This is another one from Slemen, and it is told in a very straightforward way, no made-up dialogue etc. I may as well try to copy it here:
Glass Onion
Regular readers of my books will know that the concept of time is not as straightforward as it seems. The grammar we use to express our everyday thoughts has past and future tenses, and we talk of hours, minutes, seconds and days, but as of yet, no one is able to define exactly what time is, and it would seem that under certain conditions, everyday folk have walked into the past, and future, in what are known as 'timeslips'.
A reader named Roy contacted me early in 2010 to tell me of something that has haunted him for around forty-five years. In 1965, Roy was a frequent visitor to the world-famous Cavern Club on Mathew Street, and followed most of the acts appearing there, such as The Hideaways, and a beautiful girl known as Tiffany, formerly of the Liverbirds, who fronted a band called the Dimensions.
One evening, Roy went to see Tiffany and the Dimensions, and afterwards, he foolishly swallowed a dark-green pill that he had been given by a friend at a local pub. Roy was told the pill was a 'purple heart', the nickname of a drug consisting of a powerful combination of amphetamines and barbiturates, known medically as drinamyl, but for all he knew, it could have been anything. Roy suffered a panic attack fifteen minutes after taking this pill, and shoved his way through the crowds at the Cavern to get out and above ground, but when he staggered out into Mathew Street, twenty-two-year-old Roy saw it was daytime, which did not make sense. He could see that the street was unmistakably Mathew Street, but it was now pedestrianised and futuristic, especially the arcade of shops he staggered into. Roy was quick to notice that women on this unreal sunny day were dressed in a way that he perceived as provocative, even tarty, and in this strange arcade of chrome, glass, plastic, steel and neon, he felt very unsteady on his feet.
A girl of about twenty, whom Roy described as "an absolutely beautiful young blonde lady, with flawless skin and peculiar but fetching clothes", came out of a boutique of some sort and asked him if he was okay. The name of that boutique was 'Glass Onion'. At this point in time, the term Glass Onion, the title of a song John Lennon and Paul McCartney would later write for the Beatles' 1968 'White Album', was obviously unheard of.
As the girl came nearer and took hold of Roy's arm, he noticed two odd things about her; she had what we would now call a piercing in her lip, and a tribal tattoo on her hand. In Roy's era, tattooed women were the stuff of circuses and only ears were pierced. "Where am I?" Roy asked, before everything around him "dissolved into grey shapes" and he felt the ultramodern girl's grip on his arm lessen and then fade away.
Next, Roy found himself slumped against a warehouse wall on a bleak rain-slicked Mathew Street back in 1965, surrounded by a lot of people, all looking down at him. He passed out and woke up in the Royal Hospital, Pembroke Place, where he was kept under observation for a while. Roy confided in his brother and his closest friend about the tattooed blonde and the arcade which looked like something out of a Dr Who episode. "It must have been the purple heart," was his brother's explanation.
Roy later moved out of Liverpool and married a Surrey girl. He returned to the city in the late 1990s and on visiting the city centre was curious to revisit Mathew Street, the site of his strange experience. He was truly shocked to come upon Cavern Walks, and immediately recognised it as the highly futuristic arcade he had somehow visited back in 1965, but he failed to find a boutique called Glass Onion. Perhaps such a boutique will open there one day, and if so, will a young Roy make his appearance there? (From Haunted Liverpool Casebook.)
Now that is a good question. If that boutique does make its appearance, it might be worthwhile for someone to ask the owners to have a CCTV covering the exterior view...
Yes, I had been assuming that the Cavern club was where it appears now, close to the shops. I'm not sure if it makes a great impact on the story, since we don't know how far the witness walked in his drugged state.