The Dark Universe of Death

 

I was watching a series of TV shows set in an alternative reality referred to affectionately as The Black Universe Of Death. It was well known and widely loved around the world by those who like these sorts of things, don't have a life and don't mind not being able to sleep at night. It was only available through pay-tv, so therefore, by dint of collective cultural compulsion, here in Australia it was considered a national sport and a matter of national pride to be able to download and watch it illegally without paying a brass razoo to anyone.

   The alternative universe was one of a transmogrified version of the European High Middle Ages, with suitably imaginary different geography and names. Flying high with epic fantasy fiction, it involves impregnable castles with high turret towers, knights in plate armour, women wearing wimples and similar, jousting on horseback, professed notions of chivalry, monsters, zombies, freaks, dwarves, giants, dragons, blood, murder, gore, and, especially, a lot of sex and gratuitious nudity. Primary school kids love it.

   The story line consisted essentially of the following:

- there were lots of people going around fighting and killing other people

- there were lots of people going around fucking other people, sometimes while also fighting and killing them, not necessarily in that order

- there were dragons that breathed fire and killed people

- there were dead people that walked around and killed people

- there were weird fucked-up religions that killed people

   It was, as is evident from the plot outlined above, very exciting, not to mention morally uplifting, edifying and very educational.

   Personally I loved it. I’m a sucker for a solid bit of swashbuckling, and as far as Boys’ Own Adventure Cloak-And-Dagger Swashbuckling went you couldn't get any better anywhere.

   One night I was watching an episode, procured, according to long-held proud tradition, on the sly from a bloke I knew who got it off a mate who knew a fella who downloaded it illegally. The following day I would be passing it on to my mate, in a dark corner of a dead-end alleyway, on the stroke of midnight, with a full moon rising, to the background noise of a pack of dingoes howling in the distance. Collective Contraband Copies Travelled Far And Wide, and copyright be damned.

   In this episode there was a massive, long, protracted battle that took place in the middle of the night in someplace cold and miserable, with snowdrifts and dark damp and dank Gothic forests. There were, not altogether surprisingly, lots of people going around fighting and killing other people, and, to be completely fair, also being killed by them. What goes around comes around, eventually, even in the Black Universe of Death.

   In this battle there were Living People fighting Dead People, as you do. The Dead People were, more often than not, half decayed skeletons with bones poking out of worn-out centuries’ old armour, they moved like epileptic spiders, and exclusively and highly appropriately spoke in growls and grunts, like demented constipated giant pandas.

   They were, I am not ashamed to admit it, very impressive, nay, scary. And the whole thing happened in the dark, in the – har har – dead of night. There were things sneaking up on other things, there was bloodshed and destruction appearing from out of nowhere, and the whole thing was nail-biting, edge-of-seat material. The suspense was as thick as two bricks, and a suitably menacing atmosphere was maintained throughout by dark and brooding ominous music. It was, in other words, full-on thriller material.

   I sat upon my couch and watched it in rapt delight, while my missus Kiana stood next to me and did some light ironing on her knickers with a sledge hammer and a crowbar. She kept one eye disapprovingly on the show, and muttered deprecating comments under her breath, casting aspersions on the concept, quality and sanity of the entire thing. This is coming from someone who will watch Days Of Our Lives on re-runs back to back all day every day, given half a chance.

   We were right in the middle of a particularly inventive, cunning and conniving plot twist (someone fights and kills someone, in the dark, with a lot of screaming going on in the background, and blood and guts squirting right out of the screen and hitting you in the eye), when, all of a sudden, without any advance warning whatsoever, a fuse blew and the power to the movie machine got cut off. The screen went black and silent. I sat up, well pissed off. That bloke was just about to cut that other bloke’s head off, and then, I was prepared to bet, according to the subtle hints dropped in the lead-up to the event, they were both going to have sex with goats. I had been looking forward to that.

   I got up, indignantly. Mayhaps an arch Letter To The Editor might be called for here, remonstrating against the Appalling Falling Standards Of Public Electricity Provision, outlining a few choice innovative and revolutionary policies I would strongly recommend to remedy the situation, and finishing off with dire threats to anyone who’s currently trying to get elected anywhere, and I know where they live.

   ‘It’ll be a fuse,’ said Kiana, clairvoyant and Domestic Electrical Problem Shooter Extraordinaire, ‘it happened the other day too’.

   ‘Hhhrrummphhlllggrr’, I replied eloquently, having recently become fluent in one of the many imaginary languages of the Black Universe Of Death.

   ‘Here,’ she said, turning around and pulling a torch the size of a small cow out of her Pantry, a domain unauthorised access to which is punishable by Excruciating Death, ‘take this and go fix it outside.’

   The fuse box is, as is usually the case, mounted up against the outside wall of the house. I took the torch from her, and immediately dislocated my shoulder trying to support its weight with only one hand. Wrestling the thing into a manageable and survivable position on top of my other shoulder I stalked off to the sliding glass door that is the front entrance to our house.

   And stopped dead in my tracks.

   I peered through the window into the world outside of the safety of the house. Outside lay the dark night, unfathomable territory of death and doom, with un-dead things that creep around and jump on your back and cut your throat with their teeth while shrieking, growling and cackling all at the same time. Pools of blood were coagulating and freezing over in preternatural snowdrifts, and everywhere at the edge of peripheral vision were misshapen dead things lying around with arrows, spears and swords sticking out of them. Maniacal insane laughter drifted away on the howling wind whipping the snow around my frost covered beard, and within every step’s span lay mortal booby traps, waiting to be sprung on the unsuspecting innocent wayward traveller, unwittingly caught in the twilight crossroads between two alternate universes.

   And for one split second, for one infinitesimally small slice of a unit of time, I was too scared to go outside in the dark.

   Then I gathered all of my courage, took a massive deep breath, slid back the glass door and stepped bravely, boldly and desperately outside into the cool starlit night of a suburban subtropical wet season, holding the giant-sized torch in front of me like a weapon, ready to knock the decayed skull off the shoulders of any undead zombie that got in my way.

   Nothing happened.

   The legions of the dead did not come to claim me as their own. Maybe they got the address wrong. Either way, I wasn’t going to argue with the night about not having provided me with appropriately fantasmagorical nightmare creatures to heroically fight, defeat, kill, butcher, and, potentially, fuck, and I valiantly and daringly made my way to the fuse box.

   I fixed the fuse, went back inside and turned the movie-watching machine back on again. Bring on more of the same.

 

 


 

 

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