The River of No Return

things that weren’t there, stopped even noticing what remained. He allowed himself to be entirely in the twenty-first-century present, appreciating London for what it now was, not what it had once been. Sometimes a proud blue plaque informed him of where an important person of his generation had lived, but the news of their sober achievements didn’t tend to match up with Nick’s personal library of information. Nick smiled to himself, reading that William Lamb, that cuckold and spanker of chambermaids, had apparently gone on to become prime minister in 1834. For a giddy moment Nick imagined himself texting Lamb across the ages: “omg! u r pm!” And receiving one back: “1834 rocks!”
    He wandered northward, pleased with himself and with the world. The London of his time had petered out just about here, into open fields and pretty villages. How delightful to have missed the decades across which the countryside was desecrated by adipose Victorian sprawl. Now all that smug, ruddy architecture was venerably antique and crumbling. Nick thought with wicked pleasure of the two or three British generations that had followed his own, and for whom he had developed an antipathy since jumping to the future. They were all pushing up daisies in Highgate Cemetery now. Nick straightened his cuffs and lengthened his stride. He was in the mood for a long walk; maybe he’d go and visit them. Then have a pint in a pub somewhere, and totter home to Alice and Arkady in time for tea. He began to sing under his breath: “‘Here I am one and still will be, who spends his days in pleasure! My tailor’s bill is seldom filled; he’s never took my measure!’”
    But when he reached Euston Road, he hit a wall.
    It was a wall of fear, and it strangled Nick’s little song in his throat. He could look across the streaming traffic to the pagoda roofs of the British Library easily enough. But his heart was slamming against his ribs, and panic seized his limbs. He gasped for air and stumbled backward. As he did so, the fear dissipated, like mist.
    He looked over his shoulder and there was Mibbs, a few yards back, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He looked as gormless as a Belisha beacon.
    But he didn’t have his glasses on.
    Nick twisted abruptly to face Euston again. He breathed in and out, forcing himself to a sort of electrified calm. As the light changed, he stepped forward.
    And was slammed with terror, exactly like before.
    Staggering back, he watched as a few pedestrians crossed over to the library, leaving him behind. They looked happy enough, with their computer bags slung over their arms. Academics, off to spend the day nose-deep in books about the past.
    It was Mibbs, of course, holding him back with those terrible eyes. Nick wasn’t leading him a merry chase through London. This wasn’t A Hard Day’s Night . Mibbs was the master here. Nick simply hadn’t realized that he was the one on a leash.
    He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced casually over his shoulder. No glasses. Right. Nick turned smartly, following Euston Road instead of crossing it. He kept his gait the same, looked around him with the same interest as before, but every sense was focused now on the man behind him.
    So. The Guild could control him through thought manipulation. Leo had described it all those years ago in Chile. Nick felt as if the back of his head had been taken off and a probe stuck into his gray matter.
    Nick tested his theory of the invisible cage by trying to cross Euston Road again at the next light. St. Pancras Station was right there, like a gothic House Beautiful. If Nick could only get to it, he might climb on a train to France. Run away. He nursed that feeling, feeding it images of good wine and cheese, beautiful French women . . . and tried to propel himself into the street when the light changed. But no. A chasm seemed to yawn over the edge of the sidewalk. So he stepped away, smiling lightly in Mibbs’s direction. The man might be able to control Nick’s movements, but he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.
    Nick let the crowds surge past him and across the street, then turned back south, down Judd Street, watching out of the corner of his eye as Mibbs put his shades back on and stepped after him.
    Interesting. Glasses back on. So was Mibbs’s naked gaze driving him somewhere in particular or only keeping him within the fucking Congestion Charge Zone?
    At the end of Hunter Street he stood still