Larry tried to concentrate on the music as his scarred fingers tightened instinctively on the steering wheel. He used to like this song. Couldn’t remember the name of it, but the tune was catchy. The tape in the player was old and every so often would skip, but it beat the static that dominated most of the world’s radio frequencies these days.

The last days. Capital 'L' capital 'D' Armageddon. The Final Showdown.

It had ended before most people had a chance to blink. Larry had been in the can at the time. One urgent bowel movement later and the dead were walking, the sky was as red as the devil's ass, the seas had turned to blood and all the good folk were eating cheeseburgers in Paradise.

Larry had to settle for lukewarm coffee in a burned out café.

The world flashed by outside the dirt-stained windows of the old Ford, a blur of gray and silver. The car was an antique, just like Larry. Its blue paint job had faded over the years to a dull muddy off-white with the barest hint of azure near the door hinges. Battered and beaten by everything life could throw at it, it didn’t really run. It just persisted.

Just like Larry. He didn't live, hadn't lived since that lonely night in…what? '30? '31? Larry only persisted. Not that he was alone in that. Hell, the two other people in the car could say the same thing and they had been at it longer. Not that they would. Neither one was what you'd call a conversationalist.

Of course, look who’s talking, thought Larry and grinned mirthlessly, flashing big too-white teeth at his reflection in the mirror.

My what big teeth you have.

All the better to eat you with my dear.

Larry shook his head, clearing away the fluttering red stained images that circled his brain like moths around a porch light. It was too late for regrets. He had spent the better part of the last century mired in angst and regret. At the time, it had seemed like the thing to do, his life being what it was. Brief periods of consciousness followed by a few years of blissful oblivion, then it was back up out of the grave and the dance would start all over again. At least until someone got wise and put a silver bullet into his heart. Or head. Or stomach. Something vital.

Fire was good too. But it wasn’t really his thing. More Frank's. Larry glanced at the hulking figure slouched in the passenger seat, lopsided head bowed low so that the back of his neck brushed the roof of the car. Frank smelled like ozone and shit, a testament to a constant barrage of lightning bolts and assorted chemicals, not to mention the occasional dousing in a handy peat bog or quicksand pit. Frank still wore the same too-small black coat over a barrel chest and sunken stomach, but had exchanged his threadbare pants for a cleaner pair of dockers he had obviously stolen from a fat man. He still wore the clodhoppers though. Frank was traditional that way. Or at least parts of him were at any rate.

His face was a mass of scar tissue and chemical burns, but his eyes were bright and as alive as Larry had ever seen them. Every so often, the bolts on his neck would spark and Frank's neck muscles would twitch. His big hands clenched and unclenched slowly, laying flat on the dashboard as he stared straight ahead, at the road and the rust colored sky above and ahead of them, only blinking when lightning flashed and struck nearby or when Larry sideswiped a zombie that wandered too close to the weaving car.

The zombies were everywhere. Larry hadn't thought there were that many dead folks in the whole world, but then that was the point wasn't it? They hadn’t been IN the world. Not for awhile. Not until Hell's bells rang and Satan threw wide the gates to let the damned loose.

Not until the night the world ended and hadn't THAT been a disappointment? The trumpets blared, the faithful ascended the damned woke up and Larry…Larry persisted. He banged his hand on the steering wheel in frustration, the horn blaring and spooking Frank and several zombies in the road went splat as he careened through them.

"Must you make such a racket?" A voice like oil spreading on water oozed into his ears, thick accent doing little to hide the apathy evident in every word.

"Must you complain every hour you're not asleep?" Larry fired back. Frank grunted, though whether in assent or warning Larry couldn’t tell and didn’t really care.

"It gives me something to do." A pale hand, the nails on each finger long and pointed, waved languidly from the backseat. The Count sat up out of his box, the wood creaking as it pressed against the seats it was wedged between. Grave dirt slid out of his hair and collar as he leaned over the front seat, arms dangling between Larry and Frank. "Are we close?" His breath smelled like rotten meat and fresh blood. An abattoir smell. Larry found it oddly comforting.

"Close enough. A few more miles. Storm's getting worse. Gonna be a hell of a night."

"A dark and stormy night. How…appropriate."

"Ain’t it just?"

"Are you sure you want to do this? I and Frank can always continue alone."

"Wasn’t this my idea in the first place? I intend to see it through. If nothing else, it'll be an ending." Larry threw a glance back at the Count, who nodded, eyelids half closed over his red gaze.

"An ending. I thought it would be much grander than this." He gestured at the rotten, dying world outside the car. "Entropy is a bitch."

"Amen."

"And the Devil is a bastard."

"Hallelujah."

The Count leaned back, running spider-fingers through his black hair. "What happened? It shouldn't come down to this, with us three in a car heading over the border. Where is Van Helsing? Where are my righteous foes, filled with the grace of God? I was promised a last great war with my enemies! I'm the Son of the Devil for God's sake!" he snarled, gesticulating limply. Larry snorted.

"What you are is irrelevant. Welcome to the club."

"I do not want to die in Mexico! It is…vulgar! Common!"

"It's not exactly my idea of a good place to die either, but it'll do." Larry growled. It was the Count's turn to snort disdainfully.

"You're hardly a fit judge of such things. A suicidal manic-depressive with a tendency to bay at the moon and stop bullets with his face."

"Weren’t you the one who wanted to live forever? Why did you even come with me?" Larry countered.

"I…I'm tired. My story wasn't supposed to end this way. I was supposed to spit in the face of God. Instead, I'll die here, in this forsaken waste out of sight of both God and the Devil. It is not fitting."

"We belong dead. We've lived too long as it is." Frank's voice, like rocks in a washing machine, startled them both. “We were weapons in a war we couldn't conceive. And now the war has ended and we have been discarded. Life's a bitch. Time to slap her silly and exit with the bit of grace left to us." He fell silent.

Larry laughed. After a few moments the Count joined in.

The Sons of Shock rolled into Mexico, laughing like lost souls. And the storm followed them in.

It had been just after the first night after the apocalypse that Larry decided that if death wasn't coming to him, he would go to death. Suicide had never been an option, at least not the way most people did it. The Wolf was too strong, too survival-oriented. Ropes broke, bullets were deflected and after one embarrassing night in Florida he discovered drowning was no longer an option. The Count had been there too, which had just made it worse.

In the fifties, the fact that suicide wasn't the way out of his predicament finally penetrated Larry's thick skull. So, instead, he decided to follow the Atomic Age trend and go with science. Lobotomies, fungus treatments, radiation baths. At best, he came out of things with a mild suntan and the ability to guide his 'fits' on nights without the full moon staring at him like the eye of God. At worst, he got stronger, more vicious.

He wasn't the only one. All the microwaves floating in the air had made Frank practically invulnerable and strong enough to punch a hole in a battleship, not to mention the buzz that atomic testing gave him. And the Count…well the Count grew stronger with every additive choked Californian he drained dry and tossed aside like a beer can. Every bit of Hell that seeped up into the world just fed his batteries. Fed all their batteries.

The worse the world got, the better they felt. The Devil's brood. Battening on the apocalypse like remoras on a shark. Getting stronger and stronger, filled with a sense of destiny. It was all going to come down to that final day.

Only it didn't.

Charged up and no place to go.

They had come to end of the movie and found no torch-wielding villagers, no courageous monster-hunters, no Van Helsing, no burning windmill waiting for them.

And they were unhappy about it.

Very unhappy.

They had been promised death, and they aimed to collect.

The blood-red moon that had risen into the fiery sky to stay on that final day was Larry's undoing. Where before, he only had to fear certain nights, now every moment held the potential for horror. He fell under the sway of the moon without rhyme or reason, the Wolf coiled in his gut like a hunk of undigested meat, its claws scratching at his heart. He rampaged through the burning skeletons of mankind's cities, hungry and unstoppable.

Silver wasn't what it used to be.

But in the end, he was just the epilogue. Another devil loose in a world full of them. Larry had, on some level, thought himself special. There weren't many werewolves these days. None in fact. Only him. It had been that way for a half-century. Hadn't he deserved to play some part in the end of it all? Hadn't he deserved death? It didn’t matter whether damnation or salvation followed, only that death, final and unending came to him at last after so many failed attempts. "All things run to their predestined end…" Hadn’t that been what Maleva had said, her wise old eyes boring a hole through him? It had been something like that anyway.

Larry found Frank first, wandering through the dead shell of a small Kansas town, casually slapping aside zombies as he walked slowly, but resolutely away from what lay behind. After the world ended, Frank no longer felt the need to hide. After all, with no people around, there was no one to chase him. Or so he thought. The dead clambered over him, biting, clawing for that engorged criminal brain that had carried him through the centuries. Larry supposed they could smell it. And Frank, being Frank, fought back with all his brute ferocity. But where men would have fled, the dead only continued to attack, more of them coming every day. A horde followed Frank as he at last fled, attackers that gave him no respite. Larry provided transportation and he and Frank had traveled in companionable silence until New Orleans where they ran afoul of the Count.

Of them all, the Count was the worst. He always had been. And after the end, he was the worst off. While Larry had had a suspicion that he was special, the Count knew for certain. That he was SOMEBODY. It was in his name after all. Son of the Devil. And so he was to hear him tell it. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell that to the Devil.

The Count had been ready for the end for centuries. It explained the way he dressed at least. He had surrounded himself with an army of followers…vampires, devil worshippers and worse. An army of darkness set to invade the world when the lights went out for the last time. Only the bugle never blew and the war up and ended before anyone even knew it was happening or even who had won. Good and evil met in the spaces between time and reality and everyone else got left behind. The Count's army drifted away when they realized the Big Blow was over without a shot being fired. Soon, he was alone. He could have forced them to stay. But what would have been the point?

Larry thought that it must have been an unusual experience for the Count to be truly alone. He had always had servants or at least companionship of some kind-his Brides, Renefield, hell even Frank a time or two. Now he had nothing. When Larry and Frank rolled into the Big Easy on two tires and an empty tank, the Count had been standing in front of Marie Laveau’s tomb waiting for the sun.

Now ordinarily, Larry would have been happy to watch the Count crisp himself like a dog turd on a Texas freeway, but this time was different. For all the bad blood between them, pun intended, Larry knew it wasn’t the way the Count was supposed to go down. Besides, suicide was Larry's thing. He was the one who wanted to die. The Count wanted control and Frank…Frank just wanted to be left alone. It said so in the plain black and white of their lives up to this point. It was in the contract.

So Larry had made a proposal, the sun rising fast, him talking even faster. On his trip south, he had heard that the Devil was in Mexico. Or at least some of his people were. The last earthly remnants of the Forces of Evil, capital 'F', capital 'E'. And Larry figured that since they had been left out of the Big Event, it was only fair that they cross the border and kick someBODY’s ass. One last fight for the unholy three.

The Count magnanimously agreed, steam rising off him as the sun crested the horizon.

One handshake later and they were back in Larry’s car and running for the border, just like the Magnificent Seven, only without the other four guys. Unless you counted Frank, who could make up seven all by himself, especially when the voices in his head started up.

Mexico was, in all the ways that counted, dead. Dead and orange. The sky was the dull gray of a pick-up truck hubcap and the flat horizon was technicolor orange. Larry had to squint to make out the road through the dried zombie juices on his windshield and the smell emanating from Frank wasn't helping matters. In his guts the Wolf howled and bit, ready to be released. Larry’s teeth ached as he felt them with his tongue. In the backseat, the Count was muttering to himself in Romanian. Behind them, a storm rolled on ominous and despairing.

Mexico had become Hell, the sands were red and the rivers stank of sulphur. The road went on forever, a strip of shed snake skin cutting through the wasteland where things moved and fought in the shadows of looming rocks. But the unholy three ignored such things. If this was hell, they were unimpressed. Then they came to the town.

On the sign outside, the town's name had been scoured through and the word 'Tenebrae' had been scrawled in it's place. And so the sons of shock rolled into a town called Darkness, ready for one last dance with the Devil under the Mexican moon. And the storm followed them in.

The town was as dead as everything else in Mexico, skeletal buildings stretching up towards the red moon like dead men’s fingers, dust devils whirling in an insane jig through the streets. Shadows moved in the corners and as they drove slowly down the main street, the Count pointed ahead of them, nails scratching the glass of the windshield. “There. Up ahead.” Larry followed the Count's pointing finger and saw the old mission squatting at the other end of the town, the massive doors hanging from their hinges and the upside down crosses stuck into the hard earth to either side of the entrance, bodies hanging from them.

The car gave out with a groan and black smoke belched from under the hood as it rolled to a stop. The transmission fell out with a meaty thunk and the rear axle finally broke loose. All out of persistance he figured. If that wasn't a good omen he didn't know what was. Larry sighed and patted the dash, pulling the key from the ignition and tossing it into the backseat. He glanced at Frank and the Count, his grin tight on his face. "Ready?"

Frank didn't reply, instead simply pushing his great weight against the door and bursting it off the frame of the car with a casual shrug. Frank stepped out into the red moonlight and spread his long arms wide, like a swimmer preparing to dive. Overhead, the thunder rumbled and the sky growled. The Count was suddenly beside him, long cloak flowing around him like a black cloud, the medallion on his chest glinting in the hell-light, a specter of death, tall and merciless. Larry felt his grin growing wider as things inside him stretched and twisted into new and terrible shapes and hair crawled across him like a wave, sliding out of his pores like ants out of a hill. His face lengthened and sharp teeth cut his tongue as he leapt onto the hood of the car, filled with a terrible hunger and a desire to cause pain.

Lightning split the sky as they began to move towards the doors, Larry at a lope, the Count sliding forward gracefully, Frank stomping. The scent of blood on the air caught Larry's attention and he stopped by the left hand inverted cross hammered into the ground. The man who hung there upside down still lived, though probably not for much longer. He was bare-chested and clad only in spandex pants, one leg of purest white, the other of deepest black. The mask that covered his face was also split between the two colors as well as the arm bands that covered his wrists. Blood flowed freely from his many wounds into the greedy ground, but he still struggled to free himself.

A testament to the durability of mankind or the sheer cussed stubborness Larry supposed.

Frank snapped his chains with a flick of his wrist, freeing the crucified man and catching him as he fell. The masked man looked up at them and smiled through bloodstained teeth, and said something in Spanish as he coughed up a lungful of blood. Frank placed him carefully on the ground, eyes unreadable. The masked man coughed again and pointed to the gates that hung open so invitingly and spoke again. The Count replied in Spanish, gesturing to Larry and Frank. The Count glanced at them, as if weighing whether or not to say anything.

"He's called the Saint of Shadows. Santo for short. Says this was his place before the Devil moved in. He wants to know if we are here to join the Devil in Hell."

"Satan." Larry snarled, foam dribbling through gritted fangs. It was getting harder to think. Hard to remember what it was like to be human. Better that way really. Humanity was dead and gone. Time for the monsters to go to war for what was left. The Count shook his head.

"No. Not Lucifer. El Robotico Diablo. Just a tinker-toy devil, left alone out in the darkness. And a pack of paltry followers-escapees and fallen angels. They came in to town and killed those who remained for fodder and warmth. Apparently it is getting colder."

"Not that you'd notice."

"Of course not. I am a prince. I am above such mundanity." The Count gestured at the sagging rooftops and the pitted streets. A red wind rolled through Darkness and carried the stink of far off charnel pits. Bodies were burning somewhere. Santos retched and his body writhed in Frank's hands. The unholy three watched the last living man in Mexico die.

"We never answered his question." Frank grunted. The Count shrugged.

"Does it matter?"

"Nothing matters anymore. Not nothing." Larry hissed through the haze that was clouding his thoughts. He felt like he had walked into the middle of a movie. And not a good one. Behind them, in the town, doors creaked open and windows broke and a moan rose up on the air. Larry turned with a snarl as the zombies of Darkness poured out into the street and stumbled towards them. The smell of Santos' blood had called them. Or maybe not. Larry couldn't bring himself to care.

Larry howled and the zombies seemed to hesitate. Primitive lizard brains in dessicated sand blasted carcasses remembering the sound of something hunting them through foggy, humid jungles. Not for long though. They began to rustle forward, joints popping and splitting with every faltering step. The unholy three waited, watching as the dead surrounded them, their eyes alight with flame. The dead coming for the damned. Larry ran a pink tongue over yellow razorblade teeth.

Good.

Night-time was the right-time for fight-time. Chicka-bow-wow, doom-boom bam. Somewhere an apocalypse rag began to play on rusted mariachi trumpets, a soundtrack for the day after Armageddon. Time to start the dance.

The Count went first, royalty's privilege, all black smoke and rotten meat stink curling and coiling across the cobbles and sand like a shadow on the walls of hell. Cold dead hands flashed and manicured talons cut through stringy flesh even as Larry loped into the waltz, a fur-covered torpedo full of all the malice a century could instill in a dead man. Frank's big hand lashed out and a worm-riddled spinal column went pop! and Frank whipped the heads of the dead sea that sought to drag him down. The zombies died again and the air was full of moans cut short.

Larry throttled a woman with no skin on her face until her head fell off, teeth still snapping at his ankles. He tossed aside the body and turned towards the gate to the mission. He snarled and hurtled towards it, powerful muscles propelling him over the tumbledown doors and into the courtyard.

He was greeted by a scene that would have made Dante proud. Stakes of broken timber had been stabbed into the ground, bodies decorating them. Firepits had been dug out all around and dark forms huddled around them. Ash began to fall from the dark sky and drifts of it had already collected against the walls and pillars of the mission. The Count was beside him then, cape snapping. He held out a hand to catch the falling ash.

"Reminds me of home."

"It should. It's the last outpost of Hell." A mechanical voice blared. A throne sat opposite the gate, cobbled together out of meat dappled bones and stretched tendons and on it sat a rusty tin giant with a whiplash tail and brass horns on his head. Wings composed of thousands of razor steel feathers swept back from broad ball-joint shoulders. His face was an unmoving copper mask, twisted into a demon's leer and electric hell-fire glowed in his eye-slits. The Count laughed.

"El Robotico Diablo I presume."

"Presume all you like. My name is no longer of consequence. Not even to me." The devil-robot blared, scratchy voice box hissing and sparking. "Nor are yours. The dance is done. The battle won and lost. All that remains is the final cresendo."

"Mixing metaphors is a sign of insanity." The Count said.

"Insanity is the life's blood of Hell." El Diablo Robotico laughed. It sounded like a wasp's nest being shaken up. He gestured with squeaky jointed fingers at his legions. A handful of gibbering wraiths, their evil palapable and reeking rose from around the fires to face the unholy three. Whey-faced ghouls and effeminate blood-drinkers clad in the tattered rags of the twentieth century squaring off with their elders. They had been left behind too. Unwanted and forgotten, their task finished. Only they weren't smart enough to realize it. Larry wanted to laugh but he could only growl. "And from this well-spring Hell will be reborn. Starting here. Hell on Earth."

"I thought you'd be glad to be out from under Old Scratch's thumb my cog-wheel friend." The Count chuckled, eyes unblinking. "But it's the same old song, only sadder because its just a recording. It's true what they say, there's nothing new under the sun." The Count looked up and smiled. "If there still was a sun."

"What do you want here? Have you come to join us?" El Robotico Diablo rasped. It sounded almost hopeful to Larry.

"We want vengeance." Larry snarled. The devil-robot looked at him for the first time, metal skin gleaming in the charnel-light of the fires.

"For what?"

"Leaving us alive." Larry threw himself at the throne, bounding across the distance between them, a roar building in his throat. Shadow-wrapped figures moved to intercept. He fell halfway to his goal, tangled in steel tendrils from an android octopod with a swastika stamped on its skull. Hitler's brain cursed him in Austrian as it tried to strangle him. Frank's big fingers closed over the steel skull and the curses degenerated into squeals as the metal housing bent and crumpled. The Count laughed as he lunged at another of his kind, dressed in frayed finery. The Count wrapped long fingers in the creature's golden locks and tore his head from his shoulders. Larry tore out the guts of a giggling claw-handed lunatic with a scarred face and leapt over a lumbering brute wearing a battered hockey mask. As the brute turned, lifting his machete, Frank drove a jaundiced fist through the back of its head, sending the remains of the hockey mask flying. Larry bowled over a black robed ghost with a white screaming face and leapt at the creature on the throne.

Metal fingers closed on his hairy throat and his leap was halted. The robot devil stood, wire-linked tail lashing and held Larry at arm's length. "Are you mad? Is that it?"

"Livid in fact." The Count hissed as he congealed around El Robotico Diablo's head, cat's claws scoring the metal face. "We were promised glory and oblivion. Not this. Not this."

Larry roared and clawed at the arm holding him, strangling him slowly.

Frank hurled Hitler's brain into the devil's face and barreled into the infernal machine, neck bolts sparking.

They struggled silently, four forms perched on a throne of bone, white ash raining down. Larry kicked out and rust-coated metal tore beneath his foot. Wires sparked and flared and the heart of El Robotico Diablo was revealed beneath them. Larry's red-rimmed eyes narrowed. He recognized the device clicking and whirring there. A scientist named Savage had shown him one in 1955 just before it was dropped into a massive ant-hill to kill the oversize insects there.

An atomic bomb.

It made sense really. What else would the robot devil have for a heart?

The wolf howled in his skull, concerned only with the fight. It wanted to fight them all. El Robotico Diablo. The Count. Frank. All of them. Fight them as it had in Visaria. In Florida. He squeezed it out just like his years in Tibet had taught him. Squashed it back into its little cage in his soul. He didn't want to die a monster.

Every time he did, he just came back worse than before.

He kicked out again, his foot slamming against the devil's heart. The casing cracked. A woman's face floated in front of his eyes. What was her name? It had been so long. So long since that first horrible night. Gwen. That was it.

The Count screamed a Wallachian hymn as he perched on the devil's shoulders and tried to pull his head off.

Frank's scarred fingers scrabbled for the devil's throat, dead voices whispering in his head.

And Larry tore the devil's guts out while he thought of Gwen.

Would this be the last time? Would he come back from a ground-zero grave, an irradiated beast skeleton? Larry couldn't find it in himself to care. He just wanted to sleep. He was all out of persistance. All out of everything. He kicked out again. Somewhere, in his head, music was playing and someone, maybe Gwen, said 'The End'.

All things run to their predestined end.

As it all went white, Larry couldn't bring himself to believe it.

The FORWARD (is four-armed):

The following pages are new translations of sequence I - XXVII of the Burroughs Codex [Miskatonic University File JGCR-23-MiskTaker//JF-111/qtr8]. The sequence has been preserved in the original order as the original author or authors intended. Whether or not this allows the reader to glean any further insights into the works is up to the individual reader to ascertain, but it is the belief of the staff of this project that translators should not take on the roles of editors as well, but should follow as close as possible the wording and the intent of the original work. However, as those familiar with the wealth and diversity of material available in the Codex know, a random selection and editing of the material is recommended and in this case has been done, though strictly to omit obvious errors and several redundancies in the text (which almost certainly were leaves mistaken duplications)..

A BRIEF HISTORY (And Notes On The Manuscript Sources)

When the ‘Emperor’ Jaero-Za saw that the destruction of his fiefdom was likely, as was the extermination of his cult and its priests, he ordered all of the literate elements of his household and its territories to mass-copy the books of his sect, then ordered as many of the faithful to disperse among the outer kingdoms. He provided ships, guards and safe passage for them, bankrupting his nation in the process. And mostly to no avail. Many of those ordered out surrendered themselves to the Outer Princes or to the Council directly. Others were captured. Some were tortured and killed. This loss of life being added to the usual loss of life accompanying the sea voyages of the time amounted to quite a high death toll.
          Because of the nature of the Heretical Purge that immediately followed Jaero-Za's execution, there was almost as complete a destruction of information from an earlier era in Asia as there was regarding the early history of England and the rest of Europe during the Middle Ages. Thus was created the so-called Dark Ages. A darkness that was as entirely man-made as the sack of Rome or the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
          Almost. But not quite. Some copies or parts of copies of the text did make it into safe lands. Of the extant copies known, the papyri in the Burroughs Codex are among the most reliable and authoritative available. Other text sources examined and compared include: the Richard Rosa Collection; Pennsylvania Avenue Press Archives; The Helena Rubenstein Foundation Library; Arkham House Press Archives; selections from the Lovecraft Papers; along with copies found in the Bronx Zoo, the Vatican, and the White House. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the curators of the materials described above for allowing me virtually unlimited access to their resources. My indebtedness and gratitude go beyond words.
          Also consulted for this project were excerpts from the text of an interview (and photo layout) in Penthouse magazine with former President Ronal Reagan, the only living survivor of that period. Although a great majority of the claims made in the interview were verified through other sources, most were considered too highly controversial for a book of this nature.
Sanity was never a question of honor, neither was doubt.

FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (And Some Severe Strangeness):

In the preparation of this manuscript I have been indebted to many scholars and much of the work in this particular sub-section of history, with distinguished names in the field, who are nevertheless far too many to enumerate here. I hope they will be assured that I recognize and am indebted to their scholarship more than I can see. It is for fear of inadvertently forgetting to list a name that I do not attempt to list them all here. I thank you all. For my part, I kiss you all. I would like to take the time to acknowledge my debt to one person in these pages, however: that person is my lovely wife and confidante, Dierdre Ramirez, whose buffalo soup and ox-tail hides have kept me warm for lo these long winters. I dream o screamingly beautiful.

Without further digression, I present the codex.

CODEX

1.
          Spears, and elephants, and softly-liquored phantasmagoria. Women. There was (never) enough time.
          With a cut-up technique which sliced her head open, he then proceeded to lop off an ear, whereupon he commenced to munch thereon.
          Henceforth and hither, ne’er do well and destructive. Consolations upon the prizes of the wearisome Preacher Man was foisted. The Preacher Man held a stone-hilted copper knife. There was time for one sacrifice, no more. If he dreamed of even a slightly different reality or concept, then it would all be for nought. There would be time for remembrances later. If he were able to remember it later. The goat awaited.
          The stone hilt descended in a swift and brutal arc.
          The goat awaited.

2.
The stone and wood moat which was fed from the funnel at one end of the sacrificial alter, was red with blood. Maleficent residue from the internal charnel-house floated therein, submerged briefly in the bloody water like a soft-remembered dream, then would re-emerge, rearing its bloody head once again.

3.
It wasn’t time. The goat wasn’t ready.

4.
The sacrificial lambs had had enough, and time. If there was nothing sublimeThey turned and disemboweled the pursuing wolfpack with the hoofblades hidden upon their person.
It was time.
It was not time.
It was their time.

5.
The grandfather awoke with the feeling that his days were numbered. There weren't many things to do. He had long ago left the day-to-day running of the tribes to his foster son (his wife never having given birth, and she having been dead many years, it had fallen on him to select --"adopt" -- one of the village youths: his "foster son"). It had been a beautiful choice. No one had proven as level-headed as Running Bear. And so, with time, he had entrusted to the young man all the tribal wisdom and most of the family jewels. Still there was one secret left to him yet. One secret still to show.
The grandfather made his way to the entrance of his tent on suddenly weak and shaking legs. For a moment he felt a dread certainty that he would not be able to make it, would fail to dispatch his final duty of office. He stopped his forward momentum and finally recovered himself. It passed, as it must. As some part of him knew it would. He departed the tent, never to return.

6.
He remarked to himself that in addition to being level-headed, reasonable and fair -- which were good in a leader, but which in this case was not enough -- the one thing that had capped his choice of Running Bear as a replacement in his mind was the long-livedness of his family line. Wisdom and long life. He was pleased. The old man continued on his journey.

7.
When he arrived at the temple-quarters and knocked on the leader's entrance, he was greeted by a startling, young, and beautiful woman from the neighboring village. Who also happened to be quite starkly naked. She stood there, incurious, unashamed. Completely self-aware, completely unselfconscious. The old man felt like he could begin to feel the heartbeat of love throbbing in his neck. The sun was shining full in her hair and highlighted the soft hollow arcs around her eyes. She was certainly a beauty. Wonderful. And then a cloud passed over the sun and the sky darkened almost imperceptibly. It reminded him of his purpose. Just as the nude woman in front of him reminded him of his youth, and just as he chided himself and reminded himself that he was an old man, on his last legs, and he damned well better remember it. He smiled at her, now uncomfortably, and she smiled back, obviously not so. She stepped aside and let him in, recognizing him. As he stepped in he took a last look back at the door. And at her. With a shock he saw that the right hand, which she had kept hidden behind the door held cocked a crossbow. The crossbow had been aimed at approximately where his heart had been a moment before. The muscles in her right arm were cocked and strung as a taut as the crossbow's wire, though she showed no outward signs of effort. She caught him looking at her and she gave him another one of those dazzling smiles. Only this time he couldn't help but notice the cold and calculating warrior's stare that gazed out of those beautiful hazy eyes. He grunted and smiled. Not stupid at all, this young man, he thought. She smiled even wider. He harrumphed and was off. The dark inner chambers smelled like sex: warm, musty, the scent of spilled seed and sweat mingled. The faint miasma of rank perversity hung on the air. There was very little -- and in some places no -- light in the corridors. He shook off the vague foreboding. It was more than likely an old man's conservatism and a young man's inherent randiness which gave all this the evil patina he thought he discerned. Plus the twin shocks he had already received that morning. It was turning out to be a most trying day. He sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. He would be glad when it would all be finally over and he could spend the last of his days in senile old man mindlessness and peace and quiet. He had a very definite idea of what it would be like. And virtually none of it involved the fresh meadows and sweet ocean breezes of the nearby lands.

8.
Today was the day.
It was time.

9.
          He strode the familiar corridors and made the last two turns and was right before the door to the Leader's Private Chamber almost before he even knew it. In fact he kept walking for a moment and almost left it behind. He backtracked, then knocked on the inner seal.
          "Jotuumon," he said.
          "Deidiamo," the voice on the other side of the chamber replied.

10.
          A moment later, the door was thrown back. As dark as the outer corridors had been, so was this room bright. The old man was dazzled for a minute. He put his hands before his eyes and was softly, unprotestingly brought inside. There were rich carpets underfoot, rich scents in the air and the expectant hush of a large crowd waiting silently. A familiar voice spoke up. "It's you. I hadn't expected to see you in here for a while yet, if ever." The voice was sturdy, male, strong. A hand full of gentle power grabbed the old man around the left bicep. "…Father," added the voice.
          "You son of a dog, get those damned lights out of my eyes!" the old man exclaimed with a touch of humor.
          The crowd that he could sense and dimly see beyond the lights erupted in laughter. At some hidden signal, the suite of rooms became less dim, musicians began to play, and everywhere there came a multitudinous babble of murmurs, exclamations, inquiries, laughter, surprise or mock indignation.

11.
Soon enough, the two men were alone together. Much could have been said about the personalities of those who watched them furtively in the naked instant when the two men embraced and were seen to walk out of the private chambers alone but for each other, and the conclusions that they drew. Some thought of murder, others romance; some thought of illicit unbridled coupling in the dark woods, some thought of politics or a last desperate bid to maintain titular power in the Tribes. In either case, the two were soon gone, leaving gossip to fester among those left behind.

12.
          The grandfather and the young man who was now the Leader of the New Tribes walked along a ridge that lay near the village enclave. The old man could feel the descending spirit in his bones. He had not said much to the younger man since he had persuaded him to take a walk outside of the castle compound. He had not spoken, and although the young man was now fully in power to command him to speak, the Leader elected not to do so. The old man was pleased; both in the young man for his restraint, and in his sound decision in having chosen this young man.
          The old man was crafty enough to realize that the young man probably suspected that the old bastard – he, himself – still had a few secrets left, a few tricks still hidden up his sleeve. The old man could read these thoughts flickering off the younger man's face as clearly as if they had been written in ink there. Ah, well. He was inexperienced. He would soon learn control of his thoughts, of his features as he thought. He would learn. Soon. And more than he could suspect.
          There weren't really many secrets left, none of the day-to-day workings or the mysteries of power which lay unexplained.
                    (he heard the hum of the rotors)
          Except one.
          (the rapid displacement of air at the edge of the ridge alerted him. The sun shone fully and brightly on his face.)
          The shape arose from the jagged crevice.
          (the sun was blotted out. The elder turned to face he young man, his successor)
          The young man yelled, drawing a dagger.
          (with the huge shape behind him, shadowing them both, the old man said:)
          "This is what I wanted to talk to about."
          Lights blinded them both.

13.
          Hello and hello and hello.
          95% of all human conversation
          is just saying

'hello'

And so:
"Hello."

14.
Remarkable, how the chamber wolf steals into the private valleys of his prey: the warm, spry enclosures where most they felt warm. He awoke in them the songs of the old gods, he impassioned them with the vague stirrings and warm urgings of their animal past. It was with great skill and much pride that the chamber wolf worked his musty magic; the touch of his heartbeat crimson beating skin, the sharp caress of his fur on naked, sweating skin brought delectable pleasure to the victims of the chamber wolf; indelible, even come the morning light.

15.
          The Councillor concluded his speech before the Senate, saying:
          "My fellow Citizens, it is for this reason, above all, that this Chamber Wolf needs to be captured, his activities curtailed, his person and all that he represents should be extinguished in the most public, most horrible manner."
          He paused, looked around the room, and added:
          "After all, gentlemen, it is not in our best interest to have the pursuit of pleasure become the public's policy. That energy should belong to us, and rightly so."
          The Councillor sat down, the applause of the gathered Senate ringing loudly in his ears as he did so.
          Later on, when it came time to tally the votes, it came as no surprise to any that the members of the senate, who were all male, who were all members of the majority race, who were leaders of state and captains of the mercantile unions, voted in the overwhelming majority to post a reward for any assistance leading to the capture of the Wolf. There would always be plenty of time later to find reasons not to pay the exorbitant amounts they had posted as reward for his capture. They could even always claim that the proffered help had been no real help at all, or that their investigations had led them in that direction, anyway. Or that those who had helped them in the capture of the notorious Chamber Wolf had actually been in league with him, and thus deserving of the most public censure as well. Meanwhile, they would have achieved their goal: the elimination of the Chamber Wolf.
          The Councillor rubbed his hands in glee, in anticipation of the coming festivities.

16.
But it was not to be.

17.
He left this poem in their apartments, pinned to a wall outside of their bedroom chamber:

          Not mere nothing
          Not mere nothing
          No
          Not mere nothing
          Not mere nothing
          No

          All of my works are mute
          testament to the inadequacy
          of raging against death

Still
I would not give them up

          For me,
          They are life
          itself.

18.
The chamber wolf touched her, and her skin became fire. He sent shadow-impressions along her nerve endings, gave them commands, sold them lies, made them feel the most intimate caress, gave them false neurological impressions of weight and texture. He kissed her gently upon each closed eyelid, for still she dreamt.
In her dream, the imaginary man took shape. For her he was a tall man, swarthy of skin, dark, like an Indian or perhaps an Arab. In either case, he wore a turban of an off-white color wrapped around his head. And although in her waking life she detested the sight of earrings on men – thinking them savage-looking, barbaric – in her dream her phantom lover wore earrings on both ears, with two on his left earlobe. His hair fell down his back from beneath the stained turban. The goatee and moustache that he wore gave him a sinister appearance.

In her dream, she and her lover were in a garden meadow, the scent of the blossoms heavy in air already thick with the electricity of their love. It was a sly thing, a tender thing; not so much a touching as a sly communication of half-hidden looks, slight brushing encounters, a brief whisper of flesh or fabric across skin. It was a courting, a foreplay, a prelude of things to come...

          He saw her gasp, writhe. On the bed, he heard her moan. The chamber wolf guided his tongue along the folds of her secret skin with his fingers. Night there was, then, in the meadow of her dreams. Night there was, and soft romantic moonlight. A shedding of burdensome clothing was accompanied by the mental electricity of mingled embarrassment, expectation, and pleasure. The entire surface of her skin was alive as the chamber wolf poured his power through her nerve endings, a kind of symbiotic link, a reverse vampirism. The grass on the bubble of the surface of her mind tingled her soles underfoot, each passage that she took closer to her lover brought a sensual caress from grass and blossom and moonlight and breeze. She took him in her hands and was embraced in turn. She fell into his strong and sturdy embrace.
          Through the haze of the fires which burned through them both she saw, like a beacon, the light of the kindness which shone in his eyes. She felt in them a sense of worldliness, she saw in them the impression of knowledge, of experience which was almost otherworldly in its comprehension of human motives, human events, its history…
          His eyes were brown, which was funny because a moment before she could have sworn they were blue. But this was a dream (even in her mock-abandon, she knew that), and in dreams as so too often in life as well, things changed. So they had been blue. Now they were brown; the brown of earth, the brown of mountains; the brown of decaying bodies churned in the mud of a battlefield, the day after a rich ripe slaughter, amid the stench of carrion, which was also brown…

19.
She fell into his eyes.

20.
The sands on the horizon were twisted by a malevolent storm. High in its sonic frenzy, the Phoenix could hear the shrieks of the tortured and demented souls and spirits which lived in them.
The tornado whirled like a dervish in his eyes.

21.
          The Justices were waiting. In their black hoods and robes, on their dark mounts, framed against deep-night sky and rugged evening mountains, the Justices-In-Eyre were almost invisible.
          Almost.
          He walked into their circle, gunmetal blue at his hands, in his eyes. There was no conciliation, no rude aggressiveness in his stance, there was merely an attitude of … waiting.
          Not a word was spoken.
          The silence was split by the shriek of some unidentifiable animal. A bird, perhaps. Or some scurrying beast suddenly pinioned on the talons of a predator.
          One of the judges spoke at last. The man in the circle – the gunfighter – recognized the deep measured tones of the of the Chief Justice:
          "You remember now."
          "I remember," the gunslinger replied. After a moment, he added: "I thank you."
          "For what?" asked the Chief Justice. The gunslinger took a small measure of guilty pleasure in hearing the mild tone of surprise in the Chief Justice's voice. He had managed to astound the head judge, thereby unsettling them all.
          He wrung every possible nanosecond of suspense before answering the Chief Justice's question.
"I thank you because you helped to heal the rift within my programming, thereby returning me on the path which led me back to my home. It would not have been possible without you.
          After a moment, the still, be-draped riders nodded.

22.
          Drunk with wine, awake with lust, the chamber wolf retired to his private catacombs. The ghost of old and dusty memories threatened to choke off the air in the dank corridors as he walked on past twist after turn of the catacombs. He walked on as though drawn, some small mindless animal trained to travel a certain path. Either through reward or through pain.
          Which was it for him? He couldn't say.
          Onward to mystery, flicking switches to cast spare and somehow sterile light on the passageways. Illuminating the way behind him, but not before him.
          He remembered:

23.
          The masks. It was always the masks. From courtyard to office, to the barren wasteland of crowded human environments. Always and forever, on and on through the endless centuries. Forever and ever, amen. He almost laughed. From mad poet to visionary to Out-Law; from anonymous businessman to infamous lecher, war hero to religious zealot (not so great a jump that, he had found), he was and always would remain the chamber wolf, slyly looking out through the masks that history demanded of him.
          Farmer. Cleric. King. Vampire.
          Chamber wolf.

24.
He approached the center of the castle, the hub of the catacombs. He stopped. In the sudden silence, he imagined he could even hear the ghosts of his just-passed footsteps dogging his trail.

25.
          "I am tired", he said. The gunslinger, the man in black, this young prince of strange mystery and forbidden magick. This poor unfortunate chamber wolf, who had lived for so long,, who had lived through the neurons of stolen flesh in impossible and imposing forms, who had known lust in all its myriad incarnations, but who had grown old enough to see relationships fade and wither away, who had grown cold to flesh and love and human accomplishment. There, at the heart of the labyrinth, confronting once again the judges who had shown him mystery and endowed him with knowledge, he admitted at last what he had known to be true for so long: He was tired, and it was all for naught anyway.
          The Councillor raged, the poem found, his wife still sweating from her encounter with the Chamber Wolf, his adversary. But all the sacrifices the Councillor would make, all the goats and other knives whose lives he would consume in his lifelong quest: it too, would prove to be for naught. And his life would fade and the centuries would continue to drown themselves in a sea of time.
          For nothing. Endlessly unto faded forever.
          Chamber Wolf, vampire, endless hero, Gilgamesh. Who had known love and forgotten what it meant, who had known lust and had been driven by passion until even that had faded; he was tired. He remembered a day on an endless plain a long history's forever ago. He remembered days of placid calm. He remembered an old man telling him one last mystery. He remembered the look of peace on that old man's face. There, before the door to mystery at the heart of the labyrinth, the chamber wolf almost smiled. Old man. Far older than he had known then. Far older than even that was he now and had been for quite some time. He paused and sat and remembered other times he had taken the walk down the dusty corridors, approached the door, then shied away from the final knowledge.
          They had given him the knowledge as to how to live forever. The final mystery.
          They would show him how to die again.
          He had forgotten.
          He would remember again.
          Love and lust and mystery: The true trinity, the tripolar axes against which all human lives are charted. Only one remained open to him now.
          He stood up and approached the door. The spring was gone underfoot. Was there anything he had forgotten? His hand closed around the door knob. He remembered the plain on that faraway afternoon. He couldn't remember the last time he had stopped to look, not at man or his doings, which were ephemeral at best, but at nature, who was sturdy, but unpredictable.
          Would it be enough?
          Suddenly, he smiled.

26.
It would have to be.

27.
He turned and walked down the dusty corridor, awake to new mysteries…

// disclaimer

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