by James Palmer (jerp36@hermes.cam.ac.uk)
Dirk Allen writes -
"From my various crazed ramblings over the years, I guess that most of you good honest folks out there must have picked up the idea that I actively go looking for the occult, the kinky, the kooky, the depraved, and the weird. Now back in my younger days, when I still had a liver and was occasionally able to persuade girls to sleep with me without the inducement of those little green slips of paper (though that ability seems to have come back in my old age; you'd be surprised at the number of women out there who want to sleep with a famous writer/magician/cranky screwed up drunk bastard), this was probably true. I used to be like one of those dumb kids in horror movies who always runs *towards* the scream. Deranged Mexican Cult Murders Six, Wears Kilts? I was there. University Library Haunted by Vicious Tree Ghosts? Sign me up, baby.
But now, unless there's a chance that I'll get younger or richer from it, I try to stay away from that kind of shit. No, really. I'm still seeing skeptical faces in the audience here. OK, let me explain to you why it keeps finding me anyway. Problem is, once you've waded around in this kind of sewage, it kinda sticks, and other people can smell it. So can the Great Bastards in the Sky, and you end up just wandering into all kinds of trouble purely by accident.
This is the only explanation for why, out of all the bars in the world, I had to walk into that one. It was coming on eleven'o'clock, and I was waltzing my merry way back from visiting an old acquaintance, when I realized I was dangerously close to being sober - and I was staying in the kind of neighborhood where I really didn't want to be sober this late at night. I didn't really know where I was, but I saw a flashing neon sign that said "Bill's Bar" and tripped across the street to the promise of booze.
The bar was underground, and looked pretty palatable - not that I would have minded, I had a serious, gut-wrenching need for alcohol by this point. Now, I should have turned and run as soon as the identical twins came up the stairs. There they were, all talking happily together, four pairs, boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl, with only four faces between the lot of them. But I figured, hell, double the fun, must be some kind of society, and wandered down the stairs regardless.
Just in front of me as I entered were a pair of young men, both good-looking and fully aware of it, the little swine. I overheard a snippet of conversation between them, something about the one asking the other whether he was certain Rose would be here tonight, and his friend chastising him 'cause it was dangerous to be here. Then the first one stopped dead in front of me, staring starstruck at one of the tables. I followed his gaze to see an extraordinary beautiful young girl, about fifteen, and then averted my eyes. I don't trust myself around pretty girls any more.
I stepped past the little lovelost freak and walked up to the bar. This place was surprisingly full of good-looking girls; on one table I passed there was a little pale girl, kinda Italian-looking, with long black hair, holding hands with a big ugly black guy in an army uniform, staring into each other's eyes and looking gooey. Little shivers went down my spine as I looked at them; I didn't know why, but sometimes I can sniff the future like it's a fifteen-year malt, and I smelled the familiar scents of murder and betrayal as soon as I saw them.
Fuck it, I thought, and went over to try and ease what was by now a crippling hot thirst. The bar was right in the centre of the place, and there was only one barman, which was definitely weird for somewhere this busy. He was an odd-looking fellow, balding, with a bad mustache and a knowing look in his eye. His face was - unique. You know how sometimes there only seems to be a certain number of faces in the world? No matter where you are, Hong Kong, Austin, Melbourne, Vienna, always the same people, no matter what the context. Well, this barman had a face that was, somehow, like no other I'd ever seen. At the same time, it was naggingly familiar, in a "Didn't I sleep with you sometime?" way, no, more than that, in an "ex-wife" way, like this was someone I knew intimately.
He'd turned away to serve a tall, thin depressed looking student-type, wearing black and carrying some kind of dull-as-dust philosophy text - I could tell from the cover, even without seeing the name, they have an air of tedium about them which a practiced eye can spot at fifty paces. I perched on a bar stool and regarded my fellow customers with my oh-so-experienced writer's eye.
In one of the bar's many booths a street type was working up his fellows. I love today's young.
"Now, if any of you are too chickenshit for this, you leave now, y'understand? But if you're in this with me, you stay, and we fight. They've had control of here for too long, huh? We're gonna waste their fucking asses, and people'll going to be talking about this for years round here. I tell you, we don't just run together, we're brothers. All of us. We're all brothers. Don't matter where you're from or who you are, you stand by me today, you're my fucking brother. Get me?"
Round the other side of the bar from me there was one of those big, fat barflies that are always so jolly and cheerful, and that I hate with the kind of intense passion I normally reserve for members of the Republican party, teetotalers, and caravan owners. When I drink, I want to be alone and bitter, damn it, not regaled with jolly good humour by some "Norm!" type. He didn't seem to be coming over to cheer my grim visage with a witty crack, thank God, as he'd already gathered a little coterie around his obese self. There was one preppy guy, far too well-dressed to be hanging with these types normally, who seemed specially devoted to the bastard.
The barman finally got round to me. I thrust out my little paper cup and a fistful of bills. "Scotch," I muttered. He looked at me straight, his sharp eyes looking through mine and creeping up to my mind. "Sure," he said, and turned away again. I looked around once more, noticing for the first time the three old woman, huddled in a corner, with a burly bearded man talking to them in hushed tones. Something clicked.
The barman turned back and handed me the paper cup. "Thanks," I said, and downed it in one, then placed it back on the counter. Dragging up my college days, I intoned mournfully "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," adding "Vodka, preferably." He grinned. "Why," he answered, "So can I, or so can any man," grabbing a bottle of Smirnoff and filling my cup again. We chorused the last part together "But will they come when you do call for them?"
"Bill, right?" I asked curiously.
"Yep," he answered.
"Better known as William, perhaps?"
"As you like it, my friend."
"Last name begins with S?"
"That'd be right, yes."
I stared into my cup, hoping for a moment of clarity to straighten this strange shit out. Nothing came, so I looked up again at the face so familiar from my old copy of the Complete Works. I tried to think of something suitably witty and great-master-of-the-occultish, but failed and blurted out "You're dead, aren't you?"
"But not forgotten." He smiled in a strangely charming fashion. I decided to play the situation by ear, and sod how he got here. Ghost, Avatar, or drunken hallucination, it's all the same to me.
"I always thought you were Francis Bacon."
"Outdated nineteenth century elitist bollocks," he answered, "Some people couldn't cope with a lower middle-class Great Author."
"Heh ... I'm from a broken home myself. So," I waved my hand, "All this. All this. These people are very familiar. Did you do this?"
"Do what?"
"All these people. All your stories. Did you draw these people into them?"
"The stories are always there, Dirk. Always. I only wrote them down. You just happen to be seeing particularly sharply tonight."
I didn't ask how he knew my name. I've got used to it. It's a trick these exalted types always pull - back when I was young I can't count the number of times I came out of some casual meeting and then pulled up short going "But I never told him my name!" Gets old after a while.
Bill had turned away to serve a distraught young woman. I saw an old white-bearded man, with that God the Father patriarchal look, and two other women who were clearly her sisters, clustered close together, the two sisters embracing their father affectionately. A passage from Borges rose in my mind, and I knew there was more to this than just the apparition of WS. He came back, doing a little tap-and-dance routine on the way, and whistling Cole Porter.
I traced spirals in the dust of the bartop, then looked straight at Bill. "Š And amongst the forms in my dream are you, my Shakespeare, who like myself is everything and nothing," I said, questioningly. His smile dropped, and he put his thin arms on the bartop, propping up his narrow chin with his hands.
"Il Comte de Saint-Germain," I muttered, just loud enough for him to hear.
"Well done." He kept staring at me.
"Why the - disguise? Why him?"
"I am him."
"Were you always -" I coughed, harshly, phlegm wrenching my throat - "Were you always him?"
He nodded.
I resorted to the plaintive cry of the unknowing victim. "But why?"
He stood up and pulled down a bottle of damn fine looking wine, pouring a glass, refilling mine, and looking as though he was about to make a toast.
"All the world's a stage," he declaimed, "And all the men and women merely players." Then he fixed me with that gimlet stare again.
"Even me, Mr. Allen, even me. I just wanted somebody else to know what it was like ... to see all the stories, but to never *be* anyone yourself. Why do you think my name was 'Will?'"
I can't remember anything after that, except a rousing chorus of "America," from West Side Story. I woke up face down in a gutter - nothing new, I get surprised if I wake up in a bed nowadays - and went home with a hangover and a bad case of Fear.
I should end this by saying that I went back there the next day, and "Bill's" had gone, or I couldn't find it, or something along those fairy-tale lines. But that wouldn't be true, and the Truth is all that matters in the end. I know exactly where it is, I even found it in the phone book, I know where the Comte de Saint-Germain, AKA William Shakespeare, pours beer every night. I could go back any time. There are some things even I don't want to know about, and the private angst of the Comte is one of those. I'm just too scared too, when it comes down to it, a frightened old angler on a lake of darkness. Because if I went back there, it would be acknowledging that I was just another of his characters, in the end, one more story.
And I prefer to write, not to be written."