Authors: Mercedes Keyes
Sylvia lay in disbelief. Slowly she sat up in her bed, staring straight ahead, stunned. He’d left her, just like that. Just when she’d been willing to give in to what she was feeling. His exit had been slow, as if giving her a chance to stop him. She hadn’t. She felt like her world was spinning and her life was being turned upside down. She leaned forward, with her elbows above her knees, her face cradled in her palms. With a sigh she spoke out loud. “Oh god…what’s going on?”
“Tell me about it…what a loser. Don’t worry about it…”
Sylvia’s ears began ringing as everything in front of her turned to a flashing bright white light. Slowly she rose with a slamming heart, turning on her bed with wide terrified eyes to look behind her.
“…I’ll pick up right where he left off, baby…an’ I’ll be going all the way.”
“Noooo!
Shaaaawn!
Oh god!” Sylvia screamed at the top of her lungs, lunging like a shot from beside her bed, racing for the bedroom door. Burning pain sliced at her scalp as her head was snatched back with him gripping a handful of her hair, yanking her away from the door. The brute strength of him was more than she could handle, being taken by surprise as he slung her to the floor, kicking the door closed. Sylvia continued to scream Shawn’s name over and over.
“Shaaaawn…Shaaaawn! Eeeeee! Shaaaawn!”
“Shhhhh…shhhhh. He can't hear you, he's gone. I'll take care of you now...shhhhh,” his soft warning was backed by the knife he waved before her. “Don’t make me use this on you. What a mess it would make. Let’s not make this messy,” he informed her softly, her hair still in his hand as he kneeled beside her, his mouth at one cheek, kissing as he held the knife at the other. "Now, let's move this back... to the bed, shall we?"
*
“Sonofabitch!” Shawn spat, standing at his front door after removing his luggage from the backseat of the rental. He’d forgotten to get his keys from Sylvia. Now he had to look foolish and go back and face her again to get his keys. He wasn’t afraid to face her again. The problem was that he was weak. It had taken everything in him to walk away from her just now. If he went back, he was afraid of what would happen. He was afraid. He stood there a moment, mustering the nerve to go back. Taking a very deep breath, having no other choice, he headed back across the road.
*
“Please, please, please, please, please don’t do this to me…pleeeease!” Sylvia cried, begging as the man snatched her from the floor, maintaining the tight grip on her hair as he directed her back to the bed, angry because she had refused to move when he asked her to.
“After the way he left you? Come oooon, you know you want it. I bet you’re still wet,” he rasped out, breathing hard as he forced her head back and down on the bed, the knife close to her skin. He straddled her waist, placing the knife in his mouth a moment to roughly grab one wrist, pinning it beneath one of his knees then doing the same with the other, pressing painfully on them to hold her in place there. Sylvia tried to buck him off, but he quickly grabbed the knife to still her, using it to caress her along her jaw, down by her ear, along side her neck and over the bony knobs at the top of her chest plate and down into the shirt, where he shifted the knife, using it to cut a rip in the front of her shirt. Sylvia screamed out again, now sobbing out of control, shifting her body beneath him as he cut and ripped her t-shirt to her midriff, she twisted about, turning in vain to dislodge him. “Keep that up, you gonna force me t’poke you one. Trouble with that is, I get started…I may not stop. Now you don’t want that, do ya?”
“Emmmmph…emmmm-emmmm,” Sylvia cried and whimpered, starting to shake uncontrollably.
“Shhhhh…shhhhh,” he quieted her, coming down on top of her to kiss her, his hand inside her shirt, squeezing her breast.
{{{ Knock, knock, knock }}}
“Sylvia! It’s me, I need my keys…” He called, letting himself back into her kitchen door.
The man reared up, flipping around in a sitting position, startled by Shawn’s voice, taking the knife away from Sylvia for a split second.
“Shaaaawn! Pleeeease! Help meeee - pleeeease!!!!”
The moment she started screaming, she reared her legs up and back, kicked forward with both, using every bit of strength in her, slamming the bottom of her feet against her intruder’s back, sending him off the bed and into the wall. She turned, rolling off the bed, screaming longer and louder, filled with more fright than she’d ever known in her life, scrambling to find her phone, his name a loud shrill alarm begging for help.
“Shaaaawn! Shaaaawn! Shaaaaawn!!!”
Startled into action, Shawn charged for her bedroom with Sylvia’s screams filling the house and his hearing. He slammed the door wide with such an adrenal force of his forearm that it wedged the doorknob into the wall, knocking a hole in it, shocked and enraged to see a man struggling up from the floor, a knife in hand. Everything started happening in a blinding light of slow motion: Sylvia struggling up from the floor sobbing, her shirt ripped and torn open, her hair in extreme disarray. Her face wet and tear-streaked in terror. The man responsible, coming at him with the intent of getting through him. All of this Shawn took in in a matter of seconds, igniting within him an instantaneous rage that bordered on madness.
“Sha-Shaaaawn!”
Sylvia was on the verge of collapse. Shaking from the nightmare taking place around her, she couldn't figure where it was, taking a moment to notice that it was lying on the floor, between her bed and bed table. Crawling, she scrambled to it, everything was spinning around her. Her ears were ringing; between the sharp high pitch sound, there was a roaring noise. The floor beneath her seemed to be tilting and swaying. She grabbed for the phone and with blurred vision, pressed the nine. From the other side of the bed, she could hear heavy and hard impacts like something being whacked, mixed with thuds. The bed was moving with such violent force it added emphasis to the violent sounds around her. It all seemed so surreal. At the same time, she was sobbing into the phone…begging for help.
“Pleeease…pleeease, Sylvia Payne—help, pleeeease!”
she screamed out, dropping the phone, trying to make it to the other side of the bed where Shawn was pummeling her stalker. There was red…she could see red everywhere. Though dizzy and weak, she could see that he was going to kill the man - his entire body was locked into every punch that landed into her stalkers face.
“Shawn, stop! Stop…please, stop…you gonna kill’im…ya’gonna kill’im,” she was sobbing. Unmindful of his rage, she stood swaying and fell towards him to push him off the man, trying to stop him from hitting him anymore and fell over in her effort. She grabbed at his shirt, pulling herself up with it. “Shawn, stop!” She gave the last of her energy to scream at him. Breathing hard, Shawn backed off with tears streaming from his blood-smeared face. His hand and arm was bleeding from getting cut with the knife. The sirens were suddenly outside, loud and wailing. The door burst open with officers flooding the house, three of them with their guns drawn.
“Hold it right there! Don’t move!”
they warned Shawn, because he was the only one standing. Breathing hard, he leaned back against the door and slid down it to the floor where Sylvia knelt sobbing. “Shawn,” she whimpered. Needing to calm his rage, grappling with the heat of the moment, he reached for her.
The police rushed into the room, viewing the scene before them.
Officer Royce Collier was the first in the room. The same officer who quieted down Shawn’s party due to Sylvia’s call. The same officer who escorted her home. The same who came and advised her to program her phone, stood returning his gun to its holster.
“We’re going to need an ambulance here—now! Hurry!”
Copyright © 2002 Amber Swann Publishing Inc.
Written by Mercedes Keyes, All Rights Reserved
Collaborative assistance from, Lawrence James.
Thank you, I needed the help with this one.
“Had you seen Mr. Raymond Olivetti before you encountered him outside the store?” Officer Collier asked, gathering more information for the report he would have to make out concerning the attack. Sylvia sat in the hallway of the emergency rooms trying to answer the questions asked her. Shawn was in one of the emergency cubicles behind a curtain, getting stitched up. Their assailant was upstairs in ICU, getting worked on to re-inflate a collapsed lung, set three broken ribs, a broken nose, fractured jaw and needing sutures as well.
As important as it was for her to answer the questions posed to her, it was the last thing she wanted to do. Her mind was spinning with images and a fright that wouldn’t go away. She rocked back and forth with her arms folded before her stomach in a failing effort to fight back tears that continued to stream from her eyes unchecked. Her ears were ringing and she fought down the need for a soul-shaking cry. She’d refused an examination because Raymond hadn’t been successful in going all the way with his plans. Her scalp still stung and throbbed in certain areas from his forceful yanking and hold. Again she reached up in the area where it throbbed, running her fingers nervously through her hair. She removed several strands within her fingers that had been snatched out in the struggle.
She sat looking in her hand at the large amount of long, dark brown strands, turning her hand to let them float to the floor. He’d asked her another question. She wiped away softly streaming tears, not sure of what he’d just asked, unable to focus clearly on the things happening around her. Again she reached into her thick mane; more loose hair. The other hand held a small stack of brochures and leaflets with titles like,
Rape: How to move forward and forget
and
Life After Rape
,
along with sheets on outreach groups in the area and numbers to call.
“Excuse me, officer, but could we come to the police station to finish this questioning tomorrow? I think we’ve both been through enough tonight,” Shawn asked, having stepped up slowly after watching her a moment behind the parted curtain once they were done with him. Sylvia looked up at him, silent, weary and shaken. Her eyes pooled even more, but she didn’t move. His one arm was bandaged from the cuts. Blood stained his once-clean shirt and he looked just as weary as she did. He’d almost killed a man because of her. The scene played once again in her mind. She looked down from him, closing her eyes, wondering would the event ever stop replaying in her head.
Shawn swallowed, unable to handle Sylvia being silent. What had this done to her? What had it done to them? For the second time that evening, he was truly afraid. The first had been hearing the sound of her piercing scream and cry to him for help, only to burst open the door to find her almost raped, assaulted and struggling up from the floor. He felt it again, the overwhelming need to reach out and kill the man. Standing there, he knew had she not stopped him, he would have. Nothing was more sure and startling than right then…facing the absolute knowledge that he loved her as he had never loved another. He would kill for her. Something told him as well, that he would gladly die for her. Never again did he want to see her as she was now. Within his very being, rage battled with his need to grab her, pull her to his body, and squeeze the ugliness of the past couple of hours from her mind and the ache it wrung in her stomach, causing her to bend over once again, rocking.
Pulling him from his stormy mindset, the officer agreed with his request. “Sure, ummm, that’ll be fine. I’ll give you two a ride home. Just come in tomorrow, sometime early afternoon. I’ll finish this then. I have most of what I need, anyway,” he offered, standing from the bench beside Sylvia, who was staring bleakly downward. “I’ll bring the car up to the door; that will give you two a moment alone,” he added, walking away, putting the pen in his pocket, hanging the clipboard sideways on his fingers down by his side as he made his exit through the electronic, sliding glass doors. Watching him exit, Shawn knelt before Sylvia, taking the hand she used to pull loose hair from her head. Her eyes met his and tears fell from both. He swallowed and squeezed her hand. “Tonight…you’re staying with me. Understand?” This quiet command was one Sylvia had no intention of refusing, as her barely discernible nod affirmed.
The ride back to Shawn’s place from the hospital took thirty-five minutes, both quiet, sitting in the back seat of the squad car. Sylvia was sitting against the door looking out the window, with an open space between her and Shawn that she widened as the ride went on. He sat staring at her profile as she watched the heavy, sleet-type of snow fall, large clusters colliding with the window as they rode. He wanted to hold her, but something in her manner made him reject the idea at the moment.
“Looks like we’re going to get a pile up. I hear two to three inches. I hope it doesn’t freeze tomorrow. People will be sliding all over the highway,” Officer Collier offered in the silence of his vehicle. Only the sounds of his leather jacket rubbing as he manipulated the steering wheel while driving and the radio dispatch could be heard.
“Yeah…that’s what I hear, too. Nothing new in Wisconsin with that. You’d think people would be used to it by now, but commonsense has been traded for stupidity and fast cars.”
“Oh, and don’t I know it. For some reason, they think modern technology and aerodynamics means no more sliding on icy highways…but we’ll spend the day scooping people out of the ditch. God only knows how many fatalities will happen. Hopefully none, but not likely.”