Chapter 3: The Serpent Oculist's Envious Gaze
1819 Words
(St. Mary’s Hospital, Brandon Grayson’s Private Sanctum: Bolted portal, shuttered gloom.)
*c***k—!*
A Sèvres porcelain mug detonated against teak flooring! Scalding arabica venom spattered—sepia stain metastasizing across the rug like a suppurating wound!
*"PUTRESCENT FILTH!!!"*
Brandon’s shriek tore the sealed air—a strangled death-rattle. His patrician visage now grotesquely contorted; temples throbbed with worms beneath parchment skin!
Envy!
Fury!
Defilement!
Homicidal imperative!
Four infernos immolated his celestial pride—scorching his essence to cinders!
The scene! Branded onto his psyche by white-hot irons!
That execrable cardiac symphony in the ER!
Victor Locke’s rabid invectives!
Locke’s praetorian guard—genuflecting before the menial!
Robert Locke’s resurrected gaze—bestowing divinity upon the vermin!
And he—Brandon Alexander Grayson—reduced to carrion scraped into midden heaps! Ignored! Unseen!
*Profanation!*
"Leo... Yang..." The name scraped from his teeth like rusted shrapnel. Volcanic wrath threatened to fission his ribs. His cerulean eyes, webbed with b****y filaments—hell’s own magma—fixed upon the ceramic shards as if they were Leo’s face. He would pulverize them! Reduce them to atomized dust!
The door cracked open—a sliver of light.
David, his pallid intern, peered inside. "D-Dr. Grayson? Might I... assist? The ER requires—"
*"ABSCOND!!!"* Brandon seized a bronze desk obelisk—hurled it at the aperture! *THOOM!* It cratered the jamb.
David flinched, slammed the door. Flight echoed down the corridor.
Silence reclaimed the chamber.
Only Brandon’s bellows—a forge’s bellows—and the jackhammer staccato of his own heart.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Each beat framed that custodial countenance—unremarkable, yet now indelibly stamped with triumph and derision!
"Gutter-spawn..." Brandon’s larynx produced gravel-grinds. Talons gouged his Chesterfield armrests—rending butter-soft leather. "By what blasphemy?!" His fist hammered the mahogany desk. *CRUNCH!*
White agony lanced his knuckles. Irrelevant. This pain? A moth’s kiss against the pyre consuming his soul.
"A scullion! Employing back-alley charlatanry! Feral gutter-rat! How dare it trespass upon Brandon Grayson’s Olympus?!" The guttural snarl tore through him—each syllable flaying. "You have annihilated me! My immaculate cosmos—sundered!"
His mind’s eye conjured old Grayson’s glacial disappointment.
Board members’ serpentine murmurs.
Fog City’s salons buzzing: The Grayson scion—trampled by an orderly!
Never.
"Extirpate him!" Brandon’s oath slithered like a deathbed vow. "Erase that abomination! Utterly! Eternally!" Madness, kindled by jealousy, crystallized. Yes! Implicate him! Robert Locke had died—that interlude screamed occult violation! Exploitable!
He snatched the intercom—digit spasming—miscounting twice before connecting.
"Greene!" He modulated his voice to sepulchral authority, yet primordial darkness bled through. "The Locke affair... profoundly aberrant!"
Greene’s fatigue-slurred bewilderment: "Brandon? Clarify—"
"That menial! Leo Yang!" Brandon’s cadence accelerated—incendiary insinuation. "Does it not confound reason? A corpse—verified lifeless for twenty minutes! His palms descend—and the heart ignites? What theorem permits this?!"
Silence. Then Greene’s fractured whisper: "The instruments... tested relentlessly... It perverts medical canon—"
"Precisely!" Brandon’s timbre ascended—venomous, evangelizing malignancy. "This is not science! It is maleficium! Profane sorcery! He likely administered undetectable sacrilege—pharmacological or thaumaturgical! Desecrating death as sacrificial rite!"
"Pharmacology? Rite?" Greene choked. "Preposterous... No evidence—"
"Evidence?" Brandon’s lips peeled back—the rictus of a tomb-effigy. "Evidence shall manifest! This ‘resurrection’? A diabolical ploy! That orderly is an operative! His true aim? Dominion over the Locke dynasty!"
He inhaled—compressing threat into his next words: "Greene! Recall your oath! St. Mary’s honor! Should this necromancy prevail? Should the world learn an orderly conjured ‘miracles’ in our halls?! We become grotesques! Pariahs of medicine! Your career—our careers—ashes!"
Static-charged hush. Brandon’s scalpel had pierced Greene’s core—fear of disgrace, terror of oblivion.
"But..." Greene stammered, strangled by cognitive dissonance, "Mr. Locke lives... stable..."
"Ephemeral!" Brandon severed him. "Thaumaturgy exacts tribute! Recall the lore: the undead! Seemingly whole—rotting within! When it manifests—cataclysm! Then? Culpability descends on us! Is that a mantle you can shoulder?"
Greene’s gasp—ragged, terror-stricken—confirmed his capitulation.
Brandon’s serpent-hiss intensified: "Listen, Greene! Our very existence pivots! Immediate action: First—secure all ER surveillance archives! Then... purge the originals! Eradicate every backup—automated logs included! Leave no revenant!"
"Purge...?!" Greene’s cry fractured.
"Annihilate them!" Brandon commanded. "Crucial evidence—must never reach Locke or that vermin! Second—inventory all medications used during that shift! Cardiotonic agents—especially high-risk variants! Report discrepancies—alleged or actual! Third—procure a pliant nurse! Fabricate an eyewitness account: Leo Yang ‘furtively injecting unknown substances’! I demand this document within thirty minutes!"
Interminable silence. Then Greene’s frayed surrender: "I... apprehend, Dr. Grayson... It shall... be arranged..."
"Assured! Not arranged!" Brandon slammed the receiver. His smile—a predator savoring entrails.
Leaning back, fingertips drumming leather, he envisioned Leo Yang: indicted for sacrilege, attempted murder, defiling the dead! Public immolation! Incarceration in penal abysses—broken by true monstrosities!
Perverted relief momentarily doused his envy.
Insufficient.
This merely crushes an insect. He craves... totalization. Annihilation unto ash!
Brandon’s stare deepened into stygian dementia. He wrenched open his desk’s deepest sanctum. Not files—but an immaculate alloy coffer.
He entered the cipher.
*Snick.*
Within? No currency. No gemstones.
A single obsidian-steel card. Unmarked, save for one abyssal sigil: three entwined thorns—ebon, weeping sanguine droplets.
Brandon’s hand hovered. For one nanosecond, reason flickered. Then—immolated by conflagrant envy—he seized the frozen metal!
Beside it: an archaic, unmarked cellular relic.
Iced phalanges depressed a sequence—no nation’s telephonic cipher.
*Bzzz... Bzzz... Bzzz...*
The dial tone—a death-knell in stagnant air.
Connection.
Aural void. No respiration. Only crypt-silence—as if the handset opened onto vacuum.
Brandon’s throat parched. Viscera battered his thorax. Phobic talons clenched his heart. Then—Leo Yang’s visage surged forth! His humiliation! That "miracle" that cast him into Gehenna! Pyric envy incinerated hesitation!
"I require intervention." Brandon’s whisper rasped—suffocated lunacy and power-l**t distilled. "Brandon Grayson."
Two heartbeats of absolute nullity. Then—a sound violated the ether.
Not human vocalization.
Gravel ground within corroded bellows. Shattering vertebrae. Scraping glass. Subsonic distortion warping syllables into sonic t*****e.
"Grayson’s... diminutive... raptor?" The peristaltic rasp mocked. "Your envy... reeks of gangrenous effluvia... I scent it... across copper wires..."
Brandon’s jaw muscle spasmed. Exposure seared him. He endured.
"Terminate... an individual," he snarled. "An... orderly. Designation: Leo Yang."
The abyssal friction shifted—distorted intrigue. "That which... elicits such apoplexy... in Grayson’s fledgling... is... an ant?"
"No ant!" Brandon’s control ruptured. "An abomination! Robert Locke! That fossil! Pronounced deceased for twenty minutes! The churl lays hands—and the corpse reinflates! This transcends humanity! Defies cosmology!!!"
Silence.
Cosmic stillness.
Had the line severed? Yet the pressure intensified—invisible tendrils throttling Brandon through the phone.
Brandon ceased breathing. Cold sweat beaded his brow. This response... unnatural...
Ten seconds. Twenty. The grating scour resumed—but now laced with... grim... rapture.
"Palms... upon livid flesh... compelling life from oblivion?" The thing inhaled audibly—savoring ambrosia. "Leo... Yang? An... Eastern cognomen?"
"Affirmative! Jet-haired! Onyx-eyed! Swamp-scum!" Brandon spat vitriol. He craved annihilation—swift, brutal.
"Jet... eyes..." The entity echoed. "...Vitality... consonance?... Potent... Exquisite..."
The rapture thickened—tangible. Brandon recoiled. This exceeded murderous intent!
"Remuneration!" Brandon demanded. "Name your requiem! Grayson coffers flow deep!"
A sound like fractured femurs grinding—mirth?—rattled the line.
"Currency?... Little raptor..." The voice dripped gelid contempt. "Our... recompense... differs."
"Then what?!" Brandon’s soul iced. Dread tsunami.
"We require..." the voice sank—every syllable venom-tipped. "...additional... live subjects. Like those you... procured for us... vagrant ephemera... vanished from alleys..."
Brandon’s pupils contracted to pinholes! Arctic death seized his spine! He nearly hurled the phone! That festering secret—that atrocity—laid bare!
"Tranquility..." The entity tasted his terror. "Our... prior commerce... proved symbiotic. This quarry... possesses unique resonance. Augmented... contributions... are requisite."
"Augmented... how?" Brandon trembled.
"The corporeal... essence... of Robert Locke." The voice rendered the name as livestock. "Intact. Animated. Delivered... to our demesne."
Brandon’s consciousness imploded. Abduct Robert Locke?
The old basilisk commanded Fog City’s shadow empire!
Suicide!
"Impossible!" Brandon screamed. "His praetorian—"
"Compact... or..." the entity severed him—calm as glacier ice. "...Your nomenclature... alongside records of all... gifts... shall adorn Fog City P.D.’s classified archives... and grace... every St. Mary’s director’s... private... inbox... They will... find it... illuminating..."
Naked ultimatum!
Brandon froze—cryonically preserved. Blood crystallized. This—a diabolism beyond his darkest phantasm! He had trafficked with entities who demanded... the sun itself?
"Your infernal—"
"Elect," the non-voice commanded, "Deliver both—the Leo Yang anomaly... and Robert Locke’s animate husk... unto our threshold..."
Brandon’s heart ceased. Both? Leo... and Locke?
"...Or..." the voice pronounced damnation, "...prepare... to witness... your bloodline... rendered unto the abyss... cell... by... reanimated... cell..."
Stasis.
Absolute.
Brandon collapsed—linen shirt fused to sweat-slicked skin by terror. His marrow solidified; he could hear his own blood freezing, cracking.
One path: his dynasty’s dissolution. The other: kidnap the king of underworlds?
No choice.
No! Choice!
He inhaled—dredging the final dregs of courage. His eyes congealed into obsidian—a feral beast embracing finality.
"Leo Yang... must precede Robert Locke into eternal silence!" Brandon’s decree scalded the air—finality incarnate. "Whatever your experiments—I witness his expiration first! Non-negotiable!" He required the insect’s death throes!
Telephonic suspension.
"Compact." The flensing rasp echoed—satisfied, terrible. "Robert Locke... is also... essential... biomatter. Seventy-two hours. Expect... delivery."
*Click.*
Dial tone.
Bzzz... Bzzz... Bzzz...
Brandon sat entombed in his Chesterfield—savile row fabric sodden, clinging.
The phone slipped from nerveless fingers—thudding onto coffee-drenched wool.
Dusk lanced through shuttered windows—slashing his rigor-mortis face with cadaver-glow.
He clenched his fist!
Lunulae pierced palms—crimson beads swelling!
Pain—sanctifying pain—clarified the abyss.
His last vestiges of humanity flensed away. Replaced by calcified annihilation-l**t.
"Leo... Yang..." The name serpentined from him—no longer enraged, but glacially malignant—a torturer’s whisper.
"And... Robert... Locke..."
His lips parted—revealing a smile to still blood.
"For the Grayson dynasty... For my shattered apotheosis..."
"...Hell... shall feast upon you both."
Beyond the panes—Fog City drowned in setting sun.
An arterial deluge—immense, sanguine—leaching towers into rivers of gore.
As if the heavens themselves...
...bled premonition.
- Writer
