Soil meandered in a serpentine path toward the rocky beach at the edge of the lake. Like a sleepwalker, William’s slow steps brought him to the shore. Shifting and sliding with each wave, scraping against the stones, was the lantern. William knelt at the edge of the water, cried out Meirong’s name and wept.
As the sun sank into the western shore of the lake, he found himself on the stairs to the lighthouse. Rubbing his eyes, William breathed a sigh and plodded up the stairs to fire the light. Everything was in order. Somehow, he’d polished the mirror, set the counterweights and filled the kerosene tank without realizing.
Once the flame was lit and the gears set it turning, William opened the door and stepped out onto the platform. Leaning on the rail, he watched the lake swallow the last sliver of daylight.
William buried his face in his hands.
“Meirong,” he said.
Willlliam…
He raised his head. Like a whisper on the wind, it came again.
Willlliam…
He turned to the east and looked down. Knee-deep in the water stood a motionless figure.
“Meirong!”
At the sound of her name, Meirong looked up. When William saw the pulsing, blue eyes, he knew it was her.
“Meirong,” he called and laughed. “Stay there, I’ll be right down.”
William rattled down the steps, flung open the door and raced to the beach. As he drew nearer, Meirong shuffled out of the water. Her unblinking glowing eyes burned with longing. One hand reached out to him.
Willllliam…
“Oh, Meirong,” he said, “It’s been so long…”
Loose stones scattered as William stumbled to a stop. His eyes grew wide. Meirong lurched forward.
Willllliam…
Fleshless fingertips clacked together. Pulsing eyes burned brighter as she came closer. Some of the smaller stones stuck to the blackened flesh that clung to her feet, falling off again with each step.
Then the smell hit him.
She smells nothing like rotting leaves. She… she smells dead.
“I am so, so sorry, Meirong,” William whispered.
And then he ran.
After the first few steps, he lost his footing on the stony beach. Meirong was on him in an instant. She grabbed at his shirt, her bony fingers shredding the fabric. William cried out, looking back over his shoulder. Meirong’s jaw hung open. Most of the flesh had rotted, exposing dirt-crusted bone. Inside what was left of her mouth were only clumps of soil. But her eyes. Her eyes burned with a longing that transcended the grave.
“I’m so sorry,” William said again as he scrambled away. Meirong grabbed his pant cuff but lost her grip. He found his feet and darted away.
Willllliam…
Behind him, William heard Meirong moving across the beach. By degrees, she gained purchase. He hazarded a glance behind. The intensity of her eyes had grown tenfold, illuminating the ruin of her face in a ghastly blue luminescence. To his horror, she was no longer lurching.
Scuttling was the word that sprang into William’s mind. Crablike, she moved after him on all fours with a sidelong shuffle that made him cry out. He was sprinting now. The open lighthouse door was only ten yards away. Meirong was gaining on him with frightful speed.
Willllliam…
Her voice was right behind his ear as he crossed the threshold and slammed the door shut. There was a sickening crunch. William looked down. Splintered phalanges from two of her fingers writhed on the floor next to his toe. Meirong threw herself against the door. It was all William could do to hold it shut.
Willlliam…
There was no bolt on the inside of the lighthouse door, only a simple metal latch. The door thudded against William’s shoulder. In a mounting frenzy, she repeatedly bashed herself against the door.
“Meirong,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please… please just leave me alone.”
WILLLIAM…
The scream made his scalp crawl. Over and over, Meirong hurled herself against the wood. It was only a matter of time before William would lose his footing. He spied the toolbox under the stairs. Keeping his shoulder firmly against the door, he stretched out with his foot and dragged the box closer. Placing his knee against the bottom of the door, William lowered into a half crouch as his left hand rummaged through the box. The buffeting against the door remained steady as his fingers lighted on the tool they sought.
The last time he had used the chisel was to mark Meirong’s name upon her gravestone. Between jolts to the door, William was able to wedge the chisel into the doorframe and hammered it deep, bruising the palm of his hand.
Meirong threw herself against the door. The chisel held fast. William retreated one step, rubbing his shoulder.
WILLLLIAM…
He put his hands over his ears.
“I’m sorry!” he said. “Please forgive me. I’m sorry. Please…please leave me alone.”
He fell to his knees crying. A full minute passed before he realized Meirong was no longer trying to get in.
Maybe, he wished. Maybe… maybe she’s forgiven me. Maybe she’s returned to her grave.
His fingers crept toward the chisel. Shaking his head, William sprinted up the stairs.
He flew through the door and stood at the railing. He looked toward the grave but it was too dark to see. Waiting for the turning light of the lighthouse to illuminate the grave, he heard a scraping sound from below. Holding his breath, William grasped the railing, leaned out and looked down.
Twenty feet below a brilliant pair of blue lights looked up at him. Pulsing in time with William’s heartbeat, those eyes thrummed with frenzied intent. Putrefied flesh scrapped off scrambling fingers and toes as Meirong skittered up the side of the lighthouse. Every few seconds the scant purchase she found in the narrow cracks of the whitewashed limestone gave way and Meirong fell until a finger or toe caught. With supernatural strength and unearthly resolve, it was only a matter of time.
“Captain,” the mate of the steamship Algoma said, drawing open the cabin door. “There’s no light from the tower at Misery Bay, sir.”
The captain made a note in his log. Three days later, after dropping off coal and passengers in Sault Ste. Marie, he was on the bridge as they steamed past the bay.
“It’s dark again, sir,” said the mate.
“Stop in at Providence Bay,” said the captain. “We’ll report it to the local constabulary.”
The same constable who had agreed to William’s special drinking hours rode out to Misery Bay. The keeper’s cottage was empty. The stove looked as if it had been a good many days since it had seen its last fire.
The constable discovered that the door of the lighthouse was barred from the inside. With a hammer he found in the stable, he managed to shatter one of the hinges, twisting the door enough to crawl through.
Halfway up the spiral staircase the constable knew there would be no happy ending. Wrinkling his nose, he opened the trap door. William sat with his back against the glass, milky dead eyes staring toward the horizon.
As the constable checked for signs of trauma, he tilted William’s head. When his jaw fell open, an avalanche of dirt spilled from William’s mouth, soil from that last kiss Meirong had scuttled up the lighthouse wall to deliver.
* * * * *
Originally from Britain, Dave Beynon came to Canada as an infant, growing up on a farm just outside of Dundalk, Ontario. He has been a cow milker, a residence manager at the Hamilton Downtown YMCA (there’s a novel waiting to be written about those four years), a factory worker and a purveyor of fine corrugated packaging and displays.
Dave writes speculative fiction of varying genres and lengths. In 2011, his novel, The Platinum Ticket was shortlisted for the Terry Pratchett Prize.
He lives in Fergus, Ontario with his wife, two children and a Golden Retriever who runs his life.
Graffiti Borealis
Lisa Poh
Stepping out into the dark after work, Daniel put his parka hood up, plugged in his earphones, turned up the volume and started walking as quickly as he could. He hurried, almost jogged, through the icy slush on the edge of the pavement, keeping his gaze straight in front. By now, he’d figured out the best routes through the city, the cleanest ones with the fewest disturbances. But still, they were inescapable.
At the traffic junction, he had to stop. Immediately, a luminous gaggle of mermaids slithered almost off the brick wall at the street corner, beckoning with their neon green arms. Over his digital tracks, he heard their tinkling laughter. Against his will, he looked. They squiggled on their spray-painted rock, smiling, suggesting he come closer, only to switch to jeering as he shook his head and turned away.
Just before passing through the tunnel that led home, he braced himself for the seven screaming men. He didn’t want to look at them, but the hyper-realistic scowling faces always drew him to look. Red and bloated, veins bulging, they screamed so hard he could almost feel the hot steam against his right cheek.
He stopped at the bank to make a withdrawal for the coming week. But even inside the safety of the glass-enclosed foyer, the silver alien outside fixed its creepy bug-eyed gaze on him. When he turned around, the alien pointed to its sewn-shut mouth, but beckoned to him urgently as though it had a message.
Daniel rushed out of the bank without a backward glance. He didn’t understand why these graffiti artists, or whatever they called themselves, painted such strange things. Why couldn’t they stick to tagging with letters, or paint happy, pretty things? Sunflowers, cute puppies, even shiny sports cars— he would have no problems with that. But these creatures, they were tormenters that he had to endure in silence. Who would believe him if he said he saw graffiti come to life?
Home in his third-floor flat, Daniel collapsed on his bed and stared up at the bare walls. Moving to Montreal had been a mistake. It had only been two months, but he felt like giving up. Maybe his mother was right. He should quit his dream job, abandon the permanent residency that he’d jumped through hoops for, and go back home to a country full of rules. Rules like the one that called graffiti vandalism, and made it punishable by jail and caning. He hated those rules growing up, but there wasn’t any graffiti. Maybe that was the trade off.
One wintry afternoon, he came across the first piece of graffiti he liked. Half-hidden under the snow-covered spiral staircase of a Portuguese rotisserie that had gone out of business, the rooster peeped out and flapped its wings in a friendly fashion. Someone had taken the trouble to paint it in great detail: it had a tawny head with a scarlet comb, a shiny blue-black body and jaunty tail feathers of red, orange and gold.
Before really realizing it, Daniel had crouched down by the wall to look at it. The rooster crooked its head sideways at him as if to say hello. Daniel couldn’t resist reaching out to stroke the bird’s shiny feathers. His fingers came in contact with the texture of smooth paint over sun-warmed brick. The bird shivered in excitement and a frisson of saturated color ran through it from top to bottom.
Then, when he withdrew his hand, the bird came with it.
Daniel’s surprised breath puffed out in the freezing air. The bird was attached to his fingers, a glowing translucent three-dimensional hologram that weighed nothing at all. It flapped its wings and chirruped. No amount of scrapping against the rough brick would make it go back onto the wall.
So he took the rooster home. When he touched his bedroom wall, it leapt onto the peeling paint and skittered around the room, finally coming to rest somewhere above his bed and letting out a satisfied crow.
Even though he now technically kept a piece of graffiti as a pet, it didn’t mean that he liked the other graffiti any more. But they grew more aggressive by the day. While they would just stay in place and hoot at him in the beginning, they now followed him, slithering across the length of a wall as he walked by, asking him to stop and chat in a mixture of English and French.
It didn’t stop there. No longer could Daniel stand on a street corner without some figure bulging out of the wall, hands or appendages outstretched trying to touch him. He took to walking off the sidewalk so as to keep his distance from any buildings. People gave him crazy looks and cars honked at him, but he blocked it all out. He had worked out a route that avoided the worst areas, and clung to his routine, declining invitations from colleagues to go for drinks or hit the clubs. It wasn’t the kind of social life he’d hoped for, but at least he was making it work. He wasn’t giving up.
The curveball he couldn’t avoid, though, was the annual company conference in another part of town where he’d never been. Daniel spent hours virtually panning through the street view on Google Maps, scanning for graffiti-stricken zones and mapping out a way to get from the metro to the venue and back.
Unfortunately, upon leaving the conference, he was not prepared for the massive protest march that came storming down the road. Daniel didn’t know who the protesters were or what they protested but police sirens were blaring, and he heard a flash bomb or something like one go off. And then, swarms of people were running towards him, away from the police lineAnd then, swarms of people were running towards him, away from the police line. Separated from his colleagues, he was swept up away with the crowd in the wrong direction.”
The crowd dissipated into solitary flocks a few junctions later, leaving Daniel alone and disoriented. His phone showed the roads to the metro, but the connection was slow and the photos didn’t load. And why were his hands trembling?
“To hell with it,” Daniel uttered, shoving his phone back in his jacket and shaking himself down. Here he was, a grown man, reduced to being afraid of walking in a strange place in the dark. He hadn’t felt so weak and humiliated since he was ten and his fellow scouts abandoned him in the Malayan jungle as a prank. He was sick and tired of letting his fears rule over him. Taking the next turn, he struck out recklessly towards the approximate direction of the metro in the straightest line possible.
It was only after he had plunged deep into a long back alley that he realized the place had been graffiti-bombed right in the middle.
The murals and tags on both sides rose two storeys high and flashed like disco lights as they discovered his presence. Before he could turn tail and run, two massive pink and green glowing slogans had slid almost all the way off both sides of the wall, locking 3D-block letters together to form a barrier. The surrounding graffiti figures cheered like they were in a hockey arena, as on the other end, a massive figure billowed out of the wall and started walking towards him in slow ponderous steps, leaving only the chains around its feet still attached to the wall.
Daniel swallowed his breath. It was a two-legged monster right out of some nightmarish horror film, eight feet tall with a body like Conan the Barbarian, covered by rippling, blue sinewy muscles that looked rock hard, despite being translucent. Its bestial face had three red eyes that burnt holes through his composure, and it parted its pale lips to show a mouth full of sharp teeth. Then it spoke.
“I’m really sorry we had to meet like this, but we’ve been trying to make contact with you for months, to no avail.”
“I… I beg your pardon?” Daniel asked. The three-eyed beast-man spoke with the most genteel of English accents, like a news commentator on the BBC or a butler in a Merchant-Ivory film.
“Our agents have been trying to communicate with you but reported that you’ve steadfastly ignored their advances. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this for a while. You see, we need your help.”
“What do you mean? My help with what?”
“It isn’t everyday that we come across someone who can see us and talk to us. But even more special than that is the gift you have.”
Daniel thought of his pet rooster, scratching itself on the wall above his bedpost, and didn’t answer.
“We know you can move us. When you touch us, you have the ability to unbind us from the place where we were born and affix us in a new location. You have done this once before.”
“And so what if I can?”
“We have a mission for you. A rescue mission. There’s a strand of historic houses in the city that’s due for demolition very soon. A matter of weeks. We have a large number of comrades living there in urgent need of relocation. And you’re the person who can help.”
Daniel racked his brain for the appropriate thing to say. “I’m very sorry for your, ah, loss. But I don’t think I have what it takes to help you. I mean, the very nature of graffiti is meant to be temporal, right? Your creators didn’t mean for you to live forever.”
The graffiti behemoth shook his head. The glow of his body dimmed and brightened.
“We understand temporal, human. Sun, rain and snow deplete our vitality and shorten our lifespan. We die when we are faded and broken. This fate we accept. But that doesn’t mean that those of us that are young and well made wish to perish with our homes.”
The graffiti spectators cheered this statement.
“I really can’t do this. I know nothing about graffiti. How would I get into those houses to move them? Where would I move them? I don’t even know this city well.”
“We can help you.”
The gigantic green snake on the wall next to Daniel uncoiled itself and hissed in French, “Find La Guéparde. She’s my maker. She will help you.”
The snake reared up, its emerald scales glittering, and its tail flicked out of the wall, pointing to the stylized tag above its head.
The blue beast-man repeated its plea, his red eyes gentle and sad. “You were afraid of us. But you see, we cannot hurt you. We have no substance. We cannot even help ourselves.”
That night, Daniel lay in his bed, awake, thinking about the resignation letter he’d typed up and saved in his computer. All he had to do was hand it in, and buy a one way ticket home and it would be the end of this strange, ridiculous ordeal and the end of his life in Canada. There was no need for him to submit to the harassment and turn into some sort of cat burglar who could be charged for breaking and entering as well as vandalism.
Tesseracts Seventeen Page 18