Eyes Like Hellfire [Completed]

Chapter 7

*Zoe POV*

The door slammed behind me, the house in turn shaking in my wake. My legs walked swiftly down the sidewalk, long strides, heavy feet, hands in fists shoved in my jacket pockets. The wind whipped past my face, promising a storm.

But the rage flowing through my veins, the blood that I wanted to spill, that wasn't me. I was an uninvited guest in my own body. An observer with the controls in someone else's hands. I wasn't even a fucking puppet on a string; I was a member of the audience. Helpless.

And for a girl like me, feeling helpless was the last thing that I wanted to experience. Helplessness was the enemy, and it had me in its tightest grip.

The inhumane presence in my body was the player, and my body itself was just the game. It mapped my emotions and moved my limbs, spoke with my voice and had my face. But it wasn't me.

Those thoughts that it had, the things that it wanted; they weren't me.

The violence, the sex, the blood; I saw it all. I saw the murder and the chaos that it wanted. I saw the red skies and the bloody rain, the corpses rotting on the streets and the ashes of what once was. Buildings were in ruins, and the dead and the dying littered the Earth. And the things that never even lived ruled from their home of hell.

But the clearest image was of the fire.

I saw the flames of hell every time it would close its, my, our, eyes. I heard the screams of the damned, the dark souls burning in the inferno. The promises of eternal agony were being generously met, and I heard it all. I felt it all.

The setting kept transforming into a child's horror movie, the nightmare of a four year old. It grew darker as I got deeper into the forest. I felt like I had walked straight into some crappy horror film (as you can tell, I like horror movies, even the kiddy kind), especially when the trees started to twist and turn like something from The Wizard of Oz, their branches transforming into talons. The silence was screaming in my ears, unnatural and unwanted, deafening. I couldn't even hear the leaves under my own feet, like I wasn't even there.

As I walked on, the temperature faded along with the light. It grew colder, but my body didn't feel bothered by it. Maybe the fires of hell behind its eyes are what kept it warm. Or maybe I'm just that disconnected from my own body. And the latter scared the hell out of me.

But then I felt the demon stop. We (me and that... thing. I don't even know how the hell to refer to my own goddamn body anymore) came to a stop in front of an oak tree (yet another horribly overused cliché). The bark was peeling off of the trunk, its dead skin being shed, and the ground around it was covered with rotting leaves, its dead limbs scattered alongside them.

And then I heard it speak. And I don't mean with my voice.

For the first time, I heard what the whispers of the devil really sounded like, and I knew that would be the voice of my nightmares for years to come after. It was low and hollow, with the smoothness of what a serpent would sound like, but the power of an avalanche. It held hatred and scorn, as well as emptiness and terror. It was everything that could and would go bump in the night in one void of sound.

I had heard the voice of the legions of death. And it terrified me.

Our hands were firmly pushing down on the bark when I first understood that it had Latin on its tongue. The dead language only increased the chill factor, the disgustingly silky whispers filling the already unsettling silence.

And then fog started to emerge from the Earth, rising up and dancing its own Gothic ballet around the oak tree. As the fog grew stronger and thicker, the bark stated to crack between our hands, making way for another burst of smoke to engulf my body. It lowered our hands, and the Latin died off of its tongue.