It was a dark, dark night, in a dark, dark house, in a dark, dark… well, you get the idea. But when I speak of dark, I do not mean like normal dark. When you and I speak of dark, we know not what dark be until we came face to face with this dark!

Point is, it was scary, ok? Just picture something scary in your head. But not so scary that you have to read this with the lights out by the dull glow of the computer screen. Because that can cause eye-strain, and I don’t want to be sued. Anyway, on this dark and scary night, unlike most typical dark and scary nights, the weather was warm and pleasant. None of this thunderstorm lark. However, this tranquility was misleading… DUN DUN DUUUUNN! In jumped a person known as X.

This person was rather unhappy with his lot in life, mainly because his uninspired parents decided to write X on the birth certificate. Well, actually it was his mother’s fault. She was so exhausted after 5 hours of squeezing her vagina to get him out into the world, that she lacked the basics of common sense and couldn’t have cared less what her screaming little blob was called at the time. And so X was christened.

It could have been worse, X thought to himself. I could have been called Joe Bloggs. At the time, however, he had more pressing matters. Striding upto the door or the dark, dark house, he rapped on the door. There was no answer. Balls to it, he thought, and promptly executed a Van Damme style (that is, a kickboxing) spinning back, jumping axe kick to the door. ‘OWWWW’, X screamed, as his Achilles tendon met the solid oak door. Hadn’t his teacher told him only a week before, “it is better to hit with the ball of the foot, despite the fact that the heel is harder”?

Swearing copiously, X walked over to the nearest window, threw a handy brick through it, and clambered in.

The dark, dark house was, well, dark inside. X blindly waved his hand around by the front door for the light switch. He found it, and clicked it. The bulb flickered, then ping, the filament decided it had finished with life, and that it no longer wanted to live. With that, it died. Now, this was not just an on the spot decision on the part of the filament in the light bulb. It took suicide seriously, and had been considering it for sometime after a lifetime of serious philosophical thought, complete with an A-level and then a phD in Philosophy, and perversely, cookery. Finally, after long thoughts and intense light emissions, it realised the point of it’s existence was to brighten others by allowing electrons to squeeze through itself, causing friction and heat, and thus light. It was fed up with those whiney little electrons complaining, fed up with its inert atmosphere of argon, and fed up with being controlled by a simple little on/off switch connected in parallel to it. And so, to conclude, it decided to spite X when he came in, and thus snapped itself free of the flow of electrons and promptly died.

X had, by this time, set fire to a nearby 15th century wall hanging for light with his handy lighter, so aptly named. From this, he could see a staircase. Tearing up a creaky floorboard, he carefully wrapped part of the unburned hanging around it, and set fire to that too, thereby fashioning one of those rudimentary Indiana-Jones-style torches by which to see. After climbing the boring (but rickety) old staircase, he reached a corridor.

Now X faced several decisions. Which door to pick? To make this simpler, we shall label the doors 1, 2, and 3. 1 and 2 were parallel, and close to X, whereas 3 was stationed at the far end of the corridor, and represented the end of the corridor. Well, the corridor leads and finishes with 3 X reasoned, so that must be the most important, as 1 and 2 are merely leading off from the main strip of corridor. He could not have been more wrong.

As X passed doors 1 and 2, a hand threw itself out of each and grabbed him simultaneously. They then began a tug or war, each trying to pull him through their door. ‘Oi, gerroff!’ X complained bitterly, wriggling out of both grips, and hastening, strangely unpeturbed, to door number 3. I say strangely, because if I or you were in that situation, I would imagine we would both be slightly more curious and perhaps not a little afraid of whom those arms belonged to, and why they wanted to meet us so badly, but X was a simple person, like his name, and never bothered with such thoughts. As he reached door number 3 however, he did have a fleeting moment of self doubt. What the hell am I doing? he thought. As he did so, a raven appeared. It perched on the mantle above door 3, cocking its head to look at X and quoth ‘nevermore.’ Then it just perched, and sat, and nothing more. X pulled out another handy brick and took aim. Just at that moment, the two hands, who had been previously engaged by an arm wrestle after their conflict over X decided to join forces and snuck up on him, crawling across the floor and grabbing his ankles, before pulling him back to their doors and beginning their struggle anew. ‘WATCH IT!’ screamed X in pain, ‘my legs have never been flexible enough to do the splits!’

But they appeared to be now, X flipping upside down as both arms wrenched violently in opposite directions. The raven, still sat above door 3, croaked out again ‘nevermore.’

‘Balls!’ yelled X, and taking his handy brick, rapped both hands across the knuckles, with the net result that they both let go abruptly, letting X fall with a thud. Fuck this for a lark, thought X, hurrying back down the stairs to find the room below ablaze from the unattended wall hanging.

Suddenly, Deus Ex Machina, as X was about to furnish the room with a new door in the form of an X shaped hole, Poseidon, God of the Sea, came running out of door 3 in the most undignified fashion. ‘Halt!’ He cried, his mermaid tail flip flopping down the stairs in a manner most unbecoming of a God. X turned around, resigned. ‘Yeeesss?’ he queried.

‘Stop right there. I’ve had enough of all this nonsense. I moved here after retirement to live peacefully, and ever since you turned up its been chaos.’

‘Wasn’t he the guy who created the Universe as according to Greek mythology?’

‘Yes, and I rather don’t care to be meeting the Old Gods. Afterall, we did kill the king.’

‘Violence begets violence’ X said knowledgeably, in the smug fashion of one to whom the saying does not apply.

‘Shut up’ said Posiedon, suddenly pulling out a large grey remote control. This was not your ordinary TV kind of remote control, but far more interesting, despite the fact it only had one button. This is because this button was big, red and shiny. It also had the word “Smite” printed in attractive Comic Sans Emboldened font on it. Poseidon poised his finger dramatically above the button. ‘And now…’ he began. But he did not finish, for at that moment, the front door which had resisted X’s attempts to open it from the beginning, burst open. In walked the Chemical Brothers.

‘Push the Button!’ they started singing dramatically, disco lights appearing from nowhere ‘na nananananana GALVANISE!’ And as they said it, Posiedon finally got fed up with all these interruptions to his previously peaceful watching of all three Lord Of The Rings films in a consecutive row and pushed the button. There was a brief pause, in which X noticed everything became blissfully quiet.

‘Nevermo…’ started the raven, seeing his moment. But he never finished it, because suddenly there was an enormous flash of incandescent light and a BOOM that made X’s ears pop, like when you go up in an aeroplane. Then X was aware he was standing in a huge earth crater, where the dark dark house had previously been, and the dark dark night was lit up by an enormous mushroom cloud. Suddenly, X’s skin just oozed and melted off his body, like molten wax running down a candle, only more of it. Left behind was the most enormous cockroach you will ever not see. Clicking his jaws in irritation, X ran off into the approaching dawn, just about to peak over the hill, waving his antennae and 4 spare legs before scuttling into the nearest kitchen. There was a scream, a crunch, and then silence was resumed as the radioactive dust settled.