"The Shades of Toffee" by Charles F. Myers is a comic fantasy novella following Marc Pillsworth, a mild-mannered advertising executive whose basement chemistry experiment to defeat gravity goes catastrophically wrong, triggering a chain of outlandish consequences. When Marc combines his final chemicals, an explosion destroys his laboratory, briefly renders him unconscious, and unleashes two supernatural forces. The first is Toffee, a vivacious, uninhibited redhead who materializes from Marc's subconscious mind as a literal thought-projection — shapely, shameless, and thoroughly ungovernable. She exists in the physical world whenever Marc is awake and vanishes back into his mind whenever he sleeps. The second force is George, Marc's assigned ghost, a disreputable spirit dispatched from the afterlife's bureaucratic High Council on the uncertain premise that Marc may have died in the explosion. George is lazy, self-serving, mischievous, and intermittently attempts to hasten Marc's actual death so that he can legitimately take up his haunting duties. Marc's domestic life is already strained. His wife Julie has transformed since marriage from a carefree woman into a rigidly proper suburban matron devoted to club work, weak tea, and social respectability. Marc, shy by nature and overmatched by Julie's domestic authority, has channeled his frustration into the laboratory experiments that now produce Toffee. Julie, witnessing Marc on a trellis outside her window in the early morning with an apparent naked redhead in his convertible below, concludes she has grounds for divorce and begins preparations to leave for Reno. Her scheming friends May and Jewel Drummer enthusiastically encourage the worst interpretation of events, while George invisibly raids the liquor supply and terrifies Jewel into fleeing the house. Meanwhile, the explosion has also chemically altered Marc himself. He periodically becomes lighter than air and floats involuntarily upward, temporarily anchored only by eating food or carrying heavy objects. This condition produces a series of escalating public disasters. At the snobbish Wynant Hotel, where Marc attempts to install Toffee discreetly, he floats across the lobby and grapples with a classical nude fountain statue for anchorage, scandalizing a delegation of club ladies. Toffee, stripped of most of her costume by George's invisible meddling, assaults the judge during the subsequent court hearing. George, following Marc to court, levitates and dematerializes before the assembled spectators, dissolving the proceedings into mass panic. The judge, unhinged, dismisses all charges. The Blemish brothers then enter the story — Cecil and Gerald, a pair of identically sinister, derby-hatted, thick-bearded failed movie spies who have been following Marc since the courthouse. Genuinely dangerous beneath their absurdity, they capture Marc and Toffee at gunpoint and transport them to a vast, hollowed-out mansion formerly occupied by a reclusive inventor named Adams, whom the brothers appear to have accidentally launched into deep space via one of his own experimental catapults. The mansion is packed with the inventor's extraordinary machines, including a universal production unit capable of manufacturing nearly anything and a smaller catapult capable of projecting a missile anywhere on Earth. The Blemishes intend to use Marc's formula to construct a bomb that will detach an entire city from the surface of the Earth and send it floating into space — not from geopolitical malice but from a demented desire for professional recognition, hoping that an act of sufficient monstrousness will revive their careers and earn them serious employment as spies. Marc refuses to cooperate, but while he sleeps — causing Toffee to dematerialize — the brothers administer truth serum and extract the formula involuntarily. They announce that Marc is now expendable. Toffee, during one of her police-seeking excursions as a dematerialized consciousness, encounters two bumbling burglars at a neighboring estate and persuades them to drive her to a police station, only to dissolve back into Marc's mind just as she reaches help. Newspapers report Marc's disappearance as a probable foreign-espionage kidnapping, and a global search is underway. The novella operates as a sustained comic farce built on the collision between Marc's repressed, orderly existence and the anarchic forces his experiment has released — Toffee embodying everything his conventional marriage suppresses, George representing mortality's inconvenient claims, the Blemishes embodying the world's genuine menace dressed in clownish incompetence, and Marc's own buoyancy serving as a literal and comic expression of his inability to stay grounded in the life he has built.
By Charles F. Myers · Genre: Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Psychological Fiction · 14 chapters