London Calling Box Set

Chapter 4: The Temperance Billiard Hall, 1920

Chapter 4: The Temperance Billiard Hall, 1920Archie had been the first real friend Lew had made since he got himself settled enough to start to build a life. They’d met in the Turkish baths at Bermondsey. Lew had been putting a toe in the water to find someone to hook up with—his vague grasp of the history of queer London had given him that much—and they had recognized each other as Border Workers. He wasn’t sure what Archie had been doing there—looking for s*x or someone to blackmail, or possibly both, perhaps. They’d reached a mutually satisfactory friendship, without the exchange of cash or threats, that included both casual s*x and discussion about working The Border. It wasn’t anything more than friends with benefits, but it suited them both. Once they had recognized they both had similar secrets, they’d settled into a comfortable and useful friendship, for Lew anyway. He wasn’t sure what Archie got out of it.

To start with, Lew had wandered around in a daze. He’d taken up McGovern’s offer of a job at the paper and for weeks he went from day to day automatically, without thinking about anything other than the immediate moment. Months, even. He occasionally had a rare moment of self-reflection and suspected he was like this partly because of the unexpected, enormous amount of Pulled energy the Working to find Mira had channeled through his body. A lot of the time, his head felt wobbly inside. He sometimes wondered if too much Pulling melted your brain and if it had happened to him. He was certainly careful not to do anything spectacular as he settled into his new life as Ellison ‘Lew’ Tyler. An old army nickname, that followed him into civilian life. He couldn’t answer to Ellison unless he was concentrating hard. Which he wasn’t, most of the time. Of course, that was the main thing making him dazed. He had shot back to a time nearly a hundred years before his own and he was like a fish out of water. He had a very vague grasp of the history of London—just enough to get him into trouble, he thought, wryly, sometimes—and being able to talk to Archie about it and use him as a sort of native guide was really helpful.

Archie was relatively blasé about his time-travelling situation. Despite his ability to Pull energy a little, he was pretty grounded in the here and now. Day to day survival was his priority, rather than listening to wild tales about the future. He had been happy to help Lew. Lew had thought he was probably just that sort of easy-going bloke—driven by chance and luck, good or bad.

* * * *

The Temperance Billiard Hall was quiet at this time of day and he easily made out Archie, sat at the bar with what looked like a cup of tea. “All right?” he asked, as he sat down beside him on one of the bar stools.

“Fine. I think I’ve found something.”

Lew ordered a pot of tea and tossed his cap down, leaning his elbows on the bar, foot on the brass rail. “What?”

“I found Kelly. He’s living with his daughter, up in Camden.” Archie had a nebulous network of contacts in various overlapping underworld webs, Workers, the denizens of various bathhouses and cottaging destinations, and gangsters. There were frequent and complicated intersections between them all and Lew had given up trying to keep track. “He remembered doing a Pull years ago—fifty years or more, he’s on in his seventies—to find someone. A child, I think he said, but that bit’s not the important thing. The important thing is he said it wasn’t all that complicated. It’s not the ritual so much as the intent behind it and the strength of the intent. He said that could explain both how you and your friend moved in time, too. Candles and bowls of water and all that bother are just underlining the need behind the Pull. He laughed when I told him she’d come across a book of spells—he said there was no such thing. It’s not the words. It’s the need.”

“So, this stuff we do, to repair The Border when it gets thin and things try to break through from the other side of it, that’s driven by need, too?”

“So, he said. He’s a nice old codger. He said if you wanted to go up and see him for yourself he’d be happy to chat. I don’t think he gets out much anymore. Any entertainment will do.” Archie grinned at him slightly.

Lew grinned back. “f**k you, mate. I’m a paragon of social niceties, me. People queue to have me visit them.”

Archie’s smile widened. “Kelly wanted to know if you’d told me anything about the future. I said he’d have to ask you himself.”

Lew felt his face fall. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. What if I tell people stuff and it changes what happened? I have no bloody idea what’s going on and whether this is something Workers have been doing easily for years or whether it’s a one-off.”

“Kelly said he’d never heard of it. He said he’d worked with a lot of really old, powerful coves back then, they used to track Creatures that had got through, all that malarkey. He’d never heard a peep of it before. He was interested in meeting you because of that, I think. He reckons you must be a really strong Worker to have done it. Or a Creature, of course.” Archie threw that in with a straight face. Lew double-took.

“What? A Creature? Me?”

“Yes. He thought he’d heard stories of Creatures coming through and looking human. Never met one himself. He said the ones he’d come across were all monster-looking. Claws and things. But he’d heard a story about one that looked human and fooled people for years. Workers even.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“I thought you might. He’s at home this afternoon.”