In the Nightside, that sour secret hidden heart of London, it’s always three o’clock in the morning and the dawn never comes. Streets full of sin and cellars full of suffering, magic in the air and mystery around every corner; hot neon, hotter music, and the hottest scenes anywhere. Good and bad and everything in between. Dreams come true in the Nightside, especially the bad ones. Everything’s available, for the right price. So shop till you drop, dance till you bleed, and party like Judgement Day will never come.

I’m John Taylor, private eye. I have a gift for finding things, and people. I won’t promise you justice, or revenge, or your heart’s desire. But I will find the truth for you, every damned bit of it.

Welcome to the Nightside. Watch your back. Or someone will steal it.

You don’t go to Strangefellows for the good company. You don’t go to the oldest bar in the world for open-mike contests, trivia quizzes, or theme nights. And certainly not for happy hour. You don’t go there for the food, which is awful, or the atmosphere, which is worse. You go to Strangefellows to drink and brood and plan your revenges on an uncaring world. And you go there because no-one else will have you. The oldest bar in the world has few rules and fewer standards, except perhaps for Mind your own damned business.

I was sitting in a booth at the back of the bar that particular night, with my business partner and love, Suzie Shooter. I was nursing a glass of wormwood brandy, and Suzie was drinking Bombay Gin straight from the bottle. We were winding down, after a case that hadn’t gone well for anyone. We didn’t talk. We don’t, much; we don’t feel the need. We’re easy in each other’s company.

My long white trench coat was standing to attention beside our table. I’ve always believed in having a coat that can look after itself. People gave it plenty of room, especially after I happened to mention that I hadn’t fed it recently. The trench coat is my one real affectation; I think a private eye should look the part. And while people are distracted by the cliché, they tend not to notice me running rings around them. I’m tall, dark, and handsome enough from a distance, and no matter how bad things get, I never do divorce work.

Suzie Shooter, also known as Shotgun Suzie, was wearing her usual black motorcycle leathers, complete with steel studs and chains and two bandoliers of bullets crossing over her impressive chest. She has long blonde hair, a striking face with a strong bone structure, and the coldest blue gaze you’ll ever see. My very own black leather Valkyrie. She’s a bounty hunter, in case you hadn’t guessed.

We were young, we were in love, and we’d just killed a whole bunch of people. It happens.

Strangefellows was full that night... the night he came to the Nightside. We thought it was just another night, and the joint was jumping. Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” was pumping out of hidden speakers, and thirteen members of the Tribe of Gay Barbarians were line-dancing to it, complete with sheathed broadswords, fringed leather chaps, and tall ostrich-feather head-dresses. Two wizened Asian conjurers in long, sweeping robes had set their tiny pet dragons to fighting, and already a crowd had gathered to place bets. (Though I had heard rumours that only the dragons were real; the conjurers were merely illusions generated by the tiny dragons so they could get around in public without being bothered.) Half a dozen female ghouls, out on a hen night, were getting happily loud and rowdy over a bottle of Mother’s Ruination and demanding another bucket of lady-fingers. It probably helps to be a ghoul if you’re going to eat the bar snacks at Strangefellows. And a young man was weeping into his beer because he’d given his heart to his one true love, and she’d put it in a bottle and sold it to a sorcerer in return for a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

In a more private part of the bar, a small gathering of soft ghosts were flickering in and out around a table that wasn’t always there. Soft ghosts—the hazy images of men and women who’d travelled too far from their home worlds and lost their way. Now they drifted through the dimensions, from world to world and reality to reality, trying desperately to find their way home, fading a little more with every failure. A lot of them find their way to Strangefellows, and stop off for a brief rest. Alex Morrisey keeps the memories of old wines stored in Klein bottles, just for them. Though what they pay him with is beyond me. The soft ghosts clustered together, whispering the names of lands and heroes and histories that no-one else had ever heard of and comforting each other as best they could.

Alex Morrisey is the owner and main bartender of Strangefellows, last of a long line of miserable bastards. He always wears black, right down to designer shades and a snazzy black beret pushed well back on his head to hide his spreading bald spot, because, he says, anything else would be hypocritical. Alex wakes up every evening pissed off at the entire world, and his mood only gets worse as the night wears on. He has a gift for short-changing people, doesn’t wash the glasses nearly often enough, and mixes the worst martinis in the world. Wise men avoid his special offers.

Strangefellows attracts a varied crowd, even for the Nightside, and Alex has to be able to cater to all kinds of trade, with everything from Shoggoth’s Old and Very Peculiar, Angel’s Urine (not a trade name, unfortunately), and Delerium Treebeard (taste that chlorophyll!). Alex will never say where he obtained some of the rarer items on his shelves, but I knew for a fact he had contacts in other dimensions and realities, including a whole bunch of disreputable alchemists, tomb-robbers, and Time-travellers.

I poured myself another glass of the wormwood brandy, and Suzie tossed aside her empty gin bottle and reached for another. Both our hands were steady, despite everything we’d been through earlier. A Springheel Jack meme had entered the Nightside through a Timeslip, sneaking in from an alternate Victorian England. The meme had spread unnaturally quickly, infecting and transforming the minds of everyone it came into contact with. Soon there were hundreds of Springheel Jacks, raging through the streets, cutting a bloody path through unsuspecting revellers. Every bounty hunter in the Nightside got the call, and I went along with Suzie, to keep her company.

We killed the Jacks as fast as they manifested, but the meme spread faster than we could stamp it out. Bounty hunters filled the Nightside streets with the sound of gunfire, and bodies piled up while blood ran thickly in the gutters. We couldn’t save any of them. The meme had completely overwritten their personalities. In the end I had to use my gift to find the source of the infection, the Timeslip itself. I put in a call to the Temporal Engineers, they shut it down, and that was finally that. Except for all the bodies lying in the streets. The ones the Springheel Jacks killed, and the ones we killed. Sometimes you can’t save everyone. Sometimes all you can do . . . is kill a whole bunch of people.

Business as usual, in the Nightside.

There was a sudden drop in the noise level as someone new entered the bar. People actually stopped what they were doing to follow the progress of the new arrival as he strode majestically through the packed bar. In a place noted for its eccentrics, extreme characters, and downright lunatics, he still stood out.

A tall and slender figure, with a gleaming black face and an air of aristocratic disdain, he wore a bright yellow frock coat over a powder-blue jerkin and green-and-white-striped trousers. Calfskin boots and white satin gloves completed the ensemble. He didn’t look like he belonged in Strangefellows, but then, I would have been hard-pressed to name anywhere he might have looked at home. He stalked arrogantly through the speechless crowd, and they let him pass untouched, awed by the presence of so much fashion in one person. He was too weird even for us; an exotic butterfly in a dark place. And, of course, he was heading straight for my table.