THE LAUGHTER OF TOFFEE
By Charles F. Myers
Marc's troubles began the moment Hotshot
Harold planted the miracle elixir on him. Then
came a bevy of cops—Toffee—and X-ray eyes....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
To the casual observer that morning Marc Pillsworth presented only thepicture of a rather loose-jointed, yet constrained, businessman on hisway to another orderly day at the office. One would hardly have guessedthat he was striding forward into the first leg of a journey that wasdestined to take him on a shrieking, streaking sleigh ride of madness,frenzy and crime. Indeed, Marc himself would never have dreamed thatsuch a thing was even possible.
The trouble was, of course, that this was the first day of spring.The world had finally shrugged itself free of winter and, with a tossof its golden curls, was unmistakably casting about for some sort offoolishness to get into. The sun was burgeoning bright in the sky,green things were intruding their heads impertinently through the warmsoil along the sidewalks and the breezes, gentle and flirtatious,were fingering the voluminous skirts of the passing shop girls. Theinhabitants of the city, to the man, were feeling pleasantly silly inthe head.
To the man, that is, except for Marc.
Marc, founder, president, guiding genius and devoted slave to thePillsworth Advertising Agency, felt merely dyspeptic. Making his waypast the shops with their blossoming window boxes, he loathed thespring. At the moment, in fact, there was only one thing that Marcloathed more than the spring and that was Mario Matalini, the eminentItalian portrait artist.
Marc had never before experienced jealousy and it came to him now as asingularly unpleasant sensation. For one thing, it gave him gas.
Though he had been married long enough to have achieved a certaincomplacency about matrimony in general, every time he thought ofJulie and Mario alone at the country house, he automatically burped.Italians, it was said, were notoriously affected by cold blonde beauty,and Julie on occasion, resembled nothing so much as a tantalizing andunattainable angel carved from ice. It was a combination that was notreassuring.
The trip to the country, of course, had been Mario's idea. It had cometo him in a gaudy flash of inspiration the very evening Julie hadcommissioned him to do her portrait.
"Ah, Madonna Mia!" the mustachioed artist had crooned revoltingly. "Youshall be my masterpiece! I can feel it now. There is the season ofspring in your lovely face—the enigma, the withholding, the promise!"His dark eyes caressed her classic features, and he leaned forwardabruptly. "I know!" he breathed. "I shall paint you surrounded bynature—on the very first day of spring! You will be like a goddess,with the new grasses and the first green leaves everywhere around you!"He sighed delicately. "I have never done a portrait in this manner,but how can I confine such a subject to a dismal studio?" He smiled atJulie as though Marc were not even in the room. "It is true, is it not,that you own one of the handsomest country houses in the state?"
Marc had opened his mouth to protest, but Julie's eyes were aglow withthe vision of herself as a spring-time goddess. The damage had beendone and there was no patching it up.
The two of them had been at the country house for a week