The Haunted Pipe

It was our Chinese acrobat who raised the alarm. The haunted pipe had completely ruined his routine, he said, and he'd been booed off stage.

"Not acceptable," Ling said in broken English.

As the Master of Ceremonies it was my job to steady the ship. I needed more information, but my Mandarin was a lot worse than his English.

"Dui bu qi, qing jin, qing zuo," I said, not sure if that made any sense to him. Thankfully, he understood my apology, walked in to my office and sat down. I asked him to tell me the whole story.

It all began with the breaking of his travel case. You see, our strongman Bill had come down with a nasty bout of the flu and was unable to put up our stage set. So I rallied everyone together and we did it ourselves, with mixed results. Our clown had slipped over at a particularly inopportune moment and the scaffolding crashed unceremoniously onto Ling's travel case, breaking it in two. Consequently, he had nowhere to store his props except at the back of the stage. This morning he had gone to retrieve them when he discovered that his balancing pipe was missing.

It's quite a neat trick actually. At the end of his routine he balances this long PVC tube on his forehead and throws a soccer ball up into the air, and catches it on the top of the tube. Given that it's only 2 ½ inches in diameter, that's not exactly easy. A second ball follows it, which he balances on top of the first. He then tosses a number of small hoops into the air, allowing each one to clear the stack and slip down his body. He then jumps about with the hoops still around his body and the balls don't fall. Impressive stuff.

After an extended search he finally found the pipe behind the sword swallower's trailer. Ling decides to unleash a conspiracy theory on me about the sword swallower being jealous of his flexibility, but I dismiss the claims off hand.

A manager by trade, I've seen the ups and downs of many industries over my twenty six years in the workforce. My unfailing optimism has helped many a struggling venture poke its financial head above water. My latest dream of a successful travelling variety show was not quite real yet, so this tour was definitely make-or-break. We were performing to a packed house of fifteen tonight – not fifteen thousand, just fifteen – so it was safe to say that we had problems. I was starting to think that it might all be in vain as Ling continued to tell me about his disaster performance.

It seems that the haunted pipe moved unexpectedly on his head, so the first ball bounced off at a sharp angle and smacked into the face of a particularly unimpressed elderly lady in the audience.

I reached into my drawer and pulled out a Somac. My stomach acid was really burning up today. Then I reassured my star acrobat that everything would be okay, and that we never pump that soccer ball up very much anyway.

Ling left the office looking brighter, but the mystery of the "haunted pipe" remained. I decided I'd look into it.

I wandered out to the side of the stage where the pipe lay on the floorboards. I could see Mephisto out on stage wowing the crowd with his magic carpet illusion. At least something was going to plan. I reached down to pick up the pipe when I swear it moved. I tried again. It moved again.

Enough silliness, I thought, and put my foot down to stop it. Unfortunately, it moved before I could get a good position and slipped out from under my foot across the stage where it slammed into Mephisto's shin.

I ran out on stage to calm him down and retrieve the pipe. I picked it up and looked inside it, but all I could see was a black lump of some kind. Obviously it was blocked, but I couldn’t seem to get it out. I had kind of forgotten that we were still on stage, and the audience was getting restless. One burly man walked up on stage and offered to help, so I explained the blockage to him. After unsuccessfully trying to fit his hand into the pipe, he did something which would change my life forever. You see, it turns out that he was an out-of-work trombone player, and so he brought the pipe to his lips and blew as hard as he could! All of that trombone practise certainly paid off, because the object was blown out and flew through the air at breakneck speed. Imagine our surprise when we saw that it was a little black kitten! Thankfully, Mephisto was the king of quick thinking and used his magic carpet to make a soft landing for the little astronaut. We were all speechless.

The crowd, however, were uproarious. Generous laughter and the kinds of applause normally reserved for the end of rock concerts. I had never felt so much praise in my life.

That was the day my life changed into one big adventure. Television interviews, magazine covers, the lot. It turned out that Ling's conspiracy theory was right – the sword swallower had hidden the pipe to upset him, and then somehow the stray Siamese kitten had wandered into the pipe and fallen asleep.

Now we have toured every major continent with our incredible show. It seems the audience just can't get enough of the old "blow-a-Siamese-cat-out-of-a-PVC-tube-through-a-hoop-and-into-a-rug" trick. Instead of back rooms, we now play stadiums, and I don't need those darn pills any more. Of course, the cat demands the best care and attention now, and turns up its nose at anything less than the best food money can buy. I guess it knows as well as I do who the star of the show really is.