The Complete Adventures of Toffee

by Charles F. Myers

  “Oh, Lord?” he yelled.

  “Please keep your voice down,” the clerk said desperately. “It’s bad enough what you’re doing, without yelling about it. If this is some advertising stunt...”

  “Keep my voice down?” Marc said unhappily. “I can’t even keep myself down!”

  “It’s the explosion!” Toffee cried with sudden realization. “All that stuff floating around in the basement! Now you’re doing it, too!”

  “Oh, my God!” Marc cried. The exclamation was prompted simultaneously by the terrible realization of his condition and the fact that even while they had been talking he had risen an additional foot into the air.

  “I’m going higher!”

  THE CLERK steadied himself uncertainly against the counter. “Please, sir!” he quavered. “You’ll have to stop that at once. I’ll give you a room, a whole floor, if you’ll only stop!”

  “You shut up, you quivering ninny,” Marc gritted. “Do you think I actually want to do this sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know,” the clerk said uncertainly. “I can’t think why you should. I’m sure I’d hate it myself.”

  “Here!” Toffee yelled. “Take my hand! I’ll pull you down!”

  Marc reached out to Toffee, but too quickly; the sudden movement caused him to veer away from her. He drifted to one side, revolved helplessly then moved away.

  “Help!” he yelled. “For Pete’s sake, help!”

  Toffee stood staring at him, too terror stricken to move. She watched, transfixed, as he soared drunkenly across the broad foyer, apparently marking the tide of the air conditioning.

  “Oh, Lord!” she murmured. “He’s sailing like a kite in an autumn wind!”

  Up till this time the foyer had remained blissfully deserted, but this was not a condition destined to endure. At the worst possible moment, just as Marc drifted wordlessly past the doorway, a company of diners entered from the dining room. Four in all, two men and two women, they walked into the room, stopped, observed a figure going past overhead, floating lazily in mid-air like an agonized leaf on the tide, and fell into a tense silence. All four of them stared hauntedly into space for a time. Then one of the ladies, of a lesser fortitude than the others, reached out and took her companion’s arm in a death grip.

  “I could have sworn I saw ...!”

  The man, a portly individual with a grey, senatorial mane, reached out and, without hesitation, clapped a hand over the lady’s mouth.

  “No, you didn’t, dear,” he said quietly, “we just won’t speak of it.”

  Together, the four turned and silently filed back into the dining room.

  “I’d like to enquire about the brandy sauce,” the old gentleman said through clenched teeth. “I may sue this place before I’m through.”

  In the meantime, Toffee had taken out in hot pursuit of Marc. “Grab something!” she panted, running along beneath him. “Grab something and hold on!”

  The words came dimly to Marc through the pounding panic in his mind, but he obeyed them automatically. He reached out and felt frantically for something to take hold of. He had risen by now to a height of about eight feet and was circling toward the fountain. It was destiny that guided him to the statue.

  He caught hold of the stone lady and grappled to make his grasp firm. If at this point in the proceedings the mistress of the fountain did not reach out and slap Marc it was more because she was made of stone than because of the place where he grabbed her. The effect bordered narrowly on the obscene and became even more questionable as Marc took a toe hold on the lady’s mid-section. It was precisely at this moment that the elevator doors directly across from the fountain slid open and a delegation of conventioning club ladies arrived.

  As a unit the ladies quitted the car, started forward, then stopped short. Twenty-two well-padded bosoms rose and fell sharply and twenty-two discreetly tinted mouths opened on a single gasp of horror.

  “Would you look at that!” one of the ladies blurted.

  “I’m trying not to,” another answered in a shocked whisper. “What is he trying to do to her?”

  “I shudder to think. But look where he’s got hold of her!”

  “I can’t,” another moaned, closing her eyes tight. “It’s too awful! If anyone ever grabbed me like that ...!” Her voice shuddered away into silence.

  “Police!”

  SO SOON did the others pick up the cry, there was no way of telling which of the ladies had started it. Suddenly, the foyer shrieked from end to end and top to bottom with a call to all officialdom to come and defend the honor of the beseiged statue. The ladies, milling frantically among themselves, were screaming themselves into a fair frenzy.

  At the fountain Toffee was lending her voice to the general confusion. The sight of Marc clinging to another woman, whether of stone or flesh, did not set well with the redhead.

  “You stop that!” she snapped, from the edge of the pool. “You let go of that marble huzzy before I come up there and knock her block off!”

  “Don’t be silly!” Marc called back unhappily. “She’s not real. Besides, I can’t let go!”

  “I don’t care about that,” Toffee said. “What burns me up is what you’re probably thinking up there.”

  “Good grief!” Marc cried. “I’m not thinking anything!”

  “Oh, no?” Toffee sneered. “No man on earth could grab a woman the way you’ve grabbed that one and not be thinking something.”

  “Stop blathering nonsense,” Marc said furiously, “and do something. Help me get down from here.”

  “You bet I will,” Toffee said grimly. And with that she stepped lightly to the wall of the pool, peeled off her coat and stepped down into the water.

  “No!” Marc yelled. “No!”

  “Oh, my land!” one of the club ladies shrieked above the others. “Now there’s a naked woman swimming around in the pool!”

  “It’s probably that poor statue trying to get away!” one of her sisters replied.

  As Toffee swam toward the pedestal and the statue, the doors of the Wynant became crowded with shoving spectators who had been attracted by the din inside. The foyer began to fill rapidly. Behind the desk, a door opened and the manager of the Wynant ran to the desk clerk. He was a plumcheeked, small man with dark hair and, at the moment, an extremely florid complexion. He grabbed the clerk by the shoulder and swung him around.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded. He glanced toward the statue. “Who is that man up there? What is he doing? And that woman?”

  The clerk trembled under his grasp. “I don’t know,” he said weakly. “I told them they couldn’t stay here.”

  “Do something!” the manager piped. “This isn’t a fun house!”

  “Would you swear to it?” the clerk pleaded.

  It was just as Toffee had reached the pedestal and was starting upward toward Marc and the statue that the elevator door slid open for a second time, and Mrs. Arbuthner-Wright, a small invalid of advanced years and means, maneuvered her wheelchair into the tumultuous foyer. Mrs. Arbuthner-Wright had occupied the Wynant penthouse suite for almost twenty years now. Starting across the foyer, she braked her chair to a sudden stop and observed the activity at the fountain with an interested but unperturbed eye. She turned to the manager.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she commented dryly.

  “It’s about time this place got a floor show.” She looked back at the statue. “You’ve got to give him credit for spunk. But I’ll lay odds on the statue.”

  But the manager did not hear her. He only knew that the impossible had happened; the reputation of the Wynant had been placed in jeopardy. It had to be stopped at any cost. Shoving the trembling clerk aside, he dodged around the end of the desk and forced his way through the crowd to the brink of the pool. He climbed quickly to the wall of the pool just as Toffee reached Marc and went determinedly about the business of trying to dislodge him from his curvesome anchorage.

  “There’s no cause fo
r excitement!” the manager yelled, turning to face the crowd. “It’s really nothing!”

  “Maybe you call it nothing,” one of the club ladies snorted with fiery indignation.

  “No! No!” the manager yelled. He held up his hands for quiet. “Listen to me! You don’t understand! Nothing wrong is going on here!” It was better to defend these demented vandals than have the good name of the Wynant soiled. “These people are only cleaning the statue!”

  “Oh, yeah!” a small, shabby-looking man sneered. “That statue’ll never be clean again as long as she lives!”

  THE MANAGER glanced wretchedly behind him and shuddered as he realized that current activities did nothing to substantiate the lie he had just told; never had so many pairs of grappling arms and legs combined themselves in one place to give such a glaring picture of pure, wanton abandon. With Marc clutching the statue, and Toffee clutching Marc, the statue seemed to be clutching herself with a new desperation that could never possibly have been achieved by mere chiseled stone; the poor dumb thing seemed suddenly to realize that not only her modesty but also her honor was at stake.

  “Let go of her, you debauched floater!” Toffee hissed in Marc’s ear. “Let go of her before I tear you apart!”

  “I can’t!” Marc panted, hanging on for dear life. “Do you want me to get spiked on the chandelier?”

  “Better that than atrophied to this naked trollop!” Toffee said.

  “If I were that statue,” one of the club ladies whispered, “I’d never be able to face my friends again.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, lady,” said a rather dapper but vague-looking gentleman. “You know how statues are. They’re always standing around without any clothes on and leering at each other. In that statue’s crowd this sort of thing is just child’s play.”

  “What kind of children play like that?” the woman snapped.

  “What kind of children? Do I look like the kind of a man who goes around prying into the affairs of children?” He drew himself up. “Lady, are you trying to trap me into an argument about children?”

  In the meantime the manager had turned his efforts from the outraged crowd to the entangled couple clinging to the statue.

  “Come down from there!” he bawled. “Come down this instant!”

  Almost as though at his command, the struggle on the statue came to an abrupt end. Marc, with a cry of warning, suddenly lost his grip and lurched to one side. Toffee tightened her hold on his neck and clung fast. In the next instant, entirely under the pull of Toffee’s weight; they plunged together downward and into the pool below. There was a murmur from the crowd. Then there was a brief scream from the manager as, in jumping to avoid the splash, he lost his footing and joined the pair in the water.

  The crowd watched tensely as the three heads disappeared beneath the surface of the pool, then soggily reappeared. A murmur of comment rose throughout the room, then suddenly silenced with a gasp.

  One of the heads was not behaving at all as it should; it not only reappeared, but continued to move higher and higher into the air; dragging its lank and dripping body after it.

  Slowly, Marc rose entirely out of the pool, hovered for a moment, and then came to rest, his feet resting lightly and exactly on the surface of the water. The soaking he had just received had provided him with enough extra poundage that his buoyancy had been somewhat tempered but not entirely destroyed. A smothered cry of dismay echoed around him as he stood blandly on the surface of the pool, then leaned forward to knock the water out of his ears.

  The other two heads swiveled about to regard him with contrasting degrees of interest. For a moment the manager stared at Marc, then slowly sank out of sight again beneath the green obscurity of a lily pad.

  Toffee turned graciously to the sea of gaping faces around her.

  “Give me a hand someone,” she said.

  “Not me, lady,” a man near the edge said. “With the company you keep, I wouldn’t give you so much as a clipping off my fingernail.”

  Toffee glanced around for a volunteer, then suddenly dived down to join the manager beneath the lily pad.

  Help was on its way at last and it wore a dark blue uniform. For the first time since its erection the lofty ceiling of the Wynant echoed back the firm and hurried tread of flat feet.

  Across the room Mrs. Arbuthner-Wright wheeled her chair back into the elevator and smilingly plucked at the operator’s sleeve.

  “Remind me to renew my lease on the penthouse this week, Joe,” she said. “After twenty years this place is beginning to be interesting.”

  CHAPTER V

  MEANWHILE, Julie Pillsworth had not only lost her poise, but a shocking amount of bodily moisture; a good full-lunged cry in the private confines of her bed had done nothing to erase the memory of her husband disporting himself loosely about the landscape with a strange redhead under the very noses of their neighbors.

  Julie dared not draw any conclusions concerning the affair of the trellis; there were too many emotions involved, and she, having formed her marriage on what she firmly believed to be a solid foundation of logic and sound theory, was not practiced in the ways of emotion. Suddenly, emotionally, Julie was in a strange land without a guide, at a ball game without a program, up a creek without a paddle. Briefly, she was no end confused and upset.

  Perhaps Julie might have eventually reached the right conclusion and even done the right thing, for in the back of her mind was the vague feeling that Marc’s sudden burst of misbehavior was the result of some obscure failing in herself. She might have, that is, if May Springer and Jewel Drummer hadn’t appeared on the scene just as her thoughts were turning in that direction.

  May was a small, bird-boned, heron-faced woman with a voice as slight and chirping as the mentality which it served. Jewel was the other side of the picture: dog-jawed, thunder voiced and overwhelmingly double-breasted. These two had long since elected themselves to be Julie’s “best friends,” and now that Julie was in trouble they had come to help. In short, this was just the chance they had been waiting for.

  The three women watched tensely as the maid left the tea things on the table and departed from the living room through the hall. Julie instantly returned her tear-stained face to her handkerchief. May and Jewel exchanged a look and hitched themselves forward in their chairs in the manner of a pair of ditch diggers rolling up their sleeves to go to work.

  “I wouldn’t hesitate a second,” May piped. “I’d start divorcing the bum right now. The time to let him have it is the first minute you hear about the other woman. And, honey, you saw her! I did too for that matter. When that awful clatter started, and I looked out of my window and saw your husband with that woman ...! Well! I’ll testify, honey! They’ll never shut me up.”

  “Me too, dear,” Jewel put in heavily from beyond the rolling hills of her bosom. “Of course I didn’t actually see anything, but I heard it all. The only thing for you to do is just close up the house and go to Reno while it’s all fresh in your mind. And let your lawyer do the talking. Remember that.”

  “I know you feel better, now that you’ve decided,” May said. “Jewel and I will help you get your affairs with the house straightened up.” She leaned forward and tapped Jewel lightly on the knee. “Won’t we, Jewel?”

  Julie looked up moistly from her handkerchief. “But I haven’t decided,” she wailed. “That’s just it; I can’t seem to decide anything. Marc has never done anything like this before. All of a sudden he just blew up the basement and started acting strange. I just can’t get over the feeling that maybe it’s partly my fault somehow...”

  “Ridiculous!” Jewel snorted.

  “Of course!” May chimed.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Julie said hopelessly. “I just have a feeling that Marc isn’t to blame, that something strange is happening to him, and he can’t help himself. Maybe he needs me very badly right now.”

  “What’s happened to him isn’t so strange,” Jewel pronounced. “It’s just that lousy
male chemistry at work. The devils all get that way sooner or later. Men are just a bunch of brutes, all of them. If there’s anything mysterious about all this it’s only how you manage to feel so damned charitable about it.”

  Albeit unwittingly on this occasion, Jewel, in all her history of premeditated lies, had never spoken a greater untruth. There was something far more mysterious going on than just Julie’s feeling of charity. It wanted only a trip to the basement to be discovered.

  The thing that was taking place in the subterranean regions of the house was stranger than either truth or fiction and twice as paralyzing.

  THE FACT of the matter was that George had finally arrived on earth. Starting logically at the beginning, with the first principle of haunting as set down in the Guide, George had descended to the place of his earthly part’s untimely demise. Here, according to the rules, there were certain procedures of investigation to be followed; but George was far too excited with his sudden condition of release to be bothered with those. Like a giddy school girl with her first party dress, he could hardly wait to try on his ectoplasm. Even in this, however, there were difficulties involved.

  Unfortunately, as George saw it, the process of ectoplasmic materialization depended largely upon the concentration of the entity involved; first he had to thoroughly picture in his mind the earthly form that he was to assume, and then, from that mental image, shape his earthly manifestation. The trouble was that George’s powers of concentration had never been anything to brag about.

  George’s observance of the human form had always been extremely sketchy at best. Faced with the problem of shaping such a form for himself, he was somewhat at a loss. Pressing his memory to the limit he could only recall that there were such things as arms, legs, head and torsos, but the exact number and arrangement of these appointments completely escaped him. Try as he would to think, nothing very clear came to mind. Finally, in desperation, he decided just to give it the old trial-and-error and make it up as he went along. He might have done better to find himself an anatomy chart.