Odious of Clachlachshire - From Drumcooridh to Hollywood

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IRRELIGIOUS, IRREVERENT, AND IRRELEVANT.

THE PEOPLE, PLACES, AND EVENTS CONTAINED IN ST MUCKYMUCK ARE COMPLETELY FICTIONAL.  ANY AND ALL RESEMBLANCES TO REAL PEOPLE, REAL PLACES, AND/OR REAL EVENTS PAST, PRESENT, OR FUTURE IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.  

IN FACT, ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANYTHING AT ALL WILL BE REMARKABLY COINCIDENTAL.

St. Odious

Prince Odious Coleus Turgid was born in 398AD on the island of Drumcooridh which was 48 miles off the north east coast of Scotland.  Drumcooridh was a small principality, part of Lesser Caledonia, with its own language, Cooraloora, and its own monarchy, the House of Turgid. Drumcooridh was not recognised as part of Scotland until the great revolution of 721AD.

Prince Odious was the son of King Ferfus XVII who was sovereign from 341AD til 429AD. His mother was the beautiful and gentle Queen Hallebornge, whom Odious worshipped. 

Hallebornge was originally from Denmark and a princess of the House of Sweg. She was betrothed to the then Prince Ferfus of Drumcooridh in an effort to bring to an end the fierce war which had raged between Drumcooridh and Denmark for the previous 357 years.

They married in 391AD when Hallebornge was 13 but she was never truly in love with Ferfus, probably owing to the fact that he was 61 years her senior, toothless and weighed 33 stone.

When their only child Odious was nine years old, she embarked upon a torrid affair with the village fletcher, Hector, with whom she fell in love. They were discovered in flagrante in the Turgid Palace maze by King Ferfus, who in a fit of jealousy arranged to have them both killed by one of Hector’s own arrows, tipped with poison.

Young Odious was eleven years old when this tragedy happened and legend has it that he stayed at his dead mother’s side for 5 days and nights before her corpse was carried off into the remote moors of Drumcooridh by a gaggle of mythological flying penguins to her final resting place in the windswept hills.

Odious could not forgive his father for murdering his mother, and fled, at the tender age of 14 to Clachlachshire, a small hamlet on the western side of Dumfriesshire where he took holy orders and publicly vowed to lead a life of poverty and chastity and cast aside his royal heritage and title.  Within 5 years he founded a small monastery known as Pluscardigan Abbey on the site of an ancient pictish burial ground in the centre of Clachlachshire.

By 422 AD, the monastery had a total of 147 monks, with a further 242 worldwide applications as word spread globally of the comfortable and relaxing surroundings. It was then decided that an extension to the monastery would have to be built to accommodate the extra monks.

Odious had a particular devotion to the sick and was renowned for the special attention he paid to the dead and bereaved. His requiem masses were reputed to last for 72 hours or more and he personally oversaw the care and embalming of the corpses.

He also had strong links to the nearby Clachore Abbey, a convent run by nuns with a special devotion to basket weaving. He built a special crypt within the Abbey as the last resting place for the 48 nuns who had passed away suddenly due to a particularly virulent outbreak of the nasal virus, snotitis in 423AD.

It was whilst he was working deep in this crypt in the summer of 424AD, that the monks, who were building the monastery’s extension, unwittingly bricked Odious into the crypt wall containing the cadavers of the 48 nuns who died from the nasal infection.

By the time the monks realised their fatal error, it was too late. Odious was dead and strangely, within 16 days of his demise, the 389 monks residing in the monastery had all passed away too, all of their deaths mysterious and grisly.

Odious was originally beatified as a saint in 499AD, owing to his alleged martyrdom, and was known as St Odious, Patron Saint of Bricks, but when his remains and that of the 48 nuns were exhumed in 1861, it became apparent that he was actually a man of extreme sexual depravity and the real reason for his seemingly endless devotion to the nuns’ corpses was discovered when his diaries, which were buried with him, were translated from his native Cooraloora into English.

Here we have an excerpt from one such diary:

“Ooch choochterish nunfuc. Hooge tichties. Och! Mabhoabie sferr sairdh.”  Sadly, owing to the deeply offensive nature of this quote, the actual translation cannot be printed here.

From these diaries church historians have ascertained that he was actually a practicing necrophiliac who, according to his writings and hand drawn diagrams, spent many happy hours in the crypt with the corpses of the nuns of the nearby Clachore Abbey.

The diaries also divulged that after he was accidentally bricked into the crypt, he spent many hours crying for help and, certain that his fellow monks were deliberately ignoring him, he put a curse on them, resulting in their macabre deaths in the 16 days following the incident.

As a result of this discovery, he was swiftly ex-communicated and stripped of his sainthood by Rome and the whole episode was quietly swept under the carpet.

However, in 1903, a whistle-blowing priest in Rome, Father Luca Grandebocca published the diaries of Odious and the story became a world-wide phenomenon, with the great Hollywood studio Metro-Tiepin-Maker making a silent movie telling the story of Odious, called ‘Splitting Bricks’.

It starred Donald Fairfax Snr in the role of Odious, who, subsequent to filming his final scenes, died on the set of the crypt. It emerged that the film crew forgot to unbrick the wall he was enclosed in. The film was never released.

This was due to the fact that every member of the cast, crew and film studio died suddenly and mysteriously from unknown causes within 16 days of the crypt bricking incident.

To this day, anyone in the motion picture industry who dies in strange or inexplicable circumstances is known as having “done an Odious”......

As a result of all the adverse publicity, Odious became idolised by satanists worldwide. He is now known as Odious The Great, patron saint of vomit, with a particular loathing of priests and monks.

Footnote: Kilcathclyde’s most famous living artist, Paddy Howcome, who is noted for his particularly gruesome and menacing style of painting, was commissioned by the Mothers of Mayhem, a leading satanic cult, to create a portrait of the monks’ death scene at Pluscardigan Abbey. He called his painting ‘The Blood Spattered Brick’ and it is currently on permanent loan to the Kilcathclyde Academy of Pretentiousness.

©2010 Steven Gorman.  All rights reserved.