The Graffiti Priest

There was a stranger in their midst. Everyone in Villa Sicko knew it. The whiskeybreath slingers sharpening their talons over the bingo table knew it. The porcupine girls holed up in the bordello knew it. The dusty bellhops with their lopsided mustaches and mercenary fingers knew it. The bloated bankers on Carnival Street with their spats and their hollow walking canes stuffed with rolls of banknotes knew it. The horsekeeper with boils on his face and eyebrows like sagebrush knew it. In fact the only one who didn't know about it was Sheriff Detroit, who lay stone stiff in a pine box behind the apothecary shop. He was too wrapped up in issues of mortality to pay much heed.

The Graffiti Priest had arrived the night before, made his mark on the wall of a chickenshack on the outskirts of town. In the morning most of the chickens were found scorched to death, their ruined eggs still smoldering. Wolves were blamed, but no one believed it. His second mark he made on an oak tree often used for community hangings. He dipped his fingers in his paintbucket and flicked searing bullets of hellfire against the bark, where they ran in long jagged scars and rivulets. The scars seemed to form some kind of cryptic glyph which no one could make heads or tails of. But something told them if they could, they wouldn't like what they saw.