Denise

a horror story

Note: This is a horror story involving children. If that’s not for you, maybe sit this one out.

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When Denise appeared, the screaming stopped.

Image: mohammad kashkooli, Unsplash

At night, when my mother would order me into my little green bed and disappear to the other side of the house, I used to lie awake in the dark and hear screaming.

The best way I can describe it is the silent screams of tens, maybe hundreds of people. The terrifying sound always came from inside my head. All around me, the room was silent. But inside my head, there was screaming.

I would lie on my back, staring up through the blackness of the night air toward the ceiling, trying to shut out the shrieking inside my skull. My ears would vibrate with the sound of it, the sound my mother could never hear and never know to rescue me from.

Until one night, Denise was there. She popped her head up next to my bed, blond hair shining in the dark, and when she smiled, the shrieking in my ears stopped. As if she had commanded it.

She watched over me all night, and for the first time I could remember, I slept peacefully.

After that, Denise showed up every night, as soon as my mother left me in the dark. She didn’t speak, just watched me and smiled. Always that smile.

Denise looked just like me. She almost was me. We differed in only one respect: the color of our hair. We had the same wild curls; the same length, falling like curtains down our backs. But instead of my bright red hair, hers was yellow, the color of dry hay.

Having Denise around helped me sleep at night. Soon we became close friends, the kind of friends who sometimes whisper but never really need to speak. I never told my mother about her, of course. I never spoke about Denise to anyone. I don’t think she would have wanted me to.

Like any childhood friends, Denise and I didn’t always get along. Sometimes we had arguments or outright fights. Once she got so angry at me for not sharing Fluffy Puppy with her that instead of sitting beside me at night and watching me sleep, she sat in the corner with her back turned to me and glared at the wall, her arms crossed furiously.

I didn’t sleep well that night, but at least there was still no screaming.

And like any childhood friends, we always made up.

As I got older, I started to make new friends. Outside friends, Denise called them.

Denise didn’t like that.

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In first grade, I met Maria.

Maria was hilarious. She made me laugh with her silly antics, her funny dance moves, her goofy, over-the-top faces. Maria’s wood-brown hair was stick-straight. I marveled at it, at the way the strands dropped straight down in the direction of the earth’s pull, not up and outwards at all angles like mine. Maria was new and fresh and fun and incredible.

Very quickly, Maria and I decided to make things official. We declared ourselves “best friends” and wore the broken-heart-half necklaces to prove it. We hid behind the back wall of the school building each morning and lifted our shirts up just slightly, sharing secrets: What color is your underwear today? Mine is purple.

Sometimes my mother would even drop me off at Maria’s house, where there was a whole wall of games and toys and puzzles to choose from. We would play Operation and Guess Who? and Connect Four until forced to part, tears streaming, my mother tapping her foot impatiently at the front door as we clung to each other.

Denise really didn’t like that.

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One night, I was lying in bed, my eyelids getting heavy, when Denise did something she’d never done before.

Denise got into my bed.

She was my friend. I loved her. I knew her.

But when she crawled into bed with me, her body felt like a block of ice. And I got a strange feeling down my spine, something I couldn’t understand at the time. Something I now recognize as fear.

Denise said nothing. She just stared, her body next to mine—not touching, but almost. I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and tried to ignore her, tried to fall asleep.

But all my sleepiness had evaporated as soon as I’d felt that chill coming off of her.

I thought about calling out to my mother for help. But I knew she wouldn’t come.

She never did.

All that night I stayed awake, keeping my eyes open in the dark room for as long as I could manage. Sometimes I would turn my head to look at Denise, but she just lay there, her head on my pillow, staring at me with that smile. Always that smile.

I think Denise still loved me.

She’d just had her feelings hurt.

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In second grade, we moved away.

I had to say goodbye forever to Maria. I was angry at my mother, angry at the world for rupturing my life like this. No other house, no other school, no other friends would ever be acceptable substitutes. I cried, but inside, I boiled with fury.

Denise made the move with us. She wasn’t in the car, of course. We didn’t pack her into boxes or load her into the U-Haul. But that first night in our new house, Denise’s blond head appeared beside me as always, rising like a pale nocturnal sun beside the green bed frame and hovering there, watching over me.

In the dark, I squeezed Fluffy Puppy and fingered the broken-heart necklace that said “BEST” on it, while Denise smiled her eternal smile.

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In third grade, my mother brought home my baby sister Nora.

Nora screamed all night, only quieting down long enough to let me sleep for five minutes before starting up again. My mother paid even less attention to me now than before, because all her time and energy flowed into this wailing pink thing that was supposed to be a person just like me.

I told Denise I didn’t like this.

She said nothing, just smiled that smile.

One day my sister was lying on her activity mat, drooling pathetically as she reached for her crinkly orange lion. I was on the floor nearby, drawing with my new set of crayons. I had nearly finished a portrait of the two of us—me and Denise—and just needed to add the hair.

I layered squiggles of burnt orange and red to create my hair. Then it was time to add Denise’s.

I reached for my lemon yellow crayon. My fingers met empty space.

I looked up from the page in front of me.

Nora had my crayon in her wet, toothless mouth. She gummed at it delightedly while gazing at me with those enormous baby eyes of hers.

Rage surged through me, as pure as melted snow.

I’m not quite sure what happened next. The crayon was in my hand, its wet wrapper disgusting against my skin. And I felt something soft and pudgy slap against the palm of my other hand, heard a shrill, high-pitched wail, sensed myself being lifted bodily away from the source of the noise.

A curtain of curly hair fell across my face. Blond hair. The color of the wet crayon in my hand.

I blinked, and the hair was red again. In front of me, my mother, clutching a wailing Nora, screaming words at me I couldn’t understand. I sat with my knees pulled in, a wall of noise in front of me, my drawing and my crayons trampled under my mother’s angry feet.

I was sent to my room without my crayons, without my drawing, and without my dinner.

My mother did not come into my room that night. I heard her talking in the other room, her voice a low murmur of concern interspersed with outbursts of yelling.

“Don’t worry about it,” Denise assured me. She was sitting in her usual spot next to my bed. I lay curled up in my green bed, my arms locking Fluffy Puppy into a hug, and gazed into her face. My face.

Denise smiled her powerful smile.

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My mother stopped leaving me alone with Nora after that. A few days later, she loaded us both into the car and told me I was going to see a doctor. I told her I wasn’t sick. She said nothing, just stared straight ahead as the car shot down the highway. I turned my head and looked out the window at the dusty green fields and the endless miles of telephone poles and wires.

Beside me in the back seat, Nora was quiet for once, the faint sucking of her lips as she dreamed of milk replacing her usual shrieking.

The doctor was a woman with short gray hair and enormous glasses that made her look like an owl. She didn’t wear the long white coat of the doctor who stabbed me and Nora with vaccinations before offering me a jar full of lollipops to choose from. I liked the lime green ones. I wondered if I would get a lollipop today.

When the doctor called my name, she led me into a dim room with two pink armchairs in it. Shelves full of games and toys stretched along the back wall of the room. It made me think of Maria. My stomach started to hurt.

“Sit down,” the doctor said. It wasn’t a command, like when my mother spoke to me. I wondered if I was allowed to tell her no.

I wanted to ask if we could play Operation, but I thought I might get in trouble. I chose the armchair closest to the door.

The doctor wanted to know how I felt about Nora. Did I like her, did we play together. I told her Nora made too much noise and that she ate my yellow crayon.

The doctor peered at me through her owl glasses and scribbled onto a clipboard.

I wondered if she was drawing a picture of me.

Later, the doctor brought out a dollhouse and a box of dolls and asked me to show her my family. I dug through the dolls in the box and chose a smiling red-haired one to be me. I set it in the bedroom, even though the bed was pink, not green. Then I chose a brown-haired doll to be my mother. I put her in the kitchen, then dropped a little wooden baby into a plastic crib. That was Nora.

The doctor started to say something, but my hand was in the box again, searching for the final piece.

I pulled out a doll with long blond hair and positioned her halfway under the bed. Her plastic face smiled out at the red-haired doll who was me.

I was happy with my work.

I looked up and saw the owl-eyed doctor’s eyebrows knit together in a scowl. She scribbled again on her clipboard. I wondered if I had done something wrong.

On the way back home, Nora screamed the whole time. I looked out the window, eager for a distraction from the ear-splitting noise. Outside, gray clouds bunched up in the sky, threatening to squeeze themselves so tightly together that they would burst. Against the growing darkness outside, I saw my reflection in the window.

Denise’s face smiled back at me.

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Months passed. I went to the doctor a few more times. We never did play Operation.

Eventually my mother stopped looking scared when I walked into the room. She stopped taking me to the doctor, too.

Nora grew bigger, but not quieter. From my little green bed where I huddled under blankets next to Denise, I would be awoken several times a night by Nora’s insistent screaming. It would go on for what felt like an eternity, until finally the noise died down and I could drift off to sleep again.

“I can’t sleep,” I whispered to Denise during one of Nora’s crying fits. Denise looked at me knowingly, her bright smile and blond hair almost luminescent in the dark room. She nodded without a word, then reached out and rubbed my back in a soft, slow, circular movement. Her hand felt like ice, but it was comforting to be touched like that, to know that somebody cared about me. I shivered and closed my eyes, letting sleep take me.

The next day was a Saturday, so I didn’t have to go to school. Just as well; I still hadn’t made any friends here. Not real ones, anyway. Denise and Maria were my only real friends.

I spent the morning playing in the patch of dry dirt we called the backyard. I dug up pebbles, arranging the prettiest ones in a row along the wooden fence that separated our dirt patch from our neighbor’s. I chased ants with a twig to see where they would go. I tried banging two sharp gray rocks together to start a fire, like I had heard about in stories. I didn’t get any fire, but I did manage to chip a few flakes off of the two rocks. I put them in my pocket for later.

After lunch, Nora was supposed to take a nap. Instead, she chose to wail like an ambulance siren, the volume of her shrieks rising and falling like waves. I sat in the living room with my crayons and tried to draw a picture of myself on a desert island, starting a fire with my two gray rocks. Denise was in the picture too. She stood beside me, her arms full of firewood, watching the thin line of smoke rising from our nascent fire.

Footsteps and an exhausted sigh came toward me down the hall. My mother was carrying Nora, who was still screaming. She flopped down onto the couch, Nora flailing furiously in her arms.

As I watched them, I felt a chill come over me, like someone had left a door open in the middle of winter.

My mother quickly fell asleep on the couch. Nora half-crawled, half-fell off my mother’s chest and onto the floor. She writhed like a fat snake, her face wet and pink. I felt the screaming as if it were inside my head. The noise rattled loose every coherent thought. How could my mother be sleeping through this?

Nora rolled toward me, smacking my leg with one of her waving arms. It didn’t hurt. But I felt something in me change.

The chill again. Like ice.

The red fringe in my peripheral vision flashed hay-yellow.

My hand began to move toward my pocket, though I hadn’t told it to do so. I observed curiously as my fingers closed around the larger of the two gray rocks, as they found the sharp edges.

I don’t know what happened next. The doctor asked me about it, but I swear I really don’t know. That’s the truth.

All I remember is Denise. I remember her ice-cold arms hugging me. I remember her smile, that fixed, luminous smile. I remember flashes of blond hair, then deep red spatters flying like paint. I remember the relief washing over me as the noise faded into silence.

I remember my mother waking up, dropping to her knees. I remember her holding Nora’s limp body, now blissfully silent. I remember her hitting me, over and over again.

Denise protected me, though. She held me in her ice-cold arms so I didn’t feel a thing. I smiled Denise’s smile as my mother’s fists descended upon me again and again.

Because Denise had made the screaming stop.

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This story was written in response to Week 4 of Milk & Honey ‘s Augtober Writing Challenge. The prompt for this week was:

In 3000 words or less write about your character being possessed. You can combine this theme with any subgenre you would like including the ones we have already discussed like folk, analog, gothic, or body horror. Anything is fair game with paranormal horror as it transfers easily between genres. Remember: Horror can have happy endings, there can be survivors, there can be a satisfying end. Setting is really important for this one.

Many thanks to Meg from Milk & Honey for these amazing prompts!