"And I'm locked out," Toffee observed without favor. "We'll never get anywhere that way. Where do I go to get the key?"
"You can't get the key," Marc said. "The jailer—or somebody—has it—out there." He made a vague gesture toward the iron door at the end of the passage.
"Then, I'll go ask him for it," Toffee said blandly and started away.
"No!" Marc yelled. "Don't go out there! Not like that!" He pressed urgently against the bars. "Come back here!"
Perhaps it was the effort or maybe it was the awful thought of Toffee loose in the jail, but suddenly it was all too much for him. Marc's knees buckled and he slid toward the floor. Slowly he crumpled and sprawled backwards. With an anguished murmur he passed out.
At the end of the passage, 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."