Inside The Devil | M.yg × P.jm✓

VII

"Hey? Are you okay? Why do you look like you've seen a ghost?" The man asked, his perfect brown eyes had a concerned look that burns into their deep colors. Taehyung stared stolidly, he just sat there on the floor unmoving like a dead bird fallen from the clouds. Akin to its curled stiffened feet and closed frozen wings, he doesn't have the strength to stand on his worthless legs nor does he realize the weird look on the stranger's face. His daze was lifeless as the cold body of a dead bird, he is.

"Come, let me help you," the man says and helps him up. Taehyung awkwardly stood in front of this stranger he wouldn't have known the name if his gaze weren't happened to slip and look at the nametag pinned on his chest that read ‘Park Jimin’ in a dark bold font.

Taehyung thought about telling him about what he saw in the bathroom. No, that's not exactly what he wants to do, and it will make him look stupid in this person's eyes, and he doesn't want that to happen. He doesn't want him to think he's insane and he'll just probably gonna think he's making up a story. What he seriously wants to do is to cry to this man, grab his collar, ask him for help, shout and tell him that they have to leave this place right now, right away before a horse's hooves because it is haunted, and there is a petrifying looking ghost in the men's bathroom. But he couldn't even open his mouth, the words just stayed behind his tongue, and his lips were heavily stitched.

Dr. Park noticed him looking at his name, the blank look on his face plastered like dried cement. He easily recognized him as one of the nurses working in the hospital by the white uniform he is wearing and the name tag on his chest.

"Kim Taehyung," he read, the said male immediately averted his look into him. "I'm sorry for bumping into you, but I have to go now. Please be careful next time and don't forget to look where you're going if you don't want to trip into your own feet and hit your head into a stone," he says and flashed a small smile that was visibly fake.

Taehyung gave off the same smile and bowed lightly. "No, it's my fault, I'm sorry... Dr. Park and I promise I'll watch my steps next time so I won't bump into someone again," he apologized kindly, his head still bowing and back bend slightly. Dr. Park patted his wide shoulder and walked away.

___

"Hello, Mr. Chang, it's good to see you again today," Seokjin says with a genuine smile on his face, looking at the old man sitting immutably in front of him. His face is timeworn and his skin is sickly thin and pale that you can see the veins through his arms. His dark, blood-flecked eyes are sunken deep into his marvelously wrinkled face. His hair is smokey-grey and thinning due to aging.

He rests his hand on the table casually. Two of his fingers are crooked from an old sports injury. Chang-Nam Goo is known in the town as the ‘Tennis master’. But that was when he was young and things aren't so damn. He's seventy-eight and spends almost all his life in the ward. He has no family, they all died... No, they were killed by him. He was in his thirties when it happened. There's this evil voice telling him to kill them and that it's the right thing to do. At first, it wasn't so bad, he can control it. However, each day it's getting stronger and more dominant. Chang doesn't know how to stop it. Now that tiny voice becomes louder, bigger, and stronger creating the monster inside him. It is not just a voice now, it's controlling him.

When people find out about it, they threw him into his now-only home— but he's old now and fragile. He'll also probably gonna die here. But it doesn't matter to him, even if he dies on the floor, on his bed, when he's asleep, or when Satan decided to take him. Everything's alright as long as he doesn't die naked sprawled on the floor and people going to see those dark villains in there. That's ridiculously pathetic.

"Your face is all I see every single day, so there's nothing much special in there, Seokjinnie, is there?" The old man commented and Seokjin chuckled at him, agreeing with his remarks. For how many years he's been his doctor, there's no doubt Chang doesn't know the sound of his breath.