All the same, I’m tired. My prose, I’ve noticed, becomes by turns more plain, more linear, only to jump out into time as if in a desperate attempt to maintain momentum. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, I cannot be far from the end, even if I end too abruptly. It may be that my fatigue will outweigh my momentum, that it will rush the ending and send you, dear reader, out of this riveting true-life account far sooner than necessary or proper. If this should occur, I refuse to apologize. This is an afterword or an afterward—I can’t remember anymore—and no one reads them. No one cares what they contain. By the time the afterword appears in a book, the story has already ended. Why, if I wanted to, I could write one hundred pages on obscure Truffidian rituals to offset my fear. It is not without precedence. It has happened before.

What’s left to tell? Many years passed, in much the same way as they had passed before. Sabon’s star continued to ascend. I was forgotten, although I continued on as a tour guide and cantankerous member of the Ambergris Tourism Board. On rare occasions, they called upon me to make short speeches at the rededication of certain historical buildings, or to make appearances as one of several fossils at various dinners mummifying the War of the Houses.

Duncan was forgotten, except for Sabon’s continued cruel resurrections. Bonmot died—in the long view of things, one moment he was there and the next he was not—much to my ever-growing sadness. I would sit at the old stone bench with my sandwich at lunchtime and try to conjure up the image of those wonderful conversations, that gravel voice, but it was never the same. Memory may be all we have, but it’s a poor substitute for flesh and blood.

And still, even as he seemed to make little progress regarding his theories, Duncan was changing, becoming other, the process always ongoing. He never recovered fully from Sabon (or AFTOIS, for that matter), rarely expressed interest in other women, never took enough of a break from his work to notice them, really. Sometimes, Duncan later confessed to me, he would still haunt Sabon from the shadows outside her current house, or her current lover’s house. (I went a little crazy at times. Late in the game, I set traps for Mary in the AFTOIS newsletter, using Lacond’s name for crazy theories that I thought she would be forced to refute, wasting her energy and, at the same time, unknowingly engaging me in a kind of dialogue. It never happened, to my knowledge.) Between his obsession and my tour guide job, we were a veritable team of stalkers, me during the day, him at night. (The only thing that comforted me: she never married. Surely that meant something?)

Somewhere along the way—I don’t know exactly when—we grew old, Duncan and I. Old and yet defiant; if not wise, then wizened, at least. Exactly as we had always been, only more so. No one makes it out.