(If anyone's read my other stuff, I apologize. I just seem to have a bar-fixation these days. This is lighter satire of the fantasy genre as a whole)
Some Bars…
It had been a hard day for Jones the journalist, full of scoops that failed to materialize and the nail-biting fears of litigation that had held him chained to his desk, nursing a horrible hangover.
And now he was working it off, in his own sweet way. He had sworn at and then refused to tip the taxi driver, barged into an inoffensive woman and refused to apologize, and now he was walking down one of the many streets of the East End in the pouring rain, looking for somewhere to drown his sorrows – at least until closing time.
Through the driving rain, he saw a small neon sign outside an otherwise innocuous building.
BAR, it read, in pulsating green and orange that threatened to rupture his already swollen eyes. He couldn’t remember any bar here.
Oh well.
It was warm inside, and with the door shut all the noise of the wind and rain was totally muted, as if the bar had been in another, better world. He didn’t recognize anyone in it. Good. Crossing over to the bar, he ordered a double vodka. With the first gulp, everything seemed so much nicer.
Three drinks later, he had warmed up enough to wonder about his surroundings.
With a start he realised he had wandered somehow into a theme bar of sorts – Swords adorned the walls, and those waitresses who were wandering about seemed to have had purple makeup imposed on them by a cruel management. The barman, he could now see, did in fact have prosthetic horns.
“They’re good,” he observed to the stony-faced barman, motioning with a finger. The barman nodded and pushed another drink across.
Five minutes later, his hermetic cocoon of alcohol was broken by the opening of the door. Three men in suits came in, talking loudly. He frowned. On the other side of the door, it now appeared to be snowing. But he remembered the lamp-post, it was still there. Although – had it really had trees around it? Pines, in London?
Then the door slammed. The only reminder that it had ever been there was the three men, who crossed to the bar and ordered drinks at a pitch slightly louder than he would have liked.
They began to talk amongst themselves. Again their volume was inappropriate; he had no choice but to listen.
“Nasty place, that” the first observed, jabbing with a thumb towards the door.
“Yes,” the second agreed, “can’t move five yards without a clumsy Christian allegory hitting you between the eyeballs.”
The third nodded.
“And as for the people--! We used to be able to do business there, you know? Old woman ran the place, some stupid title like all of these banana republics. “Ice Queen” or something. Now the talking animals have control, and they’re all so unionized that you can’t make a profit for love nor money.”
“Yes, unions and talking animals – not a good combination.”
“Mmmm.”
They fell silent for a few minutes, while they drank. Jones took the opportunity to study his glass for the tell-tale powder stains of LSD or – God Forbid! – Rohypnol. Their conversation had made no sense at all.
They struck it up again:
“So, Sam, you still doing business in Middle Earth? I hear their metalworking rivals the Yanks?”
“Well, Joe, I would be, but the company I used got shut down.”
“No, really? They seemed to be going strong – Mordorcorp, was it? What happened?”
“Their top R&D bloke, guy named Sauron, came up with a new product range called The One Ring. Only trouble was they were mass-produced in Taiwan. He got done over by some elvish lawyers under the trade descriptions act.”
One of the others shook his head.
“Happens so often, doesn’t it…got any hot prospects, then?”
“As it happens, I don’t. I was going to start developing a rather hot property – multiverse, with magic and metal working. Only trouble was that it was the material opposite of that place”- he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder again – “You can’t move without someone catching you between the shoulder blades with some secularist logic. Some bloke called Pullman set it up.”
Jones blinked slowly, then with the utmost care he reached for his left hand with his right, and child-like he pinched it. No good. This was no dream.
“I liked it better when it was all mythology-derivative, George Macdonald and so on-“
Sam was shouted down by the third man.
“No, you can’t mean that. I remember. Everyone there conformed to Jungian archetypes. You couldn’t so much as pick up a pencil without a little bloke with glasses sniggering into his beard and whispering ‘phallus’ under his breath. D’you remember him?”
“Oh, Freud? How could I forget? He made our jobs hell for a while, but then those paternity suits ruined his credibility, and we didn’t see him any more.”
They drained their drinks and called for more.
“However, I have got some good news for you guys.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yup. Realist fantasy – our blue sky boys came up with it. You take an average 13-year old kid in real-life Britain, and you send him off to a wizard boarding school.”
“Sorry, Sam, just to check – wizard in the sense of I-went-to-private-school-and-so-know-the-appropriate-adjectives, or wizard as in magic.”
“That was below the belt. No stock options for you. Hah. Hah.”
They circled the idea like sharks.
“Surely there must be a catch. Some subtext?”
“No, nothing. Not even secularism. Just left out. It only operates on one level.”
“Strange. Who wrote it?”
“Same as normal. Some total randomer whom you’d never expect to be involved in the murky world we live in.”
They clinked glasses.
“What do you call it, then?”
“Harry P-”
Jones didn’t hear the last words, for he had already made a surge for the door, knocking aside the clientele as he lunged for the handle and propelled himself out into whatever lurked on the other side.
It was raining. He thanked heaven for small mercies.
.
.
.