Part 9:

                The room was filled with tension as the Demon stared at Woohyun, coldly and predatorily. Woohyun didn’t pay the gaze any heed, but stared at the phone clenched tightly in his fist... Within the speeding car, which probably broke speeding laws in all countries but European countryside, the air was teeming with nerves and pressure…The room Dongwoo’s mental presence resided in was crumbling to ruin around him as the black threads formed a cocoon, covering and binding him completely. With the silk cocoon Dongwoo was blurry-minded and losing more and more of himself, fading and merging with the darkness within him. 

                Myungsoo finally managed to force the words out of his mouth, “Why now?”

The man flinched at the accusation in his tone and answered, “I’m not sure…just everything was so confusing when it happened… when I woke up I was so confused… so scared I didn’t want to come back… I never thought anyone would miss me until I heard you talking then.”

“Then why did you come back?” he asked tired, tears threaten to pour down his cheeks.

                “I don’t know,” the boy dropped his head into his hands almost crying, “I finally brought up the courage to visit the place haunting my dreams.”

                “You seriously never thought that we would miss you or worry about you?!” Anger crept into Myungsoo’s voice, “I understand it you thought that the orphanage might not but US?! We were like brothers, hyung, I can’t believe you didn’t think to tell us you were fine. You know what I thought all this time? All these years? You were haunting us. Dongwoo and me were so ed up because what happened especially Dongwoo. Everyone thought he was a criminal and eventually he turned into one! I well I might have not been as messed up as him but for years I saw you everywhere. I…I-I really hoped you were alive but in the back of my head a voice always told me you were gone and I believed it. Everyone told me that you were gone and people made up rumors that Dongwoo killed you. He became a police officer because he was guilty that he couldn’t save you when he was only teenager! Neither of us moved on and all this time you were FINE.”

                “I’m… sorry,” the young man spoke the words slowly like he just realized the depth of the troubles he caused

                “Sorry might not be enough... not for me and definitely not for Dongwoo,” Myungsoo sighed. After that a silence, heavy and weighted, took over the crowd all the way up to the hospital room.

                Woohyun looked up from the waiting room seats and Sungjong bounced out of the chair like a rocket.

                “Hey, what’s going on here,” Sunggyu questioned softly.

“It’s bad… real bad. The demon is slowly taking over Dongwoo’s conscious soon we’ll never see Dongwoo again,” Woohyun’s words hung in the air.

                “What can we do?” Sunggyu asked with hopelessness in his voice.

“I’m hoping that meeting him,” Woohyun his thump towards the man,” will shock him back to life.”

                “So what do I do?” he asked unsure of himself and utterly confused. Dongwoo is the Demon WHAT?!

                “Just walk in there and talk to it and we’ll all cross our fingers,” Woohyun answered grimly.

The man walked into the room slowly frightened to face a killer and his savior. When those cynical eyes touched his face they nearly popped out of their sockets.

                “IT CAN’T BE. SUNGYEOL?!” he shouted on the top of his lungs.

“It is.” Sungyeol answered tersely.

                “It can’t be… I must be hallucinating… he’s dead…” the demon muttered perplexed for the first time in his whole existence.

                The rope-like threads slacked as the shock reached its way all the way down into the room. Threads of light barely penetrated the darkness; however it did touch Dongwoo and aroused him from his coma.

                Dongwoo blinked, it felt like he’d been asleep for centuries not mere hours. The scene in front of him was unbelievable, Sungyeol in the flesh, healthy and alive. The shock pierced his mind, tearing apart the one truth he built his life on. Everything he did rooted from that knowledge he couldn’t save Sungyeol: the fact he become an officer, the fact part of him was a killer.

                “You can’t be alive,” Dongwoo mouthed.

“Yes, I can. I’m right here.”

                “You can-nn’t be-e a-live,” his voice cracked and tears slipped over his cheeks.

“Yes I am,” Sungyeol said more strongly. The twenty-two year old shrugged unsure of what to say. “I started having nightmares about it like three years ago? I read an article in the news about this serial killer’s murder and started having nightmares about the details. Eventually I realized that I was dreaming about what I imagined but something I was remembering the details of something I witnessed. My friend a psychologist told me I probably suppressed memories a tragic event in my past. So I went back home to ask my parents about it during winter break and they spilled that they found me half dead in an alley when I was fourteen. They were just visiting family and had no idea that to but they couldn’t just leave me there so they took me with them. After that a month later they realized I was the missing boy from that case all over the news BUT they also knew that I had no memory of anything but my name and age. So since they didn’t want me to re-experience the trauma of the events they had a friend of theirs contact the orphanage and adopt me.  Hearing that I felt really betrayed by them for never telling, but later I realized they were right. Over the year I slowly regained my fourteen years of lost memory how I saw that man kill brutally murder a guy, how I confronted him, and how you saved me. It took me forever to gather up the courage to visit the place I was nearly . When I was half-drunk I drove up here and circled the area until I saw the house… it took me two weeks after that to actually visit the place.”

                While the two were having this conversation the circle of four sober men talked among themselves.

                “So Dongwoo hyung’s going to jail?” Sungjong asked seriously without the usual childish air he had.

“No, he has a mental disease so they can’t put give him the death penalty or put him in jail,” Woohyun answered.

                “But?” Sunggyu addressed the invisible word hanging in Woohyun’s sentence.

Woohyun smiled weakly repeating Sunggyu’s “but” and added more “But he’ll have to live his life with the regret of killing all those people his whole life and that’s enough to break a person…even if he wasn’t fully aware of it… unless he chooses the other way out he can always commit suicide.”

                As both conservations went on neither group noticed the sunlight peaking through the high window frame, it was sunrise.

Epilogue:

                Woohyun was right they couldn’t convict Dongwoo because of mental insanity. All the court could do was place him inside mental illness factuality for perhaps the rest of his life, but that was better than time in a cell or the death row right?

                But like Woohyun said “he’ll have to live his life with the regret of killing all those people his whole life and that’s enough to break a person…even if he wasn’t fully aware of it…”

                Is death worst then the punishment Dongwoo must be giving himself? The victims’ voices haunting him, the visions of their death, the regret for what he had done, the sorrow of the actions, among everything else he remembered and had done that will curse him until his deathbed. Was he strong enough to survive the nightmares that plagued him? And most importantly would he be able to forgive himself and move on.

                As Dongwoo stared out at the sunrise from his white-painted room-much like the one he had in his head- he wasn’t sure if he could or if it was even right of him to do so. He might not know that but he knew that he would force himself to live every day until his natural death, that’s all he could do in repayment for all he killed. Whether ever day he repents, he would eventual come to be forgiven by them, their family or himself he wouldn’t know until the end would he?