Chapter 1 - The Water Tower

George, like all children - except Christians – had been born without sin. Born in sin perhaps, or at the very least in bad taste, for his mother was an immigrant Italian without appeal or prospect and his father a mild mannered Afrikaner of the lower caste, given to backyard motor maintenance and darts. Their time together was doomed and his children were raised in an atmosphere of low grade bickering and wasted personalities. After that the man had gone down for fraud and did a short spell in prison. His mother, bless her heart, had tried to raise the boys, but from the word go they were uncontrollable.

There above their neighbourhood lived a hill with a frilly dress of syringes and bottlenecks forged by drugs users. The walls were a memory of white layered by the paint of urban terror, lads with cans, fuelled by liquor and boyhood. One had a sense that the walls could be cleaned and it was clear to all that passed that it should all be cleaned, splashed over by some new white order, a thicker, more robust kind of paint. But if it were done, there was always the chance that the boys would return, slash their blades of colour once again across those pure surfaces and then it would be obvious to all, once and for all. They could not be stopped. Better to leave the walls as they were and pray that they did not spread.

Up there also was a water tower, a grim monster of metal and rust that had once served to supply water to the houses lower down on the hill, which had begun their lives as a planned neighbourhood but had now become prisoners of war. When the massive spherical tankard had been erected, the locals had complained against its unsightly presence. The tower however had been built with more staying power than the homes and remained much the same through the years while the neighbourhood slowly degenerated into a slumberous ruin. By a strange twist of irony and fashion it was now the most beautiful object around and though no longer useful to anyone, it remained.

We would gather there at the breast of evening and climb its spindly ladder to sit on top and watch the city spread away on all sides, a city of alchemical power, where gold had been transformed into endless structures and societies. We saw a gridlock of concrete and electricity, of sharp square edges and broken bottles, of places where the sun had not entered in a hundred years and a whole tribe of people lived in hidden cardboard cities. And out there somewhere, beyond the gold mind dumps, we knew of the other horror, the cities of corrugated iron, where lived the dark races, with blazing bloodshot eyes and bunched muscles, always sharpening their long, killing knives.

Then we would smoke, passing the neck from one to the other in a sort of grim camaraderie, as of a group of boys about to be conscripted in some foreign war, a war where miles of misfits would be propelled into the lines of the enemy without hope or remorse. We knew something was planned for us and some hoped for a quick death, for to die in battle was a far better prospect than to live in mediocrity and the circumstances from which we had sprung. So we passed the pipe and laughed loudly and bravely at the coming promise that yet lurked beyond the horizon, kept at bay only by the fragile garden fence of youth and innocence.

When I first came there, I was fourteen years of age and thin like a conversation piece. My hair, slowly rebelling against my education, had now begun to lick at my shoulders and the tips could be pulled around into my mouth, which was something of a signifier of momentum. We all wore black and some with black boots, beetle crushers, with the occasional flash of a metal cap. Others sported the colours of the Rastafarian, evidenced by beads and laces in the shades of Jah. Only a few had weapons and there were those that were into magic and carried their silver emblems and pagan signs and especially liked to wear their hair long and dark and straight.

I came there by way of a friend from our high school named Rene. Rene was a wayward one and though born to a modicum of privilege, sought instead to consort with the unlawful and the immoral. Like Pinocchio, his nose guided him unerringly to pool, cigarettes and booze. He liked to drink the strong stuff, from little bottle nips that could be got for the price of a lightning fast foray into your mother’s purse on a Friday morning. Brandy, Sambuca, Cane, Vodka and half jacks of Rumba; Beer was somehow peasant food. Liquor had to be consumed from a flask, or bottle.

Like our inspiration in the form of the droogs from Clockwork Orange, we were into the smart dress and affected cravats, tails and pocket watches as well as our silver engraved Zippo lighters and hip flasks. My friends and I used to enjoy entering a state of profound drunkenness. Only the strong stuff could do that. It gave you a moment, smeared between cataleptic stumbling stupor and complete unconsciousness that was divine, and in its passing made you temporarily a God. In that mood we fantasized about warfare, the warfare of Clockwork Orange, where we would dance about in our Tudor suits and commit acts of consummate and athletic violence while bedeviled by the torrential downpour of Beethoven’s fifth. Only our inability and cowardice kept us from that grand reality.

From early on we were into the classics and regaled in how different it made us. In our suits and with our fancy music we were about the streets and strutting ever so grandly. Only in school would we transform and conceal ourselves in the uniforms of the enemy and even tuck away our hair and its proud growth. Most days however we would skip school and concoct grand fantasies for our tutors. We lived like spiders in vast webs of ever more intricate deceit and delighted in our acts of sharp theatre, but always, it seemed, fighting a rearguard action, our only nutrition and fortification being our flasks and their hot liquid power.

George carried a chain, which was his secondary fighting weapon, the first being a blender blade which was attached to the end of a broomstick. He would wrap the chain around his wrist and punch with it or let it out, wrapped only once, and swing it in big arcs. At this stage however he was only fourteen and the swings were not as convincing as they might one day become. His chain came from his bicycle-locking device and he had stripped the plastic so that the metal was loose and free. He had gotten to use it once when he was at a bookstore and this older man had pushed him aside continuously to read the titles. He had let it out on him, and there they danced, the old man and George’s chain, all bloody and bald and with fraying tempers. George had lost that battle but he was proud for the fight.

He and my friend had met each other while hanging out in the neighbourhood and it was for this reason that we got invited to the water tower and I came there shy and scared and with full knowing of my thinness and pale skin. George was warm to me right off and his smile was golden. He had dark, flowing, slightly curled hair and pale brown eyes; Very beautiful skin, sumptuous and olive tinted - a Greek deity. The women loved him but he never learned how to respond, or even appreciate his own beauty. He would respond to the advances of women with indifference or at best coyness, if he were caught off-guard.

George, like the rest of us, had bigger fish to fry. We had plans to formulate, strategy to discuss. So there we were, all arrayed beside each other on the water tower, passing the pipe from hand to hand and meeting together to form this crucial partnership that would withstand the years. We shared the strong stuff from Rene’s flask and I felt pretty wild head wise. George told us about this friend he had that we would meet some time, who knew a doorway into another world. We were all dead keen on new doorways, both the witches and punk kids alike.

Later that week we met up with George at the school and saw that he was also a normal boy like us. He used to listen to some hard music, all Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. He smoked cigarettes like a champ and could blow smoke rings across some distance. From that day on he was our man at the school and we pulled away from the other kids, connected by our water tower secrets. Most of the other kids were wealthy and stuck to the rich neighbourhoods and had loud parties filled with every liquor known to man and beautiful teen girls who all took turns being touched in dark rooms and then bragging about it. I found it sad. They were all so strong and fast and beautiful but all so needy of group acceptance.

So there we had it - Us and them. George and Rene and yours truly, haunting the corridors and turning sharp eyes at all the others, who lived in the normal world. Then George introduced us to another boy, called Ian. He was a tall, thin, slightly freckled youth with sandy hair and pale blue eyes who, like us, was a satellite for people even more weird and self-obsessed than he was. He liked a bit of the hard stuff and the little smoke too so he was dead keen on hanging with our council of young crooks.

It was Ian who once got us into trouble, early on in the friendship, with some Italian boys at a local teen haunt we gathered at called, wait for it, ‘The Italian Club’. Italians, it seems, are very fond of fighting, which might explain George’s occasional bouts of fantastic violence. They would all come to this party, look at each other’s girlfriends, pick each other out and then march en masse to the soccer field to have it out. The fights happened so often that if you were bored of the party, you could spend the entire night sitting in the field watching fight after bloody fight. To get into a fight you needed no special qualifications. A glance or even a perceived glance was enough to get your face smashed in. Ian did not even know his crime. He got himself hammered as he walked into the toilet for a pee, by a young Italian boy with several friends backing him up. The boy claimed that he had been bumped on the dance floor and was seeking revenge.

As it turns out, Ian found out where the boy attended school and he was all over going over to the school, hauling the kid out of class and smashing his bones all over the corridor, a prospect that George for one relished. As for myself, I was as always on the cautious side, being the thin guy, but likewise felt buoyed by the idea of beautiful, powerful, crippling violence. As a matter of fact, I had grown up on the secret idea of one day becoming a ninja assassin. The idea was so powerful that from early childhood I dressed up in Ninja suits and crawled around at night in total darkness brandishing various sharp kitchen implements. My weapon of choice, at the time of the incident, was a long rosewood stick whose tip had been speared through with screws that had been sharpened at both ends for a raking action.

The call to action came while we were at a swimming gala and we all lit out of there to go home and collect our weaponry. Already I was on the phone to every big guy I knew to send their friends to try and protect us, but like all sane folk, including my older brother, nobody really wanted a piece of gang violence. Unknown to us, the other kid was facing the same predicament and approached the battle ground with the utmost terror. Unlike us however, on account of being Italian, he did have connections. By the time we arrived outside the school, each of us hiding our various bits of sharpened metal and chain weaponry, they had lined up three Italian gangster cars with opened boots and automatic weaponry and baseball bats ready to go. I remember us standing there in a row, us scrawny boys with our homemade weaponry, facing down this modern day Roman regiment. The older guys stared at us in disbelief, laughed raucously, jumped into their cars for fear of being arrested for child abuse and vanished, leaving our original little enemy quaking on the pavement side.

This small victory, amongst others, bound us together. We knew this one guy at school called Skyf, which in Afrikaans means either ‘chip’ or ‘small joint’, though we could never figure out which. He didn’t seem to smoke and in fact was monstrously fit, muscles bulging out like big, puffy white pythons, his skin pockmarked by a blood stream drowning in horse steroids. Unlike the Jock boys however he was from so far to the wrong side of the tracks that he was wasn’t even at the same racecourse, which of course we found thoroughly commendable and he looked out for us a bit like a big dog with very tiny puppies. We were united in our hatred for the school elite and he seemed to share an uneasy truce with them. The gap for him between school and jail would be a very short one, but while he peaked he ran with gangs so hardcore that we didn’t even know where their parties were.

So anyway, we had all snuck out of home and hiked from our various parts of the city to meet and go into Hillbrow for a night of booze, broads (or runaway street teens) and pool, which had now slowly become the staple means for us to earn any money. As boys, nobody felt threatened to play us for money and we delighted in the sweet hustle of youth, got the marks drunks and stripped them of their wallets. We were walking down some quiet street when Ian becomes the cranial recipient of an egg thrown from the top of a roof ten stories up. In the ensuing chaos we decide to attack and blab our way past the building security with a police badge that Ian had made and now proffered whenever under duress. By the time we reached the roof, our assailants had become so terrified that they had elected to climb down the drains that hugged the side of the building.

We raced down and into the street below just in time to see them, two of them scuttling down a side street. We ran after them through the darkness, dodging between cars, jumping over dustbins and slowly I felt myself catching up as we darted through one side street after the other. I really bolted ahead as never before and came close enough to realize that the two fleeting cowards were considerably more powerful looking and grown-up than I had ever imagined. Suddenly they both jumped over a wall and hid in a hedge, at which precise point I had two realizations: One; that I had no conception of what I would do when I caught up with them and two; that my friends had somehow become separated from me several streets back. I stood alone - the thinnest of the lot - and these other two cats, realizing the horrible reality, climbed out of their hedge and faced me with expressions that slid variously between grim humour, hot-blooded irritation and cold-minded violence.

It was at the point that Skyf appeared, running down the street, brandishing a .38 special with about thirty Russian looking thugs behind him. His story: He had been at a party at some penthouse with a hot girl and this group of friends behind him when the girl’s husband had arrived home and started spitting Slavic expletives at him. Then the man had pulled the gun, which was a mistake, and when Skyf had obliged him by sticking his own forehead against the quivering barrel, the Slavic man had pistol whipped him and thrown the gun in the air before bolting from the flat. Which was where I found my hero, who stops in the middle of his bedlam flight – with his friends freezing behind him as though their strings had been yanked – and asks politely, after glancing at me like I was the last person he ever expected to run into of a school night and says ‘Where are they?’ It was a laugh all right. Those boys ran off like the fear of God.

We decided to form a gang one day and to call ourselves ‘the piss-up club’. Though already we were dabbling with notions more noble, notions of ninjas and princesses, the liquor got us onto this care-not attitude and we ended up getting these little badges made, printed with the name of the club on a little metal disk that we pinned to our lapels. We were the piss-up kings. We would formulate grand plans to filch sums of money from our parents and then go and buy whole bottles of the strongest neat liquor, stuff that would blaze through us and light our feet as we danced street-wise.

One day the school decided to hold a money collecting rally for some bizarre world war two fund that involved sending out red poppies in return for a donation. Each of us got a sealed box and we were instructed to go to various shopping centers in our school uniforms and collect money for this fund. It took us about sixteen seconds to work out how to remove the seal and reseal it at need. We were thrilled and got our mums to drop us off in a well-coordinated net that would cover most of the rich shopping centers. If we had had wireless radios we would have used them.

At that time, the Two Rand coin had just been introduced and many of the mothers confused it with a twenty cent piece, a piece of metal with a tenth of the value. This was of course to our great advantage and we plagued those mothers at the entrances of the shopping malls with our well-pressed school uniforms. Afterwards we met and ripped open the boxes to pool our funds. We were stunned by our findings. We were rich beyond our wildest dreams, the haul of a two-month hustle. We gave our boxes back to the school, with a few coins in each and this gave us great satisfaction. Then we hit a chemist where they sold ‘Pericons’, a smokers cough tablet that when taken in massive doses with alcohol made it seem as though everything was slowed down and stretched out and generally groovy.

Pericons were an amazing discovery, only one of a host of central nervous depressants that had suddenly made their way into our mental, medical – and easily available – archives, but a very good one nevertheless. One of its best features is that slows down your vision to such an extent that you can see ghost images forming behind sudden movement, like hundreds of silver hands trailing along behind your real hand as it swings through space. They also gave you hallucinations, or what some might call pseudo hallucinations. Real hallucination would come soon. For now we were content with walking along shadowy streets and watching the shadows transform with the aqueous grace of lycanthropes. Pericons was good for that.

One fine afternoon we were lit up in my room, which was in an attic in a very pleasant house in a deep, green neighbourhood. We three of us decided to go down for a cup of coffee and we are walking through the dining room when, through the bay window, we see a figure darting across the lawn in the very dim light of early evening. This is the only glimpse I saw and can never be truly sure but Rene or Ian ran to the kitchen door and swear they saw a girl with a motorbike helmet leaping onto the back of a bike ridden by another girl. And then we saw it… a note under the kettle. Rene ripped it out and turned it over to read it. I cannot remember now the exact words and the note does not remain, but they were something like; We know about your little club, we know about you and we were think you are very cool. One day maybe we’ll meet. Signed: The FYC.

For some of you this may seem a stretch but that was how it happened, exactly. By God did that set off some snakes of fate, changing everything before them. In an instant we were transformed from some skinny little bunch of badge wearing alcoholics into a club; a real club. I decided that soon I would scrap the little badges and get a real name and get some real business cards.

I had belonged to a little gang in primary school, where my parents owned a very successful restaurant in a very dubious neighbourhood with real tough kids on the other side of the economic divide. I called it ‘The Al Capone Gang’ because my father was very into gangsters and had a gangster themed restaurant. His name is Al. We also had badges for that gang, which my mother made and they had a picture of Al Capone on them. I felt we had to have an initiation for that gang and we eventually decided that all members would rub away all the skin on the top of their index fingers until you could see the bone. Now that the ‘piss-up’ had grown into something respectable, something that other secret societies of beautiful women knew about, we had to have our own initiation. We had to take this stuff seriously. Something had to be done.

Drinking we started really seriously. Those last, sad days of my schooling were already beginning to blur through an alcohol and calmettes haze. One night, George got invited to his errant father’s house, who was now returned from prison and wanted to entertain his son and friends. George’s father was named Johnny, or ‘flip-over’ Johnny, as some would have it. Apparently he had once gotten roaring drunk, ramped his motorbike in a complete somersault and landed back on the tires. He was famous for that.

Anyway, we were all over at his house and had in each of us a cauldron of different liquors even before the father went out chasing after some loose chick. We were so very, very drunk and started fighting when I hit this table and a glass fell over and lacerated the sole of my foot so badly so that I ended up spending the night in hospital. The story only ended three operations later with a sizeable skin graft from my inner thigh. I was ordered neither to stand upright nor to get it wet for several months.

Two nights later I am hitching to Hillbrow through the rain on crutches, long hair soaked against my skinny white forehead with my miserable looking friends beside me. I honestly cannot say what drove me but it was like a bat-winged beast circling high above, urging me towards events of ever-greater catastrophe. Eventually we get there, my leg-cast a ruin, God only knows what damage going through the delicate operations under my foot. I decided I was going to hustle for booze playing pool. My crutches, I had discovered, were a great scheme because people somehow expected, to their detriment, that it affected my play.

We were hustling this one guy who I think called himself Tom, a short, plump, middle-aged fellow who seemed only delighted to lose round after round of beer to us. To cut a long story short, he invited the four of us back to his apartment where he drugged our coffee. I have a memory of sinking down next to a balcony with the mighty orange lights of the city streaming away past me in a blur, twenty-five stories below. My memory departs at that point and returns only three days later. From the account of Ian, who was the only one to resist the drug, he had to attack the man with a bread to stop his sordid sexual advances on us and we were eventually thrown out into the corridor, with Rene now coming too and screaming bloody murder as they dragged me down, crutches and all, to where we collapsed in the street, my cast submerged in a dirty gutter.

Over the next three days apparently I raged and had bruises from where my father, eventually finding me, had to subdue me. We went back there to that flat, the boys and I, armed with all of our clubs and knives and ninja weapons, but we could never find him. My foot of course was a disaster and it took a long time in recovering but our minds had been wounded by a sharper kind of glass.

Chapter 2 - There and Back Again

At the end of our second last year at school - a meaningless distinction since three of us were already in imminent danger of being excluded from the school system due to irreconcilable differences - we decided to all take a hike in the wilderness and refine the fledgling spirit and nature of our group. We studied the continent - us four boys -and went about the business of finding a little paradise for our exploration. Eventually, after much thought, we focused our sights on the strip of land called the Transkei, which hugs the East Coast of South Africa. The 'coast of storms' and many a wrecked ship. A coast of cannibals, some say.

So we got our stuff together and worked out a plan of action. George, by this stage, had begun to slide steadily away from the 'Piss-up Club' thing and over onto the 'Jah is our main guy' side of astral operations. The more you smoked Pot back then, the more you realized how completely stupid alcohol is. For one thing: Dope is more fun. You can do a lot with dope. If you were stuck in a lighthouse for a week on some remote Scottish coast with only a copy of Tolkien to read, trust me, you would rather have a little section of the good weed than a bottle of Jack.

So George had really got into the stuff and once old Jah enters your life, he gets in good and stays there some time. Suddenly, he found the idea of spewing vomit across your bedroom wall after a night of heavy drinking somehow unappealing. The Jah people can be very judgmental about these things, contrary to the main selling point of their beautiful racket. He wanted to go to the Transkei because as everyone knows, the god of marijuana fell from the heavens and was buried in the Transkei so that we, the people of the Earth, could smoke the divine green coiling light of Mary Jane that grew raw from the soil in such great abundance.

I wanted to go for the fishing. I have an obsessive love of fishing that stems, I think, from the fact that fishing time with my dad represented the only moment of real joy and contact that I ever remember experiencing between us. I now see fish as thoughts and the water body as the lake of the subconscious through which I row my perception. I dream a lot about fish, swimming in the water below me and - despite the fact that I most like to pull them out of the water and eat them - I find them very calming. I thoroughly cherished the idea of eating from the land. I brought along three huge rods - rods you could erect a circus tent with - and all of their tackle. The irony of these rods, in all of its sublime beauty, would only in the near future be properly revealed.

The main thing I can say about our leaving Johannesburg - and taking into account those gigantic rods - is that we were really heavy. Four heavy little boys, their backpacks tormenting the miserable skeletal frames that dragged them along. They were like obscene slave-masters, shoving us around, driving us forth. We left the evil surrounds of our school and its web of arcane power to travel in a train to Durban where my uncle Case, who was a cook in some hotel that favoured the ‘buffet’ and ‘Danish Style’, entertained us. He reminded me of boiled chicken heads but we took full and uncensored advantage of the open tab to get ripping drunk.

Another series of coincidences involving cars and roads and we are at ‘The Cape Sun’, several hundred clicks South, a hotel which sits on the very border of the Transkei. If you stand in the water off the beach, it is very difficult to tell where South Africa ends and the 'Wild Coast' begins, excepting of course for the fact that the South African side of the divide has a very nice, civilized hotel on it. If you sit on the hotel deck and look just over there you can imagine it, the coast of dreams and infamous savagery. At the time that we decided to travel there, in 1990, the company was in the upheavals of a revolution and the Transkei government had been overthrown in a bloody coup.

Back in Durban we were warned against traveling there and in the hotel on its edge we were warned once again. We had however all committed so much to this idea that nothing would dampen our spirits. Our guardians had not really believed that we would even go through with this. We were in danger of losing our education and had nothing to go back too. None of us even had a job. We had to pull this trip off, for sure, pull it off good.

It was a challenge to our group. It was the union of us, the trial, judge, jury and execution of us. We listened nervously to the reports of violence that were coming from that land, a land of the black people and their killing weapons. Undaunted and unable to afford the enormous costs of the protective hotel, we packed our things the following morning and headed across the river and onto the wild beaches of the Transkei, land of violence, ill repute and potentially very good weed.

Six hours along the beach and the heaviness thing became a serious problem. Some of us were dragging along sixty kilograms of compressed peanuts and baked beans. We resolved to eat everything encased in metal on the very first night. That first night was not far off and we had decided to alight alongside the banks of a gloomy, foggy river, when we heard the sounds of manic laughter and guttural Afrikaans spewing forth into the night like. Then we saw torches and realized that these foul-mouthed boatmen were roaring drunk and had gone for a night-fish. On the far bank we saw a very comforting camp with a big fire blazing away into the soggy night.

As a group we had all forced ourselves to avoid thinking about the tent problem, namely that we only had one and not only didn't know to work it, but it was designed presumably for two small monkeys, the type of tent you might well find in a lucky-packet or in your Christmas stocking. Whether it even had all its bits was another thought that had been forcibly removed from our conversations. Given these facts and the utter misery of the weather, we made great pains to attract the attentions of the boatmen and were eventually rewarded by them rowing over, looking very drunk and holding automatic weapons.

What we didn't know about them was that they were South African Special Forces killers, stationed on the border of the Transkei on 24 hours standby, who had both had the regular privilege of being able to shoot at live targets, normally at night, while drunk. Fortunately, they thought we were hilarious. It took them a long time to stop laughing and when they eventually did they rowed us over on the wildly unbalanced craft to sit by their fire. They spent the rest of the night telling us how violently stupid we were for contemplating a walk one minute down the beach. Then they happily set about making us homemade weapons to carry with us.

The next morning we left bristling with sharp sticks and fishhook grappling weapons and bamboo guns and without the worrisome additional weight of half of our food, which they had been only too glad to share. They gave us some great hints however, perhaps the most important of which is that while it was a country overrun by hungry little savages, it was also a country where the price of a tin of food could get you almost anything. The soldiers themselves had a whole army of the little Goat-herders just outside the camp who would perform even the most dubious services for these two heavily armed lunatics. It would prove to be a very useful tip.

As cold and miserable as the previous night had been, the day was mercilessly hot and the beach, which we had resolved to stick too, was like a giant magnifying glass. We were being seared as we walked. The beaches were long and completely uninhabited. At one point we met an old man with a crazy grin who enthusiastically gestured to a pot of crayfish that he wished to sell to us. In our heat-induced delirium we decided to turn him down, as at the very least we didn't want to include crawling lobsters to our list of difficulties. It was a good decision, as it turned out, because we discovered not long afterward that they were grown from seed at the bottom of the long drop toilets shared by the tribal people, where these aquatic cockroaches feasted delightedly on the accumulated human waste.

Eventually, we decided to camp under the shadow of a rocky outcrop, unsure of how far we had traveled, especially on account of lacking a map and no navigation equipment. Water, it turns out, is another very important and very rare substance on the wildest coast of Africa. The very few streams that trickle their sweet juice down to the sea are completely polluted by cow effluent further up stream and we couldn't bring ourselves to drink from them, even after we had attempted to boil it over a twig fire no better than a box of matches all piled up. To take our minds off our thirst we gobbled the last of the salty peanuts. Even more worryingly, George had seen not a sign of the promised fields of marijuana and he was starting to permanently lose his sense of humour.

There is something fundamentally different about the hunger that accumulates in a city boy. Food is like an all-pervading instant satisfaction program. You get hungry and you eat. It also goes well with sadness, irritation, boredom, joy and birthdays. You just reach out and you get it. In the bush it is more a question of timing. You eat at the eating time and when you are not eating you spend all your time trying to get food. Walking along the beach that day and we are experiencing the whole gamut of brilliant reasons for eating something and our minds are entirely possessed by the opulence of our civilized lifestyles, demanding not just simple food but complex sugars and proteins, things only a very advanced, automated civilization is capable of producing.

By nightfall we knew not how far we had traveled but we were thoroughly exhausted. Unfortunately, the point at which light and bodily strength gave out was a rocky bit of coast which blew cold winds and gave us as our only company sparse grass and big boulders. At some level there was a sense of relief because we still didn't have to try the tent out and discover its horrible truth. There was nowhere to anchor it. At around eight a light drizzle began to seep through the landscape. We still had some of the peanuts, but by this stage were having trouble swallowing them. George had a can of some food or other left and we lit into it with powerful hunger. After that we tried to get comfortable in the shade of a big, wet, rock.

The brightness of day and we trod optimistically onward. My legs and other exposed body parts had been so burned from the day before that they had swollen up like ripe, red melons and were painful to the touch. George had started to seriously consider the prospect that the marijuana legends may not have been true and he was not dealing with it well. As we walked, he became increasingly quiet and developed a far away look in his eyes as he constantly monitored the landscape that embraced the beach. It took him until early afternoon to decide that we had to travel inland and start a serious, coordinated search for the source of the marijuana rumor. At that point my legs were so swollen that I could hardly walk. I found it hard to believe that his words were actually originating in a brain.

In a savage act of irony we came around a coast and realized that we were trapped and would have to track inland in order to get back to the coast. George said nothing but I could see an insane vindication ripple through him and I knew that he was integrating this change into the plot of his working mythology. The Gods were guiding him and as a matter of fact guided us slap bang into a huge swamp of rhino grass or whatever you call it, like a million long, green knives that spear upward in every conceivable direction, sometimes so aggressive that they even spear through each other. My swollen legs opened like balloons of pus, lacerated by a thousand vicious paper cuts. After that it was a true struggle for survival hacking our way back to the coast. Renewed by a spiritual energy however, George went almost double the distance as he backtracked toward remote signs of civilization looking for a priest … or a dealer.

By darkness we were finished and were seriously considering eating the instant soup, no matter what it represented. We hurried along into the gathering darkness, collected water at a stream and by the last light of day saw a big open plain of sand to pitch the tent, just to the other side of a relatively modest river which emptied into the ocean. By the time we arrived at its banks however it was looking a lot more formidable and fast flowing. George jumped in straight away, leaving his pack behind and swimming across. Presumably, he was going to sling a fifty-foot rope across with a grappling hook and tie it to a tree so that he could haul our kit across. He even called Ian across to help him, who stupidly did so. By the time his dive was finished he was almost out at sea and it was by sheer skinny tenacity only that he made it across.

It was only as he stood wet and shivering without any kit on the other side of the now raging river and rising tide, that George must have considered his rashness and the advantages of rope. In the sinking darkness we could do nothing. But the universe is not without its sense of poetic irony. Directly across from Rene and I climbed up a cliff face and found a beautiful warm cave like a bushman villa overlooking river property and a huge pile of dried twigs with which we lit a very merry fire and made ourselves a nice cup of soup. In a final flourish Rene dug out his little walkman and external speakers and played the soft sounds of Phoebe Snow into the night, There we sat on that ledge, fishing, drinking hot soup, resting against our warm pillows, listening to some tunes and directly opposite us Ian and the barely sane George were huddled on a big flat piece of sand in a torrential downpour.

Some time after dawn we arose and swam across to the other boys with our packs dragging along beside us. 'They'll just have to dry', I thought, in the warm East-coast Sun. The sun however remained only exactly long enough to release its most deadly UV rays before leaping back behind a bank of cloud that let rip over our heads, rendering everything we owned profoundly wet. This was the start of a grand piece of dark comedy at the very culmination of this dejected rainy day. We walked along the beach until darkness and rain stopped us.

Then came the opening piece of the theatre, the unfolding of the tent. Sandy beach, lots of grip, lots of … um, rain. We hauled it out of George's rucksack. George always carried the heavy things. He had a certain stoic dwarfishness and stubborn constitution about him, despite his angelic countenance. So we hauled it out and scrambled over each like hyena's in the rushing wet darkness to try and link it all up until finally it stood, barely, and we could truly appreciate its size, it's Lilliputian grandeur. George crawled in quick and almost filled the whole thing.

Oh, what a laugh it was! We were like Indian gurus in there, all wrapped up wet and tight and twisted. And you couldn't touch the sides because then the water from the outside inverts through the cloth and showers down your back; A difference only in degree perhaps, but certainly a difference. It was a most miserable moment indeed when, in a flash of divine inspiration, I remembered a cigar I had brought along secretly for a special celebration when things looked rough. I hauled it out from its waterproof container and lit it up. In seconds, bellows of cloying, pea-thick choking fumes inundated the tent.

In the pressure of the rain and the night it was like somebody had let rip on a tear gas grenade, so disgusting it was. Contrary to the entire spirit and intention of the gesture, the tiny group had exploded into internecine violence. Rene was so very, very angry with me it was unbelievable. George, responding to the primeval vibration of the rising lizard brain instincts', jumped up in a cannon of fury and completely dismembered the tent like a killer whale tearing out of a circus balloon. He simultaneously bent the tent poles completely out of recognition. It turned out to be quite a night.

The next day we were forced to hug deep into the rocky coast and basically had to climb along miles of cliff-faces, just above the raging ocean of Neptune, which slammed into the cliffs with geographic testosterone. Not for the first time, the fishing rods became an issue. Being three metres tall apiece, they were difficult to navigate while climbing sheer, wet cliff faces. We had tied them to the sides of our packs - had George and Ian, being the designated rod carriers - and we were seriously beginning to endanger ourselves.

The question to consider most carefully in these situations is the actual point of having the rods in the first place. Everyone would know by looking at us that we would barely survive anyway - unless we had serious white man intervention - and that the rods would make no difference whatsoever. Even if you knew how to fish, you would still need bait and the local black folk - for some utterly bizarre reason known only to themselves - do not fish from the sea, instead preferring to raise the sea in their own toilets.

I had a lot of opposition to those rods and the twenty kilograms of fishing tackle that by necessity must follow them around, which temporarily had been placed in Rene's backpack. The boys just didn't believe in fishing in the first place. They had never read 'the old man and the sea'. They had never known the glory of raising the body of God from the sea and eating into it to survive. Eventually, we compromised and I ended up with both the rod and the tackle, while George struggled on with the other rod.

That afternoon we were blown away to discover a nest of Super Yuppies, the kind of people that look like they have been cut out from brochures from Ski resorts and kept photos of their yachts in their wallets. They had somehow airlifted this little beach cottage and dropped it on the beach in the middle of nowhere and were all standing around with big flashing 4 x 4 smiles and gin and tonics in their hands, greeting us pleasantly like we were not four lost teenagers at death's very door. The head lady took us around to the servant's entrance and fed us a nice big old Christian pot of rice and spaghetti and wished us good luck on our trip. When we returned the bowls, now glazed with our greasy, middle class paw prints, she smiled and kindly told us that we could keep them.

Luck must have been on our sides because from then on the whole mystical experience began to degenerate into the Cop cabaña. Not too far afterward, we discovered a five star lodge, nestled into a forest by the way side. We marched on up there and started by buying every chocolate we could, to nourish our starved bodies. Then we hit the bar and started drinking. To come out of that starving, wet hell and be vomited into the cocktail lounge of a five star hotel was beyond belief. We played the residents' darts for drinks. It was almost paradise.

Under cover of darkness we crawled around the hotel blind drunk in the darkness looking for a place to sleep. Eventually we discovered this nice big patch of soft African grass, spread our sleeping bags like tongues into the stuff and jumped into them for a good nights rest after a day well lived to sleep a comfortable night, dreaming the aqueous dreams of Bourbon and Beer. It was barely ten minutes after we woke up that we discovered the horrible truth. We had somehow discovered the fabled lost breeding grounds of the Red Transkei Tick. We sat there like red jellybeans in horrid fascination.

Rene immediately began ripping opening the medical case and taking a massive overdose of tick bite tablets. All of them, in fact, which was bad luck for us, as things would turn out. Then he proceeded to burn the little horrors off with a burning cigarette, cauterizing the wounds. I trashed myself clean with the other boys and we all had a good old hung-over argument as we marched away from the hotel and toward our final destination, which we were promised lay only a short walk away. A short Transkei walk, as the saying goes.

We traveled across a large plain of sand and eventually encountered another river, though this time it was calm and well behaved. I immediately recognized the smell and sight of the place, Mzikaba. I had come here with my family ten years before when the country had still been civilized and controlled by the fascist white Afrikaner government. We had traveled down here in a Mercedes and a big caravan camper. Both vans had lost their exhaust pipes by the time they arrived and we were in a merry old pickle trying to escape from there.

There was a surprising amount of people there, despite the regional conflict that was reportedly unfolding around us. Die hard fishermen I'll bet. Fishing folk, like myself are a hardy breed. We came into the camp and immediately encountered an armed Transkei soldier, who checked us over. He had this great trick that he showed to us after we had made friendship movements toward him. Being pretty sad looking ourselves, we found that the peasants related easily to us. He had a string tied to his wrist that wound down to a serious looking revolver that sat on his hip. With one smooth movement he could yank the cord and the revolver would snap into his hand, smooth as you please.

During the conversation with this now amiable fellow - this armed post adolescent goatherd - George started to get very skittish. I think he scented the far off call of the God of Marijuana on this man and he had begun to sink into this sort of Shark-like primitive feeding frenzy. His jaws started snapping open and shut in anticipation. It is always difficult asking for contraband substances from government military officials in foreign countries. In a few - mostly African - they say, 'sure man' and take you to the reefer merchant. In others - mostly everywhere else and half of Africa - they just turn around and shoot you in the head. This was a risk George was clearly willing to take.

We got shown to a campsite in the falling light while George disappeared with the guard. The radiant light of the divine priestess had truly smiled on us this night. Not only had we discovered that it was Christmas Eve and not only did the weather break into absolute perfection, but George returned, alive, with a big old reefer. And our luck did not end there. We met a fellow camper who gave us a run-down on the local fishing action and quality advice on how to get bait. Fishermen are something else. Every one of them with a different story, a different interpretation of the sea, its creatures and how to haul them out and kill them.

We raced down to a rocky promontory in the last of the light with our two rods and our kit and our hunting blades, baying like Indians on the hunt. The bait trick was just great. Just above the line of the retreating surf as the tide goes out, you will find little sponge like protrusions on the rock that you need to stab and cut open. In the center of the tough, fibrous shell lives the stinkiest thing in town, called redbait. This mollusk type creature makes excellent bait, hangs on your hooks like a dream and should never be left near human habitation overnight.

Within ten minutes of those hooks hitting the water, the fish were banging on us, cavorting in the rough moonlit ocean like fries in hot oil. A race of electricity ran through us. I could feel it, like mild electrical impulses snaking along our nerves and I knew they were feeling it. They were getting it. They understood, for a suspended moment, moonlit moment, what it meant to be in struggle with a life, with an unknown set of rules; to have used ingenuity to lure and capture something which is devoted to its own survival; to have gone into the wilderness of the soul and created food.

The moon was so unbelievably full and profound that it dominated the landscaped, etched out each shadow, played along the contours of our faces, carving ancient, wiser masks for us. The marijuana joint was supreme. With effortless grace it elevated us to a grander world of light and meaning. The fishes we caught are called 'Streepies', an Afrikaans word that describes the black tiger stripes that run down their silver flanks. We collected the bigger ones for our dinners and traveled back to our campsite where we sat by the fire and listened again to the Phoebe Snow tape. It was truly gorgeous.

We arose to Christmas day filled with unutterable joy and abandon. Immediately we ran down to the river and began to explore upstream, where the river gradually narrowed as it entered lush canyons, the plant growth itself like waterfalls tumbling down the sheer blue-black faces. We managed to walk a long way from beach to tiny beach, the muddy sand filled with a filigree of crab pin prints as they skated like ghosts across the surface and into the water. Long, colorful birds darted along the cliff faces and called out with unfamiliar cries. Everything we saw seemed to be beckoning. This trip was a journey into our selves and the land merely a grand metaphor.

On the very final beach we stopped as the coast became continuous, flat cliff. We looked around and realized that we were in the most private place that we had ever experienced, whether individually, or as a group. Nothing or nobody could see us. The beach was ours. George and I pulled out our ceremonial equipment from our packs. Over time the nature of the ceremonial equipment had changed. When we were first a group together no real ceremony had been necessary, other than drinking fast and passing out. Now the group had moved to a new level and I needed more ceremony.

The ninja thing was a big contender for ceremonial priority. We had all enjoyed weaponry and wiped out our fair share of the neighbourhood animals. We were all slightly esoteric and most especially we all wished that we had the power and physical prowess to leap about and defend our skinny white asses. The Ninja philosophy and art seemed to me to embrace all of these qualities and attributes. They were mysterious and secretive and powerful and were the stuff of legend that walked tantalizingly hand in hand with historical truth. My mother had sowed George and me ninja suits which were our present ceremonial gear. The other guys just wore loose pants and black vests.

All that afternoon, we stood and moved about slowly in martial arts maneuvers. We were training for all eventualities. We were hardening our bodies, through relentless exercise and exposure to the elements in one of the wildest places in Africa. We stood there for Christmas and for the entire world, us Tai-Chi teenagers. Then we walked back slowly, filled with the breath of the Marijuana deity and our newfound bond of training and secrecy. We had airlifted that old water tower from Yeoville and planted it right here, on the beach, in the middle of nowhere - A new place for our kind to meet.

Getting back in the lazy afternoon, we pondered the direction of our night. It was, after all, Christmas day. We decided eventually to split up and organize for the evening's activities. Rene and Ian went back to the camp to organize some Christmas grub while George and I decided to head across the river with a bucket and empty the bar of the five-star hotel with our every available cent. We promised to meet at sunset by the river mouth and George and I waded through the river with our bucket dragging along behind us.

We arrived up at the hotel pretty late and made the commitment to satiate our thirsts before returning, which we did. Then these four black characters came over to us and challenged us to a game of darts, if you can believe it. They agreed to play for money. A very funny bunch indeed, local diplomats as it turns out and very willing to spend their ill-gotten paychecks with the young white boys. We got so blind drunk that we barely made it to the river after dark and saw our friends on the far side of what was now a raging torrent. I could not hear them but managed to throw a bottle of scotch across before turning around with George to walk back into the hills to find a nice, quiet place to sit down and work on our future hangovers.

We had not walked five steps when suddenly the sky vanished and angry clouds exploded across the heavens, very quickly spilling into big, wet raindrops that fell at first sulkily and then moodily and eventually righteously. We were soaked in moments, stumbling through the muddy dark with our bucket of booze clambering along in tow. We completely lost our way but eventually somehow ended up back at the fancy hotel like a pair of drowned poodles.

The hotel itself was a little mansion with eight beautifully appointed rooms crafted with cloths and silks and knick-knacks pilfered from colonized countries worldwide. It was a joke that screamed into the face of all probability, this little colonial cotton-picking mansion in the middle of one of the most dangerous anti-colonial countries on Earth. When the revolution came this place was going to burn to the ground, its flaming demise reflected in the eyes of the on-looking savages, upon the sweat of whose backs it had been crafted.

The hotel would have none of us either. The matron who greeted us at the back door had either never had children or had never been a child but she would rather have seen us die in the rain than soil her coal-shed. We hung out there on the stoep shivering, sadly sharing a bottle of whiskey, for it was raining hard and we were tired of sleeping in the rain. Then this guy walked out and it became a riotous assembly, for he was Indian and funny to the point of pain. His expressions were hysterical and his voice like a nightingale after the cross matron.

'It is not advisable for you to be consecrating together in the rain at this hour' said he - just add accent - and we fell over ourselves laughing. It was such a delicious irony really. Here were George and I, colonial throwbacks of the grand British Empire, which had thoroughly stomped colonialism on to the Indian races and bludgeoned them into subjugation and serial poverty and he was staying at the posh hotel while we were out in the brain, sozzled with booze, without a roof over our heads.

Eventually he left and some hour or so before midnight on that Christmas day, we pondered the fates and choices that lay before us. Mostly we wanted to sleep and we were truly outraged by the bad Samaritan behaviour of the hotel staff. For George the solution was simple. We were going to have to break in. I was just terrified at the idea, as I have never been the great taker of risk and considering the political temperament of this place, rash criminality seemed a bit shortsighted.

The rage grew in me too though and by the end of the bottle of JD, I had committed to this nefarious plot. We pulled open the window of one of the outside rooms and slithered through it like crocodiles onto the shaggy white carpets, like eels in fact, all slimy and dirty and wet. We slithered up onto the bed and into the sheets, leaving a trail of polluted scales within the silken folds. My heart was beating like a deranged woodpecker on a piece of petrified wood.

We set his watch alarm for 5:30 but either George messed it up or we didn't hear it and we awoke to hear the sounds of the cleaners opening up all the empty room doors to air them out or something. We jumped out of the silken soiled sheets so fast that it was as if we had been teleported. Then we teleported through the window and down the hill and onto the beach. The exhilaration raced through us with pumping bellows of power. Now we were free. We had gone in and escaped alive. We still had booze and we had the whole of boxers' day to celebrate with our friends.

That was a fine day indeed. We just lay around and did as we pleased, drinking and smoking and just taking a nap or going fishing or whatever. A grand, grand day and the weather holding out just beautifully, the proverbial roof of stars tucking us in for a good nights rest. The next day was dismal, a gray sky and dampness creeping across the land and into our bones, stiff muscles and alcohol sizzled minds. We had spent almost all of our cash on booze and there was a unanimous feeling that home was beckoning and should not be ignored.

With packs lightened by lack of food but somehow heavier than ever before we trudged forward into weather that would not abate in misery for the entire return trip. A couple of hours later and we found the nest of the Super Yuppies, empty and unguarded. George did not hesitate to scamper around the back looking for an open window while I hissed at him fiercely to leave the house alone. Any minute I expected a hail of goat herder bullets to split the deathly silence of the day.

Eventually, I walked around to the back and discovered him already in the kitchen, the fridge open and his head buried in it, chomping indiscriminately, his head thrashing left and right like a sawfish moving through a shoal of sardines. Sheepishly, I accepted an offering of left over lamb lunch but warned him on pain of death not to steal anything else. It was only an hour later that I noticed the Christmas present sticking out of his backpack and I nearly throttled him. Bad karma was the last thing I needed right then. It turned out that it was a box of French chocolates - Delicious French chocolates.

There is something about going back that saps the energy. It’s like you’ve already achieved the goal and from here on in it’s just tired, hungry work. It becomes a slog. Unknown to us, the early whisperings of tick bite fever was making itself felt. By midday we were absolutely finished, my cracked sunburned legs throbbing with the monotonous pace. When we could not take any more, we sat down and rested on a high ridge some way inland.

It was there that this bunch of kids – acting goat herders – came around the corner, all laughing and singing with their perfect white teeth and bellicose smiles. Or so they automatically seemed to me, being wrapped around the faces of what was purportedly the other side. I thought to myself: These kids are probably real hungry, probably only a meal away from savagery. I watched them approach with a cautious readiness to my gaunt frame.

It was then that I remembered the immortal words of the two reconnaissance soldiers: ‘this may be a land of very hungry savages but it’s also a hungry of very hungry savages’; and in a flash I understood the wisdom of this casual statement. Our remaining scraps of food were whipped out of our bags and ten minutes later we continued walking with each of the kids sharing one of our heavy packs and thus we continued for the remainder of the afternoon. To this day I find it absolutely astonishing that a ten-year-old child handled what I could not accomplish - quite easily - in return a few crumbs of food.

The following evening, absolutely famished and drained of all energy, we crept into the forest a bit to find a place to sleep. We had spotted signs of human habitation, or rather a burned out building that had once housed humans of some description. It gave us a bit of a bad feeling and we remembered the words and dire warnings of everybody we had met, not least the trained assassins we had encountered along the way.

So we did what all boys must do in these circumstances. We trod around in the bush loudly, calling to each other in broad voices. Sometimes we even called out in Afrikaans – or Shambok Dutch as I called it – in case there were any natives lurking nearby, waiting to pounce out with spears. It was said that they feared the Afrikaans language something fierce, unlike English, which often produced only mild, embarrassed laughter from the enemy. Then we whipped out our hunting knives and made a big show of throwing them into a big, old tree trunk.

Needless to say, we were robbed in the night. Despite all our ninja instincts and our very clever trick of placing all of our valuables in the sleeping bag to create a pillow, they just whipped our stuff away out from under our very heads, their quiet little knives slitting through the fabric. It was a horrifying thought to wake up to. Visions of those quiet knives crossing over my jugular veins haunted me. George – who retained yet his blade – could not be held back and went down to the beach to track them. Unbelievably, he found two of the packs a few minutes away, hidden in the bushes. To my undying delight, one of them contained my writing files, which had achieved a sort of cult value for me.

What we didn’t find however was our shoes. In the face of this calamity we set out, sore and mind numbingly hungry, our feet scalding on the hot stones and sensitive to every tiny, sharp rock. George was cursing so loudly and furiously that I thought he would murder the first goat herder we came across. We had decided to try and complete the last phase of the journey home – a comfortable two days walk – in one go, and did not stop for a rest.

I clearly remember that dizzying day, like the slow motion replay of every starving desert scene I had ever witnessed. It pressed on us, the ferocity of the challenge. Slowly but surely we began to lose hope, or I did at least and George wasn’t doing any better, wilting in fact, his savage Italian ferocity fizzling out like the colour yellow spread too thin. At first we tried to help each other, but eventually Rene and Ian, perhaps tasting the copper tang of their own mortalities, just switched onto automatic, leaving us trailing behind them in an ever-widening gap.

At some point I collapsed and fainted, my face hitting the dirt with the chunky promise of a bruise. George had done the same, some way before or after. There we lay through the baking day with parched lips and bulging eyes, our stomach’s twisting with hunger. I must have lain there for hours before getting up and stumbling onward into the growing night. It seemed like days passed and then the lights of the hotel swam again into view. Even as I crumbled to the ground, I saw Rene and Ian, who were having a fine little tête-à-tête on the verandah, waiting without a care, their hands hooked around some very fine Martini’s, plotting our return course across the barefoot miles that separated us from home.

We had accomplished a journey through the real world, there and back again, against almost insurmountable obstacles, but soon we would begin another journey, a journey of much great danger and almost infinite distance. I like to think that we had experienced a crash course in preparation for the gate, and beyond it, paths that would ultimately reveal our astonishing fate.

Chapter 3 - Worlds Apart

Toward the beginning of our final year at school, shortly before most of our group were thrown bodily from the grounds, George finally introduced us to the mysterious Peter, keeper of doorways to other worlds. After we had finished our classes one day, we skirted the playing fields to avoid any sporting extra-mural activities and headed up the long hill that led into Yeoville.

Peter was a tall, thin guy with long, black stringy hair who sported a black Metallica T-shirt and grubby blue jeans. He had that sullen look so popular with ‘Goth’s’. George had often seen him around and knew that he attended an Art college in town. So we got speaking to him that day at the top of the hill in Yeoville, the three of us crammed into a bus stop while the sky drizzled miserably around us.

We had heard a little about LSD from various dubious sources. The most unreliable source of all, of course, was the national booklet released by the anti-drug people. In retrospect, I find it incredible that a bunch of professional people can study thousands of drug cases and come up with such useless, erroneous information. I had read somewhere that most drug users stayed away from LSD like the plague because it was characterised by uncontrollable ‘bad trips’.

By now I know that this is also a bunch of rot. Most ‘people’ will stay away from the stuff because it is pretty damned powerful in the same way that most people will stay away from mortar cannons. Drug-users are a pretty tough bunch though. The point is that I remember thinking that addiction wasn’t a problem because it was too scary a drug to make a habit of. Curiosity, however, is a powerful motivating force.

We followed Peter up to his apartment after he had explained a little about the wonderful gift that was LSD, or ‘acid’ as it was known. He lived at the top of an old building in Yeoville, not far from the water tower. It was sort of a construction hut built on the roof in between the gables, crammed with pigeons and their detritus. He lived with his girlfriend, a very alarmed looking girl who didn’t speak much and seemed uncontrollably jumpy.

We felt very uncomfortable sitting there, waiting while he rooted through his room looking for drugs. Finally he emerged with five caps of acid, five ‘trips’ in the popular vernacular. We paid twenty rand for each of them - One hundred rand in total. It was an intolerably large sum of money for us but we felt consoled in the fact that George had stolen it from his mother anyway. We took the caps and hid them with inordinate care about our bodies before leaving, glancing nervously about us as in one hour we had been transformed from young, innocent rebels into fugitives from justice in a dark and secret world.

Recently, shortly after our return from the Transkei, we had grafted another member to the group named Kevin, who would remain for the duration of our years together. He was younger than us, a slight, pretty boy with dark hair and an extremely well proportioned, elastic physique. His age never became an issue and it was only in later years that we reacted with horror to discover we had first given him drugs at the very tender age of twelve. We were all just becoming friends then with him, hanging out during breaks at school and playing a lot of fantastical role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Our imaginations were peaking. Though all of us had become quite proficient at various forms of martial arts, the emphasis had slowly shifted away from open gang warfare.

Instead, we were investigating witchcraft and the occult with zealous enthusiasm and believed that mental powers were well within our reach. All we needed was a catalyst and, if anthropological studies on Shamanistic cultures were to be believed, that catalyst was the hallucinogen. They were keen as mustard. I can’t remember what I felt at the time, but, coming from a good home, I must have been a little uncertain anyway. We met at George’s house that Friday. It was becoming our regular meeting place, chiefly because his mother was always out with one guy or another and we had the house to ourselves.

The acid had a slightly bitter taste going down. Forever after, I had that same weird tingling feeling in my teeth when I ate those tiny squares of blotting paper. It felt like I was coming off a local anaesthetic at the dentist. Shortly after we had dropped the drugs and nothing had happened, we decided to go into town and find something to do. The blotters had been so tiny and unconvincing in appearance that we were pretty convinced we had been ripped off.

Nevertheless, we attempted to spark it off by going to see a really strange movie called ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. It was about some guy who was given a powerful hallucinogen while serving in the army and suffered its effects for years afterwards. The movie alone was enough to cause craziness and, by the time we had walked out of the theatre, we were feeling pretty strange. The world was a darker shade of blue, lights had become brighter and we felt an incredible surge of energy moving through our systems. We spent an hour in Hillbrow, playing pool and bouncing about before returning home.

Since the drugs were not doing anything significant, we retired to my house. I lived in white luxury in a quiet, smart area with my parents and siblings. They were quite a bit more diligent in their raising of children and we could not push them too far. Being caught on drugs would have been tantamount to a death penalty. So we all cruised in there, looking unusually bright-eyed and maniacal but nevertheless in control of our senses. We greeted them and scampered up to my room, which was in the loft of the house, far away from them. We sat in the room then, waiting around and talking animatedly.

It was plain that the trip was over and we felt a bit cheated. It was at that moment that I suggested we inhale some Aerosol, a product called ‘Cook and Spray’. This was a bit like glue, ether and petrol rolled into one, guaranteed to cause some pretty hefty brain scrambling. They were all a bit nervous so I took the can, filled up a plastic sandwich bag with the greasy, yellow vapour and inhaled it for all I was worth. This stuff on its own made one feel fuzzy and disassociated. Taken in accompaniment with acid, it was an altogether more powerful experience. It was the beginning of my first trip.

I bent over as I breathed out the last of the vapours. Louie Armstrong was playing; a song called ‘Sunny side of the street’. My friend Kevin was standing over me and as I brought myself upright, I remember thinking that he was a royal Prince from some foreign land. He was so pretty and noble looking and he had a purple, velvet shroud about his shoulders. And then the words of the song seeped into my consciousness and suddenly, right beneath my feet snaked a golden path, and there was sunshine, on the ‘sunny’ side of the street.

The funny thing was that I snapped out of it quickly and the experience must have been so far out of my experience that I didn’t realise it was even happening, not really. I must have thought I was daydreaming, like when you don’t even realise that you are drifting until you come back and as soon as you are back, you forget the whole experience. Either way, I was sober again, sort of. What made matters worse was that the rest of bunch really were dead, cold sober and remained that way for the rest of the evening. As for me however, the night had barely begun.

The moment I walked out of the room, the sparks really began to fly. I think that I wanted to go downstairs to get something to drink and I walked out of my bedroom, closing the door behind me so that the noise from my friends would not disturb my parents. As a result, it was pitch black on the landing. In that old house we had a lovely, stone staircase, which wound down in a long curve to the lower landing with a thick wooden handrail along the side. The paving stones, which formed the surface of the steps, were heavily textured and interesting looking.

Now, before I continue, you must try to visualise something that will aid you in understanding what I saw. Imagine if you cast jelly in the exact shape of a hand and then flattened it so that it was a couple of millimetres thick. Better yet, imagine one of those toy rubber hands with long arms that you throw and they stick to any surface for a while before peeling off like undercooked spaghetti; almost translucent, sticky looking and very rubbery.

Well, the moment I placed my hand on the banister rail, I happened to glance down to the bottom of the stairs and there, in the exact converse position to me, was one of those rubbery hands on the bottom of the handrail. I took a step without thinking and immediately a rubber pinkish footprint matched me on the first step of the bottom of the stairs. You must understand that I saw this all within a fraction of second, quite literally in mid-step. So I didn’t click until I was a quarter of the way down the stairs that something was happening, something so completely out of my experience that my brain could not define it.

My first thought was that I was somehow walking toward myself, pulling myself together. In the next instant I had the horrible feeling I was seeing a ghost, a real bona-fide occult experience. One thing is for certain. I believed what I was seeing completely and entirely forgot about the fact that I was on drugs. It was just too radical. Naturally, I turned around then and bolted back up the stairs. In the next second, the creature - whatever it was - had leapt from the bottom of the stairs and landed on my back!

I froze at the top of the landing, too scared to move a muscle. It felt like hot jelly - what I would later come to know as psycho-plasma - in the shape of a person standing behind me, its hands upon my shoulders. I whipped my head around, trying to look over my shoulder and it in turn ducked and moved to the other side. Then I reversed and tried to look over the other shoulder but it did the same thing, always remaining behind me, turning as I turned, keeping just out of my vision. It was lightning fast and powerful.

Suddenly I had a brain wave and looked in the bathroom mirror that is in the small toilet between my room and my sisters. This may indicate how believable the experience was. I literally thought that it would cast a reflection, like a real person. Nothing doing. And then, for no reason at all I glanced into my sister’s room. The room was dark and the door was wide open. Almost as if I had telepathised my intention I suddenly saw my own reflection, very faint - like faded electricity or one of those kirlian auras - and behind it was the reflection of the creature behind me!

What I saw - in faint electrical green - could only have been the reflection of a tall feline woman, feline to the extent that it had ears and a tail; A super-agile alien cat woman. At that moment, I heard a low, powerful purring growl that resounded through my bones with a delicious, calm tension. A grin spread across my face and I relaxed completely, caught up in a moment that no human being was ever meant to experience. It was so special. I ran toward my bedroom door but for some reason, the creature indicated a certain reluctance, pulling away slightly. I turned again and stared back into the darkness.

The pressure on my back shifted, softened. In front of me, the air began to take on shades of translucent colour and reality on either side faded slightly into insignificance, as though the real world was becoming the hallucination. My vision focused on the area before me as the air congealed and thickened with a strange electrical energy and started to form the shape of a Jade green waterfall in motion, tumbling delicately from the roof and through the floor, transporting me to another plane in another time. Within that waterfall, the presence of the creature was captured and I was almost certain it was trying to introduce itself. I screamed with laughter and dashed into the room.

Stepping back into the room was quite literally like stepping back into my old body. The frame of the door was a sort of portal between the plane to which I had so recently ascended and the grosser world of mortals. In one flash second I was stone cold sober, just like that. Bang. I halted my excited entrance, my smile pasted crazily to my face and stared around at my friends. They had a look of guarded concern. I had travelled a long way and somehow life would never be the same again. It... she... was waiting for me though, the liquid Jade flame water falling in the back of my mind. I tried desperately to explain what had just happened to me but they didn’t look very convinced.

At length I implored Ian to go outside and see for himself what was waiting out there. He relented and disappeared briefly through the door before returning. He hadn’t seen anything. By this time, I was feeling a little hysterical. I didn’t know what was going on. I forced him out again, told him to wait out there and open his mind to whatever force awaited. He vanished for several minutes and finally returned, looking a bit sheepish. Nothing at all, just walls and darkness. In a huff I walked back out, slamming the door behind me.

In a flash, Jade tendrils of energy and kitty growls surrounded me, a feeling of such delicious familiarity rushing through my veins that I wanted to die on the spot. It was all so private and secret. I felt like the first representative of the human kind meeting an alien race. She remained behind me, but tendrils like feather boas began to stroke my sides and pulse down my back. In front of me, a kaleidoscope of fantastic colours danced through the darkness, seeming to speak to me in a language of images. I tried to communicate with it, not really speaking, but projecting my words through my mind.

Everything was beginning to fade a little. I knew that I had to go in for some more inhalant or I might forever lose this precious, tenuous connection with the beyond. I tried to convince it to come in with me. It was making the most amazing sounds. Eventually I opened the door slowly and dimmed the bedroom light. It seemed to stay with me as I walked slowly into the room. I looked at the others and made imperceptible nods with my head, telling them to look behind me. They were all sitting on the other side of the room and just looked confused. I must have looked pretty crazy. I was half way across the room when this creature nipped in behind me and shot into the clothing cupboard where it was nice and dark.

I dosed up on inhalant and sat down in the poof cushion in front of my cupboard. I was laughing and speaking like a demented man to my friends. I still could not understand why they couldn’t see what I was seeing and I kept trying to convince them. On the outside, I was looking a wreck, my pupils massively dilated and the inhalant fluid running down my chin in greasy gobs. On the inside however, the evening was just getting better. The woman of the Jade flame - whom I would later come to know as Jade and eventually by her royal and traditional Epitaph, ‘Sildarien’ - emerged from the cupboard in the half light and sat behind me, the hot feather boa tendrils snaking around me and embracing me in cotton wool comfort.

I forgot about my friends entirely. I lay back into the comforting embrace of this angel and stared ahead at the wall, where colours were once again brightening and forming a slow moving upright whirlwind. This song was playing: I think it was something by the Carpenters and it was such a sweet, romantic song that I felt indescribable love well up in me, as though I had made contact with a long lost wife across a million planes of being.

After a while, I noticed that the wall was becoming transparent, like glass. Through the wall, I began to see faint images of other places. Slowly they resolved until I saw a beach. I was looking out across the sea where the sun was setting in a blaze of plum glory in a land of paradise and peace. I will never be able to describe that moment, a moment of secret joy and meaning beyond anything I am ever likely to feel again. I remember this harp or flute seeping into my ears and as the sun set, the tendrils behind me became swan wings and encircled my body entirely, wrapping me in a world of exquisite peace and calm.

I felt that in that moment I would swear my undying soul to this creature in the most sacred ceremony of all. And there, wrapped in the embrace of this Angel’s wings, I slipped into a timeless zone, broken intermittently by the need for more aerosol. In that trance I saw many things that are not all clear or available for recall, but they mainly involved a woman at my side through many different lifetimes. One flash I remember was of standing at the top of a hayloft in the sunlight, looking down at her smiling face and tossing threads of straw which became little Chinese paper umbrellas. I remember also moving in a procession in a place that was layered in rich velvet and colourful hanging fabrics, a honeymoon in a foreign land, scattered with Moorish architecture and scented with Cinabar.

On that day a quest began that would irrevocably change my life, a journey that would lead me through hell and madness to fight a war that would ultimately end on the very summit of heaven itself, with the bloodied wings of angels.

The days that followed the Jade experience held a rosy glow. I felt reborn into a magical world of discovery and unlimited potential. Everything seemed new and interesting. School became completely nonsensical, a rapidly fading interest. In fact, high school was undoubtedly the worst five years of my life. My feelings on institutional, prescriptive, government-inspired education are much the same as my views on religion. I think it is the great task of our generation to eradicate them, failing which we will never evolve as a race.

Suddenly however I was free of the clammy, sweaty grip of middle-class mediocrity, free within the constraints of my mind, a pioneer of a new realm beyond the edge of all that is known. I could sit in my class and smile that secret smile, smug and cheeky with secret knowledge. I was a prince among paupers, the monarch of a new empire. My four friends and I thus became bound, linked together by an unspoken trust that was unquestionable. After all, we were opening the most sensitive parts of our minds to each other. We had a common enemy - the rest of the world. When we were at school, we were behind enemy lines, spies from the domain of alien cats and pink sunsets.

Of course, the other four had to take this on faith - to a large extent - because they had not really glimpsed the true power to which I had been witness and on the whole, barring some occasions, never would. It is worth noting at this point that there are at least two basic classes of hallucinations; shall we call them True-Hallucinations and Pseudo-Hallucinations. Pseudo-Hallucinations are not self evident and intelligent in their manifestation. Instead they are largely random, spontaneous and only vaguely co-ordinated, much like the sort of eidetic imagery associated with REM type sleep.

This realm we collectively called the Candy realm within the Elemental domain, which describes the frequency of the energy that makes it up. It was not anything like I had experienced on my first ramble into the nether realm but was nevertheless vastly entertaining and something we all shared in. Kevin’s first trip into the candy realm, he recalls, began with a pulsing of the walls and roof, as though the very room were breathing. We had three lights in the room, each one a different primary colour. Kevin pressed his head against the wall where he sat and closed his eyes. Upon opening them, he found his vision slit into three vertical lenses, each of a different primary colour. It was this sort of thing that kept us busy for quite some time, although everything paled in comparison to the profound experience I had told them awaited.

During this period, we first saw the sharks. For some reason, the floor of George’s bedroom became the surface of an ocean, beneath which swam sharks. At first, they swam alone and then took to roving about in packs, their dorsal fins just surfacing above the floor. The interesting thing about this particular vision was that for the first time we had a consensual hallucination, something we all saw and something that evolved only with group consensus. When I say sharks, I am speaking of little shark like creatures, the largest no longer than ten centimetres in length, their dorsal fins two or three centimetres high.

We were all delighted with this little game because nobody really wanted to take the chance of being nipped by one of the little critters. There I would be sitting, watching some interesting streak of colour doing Arab-springs along the windowsill and suddenly I would see a school of sharks moving voraciously toward my toes. To the undying delight of everyone, I would scream and jump up on the table to escape their appetites. It got so we had to move around by leaping from raised surface to raised surface, from bed to table-top to cupboard, in much the same way as children only step on the cracks whilst traversing paving stones. We were children with our very own virtual reality game.

The candy realm is quite as vast as the mind itself. It would seem in fact that what one is seeing is a magnified reflection of the interior workings of the brain itself, the tides of neurons moving about like plankton in the vast ocean of the intellect. Almost always, they would be stimulated by environmental triggers; A shift in the music or light, a loud voice or strange word, a sudden movement. Once stimulated, it is the extra-ordinary property of the inhalants we used, to escalate the line of thought consistently and continuously along that tangent until the high ran down. Generally, a good hit of ‘spray and cook’ will last a few minutes.

We quickly refined our ability to ‘see’. It must be stressed that the state of powerful hallucination - in general - is not easily achieved. It can be achieved through massive doses of drugs but then it loses a certain reflective consciousness, becoming dreamy and difficult to recall. To have clarity within the candy realm, a state in which we could sit and objectively observe hallucinations as though they were projected holograms, is difficult and takes time and co-ordinated practise. We took to this project with relish, buoyed by ‘observable’ results. George’s house became the clubhouse. Every Friday night after school we would gather there and continue the great experiment.

After a couple of months, the Candy realm became a manageable province within the countries of our imaginations. There is a trick to seeing that one picks up with practise. It involves not reacting emotionally but rather allowing the un-natural mental process to unfold. We were plagued at this time by what we came to know as ‘Mugwots’, the true citizens of the Candy realm. Mugwot’s come in hundreds of different shapes and sizes, as many classes I would imagine, as there are insects or viruses in the real world of physical things.

I first noticed them while watching a patch of colour leaping about the room. In its most rested state, the colour was like a puddle of water of a few square centimetres in area but when it moved it was not all at once but rather ‘took off’ with first the front and then the end and would land in a similar amoeboid fashion. While in flight, it would stretch out into a long thin line, quite literally a streak of colour, but by purpose rather than by virtue of the fact that my eyes themselves were streaking. It reminds one almost exactly of those wonderful water features which shoot long worms of water from one pot to another in a co-ordinated fashion so as to create the illusion of one continuous water worm leaping across the length of the room in successive bounces. Point being that I noticed that many of these bursts of colour were in fact strange entities.

Speaking of entities is another tricky area because it seems to imply intelligence and well, let’s say it, life. But calling a Mugwot a life form with a life span is the same as calling a spot of sunlight a life form that lives for the duration of a day as it crawls slowly across your room. And yet, it is a thing, - with form and predictability - and for the moment at least, we shall call it a very simple entity. So, in observing the strange behaviour of these puddles of roving colour, I noticed that what I saw was not in fact a big puddle-like entity but rather a swarm of tiny entities all moving together like sardines. The strongest ones would lead and the weaker ones would hold back while they rested and then the whole lot would revolve so that they all got a chance to lead the way across some mighty expanse of fresh air.

Another interesting property of the various realms of the hallucination is the visual equipment that is inherent within each graphical class. That-is-to-say, each realm requires that one ‘see’ in a different way and by extension, allows our brains to organise themselves appropriately. One of the perks of the Candy realm is magnification, a neat little trick which took us quite some time to get the hang of, but which allowed us eventually to zoom lens anything which would ordinarily have been to small for the naked eye. So I zoomed in and got my first glimpse of a single Mugwot. It looked like one of those tiny little candy coloured spots called ‘hundreds and thousands’ - which one finds adorned upon cakes the world over - to which was attached a minuscule little pin-spike. Upon even closer inspection, the pin was encased in a little spring, which just goes to show that in nature, even hallucinations are marvellously complex.

We were of course delighted with our discoveries and with each new discovery, the more power the ‘discovered’ had within our perceptions, a phenomena we would later call ‘homing the intention’. Those little guys leap about in swarms, landing upon their spikes for a split second and then propelling themselves onward with their springs. If they needed to stick around, the pin would hold fast while the spring was held in high tension. What is interesting is that they were each different colours, each one in fact sporting a unique shade that on its own would have been insignificant but in the hundreds took on breathtaking shades and patterns. They could, for example, leap from one point and, while in mid-air, arrange themselves so that they landed in the shades of a butterflies wings. To borrow the parlance of the ‘faerie-realm’, we had detected the basic building blocks of ‘glamour’, the class of spells by which the illusionist can change his/her appearance for every occasion.

And indeed, we attained the ability to use glamour, once we had discovered how these little critters managed themselves. At first, it appeared as though they were completely self-organised. One had only to look at the co-ordinated beauty of their flight to think this. Soon we concluded that, as almost direct reflections of our own sweeping particles of thought, they could be managed through emotive intention. After that, endless hours were spent applying make-up to our faces, whole armies of these tiniest of Mugwots scrambling over our skin at lightning speeds, adding glorious colour and sparkle to our features. It was a fantastic four-dimensional thought game that cost only a few brain cells at a time to power a vast, animated theatre of the mind.

As a Mugwot-Maestro it is possible to write sentences on the wall, using generations of Mugwot bodies as your medium. This is almost certainly how God put the writing on the wall in that bible story. With intensive mind melding, we got the knack of writing messages to each other on the wall. For example, I remember once when Kevin was standing up against the wall playing the fool and suddenly this Mugwot graffiti sprayed the message: “Kevin is a moron...” or some similar taunt. We all erupted in gales of laughter, but when he spun around, the writing vanished. When he looked away again, we saw a huge arrow pointing at him and then repeating the message.

This is an important element when trying to control Mugwots and similar visuals. It is easy to think of them as being extensions of your mind that can be rigidly controlled, but when you work like that, they lose their colour and imagination. They are damned cute little things and have their own interesting natures and habits. I guess that means that there are undiscovered parts of our minds that should be handled and nurtured gently, allowing them to evolve naturally without enforcing narrow-minded, egotistical restrictions on them. The arrow pointing, for example - none of us thought of that and yet it came from us, came from a part of us that was sneaky and young and full of fun.

Putting all of this in order is kind of like trying to remember the seventeenth time you walked as a toddler and how that walk differed from the eighteenth time - Difficult at best. I guess the blades started because of the inevitable arrival of the other. The other is within all of our lives. As a race, it almost defines us. When humanity first looked out at the stars with the new toy called consciousness and said; “I am alive!” he must also have realised, “I am going to die!” It happened everywhere else in nature. It was the darkness that lay beyond the fire, the great moon that lorded over it, the realm to the other side of death - the unexplainable and the unseen. There dwelt the other, a creature of a billion names and faces.

Even today, I walk into my house to do a bit of cleaning - not my favourite activity - and I get halfway through and think to myself; “Well okay, I have done the lounge and the kitchen, so it’s okay if I lay off on the bedroom for a while, isn’t it?” Who the hell are we talking to when we make these moral deals with ourselves? Who are we talking to when we say; “I have given money to a beggar already today so I can ignore this other poor starving chap” or, even worse; “I have given a donation, so that will surely count in my favour!” We are talking to the other. Call it whatever your social pre-conditioning insists upon, but know that it is the same thing.

By this time, I was learning all the really neat trip-tricks or, as the spiritually correct would have it, learning to enter into ever more refined states of consciousness. After magnification came projection. This meant that I started to project my mind beyond the confines of the room, to reach out with my feelings. I had grown a little bored of the candy realm and I began to miss Jade, the emerald alien from beyond. I wanted to re-establish contact with her and I began to reach out, testing what lay beyond in an effort to rediscover that wonderful place within. As it turns out, what we thought of as a candy realm was in fact merely a band, one layer, like an onion skin, beginning with the material world at the core and progressing outward into ever more profound bands of being.

One must remember, before we continue, that this was not just idle speculation or philosophical dilly-dallying. We saw everything we discovered. As far as we were concerned, our ideas quite often shared a place on the seat next to us or in turn engulfed the room in super-lucid colour. I kept my outreach experiment more or less a secret until I could understand it better, although I suspected that Rene was deep in there too. In reaching out, let’s call it farsight; your hallucinations are more internal, more dreamy and indefinable. It’s hard to be objective about them. I was almost certain though that after much effort, I skirted the border of her realm, about as certain as I was that that border was also guarded. It was not a friendly experience. I retreated hastily back to the room but alas everything had changed. For one thing, a tunnel had opened to a really big place, populated by strange beings. For another, something came back with me.

One Saturday night, we all took a trip and gathered at my parents house. It was rather a special evening because we had discovered a wonderful new product called ‘Letra-Air’. Letra-Air is used by art students as an airbrush propellant and is a delightful cocktail of pure oxygen and carbon tetrachloride, which - when compared to ‘spray and cook’ - is like inhaling sparkling clean mineral water. One of our acquaintances had died on ‘spray and cook’, so we were feeling a bit nervous of the greasy yellow liquid anyway, especially as I had consumed about thirty cans of the stuff. As a group we went up to my room and started the trip.

Several new and interesting elements had been added to the whole experience. Ian had discovered a few interesting characters – by this time many of the entities had developed personalities of a sort - one of which was a crazy native boy called ‘The woodpecker man’ who sort of hung around and stole things. There was also a jungle man and a wolf guy and a wicked Rastafarian witchdoctor, a whole cast of animated characters in fact that could be gathered and pieced together from our memories and projected onto the substance of this elemental stuff called psycho-plasma. I had started at this time to write down and try to catalogue some of the beings and places and we named everything we saw. We were all also learning a brand new trick that we called 3D through.

Not counting my first transcendent experience, most of our trips had been like two-dimensional animated images on the wall. Farsight gave you a three dimensional image, but only in the same way a television picture is three dimensional and you couldn’t really watch those trips for the same reason you can very rarely watch dreams. With 3D through, the walls of the room started to become transparent and you could see things happening on the other side, sometimes like foreign places and sometimes like there was an actual room on the other side, with real dimensions, in which things happened. At this stage of our evolution, this type of visual was very murky and faded and not much of significance had been seen through the ‘glass wall’.

We were well into the trip when I got a feeling, the same sort of feeling you might get if you were walking through a bunny park surrounded by rabbits and then suddenly you found a rabbit violently slaughtered on the sidewalk and from behind you came a low, powerful growl. Something new had come into our lives. For a split second, I saw a figure flash through the darkness, garbed in black and trailing silver steel. Ian saw it at the same time and we looked at each other but kept quiet. Shortly after that, I noticed short steel claws piercing the thin skin of the wall into our dimension, appearing and disappearing quickly and silently. I got scared, inexplicably. Everything suddenly seemed very real. Much later, a similar incident occurred in the realm of wider dynasties and if I had known how very serious the situation was, I would have had a heart attack.

I noticed of a moment that everything had gone quiet, our animated friends the Mugwots silencing like crickets do when you leap out of the front door to try and catch one. All the little trips in every direction faded and became so much wallpaper. For a moment there was only darkness and then, right next to me, a voice spoke. It is difficult to describe what these sorts of voice sounds like, or rather, this sort of communication. Suffice to say that it is very fast and whispery and makes you feel like you have tiny little insects on the interior of your brain.

I could not really understand what was being said but I felt it was clearly a warning; to the effect that I was doing something I should not have been doing and I better butt out and bugger off quickly before I had my nervous system removed and dipped in lemon juice. I turned slowly, and there, right next to me, was a person. He was to the other side of the wall, a black-garbed figure, about my height and quite heavily set. I remember clearly him holding his hand out and I saw the most exotic looking system of interlocking steel blades extending from his fingers. Then he lowered his mask and I saw his eyes and upon his right cheek, a silver star. After that he vanished.

I knew then that I was on a new level. If I had possessed any more intelligence, I would have left right there and then. It occurred to me that normal people see the faint, whispery forms of ghosts and are either scared or touched for the rest of their lives. Here I was seeing something specific and exact and powerful and almost completely alien, a scene as powerful as something from ‘Nightmare on Elm street’. My only sanctity lay in the fact that I was extremely high on dangerous, mind-altering drugs. I have never however heard of any single person experiencing anything like I did then or in the months that followed. It was far too real.

Shortly after the assassin had disappeared, stranger things began to happen. The walls started to become very transparent, like faint misty sheets of silk separating us from eternity. I was in somewhat of a dilemma because I knew that to continue my vision with clarity I would have to continue inhaling my magic fluid, a prospect I was unsure about because I was truly frightened. Nevertheless, with the courage of all great explorers, I ventured on. What happened next is that I saw a pattern start to form on the wall, a criss-cross pattern like a trellis-gate, except that the bars were flat and sharp like intersecting swords. Within moments, I was in a cage of steel, my first vision of what I would later call a ‘boundary lattice’.

And yet, it did not feel like a cage, but rather like a gazebo in the centre of an ornamental garden, almost Japanese, a steel gazebo in a beautiful garden. Peering through the holes I could see a woman in the garden, quite a way off. It was Jade. And yet, this was no kitty-cat, but rather a royal princess and I was held in attendance. I don’t know how, but I knew what was going on. I understood - in a bewildering flash - that this room I inhabited was at an intersection between my plane of being and hers. The cage was there to protect me. I was somewhere where I should not have been, something my level of evolution should not have been able to attain. It was extremely dangerous.

From a distance, she spoke to me, into my mind. I understand how this works and it is something I wish I could explain, but what occurred is by definition beyond the parameters of language. Shall we say that emotions may be transferred in a manner more complex and specific than words? She told me that she was from a place very distant from where I was. The word distant is a perfect example of the inadequacy of language, while we’re on the subject. The level of reality upon which she existed could not be measured as a point that is distant from where we are, like the moon. It existed in a dimension that cannot be defined by our understanding of space and time and yet, as a relative word, distant is what she was. As far, I guess, as the other end of the universe.

The word she used to describe where she was: a place called Loreiciel. That was the first time I had ever heard a name, a specific label. We must remind ourselves of course that I was now staring at a wall, just to keep things in perspective. Within me however, a well of emotions had sprung up with such intensity that tears formed at the corners of my eyes and trickled slowly down my cheeks. It has occurred to me since that the reason we don’t remember our past lives is because we would miss everyone too much.

That is not to say that I believe in past lives necessarily, but just that remembering that last fateful day with our life-long partners might be a bit intrusive in our present real-world relationships. A vast ocean of memories, lost lives, lost loves, flooding our every waking moment with pain and joy. That’s how I felt right then. That lady was so special to me, I tell you. That was such an old story, in a place and time more intense and grand than this grey world of compromise into which I had been born.

She wasn’t very friendly. In that special way that people reserve for attacking people they really love because they don’t want them to get hurt. She said that she had been travelling around, more specifically on vacation when she had met me that first fateful night. She had had a short dalliance with me because she did not know where I was from or even what I was. For these spirits a whole other universe exists, replete with entertainment beyond our wildest imaginings. I was at least ten million years too young for her.

Now she had returned home to her father’s palace. She told me her real name. Princess Sildarien. Their language is made up of descriptive ideas. Sildarien means, literally, highest royal person of the people. In a sense, that is her title. Actual names, like we have, they do not possess. When they are not within contact, they might as well not know each other but when they come within space of each other, they know everything about each other.

But I stray. I had her soul signature, her scent; I suppose you could say, from that first fateful meeting. Because of that I had been able to track her down across the inter-astral depths, to her very own home plane. I was not supposed to do that, roughly for the same reasons than a microbe should not have amorous intentions with the president of America. She is one valuable, precious woman upon her plane. Not valuable like you or me. We die and are reborn like flies. Her pain would be the pain of an entire interstellar empire, her funeral attended by the Gods themselves. To court her would take ten thousand years. No person that is human could apply for the position. The guy with the star on his cheek. That was her brother, or rather, one of them. She looked at me once more, across the distance of the beautiful, royal garden, and told me to get lost, for the sake of my immortal soul. And then, my father walked into the room.

Hoo boy! If I could explain to you what it’s like to shift from a profoundly complex state of consciousness to normal reality in a flash, well, I would be lying. It can’t be done. In a split second I was dragged through the candy realm. The air in the room condensed until it was as thick as jelly, big lumps of dismembered colour and clumps of drowning Mugwots flailing madly through my unbalanced consciousness. Splatters of red and violet spat across his face, thousands of bits of shapes seeping through the floors as my heart slammed in my chest and adrenalin vomited through my system. I smiled, my lips like Plasticine smeared across my cheeks.

Of course I knew that I was at a disadvantage immediately because my eyes were huge! I’m not sure if my irises could be seen at all. He looked at me strangely, at all of us, with the sort of regard that anybody might feel if they walked into a room and five young boys froze in their every action, hands and feet quite literally hanging suspended in mid-air. We could not have looked guiltier if we had had an actual murder victim sitting on a dinner table between us. Questions like: How are you? immediately flooding to mind and quickly replaced by insistent reason trying to explain that you had just spent a whole dinner with this person and that they are quite likely to be just as well now as they were then. He must have been too sleepy to want to probe too deeply. Either that or he just walked out of the room and down the stairs backwards, unhaving this troubling experience until for him he simply didn’t see what he had seen. For me however, there was a deeper concern. My fabulous princess had vanished.

At about this point, things started to go downhill. There is a place called Hell, and I found it. It’s not far from here. Anyone can go there. It’s easy to get in, but tough as, well, hell to get out. I make light of this experience now and I guess in retrospect the whole concept and domain called hell is pretty stupid to an expanded consciousness. But again, if you don’t know that, it is very powerful and can completely control your life. Take humanity, for example.

It might be spoiling things a bit to explain how hell works before I share with you some of the experiences I had during my sojourn there but it is necessary I think to understand the purpose of the place. It has a lot to do with your attention. The validity of things like Astral planes and many lives and that sort of stuff is open to question but if they were real things and had real functions, hell too would have a function and it is this: It is designed to remove fear and guilt.

The two big ones, the great marketing coup that created the franchise revolution called religion. Hence the invention of hell in the first place. It would have saved time if the pontifical powers had told us literally what hell was about but I guess maybe they don’t know and have, like everyone, their own personal hells to deal with.

Hell is a band much like the candy band, which means that while you’re in it, it is a realm, an endless realm. It is not much further than the candy realm - possibly the next layer out - and is filled with a substance much like maple syrup, only thinner. This is the outer perimeter of the Aetheric plane of energies, the last refuge of the ordinary mind before the gulf of the abyss and the far shores of the Astral Heavens. You may know it from dreams. This psychic plasma reacts to emotions and forms the most frightful archetypal imagery. The more frightened you get, the more it reacts, like a demonic plasma coating your mind with super-glue ferocity. Once you’re in, you don’t leave until you’re clean, free of the instinctive control of fear, guilt and despair.

Around the time of the Water Tower meetings we had all independently developed an insatiable interest in the Occult and for my part at least it is a fascination that extended back to my earliest childhood. I guess it’s part of the same need to know about something or have some power that nobody else has so that when you are standing in front of the headmaster waiting for a hiding, you can still say to yourself; well I have the Arch demon Beelzebub on my side so you’re really a bit of a joke Mr so and so.

Our interest in demonology should not be confused with Satanism or any other of those other ludicrous myths. We were not seeking something that was inherently evil, although we did entertain the idea of sacrificing our cat for a while. It was just about forces that are unknowable and powerful, forces we wanted to see and have in our gang. In fact, we quite liked the idea of controlling them, of imprisoning them with sheer willpower. I remember especially trying to summon what is popularly termed a Succubbi. For those of you not in the know, a Succubbi is a very powerful female sexual demoness. Five boys and one gorgeous sexual demon under our control, you can just imagine the permutations.

As far as religious implications went - All I can say is that I dropped my Christian ethos shortly after my brain formed, just before I could walk. We played a bit with Ouije boards and ‘glassy glassy’. The latter I could never really take seriously of course because some guy would always move the glass and pretend that he hadn’t. At least two of us had a house poltergeist. Rene’s one was particularly virulent and would occasionally throw him about the room or eat the house. Point being, that hell was almost inevitable.

When you peer into the void, the void peers into you. The void is a big part of hell. If you can imagine hell as being a sphere with the centre of hell being in the middle, the void is the bit on the outside. In order to enter hell, you have to pass through the abyss. Taking into consideration that hell deals with all sorts of fear, the abyss is the first scary bit. Have you ever started falling in your dream and awoken with a start just before you strike the bottom? That’s what it feels like entering that place. It is the most horrible, sucking, falling, vertiginous experience. The whole world falls away under your feet and in every other direction. In a second, you are suspended in absolute -infinity.

What’s more, you cannot feel your body. In many cases, you cannot even feel your mind. It is all-permeating and interpenetrating. In fact, it feels very much like you have just died. When I first discovered this delightful place, I ventured in only tentatively. Fortunately, you don’t have to go into it full on to get the experience. You can use far-sight to just project your mind therein. The room starts to darken, your body starts to dissolve and you feel the sucking force dragging you down, down. Your stomach begins to spin and a feeling of inexplicable dread creeps through your body. And then it’s black and you’re falling, endlessly, through pitch. At this point, one generally screams and pulls out quickly, shaking and sweating. But you know the awful truth. You have peered into the void. It is with you, forever.

I started to get a little braver after a while, projecting my mind ever deeper. After a while, the void began to take on dimension, forming - to my perception - a grid above and below that narrowed to a vanishing point far off on the horizon. This is the beginning of hell proper and it is here - as you race over the grid toward an unreachable horizon - that all of these grotesque archetypes form, rushing in at you with all the worst shapes your mind can form. I reckon this part is child’s hell because it is filled with all the sorts of things that hide under cupboards and beds and form the meat of low-budget horror movies; All mouths and spit and scorpions eyes and spiders fangs, devouring into your consciousness with wet, screaming gulps of puerile fear.

It takes a while to get used to them but horror movies have never really freaked me out so eventually it just got irritating. Over several months, they began to thin out and look sheepish and eventually vanished. These are the things that you can summon if you’re into it but once you realise that they are just distorted reflections of your own separated consciousness, as are all aspects of the Aetheric Realm, you can save yourself some time and just imagine them.

Suddenly over these weeks, whole new modes of seeing were making themselves evident. By way of explanation:

3D Through – You can see right through the wall as if it is not there and another reality surrounds you in all of its precision, detail and accuracy. For example, you can suddenly stumble out of reality into a forest and watch a caravan of medieval tradesmen walking past on horseback. These visions are fast and very read-only.

3D Real – A completely real seeming object or person that suddenly enters the confines of the room. A famous example for all of us was when one week a steam train, complete with smell and sound, crashed through the floor of the room, it’s chimney smashing apart the floorboards as it rattled noisily along beneath us, in the ‘hidden’ train station that none of us even knew existed beneath the floor boards of the house.

3D Hologram – The most exciting discovery of all. It seemed that certain persons and powers somehow had the ability to project themselves in hologramatic form into our dimension and they could be perceived in a completely objective way. You could even touch their ‘surfaces’ as I would repeatedly discover. They could remain for longer times and you could follow a completely interactive experience with them.

Suddenly we were seriously interfacing with this new place we called the astral plane. It seemed to have organisation and structure. The last words of Jade had tried to turn me from my fascination with another level of reality but I was already beyond help. The planes that I desired to visit, the planes of light and make-believe, the planes of beautiful alien mathematics, would however temporarily depart, as if washing their hands of this suicidal infatuation we had developed with the unknowable.

During this time I entered the realm of madness, the outermost border and final defence of hell. Like hell, the folds of madness are many. Consider the state of mind experienced by a truly insane person. Now imagine downloading those states of mind instantly, but without obviously the context of a life lived within their minds. There are so many types of madness, so many different bad smells, each of them a state of feeling, seeing, relating, reasoning, each a distortion in the absence of the real.

Once, for an unimaginably long time, I wondered into a state where I existed in the present to such an extent that I could experience only the very tip of my consciousness. No memory, no language, no continuity, not even a sense of my own name. It created a feeling of permanent nausea. You would try to concentrate on anything, even a spot on the wall and then your thoughts would just sort of unravel and you couldn’t hold them together. The unravelling is what created the nausea. I cannot possibly explain to you how scary this was.

Another time I entered into a state where everything in reality suddenly achieved the same consistency. The consistency had a horrible textural relation to cream pudding. It felt that if I had to inch even a tiny bit in any direction, I would just smear, like different flavours of melted ice cream blending into each other. I could feel that throughout every fibre of my being and totally believed it. The result of it was a sort of cataleptic stupor in which I could not communicate, even to save myself, for fear that my lips would just dissolve into the otherness which was a part of me. It also created a feeling of sickness, of deep fear, in my solar plexus.

It was a scary time for all of us. We were the boys who wanted to scale the wall and then found ourselves prisoners on the other side of it. I guess in a sense hell continues, but it loses its infantile power and attacks higher complexes of ourselves. While we’re being a bit honest, I’ll admit that one particular neighbourhood of hell would prove to be the hardest and most horrifying challenge to myself. You may think of it as the domain of fractured sexual awareness.

Travelling through a plane that was far beyond my level of emotional maturity, a place where even the simplest complexes exploded into vast, mental tapestries of meaning and significance, my insecurities about my sexual nature ran riot. Right off the bat I got nailed by a Madonna complex. My insatiable – thin/pale – desire to please, created a scenario in which I knelt before a female image of purity and perfection; enter Jade.

As I travelled through hell however, the purity of this memory – this fair memory of a lost love that had departed to other realms – became fleetingly the image of the whore, who seemed to dog me always. In the absence of purity, corruption must exist. All that I did not wish to think about achieved its own life. I would see beautiful images becoming corrupted, wood becoming oil, beautiful chaste women taking on the guise of the whore. I may blame some of this on my mother, who was pure and sparing of affection, but that would make me a victim and not in fact the young hallucinogenius, he who rode the lake of his subconscious effortlessly and elegantly in an attempt to light the way for all mankind.

The result of this was that I became neurotic and obsessed with morality. My shadow self could of course not be suppressed for long in these compressed realms of consciousness and retaliated with all of its might. I saw some terrible things, sickening things, images which I could not describe, even for this truth and reconciliation commission. Forever more, that will stay with me, a little scar among scars in a sixteen-year-old mind. The hardest thing about escaping from that realm was not that I could not learn to ignore these images but that I felt so ashamed Jade might be watching me and judging me.

Could it be possible that before she had left she had promised to meet me at another time? Maybe she was wasting away somewhere, consumed with love for this far, foreign soul, this wonderful boy from his tiny dimension; and she could see me, striving forth and holding her flag high, proving to her family, to her brother who had tried to warn me on pain of death, that I was worthy of her hand. If only I had understood the energy and danger she had exposed herself to by reaching out to try and prevent exactly this delusion, using even fear in a final effort to save me.

But I would not let go and by a strange and grim ultra-dimensional union, I believed that she shared with me my every private thought, my strength and my light. And so I believed she saw the images of lust and indecency that bled away from me like a plague. My true nature revealed. It was a very difficult period. I was beginning to lose hope that she would ever return and in a continuously downward spiral of recriminations, I felt that she was deeply aware of this and disappointed in my lack of faith.