The first message that caught my eye was plastered on the side of an abandoned building on the outskirts of town. I had been leaving a 12-step meeting and was still unfamiliar with the city, often getting lost on back roads. The meeting was on the edge of the city limits, where there were only a few rare gas stations and businesses.

“A Winter Lost in Translation” is what the message read. The building was a dilapidated shack, and the graffiti was a simple black spray paint. I had seen the message in the autumn, and I thought about it often as the days grew colder and we descended into winter. It was a bitterly cold winter, filled with snowstorms and power outages. What did the message mean? Did it predict the seasonal changes?

I had a friend on the police force who would often share inside information with me about politics in the city, and I asked him about the graffiti message months later. He laughed it off, then looked at me strangely, as if I was delving into conspiracy theories.

“Pattern seekers find connections everywhere,” Charles said. “I wouldn’t read into it too much.”

Little did I know, this was only the beginning. I began spotting the messages more frequently. This is my story. How I delved deep into a cryptic underworld hidden in plain sight and nearly lost everything.

*******

“I reckon it was a bunch of juveniles that did this.”

The maintenance man, Fred, shook his head as he gazed at the graffiti sprayed on the side of the downtown deli. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his foot. “I’ll report it to the police, but I guess I better get started on cleaning this up.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked. We stood in the afternoon light staring at. It was a small town, so things like this were a big deal. Most of us tend to think graffiti is for big cities.

“The hell if I know,” Fred replied. He walked back to his truck, and I assumed he was going to make a few calls to figure out what he had to do. I felt sorry for him, knowing he had to clean up the mess.

“THE MEEK HAVE ALREADY INHERITED THE EARTH.”

That’s what the message read, and I called it a message because it felt like one. It seemed foreboding to me, almost ominous. It was written in capital letters, and there was no artistic quality to it, the way some taggers can make quite beautiful graffiti. Instead, it was simple black spray paint again that seemed hastily done.

I took a photograph of it on my phone, then I stood staring at it for a few more moments. A small crowd had developed behind me, murmuring about how the town was going to hell.

Fred walked back from his truck and stood beside me. “Well, you wanna help me clean this up or you just gonna keep staring at it?”

“No, no, I’m sorry. I’ll get out of your way. I have to get to work,” I lied. I’d been laid off recently and I had nowhere to be.

“Suits yourself,” Fred said.

I left the scene to get lunch across the street and eavesdropped on people at the tables next to me talking about the graffiti. I figured I’d call Charles about it later in the day, but I began to doubt that I should. He already dismissed my previous thoughts on the subject, and if I kept pushing the issue, he may start to question my sanity.

So, I spent the rest of the day driving around town, hoping to see more messages. Disappointingly, I found none. I thought about the message and tried to decipher it. How have the meek already inherited the earth? Was it a religious nut who wrote this?

The next day, I saw an article online in the town newspaper about the message. The police said they were investigating and were asking citizens for any leads. There’s not much crime to speak of in this town, so something like this was relatively big news.

I spent a few hours online going down rabbit holes about taggers and graffiti, trying to figure out if this message appeared anywhere else. I didn’t come up with much. I got organized, though. I put my pictures of the message in a folder on my laptop and collected some research I had done, including the newspaper article.

When I returned to the deli the next day, the message had been wiped away and cleaned up. A few days passed, and people seemed to forget about it. I went to the edge of town where I saw the other message, though, and it was still there. The one about winter being lost in translation. I took a few photos while the light began to die in the late afternoon and scoured around the shack looking for anything interesting. It was then that I heard a voice that startled me.

“Searching for meaning behind this, huh?”

“Fuck! Who’s there? You scared me.”

Stepping out from behind the shed, a wiry man in a baseball cap emerged from the shadows. “I can tell you what it means, if you like,” he said. “But I must warn you. Once you start going down this path, there’s no turning back.”

“Um, okay … What does it mean, then?”

I couldn’t get a good look at the man’s face, as he stood off at a distance and it was a bit dark behind the shed. “You know anything about the concept known as the Fourth Turning?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then let me give you a clue. Read up on it. The messages you’re seeing are all related to that. It’s a form of historical prophecy.”

I went to make a note of it on my phone, and when I looked up, the shadowy man was gone. The message was still there, though. I felt a chill run through me when I saw another, smaller message inscribed under the one about the winter. It was barely decipherable unless you stood as close as possible. There were at least a dozen random sentences and words scrawled there. I took more photos and wrote the messages down on my phone.

The one that struck me the most and, frankly, scared me was written in small capital letters and simply said, “WE WIND DOWN TO THE END OF TIME WHEN THE BEAST EMERGES AND THE DEVIL SINGS.”

To Be Continued