The Complete Adventures of Toffee

by Charles F. Myers

  A flame of anger flickered briefly in her eyes. “And to think I let that little rat take me in with his phoney reports!” Again, she turned pleadingly to Marc. “Please say you’ll forgive me?”

  Marc stared at her, aghast, for a moment, wondering if he’d finally lost his mind, then his gaze darted to the scattered pile of photographs. Quickly he crossed over and picked them up, looked at them, and then dropped them disdainfully to the floor.

  “I’ll think it over,” he said severely, turning to Julie. “I don’t know if I’ll forgive you or not. You behaved very badly, I think. I’m going to my room to think about it, and I’ll let you know my decision in exactly half an hour.”

  With that, he turned and strode majestically out of the room. Reaching the hallway, out of Julie’s sight, he suddenly stopped and the grin that broke across his face, teetered dangerously on the edge of hearty laughter.

  “I might have known, all along, that Toffee wouldn’t photograph,” he murmured. Then, he shook his head wonderingly and continued to his room.

  It would be nice, he thought, just having lunch . . . in his own home . . . with his own wife.

  TOFFEE TAKES A TRIP

  Marc Pillsworth decided he needed a vacation—so he went on a trip. But where Marc went, Toffee followed—with trouble

  GLUMLY, situated in sandy discomfort, Marc Pillsworth watched as another blustering wave tripped, fell flat on its watery face, and embarrassedly dissolved into a foolish fringe of giggling froth. It was the sameness of the thing that was getting him down, the business of being constantly sold short on a promise of something interesting. He rolled carefully over, onto his stomach, which had, by now, become a bloody shade of vermillion, and transferred the sunny torture to his back, which had only reached a color, approximately that of tomato soup. Taken either way, front or back, and considering his bright yellow trunks, he was, as the biographers always say, a pretty colorful citizen. Also, as the biographers never say, he was a pretty dejected one.

  With one slender finger he traced a circle in the gritty surface before him, then jabbed viciously into its center. There was something frightening, deliberate in the action, especially when it was known that, to Marc, the circle represented the eye of a rascally unknown writer of magazine articles. It seemed only a matter of time before he entered into the refreshing pastime of sticking pins into wax effigies. He didn’t really wish the fellow any harm; only that he’d break his treacherous neck by next Saturday at the latest.

  Marc was certain that on the eve of his last earthly day he would be able to point an enfeebled finger squarely at the present day and the three preceeding it, and assuredly say, “That was the darkest period of my life.” He didn’t know which magazine article had planted the hideous idea of separate vacations in Julie’s golden head, but he had already sworn violence, bloodshed, and even sudden death to its author if ever he found out. That a man should spend two weeks in a beach house without his wife was plainly, to him, a new and outstanding high in sheerest idiocy. He was only surprised that in a country so nearly glutted with legislation of all descriptions, there should be no laws to protect an unwary husband against the published oozings of so loathsomely promiscuous a mind as would endorse, and even encourage, the diabolical arrangement of separate vacations.

  Ennui was setting in like a sort of spiritual rigor mortis. The first day, he had golfed and gotten sunburned, the second, he had ridden and gotten sunburned, and the third, he had fished and gotten sunburned. Now, in desperation, he was reducing the whole tortuous process to its primary element, and simply getting roasted to a flaming crisp with as little exertion as possible.

  WITH eyes that were as optimistic as a slab in the morgue, he gazed up the face of the cliff, beyond the highway running along its edge, and to the beach house on the hill at the other side. It was just as he had supposed.

  There was no car out front . . . no jaunty blue convertible . . . and more to the point, no Julie. She hadn’t changed her mind. He didn’t know why he should think she would. It would serve her right, he thought spitefully, if Toffee chose this precise time to make a new entrance into his life.

  He folded his hands before him and muzzled his chin into their hollow. He’d been too busy to give Toffee much thought lately, but now that she’d slipped into his consciousness, he found that he recalled her with curiously mixed feelings. Pleasure finally proved to be the strongest, however, and he began to smile for the first time in several days.

  Lord knows there was proof enough of Toffee’s existence . . . almost too much . . . but still it took an effort to realize that such a phenomenon could actually be. And Toffee was a phenomenon in every sense of the word ... even a few that wouldn’t bear repeating. With her, it was a matter of “Out of sight, in mind,” and vice versa. A creation of Marc’s imagination ... a lovely, vivacious phantom of this dreams . . . she had seen fit on various occasions to materialize from his subconscious and uninvitedly play an active role in his everyday affairs. During the duller stretches of his life, she was apparently content to bide her time in the tranquil valley of his mind, but given a moment of high excitement, she was sure to materialize and gleefully build it into a full fledged crisis with free wheeling.

  At first, Marc had found it difficult to believe he would ever become accustomed to this peculiar arrange-ment, but apparently he had, for now, as he thought of Toffee, it was not with awe of the curious circumstance under which she existed, but rather with an almost wistful loneliness for the girl, herself. It was true, he realized, that pandemonium could not be far behind with Toffee on the threshold, but he couldn’t help the feeling that his current doldrums could do with a dash of her particular brand of redheaded chaos like a man in a death chamber could do with a shiny new, cross-cut file. It was just as he had come to this decision that alien voices broke through the delicate wall of his quiet, introspective mood, and left it shattered beyond recall.

  HIS head darted up, and his hand raked back a disordered shock of hair that had fallen over his brow. Thus uncovered, his eyes, two charred embers projected through the throbbing sheet of flame that was his face, strained upward, to the top of the cliff, in search of the noisy intruders. Usually no one ever came to this particular beach, except himself, and he had come to think of it as exclusively his own. But if he were preparing to relinquish his solitude to a band of vapid, would-be bathers, he was quite, quite mistaken, for much to the contrary, at the head of the crude board stairway leading down to the tiny beach, there stood two of the most unlikely homo sapiens he had ever seen. They looked like the culls of a dyspeptic nightmare.

  The man was short, stocky, mostly bald, and at the moment, extremely animated. But the woman at his side was another matter entirely. Nearly six feet tall, an almost ghostly figure without a trace of color, she was a cruel and unconditional triumph of plainness. Worse than a horse of another color, she was a horse without any color at all. It was hard to believe that blood, rather than water—or perhaps acid—ran in her veins. She was listening intently to what the little man was saying, but there was something clearly argumentative in the inclination of her raw-boned, equine body.

  “But I tell you he’s done it!” the little man wailed.

  “But I tell you,” the woman trumpeted authoritatively, “It just isn’t possible. The old fool couldn’t! It won’t work!”

  “You’ll see! You’ll see!” the little man piped in a voice that was becoming increasingly mindful of an amusement pier calliope. “He’s done it!”

  And suddenly turning, he started down the rickety flight of steps as fast as his hammy little legs could carry him. He seemed almost to jitter along them as he sped downward, his bald pate glistening nervously in the bright afternoon sun. The faded woman, apparently still partially unconvinced, hung back for a moment, gazing icily after him. Then suddenly, with a for-betteror-worse but I bet it’ll-be-worse shrug of her mammoth shoulders, she decided to follow. Awkwardly, like a runaway beer wagon, she began jolting d
own the steps, two at a time. The ancient board creaked a feeble threat, but didn’t make it good.

  Marc, watching this baffling performance with open-faced curiosity, rolled over and boosted himself into an upright position, so as to have a better view of it. Whoever these newcomers were, and whatever they had come there for, he was inclined to regard them as a blessing, no matter how shabbily disguised. Anything that happened now was bound to be a relief from the endless monotony of the last few days. After all, the newcomers might be members of some wayward, secret cult, come here for a sort of pagan ritual. It was a good deal to hope for, and hardly likely, but his jaded mind clutched hungrily at the idea.

  Now on the beach, the two principal actors in whatever drama was about to be performed, moved swiftly past the rock behind which Marc rested and raced purposefully to the left. This only lent further intrigue to the affair since such a course, if followed to its ultimate end, could only lead them crashingly against a further wall of the cliff. And considering the rate at which the pair were traveling, such a collision seemed altogether probable . . . even imminent. Eagerly, Marc jackknifed forward to keep them in sight.

  BUT about half way to the wall, the little man skidded to a disordered stop and pointed a chubby finger toward a large rock that jutted straight and tall from the sands, like a staunch sentinel standing guard. “That one’ll do,” he shrilled, and to Marc’s bitter disappointment, disappeared behind the boulder’s shielding bulk. The woman, still reluctant, paused at the rock’s edge.

  “It won’t work,” she insisted. But her voice had now lost some of its authority. She followed her companion into the obscurity behind the rock.

  Marc would have given his immortal soul, along with his only copy of Forever Amber, to have known what it was that was not going to work behind that boulder. He felt meanly cheated. He felt that the intruders, like the waves, had led him to expect great things, then deliberately let him down. For a moment he knew what it was to be a trusting chorus girl who had been promised jewels, only to find, by the morning’s depressing light, that she had received only a hangover and a pair of cheap stockings. He knew what it was to—

  Then, suddenly, he only knew panic as a tremendous explosion grasped the little beach and shook it like a limp dishrag. Rocks, dislodged from the face of the cliff, began to fall everywhere through churning, sand-laden air. Marc wasn’t bored any more. He clutched the rock at his side with all the zeal of an impassioned suitor back home after a three-year absence on a desert island. His attitude clearly intimated that he loved that rock dearly and nothing would ever part him from it. Something that was not a rock landed thuddingly at his side, but he was too distracted to notice.

  “Earthquake!” he gasped.

  “Earthquake, my left eye!” a voice grunted thickly. And Marc’s head snapped about to find the ghostly woman looking up at him with startled eyes. She had exchanged locations with amazing rapidity. Lying on her stomach, arms, legs, and hair in a distressing state of disarray, she looked like nothing so much as a bloodless witch who had suffered a rather devastating crash landing. Certainly, she had descended as from the heavens, and yet, one glance told you that her association was certainly not with things astral. With stunning directness, she parted bluish lips and spat an impossible quantity of sand onto the beach where it looked much more natural.

  Marc shrank back suspiciously. Perhaps it wasn’t the gallant thing to do, but it seemed prudent. “What . . . what happened?” he asked timidly.

  “How should I know?” the woman asked bitterly, beginning an unconcerned inventory of her various parts. “I was too busy getting away from it to notice.” Then, pummeling an embarrassingly intimate region with vigorous enthusiasm, she seemed to come to the comforting conclusion that she had passed through her ordeal still in possession of all she had started out with. Just why this should mean anything to her, Marc could not fathom. It seemed to him that any change, willy-nilly, could hardly miss being an improvement. No matter what ever happened to the woman, it could never be any worse than the awful trouncing that nature had already given her. She got stiffly to her feet and peered cautiously over the rock.

  “Holy mother!” she breathed. “They’re gone like a maiden’s illusions!”

  “What?” Marc asked. “What’s gone?”

  “The rock,” the woman replied with dismaying heartiness, “and Mr. Epperson. He’s gone too.” Obviously, these missing items had been listed in the order of their importance.

  “You . . . you mean the little fellow? He’s dead?” Marc asked shakily.

  “Exceptionally so, I should say,” the woman replied almost gleefully. “Look for yourself.”

  MARC accepted the invitation reluctantly, and peered around the edge of the rock with eyes that were only partly open. Then he gasped with amazement. It wasn’t that there was so much to see, but rather that there was so little. Certainly, there was no sign of the rock or the little man. In the spot where they should have been, however, there was a deep hole in the sand that looked much like the work of a sizable dredger. Around this, there seemed to linger a sort of undefined gaseous body.

  “Where . . . where is he . . . the little man, I mean!” he asked hesitantly.

  “I told you,” the woman replied impatiently. “He’s gone.”

  “But his . . . his remains? Where are they?”

  “Vaporized, most likely,” the woman answered airily, as though explaining a self-evident mathematical rule to a not-too-bright child.

  “Vaporized?” The word seemed meaningless when applied to human bodies.

  “Certainly. Those gases you see out there are all that’s left of him.”

  Marc stared at the illusive last remains of Mr. Epperson, and shuddered.

  “A noisy way to go,” the woman reflected philosophically, “but nice and clean.” She seemed to be speaking of an experiment that had turned out with surprising success. “He was a dirty little pest anyway. I never did like having him around.” She smiled and it was no improvement. “I’ll bet it’s the first time anyone’s ever gone to heaven with a rock ... if he went there at all.”

  “What happened to him? What did it?”

  The woman regarded Marc thoughtfully for a time and seemed to come to a decision. She reached into the pocket of her grimy skirt and drew forth a minute, white capsule. She held it out for his inspection. “See that?” she asked.

  “Just barely,” Marc answered truthfully. “It’s awfully small.”

  “And awfully powerful,” the woman went on with dramatic emphasis. “That’s what did it. Anyway, it was one just like that.”

  “What is it? What’s it made of?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” the woman replied. “It might be anything . . . even common dirt. It doesn’t matter. The point is that whatever it is, it’s been charged so that when it’s exposed to air, it just naturally blows everything around it all to hell and gone. Mr. Epperson opened the other one, and I guess that’s why he was vaporized. I ducked around the rock just in time.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Marc protested.

  “I know it,” the woman said flatly. “It’s as impossible as a three dollar bill. But it works, just the same. Look what it did to old Eppy!”

  Marc winced. He couldn’t help the feeling that nothing good could come from such blatant familiarity with the dead. “Where did you get those things?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “They’re the brain child of a certain Dr. Herrigg,” the woman replied. “I always thought there was something offside about the old crow, and now that I know it, I’m going. . . .”

  Suddenly, she was interrupted by a nasty cracking sound, and Marc quickly took up his old courtship with the rock, lest it be the overture to another explosion. He sensed, rather than saw or heard, the woman dropping to his side.

  “What was that?” he whispered. Then he turned to the woman and started back in horror. She was lying face-down in the sand, and the hole at the base of her skull was
clearly visible. The matter of the fluid running in her veins was settled beyond all argument; it was blood.

  BLINDLY following a first impulse, Marc leaped to his feet to see where the shot had come from. He regretted it almost instantly. No sooner had he gotten on eye level with the top of the rock, than there was a second cracking sound and a bullet whined viciously past his ear, like a great, lethal gnat. He hugged the rock again, wondering incongruously if he were to spend the rest of his life in a crouching position. It seemed such a vulgar position in which to die. In the brief moment of his exposure, he had seen a small, grey-haired figure, with a pointed, sharp-featured face, and a gun to match. The sight had done much to shake Marc’s confidence in his own future. Indeed, he imagined that this, approximately, was what the mystery writers were referring to when they mentioned a “tight spot.” And the sound of footsteps descending the stairway convinced him that his own personal spot was swiftly becoming downright constricting. His eyes, wide and wild, frantically ran the length of the beach.

  There was only one choice, and it was a dismally unknown quantity. Cut off from the stairway, he would have to crawl along the base of the bluff in the opposite direction, keeping down behind the covering rocks as well as he could. He wasn’t sure just where such a path might lead, but it held one feature that appealed to him overwhelmingly; it would at least put a distance between himself and the man with the gun, who’s deadly acquaintance he was reticent to make.

  By the time Marc had come to the end . . . the dead end . . . of his tortuous path, his knees, with a trim of parsley, would easily have made an attractive addition to even the best butcher’s display. Still crouching, he drew himself stiffly up, and sat down on a flat rock to inspect his damaged joints. Finally satisfied that they had not been worn all the way through, no matter how much they felt like it, he gave his attention over to the situation at hand. It looked hopeless. To his left, and in front of him, there was nothing but ocean; to his right, a grey-haired killer; and directly behind him, the sheer, stoney face of the cliff. There was nothing to do but hope for the best . . . in spite of an insistent feeling that the best would be none too good. He picked up a loose stone and regarded it bleakly. Compared to the gun he’d glimpsed on the beach, it looked loathsomely harmless.