The Girl and the Demon Part 1

Jessica Bellevue lived on the southern coasts of France, wedged in between Nice and Monte Carlo. Jessica was fifteen years old and was an avid reader. Oh the books she would read and the versatility of those books. She loved Charles Dickens, she loved Emily Dickinson, she even loved to read about Plato and Socrates. Her parents were both wealthy middle class people who did work for the U.N. and she would sometimes accompany them as they travelled to different countries: Africa, China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Russia, and across Europe. In many ways little Jessica had it made. However, her parents constant moving around meant that Jessica had very little time to form any freinds. Jessica however, felt that everything she had the privelege of doing made up for this. But sometimes, She would get lonely. She felt isolated from the world. Almost protected by her parents from experiencing the joy of the common people. She would often sit for hours on end reading not about the ideas of Plato and the stories of Dickens, but the newspaper. She wanted to learn anything she could about the world around her. She felt it was her responsibility as someone who would eventually become a leader of the future as her parents had told her. She tried to learn everything she could, but sometimes she was disturbed about what she read. The police had released a convicted paedophile for lack of evidence and the man had adbucted a young girl and brutally raped her before slitting her throat. The newspaper seemed to go into graphic detail about it and Jessica felt herself becoming sick. Usually her parents would have checked the newspaper for such contents as these, but she read it in secret, not wanting to have it censored. What made her feel worse was that this wasnt the only story which would haunt her. A gang of kids sitting on a bus had killed a man who had politely asked them to stop swearing so much. Why would anyone do such a thing? To Jessica these acts seemed to defy the realm of logic. She felt a dark pall coming over her. She felt cold and uncertain about the future. Her little cat, Pierre, seemed to sense this and jumped up on her lap to caress her. Jessica couldnt stay in the house anymore, she needed to get outside, she needed air. She went out onto the patio and looked up at the stars. Tonight was an unusually bright night, the stars were nice and she began to lose much of her anxiety from before. She began to convince herself that what she had read was a once in a lifetime thing. That these sort of things didnt happen in the real world that often and that it was alright to feel upset about it. Suddenly something caught her eye. High in the night sky she noticed a ray of light, a shooting star of some kind. But it was too bright to be a shooting star. She saw it only for a moment and then it was gone. She felt strange once again. All of her unease had returned. She just wanted to go to sleep. It was passed her bedtime after all. Her mother tucked her in and kissed her goodnight before turning off the lights and leaving. Jessica noticed that her mother had forgotten to close her closet door. Her mother knew that she was afraid of the closet. It loomed hight above the foot of her bed. When she looked into that darkness she thought she saw a million eyes looking back at her. She got up the courage to go over and close that closet. She got back into bed and felt much better, falling into a deep sleep. She dreamed, dreamed of a boy and a dog moving across the stars enshrouded by a bright light. She dreamed of them gliding, the boy reaching out to her, calling out to her with a look of distress on his face. They then disappeared in the sky. The stars disappeared, a blackness consumed everything. She saw the face of her mother, smiling, changing, morphing into the face of the paedophilic killer she had seen in the papers, he reached out to grab her, reached out with a knife in his hands. His face changing into that of a hideous, pale blue, demonic face. She woke up covered in sweat, breathing hard. She was sitting up in bed and must have cried out because she could hear her parents coming. For a moment she realized suddenly that the closet which she was sure she had closed was now open again, and she thought she heard a rustling sound coming from within. Before absolute dread clutched her though, her parents came in and turned on the lights. They hugged her and knew she had had a bad dream. She felt a little more releived. This time her mother closed the closet door before going back to bed. Jessica felt a little better, but she was still disturbed. Disturbed by her dream and disturbed by the fact that the closet had been open. Maybe everything had just been a bad dream. She looked out her window and noticed something very odd. Something that startled her. It had begun to snow. Nice hadnt been snowed on to her knowledge any time before. Suddenly the closet door swung open and she was so startled that she didnt make a sound. She was drawn into the darkness, drawn to the pale face staring at her in the darkness, smiling at her. She could just make out that horrible face in the din. She was drawn into the eyes, which seemed to glow in the dark. There was no sound, it just stared at her. In the midst of her horror she suddenly heard herself say the name, the name which must surely belong to what was now looking at her. "Beelzebub". She had never known that name in her life until this moment.