~Elevator to Hell~
"Why isn't anything happening?" Sweeney snapped, opening his eyes.
They waited, barber clinging to his teacup, baker clinging air.
"I suppose," Mrs Lovett said in the silence, "that the wish 'as gotta warm up."
He looked at her as if she were some village idiot, which in another lifetime she may well have been. "Wishes don't "warm up", Mrs Lovett. They appear. Like your godforsaken elevator."
They waited some more.
An hour passed on Sweeney's pocket watch. He took to his customary pacing. Mrs Lovett was seated in the barber chair, improvising some sort of work-house tap dance.
"Stop that!" Sweeney said, placing his hand threateningly over the chair's lever.
Her eyes flew wide open like the underside of a Pelican's wings. "You wouldn't dare!"
"I would," he promised, their foreheads almost touching. "Get up!"
"Where we goin'?"
"I don't believe that teabag didn't contain magic mushrooms, Mrs Lovett. You and I are very likely as high as kites right now."
The baker stomped stubbornly to the door. "I'm not imaginin' flyin' elevators Mr T, I don't know 'bout you, but –"
Without warning, she felt her arm twisted back as her partner in crime led her to the stair landing. "Into the lift."
The operating buttons shone brilliantly. He slammed his fist against it, and pushed the lattice iron gates open.
"Wot are you doin' Mr T?"
"What do you think, pet? Giving it a test run."
He pushed her in, and jumped after her, as if he were afraid he might fall through the gap and go tumbling straight down to that fiery inferno. Not that Sweeney believed in such things.
"Mr T."
"What?!"
"There's more than one floor…"
"Oh."
The couple found themselves contemplating a series of fifty-one floors. Sweeney Todd's shop was number 37, but that couldn't be correct, for –
"It should be floor number 1, and mine should be ground floor," Mrs Lovett protested.
"Why don't we press "ground floor" then?" Sweeney suggested, feeling the temperature in the elevator rise by several degrees.
She glared at him. "Wot're you a flamin' idiot? Don't you know the legends?"
Sweeney knew only one legend: the one he was making for himself. "No," he said sourly.
"Well," said Mrs Lovett, her voice acquiring that husky whisper reserved for waltzing in shopfronts or relating sad tales of preyed-upon pretty women, "legend has it that thirty years ago, when we wos jus' small children, an extremely rich man came to a poor clockmaker in London and demanded that he build the fanciest elevator ever designed, only it had to have fifty one floors."
The barber screwed up his face. "Why fifty-one?"
"They say the man was very lonely, and went to a fortune teller. This shady woman told him he'd fall in love with his true love on his fifty-first birthday, an' the man was dumb enough to believe her. So he wanted an elevator to remind himself of the prediction. Anyway, they say the elevator is cursed, an' any fool who presses the ground floor button will go straight ter hell."
"That's it?"
"That's it." Mrs Lovett crossed her arms, puckered her lips, and began circling her finger around the buttons like a fly. Which one to press…
Sweeney grabbed the finger, and twisted it back. "My turn," he said, reaching past her and stabbing the 36th floor rapidly.
The baker scowled, but it was too late. The elevator churned, buckled, and dropped. "We're gonna die!" she screeched, finding another opportunity to cling to his chest.
Seconds later, the elevator groaned and jerked to a stop.
"If that man owned the elevator, what is it doing here?" Sweeney asked.
"Ferret!"
"I'm not putting up with your shenanigans Mrs Lovett," he warned, but for once –
"It wasn't me," Mrs Lovett said very quietly, staring at the two women turning circles outside Mrs Lovett's Meat Pie Emporium.
"Ferret!" screeched a diry woman in a bonnet.
It was that filthy beggar woman, and pretty little Johanna. Wot were they doing there, and why were they linking arms, talking low? Johanna appeared to be doing most of the "talking".
"What is…." It took several moments for Sweeney to piece together what he saw before him.
"It's your second wish," said Mrs Lovett flatly, stepping out of the elevator like a woman condemned for witchcraft.
Of all the worst possible wishes granted, it was possible that this one was the worst, if two shadows hadn't stepped out of Mrs Mooney's from across the road and begun walking even paced toward Mrs Lovett's shop.
One shadow was tall and stately and grey, the other short and fat and blonde, switching a cane.
The baker sucked in mouthfuls of foggy air. "Beadle Bamford!"
Sweeney Todd sucked in several more. "Judge Turpin!"
* * *