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Authors: Simon R. Green
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started out as a swinging café and social watering hole for all the brightest lights of the 1960s. Everyone who was anyone made the scene at the Hawk’s Wind, to plot and deal and spread the latest gossip. It was wild and fabulous, and almost too influential for its own good. It burned down in 1970, possibly self-immolation in protest at the splitting up of the Beatles, but it was too loved and revered to stay dead for long. It came back as a ghost, the spirit of a building haunting its own location. People’s belief keeps it real and solid, and these days it serves as a repository for all that was best of the sixties.
You can get brands of drink and food and music that haven’t existed for forty years in the rest of the world at the Hawk’s Wind Bar & Grille, and famous people from the sixties are always dropping in, through various forms of Time travel, and other less straightforward means. It’s not for everyone, but then, what is?
I pushed open the Hindu latticed front door and led the way in. Bettie gasped and oohed at the psychedelic patterns on the walls, the rococo Day-Glo neon signs, and the Pop Art posters of Jimi, Che, and Timothy Leary. The air was thick with the scents of jasmine, joss sticks, and what used to be called jazz cigarettes. A complicated steel contraption hissed loudly in one corner as it pumped out several different colours of steam and dispensed brands of coffee with enough caffeine to blow the top of your head clean off. Hawk’s Wind coffee could wake the dead, or at least keep them dancing for hours. I sat Bettie down at one of the Formica-covered tables and lowered myself cautiously onto the rickety plastic chair.
Revolving coloured lights made pretty patterns across walls daubed in swirls of primary colours, while a juke-box the size of a Tardis pumped out one groovy hit after another, currently the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There.” Which has always sounded just a bit sinister to me, for a love song. All around us sat famous faces from the Past, Present, and Futures, most there to just dig the scene. Bettie swivelled back and forth in her chair, trying to take it all in at once.
“Don’t stare,” I said. “People will think you’re a reporter.”
“But this is so amazing!” said Bettie, all but bouncing up and down in her chair. “I’ve never been here before. Heard about it, of course, but…people like me never get to come to places like this. We only get to write about them. Didn’t I hear this place had been destroyed?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Several times. But it always comes back. You can’t keep a good ghost down, not when so many people believe in it.”
The juke-box’s music changed to Manfred Mann’s “Ha! Ha! Said the Clown.” Go-Go girls, wearing only handfuls of glued-on sequins, danced wildly in golden cages suspended from the ceiling. At a nearby table, a collection of secret agents exchanged passwords and cheerful tall tales, while playing ostentatiously casual one-upmanship with their latest gadgets—pens and shoes that were communication devices, watches that held strangling wires and lasers, umbrellas that were also sword-sticks. One agent actually blinked on and off as he demonstrated his invisibility bracelet. Not far away, the Travelling Doctor, the Strange Doctor, and the Druid Doctor were deep in conference. Presumably some Cosmic Maguffin had gone missing again. And there were the King and Queen of America, smiling and waving, as they passed through.
A tall and splendid waitress dressed in a collection of pink plastic straps and thigh-high white plastic boots strode over to our table to take our order. Her impressive bust bore a name badge with the initials EV. She leaned forward over the table, the better to show off her amazing cleavage.
“Save it for the tourists, Phred,” I said kindly. “What are you doing working here? The monster-hunting business gone slack?”
She shrugged prettily. “You know how it is,
You can get brands of drink and food and music that haven’t existed for forty years in the rest of the world at the Hawk’s Wind Bar & Grille, and famous people from the sixties are always dropping in, through various forms of Time travel, and other less straightforward means. It’s not for everyone, but then, what is?
I pushed open the Hindu latticed front door and led the way in. Bettie gasped and oohed at the psychedelic patterns on the walls, the rococo Day-Glo neon signs, and the Pop Art posters of Jimi, Che, and Timothy Leary. The air was thick with the scents of jasmine, joss sticks, and what used to be called jazz cigarettes. A complicated steel contraption hissed loudly in one corner as it pumped out several different colours of steam and dispensed brands of coffee with enough caffeine to blow the top of your head clean off. Hawk’s Wind coffee could wake the dead, or at least keep them dancing for hours. I sat Bettie down at one of the Formica-covered tables and lowered myself cautiously onto the rickety plastic chair.
Revolving coloured lights made pretty patterns across walls daubed in swirls of primary colours, while a juke-box the size of a Tardis pumped out one groovy hit after another, currently the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There.” Which has always sounded just a bit sinister to me, for a love song. All around us sat famous faces from the Past, Present, and Futures, most there to just dig the scene. Bettie swivelled back and forth in her chair, trying to take it all in at once.
“Don’t stare,” I said. “People will think you’re a reporter.”
“But this is so amazing!” said Bettie, all but bouncing up and down in her chair. “I’ve never been here before. Heard about it, of course, but…people like me never get to come to places like this. We only get to write about them. Didn’t I hear this place had been destroyed?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Several times. But it always comes back. You can’t keep a good ghost down, not when so many people believe in it.”
The juke-box’s music changed to Manfred Mann’s “Ha! Ha! Said the Clown.” Go-Go girls, wearing only handfuls of glued-on sequins, danced wildly in golden cages suspended from the ceiling. At a nearby table, a collection of secret agents exchanged passwords and cheerful tall tales, while playing ostentatiously casual one-upmanship with their latest gadgets—pens and shoes that were communication devices, watches that held strangling wires and lasers, umbrellas that were also sword-sticks. One agent actually blinked on and off as he demonstrated his invisibility bracelet. Not far away, the Travelling Doctor, the Strange Doctor, and the Druid Doctor were deep in conference. Presumably some Cosmic Maguffin had gone missing again. And there were the King and Queen of America, smiling and waving, as they passed through.
A tall and splendid waitress dressed in a collection of pink plastic straps and thigh-high white plastic boots strode over to our table to take our order. Her impressive bust bore a name badge with the initials EV. She leaned forward over the table, the better to show off her amazing cleavage.
“Save it for the tourists, Phred,” I said kindly. “What are you doing working here? The monster-hunting business gone slack?”
She shrugged prettily. “You know how it is,
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