: The spirit of Toffee by Farrell Henry Gray William A Illustrator - Science fiction; Fantasy fiction; Subconsciousness Fiction

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Release date: December 14, 2023

Original publication: Chicago, IL: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1948

The SPIRIT of TOFFEE

Things were bad enough for Marc without having a friendly ghost messing up his life--but Toffee only made matters worse!...

In his private office the guiding light of the Pillsworth Advertising Agency sat behind his desk and looked slightly haunted.

And Marc Pillsworth was not the sort to look haunted without a good and sufficient reason. In this case, the reason seemed to be not only good and sufficient but rather spine-tingling into the bargain. Marc closed his eyes and made a real effort to suppress a nagging impulse to scream. But when he looked again the situation across the room had not noticeably bettered itself; the shoe was still in front of the chair, hanging indolently in mid-air.

In the last few minutes Marc had closed his eyes repeatedly, telling himself that the shoe was only a product of his imagination, an apparition born of a mind that had given way under an overwhelming burden of financial and domestic worries. But always, when he opened his eyes again, the shoe was still there, resting rakishly on nothing at all, seeming to stare at him evilly with its beady eyeletes. Also, there was something about the hateful thing that bespoke its owner's rather pungent personality. It had a look about it that was unmistakably aw-go-to-hell. It was a look that Marc found particularly distasteful, for it could mean only one thing. No getting away from it. George was back. And Marc wished he wasn't.

Marc had learned of George's existence through a previous experience so bitter it all but galled him just to think about it. When the ghost, Marc's own, to be explicit, had first descended to this region under the misapprehension that Marc had accidentally terminated his own earthly sojourn, he immediately impressed himself on everyone as a trouble maker of the first hot water. And, as though his strikingly original haunting activities hadn't been enough, he had resorted to random methods of mayhem in an effort to make Marc's demise an untidy actuality so that he, George, might thereby secure his own position as a permanent earthly "haunt." The affair had not been a picnic for Marc.

Though the wayward spectre, when materialized, was an exact duplicate of Marc in all physical respects, there the similarity did a screaming about face and streaked rapidly in the opposite direction. Where Marc was sober and serious-minded, George was a veritable connoisseur of all things viceful and frivolous. And where Marc was inherently honest, modest and retiring, George was frankly a crook, a braggart and rank exhibitionist. Also, it was not consoling that the spirit was extremely careless in the manipulation of his ectoplasm ... a thing that any other, right-minded ghost would go to any lengths not to be.

If Marc looked on the reappearance of George without pleasure, his attitude was not entirely unwarranted.

Marc glanced at the shoe again and shuddered. Absently he wondered how he would ever manage to explain the silly thing if someone should suddenly pop into the office unannounced. Obviously, something had to be done about it; he couldn't just let it go on dangling there, looking smug and complacent like that. And certainly it showed no inclination to leave of its own accord. In fact, it seemed quite content, as though it might just go on hanging around forever. Clearly, the situation demanded positive action. With quiet deliberation Marc lifted a bronze paper weight from his desk and aimed it with care.

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