Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator c-2

by Roald Dahl

  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.

  At this point, Charlie suddenly noticed that the next lift was coming down. The indicator numbers above the door were flashing… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… L (for lobby). There was a slight pause. The door slid open and there, inside the second lift, was another enormous slimy wrinkled greenish-brown egg with eyes!

  Now the numbers were flashing above all three of the remaining lifts. Down they came… down… down… down… And soon, at precisely the same time, they reached the lobby floor and the doors slid open… five open doors now… one creature in each… five in all… and five pairs of eyes with brilliant red centres all watching Mr Wonka and watching Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others.

  There were slight differences in size and shape between the five, but all had the same greenish-brown wrinkled skin and the skin was rippling and pulsing.

  For about thirty seconds nothing happened. Nobody stirred, nobody made a sound. The silence was terrible. So was the suspense. Charlie was so frightened he felt himself shrinking inside his skin. Then he saw the creature in the left-hand lift suddenly starting to change shape! Its body was slowly becoming longer and longer, and thinner and thinner, going up and up towards the roof of the lift, not straight up, but curving a little to the left, making a snake-like curve that was curiously graceful, up to the left and then curling over the top to the right and coming down again in a half-circle… and then the bottom end began to grow out as well, like a tail… creeping along the floor… creeping along the floor to the left… until at last the creature, which had originally looked like a huge egg, now looked like a long curvy serpent standing up on its tail.

  Then the one in the next lift began stretching itself in much the same way, and what a weird and oozy thing it was to watch! It was twisting itself into a shape that was a bit different from the first, balancing itself almost but not quite on the tip of its tail.

  Then the three remaining creatures began stretching themselves all at the same time, each one elongating itself slowly upward, growing taller and taller, thinner and thinner, curving and twisting, stretching and stretching, curling and bending, balancing either on the tail or the head or both, and turned sideways now so that only one eye was visible. When they had all stopped stretching and bending, this was how they finished up:

  'Scram!' shouted Mr Wonka. 'Get out quick!'

  People have never moved faster than Grandpa Joe and Charlie and Mr and Mrs Bucket at that moment. They all got behind the bed and started pushing like crazy. Mr Wonka ran in front of them shouting 'Scram! Scram! Scram!' and in ten seconds flat all of them were out of the lobby and back inside the Great Glass Elevator. Frantically, Mr Wonka began undoing bolts and pressing buttons. The door of the Great Glass Elevator snapped shut and the whole thing leaped sideways. They were away! And of course all of them, including the three old ones in the bed, floated up again into the air.

  8

  The Vermicious Knids

  'Oh, my goodness me!' gasped Mr Wonka. 'Oh, my sainted pants! Oh, my painted ants! Oh, my crawling cats! I hope never to see anything like that again!' He floated over to the white button and pressed it. The booster-rockets fired. The Elevator shot forward at such a speed that soon the Space Hotel was out of sight far behind.

  'But who were those awful creatures?' Charlie asked.

  'You mean you didn't know?' cried Mr Wonka. 'Well, it's a good thing you didn't! If you'd had even the faintest idea of what horrors you were up against, the marrow would have run out of your bones! You'd have been fossilized with fear and glued to the ground! Then they'd have got you! You'd have been a cooked cucumber! You'd have been rasped into a thousand tiny bits, grated like cheese and flocculated alive! They'd have made necklaces from your knucklebones and bracelets from your teeth! Because those creatures, my dear ignorant boy, are the most brutal, vindictive, venomous, murderous beasts in the entire universe!' Here Mr Wonka paused and ran the tip of a pink tongue all the way around his lips. 'VERMICIOUS KNIDS!' he cried. 'That's what they were!' He sounded the K… K'NIDS, like that.

  'I thought they were grobes,' Charlie said. 'Those oozy-woozy grobes you were telling the President about.'

  'Oh, no, I just made those up to scare the White House,' Mr Wonka answered. 'But there is nothing made up about Vermicious Knids, believe you me. They live, as everybody knows, on the planet Vermes, which is eighteen thousand four hundred and twenty-seven million miles away and they are very, very clever brutes indeed. The Vermicious Knid can turn itself into any shape it wants. It has no bones. Its body is really one huge muscle, enormously strong, but very stretchy and squishy, like a mixture of rubber and putty with steel wires inside. Normally it is egg-shaped, but it can just as easily give itself two legs like a human or four legs like a horse. It can become as round as a ball or as long as a kite-string. From fifty yards away, a fully grown Vermicious Knid could stretch out its neck and bite your head off without even getting up!'

  'Bite off your head with what?' said Grandma Georgina. 'I didn't see any mouth.' 'They have other things to bite with,' said Mr Wonka darkly. 'Such as what?' said Grandma Georgina.

  'Ring off,' said Mr Wonka. 'Your time's up. But listen, everybody. I've just had a funny thought. There I was fooling around with the President and pretending we were creatures from some other planet and, by golly, there actually were creatures from some other planet on board!'

  'Do you think there were many?' Charlie asked. 'More than the five we saw?'

  'Thousands!' said Mr Wonka. 'There are five hundred rooms in that Space Hotel and there's probably a family of them in every room!'

  'Somebody's going to get a nasty shock when they go on board!' said Grandpa Joe. They'll be eaten like peanuts,' said Mr Wonka. 'Every one of them.' 'You don't really mean that, do you, Mr Wonka?' Charlie said.

  'Of course I mean it,' said Mr Wonka. 'These Vermicious Knids are the terror of the Universe. They travel through space in great swarms, landing on other stars and planets and destroying everything they find. There used to be some rather nice creatures living on the moon a long time ago. They were called Poozas. But the Vermicious Knids ate the lot. They did the same on Venus and Mars and many other planets.'

  'Why haven't they come down to our Earth and eaten us?' Charlie asked.

  'They've tried to, Charlie, many times, but they've never made it. You see, all around our Earth there is a vast envelope of air and gas, and anything hitting that at high speed gets red hot. Space capsules are made of special heat-proof metal, and when they make a re-entry, their speeds are reduced right down to about two thousand miles an hour, first by retro-rockets and then by something called "friction". But even so, they get badly scorched. Knids, which are not heat-proof at all, and don't have any retro-rockets, get sizzled up completely before they're halfway through. Have you ever seen a shooting star?'

  'Lots of them,' Charlie said.

  'Actually, they're not shooting stars at all,' said Mr Wonka. 'They're Shooting Knids. They're Knids trying to enter the Earth's atmosphere at high speed and going up in flames.'

  'What rubbish,' said Grandma Georgina.

  'You wait,' said Mr Wonka. 'You may see it happening before the day is done.'

  'But if they're so fierce and dangerous,' Char
lie said, 'why didn't they eat us up right away in the Space Hotel? Why did they waste time twisting their bodies into letters and writing SCRAM?'

  'Because they're show-offs,' Mr Wonka replied. 'They're tremendously proud of being able to write like that.'

  'But why say scram when they wanted to catch us and eat us?'

  'It's the only word they know,' Mr Wonka said.

  'Look!' screamed Grandma Josephine, pointing through the glass. 'Over there!'

  Before he even looked, Charlie knew exactly what he was going to see. So did the others. They could tell by the high hysterical note in the old lady's voice.

  And there it was, cruising effortlessly alongside them, a simply colossal Vermicious Knid, as thick as a whale, as long as a lorry, with the most brutal vermicious look in its eye! It was no more than a dozen yards away, egg-shaped, slimy, greenish-brown, with one malevolent red eye (the only one visible) fixed intently upon the people floating inside the Great Glass Elevator!

  'The end has come!' screamed Grandma Georgina. 'He'll eat us all!' cried Mrs Bucket. 'In one gulp!' said Mr Bucket.

  'We're done for, Charlie,' said Grandpa Joe. Charlie nodded. He couldn't speak or make a sound. His throat was seized up with fright.

  But this time Mr Wonka didn't panic. He remained perfectly calm. 'We'll soon get rid of that!' he said and he pressed six buttons all at once and six booster-rockets went off simultaneously under the Elevator. The Elevator leaped forward like a stung horse, faster and faster, but the great green greasy Knid kept pace alongside it with no trouble at all.

  'Make it go away!' yelled Grandma Georgina. 'I can't stand it looking at me!'

  'Dear lady,' said Mr Wonka, 'it can't possibly get in here. I don't mind admitting I was a trifle alarmed back there in the Space Hotel. And with good reason. But here we have nothing to fear. The Great Glass Elevator is shockproof, waterproof, bombproof, bulletproof and Knidproof! So just relax and enjoy it.'

  'Oh you Knid, you are vile and vermicious!'

  cried Mr Wonka.

  'You are slimy and soggy and squishous!

  But what do we care

  'Cause you can't get in here,

  So hop it and don't get ambitious!'

  At this point, the massive Knid outside turned and started cruising away from the Elevator. 'There you are,' cried Mr Wonka, triumphant. 'It heard me! It's going home!' But Mr Wonka was wrong. When the creature was about a hundred yards off, it stopped, hovered for a moment, then went smoothly into reverse, coming back toward the Elevator with its rear-end (which was the pointed end of the egg) now in front. Even going backwards, its acceleration was unbelievable. It was like some monstrous bullet coming at them and it came so fast nobody had time even to cry out.

  CRASH! It struck the Glass Elevator with the most enormous bang and the whole thing shivered and shook but the glass held and the Knid bounced off like a rubber ball.

  'What did I tell you!' shouted Mr Wonka, triumphant. 'We're safe as sausages in here!' 'He'll have a nasty headache after that,' said Grandpa Joe.

  'It's not his head, it's his bottom!' said Charlie. 'Look, there's a big bump coming up on the pointed end where he hit! It's going black and blue!'

  And so it was. A purple bruisy bump the size of a small car was appearing on the pointed rear-end of the giant Knid. 'Hello, you dirty great beast!' cried Mr Wonka.

  'Hello, you great Knid! Tell us, how do you do?

  You're a rather strange colour today.

  Your bottom is purple and lavender blue.

  Should it really be looking that way?

  Are you not feeling well? Are you going to faint?

  Is it something we cannot discuss?

  It must be a very unpleasant complaint,

  For your backside's as big as a bus!

  Let me get you a doctor. I know just the man

  For a Knid with a nasty disease.

  He's a butcher by trade which is not a bad plan,

  And he charges quite reasonable fees.

  Ah, here he is now! "Doc, you really are kind

  To travel so far into space.

  There's your patient, the Knid with the purple behind!

  Do you think it's a desperate case?"

  "Great heavens above! It's no wonder he's pale!"

  Said the doc with a horrible grin.

  "There's a sort of balloon on the end of his tail!

  I must prick it at once with a pin!"

  So he got out a thing like an Indian spear,

  With feathers all over the top,

  And he lunged and he caught the Knid smack in the rear,

  But alas, the balloon didn't pop!

  Cried the Knid, "What on earth am I going to do

  With this painful preposterous lump?

  I can't remain standing the whole summer through!

  And I cannot sit down on my rump!"

  "It's a bad case of rear-ache," the medico said,

  "And it's something I cannot repair.

  If you want to sit down, you must sit on your head,

  With your bottom high up in the air!"'

  9

  Gobbled Up

  On the day when all this was happening, no factories opened anywhere in the world. All offices and schools were closed. Nobody moved away from the television screens, not even for a couple of minutes to get a Coke or to feed the baby. The tension was unbearable. Everybody heard the American President's invitation to the men from Mars to visit him in the White House. And they heard the weird rhyming reply, which sounded rather threatening. They also heard a piercing scream (Grandma Josephine), and a little later on, they heard someone shouting, 'Scram! Scram! Scram!' (Mr Wonka). Nobody could make head or tail of the shouting. They took it to be some kind of Martian language. But when the eight mysterious astronauts suddenly rushed back into their glass capsule and broke away from the Space Hotel, you could almost hear the great sigh of relief that rose up from the peoples of the earth. Telegrams and messages poured into the White House congratulating the President upon his brilliant handling of a frightening situation.

  The President himself remained calm and thoughtful. He sat at his desk rolling a small piece of wet chewing-gum between his finger and thumb. He was waiting for the moment when he could flick it at Miss Tibbs without her seeing him. He flicked it and missed Miss Tibbs but hit the Chief of the Air Force on the tip of his nose.

  'Do you think the men from Mars have accepted my invitation to the White House?' the President asked.

  'Of course they have,' said the Foreign Secretary. 'It was a brilliant speech, sir.'

  'They're probably on their way down here right now,' said Miss Tibbs. 'Go and wash that nasty sticky chewing-gum off your fingers quickly. They could be here any minute.'

  'Let's have a song first,' said the President. 'Sing another one about me, Nanny… please.'

  THE NURSE'S SONG

  This mighty man of whom I sing,

  The greatest of them all,

  Was once a teeny little thing,

  Just eighteen inches tall.

  I knew him as a tiny tot.

  I nursed him on my knee.

  I used to sit him on the pot

  And wait for him to wee.

  I always washed between his toes,

  And cut his little nails.

  I brushed his hair and wiped his nose

  And weighed him on the scales.

  Through happy childhood days he strayed,

  As all nice children should.

  I smacked him when he disobeyed,

  And stopped when he was good.

  It soon began to dawn on me

  He wasn't very bright,

  Because when he was twenty-three

  He couldn't read or write.

  'What shall we do?' his parents sobbed.

  'The boy has got the vapours!

  He couldn't even get a job

  Delivering the papers!'

  'Ah-ha,' I said. 'This little clot

  Could be a
politician.'

  'Nanny,' he cried. 'Oh Nanny, what

  A super proposition!'

  'Okay,' I said. 'Let's learn and note

  The art of politics.

  Let's teach you how to miss the boat

  And how to drop some bricks,

  And how to win the people's vote

  And lots of other tricks.

  Let's learn to make a speech a day

  Upon the TV screen,

  In which you never never say

  Exactly what you mean.

  And most important, by the way,

  Is not to let your teeth decay,

  And keep your fingers clean.'

  And now that I am eighty-nine,

  It's too late to repent.

  The fault was mine the little swine

  Became the President.

  'Bravo, Nanny!' cried the President, clapping his hands. 'Hooray!' shouted the others. 'Well done, Miss Vice-President, ma'am! Brilliant! Tremendous!'

  'My goodness!' said the President. 'Those men from Mars will be here any moment! What on earth are we going to give them for lunch? Where's my Chief Cook?'

  The Chief Cook was a Frenchman. He was also a French spy and at this moment he was listening at the keyhole of the President's study. 'Ici, Monsieur le President!' he said, bursting in.

  'Chief Cook,' said the President. 'What do men from Mars eat for lunch?'

  'Mars Bars,' said the Chief Cook.

  'Baked or boiled?' asked the President.

  'Oh, baked, of course, Monsieur le President. You will ruin a Mars Bar by boiling!'

  The voice of astronaut Shuckworth cut in over the loudspeaker in the President's study.

  'Request permission to link up and go aboard Space Hotel?' he said.

  'Permission granted,' said the President. 'Go right ahead, Shuckworth. It's all clear now… Thanks to me.'