Toffee takes a trip

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 his 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 arrangement, 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-better-or-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 down 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 it's 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 jack-knifed 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," she 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.