Her finger traces the craquelure of a white-painted brick wall, switching along and over the severe network breaking there. She wants to peel it with her own nail, but she knows she won't have to, and after a while she leaves, for she can't frustrate her impulses anymore. And for a time the wall is regular. Looking out over an alley while the humble grocery front side is all rattling glass and lottery tickets and floating on cigarette sales to the constant hum of uptown traffic.

It needs a new coat, a common mantra. But this was the new coat. Months old, in fact. But give it another week and the rotted paint would flake off until it piled at the foot of the wall like composite snow. What lay beneath it, an old culprit. A script longstanding. Bold and alien, and by some standards, reverenced.
This was not the first time the wall had been painted. Anti-graffiti projects, rejuvenators, and college paint-crews all have had their turns. And all of them have had their work peal like skin within months of laying it down. No chemical scrub could remove the script permanently either. Even the more astute of contractors who thought to clad the wall in sheet metal panels could only scratch their head to know their work had buckled as if a great heat had warped it not unlike plastic at a fire.

When the wall stood fully exposed in the sun, it was its own attractant. A work of lettering, though more runic than alphabetic, the characters interlocking but somehow still echoing of some apocryphal Blackletter. It stood roughly three feet tall and almost eight feet in length. And the common interpretations agreed that it said, Lokknote, but few mistook the work for anything Latin-based—this was a bastard tongue to every eye that saw it. What was understood for an L was enlarged and made with a grandiose, looping flourish while the defacto T was writ singularly in red, the rest of the work in black. Yes, Lokknote had a kind and kinds to adore it. Passersby often took it in with muted mystery and how many skaters smoked in its shade? And how many a homeless person slept under it, and swearing it favoured them with the best sleep on the street that could be found the city wide.

The local writers gathered here, shamanic, them. All hoodies and backpacks carting the wares of their arts. Them even sometimes costumed in their canistered masks, their balaclavas, this was part of the ritual, even if done so half-seriously. Spray cans served as totems and were placed at the wall if only Lokknote would see their patronage and bless them. Their black books holy books, their own personal gospels splayed to the mystery on the wall. A work of brush, this pseudonym was, that was agreed. But a work less in technical superiority than total effect. It endured, definitely, but it haunted too. And they'd leave to produce their own work that might live to be so resonant.

This name, that so strangely persisted here, was the fun of their speculation: maybe the work of a recluse walking among them, or the mark once original, now persisted by imitators. And yeah, ok, alright, it could be the hand of a ghost too.
But Riae, who'd claw the paint free if Lokknote could not, knew this place for what it truly was: a place of power. Lokknote, as it was written, had shown up in 1959 weeks after the little shop was built. As a child Riae would come with her father, one hand with an ice cream, the other hand in his while he broke down the lore to her wide imagination, as his father had done for him. And when she came of age, she'd be there too among the other writers offering her shadow blacks, her blood reds to Lokknote.

A decade of street art and then life took her away from the city but she came back when she'd heard too late the grocer had been torn down. The wall was gone. It was a wickedly cold and blustering November evening and already dark. She was walking to where the wall used to be, she was hunched against the wind. But just within her peripheral vision, she saw a figure under the glare of the sodium lamp crossing from the alleyway to the street. She lurched. It was hooded, its wares dark. Been a long time, it said to her with a strangely accented tongue. They'll lose themselves now. And then the figure disappeared beyond a parked van.

She didn't know the voice, not the frame or even the gait of the figure either. She wondered whether to abandon this idea, the street was otherwise empty of goers. But she didn't. When she reached the old spot she saw a new building entire but there was Lokknote's name again newly writ, the paint running at all odds against the freeze. She touched it and looked to where the figure had gone and she followed. The steps had stopped just beyond the van, no mark in the snow other but for a few drops of paint.