It would be hard to say for how long I sat on that Harley, just looking at the house. Could have been 30 seconds; could have been 30 minutes. Probably it was 30 minutes. All I know is that it was another one of those moments in which I seriously doubted my ability to go on; to just continue down the road and try to survive—not because I’d loved her but because I feared, on some level, that she’d been right: that the world of the Flashback was, indeed, talking to us, trying to tell us something—although what that might have been was anyone’s guess; and trying to figure it out was a good way to go mad—like, epically mad, cosmically mad. Lovecraftian mad. And so I let it go; just as I’d always let things go, even before the time-shift; even before the Collapse and the Vanishing and this demon
