A pair of fists pounded heavily on the wooden door. Jill walked out of the kitchen warily, her unkempt hair and wild, bloodshot eyes making her look as though she hadn’t slept for weeks. Tom followed her close by, his little hands clutched tightly at her knee-length skirt. From the din of raindrops drumming against the corrugated rooftop outside, another bout of heavy thuds rattled the door once more. Jill gulped as she looked at Tom, who looked back. 

‘Tom,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady, ‘go to your room. Lock it. Whatever happens next, do not come out. I love you,’ Jill added softly as Tom reluctantly released his grip from the fabric of her skirt and scurried back to his room. It was out of the curiosity that all twelve-year-olds shared inside of them that made Tom leave a crack of light in the doorway small enough not to be seen by Jill, but wide enough for him to peer outside. The thudding continued for what felt like an age, and abruptly, it stopped. In one ominous moment of silence, it did seem as if it was finally over, and yet, the inexplicable feeling of dread that lingered on still within Tom suggested otherwise. He could feel the man behind the door slowly mustering every shred of his strength in one final blow on the wood, which shattered like glass seconds later to reveal a towering silhouette in a backdrop of grey rain and shifting shadows of sinister intentions. Tom’s heart fell almost immediately as the figure lumbered its way through the doorway and toward Jill, who slowly backed away into the darkness of the kitchen. The stench of alcohol and filth that clung on tenaciously to the man whom he called Father (but was actually known to him deep down all these years as the Fiend that Drinks and Gambles All Night Long) from wherever he had been during Tom’s enjoying six days of the man’s absence, that suggested he might have been sleeping in a drain, was too much for Tom as the man neared Tom’s room. No way out, he thought. No way out but one. 

From where he was crouching, Tom could see Jill slipping a hand into her apron’s pocket as the man closed in on her till her nose wrinkled in utter distaste under the man’s breath. The man looked at her hungrily as he swayed on both feet, a cruel smile slowly creasing across the face of a deathly pallor. ‘As you can clearly see,’ said the man woozily, ‘I’m dead drunk… and I need more money.’ Jill finally stopped a few paces away from a chair in the kitchen. The man stopped too, right before he began stroking a finger across her cheek like an old man would to a dear grandchild in his deathbed. ‘You were once so beautiful,’ said the man dreamily. ‘Why couldn’t you stay that way, you ugly bitch?’ Jill shivered to the spine at the man’s touch, unsure of what to do next, albeit momentarily, for her hand shot out to reveal a silver kitchen knife right through the man’s shoulder. The man screamed and doubled back from Jill,  but it was not an expected expression of sheer agony or anger that was insinuated into the man’s oh so loathsome face; rather, it was a look of masochistic satisfaction that both Tom and Jill had witnessed so doing, as the man seemed to be drinking in every passing second in pulling the blade out of his shoulder. He looked up at Jill, who was now trembling like a leaf in the wind as she leaned back over the chair as far away from the man with the blade now in hand, the blade that was dripping a dark trail of blood across Jill’s apron as it edged closer toward her face, the blade that ignored the woman’s mouthing repeatedly, ‘Please, no…’ before him, the blade that at long last forcefully wedged its way deep through Jill’s forehead. She screamed, of course, from the moment the tip of the blade touched the barest of her skin, till a mere half of the silver metal could be seen only betwixt the black plastic handle the man’s fingers were curled around and her head that began oozing out blood of hers in one narrow rivulet down her face. Only then did she lay lifelessly there akimbo over the backrest of the chair like a broken twig, her eyes lifelessly staring up at the dark cobwebbed ceiling.