The Future Door (19 page)

The waitress who had been sent to wait on their table happened to be looking down at her mobile phone when the two of them disappeared. She wasn't startled at all when she looked up and noticed that they were gone.

Instead, with a shrug, she continued texting her best friend.

The waitress continued to ignore the impatient stares and frustrated waves of the other restaurant patrons trying to get her attention. She was busy conversing with her friend Tabitha, who had recently bought another Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and had had a very unusual experience with two LARPers she'd met on the road near Stonehenge.

It took exactly one thousand one hundred and twenty-three attempts to find the date and time that Griffin had specified to his uncle. In the various tries, Griffin and Rupert had gained a very interesting perspective on the evolution of Baker Street and its surroundings. While traveling back and forth, bumping along through time, they'd encountered a troop of hostile Romans, some wild boars, a close call with a volcanic eruption, and finally, after far too many tries, ended up inside their apartment with exactly five minutes to spare.

Rupert set the teapot down on the table in the kitchen and breathed a sigh of relief. “I really must get started on improving this blasted thing as soon as possible,” he said. “It was pure luck that we found this particular time. The odds of doing it again are—”

“Exactly 2.47 billion to one,” Griffin whispered, putting a warning finger to his lips and then pointing down the darkened hall. “I had time to figure it out while we were bouncing around. We must be quiet, Uncle. We don't want to alert Miss Pepper to our presence.”

Rupert nodded. Griffin could tell his uncle felt as completely exhausted as he did. Rupert tried to pull a dining room chair quietly from the table so that he could sit down, but unfortunately, due to the clutter that was ever present in the flat, the chair's leg banged against a stack of books, sending several thudding to the floor.

Griffin winced. But then he suddenly realized that he recognized the sound! When he'd heard it before, it had been muffled, but it reminded him very much of the sound that he'd heard while upstairs on the night he'd tried to catch the thief.

Next he heard the almost imperceptible pad of his other self 's feet upstairs, carefully avoiding the creaky floorboards in his bedroom. With a strange feeling of déjà vu, he peered around the corner from the kitchen and watched as a very familiar figure descended the stairs with his sword cane, looking pale and frightened in the moonlight.

It's me
, Griffin thought, feeling amazed. And then, because he was so awestruck, he failed to act as quickly as he'd planned. That was when he heard a rustle and the sound of the front door closing, sounds he remembered hearing from his bedroom on the night of the theft. Recalling how narrowly he'd missed capturing Miss Pepper before, he sprang into action.

“Now!” he said, grabbing his uncle by the sleeve.

“Crikey!” Rupert growled, pausing only to snatch the time-traveling teapot from the table as the two of them leapt into action, chasing after Griffin's own retreating figure.

It's a strange thing to see oneself frightened. But it's an even stranger thing to be the person frightening yourself. As Griffin and Rupert dashed past his own scared figure, Griffin forgot that earlier he'd swung his sword at what he'd thought were agents of Moriarty and had wounded one of them in the process.

The person whose cheek he'd grazed at that moment with the razor-sharp edge of his cane-sword was him!

Griffin let out a cry as the sword whistled past, narrowly missing cutting off his head, and opened a small wound on his cheek. He followed Rupert out the window.

Charlotte Pepper was just dashing behind a building on the corner, and together they chased the lady's retreating shadow through the cobblestone streets, running as fast as they were able.

The Griffin Sharpe who chased Charlotte Pepper thought of his other self at the moment, the one who had now swung his sword at Watts and dented his shiny metal surface. He suddenly wished that he could have talked to his other self and warned him about all that was going to happen and advise him about how he might do things differently.

But alas, their hands were full at present. And unfortunately, because of his hurt leg, Griffin couldn't keep up with his uncle as he chased the retreating figure; he soon fell behind, leaning heavily on his stick for support.

Rupert Snodgrass, on the other hand, was running as fast as his thick legs could carry him, huffing and puffing like a broken-down steam engine.

Maybe it was because he'd grown as accustomed as Griffin to eating Mrs. Tottingham's delicious scones, or perhaps it was because he'd spent much more time in his inventing room than getting regular exercise, but he soon found that a pain had erupted in his side and his once youthful vigor had long since departed.

Breathless and sweating, he chased the lithe figure in boys' clothing down a nearby alleyway.

“Stop . . . you!” he wheezed.

Suddenly, Rupert felt his ankle twist beneath him and he stumbled, crying out as he fell. And then, to his utmost horror, he felt the teapot fly from his outstretched fingers and watched as it soared through the still night air.

“No!” Rupert gasped.

But it was too late.

As Rupert's stocky frame crashed to the cobblestone street, a second crash sounded from not too far away. And it was a sound that Griffin, even though he was lagging behind, couldn't help but identify.

It was the sound of a million tiny pieces of delicate machinery hitting the bricks and the shattering of the pottery that surrounded it. And to Rupert it was the sound of twenty-five years of painstaking labor, methodically creating his own parts from scratch and composing complicated mathematical formulae, gone!

Griffin limped up in time to help his uncle, whose trousers were ripped at the knee, pick up the larger pieces of the destroyed time machine. And as they collected the remains, Rupert said, in a very choky-sounding voice, “Well, that's it, boy. We're ruined.”

28
THE FUTURE DOOR

B
ut there must be some way we can fix it,” Griffin said. Rupert stared back at his nephew with a sullen expression.

“You don't understand, Griffin. This took twenty-five years to build! I was a young man when I started!” Rupert said.

They sat on the stairs that led up to their apartment. Griffin stared out at the deserted street, breathing in the cool night air. His mind raced, trying to figure out another option.

Without the machine, they couldn't return to the time when they'd left Miss Pepper at Stonehenge and taken the Chrono-Teleporter.

In the present time they were in right now, Charlotte Pepper was already en route to deliver the time machine to Nigel Moriarty in hopes that she could save her sister's life. She obviously had prearranged transportation and could get there well before Griffin and his uncle had a chance to follow.

Attempts at finding a new solution raced through Griffin's head, but he couldn't find a single one that worked. And the more he thought about all the terrible things that had happened, the more he realized that it all boiled down to one central thing.

The Moriartys' road to power had started with the death of Sherlock Holmes.

If there was some way that we could stop it from happening, all could be set right again
.

But they had traveled immediately to Sussex after the teapot had been stolen the first time, and had arrived too late.

No, the only way to prevent Sherlock Holmes from getting murdered at this point was to use the time machine. But if they tried to break into Stonehenge again, he knew that by the time they got there, Moriarty would have already used it. And now, Nigel, realizing that he'd run into Rupert and Griffin in the future, would certainly take measures to protect it with even greater care.

Griffin sighed and rubbed a hand over his forehead. He felt tired, more tired than he'd ever been. His acute mind had never worked so hard on such a complicated problem. He felt that a solution was there, but was just beyond his reach.

What is it, Lord?
he prayed.
Please help me think!

Rupert sat next to him, saying nothing but turning the pieces of his shattered machine over and over in his hands. Griffin noticed the cut beneath the rip in his uncle's trousers and thought about his own bleeding cheek. It was just a scratch, but it hurt.

He wondered if he should knock on their apartment door and ask himself for help.

And that was when it hit him. It was a solution unlike any he'd ever come up with before. It was so bold, and so incredibly unthinkable, that he could do nothing but think that perhaps God had answered his prayer and put it into his mind.

Thank You
, he breathed. And then, turning to Snodgrass, he said, “Uncle?”

“Hmm?”

“Is there someplace you know of where you could be safe for a long time? Someplace where nobody could find you?”

Rupert thought for a moment. Then he asked the most obvious question. “How long, exactly?”

Griffin smiled, his teeth cutting a bright semicircle in the moonlight. “Twenty-five years,” he said. Then Griffin explained his idea. Rupert stared at him, looking amazed.

“It's unthinkable,” he said, stunned.

“But it might work,” Griffin replied.

Rupert stood up from the step he'd been sitting on and began to pace.

“You do realize what you're asking? Twenty-five years!” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” said Griffin. “It will take a lot of patience. But it should work.” He stood and walked down the steps to where his uncle was standing. “If you start building a new time machine now, one that can precisely set a particular date and time . . . then twenty-five years from now you could leave it for me to find. My older self will then use it to return to this time, right here and now! Then we can use the new machine to transport ourselves to the precise time that Moriarty showed up to murder Sherlock Holmes and stop him. It could work!”

Griffin's eyes shone with the possibility. Rupert shook his head, agitated. Griffin could see that for the older man, twenty-five years seemed an eternity!

“But why shouldn't I just use it myself to come back?” Rupert asked. “That way, if anything goes wrong, you won't be at risk.”

Griffin put a hand on his uncle's shoulder. “You'll be old. I'll still be relatively young, around forty or so. I'll be able to help us fight Moriarty.”

Rupert sighed and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. Then, with a resigned expression, he said, “Well, it is by far the most creative solution to a problem I've ever heard. It might be completely mad, of course. But it certainly is creative.”

Then, motioning Griffin to follow, he led him to the side of the stairwell that led up to the apartment. After carefully inspecting the rails that supported the banister, he began to twist one of them, turning it slowly counterclockwise.

“What are you doing?” Griffin asked.

“Long ago . . . [grunt] . . . I knew that a day might come when my inventions and possibly my own person would be in danger. That was . . . [grunt] . . . when I decided to build a safe place where I could remain virtually undetected,” Rupert said.

Griffin watched in disbelief as the turning of the rail lowered a false wall, revealing a hidden door beneath the stairwell.

“Behold my ‘Future Door,' ” Rupert said proudly. “The secret place where I store my most prized possessions. I hoped I would never have to use it as a place to stay, but now I'm very glad I built it.”

Rupert produced a small brass key, and Griffin followed his uncle into an amazing, subterranean room filled with every comfort imaginable.

There were kerosene lamps and enough fuel to last well beyond twenty-five years. Griffin stared at massive amounts of carefully stored food, ingeniously preserved and contained by his uncle in sealed metal containers.

There was a rug, sleeping cots, and two comfortable couches. There was even a hearth that, when lit, channeled its smoke through one of the other more conspicuous chimneys in Mrs. Hudson's own ovens.