The Bride Wore Black Leather

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