There I was standing on a stage, a lone spot light illuminating the space around me, and I could hear the sounds of an audience collectively breathing heavily. I peered into the darkness, searching for a face, a hand, anything recognizable that I could latch onto and ease my troubled mind. As the music began to play, I found a friendly face in the crowd and launched into my performance of Alfredo's aria from La Traviata juxtaposed against the pulsating rhythm of a dub step mix.
Soon the music died out and I was left holding out the final note until my lungs caught fire and my voice faded into nothingness. Standing there, in the light and the stillness, the echoes of my song dying softly, I heard the thunderous applause and I walked off stage and down to my dressing room. Once there, I stripped naked and changed into a baseball uniform and slipped behind a curtain draped over a portion of the wall that led me to an underground tunnel.
Inside the tunnel, someone was waiting for me, someone from my past, and she wanted me to escape with her. I was in imminent danger, she said from the stifling darkness, and I needed to follow her and help her find something along the way. As I didn't see the point in arguing, I agreed and we set off in the musty blackness toward whatever and where ever we needed to be going. The farther we walked, the more curious I became about exactly whom it was I was following. Naturally, I reached out and grabbed at whatever my hands could find which just happened to be hair.
The hair was no good to me, it could be anyone, even a fat guy in wig, so I worked my hand down to the shoulder trying to figure out who was leading me down into the earth. The skin was soft, so I was reasonably satisfied that it was indeed a woman and not some feminine sounding man. Suddenly, a light appeared at the far end of the tunnel, and as we drew closer I could work out more features. 'Twas my old hooker friend Tiffany, and the light we came into illuminated her features and our current surrounding.
She had led me to a sewer. Typical, I thought, now she was going to rape me in the rat infested pipelines of the underground. Once I took in the fact that we were in a sewerline, Tiffany explained to me that we were now on the run from the Nazis and in search of a long lost shoe. Great, I thought, I'm Baron von fucking Trapp. Since we were officially on the run, we did next that which is only logical and stripped down naked so as not to leave any traces that we had been where we currently trod and set about the business of climbing through the muck toward a distant set of confusing pipes.
As we plodded through the foul smelling poop water, Tiffany further explained that the shoe we were after was the mighty and mythical Golden Chuck, a shoe so legendary and powerful that he who held it would wield the strength of 1 million gibbons. I hate basketball, is all I could say. And we pressed on.
We soon came upon a ladder leading up toward a platform, and being the consummate gentleman I let Tiffany ascend first. Once we reached the platform, I spied a small opening in the wall with a faint glow coming from within. I lay down in the grimy, slimy, wetness that coated the rough concrete and peered through the hole. I grew excited, not visibly (that would have proved painful in my present position), and marveled that we had found our quest. As I reached my hand slowly into the breech, Tiffany began humming a tune that was familiar to me but I couldn't quite place it.
With my fingers beginning to fumble with one of the laces of the Golden Chuck, I suddenly remembered the song being hummed behind me. It was Dies Irae, and as the large stone cracked down on my skull, I cursed at myself.
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