Kathryn Littlewood - Rose Bliss Cooks up Magic

“Hostage!” Mr Butter laughed. “I don’t even know the meaning of the word. You’re free to go at any time.” He examined the fingernails of his right hand. “After you’ve completed your duties, of course.”

“You can’t keep me here against my will!” Rose cried.

“Against your will?” Mr Butter fanned the idea away with his hand. “We are not holding you here. You may come and go as you wish … once our five main recipes are perfected.”

Rose was getting nowhere with this man. She thought of her parents, how Ty and Sage would have returned from their deliveries by now. Albert and Purdy would ask where Rose was, and they would say that she’d wanted to make a few deliveries on her bike. It would be conceivable that Rose was still out and about. Maybe her family wouldn’t start worrying until sundown. She could finish the baking here by then, or at least find a phone.

“Fine,” she said at last, gripping Gus so tightly that he knew not to scratch. “I’ll bake first.”

“Come,” said Mr Butter with a smile. “Let me show you where we work.”

Mr Butter led Rose down a bright corridor, with Mr Kerr taking up the rear. From within her backpack, Gus leaned forward, both his paws on her left shoulder, the sound of his constant low growl a comfort in her ear.

Mr Butter opened a steel door and Rose was hit with the smell of sugar and chocolate and bleach, the heat of roaring ovens, and the sounds of industrial hissing and churning and buzzing and pounding.

Mr Butter led them out onto a steel catwalk – with railings, of course – overlooking a vast factory of gleaming stainless steel. Giant metal paddles churned enormous vats of chocolate. Dozens of hairnetted workers piped white dots onto hundreds of chocolate cupcakes that rode on a conveyor belt, like luggage at an airport. A monstrous mechanical press sealed snack cake after snack cake into plastic wrappers, then another conveyor belt dropped the packages into cartons.

Rose stared down at the scene in distaste. She was used to individually packing each precious cake in a white box and tying it off with baker’s twine.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” said Mr Butter, inhaling deeply and spreading his arms majestically. “We produce eight thousand snacks of one sort or another every minute. Our facilities here are larger than the Pentagon, and we have more delivery trucks working for us than the U.S. Postal Service.”

When they reached the end of the catwalk, Mr Butter led Rose and Gus into a tiny glass-walled room that was suspended precariously over the factory floor. She looked down at the tangled mess of conveyor belts and was reminded of the stomach-churning feeling she’d had when she looked over the railing at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The suspended room was empty except for an illuminated glass pedestal, on top of which sat a glass dome. Inside the glass dome was a small hemisphere of chocolate cake, stuffed with white pastry cream. She recognized it instantly as a Dinky Cake.

“Why do you have an entire room devoted to a Dinky Cake?” she asked.

“It’s not just a Dinky Cake,” said Mr Kerr, squinting his dark eyes.

“Beneath this hallowed dome,” Mr Butter began, like he was delivering a sermon, “lies the very genesis of the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation. Our empire was built on the Dinky Cake. Each year, the average person in the United States devours upward of seven pounds of Dinkies.”

“Ugh,” said Rose, remembering the way some of the kids at school used to gobble up the cakes in two bites. “So, why is this one in a jar?”

“This,” Mr Butter said, once again lifting his glasses and wiping his eyes, “is the first Dinky Cake we ever made. And it’s every bit as fresh as it was the day it was manufactured by my grandfather back in 1927.”

Rose was horrified. The Dinky Cake was almost a century old – it should already have rotted away. “That’s vile.”

“It’s sensational ,” Mr Butter spat, pressing his spindly arms close to his sides. “It’s the power of preservatives – something your homespun cookies lack. Two days after you bake a cake, it dries out and winds up in the garbage. But with preservatives, each Dinky is guaranteed to be as delicious as the day you bought it, no matter when you eat it. The cakes are, in a way, immortal.”

Gus, who was staring at the Dinky, began to heave.

“Oops! My cat has a hairball!” Rose cried as she whisked Gus out of the room and placed him gently on the catwalk, where he continued to dry heave. “I would like to leave now,” he said quietly so that only Rose could hear him.

“I want to go home, too,” said Rose, equally quiet. “But we have to find a way out of here.”

“We want you to go home as well!” said Mr Butter, who had stepped out of the glass Dinky shrine just in time to hear Rose. “But there is work to do first, so now we are going to bring you to our main test kitchen. It’s the happiest place on Earth.”

“I thought that was Disneyland,” Gus whispered.

Mr Butter put his thin arm around Rose’s shoulder. “Your mission, which you’ve already accepted, will be to perfect the recipes for our five key products. After that, you will be absolutely free to go. With our thanks, of course.”

“Of course,” Rose said with a gulp. “Perfecting a few recipes should be easy.” She looked at Gus.

But the cat only shook his head and sighed.

OUTSIDE THE MAIN factory building, Mr Butter and Mr Kerr ushered Rose and Gus into the back seat of a golf cart.

“Now we are off!” Mr Butter shouted. “To the place where the magic happens!”

“Magic?” Rose repeated. Were there kitchen magicians here? No, that couldn’t be … could it?

“A figure of speech,” Mr Butter said. “I’m speaking, of course, of the magic of industry!”

“Oh,” Rose said, breathing a sigh of relief.

From her backpack, the cat whispered, “Spare me, please.”

Mr Kerr drove the cart past dozens of box-shaped warehouses, all painted a lifeless grey. Rose looked up the alleyways between the warehouses and all she could see were other warehouses, as if she’d entered a labyrinth of grey blocks from which there was no escape. The buildings were so tall and so close together that even the late-afternoon sun failed to penetrate to the ground below, and the streets of the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation were dark as night.

The sun would be setting in an hour or so, and she knew that her parents would have officially started worrying that she hadn’t returned. She considered hopping off the cart and making a run for it, but in which direction? The buildings seemed to go on forever.

“How many buildings are there?” Rose asked, trying to seem casual.

“More than one hundred and seventy-five units in this compound alone,” Mr Butter answered proudly. “Then there’s our other production facility in Canada. That one has only one hundred and twenty-five buildings.”

After what seemed like a long drive, Mr Kerr stopped the cart in front of a grey warehouse with a giant 67 painted on the side. He pulled a walkie-talkie from his suit jacket pocket and spoke softly into it. “Marge, FLCPC landing, over.”

Suddenly, a part of the warehouse wall lifted into the roof, like an automated garage door, and Mr Kerr drove the cart through the opening. The door closed behind them, locking the golf cart into a pitch-black, air-conditioned box.

When the floor underneath started rumbling, Rose realized they were in an elevator. After a minute, the car emerged on the floor of a giant kitchen with rust-colored linoleum tiles on the floor, stainless steel prep tables, and a row of top-of-the-line ovens.

The perimeter of the room was lined with every conceivable kitchen appliance: restaurant-sized stand mixers, deep fryers, toasters and blenders, salamanders and broilers, stainless steel pots and pans, and a rack containing twenty spatulas of various sizes and colours.