DARK JEFF
It was a dark cold night as I stumbled home from another late night party.
As I turned the corner and ducked into an alley, A evil looking man appeared in front of me.
The heat was immense and he said...
"Yipes," I said to myself, yipingly. "It's the Stapler Police!" I gingerly fingered his stapler in my coat pocket as I struggled for a witty reply.
He continued to stare down at me, his eyes boring into mine seemingly seeing right past my attempt to look innocent even though I was guilty as hell of swiping his stapler. What would he do to me if he found out I took it? With the scary looks he was giving, I didn't want to stick around to find out, so I turned to walk away.
Just then a person yelled, "Hey look out!"
Whirling around to see what I was looking out for, I was whacked in the center of my forehead with a staple remover. What struck my bean was not the plastic handle, but the sharp, pointy metal prongs. The four small, fleshy divots looked like the mark of some vampire bat. Faint from the jolt and disoriented from all that whirling around, my knees buckled and everything went dark.
I woke up tied to a chair in front of a large mirror with just enough light to see the stapler carefully balanced on my head. Attached to the stapler was a string that ran up to the ceiling to a switch that would set free a razor sharp pendulum aimed straight for my head. I thought "how Edgar Allen Poe, all this over a stapler!" I needed to go to the bathroom.
I knew I couldn't hold it in, so I oh-so-carefully untied the bonds keeping me in the chair, without triggering the stapler-pendulum trap. I decided to make a run for it (it being the bathroom), so I ducked my head down and the pendulum swung down, barely skimming my head, close enough that it sheared half the hair off my head. Due to this near-death encounter, I no longer needed to find a bathroom. So after taking off my soggy pants, the next step was to...
figure out just where in the hell I was.
The walls were damp, warm and throbbing as if sustained by a gargantuan alloy heart just beyond. My fingers barely kissed them as I walked the room's perimeter, feeling for the seams of a door I knew had to be there. Yet after several minutes of probing high and low along the wall, no such seam could be found.
About now, I'm getting both concerned and angry. Sure, I'd cribbed the stapler, but obviously the guy had taken it back. I followed the stapler, still swinging on its rope, side to side for several minutes until I thought I might go insane if I didn't kick the shit out of something.
The chair careened from two walls before coming to rest, one leg shattered and the seat displaced, on its side in a corner. Then I screamed. Not out of fear or frustration, but just to see what would happen.
When my wail stopped echoing off the dank walls, I noticed the faint, distant swell of a tide washing ashore. Strangely, it seemed to be coming from the vicinty of the fallen chair.
Fatally curious, I inched close enough to realize the seat of the chair, hinged like the lid of a toilet, was ajar, revealing a gaping black chasm from which wafted the intoxicating oceanic murmur, accompanied now by a salty breeze.
I wave of nostalgia engulfed me. Without thinking, I sat the chair upright - the broken leg buttressed against the nearby corner - and went feet-first down into the dark unknown. I remembered the scene from Trainspotting where Ewan McGregor goes into a waste-filled toilet in search of fallen drugs. Then, again, everything went dark.
I woke up to the sound of rain and the feeling of cats tearing at my skin. When I opened my eyes I found that I was naked in an alley by a dumpster. How did this happen? I asked myself. Not important, all I needed to know was, where did Ewan go? I knew he was the only man who could help me now.