Everything Will be Dark

Part Three: Attrition

The phone clattered to the floor, skimming across the room and sliding to a halt under the coffee table.

Emily didn't know whether it was her who had dropped it or whether the girl had snatched it from her grasp and thrown it. She was too lost in the noise that was eating away at everything inside her head. It was rampaging through her skull, consuming her from the inside out and if she kept listening, she knew that it was going to eat her whole, leaving nothing but bones and gristle.

The girl, who had seemed just as calm when spitting out her horrible little revelation as she had been when Emily had found her gripping the gate with scarlet hands, remained staring up at Emily as the seconds ticked by.

I have come home, mother.

The child was sick. Sicker than Emily maybe. You heard about it all the time now. Childhood depression. Children hospitalised in mental institutions. Children medicated up to their eyeballs.

Children who killed.

Backing up, Emily's heels hit the edge of the sofa and she fell backwards onto it. The child watched, cocking her head in that strange robotic way, as Emily desperately tried to claw her way off the plump cushions that just seemed to want to hold her there.

'What's wrong, mother?'

Emily clutched at her head. 'Stop it!' she moaned. 'Stop saying that. I am not your mother.' 

The child's brow wrinkled, a flicker of darkness passing across her eyes. 'Yes. You are.'

Struggling to her feet, Emily moaned again when a sharp stab of pain pulled on the tendons at the back of her neck and the nausea swelled in her stomach, causing her to gag. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she rushed passed the girl into the kitchen where she bent double over the basin and heaved violently into the bowl. Thick stringy tendrils of vomit snaked from her mouth and she quickly turned on the tap full blast, desperate to banish the foul liquid down, down into the plughole, before scooping handfuls of water into her mouth to rid her throat of the acidic bilious burn.

When she turned around, the child was standing by the kitchen table, her hand resting on the pile of crossword books. Emily didn't want her to touch them. She wanted to grab them and hurl them into the fire. They were hers. This place was hers. And now it felt infected, invaded, as if the girl wasn't a girl at all, but some menacing alien foe intent on draining her world of every single valuable resource.

Gripping the counter as if she might suddenly plummet into an abyss, Emily tried to steady her breathing and clear the fog so she could think. She needed to choose her words carefully. The child might not have been some kind of evil extra-terrestrial, but Emily was inexplicably terrified of her all the same.

Do you live alone?

'Listen,' she said, slowly, warily. 'I don't know what's happened to you, I can't imagine what you've gone through, but whatever it is, it must have been awful. I get that. I'm just some woman whose house you managed to find. I'm not your mother. I don't have any children. I just brought you in from the cold.'

'Yes. You did. And I was so very cold.' The child's nails scratched lightly on the glossy cover of the crossword book.

'I'm sure you were, it's monstrous out there, it really is. But sometimes being out in the cold can do terrible things. You could be...sick. Delirious. We should really call a doctor.' Her voice had taken on a child-like whine, full of pleading and desperation.

'I'm not sick. I am fine.' The child smiled, a beaming glow of a smile that belied the tension that crackled in the air louder than the spit and hiss of the fire in the hearth.