Extracts from the personal diary of Rupert Giles, Watcher

Thursday, 4 January 2001

The flight to London from Los Angeles was tediously long and about as miserable as it was the last time I took it. Heathrow was its usual congested self; we were in a holding pattern for what felt like ages before they let us land. Once on the ground it went well. Jet engines, conveyor belts, computer displays showing current flight times, televisions, espresso bars: modern Heathrow, modern London, almost indistinguishable from LA. I had a jetlag-inspired moment of wondering if I'd travelled anywhere at all in those eleven hours. Perhaps someone had packed me into an aluminium sausage, fed me bad food, shown me a bad movie, then released me back into LAX. Then I heard the accents and relaxed. I was home.

My new policy of checking luggage as rarely as possible worked out. I was on the express to Paddington and then the Tube to my hotel in Bloomsbury in no time. In fact, getting to London was so smooth that I should have known it would all go pear-shaped in the worst way once I got there.

I thought about looking up Robson or Parkes, but decided I had no interest in it. Business was a better way to spend my visit. My aim was to take some papers into the Council building and begin abasing myself immediately. I also wanted to stop off at Pudge's and get a few items I was having a hard time acquiring Stateside. Maybe even make a business connection, set up some kind of understanding with the current proprietor. Who I think is still a Pudge, hundreds of years of business done in the same spot by the same family. Exactly the sort of thing one doesn't get in California, where if anything is more than 50 years old it's ancient and impels Buffy to twitch her nose. And I wanted to just be in the city that used to be home. So I took a bit of a side-trip into Soho, with my leather case slung over my shoulder. It was a brisk day, rainy, a nasty shock to my California-thinned blood, so I dressed warmly. That worked out well.

Some shockers, after four years away, welcome and unwelcome. The age, the clutter, the cigarette smoke, the pasty faces, the accents, the clothes. Who knew pinstriped jackets could look so foreign? California has begun to seep into me. Begun to feel like home. As I write, it feels more like home and more achingly distant than I would have believed possible. This afternoon, though, I was enjoying being in London again. Enjoying inhaling the smell of city, walking down the cramped little street with the cobblestone paving, picking my way up the creaking wooden stair up to the shop on the first floor. Pleasure overlaid the fear that sent me to London in the first place. Not to mention my building fit of nerves about my visit to the Council. They always manage to make me feel a complete berk five seconds into any encounter.

The first sign I had that things were going wrong was Ethan. I don't know what he was doing there in the shop. Or rather, I know why he said he was in the shop. He was also after the Thurible of Abyssinia that I need for the shop protection ritual. They had one. £100. Shockingly overpriced. I had begun to say so to Pudge when Ethan shoved his foul face between us and said he'd take it without quibbling over the price. I'd completely missed his arrival. He probably didn't want the damn thing, but we were going to quarrel over it anyway. He had some sharp words to say to me on the subject of the Initiative and the handcuffs they'd been putting on him last I saw him.

"You escaped immediately," I said.

"Of course," he said.

"I expected nothing less," I told him, and hoped he believed me.

He was still angry with me, and I with him. The chain of outrages goes so far back that neither of us remembers which started it. We had words with each other, louder than before, and the elderly Pudge behind the counter demanded that we leave. Can't blame him. I'd have thrown us out of the Magic Box. There we were on the pavement, glaring at each other. I was furious at the loss of my chance to set up any deals. I grabbed Ethan to have the usual satisfaction of beating his face in. Something about the sight of blood on his face makes me happy. Buffy says I have Ethan Issues, capital letters. Suppose she's right. I have even more Ethan Issues this evening. So I grabbed him, and shook him as if he were a rat, and something heavy fell out of his pocket. It was like a wand, only much thicker and with a knob at the end. I snatched it up, in case it was a weapon he could use against me. At the very least I could beat him over the head with it.

He saw it in my hands and cackled. "Have a nice trip, Ripper," he said, and then spoke a phrase in Latin, repeating it. I have been straining to recall the exact words. I was shouting at him as he spoke, so had trouble hearing. But I think it was I command time to bend, which in retrospect would make sense.

Something rushed around me, wind and color and noise. My head reeled, and I fell to the pavement. I thought at first Ethan had hit me with an offensive spell. In the next moment I knew that couldn't be the case. He was missing. Something was very wrong. I pushed myself to my knees. The ground was cold under my hands. Icy. Much colder than it had been moments before. The stench was amazing: smoke and horse dung. There was ice and filthy snow on the street. Same street, obviously Beak Street. By this time I'd stood up and looked around myself. The sounds were all different. No droning of motors; instead horses and wooden wheels and a boy crying out the afternoon news. The people were dressed like Victorians, in hats and long skirts. A man passing by stared at me as I clutched at a lamp-post to hold myself up. A gas lamp.

I knew at that moment the rough outline of what had happened, but I don't think it had quite sunk in. Denial, as Buffy would say.

I still had the artifact in my hands. I saw the door to Pudge's shop, looking much the same as it always had, maybe a bit more run-down than usual, and I fled into it. I burst into the shop waving the wand thing and demanding to know what Pudge knew about it.

Of course there was a Pudge behind the counter. Same pinched face and sharp nose as the great-great-grandchild Pudge who'd been serving me moments before. The Pudge looked at me as if I were a madman. I suppose I was. I calmed myself, using every bit of self-control the Watchers had beaten into me. I schooled my accent as far into Oxford as I could and drawled, hoping that was close enough to what the accent of the educated classes was at the time. I held it out to him, and asked if he'd seen it before. We bent our heads together and began discussing it. There was a crystal at the heart of the knob, which I hadn't noticed before. It was glowing, faintly. Now that I was calmer, I could feel the power in the thing. I told Pudge I suspected it moved its operator across dimensions, or possibly through time. He stiffened at that, and said he'd just had an enquiry about such artifacts. He nodded in the direction of a man on the other side of the shop, currently browsing the books. He looked like the sort of man one sees in productions of Dickens: greying muttonchops, flowing overcoat, top hat, stick.

Then I made my second mistake. I went over to the man, and politely asked him what he might know about the artifact in my hands. He turned to me, looked me up and down once, dismissing me, then his eyes fastened on the object in my hands.

"Ah. At last. You're late. Well, give it here, man!"

"What?"

"That artifact belongs to me," he said, in the most arrogant tones I've ever heard used to me. And I've heard Quentin in a temper.

"The hell it does," I told him.

He lashed at me with his walking stick. I blocked the blow reflexively. Have a nasty bruise across my forearm to show for it. He smashed at me again, this time with a word of Power, which knocked the artifact out of my hand. He grabbed it, knocked me down with another blast of magic, hit me in the solar plexus the old-fashioned way, with the stick, and ran.

Dreadful lapse on my part, and one I pray will not be one I forever regret.

When I could breathe again, I ran down to the street after him, but he had vanished. I went back into the shop and questioned Pudge about the man, but he would tell me nothing, not even when I pointed out that the man had just perpetrated robbery and assault under his very nose. I may have risen to delivering a threat. Not entirely sure; I was shaking with reaction by then. This Pudge then demonstrated the same lack of taste exhibited by his descendent, and threw me out of the shop. There I was on the pavement again, this time looking around myself in numb fear. I had no idea what to do next. I breathed until my head stopped spinning. With my overcoat buttoned, I hoped I didn't look too far off the norm. I was missing a hat, and everyone around me had one. I tried to guess the year, based on the clothing, and could come no closer than late Victorian. Then I came to my senses and walked over to the newscrier. 1886. 4 January. Exactly 115 years.

It was mid afternoon in London, in January, during the little ice age. The air was sharpening for snow, and the sky was darkening. I had a moment of desperation and hopelessness and yes, I'll confess it, blind panic. Then I realised that there were two avenues of attack for me. I set aside the Watchers for the moment, out of reflexive hatred, and chose the second as being a better bet. More likely to help me retrieve the artifact.

I set my feet into motion on the familiar yet unfamiliar streets, and made my way to Baker Street.