I always screen my calls (after an unfortunate incident with a dead ex-girl-friend), and I relaxed slightly as I discovered the caller was Alex Morrisey. The owner and bartender of the oldest bar in the world, Strangefellows, Alex was one of the few people in the Nightside entitled to call me at any time. We were friends, sort of, which got him points for courage if nothing else. And since he'd never called me before in his life, I decided I'd better take the call. At first there was only silence at the other end, then a faint whispering of sound that might have been a wind blowing, far away. I said Alex's name twice, and when he finally spoke his voice sounded harsh, strained, under pressure.

"John. You have to come to Strangefellows. You have to come right now. It's urgent."

"Alex? What's the matter? You sound really rough. Are you okay?"

"I can't keep him out! The whole bar is reverting! The Past is breaking in everywhere! It feels like dying. .."

The phone went dead, buzzing uselessly in my ear. I shut it down and put it away. I hate being interrupted in the middle of a case, but Alex sounded like he was in real trouble, and the bar itself was under threat. I had to do something. I'm very fond of that bar. Of course, the odds favoured it being some kind of trap, with Alex as the bait. All my best interests were screaming at me, and you don't tend to survive long in the Nightside without developing instincts you can trust. Walker might have had Bad Penny transported to the bar, to lie in wait for me. It was the kind of thing he'd do. So, when in doubt, depend on the element of surprise. Getting all the way across the Nightside to Strangefellows would take quite some time, whatever method I chose, more than enough time for my putative enemy to set up all kinds of booby-traps and nasty surprises. But with a little lateral thinking I could be there in moments, and maybe catch my enemy with their pants down.

A certain image of Bad Penny filled my mind, but I pushed it firmly aside.

I reached into another coat pocket and took out my special Club Membership Card. It was very special; Alex only had five made, to my knowledge. I tapped it thoughtfully against my chin, considering. They might be expecting me to use the Card ... or relying on me thinking that, so as to avoid me using it... but that way madness lies. Concentrate on the matter at hand. The Card was simple embossed pasteboard, a rich cream in colour, bearing the name of the bar in dark Gothic script, and beneath that the words you are here, in bloodred lettering. All I had to do was press my thumbprint against the scarlet lettering, and the magic stored in the Card would immediately transport me right into the bar. Zero travelling time, and the added advantage of bypassing the watched front door. (They couldn't know about the Card. Hardly anybody knew about the Card.) In the end, all that mattered was that Alex needed my help. So I pressed my thumb down firmly, and the Card activated.

It leapt out of my hand, so fast it practically burned my fingertips, and hung on the air in front of me, shimmering with unearthly light and throbbing with stored energies. Alex always believed in putting out for the full package.

The Card suddenly grew to the size of a door, and I pushed it open and walked through. And as quickly as that I was standing in Strangefellows bar. The door slammed shut behind me, and the Card was just a card in my hand again.

I glanced quickly about me, braced for any kind of trouble or attack, ready for anything except what I saw. The bar was deserted, and transformed. The low fog of early mornings covered the floor from wall to wall, grey as a shroud, swirling slowly. The air was bitterly cold, and my breath steamed before me. I could barely feel the floor beneath my feet, as though it was far away in some other distance or dimension. A wind was blowing heavily outside the bar, beating against the walls. It surged and roared, and there were voices in it. Not human voices. I'd heard this kind of wind before, announcing the breakthrough of a Timeslip, one of those brief glimpses of past or future. When the Time Winds blew, even the greatest Powers shuddered and looked to their defences. Their arrival was always a bad sign. A sign that Time was currently out of joint.

The bar was utterly empty. Not a customer anywhere. The bar only closes when Alex is off duty, and if he had been off duty, the Card wouldn't have admitted me. But here I was, alone in a room I barely recognised. The bar itself, that long slab of polished mahogany at the rear of the room, was gone, along with all the booze and accumulated trophies that were usually piled up behind it. In its place was a huge screaming face, made out of wicker. It looked big enough to burn people alive in. The expression on the green wicker face was one of horror. I shuddered suddenly, and it had nothing to do with the cold. On the phone, Alex had said the bar was reverting .. . Could this be an earlier version of the oldest bar and drinking house in the world?

I moved slowly forward, the ground fog tugging at my legs. Everywhere I looked there were overturned tables and chairs, sticking up like dark islands in the grey mists. Whatever customers were present when all this started must have left in a hurry. I had a pretty good idea why. The biggest clue to what was going on stood in the middle of the bar, dominating the room, and I stopped to study it from a cautious distance. A huge oak tree stood tall and firm, its trunk wide and gnarled, looking as though it had always been there, though I had never seen it before. Thick roots plunged down into the floor, and presumably on down into the cellars. Heavy branches thrust up through the high ceiling. There were no leaves, but the bar's two bouncers, Lucy and Betty Coltrane, had been strung up on the tree trunk, held in place by thick strands of ivy and mistletoe. They'd been battered unconscious, the blood still drying on their bruised faces. They were large, muscular women, with warrior's hearts; they would have gone down fighting. I reached out to tug at the ivy, to try and free them, and the thick strands stirred threateningly. I withdrew my hand, and they grew still again. I swore dispassionately. I knew what had happened here. Who had to be behind this.

"All right, Merlin," I said. "Show yourself." A pentacle flared into life on the floor, right in front of the screaming wicker face, forming line by line, glowing with the blue-white glare you sometimes see in lightning strikes over graveyards. There was a growing tension on the air, as that old enchanter Merlin, Architect of Camelot, the Devil's only begotten Son, Merlin Satanspawn himself, rose unhurriedly up through the pentacle to stand before me, with his familiar cold and arrogant smile. Merlin had been dead for centuries, his body buried in the cellars under the bar not long after the fall of Logres; but being dead didn't necessarily stop you from being a major player in the Nightside. Merlin was dead, but very definitely not departed.

An awful lot of what Alex had said on the phone made sense now. All the changes in the bar were artifacts of Merlin's time, and the man himself could only manifest by possessing, or rather pushing aside, Alex Morrisey, latest in a very long line of owner/bartenders bound to Strangefel-lows by a geas almost as old as the bar itself. Merlin rarely appeared in person these days, to everyone's relief, and when he did, it meant bad news for everyone.

Merlin ran one hand caressingly over the screaming wicker face, perhaps savouring old memories, then he turned the full force of his attention on me. He was tall and wiry and utterly naked, his corpse-pale skin decorated from throat to toe with unpleasant Celtic and Druidic tattoos. Beneath the curling signs of power, his dead flesh was blotchy and discoloured with rot and the various stages of decay. Even Merlin's awful will couldn't fully hold back the ravages of Time. His long grey hair fell down past his bony shoulders in thick convoluted knots, packed and stuffed with clay. His heavy brow supported a crown of mistletoe, unhealthily green and red with poisonous berries. His face was long and heavy-boned, ugly with character, and two flickering fires burned in his empty eye-sockets. (They say he has his father's eyes.) And in the middle of his chest the old, old wound that had never healed, still showing broken bone and ruptured muscle, where the heart had been torn right out of him.