reaching for the door, Toffee quickly faded and vanished into thin air.

It was only three minutes later when Sergeant Feeney, absorbed in a copy of Shocking Stories, looked up apprehensively over the edge of the magazine and turned a ghastly white. If he had not been mistaken—and he certainly had not—there was an odd sort of fuzziness in the air just beyond his feet at the other side of the desk. As he watched this clouded bit of atmosphere, it alarmingly solidified, a bit at a time, and became a strikingly beautiful redhead, clothed merely in what appeared to be a pair of translucent kitchen curtains. The sergeant gulped, and the magazine, which was already trembling like a leaf in a wind storm, dropped from his nerveless hand.

"Here, now!" Sergeant Feeney gulped. "What do you think you are up to, you?"

As soon as he had spoken, the sergeant was overwhelmed with a sense of his own utter foolishness; the girl was obviously nothing more than a trick of imagination and everyone knew that such things, no matter how industriously one might question them, could not answer back.

"I'm looking for the key," Toffee replied amiably. "Marc fainted, but I guess he's better now, or I wouldn't be here, would I? I have to go away when he's asleep but when he wakes up I come right back again."

The sergeant jumped to his feet, upsetting his chair with a deafening clatter. "Here, now!" he yelled. "Stop that!"

"Stop what?" Toffee asked innocently.

"Stop talking to me, now!" Sergeant Feeney gasped. "I'm a sober upright minion of the law, and it's not right that the likes of you should come jabberin' around so's I can hear it."

"Well, I don't see why not," Toffee said bewilderedly. "How am I going to get the key, if I don't ask you for it?"

"There you go again!" the sergeant wailed. Trembling in every fiber of his great hulking being, he turned away from her. "If you don't stop it, now," he said, "I'm going to close my eyes, and then you won't be there."

"But I have to have the key," Toffee protested.

"That does it!" the sergeant said woundedly. He closed his eyes so tightly they might never have existed. "There, now!"

"Where?" Toffee said.

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