Part Two: A Tall Tale, Well Told



LEINIGEN & THE LAMBETH TREASURE
A Twitter adventure told in portions of 140 characters or less.
Part Two: A Tall Tale, Well Told 

My teacup clattered. Phraxby winced. I apologised, gruffly, but instinct had been pricked. ‘The Guardian of the Lambeth Treasure?’ I asked.

‘The Guardian of the Lambeth Treasure,’ said Phraxby, replacing his spectacles on his nose. Outside, from the marshes, the groan came again.

‘Phraxby,’ I said. ‘Have you been at the Lavender Grey Oolong again?’ He blinked, owlishly. Alarmed, I’d put said potion on a higher shelf.

‘Not a bit of it, old chap,’ said Phraxby, with a smile. ‘That which you hear is the noise made by the Guardian of the Lambeth Treasure.’


 ‘Oh well,’ I thought. The poor fellow had obviously cracked. Too long in his study, with only carbonised woodlice in perspex for company.

'People tend to think it's the trains,' he said, 'groaning in and out of Waterloo.' I pshawed. It's a skill I have a learnt. 'Pshaw!' I said.



But the lad was not for turning. Pshawing my pshaw – and thus scoring double points, under Brockley rules – he did not moderate his gaze.

‘Shall I tell the story of the Lambeth Treasure?’ he asked. I sighed. Stories were for telling on lost whaleboats, to distract from hunger.

But he seemed bent on it. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the Lambeth Treasure.’ I poured a stiff measure of Clipstone’s, and Sam began.

‘Nobody knows what the Lambeth Treasure is or quite where it lies,’ said Sam. I snorted. He raised a schoolmasterly hand. ‘But it exists.’

‘There are clues in antiquarian texts. Medieval scripts; Roman scrolls found under the Guildhall. Renaissance and Enlightenment volumes…’



‘The Lambeth Treasure is a rich and wondrous resource, a great boon that will contribute to the advance and betterment of all mankind…’

‘… a source of wealth, whether temporal, or spiritual, or both. Some, such as Dr Ackroyd, say it may explain the origins of London herself.’

I interrupted. ‘Fascinating,’ I said. ‘But your Dr Ackroyds and co will blather for Britain if you let ’em. Tell me about this ‘Guardian’.’

‘Very well,’ Sam chuckled. ‘The Lambeth Treasure, we are told, is guarded. No one knows by whom, or rather by what. But guarded it is.’

‘The Guardian of the Lambeth Treasure lives, perforce, in proximity to the Treasure, somewhere under the streets of… well… Lambeth.’

Sam grinned. ‘And this Guardian is responsible,’ I said, ‘for’ – the baleful groan sounded outside – ‘this noise that disturbs our peace’?

‘Unless it is the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ said Sam, ‘bewailing his flock.’ He smiled. ‘No. That is the Guardian of the Lambeth Treasure.’



 I sat back and, ruminative, swirled the tea in my cup. It was a tall story. Too tall. But then, I was in need of diversion. ‘Go on,’ I said.

Sam went on. ‘The Lambeth Treasure lies somewhere in a maze of ancient tunnels beneath Lambeth Palace. And I know how to get down there.’

Leinigen may be an old dog, but old dogs’ senses prick at the hint of a chase. I prodded Sam, as they say in pulp tales, for ‘the juice’.

‘There is a house a little further down Hercules Road,’ he said, ‘in which once lived the poet, painter and visionary William Blake.’

Blake. I’d heard of the bird. Curious fellow. Wrote ‘Jerusalem’ while painting and envisioning and prancing about starkers in his garden.



‘In Blake’s house,’ Sam continued, ‘there is a portal to this magical realm, a door through which the Lambeth Labyrinth may be reached.’

‘Well then,’ I said. ‘We should take a shufti at this portal, no?’ Sam smiled nervously. ‘I could get you into the house,’ he said.

The word ‘but’ isn’t for me: it smells of caution and caveats that don’t figure when you’re in the lion’s maw. But… ‘But?’ I growled.

‘But I’m not sure I want to go into the tunnels.’ Sam coughed. ‘Have I outlined my theory of subterranean paleojurassic persistence?’

He had not. So he did. In short – necessarily so, here – Sam suspected the survival, deep below Lambeth, of certain prehistoric life forms.

Something to do with swamp gases from Lower and Upper Marsh and the flow of the Thames below the Albert Embankment. It seemed unlikely.




I told Sam as much, but in the spirit of the thing I put two and two together to make two hundred and fifty. ‘So you think the Guardian is…’

‘A survivor of the cretinophotovoltaic period of sub-Jurassic reptilian superdevelopment!’ Sam cried, before sinking back into his chair. 








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