The Bride Wore Black Leather

time . . . And it was such an exciting time to be alive . . . “I came here many times, with my original assistant and companion. A lovely young lady of great charm and enormous energies, what was known back then as a dolly bird. Her name was Juliet; she was an exotic dancer. My first friend and advisor, when I was still coming to terms with having left Victorian England for the Technicolor sixties. Juliet . . . kept me sane, in the face of so many changes, and a whole new world that often made no sense to me. A brave new world that had so many wonders and nightmares in it. Ah yes; all the adventures we had together . . . Solving mysteries, tracking down evildoers, exposing corruption and brutality and then doing something about it. There was a lot of that going on, in the sixties.”

“So what happened to her?” I said. “To Juliet?” I was fascinated; Julien doesn’t talk much about his early days in the Nightside.

“She left me,” he said, not looking at me. “When I gave up free-lance adventuring to work for the Night Times. It seemed the most obvious thing to do, to me, the next obvious step; I thought I could do more good that way. To put pressure on the Powers That Be, to bring about real and lasting change. But she didn’t see it that way.”

“You gave it all up to become the Man,” I said. “ Like me.”

“Because somebody has to do it,” said Julien. “And better us than someone else.”

“Exactly.”

He did look at me then. “Adventuring is when you do it for yourself. Crusading is when you do it for other people.”

“So what happened to Juliet after she left you?”

“Oh, she runs a night-club now, the Adamant. Very fashionable, I’m told. Very selective. I stay away. Because she’s got older, and I haven’t. It wouldn’t be fair, to keep reminding her . . . I think it’s better that we keep our happy memories.”

“Why don’t you grow old?” I said, pushing it since he was in a talkative mood. “Is it to do with the serum you created? The Anti-Hyde?”

He looked at me then and smiled briefly. “The Anti-Hyde? I suppose that’s as good a description as any. Dr. Jekyll created a serum to bring out all the evil in a man, release the beast within. I never did understand why anyone would want to do that. To wallow in the mud when they could fly with the angels. I created a serum to bring out the best in a man and tested it on myself. I suppose it worked. I can’t tell; I’m too close. But I do know I haven’t aged a day since I took it.”

“Are you immortal?” I said, the subject being much on my mind.

“Too soon to tell. I hope not. Most of the immortals I’ve encountered have been an utter waste of space.” He looked back at the hole in the ground. “I used to visit the Hawk’s Wind all the time, back in the sixties. But I rarely went back after it became a ghost. I kept bumping into Time-travellers, from the Past and the Future, and they always wanted to tell me things . . . I wonder if one of them was trying to tell me about this . . .”

“When the Bar disappeared tonight, there were still people inside.”

“Of course. A great many of them famous and important people, from the Past and the Present and a whole bunch of different futures. A few got out, but they’re still in shock. They don’t remember much. The English Assassin died, getting his sister to safety; but he’ll get over it. He always does. The point is, we have to get the Hawk’s Wind back, so we can rescue the people trapped inside, and return them to their proper places in Time. Because if we don’t . . . God alone knows how much damage that might do to the time-stream.”

“Do we have any names, for these famous and important people?” I said.

“Some. The Shimmer Twins; very big rock-and-roll stars. Zodiac the Mystical, from the eighties. Possibly a very-high adept, possibly a major con man. Either way, a Major Player in his day. Shame about what happened to him . . . The Amber Prince, and the Grey Fox. But most importantly . . . I’m in there, John. With Juliet. We Time- travelled here, from the sixties, following a case. I don’t remember the details . . .”

“But if you were in there, in your past, you must remember what happened to the Hawk’s Wind!” I said. “Where you were taken, how you were rescued!”

“No,” said Julien Advent. “It was all too traumatic. All I had was a gap in my memory. I didn’t remember any of this until the Bar disappeared today; then some of it started to come back. Most of it’s still gone. Temporal fugue.”

“I hate Time travel,” I said, feelingly.

“Well,” said Julien, “you do have more reason than most.”

“Why did you bring me here?” I said flatly. “What does the Bar’s disappearance have to do with the current major threat to the Nightside? Is the same person behind both events?”

“Yes,” said Julien. “He’s called the Sun King. And he has come a very long way, to reach this time, this place, this moment. He wants to bring the sun here, in a long-delayed dawn, and put an end to the longest night in the world. He wants to turn the Nightside into Sunnyside. No more shadows, no more shades of grey. He wants to bathe the Nightside in the harsh and unrelenting light of truth and justice. No more hiding places for old gods and lost monsters, for heroes and villains and those in between.”

“You’ve never approved of the way things are, in the Nightside,” I said carefully.

“No,” he said. “But I want to help and save the people here, not destroy them. The Nightside has it uses; it serves a purpose. It must be preserved.”

“Who is this Sun King?” I said. “I never heard of him.”

“Before your time,” said Julien Advent. “But he really was big, once upon a time. He was the real happening of the sixties. He was born out of the famous Summer of Love, in 1967. The herald of Man’s true evolution, and the mind’s true liberation. He believed we could all become more than human, become living gods and walk in glory forever. And he actually managed it. He stepped up and out of the human condition, and became the Sun King. Now he wants to bring back the Big Dream of the sixties, and put us all on the right path again. He believes we’ve lost our way, betrayed the Dream and ourselves. He’s come back to change the world, and he intends to make a start with the Nightside. No more night, no more shadows; Let the sun shine in . . .”

I looked at him sharply. “You know him; don’t you?”

“Oh, we all knew the Sun King, back in the Summer of Love,” said Julien Advent. “But yes, I knew him personally, back in the day. I knew him as just a man, before he burst out of his cocoon and became the Sun King. I left the Nightside to go travel the world and see how much it had changed, since my day, when Victoria was still on the Throne and the British Empire was the greatest the world had ever seen . . . So much had changed, and so much hadn’t, and the more I saw, the less I understood. In the summer of 1967, I went to San Francisco to wear some flowers in my hair. It made as much sense as anything else. These days, the word hippy has become an insult, but back then they were the bravest of the brave, determined to overthrow an unjust society without using violence. That was a revelation to me. My generation changed the world through brute force, with armies and opium and gunboat diplomacy. But these were a new kind of young people, gentle people with strong convictions, dedicated to non-violent action. Sticking flowers in the barrels of soldiers’ guns, knowing that some of those soldiers were quite prepared to shoot them. Standing up to be counted even though they knew someone would club them down. And the Sun King . . . was the very best of them.

“His real name was Harry Webb. No-one knew much about who or what he was before he came to America and made his way to San Francisco. Another young Englishman, walking across the USA, to see what there was to see. He found his way to Haight-Ashbury, and the counter-culture, and following the path of so many of the questing souls of those glorious days, he turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. We met when we crashed together in the same cheap boarding-house. I liked being among people who’d never heard of me, and we all sat and talked for hours about everything under the sun.

“So far, only another story of times past. But then one day, right at the height of the Summer of Love, Harry Webb went to the park and took what Timothy Leary would call an heroic dose of LSD. His mind expanded and exploded, and in that transcendental state . . . he made mental contact with Entities from Beyond.

“Now, a good many people said they did, while under the influence of the many and various mind-expanding chemicals of the day; but Harry really did. The Entities talked to him of many things, and he listened, and when he finally came down again, he wasn’t Harry Webb any more. He wasn’t human any more. He was transformed, he was transmogrified, he was the Sun King. The living god of LSD, the true Acid Sorcerer, the Miracle Man. Psychedelic rock and roll played around him wherever he went, manifesting out of nowhere—a glorious music that we could