The Runic Artist

Banksy was right. That was Nate’s first thought as he jumped the fence onto the railway tracks. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so. But it was the first time he’d almost landed in a pile of shit. So, Banksy was right, tramps really did shit everywhere. Carefully stepping away from the hopefully cold pile of excrement, Nate adjusted his black hoodie and took in a deep breath. It smelled, of course, but it felt like teenage rebellion, like a small slice of freedom.

The noises of the city in the background served to highlight the separation he now felt, being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. It made him smile. Nate started walking carefully over the tracks, extra vigilant now. Not for other people, though maybe he should’ve been. He just didn’t want to step on something gross or twist his ankle. Trying to drag himself over the fence with a twisted ankle was nothing but pain and frustration. A lesson he had learned in a previous foray and an experience that he wasn’t keen to revisit. Say what you would about Nate, he tried to learn from his mistakes.

Thankfully, it was a short walk to the train carriage he intended to decorate. Nate didn’t consider himself a vandal, though he was confident others would disagree. He’d read a quote once by Banksy that basically said that graffiti was a rational response to the in-your-face advertising of the modern world. Trying to remember the details he thought it was something along the lines of billboards, logos, and adverts were forced upon people without their consent and that turning it into something beautiful or thought provoking was art. Perhaps it was a bit hypocritical of him since graffiti was the same, but he could comfort himself with the fact he wasn’t trying to sell anyone anything. Maybe he was just a vandal after all.

His musings were cut short as his target loomed in front of him. The train carriage was one of the newer models with a giant strip down the middle of what Nate thought was a Tic Tac advert. It was hard to tell as someone had already graffitied over a large portion. Not an art piece, though. They’d just half-assed some letters that he figured was a tag. Tagging was a bit different from graffiti as a form art, so he didn’t feel bad about painting over the top of it.

As he spent a moment putting down his backpack and tools of the trade, he saw himself reflected in the window of the train with the ever-present city lights shining behind him. Nate liked how he looked, and based on a few of the girls from his school, he wasn’t the only one. Standing at around a hundred and eighty-five centimetres, he was fairly tall, sporting a lean build, with shaggy shoulder-length blonde hair and dark green eyes. He looked a lot like a surfer, though he’d never tried. Maybe if he lived closer to Sydney’s beaches, but he was just a poor kid from Sydney’s southwest.

Smiling at himself, he stepped back to take in the graffiti on the train and go over his plan. He’d spent most of the last three weeks at school refining the image he intended to overlay on top of the existing art. Painstakingly redrawing lines and links to achieve what he wanted. He’d love to have told people that it meant something. That there was a message in the image he intended to create. But there wasn’t. He just thought that it was beautiful and that beauty was its own reward. It was also a challenge. The lines had to be clean, the image clear. He wanted it to look like it had been printed onto the side of the train, not painted. To that end, he’d worked on a bunch of stencils that he was confident would create the image he had in mind.

Nate didn’t sign most of his work. Thinking about it like that made it sound like he was prolific in his graffiti. He wasn’t. He only added graffiti where he thought it would be beautiful or thought-provoking. That meant that he had maybe ten or so artworks around the city. He thought that was a decent effort for only having been in the game for two years. If he signed this piece, it would be the third that made the cut. The deciding factor wasn’t the quality of the work. It came down to how personal the piece was. He snorted as he felt himself growing pensive. He had a habit of doing so before starting a new piece. He tried to convince himself it was an opportunity of who he was and why he did what he did. An attempt to try to keep it all in perspective. But he had to admit he was probably just being moody because standing alone at night on the train tracks was a reminder that he was actually rather lonely.

Nate was an orphan. There, he said it. You would think that after knowing it for more than half of his life, he’d finally be okay with it, but the truth was, even after all this time, it still hurt. An ache in his heart that had gotten less over time but had never left. He didn’t think it ever would. He’d read somewhere that when you were emotionally scarred like him, the pain never truly left. That the hurt it caused remained the same for the rest of your life and that you just experienced it less because you thought about it less.

That was how he felt. He’d been raw and in pain after his parents died in a car accident when he was eight. A drunk driver had run a red light and t-boned them. He could still remember their faces, thankfully. He had photos of them, and he’d even worked them into one of his artworks. Small enough that they weren’t the focus, and it was one of the more out-of-the-way pieces, being around his suburb of Punchbowl. You would think that would be risky, to shit where you eat, as they put it. But no one in Punchbowl cared about that sort of thing. His work had ended up defaced a few months later anyway.

So, he was an orphan. Where had that left him? With his aunt, of course. A singularly selfish woman who had taken him in but never failed to remind him of all the sacrifices she was forced to make by having him sleeping under her roof. All the while, she was collecting extra welfare money from the government, which he supposed at least some of went towards feeding and clothing him. He’d heard worse horror stories from others in the government housing he lived in. At least his aunt didn’t beat him. Just berated him till he made himself scarce. So, he’d gotten used to being out late from an early age just to avoid the verbal abuse.

Nate rolled his shoulders. That was enough of that. Enough about the past. It was time for the present. Nate had long since learned that you couldn’t dwell only on the negative. Yes, his past had been painful. But his now, well, his now was alright. He thought about the day he’d had. His two best friends, Michael and Jung, had made plans to catch up tomorrow at Michael’s place. It was always Michael’s place, just because he had the most room.

That was for tomorrow, though. It was time to get to work before someone stumbled upon him or, worse, called the cops. He opened his backpack and pulled out his stencils before carefully unrolling them. Maybe some graffiti artists could rush their work and still achieve what they wanted, but that wasn’t his style. Swallowing the ever-present fear of being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, he carefully laid out his stencils. Next came the masking tape and, finally, his cans of spray paint. Four in total, two white and two black. He doubted he’d need all of them, but he didn’t want to run out before he was done and be left with a half-finished artwork. He wouldn’t get a chance to come back and fix it. As an afterthought, he grabbed his pocket knife from the bottom of his backpack and put it in the pocket of his hoodie. He mostly used it for cutting the masking tape, but on a couple of occasions, he’d used it to make last-minute changes to his stencils. Australia was pretty safe, and he’d never needed to use it for self-defence.

All prepared, he took a deep breath and got to work, tapping his stencils over the existing graffiti. It took him almost three hours of prep work to get it just right. All the stencils in the exact right spot. Double and triple-checked. That was something most people didn’t seem to realize about a lot of art. Like everything else worth doing, you spent a lot of time planning and preparing so that when you finally got around to doing it, you did it right. That was how Nate felt as he started shaking the spray paint cans. He’d done this right.

It ended up taking him another hour to finish. He’d been careful not to apply too much paint as he didn’t want it to run, and he had waited to let it dry a bit before carefully removing the stencils. Remove the tape too soon, and you run the risk of the paint running. Pull too late, when the paint has fully dried, and you risk tearing off some of the paint. Like a lot of things in life, it was all about timing. But now that it was done, he stood with a proud smile in front of his artwork. It was exactly what he had imagined. He’d changed it from a single white circle with an upside-down triangle inside, to six concentric circles, with the two outer circles being close together, and that same pattern mirrored as the circles got smaller. The final two circles had roughly one-tenth of the diameter of the outer circles, making it look like a distorted bullseye. The upside-down triangle remained in the third circle from the outermost ring, and he’d overlaid that entire section with a hexagon. Then, in the gaps between the outer and middle circles, he’d drawn some little icons he’d found online. With a few semi-circles added and a six-spoke cross within the hexagon, the entire artwork looked like some arcane ritual circle. He loved it.

Nate pulled his phone out of his pocket to take a few pictures. Watching his artwork through his phone, his eyes narrowed. He swore it looked brighter than it should. The white on black stood out clearly, and he didn’t think there was enough light from the moon above or the city lights behind him for it to be that clear. He walked closer to the finished artwork to get a closer look. As he did so, he felt it. The night was warm, as they tended to be during Spring in Sydney. But he could literally feel the temperature differential as he approached the train carriage. Had it been that hot today, and the metal was still cooling?

But, no, he’d felt the train himself while putting on the stencils, and while not cold, he was absolutely certain it hadn’t been hot. Staring at the artwork, he could swear it was getting brighter. As if that wasn’t weird enough on its own, it wasn’t getting brighter evenly. Some of the runes and geometric shapes glowed brighter than others, making his artwork look almost three-dimensional. His sense of danger spiked, and just as he was about to step back, the whole image melted away. Not like he’d seen in online videos of hot metal being poured like a liquid. No, the whole image just rippled like it was water before vanishing.

In its place, a yawning circle of perfect black was left. Nate turned to run, but he could already feel the hole in space where his artwork had been pulling him toward it. With one last desperate leap he tried to throw himself toward his backpack and the train rails they were sitting beside. As he got horizontal, the pull from the black hole increased, and he felt himself drawn into it. As he vanished into its shadowy depths, his last words were, “Oh shit!”