Last week our foolish heroes faced certain madness in our first ever Cthulhu-themed cosmic horror edition of Dungeon Crawl. In a fortnight’s time, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival begins, bringing with it a whole new kind of madness. So: madness all round, then!

While Dungeon Crawl isn’t an official part of the Comedy Festival, we couldn’t resist the lure of so many fantastic performers being in town – so, just like last year, we’re running a season of Late Night Dungeon Crawl. You can catch us at the Bella Union every Wednesday during the festival at 11 PM with a spectacular line-up of guests from all over Australia – and maybe even a few international surprises. With this many comedians in town, you never know who might show up! You can catch them questing for glory for free with your Dungeon Masters Ben McKenzie and Richard McKenzie on March 28th, April 4th, April 11th and April 18th. In case that’s not enough, you can also catch both of them in Pop Up Playground on Thursdays, and individually at various other gigs; see Ben’s web site, The Man in the Lab Coat, for a full list of his, and look up Richard’s reprise of A Sting in the Tale at St Ali Comedy.

So that’s madness future; but what of madness past? Never fear, mortals; we’ll be updating the site in the next few days with a recap of the Lovecraftian descent into terror undertaken by Nick Caddaye, Michelle Nussey, Robert Reid and Richard Watts.

In the meantime, however, we leave you with the follow disturbing missive received from one Andrew McClelland, Esq., who was unable to join us last Wednesday for reasons that shall become all too clear…

I dreamt I was alone. I was sitting in a life raft, the final survivor of some great tumult on the sea. I was oarless and merely floated, day upon day, on the flat glassy surface of an endless still ocean, the sun beating down upon me. The sky and sea enveloping me in their ceaseless blue.

Most of the time I slept. There was nothing else to do. Nothing to see. Except at night when the great swathe of the heavens, undiminished by any competing light, was revealed to me in its awe inspiring glory. And I thought of those stars. So tangible to my eyes and yet I knew the light of those stars was millennia old. Long dead. I knew that beyond out little planet those skies stretched on and on for eternity and that out there, somewhere, there was almost certainly something looking back at me, back at us, and back at the light that our little planet reflected.

After several days of aimless floating my little boat unexpectedly bumped into something, just below the surface. I looked to the ocean below me and found it was blue no more. Instead it was black. As black as tar and just as thick. And as I stared at this curious phenomenon the tar began to swirl and seethe. I shielded my eyes as viscous blackness swirled about me. In the black I could make out shapes, faces, letters of a language so ancient as to put the light of those distant stars to shame. Swirling about me, the black then seemed to come for me. I could only stand still, horrified beyond all capacity to move as the black tar forced its way into my mouth pouring down my throat. I could feel it coursing through my body. My nose and lungs filled with its mucous. The glands about my neck filled with its foul bile. I sweated and I shivered all at once and then a voice. As wet and thick as the foulest of slimes to emerge from any deep and ancient sea bed called to me:

“I… am… your FLU!!!”

And in the wake of that black monster I saw the death of worlds and the infinite emptiness of cold and cruel space and I knew, in a horror from which I will never fully recover:

Getting the flu really sucks balls.

Sorry I can’t be there tonight everyone. Clearly, I would have enjoyed it.