The Rain of London
The Rain of London
The wet drops came down on my face, as if the sky was kissing me all over. People ran with
their jackets over their heads and had a tense expression on their face. None of them seemed to
realize, that it was only water, not poison as their faces suggested. People might find it odd that
I enjoy this kind of weather, but who cares? There isn’t much pleasure in life so why take away
a thing as natural as the rain?.
I walked down Oxford Street; people were still running to nearby shelters to escape from
the “deadly” rain. The splashing sounds of the rain and the cars making their characteristic
humming sounds were like a symphony to me. All troubles seemed to go away in this almost
dreamlike world of mine, until a gunshot penetrated the idyllic scenery that had kept me away
from reality. I felt people staring at me from the doorway of all the shops along the street.
I couldn’t understand why they were looking at me. A woman screamed and pointed towards me
while she was shouting,
“He’s got a gun!”
That made no sense to me; I just figured that she was insane or something. But then the horrific
truth hit me as if I was just hit by a baseball bat. In front of me lay the body of a young woman;
the rain had washed her blood out onto the road were it formed a pattern that slowly spelled
out my name. “Maxwell Swayne”.
My mind couldn’t comprehend the episode that had just taken place. I felt like I had been
staring at the corpse for hours, but then I heard the sound of sirens that broke the sickening
silence that had arisen. The natural thing to do was to run, it seemed, so I did! As I ran away
from the crime scene, I glanced back to have a last look at the corpse. People had started to
gather around it, and the police had arrived. I sat my pace up and took a sharp turn into an alley.
The rain poured down, but it wasn’t kissing me anymore, it was as though it slapped me in
the face instead. My hand wouldn’t let go of the still warm gun; it was locked into my fingers. It
was a part of me now; if I let go of it I would die. “What have I done?” I screamed towards the
crying sky, but I got no reply from its merciless tears. Instead I heard voices screaming: “He’s in there”.
I started panicking and raised my quivering arm in the direction of the approaching voices.
A bobby came running around the corner but stopped with a terrified look upon his face when
he saw the gun. “Put the gun down and place your hands where I can see them!” he said with a
nervous quiver in his voice as he pointed his gun towards me. He was young and didn’t have
much experience in the art of crime fighting I could see, but he was still calmer than me. I felt the
raindrops pounding on my forehead; it just made the situation more confusing and tense.
Suddenly a man in a white coat came running into the alley and stopped next to the bobby.
“Maxwell, put the gun down! I’m here to help you”. He seemed to know me, and I felt like I
knew him, I trusted him. I was about to put the gun down when a cat suddenly jumped up from
a garbage can behind me. My hand reacted to the sudden chock and squeezed the trigger of the gun.
A piercing sound drowned all the rains splashing sounds and humming of the cars. Almost
immediately after the first shot I heard a second one. Everything went into slow-motion and
strange memories of my life flashed before my eyes as I fell backwards. A distant sound of sirens
and men talking brought me back from my trip down memory lane. The rain fell directly down on my
face as I was being moved into an ambulance, I kept getting small flashbacks but I still had a
hold of reality. “We’re losing him!” were the last words I heard. The light of life faded away and
everything went black, but slowly emerged a white light that attracted me in a strange way.
The rain had finally stopped…
Sebastian H. Christophersen