A Golden Ticket To Hell

Chapter One

Dear Worthy Companion on this Journey of Horror and Woe,

You think you know the story of Mister Willy Wonka and his marvellous, amazing chocolate factory; the place where dreams come true, the mecca of all candy addicts, the proverbial wonderland in a box room, somewhere any child would give his right arm to see just once. And if I should tell you I had been one of those 'lucky' enough to have seen it, seen that miraculous place, would you be jealous? Impressed? Would you congratulate me? For having won the 'tour of a life-time'? What if I told you instead, that what I won was no ticket to paradise, no ticket to a land of wonder, no ticket to any child's Heaven, but an intended one-way ticket to Hell? You wouldn't believe me? Well you should.

Because, my friends, that is exactly what I won that day 5 years ago today, no less. You would never think that though, the papers and local news did a frankly superb job of covering up the whole incident but of course, there would always be loose ends they couldn't tie up. Me for one. I'm Augustus Gloop, the first one to find one of those accursed golden tickets. And everything you know about me is almost certainly false;  for a start, I'm not just some stupid, fat German kid. Yes, I AM from Germany and I do love chocolate. However, I'm not the obese, ignorant, selfish child I am portrayed to be. I was simply made out to be a bad guy in order to make Wonka look good, to make it look like I deserved what I got. Ha. As if anyone could deserve what we went through that day....

By we, of course, I mean the others; the four other unfortunate souls with whom I once shared a candy-coated purgatory with. The second ticket holder, as you well know, was the lovely Violet Beauregard. She was not the self-absorbed, 'I must be the best' obsessed girl she was made out to be. Far from it. She did indeed, however, have an enormous array of trophies from martial arts belts to sporting trophies, and of course, at the centre of it all was her World Record for the longest time chewing a single piece of gum. She was most proud of that one, but she never lorded her success over others. God, the very opposite. She was so shy the day we met she couldn't even look anyone in the eye for blushing. I had to ask three times before I could get her name properly due to her nervous mumbling. Yet another load of facts that Wonka's media ties twisted to his own gain. The next winner was the gorgeous Veronica Salt. No, her name was never Verruca. The nerve of that bastard! Defiling her memory like that....it's unforgivable! But as I was about to say, Veronica was indeed from a wealthy English family, though her father's business was a simple accountancy firm from Bristol. A peanut factory indeed...the nonsense people were lead to believe...it's despicable. And while her family background was indeed very high on the social class food chain, she spoke elegantly yet wasn't the type to even entertain the thought of looking down on anyone. In fact, she greeted myself, Violet and Mike at the airport with a hearty welcome and open, smiling arms.

Speaking of which, I should probably talk a little about Mike too. Mike Darbey, or Mike 'TeeVee' as you know him (I'm still surprised those tabloid cads never changed Violet's surname to 'Bubblegum' with all their other nonsense), was in the most simple of terms, a fucking genius. Pardon my French. And he sure as hell wasn't just some TV and video game-obsessed shut-in; sure, he loved being on his computer, phone and game-boy for insane amounts of time, but really, he was the most energetic boy I'd ever seen. Not at all like the drab and dull little kid people thought he was. A real nice guy too, as soon as I mentioned my phone was busted, he immediately fixed it up for me in the time it took for the minibus to pick us up from the airport. But Mike had nothing on Charlie. Dear friend Charlie. Unlike the others, no one knew anything at all about Charlie; the stories about him being from some poor family barely making ends meet was a load of rubbish made up by the press. By the look of his clothes and the fact he had a pretty decent digital camera and cellphone, it was pretty hard to imagine that he could be anything less than middle class at the least. His hair was neat and tidy too, that along with filed nails and the faint scent of body spray also added to my theory that his parents definitely had money. Though what captivated me about Charlie wasn't just the mystery behind his family, but behind the boy himself. When he and Veronica first met up with Violet, Mike and I, I couldn't help but notice he almost looked depressed.