There was a click and the President went off the air.
‘What a fantastic thing!’ whispered Grandpa Joe. ‘The White House, Charlie! We’re invited to the White House as honoured guests!’
Charlie caught hold of Grandpa Joe’s hands and the two of them started dancing round and round the lobby of the hotel. Mr Wonka, still shaking with laughter, went and sat down on the bed and signalled everyone to gather round close so they could whisper without being heard by the hidden microphones.
‘They’re scared to death,’ he whispered. ‘They won’t bother us any more now. So let’s have that feast we were talking about and afterwards we can explore the hotel.’
‘Aren’t we going to the White House?’ whispered Grandma Josephine. ‘I want to go to the White House and stay with the President.’
‘My dear old dotty dumpling,’ said Mr Wonka. ‘You look as much like a man from Mars as a bedbug! They’d know at once they’d been fooled. We’d be arrested before we could say how d’you do.’
Mr Wonka was right. There could be no question of accepting the President’s invitation and they all knew it.
‘But we’ve got to say something to him,’ Charlie whispered. ‘He must be sitting down there in the White House this very minute waiting for an answer.’
‘Make an excuse,’ said Mr Bucket.
‘Tell him we’re otherwise engaged,’ said Mrs Bucket.
‘You are right,’ whispered Mr Wonka. ‘It is rude to ignore an invitation.’ He stood up and walked a few paces from the group. For a moment or two he remained quite still, gathering his thoughts. Then once again Charlie saw those tiny twinkling smiling wrinkles around the corners of the eyes, and when he began to speak, his voice this time was like the voice of a giant, deep and devilish, very loud and very slow:
‘In the quelchy quaggy sogmire,
In the mashy mideous harshland,
At the witchy hour of gloomness,
All the grobes come oozing home.
You can hear them softly slimeing,
Glissing hissing o’er the slubber,
All those oily boily bodies
Oozing onward in the gloam.
So start to run! Oh, skid and daddle
Through the slubber slush and sossel!
Skip jump hop and try to skaddle!
All the grobes are on the roam!’
In his study two hundred and forty thousand miles below, the President turned white as the White House. ‘Jumping jack-rabbits!’ he cried. ‘I think they’re after us!’
‘Oh, please let me blow them up!’ said the Ex-Chief of the Army.
‘Silence!’ said Miss Tibbs. ‘Go stand in the corner!’
In the lobby of the Space Hotel, Mr Wonka had merely paused in order to think up another verse, and he was just about to start off again when a frightful piercing scream stopped him cold. The screamer was Grandma Josephine. She was sitting up in bed and pointing with a shaking finger at the lifts at the far end of the lobby. She screamed a second time, still pointing, and all eyes turned toward the lifts. The door of the one on the left was sliding slowly open and the watchers could clearly see that there was something . . . something thick . . . something brown . . . something not exactly brown, but greenish-brown . . . something with slimy skin and large eyes . . . squatting inside the lift!
7
Something Nasty in the Lifts
Grandma Josephine had stopped screaming now. She had gone rigid with shock. The rest of the group by the bed, including Charlie and Grandpa Joe, had become as still as stone. They dared not move. They dared hardly breathe. And Mr Wonka, who had swung quickly around to look when the first scream came, was as dumbstruck as the rest. He stood motionless, gaping at the thing in the lift, his mouth slightly open, his eyes stretched wide as two wheels. What he saw, what they all saw, was this:
It looked more than anything like an enormous egg balanced on its pointed end. It was as tall as a big boy and wider than the fattest man. The greenish-brown skin had a shiny wettish appearance and there were wrinkles in it. About three-quarters of the way up, in the widest part, there were two large round eyes as big as tea-cups. The eyes were white, but each had a brilliant red pupil in the centre. The red pupils were resting on Mr Wonka. But now they began travelling slowly across to Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others by the bed, settling upon them and gazing at them with a cold malevolent stare. The eyes were everything. There were no other features, no nose or mouth or ears, but the entire egg-shaped body was itself moving very very slightly, pulsing and bulging gently here and there as though the skin were filled with some thick fluid.