uninspiring prose. From time to time, he took a break, although not to get up and stretch or go to the bathroom or find food. And it remained an eerie revelation that none of that was necessary.
No, he stopped just because he felt like it was something he would have done before: When he’d been studying in high school. When he’d been on the grind in college during the year prior to him dropping out. It seemed important to connect to who he’d been, even if the old him had no more substance than a reflection in a mirror.
Fanning the remaining pages, he remembered that scene at the end of Beetlejuice where the father is sitting in his study, trying to get through a copy of The Living and the Dead.
This thing reads like stereo instructions.
Mr. F should be so fortunate. What he had in his palms read more like the Dead Sea Scrolls trying to explain how to hook up a seventiesera record player.
But he had learned a lot. Some twelve hours after he’d started, he now had the basics about what happened during induction, and what was in the jars that had to be guarded against pilfering by the Brotherhood. He knew how slayers were killed with a stab through the empty heart cavity with anything made of steel. He understood the process by which, thereafter, the essence was returned to the Omega, as the master was called. He also had a history of the war with the vampires, including the original conflict between the Scribe Virgin, who’d exercised her one act of creation to bring those with fangs into being, and the Omega, who was her brother and suffered from what sounded like standard sibling jealousy. Further, Mr. F now knew about the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and the great Blind King, and the different social strata of vampires.
And then there was the shit about his own role. There were chapters on the previous incarnations of organization within the Lessening Society, and a section devoted to what the Fore-lesser was supposed to be and how he was supposed to act, including a primer on troop mobilization, training, and provisions.
Not that that last one seemed relevant anymore. Assuming there were a couple more of these outpost houses scattered around the suburbs of Caldwell—hello, those keys that did not fit the lock here—the pathetic, ill-matched bunch of war knickknacks he’d found during his search of this place were no doubt no better than he was going to get at any of the other properties.
As he glanced around the empty living room he’d camped out in, he had the sense of a power structure left to rot, and, like a body that through a combination of age and disease no longer properly functioned, he wasn’t sure a revival was coming—or even possible.
He’d been hoping for light at the end of the tunnel with all the packed prose he’d been wading through. Now that he was coming to the final chapter, he was worried he wasn’t going to get one. For all the knowledge he’d gained, he still didn’t know what to do.
That changed in the last four pages.
Like the finish line of a marathon, the solution arrived only after he had expended assiduous effort through the twists and turns of an uphill slog. And at first, when his eyes traced the words, he almost kept going.
Something drew him back, and as he reread them, he realized it was only because they were set in the middle of the page, the lines indented, each one of them.
Stanzas. Like it was a poem.
There shall be one to bring the end before the master,
a fighter of modern time found in the seventh of the twenty-first,
and he shall be known in the numbers he bears:
One more than the compass he apperceives,
Though a mere four points to make at his right,
Three lives has he,
Two scores on his fore,
and with a single black eye, in one well will he be birthed and die.
An end before the master? Or an end of the master?
Mr. F thought back to the night before, to the Brother who put his mouth over that slayer’s and started to inhale, the Brother who the Omega took on as an enemy of special importance. Mr. F wasn’t sure what to make of all the passage’s threes and fours, two scores and the single black eye, but he knew what he’d witnessed. The Omega and that particular vampire were tied together, and the strings that