SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR DEATH

Death -- the last sleep?  No, it is the final awakening.
Walter Scott


"SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR DEATH"

AN ORIGINAL SHORT STORY
BY
CHARLES H. SCOTT

         Tommy Lee woke up in a cold sweat, even though the temperature outside was already 90 degrees.  Her damp hair was matted against the back of her neck.  Her face was deathly pale.  It took a few moments before her eyes could distinguish shapes and differentiate between objects in the dark shadows all about her room.  Everything seemed all right, though she had a queer, uneasy feeling.  The kind of sensation that is inexplicable, even to oneself.  But there it is all the same.

         She stared at the fluorescent electric clock on the far wall.  Four in the morning!  She heard the tick ... tick ... ticking of the clock as the hands of time swept across the garish-colored face.  Another sleepless night in an unbearably long string of them, she thought as she sighed.  This "transient insomnia" as the doctor referred to her sleeping problem, had recently become an all too familiar pattern, a way of life, perhaps, moving in on her like an unwanted house guest she can't get rid of.

         Regaining her senses, Tommy Lee discovered she was sitting upright in bed.  How long she had been thus she couldn't say.  Nor could she say how long her eyes had been open before she became aware of her surroundings.  Even now she was still not yet fully awake.

         All she could remember was the last images indelibly imprinted on her mind just prior to awakening.  Somehow it seemed so real, even though she knew it was only a dream.  A dream she had dreamt often.  A dream bereft of any mystery save for the conclusion, for she always awoke at the precise moment prior to its climax.

         Unable to fall back asleep or, for that matter, re-enter the dream where she exited, Tommy Lee just lay in her bed, gazing at the ceiling and trying to relax.  After about an hour and a half, she slipped back into an unsettled slumber, only to be abruptly and quite rudely jolted awake by the alarm at 7:30.

         "Good morning, Tommy Lee.  Today is Wednesday, June 16th, 1999.  The time is 7:30.  The temperature is 92 degrees.  Today's forecast calls for partly cloudy skies with a 50% chance of rain.  You have a dentist's appointment at 4:30 this afternoon.  Have a productive day," the machine said in a husky, upbeat but still mechanical man's voice, a noticeable Cockney drawl punctuating the words.          
         Tommy Lee reached over and slammed the alarm button off with her fist.  Normally she didn't mind the talking alarm.  Bradleigh bought it for her as a Christmas present.  She could remember him saying in his British accent: "Well love, it's not exactly like having a man around the house, but, after all ... it does have my voice.  So, when I'm not here to awaken you myself, my darling, my surrogate will."  She appreciated his thoughtfulness.  However, this morning she woke with one of her not infrequent cluster headaches and the alarm jarred her like an electrical shock sending prickling shivers racing down her spine.

         Slowly, and most unenthusiastically, Tommy Lee climbed out of bed.  She slipped into her robe and went to the bathroom medicine cabinet for aspirin. Glancing only briefly in the mirror, she frowned.  Not so much at her image that reflected back at her, but for all the things she wished she saw mirrored there.

         Aspirin securely in hand, she ambled down the hallway and into the newly-remodeled kitchen.  She inhaled deeply the heady scent of the freshly brewed coffee coming from an automatic coffee maker, Bradleigh's Christmas present from the year before last.  He was a practical guy in every aspect of his life and he was determined to make her the same.

         Even though she didn't normally go to work until 10, she usually got up by 7:30 every morning.  But today she had promised to work early because she had a dentist appointment that afternoon and, therefore, had to be at work by 8:30.  She poured herself a cup of coffee.  Shook down a couple of packs of sugar, ripped them open and dumped their contents into her cup, stirring with a swizzle stick
laying on the countertop.  The quick sip she took to knock back the aspirin burned her lips, so she set the cup down on the counter and headed back to the bathroom.

         Dense, steamy clouds rose from the hot shower.  She removed her robe.  Looked approvingly at her naked body in the cloudy full-length mirror on the back of the door.  Bradleigh said he liked "the fullness of her bosom and the tight little arse".  She must admit, she likes her body too.

         She pulled back the shower curtain.  Just as she was about to enter, the phone rang.  Wrapping a towel around herself, she went to the bedroom vanity and picked-up the receiver.

         "Hello," she said, looking in the view screen.

         "Hi, babe.  How you feeling today?"  It was Bradleigh making his daily call.  Bradleigh was so predictable, Tommy Lee could set her clock by his actions, as she often did.  She affectionately refers to him as her "own private Big Ben."

         "Alright, I guess.  I have a splitting headache this morning."

         "Sorry to hear that, love," Bradleigh offered.

         "How's everything in D.C.?" she asked.

         "Unfortunately, things aren't going all that well here either.  Even after 3 days, I'm still not able to see the committee Chairperson.  If something doesn't break pretty soon, I'm afraid the trip will have been a waste of time and money," he said in his trademark speed-speaking style.

         A moment of silence followed then he spoke to her again.  "I'm sorry you're not feeling well.  Wish there were something I could do --"

         "I know something you could do," she joked.

         "I meant something to make you feel better."

         "Don't worry about me.  I'll be just fine.  When will you be home," she inquired.

         "Who knows.  Unless I get in to see Senator Olden today, I will most likely be on tomorrow evening's red-eye.  If so, perhaps we can go to Chez Nous for dinner and drinks."

         "I'd like that," she replied.  There was a touch of hesitation in her voice.

         "But don't make any reservations just in case I can't make it.  We wouldn't want Jacques to give away our table simply because we fail to show up once."  He laughed at his attempt at humor.  "Besides, I'll call you as soon as I know what the deal is."

         Another pause.  And then: "I love you.  And I miss you.  Talk to you later."

         "I love you and miss you too.  Hurry home safe and sound," she said almost pleadingly.

         She senses a hesitation coming from his end of the line too.

         "Tommy Lee ...  what's wrong?"

         "It's nothing, really."

         "Now, I know you well enough to know when something's bothering you."

         "Just these headaches, that's all," she submits as an explanation.

         "What about sleep?  Have you been getting enough sleep lately?"

         She looked away from the viewer screen momentarily.  "Yeah.  Plenty," she lied.

         "And the dream?  Are you still having the same dream every night?"  His voice wavered.  These were not easy questions for Bradleigh to ask.

         "Not lately.  It's all been sweet dreams of you."  Again she lied.  She laughed a high-pitched false laugh to cover up her prevarication.

         "Do I have to worry about you all the way back to California?"  He exhaled loudly to express his mounting frustration.

         "There's nothing to worry about.  You're an old English mother hen, I swear.  But that's why I love you."

         She blew him a kiss thru the viewer screen.  He actually cracked a smile as he rubbed the side of his cheek where the cyberkiss landed.  He was really quite handsome, though a good deal older than Tommy Lee; at least 15 years.  But he liked to consider himself "quite well preserved for a man his age".

         "Well then, if there's nothing else, I bid you adieu."  He tipped an imaginary hat to her like a gentleman of old or a knight saluting his queen.

         "And a fond fare-thee-well from me to you," she smiled as she said this.  It was a game they played -- see who could come up with the most flowery exit line before disconnecting.  But this morning she wasn't up for his playfulness.  "Bye," she intoned in a way that he understood meant: "I'm ready to hang up now."

         He understood completely.  "Bye," was his only reply.

         Tommy Lee heard the sound of his end disconnect.  "See you soon," she said as she retracted the antenna and hung up the receiver.

         Suddenly, she felt so very all alone.  Try as she might, she couldn't shake the feeling of impending disaster.  It was foolish, she thought, women's intuition and ESP were simply convenient explanations for unfathomable and inexplicable events.  Nor did she lend much credence to phenomena such as hallucinations, cognitive premonitions, astral projections, psychic links with the future or the past or even hunches.  In fact, she considered herself a healthy skeptic.

         She returned to the steamy bathroom.  All through her shower, she tried to clear her mind of the perplexing and jumbled dream that had lately interrupted her sleep and her life.  Whether there was a message in the allegorical scenarios she couldn't say.  As the hot water splashed her face and chest, she shook her head against the remembrances of the distorted, fragmented visions.  Was the dream a flashback of things from the past left unresolved or a touchstone of things to be done in the present or a harbinger of things to avoid in the future?  Her head still ached despite the cumulative effects of the aspirin and the soothing spray.

         The water washed over her, reviving her slowly from the deep funk she was in.

         She turned off the shower, grabbed her towel from the rack on the door then stepped out onto the shower mat.  Water dripped off her as she towel dried her hair and then down her sleek torso.  Usually she reveled in the luxurious sensation of the fluffy cotton oversized bath towel against her silky skin.  As a rule, it soothed her, made her feel wonderfully alive, vibrant.  But not lately.  And certainly not today. 

         Feeling somewhat better, she wandered into her bedroom.  After taking the clothes out of her closet that she'd picked out the night before (another one of Bradleigh's efficiency ideas that actually worked), she lay them on the bed.  She retrieved her bra and pantyhose from a drawer in her dresser, put them on without much conscious thought, performing the chore like one does a monotonous routine, trying to get lost in the mechanics of the task, leaving the mind to wander.

         Yet she still didn't know herself why she was so apprehensive.
Mercifully, the intercom bell sounded.  Shaken out of her reverie, she suddenly remembered she was riding with Marilyn this morning.  She decided she would give the dream more thought later; work it out in her head when she found the time.

         "Are you ready or do you need more time?"  Marilyn's voice came through the intercom's tiny, tinny speaker.

         "Be right there.  Just another minute," Tommy Lee shouted back as she pulled on her coat.

         She gave the place the last minute eye.  She hated to reach her office only to discover she left her keys or purse or something equally important at home.  This had happened to her on more than one occasion.  Bradleigh told her to "take an extra minute -- determine she was all set -- before taking off in a hurry."  Bradleigh explained that most accidents occur when people rush about.  God, he was so logical and sensible and down-to-earth about everything.  That was one of his best qualities.  But it could also be one of his biggest drawbacks.  Bradleigh was sometimes overbearing without meaning to be, for he was always giving unsolicited and often unwelcome advice.  Maybe the dream was trying to tell her something about Bradleigh, something really bad, she thought to herself.
But she quickly dismissed the idea as absurd.  Bradleigh was, after all, a well-respected man about town, a bulwark of the business community and a towering pillar of social responsibility.

         Once sure she hadn't forgotten anything, Tommy Lee exited her apartment, locking the door behind her with the key.  She proceeded down the 3 flights of stairs that empty into the foyer, an open, trellised garden area of approximately 10 yards by 20 yards.

         "Sorry to keep you waiting.  I didn't sleep too well again last night, and I have a terrible headache.  I'm just not with it today," Tommy Lee said.

         "What's the matter?  I thought you only got those headaches when you and Bradleigh were fighting," Marilyn joked.

         "Don't make me laugh; it hurts too much.  Besides, this pain has nothing to do with Bradleigh.  I woke-up with this long before Bradleigh called," Tommy Lee was saying as she climbed in the passenger side of an expensive sports car.

         Marilyn Adams and Tommy Lee Hopkins, both up-and-coming attorneys, shared an office in a downtown high-rise.  Marilyn had spent her first year's bonus on this new sports car.  Tommy Lee had invested most of hers in several stocks Bradleigh couldn't recommend highly enough.  Already she had doubled her initial investment and had rolled over her profits into other growth stocks.  Some of Bradleigh's practicality had finally rubbed off on her.

         After driving a while in silence, Marilyn turned to Tommy Lee as they stopped at a red light.  "Tommy Lee," she said timorously, "I have a question I've meant to ask you for some time, only ... well, I don't know exactly how to put this ..." her voice trailed off.

         "Marilyn, we've known each other since -- what -- our freshman year at college?  Is there anything we haven't asked each other in that time?" she stated in a voice that indicated the question was rhetorical and needed no reply.

         The light changed and Marilyn ground the gears a bit as they lurched forward.  Her mind was obviously preoccupied by something weighing her down.  She sighed deep and mournfully.

         Tommy Lee, quickly forgetting her own quandary, looked with concern at Marilyn.

         "No, nothing I can think of."  Marilyn had a look of misgiving in her eyes.

         "We've always been able to talk to each other about anything." offered Tommy Lee very matter-of-factly.

         "I know.  And that's why we've been best friends all this time.  You listen.  And you care.  You always have.  But this is different," Marilyn said with conviction.

         "Different from the time you snuck those fraternity guys into the House mother's room and hid them in the closet until she fell asleep?"  Tommy Lee laughed at the memory.

         Marilyn smiled at the fond but fading memory.  The look on her face conveyed this was in a different class all together.

         "This is something we've never talked about."  Her voice was choked off in the back of her throat.  Moistness played around the corners of her eyes.

         "Marilyn, come on.  It's me.  Tommy Lee.  The girl with the guy's name.  There's nothing you can't say to me.  You know that!"  Tommy Lee reached out and took hold of Marilyn's hand, as long time girlfriends do sometimes and as they had over the course of their friendship thru times thick and thin.

         Marilyn tensed.  It was as if she had received a shock from Tommy Lee's touch.  Shivers ran through her blood as she prepared herself for the moment of truth.

         "I'm in love."  That's all she said.

         Tommy Lee had a nonplused look on her face.  That's it?  That's the big secret?  She breathed a sigh of relief.  She thought for sure Marilyn was dying of some rare and incurable disease.  But she's in love.  "That's wonderful," Tommy Lee said in a heartfelt, sincere way.  "Who's the lucky guy?"

         Marilyn hesitated before answering.  "It's ... it's not a guy."

         Though shocked, Tommy Lee maintained her composure for Marilyn's sake if nothing else.  "Then it's another woman?" she asked as if the question was a simple request for trivial information.

         "Yes," Marilyn affirmed.

         "Who's the lucky girl, then?"

         "Someone at work, said Marilyn.  "I watch her when she's not looking.  She's so beautiful and --"  Words failed her.

         Tommy Lee thought of all the women in their office.  What type would Marilyn be attracted to, she wondered.  "Does she know you feel this way about her?"

         "No!  I don't think so.  Not yet any ways," Marilyn said in a subdued voice.  "Do you think I should let her know how I feel?"

         Tommy Lee thought this over.  She felt the tension mounting around her temples.  The dull, general ache that was the headache she woke up with rapidly coalesced into a cluster of mindnumbing, searing and stabbing pains.  Here was her best friend asking her advice and she didn't know what to say.  It was times like these she wished she had Bradleigh's common sense.  He'd know the right thing to say.  He was never at a loss for words.

         "I'd say that's entirely up to you.  You seem so worked up over this.  The real question might be can you go on with things as they are now?"

         "What if she's repulsed by the idea?  I'd be humiliated.  I'd just want to die."

         "I don't know what to say, Marilyn.  If it were me, I'd rather know then not know.  At least that way, I could go on with my life knowing I'd done what I could to make my feelings known."  Tommy Lee thought that sounded like good advice as she was saying it.

         "What if it was you?  Would you want to know then?" Marilyn asked tentatively.

         Tommy Lee wasn't sure she understood the question.  Moreover, she wasn't sure she wanted to.  She had that uneasy feeling anew.  "You mean if I was in your position?  I'd rather know than not know.  As I said, at least that way, I could go on with my life knowing I'd done what I could to make my feelings known."

         Marilyn looked directly at Tommy Lee.

         Tommy Lee unconsciously shifted in her seat.  Waited with the nervous anticipation of an expectant father in the delivery room.  Warning signals were going off in her head like fireworks gone awry.

         "No.  I meant ... if you were the woman I was in love with."

         "If you're asking me a hypothetical question ..." she hesitated to continue.

         Their eyes locked on each other.

         Marilyn reached deep down inside for the last ounce of courage she could muster.  Then, she mumbled under her breath, "It is you, Tommy Lee."

         There it was.  The second shoe fell right thru the hole in Tommy Lee's head that this revelation opened in her carefully constructed mindset.  "What?" was the best Tommy Lee could answer, the air rushed out with the force of a punch in the stomach.  She stared right thru Marilyn, her best friend for the last 10 years, as if she weren't there or was someone heretofore unknown.  She was prepared for practically anything; anything but this, that is.

         Marilyn scrutinized Tommy Lee with unfocused eyes.  "You didn't know, did you?  I can see it in your eyes."  Marilyn reacted with horror at Tommy Lee's shocked, slack-jawed expression.  Panic crept into her eyes, "it was a mistake -I shouldn't have said anything.  Oh God, what should I do now, she thought to herself.

         "You're not serious?!"  Tommy Lee had to ask.  But the look on Marilyn's face confirmed it beyond a doubt.  How long had she been harboring this secret, undeclared love, Tommy Lee asked herself.

         Marilyn's mind reeled.  She couldn't answer because she felt woozy.  Her foot pressed down hard on the gas pedal reflexively.  As Marilyn tensed, her fingers white-knuckled their grip on the steering wheel.  She struggled to catch her breath; felt as though someone had stomped on her chest while she was down.  Her mouth was bone dry.  She couldn't swallow.  It was as if she was choking on the air she breathed.

         Tommy Lee's state of shock was abruptly suspended when she noticed Marilyn, in her tear-blinded distraught condition, had inadvertently steered the car into oncoming traffic.

         An articulated municipal bus swiftly bore down on them.

         Tommy Lee screamed, "Marilyn - LOOK OUT!"

         Marilyn looked up the moment before impact.  "OH MY GOD!" she shouted as she swerved, jerking the wheel hard to the right.

         But it was too little too late.

         Everything became a mind-numbing, chaotic blur.  Time telescoped at the instant of collision then slowed down to a virtual standstill.  The sickening sound of busting glass and crunching metal and squealing tires reverberated in the graveyard of buildings, mingled with the horrified screams of nearby witnesses.

            ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

         Tommy Lee finally regained consciousness after 2 weeks in a coma.  When her eyes opened, there was Bradleigh, conducting business with a portable computer, fax and modem hook-up.  It took him a moment before he was aware that she had regained her senses.

         Bradleigh rushed to her side.  "Hello, love.  Welcome back to the land of the living."

         "Where am I?"

         "You're in the hospital."

         "I feel like someone removed my spine and danced a jig on it."  She tried smiling through her swollen mouth, but it was very painful.

         Bradleigh tried his level best to be cheerful for Tommy Lee's sake.  "Nothing so drastic as that."

         "Wha -- what happened?"  It was an obvious strain for her to speak.  She tried lifting her head off the pillow, but fell back recoiling in pain.  Her bandaged right hand flew to her gauze swathed cranium.  Her right eye was blackened and blood red, a hematoma the size of her pupil enveloped the white and joined the purplish-yellow bruise astride the bridge of her nose.

         "You and Marilyn were involved in an accident.  Head-on with a city bus.  You've been in a coma ever since."  He feared to say any more, afraid of upsetting her.

         Tommy Lee fought the pain, propped herself up on her elbows as she scanned the room.  Slowly, it dawned on her where she was.  As the light of consciousness returned to her eyes, the deeper implications of her present location filled her with dread.  Where was Marilyn?  Was she all right?  were the questions in her eyes.

         "Where's Marilyn?" she asked, as afraid of the question as she was fearful of what the answer would be.

         Bradleigh grimaced.  He broke eye contact.  This was what he had dreaded most, that he had to be the one to break the tragic news.  "Marilyn didn't make it."  He didn't know how else to put it.  "She died instantly."

         Tommy Lee felt the scream as it welled up from someplace deep within her tortured soul, gaining its strength as it robbed her of hers.  "NO!  NO!  OH GOD, it can't be so!"  Her body convulsed, suddenly wracked by spasms of uncontrollable sobbing.

         Bradleigh tried his best to comfort Tommy Lee.  But she was beyond any possible consolation.  Something of herself had died with Marilyn.  It was as if someone had excised a part of a vital organ that she couldn't live without.  She began convulsing, flailing around the bed in the grasp of a seizure.

         Bradleigh called out, "NURSE!  I need some help.  NURSE!"  He held Tommy Lee's hands tightly together.  Tears welled up into his dark eyes, his brooding and somber face tightened into a rigid mask of despair.

         A nurse rushed into the room responding to Bradleigh's plaintive cries.  Together they restrained Tommy Lee from clawing her way out of the bed.  Once subdued, the nurse injected Tommy Lee with a sleep-inducing drug.

         Mercifully, Tommy Lee blacked out, sparing her the anguish of being conscious to absorb the loss more dearly.  But that night, in her fitful bouts of semi-consciousness, the dream returned.  Only this time, being entirely under the power of her unconscious mind, she experienced the dream in an extraordinarily lucid fashion.  It washed over her like a full-moon hightide, devouring her senses and sensibilities in one fell swoop, a flood of sensation sweeping away everything in its path.

         Tommy Lee is on a dance floor, lighted from underneath and from above.  A revolving globe with a mirrored surface throws brilliant patterns of shadow and light swirling across her face as she dances.  All around her couples move slowly to the down tempo.  But Tommy Lee is dancing by herself.  Actually, to be entirely precise, she mimics the motions of dancing with someone while she is really dancing all by herself.  She reacts to an imagined tap on her shoulder, bows gracefully as if accepting a gentleman's invitation to dance.

         Bradleigh sat by her bedside day and night for the next week.  Day in.  Day out.  He mopped her feverish brow and moistened her chapped lips.  By the end of the seventh day, he looked like he'd been through the spin-cycle in all twenty machines at the local Launderland.  He looked at the floor; stared out the windows; anything to pass the time till Tommy Lee came around.

         Finally, she did.  When Tommy Lee told her dream again to Bradleigh -- in all its hyperbolic imagery -- she heard him saying, "It's just a dream, love.  Nothing to fear.  Dreams can't hurt us."  He employed his most convincing smile, but it had little effect on her.

            -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

         She entered her apartment for the first time in many weeks.  Scanning the room she found everything was just as she'd left it, right down to the cold cup of coffee she left on the counter.  But how could it be she wondered, because practically everything else in her life had irrevocably changed.

         Bradleigh was still around, that much hadn't changed; but lately even he seemed very distant.  It was as if a wall had been erected while she was comatose.  Try as she might, she couldn't figure out whether it was he or she that was pulling back from their relationship.  Did it really matter one way or the other, she reasoned.  The fact was that there was a distinct and widening schism in their intercourse since the accident.

         And not just sexually, either.  While Bradleigh was never a spark plug of passion, he'd been more inhibited ever since her "most unfortunate incident" as Bradleigh referred to the accident.  There were precious few things they could talk about any more that didn't end in either her crying or him retreating into his
overwhelmingly stuffy and insufferably sanctimonious and oh so British stoicism.

         Was she just being paranoid?  Was she going crazy?  She didn't think so.  But still the perception that something or, rather more specifically, someone was out to get her shadowed her every thought.  Her once vivacious personality and even temperament had drained away of late.  She felt strangely vulnerable in a manner she couldn't explain.  Stolen moments of life slipping thru her feeble grasp like water through a fisherman's net.  It was as if she lived on borrowed time.  And her line of credit was reaching its limit.

         Tommy Lee's sleep was again visited by the cryptic dream.  Shrouded in darkness, cloaked in a miasmic psychic fog and confined to the twisted nether regions of her tortured subconscious until this night -- when the dream sprang up full-blown, a chimera of the mind.  The images ascended to sheer madness.  The dream was there.  It was real.  It was palpable.  A living and breathing thing that existed independent of her conscious will.

                Inexplicably she knew, though knew wasn't the right word, it was more like she sensed the dream was conveying an important message, a message she must receive, a message she couldn't escape, one she, in fact, couldn't live without.  So she finally submitted to it, surrendered completely, giving herself over to it like a virgin bride on her wedding night.

         Funny, she thought to herself, once she relinquished her conscious will to the omniscient power of the images from her mind, she felt at peace, like the calm of a roaring fire after it's used up its fuel.  Only the dream was the fire and she the fuel.  She consumed it and was in turn consumed by it.

         The dream, as it had always been, was the same.  Only this night it washed over her with tsunami force.  Everything was warped and twisted out of shape, the sort of place one visits only in their worst nightmares or a county fair.

         There she was again, dancing all alone in the middle of the dance floor, while reeling couples traversed the floor around her, and the lights whirlpool amidst this curious scene.  Suddenly, Tommy Lee stiffened as if an icy hand had settled on her shoulder, cutting in on her phantom partner.  A strange stillness came over her.  She threw her head back, gazed upwards as if looking into the eyes of a much taller man.

         "I believe this is my dance," the stranger said with a deeply resonant voice, an evocatively resounding and powerful voice that could be all things to all people.

         "Who are you?"  Tommy Lee was startled.

         "Come, come now Tommy Lee.  After all this time, surely you have some clue as to my nature and true identity.  I am known by many names, to peoples near and far across the universe," he declared.

         Tommy Lee inquired, "How do you know my name?"

         He didn't answer.  For he knew that she knew.

         "Are you Death?" Tommy Lee quizzed.

          "How perspicacious of you, my dear."  There was a demonic, glacial coldness behind his eyes.  "You have eluded me for far too long.  Like the butterfly flitting just beyond its captor's net, your strong will to live has postponed your surrender to our little dance," Death said icily.

         "I'm an unwilling partner in this horrendous dance that I can not
stop.  But this is only just a dream.  You are only a part of my dream," she protested.  "Dreams can't hurt you."  Though she was drawn to him, she knew she had to get away.

         So she ran for her life.

                With unearthly swiftness, Death intercepted her.

         Your time has come," he intoned.

         "Am I DEAD?  Can it be that I have died?" Tommy Lee asked herself aloud.

         The stranger took a bony right index finger, touched the tip of its nose indicating she was "right on the nose."

         She went ghostly pale.  The rush of nightmare images would not stop.  Her voice faltered as she tried to speak.  "I don't want to be dead," Tommy Lee replied in a voice that could have come from a corpse.

         "No one does, I dare say," Death said when he stopped laughing.  "Death is nothing to fear.  It is not the end but a new beginning.  The death of this life gives birth to the afterlife.  Death and re-birth are the way of life," Death said philosophically.  "Shall we dance?  You really want to, don't you?"

         In response, Tommy Lee bowed gracefully, accepting his offer and her fate.  Her face took on a look of complete acceptance, even tranquillity, as she again began to twirl around the dance floor in tandem with her imaginary partner.  Her own movements grew exaggeratedly grand as she swept across the floor with the style and elegance of Ginger Rogers, her imagined partner moving light-footed in tandem like Fred Astaire, shadowing her every move.

         The stranger's face contorted, melting down before her astonished eyes.  His features transmogrified to the point that what was revealed was more skeleton than human.  "I always insist they save the last dance for Death."

         Like some grotesque, animated skeleton, the pallid figure threw his head back and laughed a spectral cackle that froze her blood and chilled her heart.

         The pall of death that comes to all came over Tommy Lee's face, blanching it ashen gray as her lips turned purple and lifeless.

         Tommy Lee awoke nevermore.

THE END