I'll Be Watching You by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page B

and inviting), a comforting “Mary Tyler Moore” smile, and porcelain, blemish-free skin. Mary Ellen was plainly attractive, kept her figure slim, and had a charisma that drew men toward her.
    Ned wasn’t interested in any of those positive qualities, however: he was focused on rendering her unconscious so he could finish fulfilling his fantasy. As he squeezed her throat harder and Mary Ellen began to slip into unconsciousness, a notion occurred to her: I never thought my life was going to end like this. And then a white light, she recalled, approached…and here it was—after all she had been through. All she had put up with throughout her life. Here, things were beginning to get back on track and she had attracted another animal, a rapist this time, who was obviously going to kill her.
    Has it really come to this?
    She felt herself losing consciousness…and so she began to pray. The white light soon disappeared, Mary Ellen recalled. Then she saw total darkness. “I said my prayers—I said all of my prayers…and the room was spinning, and it was getting black, and I knew, I knew I was dying.”
    “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name….”
    “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee….”
    What Mary Ellen didn’t know was that as she slipped further into unconsciousness, he was undressing her from her waist up, refusing to strip off any of her clothing below the belt. He wasn’t concerned with her vaginal area. It was her breasts. To complete his fantasy, he needed to have her breasts fully exposed. Her bra couldn’t be hanging off her shoulder. This was important. He needed to stare at them as he straddled her like a horse and choked her.
    “I remember,” she said later, “as I was slipping into unconsciousness, him staring into my eyes, directly staring into my eyes. He never spoke a word. I realized later that he was watching me die. He was fascinated by this. Losing consciousness, it felt like I had died…. I knew I was dying.”
    III
     
    Mary Ellen didn’t know how long it was that she had been out. But it was quite some time later when she came to and realized that he was gone. Where is he? He left? I’m alive? Waking up, she looked around and figured out that she was on her bed—not the couch. He must have carried her into her room and posed her on the bed. She was at an angle on her bed, positioned in a certain way.
    His way.
    As Mary Ellen came to and began to get her bearings back, he realized she was moving as he walked back into the room. “He was coming back into the room, and I was on the bed, I was very dizzy,” Mary Ellen said. “The next thing I knew, he was on top of me again.” And that’s when she felt “something cold” in the middle of her stomach. It was here when Mary Ellen first saw that, as she put it, “my clothes wre torn off down to my waist, but nothing from my waist down had been disturbed.”
    Looking toward her ribs, Mary Ellen noticed his fist going up and down and wondered what he was doing. She felt that “cold” feeling again—it was steel—on her ribs. It didn’t hurt. Not then. She was still groggy. Dizzy. The room was spinning. She didn’t have the strength to scream.
    Realizing she still had a chance to survive, Mary Ellen made a decision to fight back. “I remembered that I had read an article about self-defense,” she said. It was there, in her room, as the man called Ned, whom she had just met, began stabbing her in the chest that Mary Ellen decided not to be a victim any longer. Suddenly two lines from that self-defense article came back to her: “Hurt the attacker in his eyes. Try to blind him for a moment.”
    Without even thinking about it, totally involuntary, Mary Ellen reached up and raked her long fingernails across his face. (“I gouged his eyes as hard as I could.”) It was as if her arm had moved on its own. (“I didn’t even have to will it—it just happened.”)
    Mary Ellen never yelled or screamed. It