Undead Living #5: Back from the Gates of Hell

Greeting ghoulings, boy has it been forever since I’ve last seen your pretty faces. Oh, don’t look so confused, of course I know what you all look like. Every single one of you… Anyways, that’s besides the point. The important thing is that I’m back! It’s been almost a year since I disappeared from these parts of the internet and I do humbly apologize to you all for my sudden hiatus. You see a lot has been going on in the last 11 months or so that have served as quite the eye opener to an undead fellow like myself. In short, you living things are absolutely crazy! I mean, I thought my kind had a few loose screws here and there, what with our brains being partly decayed and all. But no, you daywalking fleshlings take the cake. I mean, the amount of drama and headache-inducing bullshit I had to deal with these “people”, many of whom I once counted upon the ranks of friendship (yes ghoulings, I actually do have friends. There are some humans in this world sick enough to amuse me.) is absolutely astounding.

It made me wonder for quite a long time as to why I even bother to wake up from my coffin, of which I did buy a new one a few months back. The old one was getting a bit stuffy for me and brought memories of another ghouling whose face I rather forget. (I’ve decided to handle that matter by keeping her face stored in one of my boxes until I can decide a much better method of disposal. I’m thinking sauteing with mushrooms and green pepper. What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments below.)

Add some cayenne peppers for some kick

Ah, but yes, I kept wondering why I bother rising every night and day, dealing with the same useless mortals who waste their lives on idiotic feuds about bearded men in white and complaining that that life is so unfair because they don’t have what their fellow neighbors do. By the devils beneath us, I sometimes wish they simply die already so I can put them to some use and feast upon their flesh and souls already. (Let’s not kid ourselves here, ghoulings. I love all of you, but in the end I’m hanging out in this dreary fleshy world to satisfy my hunger) But no, they continue to toil away with their half-baked lives and sheep-like faces.

You must be asking yourselves, “Why Sir Jeffrey, if we humans are such a bore and waste of space, do you bother hanging around here with us?” Hoho, my dear ghoulings, well it’s quite simple really. One, as I stated before, I must still feast upon thy flesh and spirit if I hope to survive as a loveable, zombie writer. But two, and I suppose the more important reason, is that despite all the stupid humans I had to deal with, there were and still are a handful of mortals who have stuck by me through these rough times and have showed me that not every fleshling is a sad sack of meat. These mortals, who I view as some of my best of friends in this world, give me a reason to get up from my coffin and live!

You know what, no, there’s actually a third reason why I’m up and refuse to just rot away. I’ve been through Hell and back recently and I can safely say it was not pleasant. I do not wish to die. Again.

I’ll start at the beginning. See at first, there was a handsome, intelligent, charming man with a craving for human flesh named Sir Jeffrey of the Pen. Now Sir Jeffrey was having a normal night talking to one of his new friends, the Sewing Mistress, Lady Jamie, about random things, ranging from cats to homicides. When, at around ten o’clock, on the eighth day of the month of July, God said unto Sir Jeffrey, “Let there be pain!”

And there was pain, right around Sir Jeffrey’s lower abdomen.

And it was not good.

God: The World’s Biggest Troll

Sir Jeffrey, being the stubborn old bonehead that he is, decided to ignore the pain and went to bed. As he slipped into the dark realm of dreamland, a sharp pain shot across his side. Sir Jeffrey awoke with a start, gripping at the inside of his coffin as the pain circulated toward his belly button and then died off. Sweating and confused, our undead hero tried to get up to see the time, but any slight movement, even if it was just a centimeter to left or right, would cause his unseen assailant to stab at his insides once more, wriggling whatever vile weapon was being used until his intestines felt contorted and Sir Jeffrey simply passed out from the pain. But it would not be the only time throughout the night that Sir Jeffrey would feel this pain. Oh no. Every couple of minutes or hours the pain would wake him up as it moved throughout his body. Tears streamed down his face as the pain grew more and more intense. He could feel the pain and pressure push against his bladder, which took it upon itself to try to release the liquid waste it stored. Sir Jeffrey tried to get up, tried to cry for help, but the demon that was growing inside of him, twisting it’s way through his body kept him glued to his coffin. No words could escape. Not even a scream. And yes, my dear ghoulings, in that state of helplessness and pain, Sir Jeffrey did indeed expel the contents of his bladder upon himself and blacked out.

The following morning, Sir Jeffrey awoke and was greeted by the moist stains on his pants and the worst case of fatigue he had ever felt. It was as if the demon that bore its way into his gut was sapping the life out of him. The pain had died down a bit, and with the assistance of his cane, Sir Jeffrey managed to drown himself in a hot bath and change into clean clothes. With the exception of getting up to feast on a soul or drink from his stash of virgin blood, Sir Jeffrey spent the entire day laying in his coffin, listening to old podcasts about video games and his entire collection of Voltaire songs, as well as catching up on episodes of Marble Hornets.

A virgin a day keeps the doctor away…

As night was encroaching, fatigue had completely drained Sir Jeffrey again and he could feel himself slipping once more into sleep. However, that would barely last but an hour or two as the demon nestled in his stomach woke up once more and began to chews and claw its way throughout his body. The pain was ridiculous and ate away at Sir Jeffrey, whether he moved or not. It got to the point that Sir Jeffrey forced himself up out of his coffin, despite the crying pleas of the demon, and stumbled into the bathroom where he submerged himself in scalding hot water. The heat managed to calm the demon down, if for a bit. But when Sir Jeffrey finally got out of the tub and returned to his coffin, it took no more than 20 minutes for the vile creature to become restless and attack his insides once more.

It was at this point in Sir Jeffrey’s journey through hell that he became delusional. He began to honestly believe he was seven Chinese mortals, five men and two women, who were all feeling the same pain. Why they were Chinese, I couldn’t begin to tell you, but they were nonetheless, and they were all in pain. Every time the pain shifted just a little bit, Sir Jeffrey would switch over into the personality of one of the other Chinese fleshlings. It was discovered, through this nightmarish, dissociative identity disorder crisis, that the pain was caused by a laser that was implanted by the Chinese government and was being hunted down by the Chinese mafia. The mafia managed to capture one of the personalities and was in the process of ripping into his stomach to pull it out. Sir Jeffrey managed to flip over into another personality before they cut in too deeply, but that didn’t make the overall pain disappear.

By morning, Sir Jeffrey awoke still in pain, though the fatigue was gone. He managed to move around throughout his house, his hand on his trusty skull cane, looking like a bent-over Dr. House. Eventually, when his mother returned home from work and found that Sir Jeffrey was not only in pain but that his abdomen was so swelled he looked like he was four months pregnant (and at some point, Sir Jeffrey did in fact believe he was giving birth to a demon spawn or alien), she immediately rushed him to the one place Sir Jeffrey is terrified of, second only to the hellhole that was his ex-girlfriend’s home….

Memorial Regional Hospital.

Don’t let the pretty flowers and bright atmosphere fool you. You’re staring at the Gates to Hell themselves.

It’s not Johnson in particular that Sir Jeffrey fears; he’s terrified and despises all hospitals. Any place that makes you feel better by forcing you to feel a ridiculous amount of unwanted pain is a questionable place for anyone, alive or undead. And after his stay there, his feelings have only been enforced. You see, after waiting about two hours for a nurse to see him, and the usual process of peeing in a cup and spilling his blood into a few vials, Sir Jeffrey was approached by his temporary doctor, where he was asked a bunch of questions, injected with morphine and had a machine take a few scans of his insides. The doctor returned to the drugged undead patient and told him the utterly horrible news. There was indeed a demon inside poor Sir Jeffrey’s guts. The demon was known as Appendicitis, and the only way to exorcise the monster was to cut open Sir Jeffrey and remove the demon’s home: his appendix.

Tears wet Sir Jeffrey’s face as he heard the news, but soon got a hold of himself and accepted his fate. And by accepting it I mean he cried a bit more and looked for a way to escape. He barely made it 20 feet from his bed. He was taken, instead, into another room where he was greeted by a solemn man, whose demeanor did not comfort Sir Jeffrey at all. The man went through the run downs of the procedure, explaining that they were basically going to shove a camera down his throat and make small incisions so they can cut into his appendix and scoop it out. That didn’t bother Sir Jeffrey so much as he was going to be partially dead when this occurred. What did bother him was the horrifying thing that came spewing out of the doctor’s mouth not a second later. It seems that the demon inside Sir Jeffrey had blocked the passageway out of his large intestine, so everything he’s eaten was still inside him… which was going to get in the way of the operation. Their solution: To put a long tube through Sir Jeffrey’s nostril and down his trachea into his stomach and suck everything right out. Oh, and by the way, he’ll be awake for the entire thing.

“Don’t worry. This will only hurt a lot.”

So after about an hour or so, three sadists, I mean nurses, came into the room to complete the deed. One of them held Sir Jeffrey down with their filthy claw as a second took a long q-tip and lathered a weird, thick substance on his right nostril that was meant to numb the feeling. Yeah, that didn’t work. Useless humans. Needless to say the next couple of minutes were not pleasant. Gripping at the side of his bed, Sir Jeffrey closed his eyes as the nurse slowly shoved the tube down his nose. A burning sensation emanated from his nostril and Sir Jeffrey did all he could to prevent himself from screaming. As the tube crept its way closer to his uvula, the nurse told Sir Jeffrey to swallow when he gave the signal. Ages passed but Sir Jeffrey simply sat in his bed, eyes closed, hands white as they continued to squeeze the bars along his bed. He then gave a small nod and started swallowing as the tube slid down his throat. It wasn’t long before his body reacted and vomit would try to spew out of Sir Jeffrey’s mouth. But the undead would not allow his body to win and stopped the vile substance in his throat, forcing it back down into his stomach until the tube reached its destination. Every time the nurse pushed the tube just a bit further, Sir Jeffrey had to stop him in order to fight his body back into submission. The process was painfully slow and hours felt as though they had passed when the final bit of the tube was inserted. Sir Jeffrey was sweating and doing his best to ignore the tube in his mouth so his gag reflex didn’t go off.

Then came the suction.

Sir Jeffrey cringed as he felt the contents of my stomach pour out of his body through the tube. He opened his eyes and watched as a yellowish liquid rushed out of his mouth and emptied itself into a nearby machine. The process took about 20 minutes, in which they disconnected him from the machine (though mind you the tube was still stuck inside his throat) and a lovely nurse took him upstairs where he would wait for the surgeon to arrive and exorcise the demon inside. They connected his tube to another machine, which for reasons he didn’t understand, was going to pump out and pump in the last bit of liquid in his stomach. The entire thing made Sir Jeffrey queasy but he held on and suffered in silence, so as to not throw up what little he had left in him.

Hey there ghoulings! Yes, it’s as unpleasant as it seems.

It didn’t take long though for the demon to stir, perhaps catching wind of what was going to happen. As Sir Jeffrey laid in bed, the demon inside decided to voice his own complaint and started stabbing and tearing at his insides. The pain struck Sir Jeffrey out of nowhere and he began begging for more painkillers, though he was denied as he couldn’t have anything until the operation began. As he moved and thrashed in his bed, the pain ever growing, the tube in his throat slightly moved and tickled his throat, causing the zombie to enter a coughing state and start a chain reaction with his uvula. Doing all he could to hold back his insides, Sir Jeffrey could feel he was losing the battle due in part of the pumping from the tube. As he felt parts of his insides crawling out of his throat and reach his mouth, a nurse came in to shut the machine off, giving Sir Jeffrey the edge he needed to fight off the coughing fit, force the digested matter back into the pit inside and calm himself down.

Hours passed and at exactly 5 AM, about 11 hours since first arriving at the hospital, they finally came in and took Sir Jeffrey to the operating room. At this point, the demon was screaming and trying to eat its way out of Sir Jeffrey’s stomach. The pain, become numbingly unbearable, had our undead victim begging for the anesthesia and for the surgery to begin. But like everything else in this hospital for the tormented, nothing is done quickly and after laying in the operating room for about 30 more minutes, the surgeon finally showed up. They began to inject Sir Jeffrey with the magical sleeping serum and as he moved onto the operating bed, everything went black.

Sir Jeffrey could barely remember what occurred while he slept. He could remember seeing shapes and figures of his mortal family and ghoulish friends, all twisted and turned and floating across a black background. Sir Jeffrey was falling. He could feel gravity pull him down into the darkness below. He felt the cool embrace of nothingness wrap around him as he sunk, touching his skin and forming into something. Images. Memories. Feelings. All of his regrets and successes formed before his eyes. Graduating from high school. Meeting his first love. Losing her. Crippling depression. Life-inspiring adventures. Rebellion. Conformity. His Life. His Death. His Rebirth.

All of these things floated out of Sir Jeffrey and into the darkness above him. He reached out to touch them, the faces of people he knew and loved, the goals he would hope to achieve. But he could never touch them. They disappeared into the shadows and Sir Jeffrey would continue to sink. That’s when he noticed that whatever was pulling him down was not gravity, but something else. He could feel something forming, something large and sharp, around his right leg. But before he could look, he finally hit the dark waters below.

When the waves receded and Sir Jeffrey could see once more, he was in a desert. Sand everywhere, blanketing the horizons, and the sky was a pale shade of grey. Even the sun, whose heat washed over the naked zombie, was bleak and dead.

Apparently this is what the Afterlife looks like to me… Fantastic

Then, from the ground came a small quake, followed by the sands parting before Sir Jeffrey’s eyes. The earth ripped itself apart as a giant, blood red claw crawled out from the sandpit and grabbed a hold of Sir Jeffrey’s right leg. Another claw, as huge and bloody as the first, followed afterward and reached for the sky above, blocking out the sun. Sir Jeffrey’s eyes widen as a great and terrible beast rose from in between the claws. The beast looked like a skinned wolf, with skin like charcoal and blood gushing from his head and snout. The beast’s green eyes looked intently at Sir Jeffrey’s and after what seemed like forever, the beast brought down his other claw and ripped into Sir Jeffrey’s side.

Sir Jeffrey winced as the claws dug into him, though was surprised when no pain followed. The feeling was cool, similar to the touches of nothingness that stole his memories. The beast continued to stare at the undead being as his claws twisted and turned inside of him. And then, Sir Jeffrey heard a pop, followed by a frightful scream. The beast removed his claw from Sir Jeffrey’s side, pulling along with it a bloody appendage. The dying screams were coming from the appendage, who Sir Jeffrey could’ve sworn had a face. But before he could get a better look, the beast dropped the bloody pulp into his jaws and swallowed it whole.

The beast then looked back to Sir Jeffrey and placed his claw around his face and said, in both a growl and a whisper…

Next time you won’t wake up

And apparently Satan looks like a giant version of Smile Dog… Fan-fucking-tastic

What followed afterward were broken bits and pieces of memories of Sir Jeffrey waking up hours after the procedure, his throat sore and his eyes groggy. He could make out shapes of people walking by, noticing he was in the recovery area of the operating room. A voice called out to him, coming from a man he did not recognize, though he had a smile on his face as he said, “I see you’re awake. That’s good-” That’s all Sir Jeffrey heard before sleep overtook him and he was knocked out again. This would repeat about a few times, waking up in a daze, weak, before succumbing to sleep once more.

As the sun rose high into the sky to greet the afternoon, Sir Jeffrey was finally out of his sleep spell. He was tired, confused, and with a tube still down his throat (it was soon taken out after he was awake, which was quite terrible to experience)… but the pain was gone. The demon was expelled, along with his appendix. Though the monster left its mark, with four small scars left upon the left side of his abdomen, as if the claws of some terrible beast had pierced his skin and dragged the creature out…..

Nonetheless, Sir Jeffrey let out a sigh and laid back down, contemplating his situation.

The next couple of days were spent slowly regaining the ability to walk on his own, eat solid foods and restart basic bowel movements, all while dealing with extreme levels of fatigue and crippling back pain. But, as time went on, and with the help of his closest friends, Sir Jeffrey was able to recover and is back to his old, decaying self. How sweet.

But, there is one thing about that night Sir Jeffrey just cannot get out of his head. The dream. The dream was so vivid and felt more real than anything else he’s ever felt, at least in a dreamlike scenario. The memories of everyone floating away. The chilling black lake. The bleak grey desert. The beast. And his words, “Next time you won’t wake up.”

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Now I’m pretty sure the entire dream was just a trippy side-effect of all the drugs they had in my system, but regardless it did open my eyes to a realization I’ve been too afraid to admit. I do not know how long this body of mine will last. While yes, I am relatively young, anything can happen and this body can fail on me at any time. I can just as easily develop cancer as I can get hit by a car doing 80 mph in a 35 mph area because fuck me, that’s why.

“Yeah, you only have about 5-10 minutes to live… mind signing these malpractice forms real quick?”

I do not wish to die again, I do not think I have the will nor ability to come back this time. And before I leave for good, I realized that I need to leave something behind. I need to do something so that my name, my image, my words continue to live in the minds of humans long after I am physically gone.

And that is why I am here, why I am back. I’ve decided to finish what I have started, such as this blog and the Dark Scrolls site, and do all of the things I’ve wanted to do.

So, I plan to stick around a lot longer than before and I hope those of you who are reading this will continue along in my journey as an undead writer living my daily unlife among the living.

Thank you for your time ghoulings, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

Happy Hauntings, now and until the day we all draw our last breath.

-Sir Jeffrey of the Pen.