The Demon's Nightmare

It can’t hurt you. They can’t hurt you. Not here. Don’t listen to them. They don’t control you.

--

It burned like sixty hot irons all at once, searing across his whole body. Forty days—or had it been forty one now? It was getting hard to count the days anymore—since he’d been there. Every day, someone new came to him, a new pain to experience. It was all because of that girl… that one girl, and now he was here.

Where was here, anyways? Certainly it couldn’t be hell. He honestly didn’t remember dying. Then again, if one dies, do they remember it? He couldn’t be certain. But the pain felt real, so perhaps he wasn’t dead.

He was stuck, however, in that red room. The walls were blood colored, and loomed over head so high that he couldn’t see the ceiling.

The door opened, and he didn’t even really feel like he needed to look to see who it was. It was always someone different, after all. He never met the same person twice. He looked anyways.

“It sucks, doesn’t it?” she asked, and Dorian felt the air leave his lungs. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t be there, this was a trick! She seemed to read his face, and laughed maniacally, so much unlike her previous self. “It sucks, knowing you deserve to be here, doesn’t it? You killed me, after all.”

“That was an accident!” he protested, nearing hysterics. He was hyperventilating as she approached him, calm and far more seductively than she ever would have when she was alive.

“We both know that isn’t true. You killed me on purpose. You didn’t want the burden of a child. So you crashed your car, you did it on purpose. You killed me, and our unborn child. How else could you have been the only one to survive?” Not true, he thought, now completely unable to voice his thoughts. What she said cut right through him. Right to his heart…

“Perhaps we should give you the pleasure of being mangled as I was in that accident. I didn’t die right away, you know. It was painful. Let me recreate that, for you.” No. He didn’t want that. He didn’t like being in pain. He didn’t like that she had been in pain. Why does he have to go through this? It was his fault…that’s why.

She approached him, a feral smile on her lips. At some point, a large steel pipe had appeared in her hand. She lifted it, so high, and then she struck.

--

They don’t control you, Dorian!

“They control me,” he whispered, not knowing who he was talking to. They always told him that, but it wasn’t true. The demons really did control him. They killed him, over and over again, but he never died. He felt the pain of death so many times, but he never got any relief. Just when the feelings of soreness and aching started to ebb, another demon would come to harm him. The last one, of his dead girlfriend, had been the worst.

“They don’t control you Dorian. You’re hallucinating again,” that distinctly male voice had repeated. That voice didn’t know anything. He was in hell, receiving the punishment he deserved, nothing else. It wasn’t like he was able to fight them off. This was his fate.

Something cold hit his face, a stark contrast to the heat of where he was. His eyes, which he had closed at some point after the torture had stopped, snapped open again, only now he was blinded by intense white light.

“Where am I?” Dorian asked, blinking several times at the brightness of this room comapred to the previously dark one he had been in. Hell didn’t have white walls, after all, even if it would have been an appreciated canvas to the demons for the blood that would often splatter like paint.

“Where you always have been, Dorian. You’re in your room at the hospital.” He said hospital, but he meant asylum.

“Samantha killed me because I killed her,” the 20-year-old said.

“Samantha has been dead for four years, Dorian. She can’t kill you. The demons tricked you,” his Doctor said.

“They always kill me. This was the first time she’s ever appeared, though,” Dorian said, sitting up now to meet his Doctor’s gaze. The man’s kind blue eyes startled him, they always did. He was so used to the glowing red ones of the demons. He looked away, not able to hold the gaze.

“Why am I wet?” he asked as he caught the sight of the water on his body.

“You were sweating in your hallucination,” the Doctor replied. Dorian rolled his eyes, aware that his Doctor thought his personal hell was just a hallucination.

“I want to be alone, now,” he said. The Doctor didn’t look like he wanted to comply, but he did anyways. He left the white room, stripped of any and all harmful things so that Dorian could not actually kill himself. It was a pointless precaution, he’d never tried anyways. He lived it enough in hell, he didn’t need it in the white room too.

He’s annoying.

Dorian grimaced at the sound of the voice. One of his many demons, though he didn’t know which one. There were so many of them.

Get rid of him.

Dorian didn’t like the idea, but he also didn’t like when the demons were angry. Everything was always so much more painful when they were angry.

“God doesn’t condone killing,” Dorian whispered, but he didn’t deny the demons, and they laughed collectively at his foolish words.

The white walls became the canvas the demons had always appreciated, but not with the Doctor’s blood.

Dorian stopped hearing their voices for good.