The Spraypaint Somnambulist

It was a good few weeks after he'd moved in, when he noticed the first one. He looked up to his right as he turned the key in the front door and there it was. Scrawled on the side of a shop sign, right next door, were three black letters. And those letters just happened to be the initials of his name.

He stopped, hand suspending the key in mid-air, one foot in the open doorway. How strange, he thought. What are the chances that someone with those same three (slightly unusual) initials not only exists, but has tagged them right there, next to my apartment? He marveled at the improbability of it all. Perhaps it was someone he knew, he pondered. But he knew precious few people in this town, none of them vandals. He shrugged it off and entered the cool hallway, leaving the mystery behind him. (Though it lay in wait for him there, every time he left the building.)

A few weeks later, he was walking down an alley which flowed into his street. Something on a wall tugged at his vision until he turned his head to glance back. And there it was again. Those same three letters, those letters which, to him, had always been a kind of personal code, special to him alone. The idea that they were not only shared but being used, flaunted around by some petty vandal, unsettled him slightly. He had a bad taste in this mouth. Like fumes from an aerosol can.

After that, the artist grew more prolific. He noticed his initials at bus stops and scratched into tram windows. Rendered beautifully in spray paint on the sides of crumbling buildings. Thrown up onto closed shop fronts. Squiggled over bins. It wore him out, somehow. Every morning he awoke feeling weary, because he lay awake at night wondering how  to contact this mysterious artist, this letter-thief. He felt very confused as to why it bothered him so; but nevertheless it did. It troubled him, deeply.

He began to go mad, slowly. He dreamt, too, of wandering the streets at night, spraying letters onto walls and old vans. He would wake with tingling nostrils and strange stains on his hands, that wouldn't go away.

One night he dreamt that he was standing in the middle of a dark street with a can of spray paint in his hand. He'd just painted two letters, and half of a third. Then he woke up. He was cold. He was fully clothed. He was standing upright.

In front of him were two letters, and half of a third.