The Environmental Demon.

I sat rigid in my armchair, I was too scared to move. They, were trying to get in. The holiday caravan home I was staying in sounded like a bulldozer in its last actions of ripping apart a building. I decided to crawl along the pink-carpeted floor. They, outside couldn't have known I was here alone. I was determined to keep my head. I turned the volume up on the television set and curled up into a ball like a scared kitten, back on that cold carpeted floor.

My mind raced back to when I was nine year old. I was scared to death then too. That nightmarish night when forked lightening and the torrential rain had scared the living daylight out of me. That horrible night, I had seen the flickering lights and the fittings sway back and forth; forming shadows that danced across the room.

That night my stepfather had dragged me from my bed and down the staircase. He pushed me into the pitch black cupboard, underneath the staircase. I heard the key turn in the lock. I had shared that small black space, with a musty odour for what seemed like hours. I can still hear the rumbling sounds and well remember thinking I was going to die.

My stepfather was sent to prison soon after that incident for cruelty and neglect. My mother too had suffered at his violent hands, and spent a year in a psychiatric hospital and ended her own life in there.

The time had come to take the drastic decision to arm myself, before they, outside, resorted to their drastic steps to eliminate me. I donned on my black plastic raincoat and knee length boots. I took hold of my brown wooden handled brolly, with a razor-sharp edge. This was my weapon against the outside force; that had been hounding me for the long weary hours I had endured.

I flung open the black metal door and pointed the razor-edge of the brolly. Suddenly! The howling wind and the treacherous wet weather engulfed the inside of the holiday home like a vicious tornado. They, were trapped inside. The environmental demons. I was at last free and alive.