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The important part of the story is that there were three of us, and we shared a common interest. It is unfortunate that I cannot go into the details that would prove my case, but if you were to be persuasive and convince me to allude to them too closely, you might be able to identify my associates. There are, after all, certain correlations between various events in my story and those which have been reported in what is foolishly referred to as the real world. As if there really is a difference. It doesn't matter for me anymore, but I'll not tell you my name and I'll give them false ones, if only to simplify talking about it. I'll tell you what you need to know about their backgrounds, but only on a case-by-case basis.

The first of my associates was a woman I'll call Jan, because although it's actually a Dutch name, it sounds sufficiently Asian give an idea of the very oriental nature of her character. I got to know her over the course of many years before she shared her history with me; her real name was an unpronounceable mess of consonants that sounded like a bullet ricocheting off steel plate, so she used a pseudonym anyway. I'm sure she'd not be offended by being known as Jan.

Her youth and cultural upbringing, were I to tell you about them, form a sort of exotic martial arts themed tragedy that would make an excellent Asian action movie, provided that you dubbed the whole thing badly enough and maybe moved it back a few hundred years, back into the Sengoku Era from which it had somehow survived. Without going into too much detail, the whole thing had ended - and I must emphasize that she truly, literally believed this - with eleven assorted members of her family, who were a sort of coven of Asian ninja occultists, being eaten by a particularly large and aggressive demon.

The actual total was fourteen, but she refused to count the other three because they were half-bloods. It wasn't a racial prejudice - they'd been sired on three of the female members of the family near the start of the whole sorry saga, and subsequently consumed to improve the demons assimilation of their powers.

I emphasize again that she believed this. To her it was not just an implausible story told by some elderly relatives to account for the absence of all her family. She believed this.

The other of my associates was a young man who I'll call here Christopher, because he certainly looked like someone named Christopher. Also, he used to tell an implausible tale about how St. Christopher was a benignly inclined werewolf, evidence for which he had in the form of assorted documentary proof originating with his family from the 14th century. He used to wear a silver St. Christopher's medal of the sort worn by travelers under his clothes, but it was lost later on.

Christopher was a sort of specialist in European-style and occidental magic, including Celtic ritualism, pagan practices and ancient myths, masks and symbols, that sort of thing. Although he wasn't that old, he had completely white hair that was nonetheless black at the roots. Maybe he bleached it somehow for effect, I don't know. He claimed it was a product of some sort of terrible shock he'd received in childhood, but much like myself at this moment, he refused to ever go into any details about the incident in question.

Once, when he was uncharacteristically drunk and we were in bed, he said something about how killing things the second time was far more disturbing. Then he said don't ask, and was all silent, and fell asleep lying on the side of me.

As I said earlier, I don't dare tell you anything about myself. But since you already know that the others were oriental and occidental, you can imagine me as the binder at the middle, holding the leather covers of the book together. Sort of an extra from neither side, but participating in both.

Knowing about Jan's family history in relation to her demon, it's easy to understand how one of her major motivations might be to get revenge on it. This was, of course, not the easiest of propositions, given that it would involve both finding it, a search not limited to conventional space, and then finding a way to hurt it, an attack not limited to conventional weapons.

More importantly, if Jan were to be drawn to the demons attention, she would be getting off lightly if it only chomped her down in several pieces whilst still alive. So whether you believe any of this or not, you can surely see what an insane proposition her driving motivation was.

So nothing came of it, until one day I made the mistake of mentioning an idea I'd had. I can't actually recall whether it'd occurred to me slightly beforehand, or whether it was something I'd simply made up on the spot to give Jan a new idea to gnaw on for a while and take her mind off her impossible revenge.

The essential part of the concept was a simple disquisition on where one could hide a substantial volume of extra-dimensional space in the modern day and age without it being noticed. In the absence of lost worlds and unexplored seas, the solution should ideally involve ready access from as many locations as possible, so as to avoid a fixed and thus easily detectable entrance point. Similarly, there would need to be adequate concealment of all access points already extant, such that they could not be detected from, for example, aerial photographs or satellite mapping.

Whilst out of the way, wild or empty places would seem like the ideal solution at first, in the modern day and age, mere remoteness would no longer be sufficient for concealment and would lead to ever-increasing inconvenience. The correct place to look, therefore, would be somewhere a little closer to home, in areas that were already populated yet generally inaccessible.

Whilst observing a map of the common distribution and design of suburban areas around the world, specifically where they occurred densely in irregular terrain with hills and valleys (we had day jobs, of course; I can't go into mine, but it involved me looking at said map) it occurred to me that between the roads there is a whole territory no-one ever sees, where the remote backyards of houses meet the remote backyards of other houses, already so removed from any of the main thoroughfares that long, long driveways are required to get to either. All of these spaces are private property, and yet where enough of them intersect, issues of ownership become hopelessly snarled. In some cases even the owners of the homes don't go back there, both for safety's sake and because in the absence of a border fence, and the presence of heavy overgrowth, it's all too easy to trespass on someone else's property. Only occasional lost children, drunk teenagers and petty criminals cross these unexplored regions, and even they tend to stick to well worn paths, heading off later towards the nearest road to find their parents, sober up or escape from activities recently perpetuated.

The last great unexplored territory in the world, in short, is the lost continent of suburbia.

Unfortunately for all concerned, both Christopher and Jan immediately latched onto my off-the-cuff concept, which really quite intrigued them, and would not let it go. Christopher kept going on and on about 'the lost continent of Suburbia,' in tones normally reserved for evidence of Azatlan and Mu. While it was certainly an interesting concept, intellectually speaking, I never held much faith in it myself until much later. By which time it had become very important indeed.

It was several weeks after I first raised the idea when, at our next meeting, Christopher showed up very excited, eyes shining with an esoteric glaze and obviously highly impatient to tell us something. He had, it seemed, tested my abstract idea in what was for him, a surprisingly practical way; he had been sneaking into and across the back yards of an obscure suburban area, location as determined by himself through some unspecified means. Probably map dowsing, or something like that.

Where his trespasses had happened is probably another thing I should not disclose. He was used to stalking game in the final remnants of Europe's primeval forests; his exploration of what was essentially someone's backyard was no difficult task. But after covering a distance much longer than the area was wide, and then doubling back to return to the road, he'd checked his personal observations against the matching satellite image.

Somehow the satellite had failed to catch the huge yet poorly known open park in which he'd found himself; a place with fixed low mist above the grasses, and shallow bleak breezes, and old fallen stones visible above the vapor, overgrown by impressive lichens. He, at least, found himself completely convinced that the place where he had stood was on the threshold of an undiscovered continent.

Confronted with seeming proof of my odd supposition, which she was all too eager to believe for those reasons of her own which I have already related, Jan was also completely convinced and and became utterly certain that it was somewhere in that place that she would find the demon which had made lunch out of her relatives.

She had this device, a geomancy and feng-shui accessory of heavily customised type, which we called a mage compass, because it looked nothing like the standard design freely available in most Asian countries. Her ancestors had made practical upgrades to it over several generations of occult practice. She'd tried to use it in the past to determine the demons location, but without success, because the needle would just spin randomly or stay completely fixed. Kind of like what you'd see over Bermuda, where the planes sometimes arrive before they left, or not at all.

On a second test intrusion into the suburban extraspaces, the first thing Jan did was pull out her compass and take a reading, and oh my, did it work well. The needle went fixed and rigid and wouldn't move, even when you shook the thing with both hands. What it was pointing to sort of twisted about - the direction would change in non-rational ways as you walked along - but it always indicated which way to go next and never doubled back on itself. Striking the spherical housing which surrounded the needle had no effect whatsoever.

Confronted with the apparent reality of not just my idea, but possibly also Jan's mythical demon, I reluctantly agreed to travel with them on a longer expedition into the extraspaces. Which, it has to be noted, could have been of almost any size from a few kilometers to effectively limitless. Both Jan and Christopher were wild with enthusiasm, but I found myself more cautious in the face of the all-too-imaginable. Pointing out the well-known lack of continuity seen in such convoluted places - there are lots of relevant examples in the literature, once you realize what they mean - I pointed out that we should probably try to find an incursion point that was as close as possible to wherever the demon normally laired up. Otherwise we could spend literally years exploring an entire continent's worth of suburbia when the target was, in fact, just across the road.

Also, I asked them, how was Jan actually intending to avenge her family? She'd spent so much time and effort searching for her demon in the first place, I don't believe she'd ever given more than a moments thought to what it actually was and how to kill it. Even if she did know, it might well be that it was a vengeance impossible to undertake, on the order of nailing its shadow to a wall with silver. Well, okay, that example's somewhat more practical in the modern age, what with nail-guns and electroplating. But such situations exist and are problematic.

It took a great deal of persuasiveness to get them to wait even a week, but I made the best possible use of it. First I researched Jan's demon, or at least as much of its history as had been translated into languages that I could read. The material was quite unhelpful, suggesting that whilst the creature could take material form at will, to interact destructively and intimately with humans, the true form of it in its own stately hells was so unspeakably contrary to the laws of nature as to break the mind and stop the heart. No practical form of attack was suggested.

I told this to Jan, but it seemed likely that she'd known it all along. Her eagerness for revenge was such that she suggested we should simply find its home and then, given that it was bound to own something, steal whatever it might value. This sophisticated plan did not improve my optimism.

Next, we examined maps and charts to find a better access point. The best prospect seemed to be a specific central suburban location where there were to be found several square kilometers of land with no direct road access, isolated atop a large, wide ridge with a steep cliff off to one side. In the shadow of the cliff, nothing could be seen atop the ridge, and yet from the nearest road that actually crossed it, only a single row of the nearest houses was visible, with a few isolated track-ways leading in. There was room, in all, for a very large volume of hidden territory, accessible more deeply here than from anywhere else nearby.

When I say it was suburban, I mean only just. There were just enough houses and just enough paths that no-one would think to go looking for something hidden there, not even the owners. No-one would even give it a second glance.

Finally, I made up packs and equipment to allow us to survive for an extended period of time within the unknown extraspaces. Full kit was not an option, but a small shared tent, basic food supplies and survival gear such as climbing ropes and hammers (also useful as larger weapons), bladed multitools, and heavy boots and gloves made of leather seemed like a good idea. All were readily available without any questions at all from an adventure and wilderness survival shop.

Equipped and provisioned, but still without a proper plan, we attempted at our next meeting to re-enter the suburban extraspaces at the new incursion point, an endeavor which met rapidly with success. I was afraid we might have to wander around for hours on end to find the correct entry path, but it only took five minutes worth of trespassing on other peoples yards to penetrate through into a newer and more tenebrous area, flavoured by suburbia but clearly not part of it. How exactly a space can derive topologically from suburbia, without any actual people, is rather difficult to describe and so once again I'll skip the details, just as in any good friend-of-a-friend story. Suffice to say, it was somewhat like that sport of urban exploration, in which people explore old and long-abandoned buildings, but with many more untrimmed trees, tall weeds and grasses. Imagine that you are in the outskirts of a major city, evacuated due to some unseen but dire force, and although there are still people somewhere nearby, you are always heading away from them. That gives you an idea of the disturbing desolation.

There were old wooden fences, some with very strange graffiti, and overgrown hedges now large enough to sleep inside, and the remains of old concrete foundations broken up and hidden under grass like unused tennis courts. Faint traces and remnants of paths led away to nowhere, with occasional steps placed suddenly by themselves. Parts of the extraspace were very close and surrounded, with landscape on all sides preventing any visibility into the distance, whilst others were worn and open, covered with low bush and reminiscent of industrial decay.

I believe, as we moved deeper and deeper into the extraspaces, that we drew steadily further away from our own world and deeper into someone else's. The suburban aspect of the elsewhere gradually decreased, even as its alieness grew steadily stronger.

We camped, the first night, in an enormously long concrete-paved corridor of sorts, that back in far-off reality must have correlated at some point to an overgrown short-cut walkway of which it was the terminal archetype. At no point was it ever possible to climb up the walls or otherwise look over or past them, a coincidence strained to its final breaking point. Christopher stopped trying after he fell down the third time, and contented himself with keeping a close eye on the effect, which kicked in the very instant something might be about to become visible.

We chose to stop there because it could only be accessed from two directions - either end of the corridor - and the hard concrete would surely make noisy going for any would-be predator. After it got dark, we kept watch nervously from a camp made up to be as camouflaged as possible, against the side of one of the walls. Jan was insistent that we should not start a fire there, for poorly explained reasons. In the night, we heard howling, like the cries of very large dogs. Perhaps they were merely wild things that had wandered deeply into the extraspaces and, unable to extricate themselves, had made these new territories their hunting grounds. I certainly hoped so, and that enough food was available for them that they wouldn't hunt us.

Near the end of the second day, by which time we had covered a considerable distance, we came upon the ruins of a local city. The landscape had changed just after we took a break to rest and have some lunch, the terrain becoming more rugged and irregular, rising into distinct hills and valleys, but the view from the tops of the valleys was strangely unhelpful, revealing only small remnants of the suburban houses and habitations in the far distance, near a misted-out horizon. Closer by, the local landscape and paths of our own approach were through lands of the desolate and industrial type, only more overgrown, and with no evidence of ever actually having been used in the past.

Although it was all quite real, the reality was starting to take on the aspect of an uncomfortable facade. "It's like the background in a video game," was what Christopher said. "It's not real and you can't ever actually get to it."

I said that we found the ruins of a city, but that is a slight exaggeration. Making a switchback along very narrow valley, with exceptionally high and steep slopes, we emerged out into a hollow in the hills, really just part of a wider and shallower valley, from which the view outward in all directions was obscured conveniently by the surrounding slopes and ridges. In this small, almost flat place were the tumbled stones, no building left standing, of what must once have been a largish village or small town. It looked a little like Mayan or Incan ruins, but being reclaimed by bush and trees instead of rainforest. In a few places, amongst some of the piles of stone, were statues, carved apparently from what looked a little like pink or reddish marble, but none or them were whole.

The parts suggested at by the fragments were just slightly strange, or perhaps disturbing, though the lack of a whole example failed to confirm any of our suspicions. A common theme seemed to involve lizards or reptiles, of which there were a number or fairly recognizable pieces, as well as the portrayal of female nudes with peculiar proportions. Jan was very excited by this and said that she was positive that it meant that we were approaching the dwelling place of her demon, but the rest of us were keen to get out of the ruined area as soon as possible. The ruins as a whole were oddly reminiscent of the mountaintop Shrine of Apollo in Greece, even down to the colour of the building stones, but that just made the place even more disturbing, for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on.

On the second night, we camped out in the remains of what looked like it had once been an outdoor garden centre, now long abandoned. Parts of shelving and tables at various levels still remained, as did portions of the scaffolding that supported permanent areas of shade mesh. Some of the plants had been left behind or had spread like weeds across the ground and between the gravel and paving stones, and were now reclaiming the site for themselves.

The garden centre spread out across a fairly wide area of land, on a shallow ridge that that varied by several inches in height across the site, affording us a fairly good defensive perimeter. We made camp under one of the areas of tumbledown shadecloth, again without a fire. This time no howling was to be heard, but the wind breathed raggedly through the wooden structures at night, and both Jan and Christopher complained that they could hear whispering, a soft murmuring and chattering almost subaudible, carried on the breeze from far away when they were silent.

I heard nothing but the wind, and I suspect that they had been influenced more than I by the ruins of the primitive city we had seen earlier in the day. Perhaps such a place had its share of more tangible ghosts.

It was near the end of our third day of travel that we finally reached the depths of the interior and found what can only have been the home of Jan's demon, and proof of all her claims. The closely confined appearance of leafy backyard suburbia had resumed some time previously, and we came up over a ridge that was bounded on one side by an old-fashioned vertical wooden slat fence, and the other by dense bush and fallen stones. I noticed that this latest ridge was similar to, and closely resembled, the actual cliff-side edge, back in real reality, of the area through which we had entered the extraspace. If this was the case, it would seem that we had traveled all the way through to the other side, opposite to the point at which we had first entered, with the cliffside interrupting the transition out.

I remember that the wooden fence, which was to my right looking outward, and had vertical slats as I have already described, was decorated or perhaps defaced by an example of primitivist art which was repellant yet stirring in its fully developed theme. It showed a standing figure, with two arms, two legs and head, just as one would expect, yet not otherwise recognizably of human form. The thing depicted had been delineated using red, orange and yellow paint, with occasional fine highlights, using a spray-can in much the same manner as conventional graffiti, if said spray-can had been wielded by the last living member of a nearly extinct aboriginal race. The result was bold in its sheer unpleasantness.

The fence terminated near the top of the ridge, choked off by the twists and turns of the terrain, but it was superseded a few feet further forward by its horizontal equivalent, a wide but relatively narrow structure like a viewing platform that extended outward several meters into the air. The result of this, at its forward edge, was a short vertical drop and then an abbreviated area of steep slope, before the rugged cliff face fell away below. The viewing platform had no forward railing, indeed no railing of any sort, and its design, as well as the weathered colour of the wood, suggested that both it and the fence had been built from the same materials, at the same time, very badly and in a great hurry.

Out beyond the viewing platform, however, the prosaic physical laws of our world left off and reality was skewed completely sideways.

How do I tell you about something I literally could not look at or describe, even if I wanted to? I freely admit there are a great many things I have left out of this, mostly for the safety of all concerned, or to avoid smearing the names of those who have done no wrong. But some things fall outside those categories the mind and the senses were ever designed to perceive. The eyes see them and then slide aside, or go out of focus if forced to remain still; the mind cannot even interpret what it does see and tries likewise to flinch away. Such things cannot be accurately described.

Still, if I overlook the details of what I clearly saw, right in front of me, and try to simply imply the overall impression, it is possible to come close. Outward and upward, but also beyond-ward of the viewing platform, some distance out, across a deep chasm that was in a certain inexplicable way not actually there, was a vast architectural assemblage of lesser edifices, all partaking equally of the impossible angles and unacceptable lengths that are such a frequently reported characteristic of the deep extraspaces. The result was a castle, a palace, a city, a pandemonium. It had a forward and for practical purposes vertical aspect that featured crenelations straight out of Escher and a walkway straight out of Giger. There was a courtyard. There were carvings to induce nausea.

Additional conflicts were posed by the intersection of extended suburbia with the reality of the palatial lair, which was overlying it. Words fail in the face of it.

Jan immediately declared that this was her demons palace, citing attempted depiction of same in some piece of obscure oriental folklore as certain proof. Christopher was equally excited. I was, as ever, somewhat more dubious about this conclusion, which I felt must by definition fall badly short of truly or even accidentally revealing what Jan's demon actually was. If its dwelling was located in a completely alien reality to our own, the consequences of entry alone might be truly frightful to the human form - to say nothing of trying to negotiate its pathways.

Jan would have none of it. She unshipped one of the coils of climbing rope we had bought with us from the bottom of her backpack, improvised a grapnel from two of the climbing hammers by tying them together at right angles, and prepared to go fishing for her demon. She tied the other end of the rope to several of the wooden slats at the edge of the viewing platform, and declared that even if we were all too gutless to try it, she was going to climb across the intervening space, enter the demons palace and steal whatever it held most dear.

It didn't take her long to coerce Christopher in as well. She used his occult curiosities shamelessly as a lever to exploit him into joining her on her foolhardy expedition. I suggested caution; pointed out that we had more than enough supplies to spend a day carefully observing the structure, at least as much as it was possible to observe it, before trying anything. They refused to listen; I refused to join them. They told me if I was too afraid to go, I should at least stay put and guard the nearer end of the rope.

Christopher went first, lending his greater strength to spinning and hurling the rope across the gulf, like it was twisting through mirrors. Harsh words were exchanged, but in the end, the rope was just long enough and he was able to cast it just far enough. The hammer-blades hooked on something, somehow.

From the instant the grapnel caught I tensed, expecting if nothing else some random response to a sudden loud noise originating externally to the inhabitants. Once several minutes had elapsed without any significant happenings I relaxed slightly, but only a very little. Jan first, then Chris climbed out along the rope and then, after a certain distance, disappeared into the distorted faces of the still imperceptible structure.

I waited about two and three-quarter hours, in the end, getting slightly more worried with each and every passing minute. There was no sound; all was silent. There was no breeze; the air was almost still.

Suddenly, Jan and Christopher reappeared at the other end of the rope, obviously in great haste, moving too fast to take suitable cautions about weight distribution or the increasing oscillations of the rope. Jan was carrying a something that was long, unwieldy, spiky and metallic, which significantly impeded her ability to climb along the rope. I think some parts of the something were more bluish and glowing, whereas others were more dull and silvery-gray, but I didn't get a very clear look.

Suddenly the rope snapped. Or more accurately, the rope held, but the old and weakened boards to which it was tied gave way, shattering explosively. I managed to catch the trailing end - only because there were a couple of pieces of wood still caught in the escaping loop of the knot - but by throwing my entire weight against them I was able to drive the pointed and splintered ends down into the small interval of incredibly steep slope before the drop-off. By then bracing the wooden pieces in their turn, pushing them into the thin soil with all my strength, I was able, just barely, to keep the rope from falling.

Somehow Christopher and Jan had managed to keep their grip; I don't know how. The moment of danger was hardly over, however; it had barely begun. The cliff-side edge against which I was bracing the rope consisted of rock, but it was strangely soft and malleable, especially at its most exposed and weathered edges, perhaps because it had impinged right upon the edge of the other reality for some unknown length of time. The texture was like stretchy clay, or hardened foam; thus the viewing platform, assembled in haste long before to get up closer to the edge.

I had little time to think, before a frantic glance showed Jan's lips were moving, framing a single desperate sentence in complete silence. She kept trying, again and again, until suddenly she got close enough that there was once again a certain continuity of physics between us, and only then was she able to cry out, "Don't look, it's coming after us!"

I looked, which was definitely a mistake, because I saw it.

Jan's demon reared up from behind the crenelated structure at the far end of the rope in its true and terrible form, a mind-destroying abregnation of aesthetics and sanity. It is only because I have never seen the world in quite the sane, normal way of others that I was not struck mad on the spot. Even vague and inaccurate memories of what I saw refuse themselves to be examined too closely. But like its picture, it had two arms, and two legs, and a head, and apart from that in no way shared any other recognizable points of similarity with a human being.

But whilst my mind still held out some fragile resistance, it was the rest of my physiology that failed me. I have high blood pressure; a purely genetic condition, addressed by a single simple pill each day, designed to accumulate in my system and hold it down to safer levels. But nothing was ever designed to allow the human organism to cope with something like this, and I felt my heart begin to accelerate, faster and faster, as I looked at it, as my pupils widened and vision blurred, as Jan and Christopher scrambled up my back and clawed their way onto the platform and ran for their lives.

Barely had they even started to take their first steps when the rope was torn out from under me by its other end, and I came within mere inches of losing my grip and sliding irreversibly over the edge of the cliff. This final reminder of survival was all that enabled to turn my head just in the slightest degree and look away, but it was already too late. My heart continued to accelerate, beating ever faster, and I was unable to stop it as I frantically clawed my way up the spongiform stone of the cliff, half-crazed with terror.

Suddenly I felt my heart stop, quite completely and utterly, thrown into total cardiac arrest by my involuntary and total terror of the creature that I could no longer even see, climbing along the jaggedly irrational parapets of its lair somewhere behind me, readying itself no doubt to make its spring across the intervening chasm. And yet, even in the total silence - the sudden absence even of a heartbeat, of blood moving in my veins - I was able to ascend the last few feet of the cliff face - to brace my feet against the edge of the viewing platform - to throw myself free and clear out over the edge of the cliff, avoiding the many snags and spurs of rock - driven by fear, nothing but fear alone, purest terror, enough to drive the dead themselves to flight!

When I regained consciousness, many hours later, I was lying in a heap atop the overgrown bush and spill of small stones that formed the base of the cliff. But more importantly, I heard the sound of human inhabitants in the houses nearby. In that last moment of desperate calculation atop the cliff, I had hoped that in the fall, I might pass back out the far side of the extraspace, and that in striking the ground, the impact might start my heart once more. My chest was in agony; I could barely breathe. But I was able to crawl to the nearest occupied home, and that was enough.

I misrepresented myself as a sort of suburban explorer, with little or no regard for the rules of trespass; I had stumbled and fallen from the cliff, although how no-one had heard me cry out or fall, it was difficult to say. I had two companions with me, but they must have fled, fearing possible implication in the accident; my visit to the adventure and wilderness survival shop to obtain kit suitable for three persons surely proved this. I refused to identify my accomplices; I paid the cost of fines and medical bills myself. It was easy enough to keep it out of the papers; in this I was aided by the owners of the cliff-side houses themselves, because they were wealthy and did not want to raise a scandal in the matter of their safety considerations, which it turned out were little to none at the top of the cliff itself.

Jan and Christopher never returned. I miss them both, but I miss him more. It's remotely possible that they're still alive - if they fled deep enough, taking random ways and paths, they may have managed to lose that thing and emerge, eventually, into some unexpected and far distant place. But I'm sure they would have contacted me by now, if only in the most roundabout of ways. As for myself, I can only assume that the fact of my actual death - if only for half a minute or so - led the creature to overlook me and continue with the pursuit of its stolen treasure. I just hope that the thing Jan stole never finds its way into the hands of any innocent people; because I don't think her demon is ever likely to give up.