MARC grimaced as a new wave of pain surged upward through his body. “I just hope you’re proud, waiting until a man’s got his back turned and then kicking him in the ... !”
“There’s no need to be crude about it,” Julie cut in quickly.
“That’s funny, that is!” Marc snapped, baring his teeth. “Me—crude! What about you? I suppose you’ve been the perfect little lady in this affair? I’m not surprised you can’t bear to face your crime!”
“Vulgar!” Julie yelled. “Vulgar, skinny man!”
Marc glanced at the radio. “You’ve ruined it!”
“You ruined it yourself. Though I will say that if you hadn’t, I had every intention of taking a meat axe to it.”
“And to me, too, I dare say. A nice way for a wife to go on to a husband who has cherished and protected her.”
“Oh, stop it, you ninny,” Julie said. “Stop carrying on as though I’d murdered you.”
“I’d have preferred to be murdered,” Marc said, shuddering with pain.
“Stop crouching like that,” Julie said. “And stop holding yourself in that suggestive way. You look like a child with uncertain habits. Straighten up.”
Marc considered the matter of straightening up; never had he felt so strongly the need to rise to his full height. He relinquished his grip on himself and tried to unbend. Instantly he fell back into the crouching position with a cry of pain.
“I can’t!” he cried. “I can’t straighten up!”
Julie’s expression swiftly undertook a series of transformations ranging from suspicion to chagrin to abject contrition.
“Of course you can,” she said anxiously. “Try.”
“I can’t, I tell you!” Marc gritted. “And it serves you right. As a matter of fact I hope I stay this way, and you have to spend the rest of your days explaining to everyone how it happened. You’ve dislocated my sacroillac, that’s what you’ve done, you brutish female!”
“Oh, no!” Julie gasped. “Oh, Marc!” She ran toward him.
“Get away from me!” Marc snarled. “Don’t you touch me, you Judith Iscariot!
“Oh, dear!” Julie wailed. She held out a hand. “I’ll get a doctor, the one down the block. Don’t do anything. I’ll be right back.” She started toward the door.
“Tell him how it happened!” Marc called after her spitefully. “Tell him how you kicked your own husband in the ... ”
But the door slammed as Julie hurried out of the house and down the steps.
Marc returned his hands gingerly to his pulsing bottom and stared gloomily at the floor.
“Damn!” he said. “Damn, damn, damn!”
THE doctor strapped a final length of adhesive across Marc’s back and helped him into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.
“It may be tender for a day or two,” he said. He helped Marc into his pajama coat. “You’ll be all right, though. You can have Mrs. Pillsworth take that tape off for you at the end of the week.”
“I’ll wear it to my grave,” Marc snapped, “before I’ll permit that woman to touch me again.”
“Now, now, Mr. Pillsworth,” the doctor temporized. “You’ll feel better in the morning.” He turned and picked up his case. “I imagine those sedatives will take care of everything for tonight.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Marc said gratefully, and sank back rigidly on the bed. Lying down, held stiffly by the tape, he was forced to watch the doctor from the corner of his eye.
“Goodnight, doctor.”
“Goodnight.” The doctor nodded from across the room and opened the door to leave. Julie was revealed wringing her hands in the hallway. She stepped forward.
“How is he, doctor?” she asked. “May I see him now?”
“Keep her out!” Marc growled from his pillow. “If she so much as sticks a hand in here I’ll bite it!”
The doctor took Julie’s arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everyone’s a little neurotic these days.” He guided her back into the hall and closed the door.
Marc shifted his gaze from the door to the ceiling. The laughter of the Fredericks and their guests drifted in through the open window, and he reflected on its quality; it was the laughter of desperation, not abandoned. Then the scream of a fire siren sounded faintly in the distance, and a woman echoed the cry weirdly from somewhere down the block—another patient for the good doctor.
Marc closed his eyes and waited for the sedatives to work. An echo of pain throbbed along his spine. He tried to shift a bit, but the tape held him in place, and the pain was only worse for the effort. He looked at the ceiling again and noted its singular blankness without pleasure. Finally he decided to turn his mind to other things—to the past and happier circumstances. Instantly, without any conscious cooperation, Toffee’s pert face stirred in his memory. The ghost of a smile played at the corners of his mouth.
Not that the thought of Toffee was undilutedly pleasant. The gamin creature of his mind had strong predisposition for trouble as well as pleasure—a sort of special magnetism that drew calamity to herself as well as the hapless souls around her. And yet the basic feeling, when thinking of Toffee, was one of distinct cheer. If trouble came to her it was never altogether unmixed with a certain element of hilarity. There was always a dash of excitement at least.
NATURALLY Toffee had not been in Marc’s mind at all these last few nonths. For one thing he had been much too concerned with the perilous state of the world, and Toffee, not a consistent inhabitant of this world, or much of any other, was difficult to picture in conjunction with truly worldly matters.
If it could be said that Toffee lived at all, it would have to be the Valley of Marc’s mind. Not that she wasn’t quite real; it was just that she did not exist materially unless she was projected into the material world through Marc’s imagination. After that she was as flesh and blood as anyone—indeed, to an almost overwhelming degree at times.
If Marc had grown used to this strange circumstance—that his mind could actually create a living, breathing perfect hellion of a redhead—it was only by virtue of repetition. The human mind can adjust to the wildest of impossibilities in time, if it is only subjected to them often enough.
The smile grew on Marc’s lips as he considered the provocative form and features of Toffee. It was a vision to prod the sternest lips into a smile.
Then the smile vanished as Julie’s footsteps sounded outside in the hallway. Marc listened to their approach, turning his eyes toward the door.
He could almost see her standing there in the hallway beyond the closed door. Desolated with remorse, she would be undecided. A trickle of compassion bullied the surface of Marc’s resentment. After all, she had really meant to hurt him. He would have called out to her, but the footsteps sounded anew and retreated down the hall. A moment later a door opened and closed. Marc sighed; tomorrow would be time enough to make it up to her.
He closed his eyes as a slow drowsiness began to seep through his lean body—probably the sedatives going to work. His mind wandered aimlessly for a moment, then collided, quite forcibly, with a sudden realization; during the last hour—for the first time in weeks—his thoughts had turned away from the dismal state of the world and centered on himself. For a whole hour his interest had been entirely absorbed in a simple domestic crisis—a little thing like a fight over the radio!
Marc’s mind spun with the thought. In the last few months things—the matters of men’s lives—had somehow gotten themselves all turned around backwards. People had ceased to concern themselves with the really important things—fighting over a radio, for instance—and had turned to the childish business of blowing up the world.
Marc paused to sum up the thoughts. Somewhere they contaned a very great and very simple truth, though they were all snarled up. Somehow his dislocated sacroiliac and the troubles of the world were subtly related ...
The drowsiness washed over his mind again, and the thought was carried away on the crest. He reached after them, but couldn�
�t quite make it. There was but one last glimmer:
“What this world needs,” Marc murmured, “is a good five ton kick in the ... ”
His eyes closed, and instantly his chest began to rise and fall with the deep, regular breathing of complete sleep.
A WARM breeze dusted the edge of the curtain and set it rippling. Somewhere in the night, in the distance across the city, a siren wailed with inconsolable melancholy. A cat stalked the intersection, as silent and intense as his leopard-long shadow. In his narcotic slumbers Marc rolled a bit to one side and made a small whimpering sound as the adhesive pulled at his back. He lay back and was still.
But Marc had dismissed all conscious memory of his injury some time hence. In the same moment when he had fallen asleep he had left the room of the rippling curtain and unhappy echoes and had passed into the untroubled, all-black world of unconsciousness.
Now, however, he stirred again, and with that almost indiscernible movement, leaped from the darkness into lighter regions; into the secret, all-things-are-possible world of his subconscious—into the world where dreams can become more real than reality itself. Marc paused on the brink of this world for one tremulous moment, then plunged forward ...
Brilliant light shot up to meet him so that he had to close his eyes against the glare. Then, slowly, he opened them again. Much like the sensation of stepping onto cool lawn after having walked barefoot on scorching concrete, pain was swiftly followed by almost unbearable pleasure.
Before Marc’s gaze a soft greenness stretched away from him into graceful rising slopes and cool shadowed hollows—artfully like a display of green velvet in a shop window. On the rise of the most distant knoll stretched a forest of strange trees which held at once a cathedral of stateliness and a feathery pliability. Weaving slightly with the breeze they were mindful of nothing so much as a handful of royal plumes stuck into the earth at the whim of a bemused child. The Valley of The Subconscious Mind ...
Marc knew instantly where he was; he’d been there often enough before. He glanced around in search of some movement, some flash of animated color. But there was nothing. He started up the rise, stretching his long legs purposefully before him. Surely she would be there, probably among the trees.
But she was not. Nor was there any sign of her. Marc moved to the crest of the knoll where the trees were the thickest, but the far horizon proved to be obscured by a blue mist that swirled and disported itself in the way of something alive. He stood there for a long moment, turning slowly, watching anxiously for any sign, but there was none. Finally he sat down, braced his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hand. Disappointment welled inside him—and hurt too; always before, she had been right there to meet him at the moment of his arrival.
HE stiffened with a sudden, dreadful thought; what if Toffee wasn’t there at all? What if she had ceased to exist? Wasn’t it possible since she was only a product of his imagination? He stood up and again scanned the horizon. He bent down to peer into the shifting frontiers of the mists.
And then it happened. It was low and mean and sharply reminiscent of a similar agony which had befallen him in another time and place that he couldn’t rightly remember. Grabbing himself uninhibitedly he doubled forward and sat down heavily on the ground.
Then it was over as swiftly and surprisingly as it had begun. The air rippled with musical, feminine laughter, somewhere behind him. Marc swung around.
Lovely as ever, her mist-textured tunic only served to cast a cool greenish tint on the flesh of the outrageously perfect body beneath it. As she moved from beneath the trees, her flaming hair fell loose about her shoulders, as free and wild as the spirit it adorned. Though her full red lips quivered with laughter, the real laughter was in the depths of her green eyes. She paused for a moment, then ran forward and sat down lightly at his side. She eyed him with mischievous amusement.
“You dilapidated old despot,” she smiled. “It’s about time you showed that simpering old face of yours around here again.”
Marc, mindful of his recent discomfiture, returned her gaze with chilly suspicion. But if Toffee noticed she pretended not to. With a quick maneuver which was executed with the skill and precision obtainable only through long and diligent practice, she twined her arms about his neck and kissed him full upon the mouth. Marc received the kiss with unblinking aloofness. His gaze remained hostile even as she leaned back from him.
“You kicked me,” he said injuredly.
Toffee’s eyes widened with enormous innocence. “You’ve got it, wrong. I kissed you, that’s all.”
“Kicked,” Marc said stubbornly. “You kicked me.”
“Where?”
“Never mind.”
“I was yards away from you at the time,” Toffee said. “You saw me, yourself.”
MARC reflected. It was true; she hadn’t even been in sight. Still, experience had taught him that she was capable of anything, perhaps even a longdistance boot in the bottom.
“Well, somebody did it,” he said sullenly.
“I swear it wasn’t me,” Toffee said stoutly. “I swear it on the old bald head of my maternal grandfather.”
“You haven’t got a maternal grandfather,” Marc said shortly. “Don’t talk nonsense.”
“If I had a maternal grandfather,” Toffee amended smoothly, “and he had an old bald head, I would unhesitatingly swear on it.”
“You would just as unhesitatingly lop it off with an axe, too,” Marc said, “if it served your purpose!”
“Who wouldn’t?” Toffee said. “Who wants an old bald head around all the time? Even a maternal grandfather’s?”
“You haven’t got a grandfather,” Marc reminded her sharply, “maternal or otherwise.”
“Certainly I have,” Toffee said stoutly, “I just swore on his old bald head, didn’t I? Or did I swear at his old bald head? I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s always whining around about how maternal he is and I know darned well he’s never been a mother in his life. It’s disgusting.”
“Sometimes I wonder why I even listen to you,” Marc said. “I only get dizzy.”
“Well, it’s no wonder I’m flighty with that nasty old man under foot all the time,” Toffee said. “If you’d just speak to this maternal grandfather of mine and tell him to stop sticking his old bald head into everything ... ”
“Stop!” Marc cried. “If you go on any more about it I’ll start foaming at the mouth!”
Toffee lay back on the grass and stretched her arms thoughtfully above her head.
“Anyway,” she said, “I swear my foot has not so much as brushed the seat of your pants.” But even as she said it a smile played fleetingly at the corners of her mouth.
Marc turned to her, prepared to the last inflection to inform her that he would trust her only a little less farther than he could hurl a steam shovel with his bare teeth, but he did not speak. His gaze went to her left hand and remained there.
IN all the time he had known her Marc had never seen Toffee wear even a single piece of jewelry; it was taken for granted that her charms were sufficient unto themselves without any superficial ornamentation. One might be silly enough to apply gilt to a lily, but never to a gold piece. Therefore, he was surprised now to glance down and see quite a large ring on her finger.
And the ring itself was quite as remarkable as the fact of Toffee’s wearing it. Marc had never seen anything like it before and was willing to bet a tidy sum that no one else had either.
The metal part of the ring was neither silver nor gold, yet faintly resembled both—with a strange translucent quality that seemed altogether unreal. It had been fashioned into a design that was both simple and beautiful. But it was really the stone which caught and held Marc’s eye.
Such a stone was simply not possible! It resembled an emerald of the largest, rarest and most beauful kind, and yet it was not an emerald. No mere emerald, no natural chemical fluke, could possibly have the life—the almost living vitality—of this stone. It gave off
a light that met the eye with something like an electrical shock. But that wasn’t all. It was the feeling you got just from looking at it—that the stone both absorbed from and contributed to the living atmosphere around it. The thing actually assumed a personality as you stared at it. Marc felt a shiver of apprehension.
“Where did you get that ring?” he asked.
“Oh, that,” Toffee said negligently. “Just something I dreamed up out of my head—the way you dream me up.”
“You mean ... ?”
“Sure,” Toffee nodded. “You aren’t the only one around here who can do cerebral somersaults. After all, I’m right here at the source. As a matter of fact it was something you said that gave me the idea.”
“What do you mean?” Marc asked. “What did I say?”
“Oh, I forget just how it went right now,” Toffee said. “Besides there’ll be lots of time for all this dull conversation later. Right now ... ”
“Are you trying to hold something back from me?” Marc asked suspiciously.
“Nothing,” Toffee said. She pulled herself closer, brushed her lips playfully across his cheek. “Absolutely nothing.” She slipped her arm around his neck.
THE next few seconds were characterized with quiet struggle as Marc disengaged himself from her determined embrace.
“Next time hold something back,” he said confusedly. “There’s just so much that human flesh and blood can stand, you know.”
“And you have so little of either,” Toffee said. She gazed at him reflectively. “Kissing you is like tying on your bib over a plate of bleached bones.”
“Leave it to you to paint a disgusting picture,” Marc shuddered.
“Give me a good heaping plate of bleached bones any time,” Toffee said. “I’d prefer it.”
“May I remind you,” Marc said coolly, “that it was you who hurled yourself into my arms? You seemed to be all for it at the time.”
The Complete Adventures of Toffee Page 53
