Mind Games

Chapter Three: The Devil's Call

There was a certain, almost indescribable sense of being awake when the rest of the world was asleep. A feeling of calmness that came with the notion that you had nowhere to be and nothing to do until the dawn of a new day. The hours and minutes would tick by unnoticed, with an unhurried urgency. Belonging to no one but yourself.

Though there were people that did notice those hours pass from one to the next. Who claimed the minutes as their own. The creatures of the nightlife. For the most part, they were consisting of nurses and doctors, police officers and firemen, working within the light of the law to protect the people at their most vulnerable.

Then there were the people that worked to injure those vulnerable. The monsters that hid under our beds, lurking in the shadows. Putting on their person suits to trick the innocent partygoers and unsuspecting teenagers out for a stroll, or the hard workers trying to make a living on street corners to meet an untimely end.

Oliver Kanas was neither a government worker or a criminal, but he was another important name to the story.

He worked in a perpetually grey area of the law, and that of his own conscience. Which, perhaps, made him fit into both the category of the innocent and the corrupt.

To simplify it, he was a psychiatrist with an apt for getting people to talk about their deepest and darkest secrets and truths without them realising before it was too late. He was a psychologist who could read the tells of hardened criminals.

Although, he could personally attest that sometimes it took a little time and a lot of persuasion. That's where TV got it wrong.

He now owned a restricted private practice in an unsuspecting street in Seattle, treating Seattle's prominent socialites and wealthy businessmen for problems they found detrimental to their lives and work ethics. It was innocent work, even if the people he did treat were corrupt.

Just not the corrupt he was used to.

Previously, Kanas had been treating criminals at a government black site in New York.

His knowledge of the workings of a psychopaths' and sociopaths' brains was phenomenal and had come from the years he had spent working in the black site prison. The knowledge had also taught him how to break them. Over days or endless hours, with harsh punishments and manipulation or gentle persuasion, he'd find a way. He always did. 

He'd changed careers when the codes he'd set for himself no longer appealed to the criminals under his charge, finding that they were unworthy of the very air they breathed, which in turn, appeared to be enough to have a growl growing in his throat and for his nails to be used as claws.

Being surrounded by animals slowly turned you into one, he discovered.

And without realising, he had slowly been turning into the monsters he'd been keeping locked behind bars. And, thus, the corruption had set in.

Now, his hands were covered in red.

The sins he had committed in those final months were almost as damning as the acts that had the criminals in that prison.

And the memories of the life he no longer lived lurked at the forefront of his mind, crowding the halls and rooms of his mind palace until sleep was nothing more to him than an illusion.

Which was why he worked on exhausting himself.

His appointments started earlier in the day, and ran later. His phone was always on, with the promise that he was never unreachable for his clients. He'd spend hours at the office, jotting down his thoughts without the prying eyes of the people he treated staring at him. The people with a reputation to uphold. In the sanctity of his office, he was away from their scrutiny.