Purgator

“What are you going to do?”

The man who had killed his wife lay at his mercy before him, bound in a straitjacket on the couch. He had confessed his crime to him in person, knowing that he could not charge him without proof. He had suspected him, for he knew him well. He had once taken it upon himself to take him under his care, thinking that he was the way he was because he needed someone to care for him. He was the worst case he had ever treated, and as with all of his patients, he wanted to give himself up entirely to his treatment. When the room next to his became vacant, he invited him to become his neighbor, and so he did. In a way, he had been his only friend, as he was the only one who took him for who he really was, but to his patient, he was just another of many he could use, and him more than anyone because he cared so much for him. The patient knew he could do anything he wanted to him, because he would never have the heart to kill him, even as he confessed his crime to him. But he never knew just how much his wife meant to him. The anger he felt was beyond anything he had ever seen in any of his patients, and he knew that none of his care for this man would still hold him back from what he was about to do. It was not a heated anger which would have brought him to end it now with death, but a cold anger that wanted to get as much life out of him as he could to make him suffer for as long as he lived. He wanted to put him through a fate worse than death, and as one of the best psychiatrists around, he knew just the way to do so. The past few days, he had been putting all his time into preparing his plan. He wanted it to last as long as possible, because as soon as it was over, there was nothing more he could do to turn the sadness into anger.

“I know you won’t kill me,” the patient said. It was dark in the room, but as he looked up from his preparations he could just make out the tears in his eyes, glinting in the light of the flash lamp on the desk.

“I don’t want to kill you,” the psychiatrist said with a dark voice. “The last thing I want to do is to kill you. But when I’m started with you, you will beg me to kill you. But I won’t. Because we are going to keep going until we end what we began.”

“Are you going to torture me?” There was real fear in his eyes now. Many believe that psychopaths feel no fear, but once they have reason to fear for themselves, they are more afraid than anyone would be. More than anything, they are afraid of that one moment of their death, when they would have to face themselves. But the psychiatrist would make him go through that moment not just once, but for a very long time.

“No... what you are about to feel is beyond even suffering. It will take you to a point where you are no longer even able to tell just what suffering means.” He put two small bottles next to the syringe on the desk.

“What — what is that?”

“This one,” he put a finger on the first bottle, “is scopolamine.” He looked him straight in the eyes. He put the finger on the second bottle. “And this one is LSD. The LSD is meant to make you as suggestible as possible, and the scopolamine will make you take any suggestion I give you.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I am going to destroy you. I am going to take you apart piece by piece, and when I’m done with you, there will be nothing left of you. You will have become much like some of my schizophrenic patients. No one will still have to punish you for what you’ve done, because you are going to punish yourself, for the rest of your life if needed.”

The patient began to scream.

“You know no one can hear you now. There’s no one around here.” They were in one of the rooms of an abandoned building complex. He began to fill the syringe with the LSD. It was a very high dosage, but there was no known overdose. It was so high that without the scopolamine to force him to focus, there was no way he would still be able to listen to what he was saying. He screamed at the top of his lungs as he gave him the injection, but when the scopolamine came next, he stopped screaming within seconds. He could now do with him whatever he wanted. For a moment he thought of all the things he could make him do, but then he remembered to stay focussed. Nothing could ever be enough to set right what happened, but perhaps he could at least find a resolution.

With that thought in mind, he began the hypnosis, step by step disintegrating his ego.