Emilia White was a very unobtrusive little girl. Her mother described her as quiet and self-sufficient. Family friends thought of her as dull, if precocious, and her classmates didn't bother with her, as Emilia kept to herself.
Emilia did not plan on telling anyone when she woke up in the morning to be sick in the bathroom sink. She was quite frequently ill with various ailments: a stomach bug, a pounding head, a toothache. It was nothing out of the ordinary for Emilia to have a vomiting spell — that is, until she looked in the sink and saw that it was covered in black.
Emilia peered into the sink worriedly. She had never seen something as black and viscous as tar come out of her mouth. This did not slip down the sink the way most things would. It stayed, sticky and unsightly, and stark against the white porcelain of the basin.
Mother wasn't pleased when she saw the mess in the bathroom sink. She wasn't pleased Emilia had woken her up, either. "If this is some sort of practical joke," she said, rummaging furiously through the bleach-white cabinets, "it isn't very funny. You're far too old to be messing about like this, Emilia."
There was a boy in Emilia's class at school who loved to play practical jokes. His name was Jack Gardner, and he had funny freckles and brown hair that stuck out at all ends. He was the same age as Emilia, and he played jokes all the time. Emilia deliberately didn't mention this. Instead, she stood and watched as her mother scrubbed furiously at the black tar in the sink. There was a pit of fear in her stomach that didn't go away, even when Mother sent her back to bed.
In the morning, the sink had been scrubbed clean. It was artificially white in the light of the bathroom, and Mother scolded her again for having made it dirty the night before. "Imagine if we'd had guests," she said.
Emilia couldn't think why they would have guests at two o'clock in the morning, but it was never a smart idea to argue with Mother anyway. She just nodded, eyes fixed on the tiles of the kitchen floor.
The dark pit in Emilia's stomach followed her around all day. She couldn't sit through dodgeball, and was sent to the benches when a particularly hard throw caught her in the abdomen. She got muddled in Comprehension. Her artwork was ruined when she spilt paint-water over it. Her concentration in German was abysmal.
It only got worse from then. On Wednesday afternoon, Emilia had to excuse herself from lunch period and run into the bathroom. She locked herself in one of the dinky girl’s toilet stalls. The coolness of the stall was merciful relief, and Emilia tipped her hot forehead against the door.
There's something wrong, Emilia thought desperately. She could barely think past the thrumming heat in her head. She wanted to get up and go to the nurse's office, but her body was too dizzy, and her legs felt like they were about to give out.
The lunch bell rang while Emilia was in the toilet. She thought of the looming threat of maths class, and the possibility of being late to maths class, and reluctantly pushed herself away from the stall door. When she made it to the nurse's office in the library, she was shaking all over, and her voice came out as a croak.
The nurse laid her down on a bed. She had her temperature taken. The nurse looked at the thermometer and tutted, shaking her head. "You're really too old to be making up these silly ailments, Emilia."
Emilia stared at her, nonplussed and a little frightened. "But I'm not,” she said. “See? I'm hot all over."
"None of that." The nurse finished scribbling a note and handed it to Emilia. "Back to class, please."
The rest of the week was miserable. Emilia drifted from school to home, barely cognizant through her sums and jump-rope and dinnertime. It was at night that she was more awake than ever, for she was taunted by strange, frightening dreams.
On Thursday night, she dreamt there was a monster in her wardrobe, and his eyes were bright white as the bleach in the bathroom. On Sunday she dreamed God was giving her stomach-aches to punish her for being a bad daughter, and soon He'd send her to Hell. In Monday's dreams, a monster crawled out of Emilia's body, thick and heavy as tar, and started feasting on her all her bad, sickly bacteria. She had to lie flat on her bed, face pale and white in the light of the moon, and watch him eat what was left of her.
She struggled to eat; she struggled to get to sleep. She struggled to wake up from the dreams she was trapped in, and had to be shaken awake every morning. She was sick through church service, and choir practice, and the walk to and from school.
She fell out of bed that Monday night. Mother heard the thump of her body against the floor and came running.
"Whatever did you do that for?" Mother demanded, rolling Emilia to her side. Emilia moaned, a chorus of sickly stars bursting behind her eyelids.
"It hurts," she coughed.
"Well, I'm not surprised about that. Oh, Emilia, you've made a rip in your nightgown."
Emilia looked down. Sharp toothmarks dotted the hem of her nightgown. When she turned to look at her wardrobe, whose door laid ajar, she saw inhuman claws and a pair of gleaming eyes. Then she blinked, and it was gone again.
Mother stood up. "I'll just be a minute. I'll go get some thread."
Whatever feeble protestations Emilia mustered up went ignored. Mother swept out of the room, and Emilia was left shivering in the darkness until she returned. She thought the monster was closing in on her, but it was hard to think past the thrill of fear in her stomach.
As the days went on, Emilia began to list her symptoms in her head. It was a frightening sort of list. Headaches, wheezing through her ribcages. Seeing monsters at night and dreaming about being eaten alive. Hair falling out as she brushed it. And, of course, the sticky black tar that dripped out of her mouth every time she coughed.
It wasn't normal, she knew. But she couldn't find a diagnosis anywhere, not even when she stayed late after school to check books in the library. Even when she crept onto Mother's computer before supper, an activity which was forbidden even in the case of emergencies, she found nothing.
Maybe there were parasites in her. Maybe some hand had got into her guts and was making them dirty, and that was the reason she felt so sick, because there were germs in her, and no medicine could get them out. She tried: teaspoons of Calpol, the nasty fish oil in the pantry. They curdled inside her like a sick cocktail. Her whole body was germs, germs, germs.
It came to a head one night when Emilia had vomited all over her bedroom floor. She was surrounded by a puddle of black tar, and in the centre of it she was weak and white and frail, and she couldn't do anything. She called for her mother, and Mother came.
Mother didn't seem to realise that anything was wrong. Instead she sounded cross. "For goodness' sake, Emilia. I've got work to do other than cleaning up your spilled inkpots."
Emilia startled from where she sat, watching her mother wring out the mop. "It's not ink," she said. Her voice was as thin and weak as tightrope.
"What else could it be?" Mother was scrubbing at it on her hands and knees. "Oh, Emilia, look, it's seeping into the floorboards… What's up with you? Why do you look like that?"
Emilia inched closer to her. She slid into her mother's lap and put her arms around her neck. Her mother let her.
"What's this about, then?" Mother said, jigging her a little on her lap. "Hm?"
Emilia tucked her face into her mother's neck. She felt hungry and desperate for comfort; she turned her mouth to Mother's ear, and said, "Mama, I think I'm sick."
"Sick?" Mother pulled her away and held her at arm's length. "Well, you don't look sick. You haven't been sneezing or shivery or anything, have you?"
"It's not that kind of sick," Emilia whispered.
"Do speak up, Emilia. I can't stand it when you slur your words."
"It's not that kind of sick," she repeated, louder this time. "I – I think I'm dying."
Mother was still for a moment. Then she burst into laughter. "Oh, Emilia! Dying! Wherever did you get that silly idea into your head?"
Emilia swallowed, and imagined all the black saliva slipping down her throat. Her voice came out very small. "You don't understand. I've been having all these nightmares, and I keep getting headaches—"
"Everyone gets bad dreams," Mother soothed, smoothing a hand over her hair. "And everyone gets headaches. It's probably from all that hunching over your desk. I’ve always said you could benefit from better posture."
Emilia stared at her. "But I really think I'm dying," she said.
Her mother laughed and shook her head. She stood up, pushing Emilia off her lap, and ran a hand over the crown of her head. "Every little girl thinks she's dying at some point," she said. "Now go to sleep now. It's awfully late."
The door closed, shrouding the room in darkness and a distinct lack of warmth. Emilia got up off the cold floor and crawled into bed. Her eyes burned with the threat of hot tears when she laid her hair on the pillow. She sat up and wiped them away.
When Emilia cut her eyes across to her wardrobe, she saw there was still a monster there. This time when she blinked, it didn't go away. It just stood there, seeming bigger and larger and stronger than ever before, its eyes white as car headlights before a crash.
Emilia thought about telling her mother. She thought about writing down all the ailments she had listed in her head and presenting her with them. She thought about telling everyone she knew until someone believed her.
But no one would believe her anyway, and Emilia wasn't quite sure she believed herself. She laid down in bed, and the tar bubbled up in her throat, and her organs were all germy and sick. She let the darkness consume her. There wasn’t anything else she could do.
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