Terence began his walk down the hill from the Chocolate Factory after dinner under the dim bulbs of the street lamps, but he didn't end it that way. As his foot hit the pavement to make the turn into his side street, the pavement around him lit up: Blue. Blue— like the sky, but under his feet: a sky you could walk on. The timing of the change matched so perfectly with his footfall, Terence grinned to think his foot had activated a hidden switch, the transformation catching and spinning him. Shoving his hands into his pockets, instead of making a ninety degree turn, Terence made a one-eighty.
The central stack of the Factory was awash in light. Blue light. It was striking, and Terence wasn't the only one on the street who thought so. Everyone was staring and pointing, wondering what it could mean, their excited agitation growing like a cresting wave as they whispered wild speculations back and forth, drawing together in little knots.
Having just come from the mysterious object being scrutinized, Terence heard the whispers and murmurs with whimsy, and his laughter spilled over unchecked. 'To the Wizard,' he crowed to himself. 'The Wizard will know what it means!' Terence was glad his hands were in his pockets, or he'd be applauding. The Wonderful Wizard of Chocolate! Willy Wonka… He sure does like his theatrics! As if reading his thoughts, a few of the people near Terence tentatively joined in his laughter; but Terence wanted his privacy, and when, with a sidelong glance he responded by laughing harder, his eyes wide and staring, they thought the better of courting his company and sidled away.
Satisfied to have his anonymity back, with calculated silence Terence watched them go. Pushing his hands deeper into his pockets, he stared back up at the Factory. More lights were coming on, and soon the entire complex was lit in blue. The pièce de résistance were the lights along the outer wall: they were white and came on last: the effect against the blue was glorious. Against the brilliance, the light of the street lamps nearest the Factory stood as stars against the sun: washed out, and unseen.
Once the Factory lights were fully lit, the pointing and whispering died away, the onlookers' agitation dying with it. The blue flame that was the Factory made you want to walk up the hill and be near it. Like hapless moths, quite a number of people did just that, but Terence wasn't one of them. The people left looking at the spectacle near to Terence shared his silence, feasting on the display as if they were guests at a sumptuous banquet, seeing a rare and delectable dish for the very first time, drawing sustenance from it. Terence studied the people studying the Factory, and everyone let the time stretch out: this luminous wrinkle in the humdrum of existence from Mr. Wonka as enjoyable as his candy.
Too soon, the currents of their lives pulled most of the people away, but one man in particular had felt the stare: he purposefully passed by Terence on his way away, and as he did, he paused to whisper darkly, "If you ask me— and I know you haven't— Mr. Wonka hasn't been the same since he gave that tour."
Terence kept his reply easy as he tried to see the man's face. "If you say so."
"I do."
The man scurried away, and Terence was left wondering. The man had kept his head down, his face in shadow, but despite the whisper, Terence thought he recognized the voice: it was the reporter he'd talked to in the afternoon.
The squib in the newspaper tipping Dr. Wonka off to the unfortunate return of Terence James wasn't the only thing that soured the evening: the night sky was damnably wrong as well.
Dr. Wonka, doubting the frozen dinner that had served as his evening meal would stay down the night, snapped off the light as he lowered himself carefully into his sensibly narrow, but luxuriously pillow-topped bed, only to angrily snap it back on when the level of ambient light in the room failed to sufficiently diminish. Light annoyed the living hell out of Dr. Wonka, and he guarded his home's isolated site jealously. To that end, he'd bought up all the parcels of land surrounding his, and having gone to the trouble, he'd effing well know now what, or who, was interfering with his precious darkness.
Throwing back the bedclothes, Dr. Wonka swung his thin legs to the floor, his feet easily finding the slippers positioned just so on the oiled floor boards. His nightshirt, tangled in the lifted sheet, gave him a glimpse of those legs, and he smoothly averted his eyes. He'd been a towering presence once, and the present wasting condition of his body was an irksome disappointment Dr. Wonka bitterly wished he'd been spared. The frown on his face expressing the thought was as sour as month old milk. Mina was lucky in that: she'd do well to thank him for the favor he'd done her. The Boy never thanked anyone for anything, but what did that matter? He was a runt with nothing to lose. Dr. Wonka leant forward, lifting a massaging hand to his forehead. Thinking of those two ingrates was like a knife twisting in his brain, and with a grimace, Dr. Wonka squeezed his eyes tight shut, squeezing away the memories.
That worked well enough. Flicking his eyes open again, a semblance of emotional equilibrium regained, Dr. Wonka noted the hall beyond his door was a wall of darkness. Forgetting to turn off a light elsewhere in the house wasn't the culprit. Dr. Wonka already knew that: failing to put out a light wasn't a mistake he would make.
Terence tried to brush off his new-found unease, but had no luck. It made sense—what with the Wonka truck activity today and no candy in sight—for the reporter to hang around the Factory, but now it was late, and he was still snooping. Terence saw no sense in it, and the chap was over-the-top with his cloak and dagger delivery: the Factory lights were a bonus, but hardly newsworthy.
Restless, Terence continued on to his flat, only to find when he got there this wasn't where he wanted to be. After making a quick check of the place and grabbing a few things, he retraced his steps until he turned down the hill to make a similar check on the Bucket house. He wondered what he expected to find, but still unsettled, the thought of the lurking reporter wouldn't let him be.
Once there, finding nothing except the house as he'd left it, Terence crawled up into Charlie's loft. Dropping what he carried to the floor and joining it, Terence settled himself against a beam, the better to contemplate the resplendent Chocolate Factory in the distance. The largely dismantled Bucket roof was no impediment at all, and Charlie's view was one of the best in town: far better than the view from Terence's flat.
The Factory did look inviting, and Terence could be living there now. Willy had twice invited him to make the move. The first invitation came on the same day Willy invited Charlie and his family to live there, but it was an aside, made as they'd entered the Bucket house to break the news, and Terence easily ignored it, chalking it up to Willy's nerves, and a misplaced belief in a need for morale support.
Willy bringing up the invitation a second time on Saturday, after Terence agreed to take over the project, forced Terence to erase the chalk and take the offer seriously. For not the first time, Terence wished Willy had taken the hint and let it lie. The first invitation was easy to duck under cover of Charlie's excitement and then his family's, but this next one, made in the Factory's courtyard was tougher. Not wanting to disappoint his friend, but knowing he must, Terence ran blithely through a litany of false objections, to no avail. With cool precision, Willy handily shot them all down, ready and waiting to eagerly shoot down whatever next salvo Terence might lob as well.
In the face of Willy's determination, Terence had finally resorted to telling the truth. "It's too much lock and key for me in here, Willy."
"Out there, it's not enough lock and key, Terence."
"Shall I have mine and you have your view on this?" Terence held up a friendly fist. Willy was nothing it not persistent, and if Willy were going to let this go, he wouldn't want to say the words.
Willy eyed the gesture with tilted head and narrowed eyes, but he came round. Rome wasn't built in a day. Making a fist of his own, Willy barely bumped Terence's: reluctant agreement of the most tepid sort.
Terence shook his head. Agreement was agreement, but tonight Willy had issued invitation-lite, telling Terence he was wasting his time leaving the Factory. 'You'll only have to come back in the morning spokesman, and I'm talking early-thirty here, or I'll wind up as spokesman for my spokesman. Ha!' Arranging his sleeping bag as comfortably as he could, Terence cracked open the beer he'd brought from his flat, wondering if in this instance, Willy wasn't right. A shake of Willy's head had spared Terence the need to answer this last time—Willy knew the answer—but the lilt in Willy's voice and sparkle in his eyes as he wished Terence good-night made Terence wonder what the joke was.
Dr. Wonka stood at his window, his eyes flinty slits in his cold face, his fists clenched so tightly his razor like fingernails dug unheeded into his palms. The glow in the sky was coming from town. It lit up the undersides of the broken layer of clouds in a way that made their dreary shapes look pretty. The clouds prettily returned the favor by magnifying the light until it spread itself like a false dawn, or a heavenly searchlight lighting up the town and its environs from above.
This abomination could only be caused by one thing, and Dr. Wonka knew exactly what that one thing was: that accursed Chocolate Factory. Dr. Wonka had taken steps to put out the light of this wretched phenomena years ago; successful steps, and in his worst nightmares he'd never imagined he'd ever see that glow again. The stream of measured vitriol that flowed under his breath as he cursed the Factory and its ghastly light rivaled the flow of his son's chocolate river.
Sleep was impossible now. The Factory lights were back on, the stalemate was disintegrating, and just like the last time his arrangements had come undone, that shiftless drifter Terry was on the scene. Dr. Wonka's teeth ground into each other as he clenched his jaw and his curses ran dry. Terry was ripping holes in the beautiful isolation Dr. Wonka had so painstakingly engineered, and The Boy had so obligingly bought into. Dr. Wonka let a few more considered curses drip from his lips.
Isolation is the key to control.
Hours later the sweep of headlights roused Terence from his doze. A car pulled up, but the motor kept running, and no one got out. The car didn't linger long, and as it arced away from the house, Terence could see it was a cab. That could only be Nora, and hadn't she been burning the midnight oil! Settling back down, Terence wondered if Willy had, too.
Nora hummed quietly to herself as she made her way down the corridor to her temporary home, hugging her thoughts to her as warmly as if they were long-lost friends. Her searching fingers found the little gold doily secreted in her pocket that made it all real. 'It's part of the irony'. Willy had said that.
Nora smiled, remembering. 'I haven't said a thing'. Willy had said that, too. Nora tossed her curls dismissively, renewed humming dispelling all doubt. That's what Willy might think, but the implication of what Willy had said he hadn't said made Nora feel like skipping, and like the carefree girl she'd once been, on weightless toes, skip she did. What Willy said he hadn't said was more than enough for her, and Nora's head was in the proverbial clouds. What Willy said he hadn't said made the Bucket family contribution to the future of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory—if that's what Charlie wanted—priceless. The change of footing changed the way Nora saw everything: she didn't feel like a charity case anymore, and as light and free as that made her feel, she wondered how she stayed tethered to the floor.
Her skips quickly covered the small remaining distance to her family's suite, and confronted with the solid door and the thought of rejoining her family, Nora took a minute to rein in her zeal. Willy positively dripped energy—it was contagious—but it would never do to wake everyone else just because her perhaps faulty interpretation of an innuendo had her bursting with joy. Her hand on the door, Nora waited until she caught her breath, her eyes drawn inexorably back to the end of the hall.
That wild glass elevator Willy was so fond of was gone, and so, to heaven knows where, was he. After having said he hadn't said a thing, Willy hadn't said a thing more, and Nora wondered if that wasn't to make his point. Why ever it was, it hadn't stopped him from gallantly gesturing her into the Great Glass Elevator, and though silence reigned, it was the pleasant silence that springs up between two people at the end of a long day, with a lot to think about, sharing a ride home together. They never had gotten round to any small talk, and once they reached this hall, Willy had left her to finish the trek to her suite on her own. With a tip of his hat, Willy had just as gallantly gestured her out of the Elevator before he determinedly pushed the button that whisked him away. The distinctive 'ding!' of the closing Elevator doors was already fading as Nora turned back and lifted her hand to ask another question, only to lower it again as she watched the Elevator disappear. She'd left it too late.
Just as well, Nora thought, her calm returning. Rome wasn't built in a day. The 'ding' of the Elevator faded from Nora's mind as it had from the hall, replaced by the quiet swish of the door to her quarters opening under her hand.
Warmest thanks to dionne dance, Celeste K. Raven, and Kate2015 for sharing your thoughts and encouragements with your reviews! I do not own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in any of its many forms, and there is no copyright infringement intended. That goes ditto for The Wizard of Oz. Thanks for reading, and please let me know what you think.
