To my surprise, Mary told me Hoegbotton & Sons should publish it. She was quite adamant about it, and further instructed me not to delete or soften any references to her, regardless of how unflattering. She became very emotional on this point, and I had the impression she wished I had shown her the manuscript the day I had found it.

Obeying Mary’s wishes, I did not make many edits of substance in preparing Janice’s account for publication. I did, in some instances, smooth out the text—for example, fixing the grammatical errors in those sections written in exceptional haste. Likewise, I corrected all spelling errors. Where Janice had alternate versions of a page or scene—which occurred with some frequency—I chose the more polished of the two. I also untangled Janice’s handwritten corrections from Duncan’s comments, deciding that placing the latter in parentheses and removing parentheses from Janice’s text was the most elegant solution to a potentially wearisome problem. Where she spent too long on a subject, or lost focus completely, I did excise text, but the entirety of these deletions constitutes only five or six paragraphs in total. I may have erred too far on the side of preservation in this case—some of the discussion of Duncan’s theories strikes me as tedious—but better tedium than claims I was overzealous in my editing duties.

I also deleted Duncan’s final comment on Janice’s manuscript, which he wrote on the page following her last chapter. I did this not because I wanted to, but because I had to. The comment was illegible. I had several handwriting experts examine the sentence. None could come to any agreement as to how it might have read. The most coherent interpretation? “Confluence of light between towers and being there at the right time leapt forward.” I include the phrase here despite my best instincts to do otherwise. My sole addition to the text consisted of fleshing out one or two scenes where Janice’s descriptive powers deserted her, but only in cases where I had been privy to the same information.

A further complication concerned the fungal contamination of the pages, coupled with the haphazard way in which the pages had been stacked on the table at the Spore. On some pages, the words were barely legible, and many pages or sections were out of order, several lacking the page numbers that might have allowed me to easily sequence them. I erred on the side of chronological order—even though Janice did not always adhere to such an order—but it is possible I made a few errors in my sequencing.