In a way, Hannah Lewis always knew that something like this would happen to her. Not so much being involved in a deadly car accident, hearing strange noises at night, and then having the place where she worked burned down (who could possibly predict such things at the age of nine?) as the fact that she would go through so many difficult situations that it would come to the point where she'd become helpless and give up on everything. At this moment, lying on the couch in her old blue pajamas with a drenched cloth around her forehead and the latest issue of The Guardian having been tossed in the bowl where she'd been eating crisps several hours before, she couldn't imagine any other point in her life where she'd felt such helplessness as she did now.

However, there had been other times when she felt very close to reaching this point. The first time was when she was seven and her father, David Lewis, who was the head of a major manufacturing company in the US, had moved the family from Utah to England in order to promote business in Europe. At first, they were supposed to be moving around to different European countries every four months so that the company could branch out across the continent, but because David was a very powerful persuader, he was able to come up with a different deal in which foreign business executives came to see him at his new home instead of him moving to around. As a result, David and Leeann Lewis and their four children (two more would be born in England; with Hannah being the second oldest of her siblings) left everything behind and moved to Bristol, England.

Since it was the late seventies at the time of their move, with the much more liberated social attitudes being clearly visible in everything from music and late night shows to the dress of students (girls wearing pants to school and boys trying to imitate the styles of their favorite rock stars), Hannah's parents were already more than a little mistrustful of current social trends in the states. However, upon their arrival in England, where songs like The Sex Pistol's anarchic "God Save the Queen" made the sensual music of Marvin Gaye and Barry White sound wholesome in comparison, and sixteen-year-olds could be seen walking out of bars with cans of beer in their hands, it was already too much for her parents to take. David Lewis went so far as to sell the family radio and Leeann forbade the children from hanging out with other children who weren't a part of their church (meaning they could only have up to three playmates at best). As a result, much of Hannah's early days in England were spend alone in her room, with her wishing that she could run off in the middle of night and catch the first flight back to the USA.

To make matters worse, no one at school would respect Hannah at all once they found out she was a Mormon. Given the fact that she'd been enrolled in a strict, private Anglican school, since it was one of the only religious schools available in the area, even the teachers would sometimes cast suspicious looks upon her when they thought she wasn't noticing them and would purposely refuse to interfere as students would ask Hannah how many stepmothers she had, imitated her American accent, or try to offer her coffee-flavored chocolate. As a matter of fact, the more kids made Hannah's school days a living hell, jumping at her during recess, sticking gum either in her hair or under the chair, or bellowing out insults at her during dinner, the more satisfied they seemed to be, perhaps because deep down, they believed more in making sure outsiders remained cast out than in the values they were actually supposed to be passing on to the kids.

None of this stopped until a school sponsored camping trip when Hannah was in year five, during which a group of kids stole her clothes as she was swimming in the lake and then, as she went around half clad in front of the majority of the class trying to find her bag of clothes around the woods, these kids got a hold of her, dragged her back into the lake, and started dunking her into the water. A teacher had to take her out of the water and then drag the troublemaking students immediately into the cabin, with the final disciplinary action being a month's suspension. When Hannah's parents found out about this, though, they complained to the school, and after the headmaster only went on insisting that the actions they'd taken with the perpetrators was fair enough because they didn't know better and it would be harsh to permanently ruin their records as students by expelling them at such young ages, David and Leeann removed Hannah from the school and enrolled her in public school for the rest of her academic years.

In some ways, this had been a good change for Hannah. After this incident, her parents became a little less strict and permitted Hannah and her siblings a lot of the things which had been denied to them when they first arrived in England. As the years went by, each one of them was speaking in a British accent, spending time with classmates of different religious beliefs, and doing activities such as going to concerts, attending parties, and accompanying their father on business trips around Europe without having to receive too much supervision. And yet, Hannah still felt very self–conscious and unsafe sometimes, resulting in her barely ever visiting the homes of even her closest friends, going out at night only if one of her siblings accompanied her, and remaining more focused on her duties at home, school, and church above all else. Her biggest fear was that if she broke out of such routines, that everything would go wrong to the point where she'd lose confidence in herself and end up falling apart.

And then, she'd met Jackie Tyler as she was preparing to finish her degree in education, who'd been different from all her previous friends in the past, being a young single mother and an alcoholic. The fact that she was so different and troubled yet deeply devoted to her daughter, as well as how most of the other teachers didn't like her, was most likely what had drawn Hannah to Jackie. Several times she'd had plans to help Jackie out, thinking of perhaps offering her a little money to start a savings account to return to school, or encouraging her to attend support groups for alcoholics. But what happened instead was that Jackie would get Hannah involved in her problems one way or another, whether by leaving her to look after Rose when she was having one of her strange blackouts, or having her along during one of her drinking binges. At best, Hannah had been able to provide a helping hand when Jackie was feeling too helpless, but at worse was the car accident and fire, which had left Hannah in the worse emotional state she'd been in years.

During her darkest moments, Hannah sometimes wondered if she would have been better off if she'd never met Jackie Tyler. As a matter of fact, it seemed like all she could think about regarding their friendship was the bad vibes she felt whenever she was around Jackie, whether they were working together at the nursery school or driving home from a bar late into the night. It felt as if some kind of dark force was always by that woman's side, waiting to knock down anyone who got too close to her. But whether the force at work was Jackie's own self-destructive nature, or something which Hannah couldn't even begin to understand, was what she couldn't stop thinking about.

Her thoughts were then interrupted by a rapturous knocking on the door, forcing her to step out of the living room in order to answer it. At first, she thought it would be Laura Benton, who was her closest neighbor and a sergeant in the British Army, something which under normal circumstances would have caused Hannah to have a deep mistrust of her. However, because she'd managed to learn that Laura had spent much of her childhood living abroad (the fact that the two of them had to adjust to life in a foreign country at a young age had instantly brought the two of them together), as well as the fact that she had a very likable personality despite still having some of that tough demeanor which was common in soldiers, the two of them had managed to become friends, and there were times when Hannah felt closer to her than she did to Jackie Tyler.

But when Hannah opened the door, there was no one standing around waiting for her. Instead, she felt a rush of chilly air running through her body, causing her to violently shake despite the fact that the chill was a rather small one that went away quickly. As a matter of fact, it almost felt like the force was coming from down below, as if a small animal were attacking her through her feet and legs, instead of coming from the cold yet light air from above.

And as this awful shaking went on, Hannah suddenly felt her vision starting to become more blurry, and what felt like the spinning of the room, causing her to lean against the wall in an attempt to maintain her balance. Then, she actually did feel something pulling her by the legs, followed by a feeling similar to being stabbed as she felt something cold and metallic running its way across her skin.

Upon feeling this terrible pain, she screamed as loudly as she could in an attempt to get the attention of her neighbors. However, all she heard in response was a wild, sickly laugh, sounding as if someone were heavily coughing and chuckling at the same time, or as if the act of laughter were physically painful for the person (or thing), yet for some unthinkable reason still had to be let out, perhaps due to the pleasure of seeing someone in a more helpless state than it was in.

And, as if in response to what she was suspecting, the last thing Hannah heard before she fully lost consciousness was someone yelling out in a coarse, yet satisfied, voice, "How does it feel, my dear woman? How does it feel to be in such a helpless state and knowing no one will come out to help you? How does it feel to be staring directly into the face of death for months and knowing, despite how much you hope for your situation to change, that there's no escaping what fate already has in store for you?"

Seconds after she passed out, a woman in a sky blue nightgown with a sickly, malnourished appearance, dark, unruly hair, and a neck which remained twisted to the right side of her body trotted over to Hannah. Bending down, she gripped the small, blood socked knife away which had been left stuck between Hannah's legs, whipped it with her nightgown, and then held it straight through her right hand. She then started dragging Hannah's body away, heading in the direction of the bathroom, and said to herself, with an evil smirk on her face, "Now here's someone else who's soon to understand what true helplessness is. If she thought nearly getting drowned by her classmates as a child was torture, I'm sure she'll soon take that back and realize, that the last months of her life, during which I tormented her and some of her closest friends to the point of a breakdown, were a whole lot worse. Perhaps she'll end up becoming as vengeful as me, but of course, only time can tell."

On the flat next door, Laura Benton was seated on a desk in her bedroom, typing a report for UNIT through her computer while listening to an old Anne Murray record, which had been her mother's favorite back when her family lived in Vancouver. It was very hard to concentrate on work lately, especially due to the Rose Tyler business and what was going on with her neighbor, Hannah. Regarding the former, she not been able to come in contact with Mrs. Tyler at all since her meeting with Harry Sullivan. For one thing, whenever she tried to call her using her home phone number, either she was never there to answer it or the line was somehow cut. And when she asked Michael Truman about Mrs. Tyler during the three occasions she'd gone over to Northern Horizons for meetings, he'd give her a stoic look as he responded by saying, "Ms. Benton, if you could provide evidence to me regarding why you must see her so badly, then I'll gladly let her come in contact with you ahead of time. But given the fact that you have none so far, I can only assume that you're probably just being nosy about my employees, something which I'm not very keen on at all."

And when it came to Hannah, it was much worse. She rarely ever left her flat after leaving her teaching job shortly after the nursery school where she worked was burned down, and when Laura dropped by to visit, she was almost always lying down in either the sofa or her bed, rarely saying more than a brief, vague sentence to her in response to her questions, saying things like, "Oh, I'm feeling fine today; better than yesterday in fact", or, if she were being more honest, "I'm just plain old lousy right now". If she ate anything at all, it was usually a bag of crisps or a package of pastries; full meals were just too much for her now. For a long time now, Laura couldn't stop thinking of what the right thing to do was during this situation. Was it best to just leave her be, or should she tell someone about this, perhaps to Uncle John or through a call to Hannah's parents? Or would it be better if she were to call the hospital, telling them that she believed her neighbor was possibly mentally ill?

Then, all of sudden, Laura heard a horrifying scream coming through the walls. Not one of those small and quick ones you heard after someone had been startled or spotted a bug crawling through the kitchen, but the long, blood- shattering ones you heard in horror movies when someone was face-to-face with a psychotic killer.

Laura didn't hesitate for even a second, her military instincts taking over immediately; almost as soon as she heard the screaming, she shot right out of her flat as quickly as if she were the one being chased by a potential murderer and went into Hannah's flat right away (the door was left unlock, another sign that things weren't right over there). Upon being inside, the screaming only got louder, and with just a quick glance around the place, Laura could tell that it was coming from one of the rooms in the back of the flat. As a matter of fact, she was paying such close attention to the screams that she didn't even consider looking down at the floor, where the blood which was drenched all around would have been enough to figure out what was going on without going any further.

But upon making it into the bathroom, there was a more gruesome scene awaiting her: Hannah was sprawled around the bathtub, which was filled with cold water, and her legs were almost completely covered with bloody cuts, some which ran all the way across her thighs and others which were small yet fully visible due to the fact that they were bleeding so heavily. But the even worse sight was the wound between her neck and her heart, in which both her blood and her flesh could be seen.

"Laura!" Hannah screamed, clearly struggling to let the words come across clearly, since her voice was now severely strained due to her injuries. "Laura. It- It's too la- late now. I-I'll be de… dead before I cou- could ma-make it out of here." She then started heavily couching, and spat out blood into the bathtub, in which the dark red liquid was more visible than the water which it was running through.

"No, Hannah," Laura said, struggling to remain calm as she was looking directly into this sickening sight. "I'm going to call the hospital and they're going to take care of you. Perhaps you'll make it if I can be quick enough." But as she said this, she didn't if she was trying to convince Hannah of this or herself.

"So-someone's life is in da-danger, and you mu-must t-try to he-help th- them," Hannah said, struggling even more to let all the words out.

"Who is? Tell me if you can," Laura begged.

Hannah took a deep breath, and then said, without a hint of a stutter, "It's Jackie and Rose Tyler. Their lives are in danger, and if no one helps them, they'll suffer the same fate as I will." After she said this, she coughed violently and then lost consciousness, lying so still in the bathtub that Laura had no choice but to check her pulse through her wrist. She felt nothing at all, an automatic sign that Hannah Lewis was dead.

She then called both the hospital and her uncle John, and he managed to join along with her as they drove up to hospital, since they were not allowed to accompany Hannah in the ambulance due to the fact that they were not relatives. Hannah's death was made official at hospital, and both Laura and John Benton had to give a testimony of what they witnessed to the police, who were the first to contact Hannah's family with the bad news.

The news of this was all over the papers the next day, yet it would be a while before Jackie and Rose Tyler were informed about it.