The laughter of Toffee

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 the picture of a rather loose-jointed, yet constrained, businessman on his way to another orderly day at the office. One would hardly have guessed that he was striding forward into the first leg of a journey that was destined to take him on a shrieking, streaking sleigh ride of madness, frenzy and crime. Indeed, Marc himself would never have dreamed that such 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 toss of its golden curls, was unmistakably casting about for some sort of foolishness to get into. The sun was burgeoning bright in the sky, green things were intruding their heads impertinently through the warm soil along the sidewalks and the breezes, gentle and flirtatious, were fingering the voluminous skirts of the passing shop girls. The inhabitants of the city, to the man, were feeling pleasantly silly in the head.

To the man, that is, except for Marc.

Marc, founder, president, guiding genius and devoted slave to the Pillsworth Advertising Agency, felt merely dyspeptic. Making his way past the shops with their blossoming window boxes, he loathed the spring. At the moment, in fact, there was only one thing that Marc loathed more than the spring and that was Mario Matalini, the eminent Italian portrait artist.

Marc had never before experienced jealousy and it came to him now as a singularly unpleasant sensation. For one thing, it gave him gas.

Though he had been married long enough to have achieved a certain complacency about matrimony in general, every time he thought of Julie 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 and unattainable angel carved from ice. It was a combination that was not reassuring.

The trip to the country, of course, had been Mario's idea. It had come to him in a gaudy flash of inspiration the very evening Julie had commissioned him to do her portrait.

"Ah, Madonna Mia!" the mustachioed artist had crooned revoltingly. "You shall be my masterpiece! I can feel it now. There is the season of spring in your lovely face--the enigma, the withholding, the promise!" His dark eyes caressed her classic features, and he leaned forward abruptly. "I know!" he breathed. "I shall paint you surrounded by nature--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 at Julie 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 with the vision of herself as a spring-time goddess. The damage had been done and there was no patching it up.

The two of them had been at the country house for a week now, looking for the perfect setting for the portrait, waiting for the perfect day to begin it. With each passing day Marc had grown a bit uneasier. Of course Mr. Busby, the caretaker, made a splendid chaperon, but there was still something about Mario that just naturally put your teeth on edge.

Business had prevented his joining the pilgrimage to the country; the summer advertising campaigns, now in preparation, demanded the last measure of his personal attention. As an active guardian of his castle and his wife's virtue, he found himself seriously hampered. With this dark thought looming in his mind, he burped anew and halted his office-bound progress to enter a drug store. A man could hardly expect to retain his clients' good will by belching in their faces.