Hey everyone, long time since I've posted here! Had to pause from the story detailing Maatmeses' legacy, as uni work and social life became too much and I couldn't find the time her stories deserved to write them properly.
Anyway, here is another piece I have started on. It is set in our world, not the WH one, in present time, and I thought it might make a refreshing change for anyone interested here to read some of my other stuff, even thought it is far from finished. I am struggling with a concept at the moment as it keeps changing, but to loosely fill you in, something is going to be born from the ruins of George Dudley that does not belong in our world, and I am going to explore its 'adventures,' if you want to call them that.
Comments and criticism are of course encouraged!
*
To say this is a story about a man called George Dudley would be incorrect. Rather, it is a story that begins with the death of a man called George Dudley, for had he not died when he did, his life would have stretched uneventfully on and the events that were about to unfold would have happened to somebody else entirely. As it was, eating himself to death in the lonely confines of his four-storey apartment would prove to be the most poignant and influential thing George Dudley had ever done.
Thirty-nine years of sugar, fat and complex carbohydrates had turned George’s arteries into greasy, congested highways, and the quivering mountains that hung from his neck and around his waist had placed a terrible strain on his sorry state of a heart. Furthermore, the most vigorous of George’s daily chores consisted of him descending the three flights of stairs to the ground floor and retrieving his post from the box by the apartment block entrance. Because he had no friends, George’s post invariably consisted of the morning paper, and occasionally, just occasionally, an important-looking letter from the council, which he never opened, but binned automatically upon his return from the strenuous journey downstairs.
So it was that the inevitable happened, and on the afternoon of the seventh of July, while reaching into his microwave for a piping-hot Rizzler’s Burger, George felt a stabbing pain in his chest. It was quite unlike anything he had ever felt before, and his grubby hands flew to the mounds of flesh that shook across his body. His vision swam, the cabinets, fridge, cooker and microwave all blurring into one stream of inconstant colour, and his chest tightened. He gasped, then stumbled back, his mouth agape. It was perhaps the most emotion George had shown in over a decade. He was a sour, lonely man, and had no company other than his fine self with who to talk.
The smell of the Rizzler engulfed his senses, and suddenly it was a stench: the horrible tang of processed meat, chemical flavourings and bitter self-loathing. George choked, and took another uncertain step back. A flurry of thoughts bubbled through his mind, visible in the stark whiteness of his eyes as tiny scenes: a young boy, sat at the dinner table, gravy dripping from the corners of his grinning mouth, then a teenager, as greasy as the wrappers on the desk beside him, the blue blur of a computer screen reflected in his face, then a marble gravestone, bathed in the swollen shadow of a young man, and then a bank, its hawk-eyed employee staring down at him through the safety glass that separated them. It was an awkward look, rich with sympathy, and topped off with a fat dollop of helplessness, and it had haunted George for many sleepless nights.
Then he saw no more, and with a single, tremulous ‘thud,’ George Dudley collapsed dead to the kitchen floor.
Had George been a social man, with a large network of friends and family, the events that were about to unfold might well not have happened. All it would have taken was a single guest, a well-wisher, social worker, even a Jehovah’s Witness, to approach his apartment, and smell the rot that seeped from beneath the thin door, and George’s corpse would have been discovered. He would not have been left alone for nineteen days, sprawled awkwardly on the cold lino floor like a crushed insect, and he would not have begun to rot.
But rot he did. It was a gradual thing, and to begin with, it was as unremarkable as the rest of George’s life. For two days he remained unchanged. His thick, wet lips retained the grimace that had twisted them in his last seconds. His eyes stared piteously up at the ceiling, as though the smooth, mottled yellowness was a cinema screen, and he the audience, watching his own disappointing life playing back before him. Only his flesh hinted at something being amiss, George’s once rosy cheeks fading into a soft grey pallor. Outside, the sun sank, then rose again, cars growled, and children laughed as they raced down the street to school. The world went blissfully on without George Dudley, none the wiser to his untimely death.
On the third day, his already gargantuan frame began to swell. His neck distended, bloating out of all proportion, and his lips and cheeks quickly followed suit, so that with every hour that passed, he became a little less George, and a little more something else. An unhealthy tinge crept over his skin, starting around his stomach and crawling like an insidious mould toward his face and feet. His flesh surrendered quickly to the greenness, showing as much defiance and resistance as was to be expected from a man who devoured on average no less than seven Krispy Kreme donuts a day. Death, or as it would turn out, an equally vile and malignant being, laid its clammy claws over the corpse of George Dudley, and moulded him to suit its purpose.
Perhaps the worst, and most important thing about the decomposition of George was the stench. It filled the air with an acrid bite, hissing venomously from the corpse and tainting everything around it with a putrid, throat-catching quality. Everything from the ancient sofa to the sodden beige curtains became saturated with it. George himself, an unusually smelly and generally unhygienic man, would have gagged and recoiled from the terrible stench, such was its vehemence. In short, George Dudley’s flat became little more than a charnel house.
As it happens, the nurturing of this festering den of rot was the aforementioned most poignant and influential act of George Dudley’s life. Every day that passed, his flesh grew a little greener, sank a little softer and reeked ever more repulsively, until the sun rose for the eleventh time since his heart stopped beating. It peeked in through a chink in the curtains, bringing some semblance of light to the pestilent darkness of George’s kitchen, and illuminating in all its grisly horror what had become of his corpse.
Anyway, here is another piece I have started on. It is set in our world, not the WH one, in present time, and I thought it might make a refreshing change for anyone interested here to read some of my other stuff, even thought it is far from finished. I am struggling with a concept at the moment as it keeps changing, but to loosely fill you in, something is going to be born from the ruins of George Dudley that does not belong in our world, and I am going to explore its 'adventures,' if you want to call them that.
Comments and criticism are of course encouraged!
*
To say this is a story about a man called George Dudley would be incorrect. Rather, it is a story that begins with the death of a man called George Dudley, for had he not died when he did, his life would have stretched uneventfully on and the events that were about to unfold would have happened to somebody else entirely. As it was, eating himself to death in the lonely confines of his four-storey apartment would prove to be the most poignant and influential thing George Dudley had ever done.
Thirty-nine years of sugar, fat and complex carbohydrates had turned George’s arteries into greasy, congested highways, and the quivering mountains that hung from his neck and around his waist had placed a terrible strain on his sorry state of a heart. Furthermore, the most vigorous of George’s daily chores consisted of him descending the three flights of stairs to the ground floor and retrieving his post from the box by the apartment block entrance. Because he had no friends, George’s post invariably consisted of the morning paper, and occasionally, just occasionally, an important-looking letter from the council, which he never opened, but binned automatically upon his return from the strenuous journey downstairs.
So it was that the inevitable happened, and on the afternoon of the seventh of July, while reaching into his microwave for a piping-hot Rizzler’s Burger, George felt a stabbing pain in his chest. It was quite unlike anything he had ever felt before, and his grubby hands flew to the mounds of flesh that shook across his body. His vision swam, the cabinets, fridge, cooker and microwave all blurring into one stream of inconstant colour, and his chest tightened. He gasped, then stumbled back, his mouth agape. It was perhaps the most emotion George had shown in over a decade. He was a sour, lonely man, and had no company other than his fine self with who to talk.
The smell of the Rizzler engulfed his senses, and suddenly it was a stench: the horrible tang of processed meat, chemical flavourings and bitter self-loathing. George choked, and took another uncertain step back. A flurry of thoughts bubbled through his mind, visible in the stark whiteness of his eyes as tiny scenes: a young boy, sat at the dinner table, gravy dripping from the corners of his grinning mouth, then a teenager, as greasy as the wrappers on the desk beside him, the blue blur of a computer screen reflected in his face, then a marble gravestone, bathed in the swollen shadow of a young man, and then a bank, its hawk-eyed employee staring down at him through the safety glass that separated them. It was an awkward look, rich with sympathy, and topped off with a fat dollop of helplessness, and it had haunted George for many sleepless nights.
Then he saw no more, and with a single, tremulous ‘thud,’ George Dudley collapsed dead to the kitchen floor.
Had George been a social man, with a large network of friends and family, the events that were about to unfold might well not have happened. All it would have taken was a single guest, a well-wisher, social worker, even a Jehovah’s Witness, to approach his apartment, and smell the rot that seeped from beneath the thin door, and George’s corpse would have been discovered. He would not have been left alone for nineteen days, sprawled awkwardly on the cold lino floor like a crushed insect, and he would not have begun to rot.
But rot he did. It was a gradual thing, and to begin with, it was as unremarkable as the rest of George’s life. For two days he remained unchanged. His thick, wet lips retained the grimace that had twisted them in his last seconds. His eyes stared piteously up at the ceiling, as though the smooth, mottled yellowness was a cinema screen, and he the audience, watching his own disappointing life playing back before him. Only his flesh hinted at something being amiss, George’s once rosy cheeks fading into a soft grey pallor. Outside, the sun sank, then rose again, cars growled, and children laughed as they raced down the street to school. The world went blissfully on without George Dudley, none the wiser to his untimely death.
On the third day, his already gargantuan frame began to swell. His neck distended, bloating out of all proportion, and his lips and cheeks quickly followed suit, so that with every hour that passed, he became a little less George, and a little more something else. An unhealthy tinge crept over his skin, starting around his stomach and crawling like an insidious mould toward his face and feet. His flesh surrendered quickly to the greenness, showing as much defiance and resistance as was to be expected from a man who devoured on average no less than seven Krispy Kreme donuts a day. Death, or as it would turn out, an equally vile and malignant being, laid its clammy claws over the corpse of George Dudley, and moulded him to suit its purpose.
Perhaps the worst, and most important thing about the decomposition of George was the stench. It filled the air with an acrid bite, hissing venomously from the corpse and tainting everything around it with a putrid, throat-catching quality. Everything from the ancient sofa to the sodden beige curtains became saturated with it. George himself, an unusually smelly and generally unhygienic man, would have gagged and recoiled from the terrible stench, such was its vehemence. In short, George Dudley’s flat became little more than a charnel house.
As it happens, the nurturing of this festering den of rot was the aforementioned most poignant and influential act of George Dudley’s life. Every day that passed, his flesh grew a little greener, sank a little softer and reeked ever more repulsively, until the sun rose for the eleventh time since his heart stopped beating. It peeked in through a chink in the curtains, bringing some semblance of light to the pestilent darkness of George’s kitchen, and illuminating in all its grisly horror what had become of his corpse.
