Millie was a soft brown-haired beauty. Her hair was always straight and so soft, so dark it was almost black. It laid just slightly on her shoulders. She had the creamiest, softest skin. Her face was unblemished despite her teen age, and her hazel eyes were penetrating. She had large and lovely eyes, always reflecting that she was deep in thought.
Millie could almost always be seen with a horror book in her hand, when she wasn’t doing homework. This bothered her mother, who was a friendly, outgoing type, who enjoyed sunshine and flowers and other beautiful things in the world. She didn’t like to see her gorgeous daughter reading about gruesome killings, grisly scenes, and disturbed minds.
Millie’s mother decided on a whim one day to take one of Millie’s horror novels to a voodoo woman and get a curse put on it. “Please make it so Millie never wants to read another horror novel again,” Millie’s mother instructed the woman. The woman took out a large black bowl and an incense cone and some dried leaves. She placed the cone in the bowl, lit it, and then placed the book on the cone. A large black cloud of smoke arose and the woman sprinkled the dried leaves on the book and the smoke, saying incantations that sounded ancient and frightening. Then she waved both hands, crisscrossing, over the bowl, and said, “Horror, be gone!” The black smoke suddenly disappeared and the woman pulled the book out of the bowl. It was not burned.
Millie’s mother was amazed and hoped the spell really worked. She silently slipped Millie’s book back to where it had been at home, in Millie’s tote bag. The next day, Saturday, Millie awoke from an afternoon nap and decided she wanted to read in the living room. The house was quiet; her mother was gone on errands. Her father always worked on Saturday. The day was already turning into evening, the light from the sun faint on the walls.
Millie started a tea kettle for hot chocolate and settled on her favorite spot on the couch. She started on her new horror novel that was in her tote bag. The setting of the novel was a teen girl reading alone in her house. Millie read some of the girl’s background story and then the novel was mentioning a strange scratching sound at the window.
Suddenly Millie herself was also hearing a scratching sound at the window. She looked up and saw nothing at the window and chuckled to herself. She continued reading, after fetching her cup of hot chocolate.
Next the girl character was hearing footsteps in the hall. She was getting really creeped out as she was supposed to be alone. Millie reflected on how she was alone also in the house. She looked up again. It was even darker in the room. She decided to turn on a lamp. As she was finished clicking the lamp’s knob, she thought she heard some thumps in the hall. She decided it was her mind playing tricks on her. She picked up her novel and the girl character decided to jump up and have some hot chocolate. She reached into the kitchen’s pantry closet and instead of a box of chocolate she was groping at her own mother’s corpse, blue in the face from having been strangled.
Millie slammed the books shut. She was starting to get the creeps. It was weird that she was hearing some of the same noises the girl heard and drinking the same drink and in the same predicament, alone at home in the evening. She decided to put the box of hot chocolate back in their kitchen pantry, to put her mind at ease, once she saw her own mother wasn’t in the closet, dead as well, she could go back to her book.
She opened the closet and couldn’t believe her eyes. It was her mother, looking still and blue, her neck with a bloody ring around it from being strangled. Millie screamed and ran out of the house.
Later after her father came home, the police and mortician came and went, and days passed by. Millie tried to bring her life back to normal as much as possible. But she found she could never, ever read a horror novel for the rest of her life.
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