Young Griffin Sharpe, Rupert Snodgrass, and the older Griffin Sharpe sat with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson at 221B Baker Street, enjoying a much-needed cup of tea.
The older Rupert Snodgrass had refused to travel back in time with them to save Sherlock Holmes. The old fellow had said that he intended to take a very long and much-deserved rest. And Griffin couldn’t blame him at all. After all, his uncle had been working on his invention for nearly twenty-five years without a break!
“Needless to say, I am eternally grateful to you all,” the great detective said. “You have done me a great service, and I’m in your debt.”
“It is good to have you back, sir,” Rupert Snodgrass said. And to his surprise, he found that he actually meant it. “I really don’t think that this apartment should belong to anyone else.”
“It does feel like home,” Dr. Watson commented, glancing around at the familiar surroundings. A fire blazed in the hearth, and the pungent but oddly comforting smell of pipe tobacco and chemicals from Holmes’s experiments hung in the air.
“As for Charlotte Pepper and her young sister, I have already arranged for the girls’ release. The Black Widows were very reluctant to have their London whereabouts publicized and, with the death of Nigel, have returned to hiding,” Holmes said, smiling. “I also managed the release of Mr. H. G. Wells and the rest of Moriarty’s prisoners from the dungeons beneath the Tower of London.”
He turned to Rupert, who was sipping his tea. “By the way, Snodgrass. Miss Pepper asked about you.”
Rupert Snodgrass sat up so abruptly in his chair he nearly spilled his tea.
“She did?” he asked.
“Yes. She said something about hoping that you can forgive her for the theft of your invention and would enjoy an opportunity for conversation at a later date, if you were so inclined.”
Rupert blushed deep crimson. In reply, he muttered something like, “Delightful woman. Pleasure’s mine.”
Watson chuckled, then, turning to Sherlock Holmes, said, “So, you’ve really decided to come out of retirement at your age, Holmes? Are you certain you want to do this? After all, you’re no spring chicken anymore.”
“Begging your pardon, old chap, but this old rooster still has quite a bit of fight left in him,” Holmes quipped, then added seriously, “I’m quite certain, Watson. My presence is still needed on Baker Street as demonstrated by the clever rescue that was orchestrated by our young friend here.” He indicated Griffin with a nod. “Although the younger Moriarty is no longer a problem, his uncle certainly remains so.”
Dr. Watson gave young Griffin a friendly wink and passed him a plate of Mrs. Tottingham’s famous scones. But for the first time in his life, Griffin wasn’t hungry for them.
He felt glad that Sherlock Holmes’s life had been spared and that he was back where he belonged, protecting London from evil. But he felt deeply troubled by the fact that Nigel Moriarty’s death had come by his own hand, even if it was by the hand of his older self.
Killing someone was not a Christian thing to do. How, then, could he have been capable of ending another’s life, even if Nigel was one of the most evil men in London?
The older Griffin gazed at his younger self, reading his thoughts. Then the man stood up from the table and asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”
Griffin still didn’t make eye contact, but nodded his head. After excusing himself, he slid from the table and walked with his older self out of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment and onto Baker Street, both of their ebony canes keeping time with each other as they walked.
The sun was setting, casting gentle shadows over the tall buildings. The clip-clop of a few horses’ hooves pulling hansom cabs echoed on the cobblestones, but other than that, the street was empty.
Young Griffin gazed at the street, his sad, blue eyes reflecting the troubling question that he couldn’t bring himself to ask. After a long pause the older man cleared his throat and said gently, “You’re wondering if there was another way.”
Griffin didn’t say anything. When the older man spoke again, his voice was still gentle but also firm. “No. There wasn’t.”
Griffin looked sharply up. “But there had to be. It was someone’s life!”
Older Griffin gazed down at him and sighed. “You know the way we think. Once our uncle finished building the time machine, I used it to explore every possible scenario.”
“How was that possible?” asked Griffin.
Older Griffin glanced back up at the darkening street and said, “I asked Rupert to create one last enhancement to the machine, a setting that would allow me to hop along the millions of different time streams as an observer.”
He glanced at Griffin. “Imagine the ability to watch endless scenarios unfold based on the different choices you would make. To see the cause and effect of every decision and never age a day while watching them!”
His voice grew quiet. “Rupert was able to make it work. He really is a genius. I think he called the invention his ‘Snodgrass Time Stream Synchronizer’ or something like that.”
Griffin listened, awestruck. His older self continued, speaking slowly.
“I watched as I tried every possible way to stop Moriarty without killing him. The trouble was, no matter how hard I tried to find a different outcome, every time it turned out the same. Millions of possibilities . . . and I tried every single one.”
He sighed. “One time I tried capturing Nigel Moriarty, but later he escaped. Another time I used the Scorpion to teleport him somewhere else . . . of course, he found his way back into power again. Every scenario, every timeline, ended with the same result. I tried hundreds of times to keep Charlotte Pepper from stealing the machine, and yet it still happened. I tried persuading Rupert Snodgrass to never build it, and yet it still was made. Sometimes by him, sometimes by someone else. But no matter what I tried, Nigel Moriarty stole it and had countless innocents murdered, and his way into power always hinged on the death of Sherlock Holmes.”
Older Griffin gazed back out to the streets, and Younger Griffin noticed the lines around the older man’s eyes. They were eyes that looked like they had seen too much.
“If one evil man has to die so that countless innocents can live, then there is no alternative,” the man said. Then he looked back down at Griffin, and when their eyes met, young Griffin was surprised to see the tears in the older man’s eyes.
“But taking a life, no matter whose it is, is always a terrible thing.”
They stood in silence for some time, each lost in his own thoughts. The words his older self said made sense to Griffin, but he had a hard time accepting them. Perhaps he would better understand when he was older, he decided. But then he wondered if he ever really would.
The sun sank below the horizon, and the gaslights on Baker Street came on one by one, each lit by a lamplighter and his young assistant.
Griffin noticed their matching, ragged clothes, counted the number of missing buttons on each of their coats, and calculated the difference in their sizes. And he realized that their body sizes were not that different from the size difference between himself and the older version that stood beside him.
He gazed up at his older self and felt that he had many unanswered questions. He took a deep breath and said, “What will happen now? Moriarty has been stopped and we fixed the future. Doesn’t that mean that the version of you that I’m talking to shouldn’t exist? How is it possible that you’re still here? Did my uncle invent something that would keep you, you? And you said that you’ve seen all the different timelines. If that’s so, what will happen to us in this one? What will I be like five years from now, or ten years? Will I grow up and get married? What about my parents and Uncle Rupert? How long will they live? How long will I live? Is there anything I need to watch out for? Will I really become the World’s Most Secret Detective?”
Older Griffin smiled down at his younger self, his teeth shining bright in the gathering gloom. “Do you really want to know?”
Griffin paused to think. Here he was, with an opportunity to have answers to any questions he wanted to ask. Should he do it?
He had an inquisitive mind, a mind that noticed everything. As long as he could remember, he had sought the answers to his questions, and the more difficult and puzzling, the better.
But now, as he gazed up at the same pair of sad, blue eyes he himself possessed, he found that for the first time he didn’t want to know.
“It would spoil the adventure, wouldn’t it?”
And as the older Griffin put his arm around the shoulder of his younger self, he laughed, and Griffin knew exactly what he was going to say.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” the two of them said at the same time. And then they both went back inside Sherlock Holmes’s apartment, each walking with the help of his ebony cane, to help themselves to as many of Mrs. Tottingham’s famous scones as they could possibly eat.