'Ah-ha!' cried Charlie. 'I see what you're getting at. Then you could turn the Minuses quickly back into Pluses and bring them home again.'
'Precisely, my dear boy, precisely - always supposing, of course, that I could find out where the Minuses had gone to!'
The Elevator plunged on, diving steeply toward the centre of the Earth. All was blackness outside now. There was nothing to be seen.
'So once again,' Mr Wonka went on, T rolled up my sleeves and set to work. Once again I squeezed my brain, searching for the new recipe... I had to create age... to make people old...old, older, oldest..."Ha-ha!" I cried, for now the ideas were beginning to come. "What is the oldest living thing in the world? What lives longer than anything else?"'
'A tree,' Charlie said.
'Right you are, Charlie! But what kind of a tree? Not the Douglas Fir. Not the Oak. Not the Cedar. No no, my boy. It is a tree called the Bristlecone Pine that grows upon the slopes of Wheeler Peak in Nevada, U.S.A. You can find Bristlecone Pines on Wheeler Peak today that are over four thousand years old! This is fact, Charlie. Ask any dendrochronologist you like (and look that word up in the dictionary when you get home, will you, please?). So that started me off. I jumped into the Great Glass Elevator and rushed all over the world collecting special items from the oldest living things...
A PINT OF SAP FROM A 4000-YEAR-OLD BRISTLECONE PINE
THE TOE-NAIL CLIPPINGS FROM A 168-YEAR-OLD RUSSIAN FARMER CALLED PETROVITCH GREGOROVITCH
AN EGG LAID BY A 200-YEAR-OLD
TORTOISE BELONGING TO THE KING OF TONGA
THE TAIL OF A 51-YEAR-OLD HORSE IN ARABIA
THE WHISKERS OF A 36-YEAR-OLD GAT CALLED CRUMPETS
AN OLD FLEA WHICH HAD LIVED ON CRUMPETS FOR 36 YEARS
THE TAIL OF A 207-YEAR-OLD GIANT RAT FROM TIBET
THE BLACK TEETH OF A 97-YEAR
OLD GRIMALKIN LIVING IN A
CAVE ON MOUNT POPOCATEPETL
THE KNUCKLEBONES OF A 700-YEAR-OLD CATTALOO FROM PERU...
... All over the world, Charlie, I tracked down very old and ancient animals and took an important little bit of something from each one of them - a hair or an eyebrow or sometimes it was no more than an ounce or two of the jam scraped from between its toes while it was sleeping. I tracked down THE WHISTLE-PIG, THE BOBOLINK, THE SKROCK, THE POLLY-FROG, THE GIANT CURLICUE, THE STINGING SLUG AND THE VENOMOUS SQUERKLE who can spit poison right into your eye from fifty yards away. But there's no time to tell you about them all now, Charlie. Let me just say quickly that in the end, after lots of boiling and bubbling and mixing and testing in my Inventing Room, I produced one tiny cupful of oily black liquid and gave four drops of it to a brave twenty-year-old Oompa-Loompa volunteer to see what happened.'
'What did happen?' Charlie asked.
'It was fantastic!' cried Mr Wonka. 'The moment he swallowed it, he began wrinkling and shrivelling up all over and his hair started dropping off and his teeth started falling out and, before I knew it, he had suddenly become an old fellow of seventy-five! And thus, my dear Charlie, was Vita-Wonk invented!'
'Did you rescue all the Oompa-Loompa Minuses, Mr Wonka?'
'Every single one of them, my boy! One hundred and thirty-one all told! Mind you, it wasn't quite as easy as all that. There were lots of snags and complications along the way.... Good heavens! We're nearly there! I must stop talking now and watch where we're going.'
Charlie realized that the Elevator was no longer rushing and roaring. It was hardly moving at all now. It seemed to be drifting. 'Undo your straps,' Mr W'onka said. 'We must get ready for action.' Charlie undid his straps and stood up and peered out. It was an eerie sight. They were drifting in a heavy grey mist and the mist was swirling and swishing around them as though driven by winds from many sides. In the distance, the mist was darker and almost black and it seemed to be swirling more fiercely than ever over there. Mr Wonka slid open the doors. 'Stand back!' he said. 'Don't fall out, Charlie, whatever you do!'
The mist came into the Elevator. It had the fusty reeky smell of an old underground dungeon. The silence was overpowering. There was no sound at all, no whisper of wind, no voice of creature or insect, and it gave Charlie a queer frightening feeling to be standing there in the middle of this grey inhuman nothingness - as though he were in another world altogether, in some place where man should never be.
'Minusland!' whispered Mr Wonka. 'This is it, Charlie! The problem now is to find her. We may be lucky... and there again, we may not!'
17
Rescue in Minusland
'I don't like it here at all,' Charlie whispered. 'It gives me the willies.'
'Me, too,' Mr Wonka whispered back. 'But we've got a job to do, Charlie, and we must go through with it.'
The mist was condensing now on the glass walls of the Elevator making it difficult to see out except through the open doors.
'Do any other creatures live here, Mr Wonka?'
'Plenty of Gnoolies.'
'Are they dangerous?'
'If they bite you, they are. You're a gonner, my boy, if you're bitten by a Gnooly.'
The Elevator drifted on, rocking gently from side to side. The grey-black oily fog swirled around them.
'What does a Gnooly look like, Mr Wonka?'
'They don't look like anything, Charlie. They can't.'
'You mean you've never seen one?'
'You can't see Gnoolies, my boy. You can't even feel them... until they puncture your skin... then it's too late. They've got you.'
'You mean... there might be swarms of them all around us this very moment?' Charlie asked.
'There might,' said Mr Wonka.
Charlie felt his skin beginning to creep. 'Do you die at once?' he asked.
'First you become subtracted... a little later you are divided... but very slowly... it takes a long time... it's long division and it's very painful. After that, you become one of them.'
'Couldn't we shut the door?' Charlie asked.
'I'm afraid not, my boy. We'd never see her through the glass. There's too much mist and moisture. She's not going to be easy to pick out anyway.'
Charlie stood at the open door of the Elevator and stared into the swirling vapours. This, he thought, is what hell must be like... hell without heat... there was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical... It was all so deathly quiet, so desolate and empty... At the same time, the constant movement, the twisting and swirling of the misty vapours, gave one the feeling that some very powerful force, evil and malignant, was at work all around... Charlie felt a jab on his arm! He jumped! He almost jumped out of the Elevator! 'Sorry,' said Mr Wonka. 'It's only me.'
'Oh-h-h!' Charlie gasped. 'For a second, I thought...'
'I know what you thought, Charlie... And by the way, I'm awfully glad you're with me. How would you like to come here alone... as I did... as I had to... many times?'
'I wouldn't,' said Charlie.
'There she is!' said Mr Wonka, pointing. 'No, she isn't!... Oh, dear! I could have sworn I saw her for a moment right over there on the edge of that dark patch. Keep watching, Charlie.'
'There!' said Charlie. 'Over there. Look!'
'Where?' said Mr Wonka. 'Point to her, Charlie!'
'She's... she's gone again. She sort of faded away,' Charlie said.
They stood at the open door of the Elevator, peering into the swirly grey vapours.
'There! Quick/ Right there!' Charlie cried. 'Can't you see her?'
'Yes, Charlie! I see her! I'm moving up close now!'
Mr Wonka reached behind him and began touching a number of buttons.
'Grandma!' Charlie cried out. 'We've come to get you, Grandma!'
They could see her faintly through the mist, but oh so faintly. And they could see the mist through her as well. She was transparent. She was hardly there at all. She was no more than a shadow. They could see her face and just the faintest outline of her body swathed in a sort of gown. But she wasn't upright. She was floating lengthwise
in the swirling vapour.
'Why is she lying down?' Charlie whispered.
'Because she's a Minus, Charlie. Surely you know what a minus looks like... Like that...' Mr Wonka drew a horizontal line in the air with his finger.
The Elevator glided close. The ghostly shadow of Grandma Georgina's face was no more than a yard away now. Charlie reached out through the door to touch her but there was nothing there to touch. His hand went right through her skin. 'Grandma!' he gasped. She began to drift away.
'Stand back!' oruered Mr Wonka, and suddenly, from some secret place inside his coat-tails he whisked out a spray-gun. It was one of those old-fashioned things people used to use for spraying fly-spray around the room before aerosols came along. He aimed the spray-gun straight at the shadow of Grandma Georgina and he pumped the handle hard ONCE... TWICE... THREE TIMES! Each time, a fine black spray spurted out from the nozzle of the gun. Instantly, Grandma Georgina disappeared.
'A bull's eye!' cried Mr Wonka, jumping up and down with excitement. 'I got her with both barrels! I plussed her good and proper! That's Vita-Wonk for you!'
'Where's she gone?' Charlie asked.
'Back where she came from, of course! To the factory! She's a Minus no longer, my boy! She's a one hundred per cent red-blooded Plus! Come along now! Let's get out of here quickly before the Gnoolies find us!' Mr Wonka jabbed a button. The doors closed and the Great Glass Elevator shot upwards for home.
'Sit down and strap yourself in again, Charlie!' said Mr Wonka. 'We're going flat out this time!'
The Elevator roared and rocketed up toward the surface of the Earth. Mr Wonka and Charlie sat side by side on their little jump-seats, strapped in tight. Mr Wonka started tucking the spray-gun back into that enormous pocket somewhere in his coat-tails. 'It's such a pity one has to use a clumsy old thing like this,' he said. 'But there's simply no other way of doing it. Ideally, of course, one would measure out exactly the right number of drops into a teaspoon and feed it carefully into the mouth. But it's impossible to feed anything into a Minus. It's like trying to feed one's own shadow. That's why I've got to use a spray-gun. Spray 'em all over, my boy! That's the only way!'
'It worked fine, though, didn't it?' Charlie said.
'Oh, it worked all right, Charlie! It worked beautifully! All I'm saying is that there's bound to be a slight overdose...'
'I don't quite know what you mean, Mr Wonka.'
'My dear boy, if it only takes four drops of Vita-Wonk to turn a young Oompa-Loompa into an old man...' Mr Wonka lifted his hands and let them fall limply on to his lap.
'You mean Grandma may have got too much?' asked Charlie, turning slightly pale.
'I'm afraid that's putting it rather mildly,' said Mr Wonka.
'But... but why did you give her such a lot of it, then?' said Charlie, getting more and more worried. 'Why did you spray her three times? She must have got pints and pints of it!'
'Gallons!' cried Mr Wonka, slapping his thighs. 'Gallons and gallons! But don't let a little thing like that bother you, my dear Charlie! The important part of it is we've got her back! She's a Minus no longer! She's a lovely Plus!
'She's as plussy as plussy can be!
She's more plussy than you or than me!
The question is how,
Just how old is she now?
Is she more than a hundred and three?'
18
The Oldest Person in the World
'We return in triumph, Charlie!' cried Mr Wonka as the Great Glass Elevator began to slow down. 'Once more your dear family will all be together again!'
The Elevator stopped. The doors slid open. And there was the Chocolate Room and the chocolate river and the Oompa-Loompas and in the middle of it all the great bed belonging to the old grandparents. 'Charlie!' said Grandpa Joe, rushing forward. 'Thank heavens you're back!' Charlie hugged him. Then he hugged his mother and his father. 'Is she here?' he said. 'Grandma Georgina?'
Nobody answered. Nobody did anything except Grandpa Joe, who pointed to the bed. He pointed but he didn't look where he was pointing. None of them looked at the bed - except Charlie. He walked past them all to get a better view, and he saw at one end the two babies, Grandma Josephine and Grandpa George, both tucked in and sleeping peacefully. At the other end...
'Don't be alarmed,' said Mr Wonka, running up and placing a hand on Charlie's arm. 'She's bound to be just a teeny bit over-plussed. I warned you about that.'
'What have you done to her?' cried Mrs Bucket. 'My poor old mother!'
Propped up against the pillows at the other end of the bed was the most extraordinary-looking thing Charlie had ever seen! Was it some ancient fossil? It couldn't be that because it was moving slightly! And now it was making sounds! Croaking sounds - the kind of sounds a very old frog might make if it knew a few words. 'Well, well, well,' it croaked. 'If it isn't dear Charlie.'
'Grandma!' cried Charlie. 'Grandma Georgina! Oh... Oh... Oh!'
Her tiny face was like a pickled walnut. There were such masses of creases and wrinkles that the mouth and eyes and even the nose were sunken almost out of sight. Her hair was pure white and her hands, which were resting on top of the blanket, were just little lumps of wrinkly skin.
The presence of this ancient creature seemed to have terrified not only Mr and Mrs Bucket, but Grandpa Joe as well. They stood well back, away from the bed. Mr Wonka, on the other hand, was as happy as ever. 'My dear lady!' he cried, advancing to the edge of the bed and clasping one of those tiny wrinkled hands in both of his. 'Welcome home! And how are you feeling on this bright and glorious day?'
'Not too bad,' croaked Grandma Georgina. 'Not too bad at all... considering my age.'
'Good for you!' said Mr Wonka. 'Atta girl! All we've got to do now is find out exactly how old you are! Then we shall be able to take further action!'
'You're taking no further action around here,' said Mrs Bucket, tight-lipped. 'You've done enough damage already!'
'But my dear old muddleheaded mugwump,' said Mr Wonka, turning to Mrs Bucket. 'What does it matter that the old girl has become a trifle too old? We can put that right in a jiffy! Have you forgotten Wonka-Vite and how every tablet makes you twenty years younger? We shall bring her back! We shall transform her into a blossoming blushing maiden in the twink of an eye!'
'What good is that when her husband's not even out of his nappies yet?' wailed Mrs Bucket, pointing a finger at the one-year-old Grandpa George, so peacefully sleeping.
'Madam,' said Mr Wonka, 'let us do one thing at a time...'
'I forbid you to give her that beastly Wonka-Vite!' said Mrs Bucket. 'You'll turn her into a Minus again just as sure as I'm standing here!'
'I don't want to be a Minus!' croaked Grandma Georgina. 'If I ever have to go back to that beastly Minusland again, the Gnoolies will knickle me!'
'Fear not!' said Mr Wonka. 'This time I myself will supervise the giving of the medicine. I shall personally see to it that you get the correct dosage. But listen very carefully now! I cannot work out how many pills to give you until I know exactly how old you are! That's obvious, isn't it?'
'It is not obvious at all,' said Mrs Bucket. 'Why can't you give her one pill at a time and play it safe?'
'Impossible, madam. In very serious cases such as this one, Wonka-Vite doesn't work at all when given in small doses. You've got to throw everything at her in one go. You've got to hit her with it hard. A single pill wouldn't even begin to shift her. She's too far gone for that. It's all or nothing.'
'No,' said Mrs Bucket firmly.
'Yes,' said Mr Wonka. 'Dear lady, please listen to me. If you have a very severe headache and you need three aspirins to cure it, it's no good taking only one at a time and waiting four hours between each. You'll never cure yourself that way. You've got to gulp them all down in one go. It's the same with Wonka-Vite. May I proceed?'
'Oh, all right, I suppose you'll have to,' said Mrs Bucket.
'Good,' said Mr Wonka, giving a little jump and twirling his feet in t
he air. 'Now then, how old are you, my dear Grandma Georgina?'
'I don't know,' she croaked. 'I lost count of that years and years ago.'
'Don't you have any idea?' said Mr Wonka.
'Of course I don't,' gibbered the old woman. 'Nor would you if you were as old as I am.'
'Think!' said Mr Wonka. 'You've got to think!'
The tiny old wrinkled brown walnut face wrinkled itself up more than ever. The others stood waiting. The Oompa-Loompas, enthralled by the sight of this ancient object, were all edging closer and closer to the bed. The two babies slept on.
'Are you, for example, a hundred?' said Mr Wonka. 'Or a hundred and ten? Or a hundred and twenty?'
'It's no good,' she croaked. T never did have a head for numbers.'
'This is a catastrophe!' cried Mr Wonka. 'If you can't tell me how old you are, I can't help you! I dare not risk an overdose!'
Gloom settled upon the entire company, including for once Mr Wonka himself. 'You've messed it up good and proper this time, haven't you?' said Mrs Bucket.
'Grandma,' Charlie said, moving forward to the bed. 'Listen, Grandma. Don't worry about exactly how old you might be. Try to think of a happening instead... think of something that happened to you... anything you like... as far back as you can... it may help us...'
'Lots of things happened to me, Charlie... so many many things happened to me...'
'But can you remember any of them, Grandma?'
'Oh, I don't know, my darling... I suppose I could remember one or two if I thought hard enough...'
'Good, Grandma, good!' said Charlie eagerly. 'Now what is the very earliest thing you can remember in your whole life?'
'Oh, my dear boy, that really would be going back a few years, wouldn't it?'
'When you were little, Grandma, like me. Can't you remember anything you did when you were little?'
The tiny sunken black eyes glimmered faintly and a sort of smile touched the corners of the almost invisible little slit of a mouth. 'There was a ship,' she said. T can remember a ship... I couldn't ever forget that ship...'
'Go on, Grandma! A ship! What sort of a ship? Did you sail on her?'
'Of course I sailed on her, my darling... we all sailed on her...'