever had gone down in the outside world, it would just have to wait for a huge proportion of the Glastonbury Massive to come down from its collective trip.

Even for those who had been playing it completely straight - the crew, performers, stall holders, and assorted ‘My Body is a Temple’ types, the outlook was equally trippy. In her corner of the Tipi Field, Ariadne knew all about ‘Now’. She’d read a dozen books about ‘Now’, sat through entire weekends about ‘Now’. But right now, as she surveyed the moody sky, she realised that ‘Now’ was looking extremely unhappy. ‘Now’ was stinking like a toxic waste dump.

As she turned to face her fellow tipi-dwellers, Nick from the band Solar Warrior and Star, another New Age mantra sprang to mind - ‘Visualise to materialise’. But what kind of a sick mind could have dreamt this up?

* * * * *

Fliss and Pete jumped the fence and managed to materialise inside, of all places, the main police compound, cowering behind a Land Rover, both totally exhausted and bewildered, but thankfully no longer molested by those fuck-off boulders of molten lava. Everywhere they looked police officers were running back and forth barking orders.

During their flight from Hairpin Hill, Fliss had convinced herself that their 360-degree three-dimensional representation of a DNA strand had somehow angered the Big behind the Bang, flicked some kind of cosmic trip switch, and thrown the entire planet into meltdown.

“What have we done?” she kept muttering. “What the fuck have we done?”

To which Pete just moaned and sniffed the back of his hand.

And then, the weirdest thing happened. Two alien beings, your total stereo-typically lanky, fat headed, wide eyed, classic B-Movie type aliens, came sprinting into the compound and disappeared inside one of the port-a-cabins.

“Wooooohh!” Fliss gasped and turned to Pete. “We need to get the hell out of here right now.”

Slowly, her heart pounding like a dodgy indicator, she raised herself up, grabbed Pete’s hand and dragged him out from behind the Land Rover into a shadowy blind spot beside the port-a-cabin.

“Wooooohh!” she gasped again.

Through one of the windows, she could see two police officers climbing out of their alien skins and hanging the limp rubbery costumes onto a row of hooks on the wall.

Could it be that the police were somehow part of this? Forgive her for sounding fucking paranoid, but could the police be part of some kind of hideous and ingenious plot to blow up Glastonbury Festival? For clearly no-one would believe any eyewitness, especially at a festival, who might later claim to have seen a couple of aliens acting suspicious and planting shit. They needed to get out of there and take stock. But with all the to-ings and fro-ings, there was no chance of her and Pete getting past the compound gate unseen. Unless, of course, they were in disguise.

She took another peep at the two rubbery alien costumes hanging on the wall, their previous inhabitants disappearing out of the door. The coast was clear. Their only escape route suddenly oh so blindingly obvious.

“Wait here,” she said, scurrying into a pool of piercing arc light, the clat-clatter of a nearby generator as hectic as the pounding of her heart. There was no time to lose. She shot inside the port-a-cabin and grabbed the costumes, pausing briefly at the doorway, before racing back to Pete.

She began to climb into one of the suits, throwing her arms and legs about and wriggling her shoulders like crazy, the tight rubber catching on her clothes, a strong smell of human sweat getting stronger the more she heaved and yanked and disappeared inside.

Pete was transfixed. Sister Fliss, his best friend and partner in crime, was shape-shifting into an alien right before his eyes. It was all getting a bit much. It had been getting a bit much for some time, like a very bad acid trip. Each bit much that little bit much more than the previous. An ever increasing gut-churning centrifugal force of much-ness, shaking loose the bolts and hinges and joints of his sanity. Fliss’s hazel eyes had become two huge shark black saucers of fathomless evil. He suddenly let out this piercing scream, and made a dash for it, out into the open, out across the middle of the compound within sight of anyone who cared to look.

“Pete, come back!” Fliss cried, her voice muffled by the rubbery membrane stretched across her face. There was nothing for it but to give chase.

Pete looked back and screamed once more. Years of circle making, of muddying those ufologist waters, were catching up on him.

“Get away from me!” he screamed. “Get away!”

“Pete! It’s me – Fliss,” the alien cried.

Suddenly, a cop appeared from no-where and rugby tackled him to the ground.

“No, you don’t! No, you don’t!” he snapped, strong-arming him into a pair of handcuffs. Suddenly getting this potent whiff of...

“Uuuurgh! Don’t you lot ever wash?!”

Fliss stopped in her tracks, watching the whole scene through two huge tinted lenses. She could hardly breathe.

“I’ve got him, mate,” the cop said, almost gagging, but in no way phased by the sight of an alien in hot pursuit.

“Look, I’ll take him in, while you climb out of that get-up.”

They were obviously ALL in on it. All she could do was to just stand there while her brother was frog-marched away, disappearing inside one of the port-a-cabins. It had all happened so fast. Within seconds she was alone, casting the weirdest shadow, cursing herself for not intervening, trying to reassure herself that she’d done the right thing. Whatever happened, she would find a way to free her brother from those evil cops and wake the world up to the truth.

Seconds later, she was gone.

* * * * *