A/N: An explanation of one of the more inexplicable characters in the Wonka universe. Inexplicable, and not usually thought very deeply on. But really: nobody ever comes in, and nobody ever comes out? Mmhmm. Except…?

This is pretty strictly a ’71-version fic… I mean, Wonka is fairly batty and disturbed here, but it’s meant in a pretty Wilder-ish way: I tried to capture that total ambiguousness about him that I loved in the first movie. I suppose there are a few Deppy moments, but those are more the exceptions, I think. Oh, you can try picturing Depp if you like, but the physical descriptions and the speech patterns may not fit all that well… and I think the physical contact aversion won’t hold up too well either. More importantly, the two plot-points I’m explaining by this—a certain character and a certain room—are exclusive to the original movie.

I’ve rated it T mostly because my POV character simply will not stop cussing… it isn’t quite canonical, but somehow I conceived of him that way. You’ll see who he is. Note... I had it as M before. I think T is alright... there isn't much in here worse than a bunch of the generic curse words. Tell me if I'm wrong and I'll switch back.

As to the genre of this… it isn’t exactly angst, because that would require an unobstructed view into a mind that was angsting, and it isn’t exactly humor, because that implies something a little lighter and happier, but it seems to have elements of both of those. And there’s just something about Eddie’s narrative voice that I find very funny.

Oh, right—and the regional vocab. Confuses the heck out of me, trying to figure out what to call certain items in the Wonka universe. Is it America? Is it England? Is it some undisclosed place? Where might that undisclosed place be nearer to, so that when a character is in the dark and pulls a cylindrical battery-powered object from his pocket in order to produce a beam of light, I know whether to call it a torch or a flashlight? On the one hand, American editions of CatCF that have Charlie finding a dollar in the snow seriously bother me (holy mother of Bob, do we need to shelter kids from the fact that gasp Dahl was British, and gasp not everyone uses American money?), and yet... If these are movie characters, they have their movie accents, and "torch" in an American accent with reference to anything not on fire just doesn't make sense. Eventually, I decided that, as I am American and my knowledge of which vocabulary is unique to my own country is unfortunately limited, and as this is based primarily on an American movie anyway, and characters with American accents, I’m going to stick with what comes easier to me. It’s a flashlight. And people eat candy and live in apartments. Deal with it.

Aaanyway, Enjoy!

"I hope you like it. I think you will."

(Yeep! Quoting, not arrogant.)

Eddie wasn’t the sort of man that broke into factories in the dead of night, habitually. God knew, he could have done without the torn trousers, scraped knees, and the slash of barbed wire across his palm, and he couldn’t see what could possibly be worth the trouble in there, anyway. It may have manufactured and housed the best candy in the world once, but no one had seen so much as a light in the place in a year, not even the glimmers from the flashlights of young hooligans.

So why was he going in? Not be choice, oh no. And his superiors hadn’t given him much of a reason either as to why it was Slugworth & Son’s Candy Co.’s official mandate that he smash the window of an ex-rival corporation at one in the morning and let himself inside. Oh, they had said something about preliminary inventory of the machines, but as he didn’t know shit about mechanics that was somewhat fucking unlikely. What they actually meant was that since he had grown up in the area, worked in Wonka’s factory for about a month before it closed, had something of a criminal record, and had, moreover, exactly the employment qualifications that made him totally and completely dispensable to Slugworth et al., he was to be the bait for whatever sick booby traps the madman Wonka had left when he had whisked off to serener waters, or crawled into a corner and died, or whatever the fuck it was that he had done. It wasn’t that Eddie was overly sorry to see the little bit of mayhem that he was bringing to the factory brought to it—it was just that he would rather he didn’t have to do it himself.

“Fuck,” he said, as he dropped a pane of glass into the basement room he was tackling. It shattered with an absurdly loud sound—some manipulation of the acoustics? That bastard. Or maybe it was just the silence that made it seem like that. A dog started barking several blocks off. Apparently, on top of everything else he wasn’t any good at, he was a fucking wretched burglar.

He waited a moment to see whether anyone was making any objections to his continuing, then slid himself feet-first into the dark.

This was a further mistake, as he had neglected to determine what was below him first. He didn’t let go of the window, but he also didn’t reach the ground when he hung by his hands from it.

“Fuck,” he said. His flashlight was in his pocket, and he wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to hold on one-handed. He tried pulling himself back up, but he wasn’t as strong as he had been a few years ago, and he failed.

“Fuck.” The room could be ten feet high or a hundred, and it was completely black. A distant streetlamp cast a little bit of orange through the narrow window from which he hung, but it didn’t really help. Perhaps if his eyes were adjusted? Right, but what did that take, half an hour? No fucking way was he dangling by his fingers in a pitch-black room for half an hour, wondering how many miles of space stretched below him. And he wouldn’t be able to get out of it even if it were the fucking bottomless pit anyway—he let go.

He slammed into a loose pile of hard, metallic things at the bottom, battled with them for a bit, rolled off, and found himself on the floor. A few new bruises, but probably nothing too bad. He found his flashlight and turned it on, then groped around for his lost glasses and put them back on—the frames were a little bent, but the lenses were still there, at least.

The metallic things were ordinary pots and pans, the window was about nine feet up, and the room appeared to be an entirely normal restaurant-style kitchen, all chrome and dust, smelling of ordinary staleness and disuse. After all the rumors he had heard about this place over the years, this was just anticlimactic. But it figured that even Beelzebub’s fairyland (or Oberon’s Hades, if you preferred) would be nothing but a bunch of average rooms behind big gates and impregnable hype.

He picked himself up and went out of the room into a hallway that seemed to be covered in fruit-patterned wallpaper. Tacky.

At least there didn’t seem to be any of the booby traps he was supposed to be springing. He chose rooms and corridors at random. The rooms didn’t enlighten him any—he had no way of knowing what any of the dusty and lifeless contraptions did, so he just gave them cursory glances and moved on. What kind of report could the fine folks at Slugworth & Son’s possibly be expecting from him? He came once to a huge room containing what appeared to be a set out of a playwright’s nightmare, with a dry riverbed and drooping tree-like shapes on a barren concrete hillside. Everything here had a softer look than elsewhere, so he looked closer and found that it was cobwebs and mold and mouse shit. He shuddered and hurried out.

Once, the factory had been rumored to be full of surprises, though lowly workers like Eddie, when he had been in Wonka’s employ, hadn’t seen much of it. Today, the first thing that really surprised him was the wood shavings. There were only a few at first, pale fluff of sawdust and delicate curls that had drifted down the corridors on trespassing winds. As he went on, the wood became more common, nestled in the ubiquitous thick dust. The wood shavings looked new—fresh, crisp, white, not yet dust-covered—but what did he know about that sort of thing? Perhaps in the stillness of the factory they stayed fresh looking for a long time? Or maybe they had drifted in from construction somewhere nearby? But he walked more cautiously, watching the concentrations of wood increase gradually as he went on, and looking for signs of anything else strange in the treacherous shadows his flashlight cast.

He stopped dead when he saw the first footprints in the carpet of dust. Someone had walked in the hall intersecting his—and he didn’t know how long ago it might have been, but it must have been much less than the twelve months that the factory had supposedly been empty… he hurried past.

He reached an intersection where the wood shavings were thick and the middle of the hall was almost clear of dust: someone had walked here recently, and often. Impossible. Vandals, it must have been vandals, or kids looking for a thrill… but he moved on with exaggerated care.

The next door he came to was piled high with debris all around—desks, picture frames, strips of wallpaper, even what appeared to be a ceramic washbasin. On closer examination, he found that the pile of junk was the source of the sawdust, for each piece had been sawed in half, and only one half of each was to be found.

“Fucking loony,” he muttered. But he didn’t say it loudly.

The strange lumber was piled around a doorway, but it left room for the door to open, and, judging by the disturbed dust, it had been opened not too long ago.

Carefully, he pulled the door open and the hinges shrieked in the dust-muffled silence. When he cast his light inside, the room was eerily neat. The other half of each object in the hall was here, but none of the wood shavings, or even the coat of dust he had seen in every other room. It was a normal, clean, organized, ordinary office, except that every article in it, including a plaster bust that might have been of its owner, had been sawed in half.

Which meant that somewhere in the dark, a lunatic was wandering around with a saw. Oh, good.

It would have been healthier to leave quickly, since the owner might be back. But the room made him curious, as none of the other rooms had. He sat—gingerly—in the half-chair and rifled through the papers on the half-desk. There were newspaper clippings, impossible to make much sense of as only half of each of them remained. They seemed mainly to treat of the closing of the Wonka factory. A few books: there was a volume of Shakespeare whose owner seemed to have had a change of heart halfway through sawing through the cover and which was therefore torn asunder along the spine. An anthology of poetry had also met with that latter fate. Eddie flipped it over to its last intact page and read by the beam of his flashlight:

Ode—O’Shaughnessy

The poem might have been longer, but the rest was in the lost half. Eddie grunted to himself. Fanciful stuff. He had given up on poetry when he had given up on university: life didn’t leave time for that sort of thing. He tossed the book down and stood up.

There was a hoarse scream behind him. A body slammed into his back, grappling to grab his throat. The force and the surprise knocked him forward onto the half desk, which tipped and spilled everything on it sideways onto the floor. The flashlight rolled from his hand so he fought in near-darkness, tearing his attacker’s weak hands from his neck and slamming him, her, or it into the ground. Holding his attacker down by the throat, Eddie groped for the flashlight, found it, and shone it into his attacker’s face.

It was a man, squinting, writhing, and screaming under the beam. His hair was a bramble of feral curls, his body was gaunt, and his teeth were terrible. He quieted after a few minutes from shouting to more subdued gibbering. With his features smoothed into a more neutral expression (if still rather wild), he had a surprisingly unthreatening aspect: round face, large, blue eyes, a small mouth, a sad look, and an old, rumpled, velvet frock coat.

“You’ve come to spy on me, you’ve come to steal my secrets, it’s closed, I’m done, I give in, why don’t you leave me alone? You’re a spy, aren’t you. Are you a spy?”

“Yes,” said Eddie.

The madman blinked. “Oh. Did you find anything?”

“No.”

He frowned, looking suspicious. “The factory is full of secrets. You’re lying.” He thought a moment. “I don’t like liars.”

“I wasn’t sure what to look for, so I didn’t find anything.”

“Oh.” He paused. “I don’t really believe you, you know.”

“OK.”

“What’s your name?”

“Eddie,” said Eddie.

“I can’t just call you Eddie.”

“Everybody calls me Eddie.”

“We’ve only just become acquainted. It seems coarse and impolite.”

“I am coarse and impolite.”

“But I am not. What is it short for? Edward? Edmund? Edgar?”

Eddie winced. “Edwin.”

“Ha! Excellent, excellent! And your last name?”

“Wilkinson.”

“Well, Mr. Edwin Wilkinson, I would shake your hand and say good afternoon, but you have pinned me to the floor very effectively.”

“And it isn’t afternoon, it’s the middle of the night.”

“Can you remember noon? Of course you can. Therefore, this is after it. But, no matter. I am Willy Wonka.”

“Willy’s a nickname too.” Eddie found himself drawn into the idiotically irrelevant blather.

“Oh yes, and likewise the diminutive of many possible names. ‘Erwilian’ was always my favorite—like the old song, you know? ‘with me roo-run-rority ri-run-rority ri-no-ority-an’… I see you don’t know it. That, alas, is not in fact my name, but wouldn’t it be lovely if it were?”

“Are you mad?”

“Oh, yes.”

Eddie blinked. “Oh.”

Willy Wonka wriggled to a sitting position and Eddie let him go. “Isn’t so much simpler when everyone is what you think they are, no nasty surprises, I a blithering madman, you a horrid, creeping spy, a place for everything and everything in its place, and everyone does just what you expect them to? I have always much preferred it that—” All at once, Willy Wonka snatched up the heavy half-volume of Shakespeare from the floor and slammed it down onto Eddie’s head with all of his strength.

“FUCK!”

“—way. Haven’t you?”

“FUCK!”

Willy Wonka scrambled to his feet and made a dive for the door. Eddie roared and caught the mad chocolatier by the ankle. Wonka hit the ground with a sharp cry and began to kick and struggle again.

“What the fuck was that for?”

But Wonka was back to screaming, with his face contorted. “Let me go! Spy! You filthy turncoat spy, you’ve come to take all my fabulous, beautiful, wonderful inventions to the enemy, you’re going to tell them! Help! Police! Murder! Get off! Get off! Get off!”

“Hold still, you son of a bitch!” Wonka had begun beating his head against the ground, so Eddie hoisted him up, and sat himself against the wall with the chocolatier’s back against his own chest, and Wonka’s head positioned before Eddie’s shoulder where he couldn’t hit anything with it, all held in place by Eddie’s arms wrapped firmly around Wonka’s waist, pinning the little man’s arms to his sides.

Wonka screamed a while longer, but finding his thrashing could do no more damage, he stilled at last, and turned away from his captor with a shudder and a whimper.

“Holy shit,” gasped Eddie, when the little man was quiet. “Will you fucking stop that?”

“D-d-d-don’t—d-don’t—”

“Don’t what?”

“C-curse.”

“Fucking—”

“Noooo….”

“Oh, all right.” Eddie sat awkwardly, and examined the molding where the wall met the ceiling, ignoring the fact that his arms were wrapped tightly around a tiny madman that smelled of dirt and old sweat, and seemed to be sobbing quietly on his shoulder.

Wonka hadn’t moved for a while, so Eddie cleared his throat. Wonka began humming quietly to himself, and Eddie couldn’t tell whether it had no melody, or whether he simply couldn’t catch it. “What… why is everything cut in half here?”

“I’ve thrown away the worser part of it and live the purer with the other half,” hummed Wonka to the empty corner of the room.

“Don’t fu—don’t quote Hamlet at me.”

Wonka’s head rolled in his direction, bringing his face uncomfortably close. Eddie loosened his grip a little and sat back a few inches. Wonka took no notice. “You know Shakespeare, Mr. Wilkinson?”

“The fact that it’s Shakespeare doesn’t make it not an idiotic reason.”

“Oh dear, the structure of that last sentence… And, by the by, where did you get that scar on your face?” As if considering this to be a rhetorical victory, Wonka sighed with contentment, then leaned back and settled himself comfortably against Eddie’s chest, with his head nestled against Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie froze, then let go quickly, shaking off the little man and the smell of his unwashed hair.

“Fine. Sit over there. Just… sit still.”

Wonka blinked and cocked his head to the side, but he got up and went obediently to the wall a few feet away. “Very well,” he said. “Now, were you just making conversation, or did you really want to know? Because if you were just making conversation, then I really must apologize, because there’s nobody else around here to tell. And if I tell you my secret, you will have to tell me yours, you know: that scar and all. So, then. What do you think of my factory, Mr. Wilkinson?”

Eddie was at a loss. “…It’s nice.”

Wonka raised his eyebrow, and suddenly the whimpering madman looked canny. Not sane, perhaps, but lucid. Eddie shivered, wondering what he had unleashed. He tried again. “It… well I can’t tell what it was. I worked here a little while you know, a year ago, before you closed, but I didn’t see much, though I’m sure it was a lot nicer then. But… well, now? It’s just a lot of dusty rooms. I don’t know what you want me to say about it. There isn’t much here any more.”

“Good, good. ‘And, round about his home, the glory/ That blushed and bloomed/ Is but a dim-remembered story/ Of the old time entombed.’ …Why are you sulking now?”

“You should have outgrown that kind of melodrama years ago. Rots the brain.”

“I think not. Do you know who that one was?”

“Poe, of course. And I think it does. You’re making it romantic to sit in here and think yourself mad. How mad are you, anyway?”

“‘When the wind is southerly—’”

“Oh, never mind. Just explain all this, if you intend to.”

“Oh, you know the answer already. Grand dreams, disillusionment, loss of hope and the will to keep squelching through it all. The old story.”

“Why is this room in half, then? There’s more to it than that.”

“You mean you want a more romantic story? I thought you despised that sort of thing. Very well. Well. This factory that you call… dusty, was once the greatest fairyland ever conceived. I created it, loved it, and wanted the world to love it too, through the works of art I could create by it. So I made chocolate, and I poured everything I had into that chocolate—the utmost of my passion, my love, my intelligence and my ingenuity, most of my waking thoughts and all of my dreams, and the result was greater than I could have dared hope, and I knew that every day I toiled would make it greater still.

“And then the spies came, and thought of money, and at first I took no notice—money seemed so unimportant to all of this, that I assumed they were misguided madmen—a dwindling handful of people, but that the rest must understand.

“But it was not a small handful, and it only grew larger, and I still did not get it. Why would others care how I made my products, and why would I care that they knew? The joy of chocolate was not the magic of the end result, but the love and toil and thought that made that magic—so what purpose could be served by knowing it, other than curiosity? I was so young.

“But so much money drained away that even I took notice, and at last I understood that the money was enough for the other factories, and the flavors were enough for the customers, and I was a sad, deluded fool to believe in art.

“The very last spy I caught was a friend of mine, my most trusted advisor. I had told him my secrets hardly realizing that I was telling secrets, because I spoke out of the passion of creation. And I asked him, how, how could he have done this, did he not find my art as wonderful as he had always said he did?

“And he said, yes, of course he did, he understood it all. I asked him how, then, he could have exchanged that wondrous thing for dead cash, and he just shrugged, and said that that was what the world was, and that is what mankind does in the world. Then he walked away.

“So I left the world, or made the world leave me, and here I am.

“As to this room? I was sitting at that very chair when it was a whole chair—well, I think our little skirmish finished it, but you know the one—and I was bored and lonely and discouraged, and it occurred to me how wonderful it would be to restart it all, show the world the genius of Willy Wonka, and stand above everyone as the greatest chocolate maker the world had ever known.

“And then it occurred to me that that thought had nothing to do with chocolate, or art, or creation, but with power, prestige, success. No, that, that was what the world was, and what mankind does in it. And for a moment, I was no longer better than the rest of them.

“So I sliced off half of everything in this room because I couldn’t very well slice the evil out of myself, and I come in here to remind myself that I too could be what the rest of them are, if I forget what I really meant. That is why.”

There was a pause. Willy Wonka slid himself so that he sat in front of Eddie, leaning forward. “Now, Mr. Wilkinson. Now do you understand?”

Eddie stared at the little figure of the chocolatier before him, frizzled hair and smoldering eyes, and felt compelled to speak the truth.

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

Wonka’s round face sagged with pain and disappointment. “Nothing? I—” He squeezed his eyes shut and hugged his thin chest. Perhaps if he had not been reminded of his loneliness and desperation he would not have done it. Eddie saw the bright eyes flash open, solemn, concentrating, and then the chocolatier kissed him. Eddie was frozen for a moment before he scrambled to the side and stared with blank confusion.

“Oh, dear.” Willy Wonka looked contrite, and inclined his head with an odd sort of gallantry. “I apologize for that… you understand, I have not spoken with anyone in a very great while. I fear my social skills have become… a little rusty.” The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Alright. It’s… alright. Just—”

“Won’t happen again.”

“OK. Alright.” Eddie rubbed his head with what probably came off as a slightly shell-shocked expression.

“Now.” Wonka leaned forward towards him again. Eddie leaped backwards with a speed that seemed to rather shock them both. Wonka stopped with bemused surprise. “Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t mean…” He sat back again. “I was merely going to ask for your story. You promised it me, you know. Well, at least tacitly you did.” He looked inquiring.

“My… story. What do you want to know?”

“Well, start with that scar… the whole length of your left cheek. How did that happen?”

“Not a long story. I tried to steal a woman’s purse eight months or so ago. Fortunately or unfortunately, she was carrying a screwdriver.”

“Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Well… what ever made you do a thing like that?”

Eddie narrowed his small eyes. “You did, I suppose. Maybe that isn’t fair, but that’s what I was thinking… do you know what happened to this town, when its largest factory shut down without warning? How poor the people are? Of course you don’t, you’re hiding in here… You talk of money as if it were something no right-thinking person would be motivated by. Not all of us have factories to hide in, Wonka. And I’m a complete bast—completely bad person; I probably always have been. But no one has it easy here, and those that didn’t leave this town like I did are much worse off.”

Wonka was staring at him, and his self-possessed, self-obsessed arrogance had melted away for once, and he looked uncomplicatedly horrified.

Eddie shook his head. “There’s no help for it, I suppose.”

Wonka shook off his brief flash of social conscience. “No, I suppose not.” There was silence for a moment, then Wonka looked up. “For whom do you work?”

“Slugworth.”

“You’re a spy for Slugworth.”

“Yes.”

Eddie noticed, not for the first time, how pale and sickly he looked with his bravado deflated, and the reminders of his failures in his mind. “What do you eat, Wonka? Surely you have real food here, not just year-old sweets…?” Wonka shrugged disinterestedly. “Oh God.”

“What does it get you, I mean, how is it, to work for him?”

“My God. I’m going to bring you a roast beef sandwich. Lettuce and tomato. You’re not a vegetarian or anything, are you? Shit. (Sorry.) And a toothbrush. How can you—?”

“Are you happy, Mr. Wilkinson?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, of course I’m not happy. My job is to take little bars of Slugworth chocolate off of a conveyor belt and fit them into boxes. Even my employers regard me as so useless that they sent me off here without any knowledge of what I was supposed to be looking for, just because they wanted to see if people that went into your factory would survive it. I have an apartment I can barely pay for, and it’ll be months before I’ve saved enough to get myself a TV, let alone a sofa. My last girlfriend stayed with me two weeks, said I was a fucking cold fish, and left, and even my cat keeps running away. I don’t know about your debates about art and money—but this is what the world is.”

Wonka looked small and sad, faced with a mundanity that he had probably forgotten about.

Eddie shook his head. “Forget it. Maybe it’s better to be mad grandly than to be sane in a commonplace way, I don’t know. I suppose I almost envy you, you’re so spectacularly miserable.”

“But you would not change places with me, I think. Or adopt my romantic pining.”

“No.”

“I suppose we would always ‘rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others we know not of—’ Oh, alright, no more Hamlet. But it is a pity you will not join me. It gets lonely here.”

“You like it that way. Your kind enjoys being mad.”

“My kind… Are you leaving?”

“I’m not going to tell Slugworth.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I’ll come back. I’ll bring you real food. And a toothbrush. And soap.”

Wonka smiled wryly. “You aren’t very subtle, are you? I suppose I have been more lax in certain things than was previously my wont… But do not bring me food. Come, and cook me dinner. The kitchen you fell into when you first entered is still in working order, if a little dusty, and it would be an honor to have a meal from so ambitious a chef.”

There was silence.

“Did I say something wrong, Mr. Wilkinson?”

There was more silence.

“Oh my dear sir, was I too presumptuous? You were being so kind, I merely thought… I wouldn’t want to impose, of course…” Wonka’s conciliatory tone was belied by the amusement in his eyes.

Still more silence.

“Explain, Wonka.”

“But you have not asked any question, Mr. Wilkinson.”

“Explain.”

Wonka smiled and examined his fingernails with a smug, untroubled air. “Explain which? That I knew you had come into my kitchen? I may be mad, Mr. Wilkinson, but when I am sane enough to look about me, there is nothing that happens in this factory without my knowledge.”

“And when you are not sane enough to look about you?”

“My dear Mr. Wilkinson, your charming burglary techniques could rouse a man from the deepest trance, from a mile off. I was particularly impressed by the bold rhythm of the tussle with the pots and pans following so closely upon the heels of the shattered pane of glass. What an exciting tempo, and what original instrumentation. May I say, it roused me quite effectively from a particularly vicious bout of self-pity.

“But that isn’t what you wanted me to explain, is it.” Very slowly, Wonka approached him, probably so that he would not leap away again. Eddie tried halfheartedly to move backwards, but he was already at the wall and he could only flatten himself against it. Wonka stopped with his face a few inches from Eddie’s, his blue eyes wide and expressionless, and his features weird in the shadows that the flashlight cast. “I don’t let just anyone into my factory, you know.”

“I broke in through your window. You couldn’t have prevented that.”

“No, but you were wandering blindly by machines of which you knew nothing. Had I wished you not to penetrate here…”

Eddie started. “H-how many people have come in here—how many people have you—”

“But, I was not referring to tonight. You first came here more than a year ago, and I hired you.”

“I worked on a glorified assembly line.”

“But you worked for me. And no woman or man works for me in whom I see no spark of inner fire.”

“You must have damn good eyes, then. And I can’t have met you more than once before this, if that.”

“You wanted to be a chef at that time. You were taking informal lessons from a fine retired chef in an apartment nearby, only taking on my work for extra money. And before you tried to become a chef, you wanted to be a painter. Before you left university, you wanted to be a poet.”

Eddie passed his hand over his face.

“You were an artist, too, Mr. Wilkinson.”

“Art is foolishness, for which the real world has no place. And I have no patience for, for that matter. I’m not—”

“No, not anymore. But…”

“But?”

“Work for me, Mr. Wilkinson.”

“Will you pay me? Do you even have any money?”

“Of course, of course. There are piles of cash lying around, that’s never been an issue. But say that you will work for me.”

“What would I do for you?”

“Oh, things. There is plenty to be done… perhaps the factory will be reopened one day. One must begin regaining employees some time. Even if not, I will need someone to watch it for me, while I am away.”

“Away?”

“Oh, yes, I have been hiding here too long. My health and my sanity are in shambles, I simply must get away, find new hope somewhere.”

“And where do you expect to find this hope?”

“Oh, down there.” Wonka waved idly at the floor.

“Down…?”

“Down there. I expect you believe you came in through my basement entrance? You simply have no conception of how many basements lie below that. Well, basements in the very loose sense of the term… you see, there is a vast system of caverns directly below here, and even as shallowly as I have skimmed them, I have found beasts the likes of which no scientific text has ever documented. I have looked down from above upon the canopies of great phosphorescent jungles, and upon the backs of strange creatures flying above them, seen rustlings among their branches of monsters the likes of which we cannot conceive. Most remarkable of all, I have seen hints of a civilization in the high branches, just below the tops of that canopy—though of what kind, I could not tell.”

“And you did not think to look a little closer?”

“Well, I didn’t have any more rope, you understand. And it was nearly bedtime.”

“I see.”

“Ah, I have just had a glimpse of our working relationship. I will forever make fantastic assertions about the things that I have done and seen, and you will forever use them as confirmation of my madness. Ah, well. I suppose I knew that when I chose you.”

“I see.”

“You really must stop saying that. You don’t see at all, you know.”

Eddie rose. Wonka sat back, letting him up. The chocolatier had a vexed look as he looked up, as if fearing his new acquaintance were not as completely under his control as he had previously thought.

“I must be getting back.”

Wonka’s face fell. “To Slugworth?”

Eddie sighed, wondering whether he would regret it. “I don’t work for Slugworth, Mr. Wonka, I work for you.”

Wonka smiled. In fact, he looked insufferably smug. But he said nothing, and simply turned away and began tidying up the books and papers that had fallen from the half desk. Eddie stood uncertainly for a moment, looking down at his new employer’s purple velvet back.

“I’ll need to take my flashlight, you know.”

“Oh, yes. It’s right over there.” Wonka didn’t look up, but gestured to the source of the only light in the room.

“Well yes, but…” Wonka continued to wave disinterestedly. After a moment’s more hesitation, Eddie bent and picked it up. After another pause, he went out the door, slowly, looking back frequently, although he could no longer see Wonka in the gloom.

As he turned down the hallway, he stopped, listened, and heard Willy Wonka still shuffling papers and humming to himself in the thick dark. Eddie shivered and continued on his way.

As he made his way, he found himself beginning to think about what sort of meal it would be best to prepare when he came back.

The End.