For the briefest moment, I saw the whole side of Calaphase’s house, a long low rectangle of red brick and white trim covered with a massive, elaborate graffiti tag, a tortured whirlpool of vines and chains and tentacles swirling towards a point just left of center.
Then the tentacles pulled us into the maelstrom-and we fell inside the tag.
Column of Hate
Our screams swept away on the whirlwind. Blinding waves of color assaulted my eyes. Burning torrents of magic twisted me up like a towel. An orange and black horizon flipped around us. Then a vast octopus of graffiti exploded outwards and swallowed us up.
It spit us out into empty space. A black glittering sheet rushed forward and hit us like a wall of concrete. Pain exploded in my cheek, my shoulder, my hip, my knee, and I registered a delayed whack-whack as Calaphase fell to the pavement beside me.
Don’t pass out. Don’t give up. Don’t let them win.
I opened my eyes. We were in absolutely the worst section of Atlanta I had ever seen, a cityscape so decrepit it bordered on the surreal. We stood in the twisted remnants of a concrete playground, hemmed in by tottering chainlink fences. Beyond the fences, hulks of building staggered up, forming a canyon of ruins. Deeper within the canyon, the pavement stepped down, a ravine of garbage piled up between a decayed tenement and a crumbling parking deck. The sea of garbage and rusted cars rippled out away from us across the broken pavement, seeming to crash in waves against a giant wall, a huge slab of cinderblocks that towered over us like a cliff at the dead end of the canyon.
Briefly I wondered whether this playground was a real place, whether we’d fallen into some tag-induced hallucination. But surely that was impossible; no-one could ink a whole world… could they? And the grit against my cheek didn’t feel like phantom dirt: it was real.
Then my eyes registered what was written on the cinderblock wall.
I staggered to my feet, staring up at the cliff in absolute horror. Spray painted at the upper edge of the huge wall of cinderblocks was a block letter logo: THOUGHT CRIME LORD. And beneath the logo, bleeding out over every surface, infinite layers of graffiti.
Every graffiti artist and style I’d seen across Atlanta were represented: bare white lines, repeated stencils, finely shaded oilchalk. How had they done this, cover a wall six stories high? Climbing on scaffolds? Hanging from ropes? On jetpacks? Both toys and masters sprayed here, leaving simple tags and extensive pieces, stretched-taffy letters and elegantly shaded portraits. Even Keif and Drive were represented by a few tall, narrow tags depicting cartoon rabbits in army fatigues. But the tags, pieces and masterpieces of all the artists-save one-looked slightly old, worn by weather and time, as if all the artists-save one-had given up on this playground and yielded it to its new overlord: the graffiti killer.
The designs of the journeyman and the apprentice were absent; this place was the exclusive canvas of the master. All of the familiar signs were here: the vines, the chains, the barbed wire; but he had not stopped there, experimenting with new motifs that I hadn’t seen elsewhere: ships crewed by hostile hip-hop frogs; herds of blood-dripped sheep with sparkling eyes; a vast writhing worm wrapped around the arc of a swinging pendulum-figures tortured and amazing. But across the cliff I recognized a familiar design: the skyline of Atlanta, a grassy dome of a hill, and a coiling rose hovering between two sets of tombstones.
The same type of tag that had killed Revenance.
The vast tag seemed to shiver, a wave of wind rippling over the grassy dome, and I seized Calaphase by the arm, pulling him to his feet. “We have to go. We have to get shelter. We have to get you shelter. That entire thing is a vampire trap!”
Calaphase’s head snapped quickly from side to side, sizing up the canyon around us. “The opening faces the rising sun,” he said. “Think, Dakota! The trap is almost fifty yards away. How do you think he planned to get me into it?”
Good point. The master tag was too far away-probably. Surely it couldn’t grab us all the way out here? I tensed, eyes seeking movement. Then I felt a prickling, goose bumps rising on my flesh-but it wasn’t goose bumps. It was a flood of mana-but not from the master tag.
“Behind us!” I said, and we dove under the uncoiling whip of a serrated wire that trailed drops of glowing blood as it snapped through the air. Sure enough, there was another tag, a sprawled octopus snapping hungrily on the wall of a decayed tenement looming behind us.
On the cliff, the master tag’s vines were now uncoiling, and we dodged back from them too, edging backwards, away from the tags, until we butted against the chainlink fence barring us from the parking deck’s dark, twisted innards. Light flared from within, flashes in darkness, illuminating moving shapes which bore no resemblance to anything human.
“I think the tagger means for us to go to the tag,” I said, “rather than it come to us.”
“What do we do?” Calaphase said. “Run the gantlet?”
I swallowed. The tagger’s playground was a box canyon of buildings. The black pavement stretched away from us, between the expanding rings of the master tag on the cliff and the waving wires of the coiled design on the tenement that had brought us here. Some of the twisted remnants of the swings and jungle gyms had tags on them, almost certainly traps. At the other end of the weed-strewn lot, forming the only opening in the box canyon, was a painted wooden fence, filled with hundreds of marks by the tagger.
Only then did I notice that the tagger was breaking the unwritten rules of the Atlanta graffiti scene: he had painted over the marks of other taggers. In my research, I’d found other taggers had immense contempt for paintovers and whitewashes; no one with any skill did them. I scanned the lot rapidly. The more I looked, the more I saw his tags almost desperately trying to plaster over his competition. The better the original, the harder the tagger tried to outdo it.
And through it all, woven through every design, was a quirky spray of wildstyle letters that I now recognized as the artist’s actual ‘tag’, his signature: the word XRYBE over a stylized road snaking into the distance. At first I didn’t get it, but then I saw older variants, the same road with all the letters above it still spelled out, still wildstyle, so I had trouble parsing it: S-T-R-E-E, then T, the X was actually a jammed-together S-C… and then I got it.
“ Streetscribe,” I breathed. The name Revenance had warned us about. It was everywhere. “ Someone is crying for recognition.”
“Dakota!”
“What? No, no, we can’t risk it,” I said, glancing around. “The playground equipment is tagged. The far wall is tagged. This whole place is one big trap.”
“Can we go back through the tag that sent us?” Calaphase asked.
I glanced up at it. It was weakening, spinning down, though it wasn’t clear that it was actually going to shut off. “No,” I said. “I think it needs to recharge-and besides, do you have any idea how to work that thing? Because I sure don’t-not yet, anyway.”
He glanced around. “We can climb the fence there, try the parking deck-”
“He’ll have tagged the cars,” I said-and then a solution hit me. “He’ll have tagged everywhere he could-so let’s go where he can’t.”
There was a narrow gap between the parking lot and the tenement. I ran to the corner of the chainlink fence and peered through, seeing a long parking lot and a ruined carousel covered by old graffiti. The fence was strong, the chainlink newer, and rings of razorwire guarded its top twenty feet above-and it held no surface for the tagger. Little tags lurked at its base, squealing sausage monsters like blind piglets, but they were too simple to pose real danger. I paid them no mind, spinning round over them as I built up mana and cried: “Striking serpent, open a door!”