Lives of great men, they remind us/We may make our lives sublime;/And departing, leave behind us/Footprints in the sands of time1…. (1)
The small boat drifted lazily at anchor in the river Ankh. Its two occupants reclined lazily, fishing rods at rest, their lines trailing over the side and marked by bobbing coloured floats where they met the clear clean waters.
On the Rimward shore, the unbroken flat countryside was broken up only by the occasional wood, with a bigger, darker, forest in the distance stretching across the horizon in the direction of what one day would be Überwald. In the other direction, the first peaks of the Ramtops glittered a lazy blue-white, a long way away. There were two solidly built yurt-like structures on the shore, in a very Hublandish architectural style, with a wide courtyard defended by a semi-circular wooden palisade whose ends met the River. Otherwise, it was a warm and pleasant spring day. Time to be lazy. Just time to be. Time.
"I've got to hand it to you" said Newgate Ludd, relectively, listening to things scurrying and chittering in the catch-basket. "I'd never have thought somewhere like this existed in the city centre!"
"It's a good time to come to and chill out." Marco Soto agreed. You have to step back seventy million years to find it, though"
"It's a shame" Newgate reflected. This river doesn't deserve what's going to happen to it in seventy million years."
"Got to happen, though. The first humans set up a fishing village here. They think, river, flowing water. Great way of getting rid of our refuse. Takes it downriver to the sea. Problem solved! After that it's downhill all the way, and the river Ankh never really stands a chance."
There was a tug on Newgate's line. He reeled it in. Another of the angry claw-clicking things that looked like a cross between a cockroach and a lobster.
"Of course, we're a bit too early for fish to have evolved. I can project us forward by about thirty million years?" Marco offered.
"No need. Really." Newgate assured him, having tasted Trilobite Newberg at lunch, and having found it extraordinarily tasty, like smoked lobster.
He deftly dropped the trilobite into the catch net, and looked up.
"Soto…"
"Hmmm?"
There are what looks like a couple of hippopotamuses.."
"Hipopotami"
"Whatever. Just downstream. What's to stop them coming down the river and, I don't know, attacking the boat or something?"
"Watch"
Newgate watched. The two proto-hippos wallowed down river and got as far as the point where the innocuous-looking wooden palisade met the water. And disappeared.
"Now watch the other end of our little enclosure. Where the fence meets the water. " Marco Soto prompted him. "In about, ooh, three or four minutes, I'd say."
Newgate watched. Time elapsed. Then the hippos re-appeared, wallowing unconcernedly onwards in the flowing river.
"That's something else you do with Time, right?" he asked, interested.
"You got it! Those two animals weren't so much diverted in space as in time. From their point of view they were swimming down a river somewhere, and it was all one to them. The river might have been twenty years ago or two hundred in the future. And it might not even have been on this world. They just got re-directed in time and space for just long enough. Anything that blunders into the fence also finds itself bypassing our little base here. Otherwise, and you've seen the size of some of those things, we get stomped flat."
"Wonder where they went?"
The buffalo herder Anyoldweyo N'Kouth leaned stolidly on his assegai at the two extra hippos that had appeared from nowhere in the river. He wondered if he should see the witch doctor, but shrugged it off. Things have to come from somewhere, he thought, maybe this is how new hippos appear, to replace the ones taken by lions and hyenas and crocodiles. And this is the Serengeti, right? You expected to see hippos. Be an odd sort of veldt if you didn't. He lazily followed them as they swum down the river, then blinked as they winked out of existence again. Ghost hippos, then. Souls of the ancestors. Better start a cairn at the riverside…
"Search me" shrugged Soto. "Qu set it up when we established this temporal base. All I know is, any inconvenient large animals that get too close are humanely relocated somewhere else for the time it takes them to cross our space, then they return to this space and time at the opposite end of the barrier, more-or-less where they'd be if they'd walked straight through it. They're not harmed, we don't get dinosaur-shaped holes in the wall, and it seems to work OK."
"But surely the people in the other place where they appear and disappear are likely to see something odd? You said one of the mottos of the History Monks is to tread softly and leave no trace."
"Qu rigged it so they go to remote times where there aren't any people to notice, or else to remote places in the middle of nowhere, where the chance of a little temporal anomaly like this being spotted by anyone is pretty near a million-to-one…"
Marco Soto paused, contemplated his own words, and frowned.
"Well, not exactly a million to one, anyway. You know what I mean."
They fished on. Well, trilobited on.
"Any conclusions, kid? About joining us? For this to work it has to be of your own free will."
"I'm getting more interested all the time." Newgate Ludd admitted. "You used what you know to save my life when I was falling…"
"No, you saved yourself. That's why HQ wants you, back at the monastery."
"And now I'm getting the tour. But…."
He then saw what was barreling down the Ankh at some speed, coming upstream from the estuary. It was huge. It had fins. Big fins. Its neck stood up someway proud of the river surface. Its back appeared to undulate in a series of curves.
"What the Hell is that?" Newgate half-screamed.
Soto stretched, languidly, and inclined his head.
"Pleisiosaur, I think. Big one. Maybe sixty, seventy, feet and forty tons. Careful, kid, you're rocking the boat! Just watch…"
As the torrent of river-water with the huge beast somewhere in the middle closed level with the palisade, it vanished into thin air. The wake, with nothing left to make it, rushed on for a few moments and then ebbed to mere surface turbulence. The fishermen's boat rocked and bobbed in the sudden wave, then settled again.
"Foolproof" said Soto, complacently.
The Pictish chief Aengus Ógg wrapped his plaid around him against the cold wind blowing off the mountains and over the loch, and scowled horribly. This wasn't going according to plan at all. He looked over at his unwanted guests. The fact that they were guests complicated things enormously, as Highland law bound him by fearsome geása to provide hospitality for guests in his fiefdom. This meant he couldn't have them dragged out his halls and killed on the spot, as would have been his first instinct with Christian missionaries coming up from some cosy monastery in the soft south, aye, with their soft Southern names like Columba and Dunstan, aye, to spread foment among his people and take them away from the worship of the Old Gods.
And what was worse, even worse than the fact that even by easy-going Pictish standards they desperately needed a bath, was that people were listening to them. All that blether and hot air aboot the White Christ, who got himself killed by yon Romans, soft southern ponce that he was, to redeem our sins, whatever they were. What was wrong with the Morrigan, our raven goddess, She who delights in war and the honest taking of heids in battle?
Aengus scowled, through a mass of blue tattoos, at the dun-robed missionaries. He noted a great body of the People had followed them to the loch shore, eager to hear this… Godspell.
Well, it would have to be a mighty big spell to turn him, Aengus Ogg, from the old ways. And he thought he had just the thing to demonstrate these people were shilpit charlatans and nyaffs wi' nae power to their name.
Thank you, mither! Nani Ógg, witch and wise-woman of our people!
He watched the bobbing coracle, as his mother had directed. And then…
…the loch-monster suddenly appeared, a big beastie, breaking the waters of the Ness, and barreling towards the coracle. Its occupant never stood a chance. Bowled over by the creature's wake, and snapped up as a morsel by the huge long heid on the waving slender neck.
Aengus took his chance.
"Hey, you. Big Yin! Can your God pit the hems on yon? Can yez stick the heid on that? Dae somthin', in the name of yir Goad!"2 (2)
He will fail. Then I have him. And he's deider than a deid thing!
Columb, long, thin, monomaniac eyes glittering behind a mass of unkempt facial and head hair, stepped forward, raised his staff and screamed
In the most holy name of Jesus Christ, I command ye to go back to whence ye came! Come no further! And release unto us the body of our brother for clean Christian burial!"
A sluggish neuron must have fired in the brain of the creature, as its head turned to regard the crazy hairy primate, screaming monkey rage at it from the shore. It dropped the morsel, which it hadn't found appetizing anyway and had swept up by force of habit. Monkeys were off its diet from now on. And then… its world changed.
"You see? said Soto, as the massive creature re-appeared further down-river. "Impressive, isn't it?"
"I'd love to know where they disappear to." mused Newgate.
It had all gone wrong. Maybe this Christian God has the power after all, Aengus thought, as the people swept up and cheered the evil-smelling missionaries. Columb was already calling for volunteers for baptism and a queue was forming. For who would gainsay the word of a priest whose magic had slain the great loch-monster and forced it to give up it's prey?
Aengus half-heartedly forced the words out "Now revive him frae the deid, like yon Lazarus in your holy words. Really impress us. Gae on… dae a miracle, ye mug ye! " but nobody was listening.
He went to warn his mother. He knew the second thing Christians did when they controlled an area was to build a bonfire. The third thing was to round up suspected witches…
Nani Ogg caught her son a right ding alongside the heid for messing it up. Then, having no intention of burning, she summoned her favourite grand-daughter Geatha, said the Words, and crossed into a parallel dimension where she knew they'd find sanctuary. For the Eternal Ógg existed in more places than just Scotland….
"I know you might not want to have a thing about getting into religion too young and soon, and being seen as some sort of holy-book bashing freak. But we're not like that. We deal with what is, and we're not that much into prayer and ritual. Not at all, I'd say. And it all goes on at Qi Dong, our monastery in the Hubland. You'd get a good education there. Learn how to control and use what you've got."
Soto flicked another large trilobite into the keep net.
"That's it, though. It takes me out of the city. Everything I know is here. The Guild. My classmates." He paused. "Steffi."
"Ah. Lady friend? We're not a celibate order, if that's what worries you. Although the old hands say you kind of lose the urge after the first thousand years or so."
"We were both Guild foundlings. Grew up together. Trained together. Somehow it seemed natural for us to… but that girl is a thief! Ten times better than me."
"But unable to slice time."
"Here comes another of those pleisiosaur things… "
"Relax. Just watch."
"Ite misse est!"
The celebrants, grouped at intervals around the ceremonial unicursal hexagram drawn on the floor inside a magick circle, raised their arms and chanted
"Io! Panphage! Io! Pangenitur! Io! Io! IAO!"3 (3)
The Master of the ritual, sweat dripping down his broad cruel face from recent exertion, stepped back from the altar and bade Frater Janus to seal the Temple with the Lesser Banishing Rite of the Pentagram. His ceremonial robes swishing about him, he strode out onto his Oratory, overlooking the water of the Loch. (He saved particular sdistic ire for any untutored ones daring to refer to it as a patio)
At the age of twenty-four, Sir Aleistar Crowley, Laird of Boleskine Manor, is approaching the peak of his physical power. Observers notice a kind of cruel, powerful, grace and beauty to his carriage, and the most objective of them might applaud his prowess as explorer of remote regions and pioneer mountaineer. The over-consumption of class A drugs that will mar this beauty and physical health has begun, but has not yet noticeably slowed him nor diminished his stamina. Friends from the A*A* and the O.T.O. have gathered here, in this summer of 1899, to perform a Great Ritual to awaken the Elemental Spirit of the Waters and channel its energy. Crowley's penetrating eyes narrowed. Given the poor quality of the human material the Great Ones have seen fit to give him, he'd be lucky if he raised a blessed tadpole.
He did not turn as senior Fraters and a Soror came out to join him.
George Cecil Jones. A faithful friend and disciple and a stolid English yeoman. And that frightful Irish bore Yeats. Away with the fairies in some damnable Celtic twilight, looking for the magick in dying Hibernia and not where it really resides, in Egypt and Africa as it always did. Let him write his poetic twaddle by all means, but it irks when the critics claim it as greater than mine! Crowley's attitude softened for a second. And my current Great Whore, that avant-guard dancer, the Duncan woman. I put her to work in that Ritual, did I not!
Crowley chuckled at the memory, then remembered the true purpose was to bend the will of the magickal tourist, the rich English nobleman who wanted to "see something different". Well, he saw me tupping Duncan to raise the Cone of Power. But have I raised anything else….
"Look, Frater Perdurabo!"
Other members of the circle were spilling out onto the patio, with gasps of fear and terror.
The waters had suddenly thrashed. And there it was. The sea-dragon which was the embodiment of the Elemental Spirit of the Waters. Crowley seized the moment and raised his arms and voice in incantation. Inside, he exulted. He had performed true Magick! And he was sure of a massive cash sub from the Magickal Tourist, surely… he barely heard Isadora Duncan shrieking in terror as the thing drew nearer, turning its majestic head to regard the mere humans standing outside a human-nest.
It swam past, receded, and disappeared as quickly as it had arrived – surely no thing of this earth, although a bit drab. Crowley had been visualizing a multicolour scintillating jeweled entity, not a uniform drab slate-blue-grey. But the God chooseth what outer raiment it will…
In later years, alone in the boarding house in Hastings where he went to die, Crowley was to claim that he had created the Loch Ness Monster, he and nobody else…
"Here comes another of those pleisiosaur things… what's it doing?"
The creature was painfully dragging itself onto dry land, near the perimeter fence.
"Probably looking for somewhere to lay its eggs. Not near that fence, it won't!"
There was a flash, and it disappeared.
"Touching the fence activates he temporal displacement field. It'll do what it has to do and pop back later, but somewhere else." Soto rebaited his line and cast it, then settled down in the approved hands-behind-head "gone fishing" pose.
Dr Spicer steered the clumsy Austin Seven round the line of the coast-road, running alongside the placid Scottish loch. His wife sat at ease in the front passenger seat, and his children were chattering in a subdued but excited fashion in the back seat, as fitted well-brought up children of a professional middle-class parent. He was really looking forward to this holiday, and a week or two away from the clinic and his professional speciality. Gynaecology paid well, especially in private practice, but he'd be the first to admit it all got a bit repetitive after a while and the view tended to be monotonous. You also never got to see the patients at their best and most relaxed. He looked across to Dorothy, who was turning the camera over in her hands, speculatively.
"Might be best if we stopped, my dear. Film is expensive, and any pictures you take whilst on the move might be a little blurry."
Thus it was that uniquely in the history of Forteana and crytozoology, a paranormal manifestation happened right in front of somebody who already had a camera in her hand, with the lens cap off, a full load of film, and the quick wits to snap off several shots before….it…passed from view and disappeared into the black waters of the loch with barely a ripple. The London Daily Mail paid the Spicers handsomely for the photographs4 (4), and they were syndicated around the world, even though Dorothy's camera skills were still not of the best and the pictures were – understandably in the circumstances – slightly shaky and out of focus.
"Apart from us, who's ever going to believe that?" Dr Spicer mused, as his shaken and frightened family took stock of what they had just seen: namely a bulbous-bodied creature with massive finned limbs and a long, undulating, serpent-like neck, slithering out of the undergrowth and down into the waters of Loch Ness, barely forty feet away.
Dorothy set her jaw firmly in a very English just-you-try-and-intimidate-me sort of way, and took a final inexpert photo of the beaten-down and broken undergrowth left by the passage of the thing.
Life for the Spicers was never quite the same again…
And if they'd searched further, they'd have located a clutch of eggs not seen on Earth for seventy million years. But they didn't. Nobody thought to look.
The latest pleisiosaur reappeared on the far side of the encampment, and, relieved of its egg-load, took to the water again, having discharged its motherhood duties to the best of its abilities.
Newgate Ludd grinned. He was enjoying himself.
Two more pleisiosaurs came in swift succession. Each swam into the temporal barier, vanished, and re-appeared several hundred yards down river. Newgate Ludd lost his wariness of them – they were just another river creature now.
In early August 1933, a month or so after the sensational Spicer photographs, the Royal Caledonian Hospital in Inverness received a Mr Grant, with injuries sustained after losing control of his motorcycle on the Loch Ness Road. He was babbling something about a monster, with humped back and a long thin neck, which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the lake. This was put down to shock and stress.
And a fortnight later, a local farmer, a Mr Munro, reported spotting an aye weird beastie swimming in the loch. His description tallied with that of Grant and the Spicers, and a local historian reflected on the fact that the Great Beast, The Most Evil Man In The World, had owned Boleskine Manor at the turn of the century, and speculated on a confession. Given Crowley's propensity for backing up magickal curses with the legal rite of libel, he did not say this very loudly while the man still lived. But after his death in 1947, he approached the Reverend Doctor Omand, chief exorcist for the Anglican Church of Scotland, who took pride in exorcising both loch and Boleskine Manor (5) from a small boat (the current owners of the manor house would not let him in) . The Rev. Dr. Omand proudly pointed to the fact that there were no more manifestations in the loch during his lifetime as success. But after his death in the late 1970's, they started up again…
"Any conclusions, kid?" Soto asked.
Newgate grinned. He liked this laid-back history Monk with the sideways sense of humour.
"I'll do it. But I'm worried for Steffi."
"You can come back for her. There'll always be Time." Soto said.
"Besides, the abbot wants to give you to Lu-Tze."
"Lucy?"
"No. Listen. LU-Tze. Tz. You are privileged, kid. The old man doesn't take many novices. But the abbot thinks he'll take you like a shot. Me., I think that's good. You're learning from the best and it gives the old man something interesting to do. When you're variably eighty, eight hundred and eight thousand years old, finding something new and different to occupy your mind with can be a problem."
Newgate looked puzzled, but didn't ask.
"Plesiosaur." he said. Neither of them gave more than a cursory glance.
"Sixth one today. Must be something in the water." Soto remarked.
The Master-At-Arms stomped in ahead of the prisoner and escort, and threw up a textbook salute.
The prisoner looked tiny and woebegone in between the two hard-eyed Regulating Petty Officers, but still managed a salute and an attention. In accordance with his arm of service, he saluted with the open palm and not the horizontal.
The three officers behind the desk, two Royal Navy and one Royal Air Force, nodded acknowledgement. The Rear-Admiral heading the tribunal sat up straighter, and dismissed the escort.
"Wait in the corridor, gentlemen. This is Top Secret."
He waited until the three NCO's had left, and kindly said
"We should be more informal, Observer. Please take a seat."
The prisoner gratefully sat, and the Royal Air Force group captain, drafted in to see fair play to an RAF person who was necessarily under Navy detention, asked:
"You are Leading Observer George Farrell, of His Majesty's Royal Observer Corps. As such, you come under Royal Air Force operational command, so I expect you're wondering why you're under Royal Navy detention? No complaints? Food and cell alright? Good. Let's begin." He nodded to the stenographer, who crossed her legs and began writing.
"14th September, 1943. Court of Inquiry into reports lodged by the aforesaid Observer Farrell whilst on duty on the shores of Loch Ness, Invernessshire. Rated Top Secret. Got that? Smashing."
The admiral fixed Farrell, a middle-aged conscript rated unfit for regular overseas service, with a kindly eye.
"I deeply regret having had to arrest you and place you in custody, Farrell, as you're most likely an innocent in all this, but your report was alarming and raised concerns about security leaks. I hope to be able to release you with a clean service record – this will not be held against you – but there are very big things at stake here, that could affect conduct of the entire naval war. Now, in your own time. Please tell me what you saw?"
Farrell explained, hesitantly, that on the very early morning in question, he had been manning an observation post on the shores of the loch, close to the empty and rather sinister-looking Boleskine Manor, at map reference….
The Admiral and the Board listened intently. They knew Royal Observer Corps people were recruited and trained to do one thing to a pitch of excellence – to observe and record. Therefore this report could safely be rated ultra-reliable.
"So what did you think you saw?" the Commander of Naval Intelligence asked, kindly.
Farrell's face creased in honest perplexity.
"That's just the thing, sir. It was very early morning, the light was poor, and I couldn't make out if it were some immense animal or something man-made. But a bit small, for a submarine, even if there was something that might have been a conning tower and a periscope. From the way it abruptly disappeared I would conclude it was more likely to have been a miniature submarine, submerging.."
Admiral Ridculleigh nodded.
"Well, you're free to go" he said. On behalf of the Royal Navy, may I extend our sincerest apologies for your having been our… guest… for the last three days? I'll see it doesn't go on your record, and I suppose we owe you some sort of apology. Can't tell you everything, of course, but we are using the Scottish lochs to test advanced weaponry that may contribute to shortenin' the war. What complicates things is that the world leaders in this particular technology were not us, unfortunately, but the damned Italians. When Mussolini was deposed earlier this year, we and the Americans had a magnificent chance to get in there and grab the whole country. Winston was all for it, but the bloody Yanks were too cautious and while they were ditherin', the Germans took over the entire bloody country from under our noses, and grabbed this advanced Eyetie technology for their own Navy.
"Chances are that what you saw was one of ours gone astray on a navigation exercise, but we can't rule out Jerry having launched one from a mother U-boat standin' offshore in the North Sea. That's why your report set off all the alarm bells and we pulled you in.
"And these weapons remain absolutely top-secret, Farrell. Not a word to anyone about what you saw. Got it? Look…" the Admiral fumbled in a pocket. "There's a fiver for your inconvenience. Have a drink on me. Least we can do. Now off you go with the Group Captain, there's a good chap".
The two Navy officers waited till the door closed, then the Commander asked:
"There were all kinds of strange stories about Loch Ness in the Thirties, sir. Do you really believe it was one of ours?"
The Navy Intelligence commander was a sparely-built saturnine dark-haired man, who liked Intelligence work as an intellectual exercise, and had joined the Navy purely because it was the only arm of service that let him keep his neat little goatee beard.
"Ye gods, no" Admiral Ridculleigh said. "Ness is too far south of our midget subs' training areas. It was either Jerry trying out one of his booty Eyetie submarines – and you know how deadly those were in Alex last year – or else it was this damned lake monster thing. What do you think, Havelock?"
"A repetition of what happened in Alex, in one of our home ports, wouldn't just be bad for morale." he said, thoughtfully. "For one thing, we're not exactly flush with battleships, and for another, we need all our naval assets for the big push into France scheduled for next summer. Think of Scapa Flow in thirty-nine. (6) If Jerry gets into the henhouse with a fox again, we could end up kissing D-Day a fond goodbye. And if the sunken ships are American ones that we've assured Brother Yank we can defend in British ports… well, bad for the Grand Alliance".
Havelock Herriot had been a veterinary surgeon before enlisting in the Navy. He had exactly the right sort of analytical, forensic, mind needed for intelligence work. Rght now, he pushed his advantage.
"It seems to me, sir, that a lot could be gained by going public on this one. We talk to sympathetic newspapers, we remind them it's the tenth anniversary of the original Spicer sighting at Loch Ness and the monster's been seen again. We produce Farrell and prime him with a story, and the papers get an exclusive. Of course, those papers also go out to neutral countries, and as usual Jerry intelligence hoovers them up. If Admiral Canaris gets the idea we've written it off as a sighting of an imaginary monster by an exciteable airman, then we've bluffed Jerry into sending their midget sub in again, to carry on infiltrating our home waters. But this time, we have a flotilla of fast torpedo boats waiting for it, primed with depth-charges, ready to sink it with extreme prejudice. We take a prisoner or two, and we have divers on standby to retrieve the wreck. We could make a killing here."
"Havelock, you have an extraordinarily devious mind. I like it." the Admiral said, approvingly. "Right, let's do it your way. Fool Jerry and get him with the old double-cross."
The latest plesiosaur, unaware of depth-charges nor of the idea of becoming collateral damage in a naval war, reappeared in the distance.
Newgate Ludd sat up in the boat. He nodded.
"OK, you've got me. I'll do it. Where do I sign up?"
"I'll get you to HQ after we've had tea, kid. Welcome to the Men in Saffron. The pay's lousy, but the perks are out of this world. Now unship those oars and get us back to shore."
Soto watched contentedly as the boy started sculling them back to the beach, which in seventy million years time was destined to be the waterfront of Ankh-Morpork. Unaware of the terrible fate Time and Destiny had in store for it, the crystal-clear waters of the River Ankh gurgled and flowed on to the Circle Sea….
(1) Lines used by space-rock band Hawkwind in the song Assault And Battery on The Human Anatomy. I'm assuming these are borrowed from somewhere, as their poetic quality doesn't quite sit next to the following lyrics On these stones, the Sacred Circle/Where the wizard sages sat/Let us try to remember/All the times where they were at….. ref. LPLevitation (1979)
(2)OK, so it's all getting a bit Feegle here… but this bit deliberately mirrors a Billy Connolly sketch called The Crucifixion, in which Christ's mission takes place not in Galilee but in Gallowgate, Glasgow…. Thought obscene and blasphemous by many, Connolly portrays an unforgettable Glaswegian Christ
(3) IO – IO – IAO! The invocation to the God and Goddess used in ritual Magick and some forms of Wicca. And you thought the Police track Regatta de Blanc was just nonsense syllables, did you… listen again. Sting also does this chant at the end of the single "Every Little thing She Does is Magic(k)", which on the surface is about his baby daughter… but every woman is a Goddess, however young…
(4) As this was Summer 1933, the Daily Mail printed the Loch Ness Monster exclusive right next to an approving article on the great things Herr Hitler was achieving as Chancellor of Germany, contrasting this unfavourably with the wishy-washy policies of a socialist government in London, while wishing for the same firm hand (and jackboot) of sensible Leadership to be applied in Great Britain. Which would really show those damned Socialists, Liberals and Jews where to get off! The only thing that stopped the Mail from being a pro-Nazi, pro German newspaper was the outbreak of war in September 1939, and a little hint to owner and editor that supporting the enemy in wartime gets you rather more than a slapped wrist.
(5) Boleskine Manor was bought by Led Zeppelin guitarist and alleged Satanist Jimmy Page in 1971. Page may also have been, allegedly, a follower of Crowley. The fact he bought the Master's old house is telling. It had sat largely empty after Crowley vacated it, and the few buyers had never been able to stay in it for very long before selling it on, often at a ruinous loss.
(6) British battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk in its home port by a determined German U-boat that evaded local defences and pressed home an attack from right in the middle of what the British considered to be extremely safe waters. The battleship HMS Barham was sunk in Alexandria harbour, Egypt, in mid-1942 by Italian naval commandos operating from high-tech miniature submarines. In 1943, with preperations well in hand for D-Day in 1944, the British were right to be worried about attacks on shipping in British harbours. The Royal Navy's own fleet of midget subs were training up in Scottish lochs at the time, and were first deployed in an assault on the German battleship Tirpitz later in the year. Tirpitz wasn't sunk, but crippled so badly she never left port again.
Author's note
This fanfic was partially born out of research for a coming story in the "Good Omens" continuum, in which the demon Anthony Crowley has to enter an Unholy Pact with his human but arguably more evil namesake Aleistar. When I read the bits about Crowley and Loch Ness.... well, hold me back. It also fills a narrative gap in Thief of Time and remains absolutely faithful to the known canon. Newgate "Lobsang" Ludd's girlfriend Steffi is briefly referenced in Thief of Time as a very minor one-shot character. I've tried to flesh her out a bit in other stories.