Part 1
The Time Traveller, Smith; Or The End Of London
“As you are aware, Miss Brown, I was once assistant to the Polish-Irish master clocksmith, György Conel, and it is through my association with that gentleman that I first found myself cast through time to the year Two Thousand and Eight….”
The drab cellar reeked with the musty sweetness of damp wood and smouldering poppy. Around the room several filthy and torn chaise-longues and a number of rickety, bent legged side tables were arranged in a hodge-podge manner. On some of the chaises there lounged heavy eyed and dishevelled gentlemen, their minds as scattered as the furniture was rotten, lazily preoccupied with the dreams of their foggy vice.
The room itself, like its furnishings and occupants, had seen better days. The ancient varnish on the wall panels was veined with cracks and flaked like encrusted blisters to a floor which may once have been carpeted, although I was not entirely convinced it was carpet that made the floor seem somewhat spongy beneath my feet.
Above the panels the walls rose, black with the decades’ stains of burnt poppy-tar, to a ceiling lost in darkness and the fug of purple-grey fumes lifting from the smokers’ long pipes. A single gas lamp on the far wall failed to throw its feeble light far through the haze. Somewhere a clock tick-tocked, its persistent ticking at odds with the languid exhalations of the rooms occupants; the occasional grumbled “Aha!”, a sigh or a moan.
That there were opium dens in the East End of London, even in the drug’s heyday in the last century, I had always assumed to be something of a modern myth. It was, therefore, entirely incongruous that I should find myself in such a place in the autumn of 1908.
I moved gingerly to one of the unoccupied chaises and perched, rather grudgingly, on as little of its forgotten coloured fabric as possible. The man who had spoken lolled on the seat opposite. His single eye, the left one, his right covered by a simple canvas patch, was puffy and heavy lidded, and the rest of his features seemed to droop loosely from his face, as if they could fall to the floor at any moment, joining the years of foul detritus already spread there.
It was impossible to tell from looking at him exactly how old the man was. Like many drug addicts he appeared prematurely aged. His shoulder length hair, which I knew, from a fairly recent photograph, to have been once dark, almost black, was shot through with sprays of wiry grey and his face, the collapsed frame to his errant features, once handsome and bold boned, was now fissured with dark and blotchy shadows. His hands were skeletal, the skin tight and scaly over prominent tendons, his fingers twisted into claws, visibly shaking as he held the pipe to his lips and drew in some more of the noxious smoke. I would have guessed him to be well advanced of middle age, but I knew this man to be not a day older than twenty-eight years of age.
“Mr Smith,” I said. “Perhaps you would like to tell me what happened on the day of the 21st of May of this year, 1908. The day Conel’s watch shop on Clerkenwell Road was mysteriously reduced to a pile of rubble and the day both Mr Conel and yourself seemed to vanish from the face of the Earth.”
“Ah,” he exclaimed vaguely, his voice a smoky rasp. “But that’s the thing, Miss Brown, don’t you see? I did not vanish from the face of the Earth, I merely vanished from this time.”
He looked absent-mindedly around the cellar room, his eye seeming to follow a moth as it fluttered through the haze. I followed his gaze for a moment before realising that whatever it was he was seeing was entirely in his own befuddled mind. I wondered what use he could be to me, his mind so obviously addled by the drug. But it had taken months to track the man down to this dreadful cellar and I was intent on finding some explanation as to the mysterious explosion in Clerkenwell, no matter how unreasonable, indeed fantastical, the man’s explanations turned out to be.
“Well, perhaps we should start there then, Mr Smith,” I said, rather sternly. “Perhaps you would like to tell me how it was you were, as you say, ‘cast through time’.”
The man’s gaze briefly found focus on me. His single eye widened, the dark bag beneath somewhat lighter, his features somehow more fixed to his face, his crooked half-smile almost youthful. There was that strength I had seen in the earlier photograph! I adjusted my veil nervously under that gaze.
“Thank you for humouring me, Miss Brown,” he said, gravely. “I do not ask that you believe me, merely that you listen to the tale I tell and make up your own mind as to its veracity. I do not understand fully how it was I came to be in the year Two Thousand and Eight, but I believe it had something to do with whatever old man Conel was engaged at in the cellar of his shop….”