Raphael

I never wanted to live forever. Most people do but the truth is that I wanted to die before I hit eighteen and my dad could throw me out. But love makes you do crazy things.

I’d been planning my suicide for several years when it finally happened. My school had taken my entire senior class to England as it did with every senior class. The streets of London were cold and muddy, but I had reveled in all of it. I had waited for years, planned my suicide around this entire trip. I had scrimped and saved for the money to pay my way. It was the pinnacle of my meager little life, the climax to the meaningless play of my existence.

It was all so unreal, being there, walking the streets that Charles Dickens himself had walked down, thinking up brilliant ideas for his stories. Shakespeare, Austin, Byron, Shelley, Bronte; so much history and beauty to rediscover.

I was lucky when I got assigned a hotel room with an airhead Barbie-doll who was too busy chatting with her girlfriends to notice me sneaking out the window. I got lucky again in that they had assigned us a room on the first floor; I had never been a particularly big fan of heights.

I walked for hours, taking in everything my eyes laid on, breathing in the crisp early-morning air. I was surprised by how few people were out; in a city that big I had expected dozens of drug-dealers and working girls on every street corner.

It was close to three in the morning when I heard a strange sound, like gurgling. I was on a deserted street and there was an alleyway a few yards ahead of me; the sound seemed to be coming from there. I walked cautiously toward the alley, the sound growing louder and clearer with every step. I peeked around the corner.

I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first; the pavement was wet from a previous rain and a street light behind me caused a glare. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the harsh light but when it did the cold truth hit me.

A man was pressing a working girl up against a wall. There wouldn’t have been anything truly horrible in that, except the fact that I would’ve had to wash my eyes out with holy water. But she was clawing at him like an animal, trying to fight him, and all the while these horrible sounds came from her mouth. The man’s mouth was wrapped around the skin of her neck, and I could hear the faint sound of sucking echoing off the walls of the alley. Her protests were becoming weaker as he lifted his head from her neck. He tilted it back and gasped for air, his chest heaving and a sick, pleasured smile on his lips. And that’s when I saw it: blood dripping down his chin and neck, his tongue darting out to catch what he could of the crimson liquid.

My mind tried to wrap itself around what I was seeing, what was happening right in front of me, but it couldn’t. The only thing my mind could come to grips with at that moment was that he was opening his mouth wider and lowering his head to her neck again.

“Let go of her!” I heard someone yell.

The man’s eyes snapped to mine and I realized that not only had it been me that had spoken but I had also moved right out into the open.

Suddenly my feet were moving and I was bracing my body to tackle him. I was inches away from him when he just wasn’t there anymore. I landed hard on the ground, the sick thud of metal hitting my skull, and then darkness.

Awareness came to me slowly, not like in the movies where the heroine jerks upright after having a terrible nightmare. No, it came slowly, like waking up from a drug-induced haze or a night of sleeping off a shit-load of alcohol. First there was the distinct sound of silence when someone is hovering over you, then the shocking pain in my head, and then, as I opened my eyes, the blurred image of a man standing over me. I groaned in pain, and slowly the image became clearer. A shock of dark ringlets against a pale face so beautiful it could have belonged to a god, and the shining green eyes of an intelligent person staring back at me, so piercing it almost hurt. But they were cold, calculating; the eyes of a predator catching sight of his prey. These were not the eyes of a man, but of an animal.