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here myself… assuming I can leave, that is. One man's haven is another man's hell.
    “You're free to go,” I tell Jack after the meeting.
    “You're shitting me.”
    “Nope. I told them you were sane.”
    He laughs, looks at me in shock—
you fucking believe me
—and laughs again. I suppose I wasn't entirely lying, any more than Jack is entirely insane.
    ——
    Up on a desolate hillside just outside of town, a split-rail fence is burning, petrol flames flicking high into the sky, a bonfire and a personal pyre of rage against the Hinter night and a haven of hate. I can hear him whoop and holler, roar, as he swings the petrol can around his head and throws it far off into the darkness, but Jack himself is little more than a silhouette. As he throws his arms out wide like a scarecrow, screaming obscenities, profanities, blasphemies, there's a hellish truth to him, I think.
    And as his cathartic inferno lights a slant of angular face, his obscenities, his profanities, his blasphemies turn to sobs and laughter, invocations of his lost love that break my heart as I sit here in the car, the engine idling, my hands shaking so much I know I cannot write those actual words of rogue desire without dissolving.
    “You know you don't really belong here,” Jack had said.
    I hadn't answered then, because I didn't really have an answer, and I still don't. I sit in my office now after seeing him off, cigarette in hand as I leaf through my copy of the Book. It's useless as a guidebook now—useless
here
anyway; it doesn't tell me where I am, where I might be going—just a morass of myth and morphology. But maybe it'll change again once I get it away from this place. If it doesn't… well, I write these words in it now, scribbling in red ink over printed black: an annotation, an exegesis of Puck's murder, Jack's madness and my awakening, to bury the hateful dogma in.
    It doesn't belong in my Book of All Hours.
    In the beginning
, the first chapter of the Book of All Hours begins, in this world. But how can you begin a story with the beginning of all beginnings? How can we understand a story that claims to be the beginning of all stories? Better to simply pick a random point in time and space, in all the vellum and the ink that covers it, and begin.
    “Jump in,” I say.
    Jack shakes his head. Hands on the roof above my head, he leans down to the window, weight on one leg, a cocky angle to his stance.
    “Road's blocked,” he says. “You'll never get out by car. I'm headed that way, Guy.
You
ought to come with
me.”
    He points past the burning pyre of the fence where they murdered Puck, way out into the Hinter. It looks so dark, so cold, I can't imagine anyone surviving such a desolate landscape. He might walk an eternity before arriving at another Haven. Then again, perhaps that's what he wants. Perhaps that's what he needs.
    “I don't think that's my path,” I say. “Not yet.”
    I look at the Book of All Hours on the passenger seat beside me, and I realize we both have the same delusion now, Jack and I. Somewhere deep inside I think— I really think—that I might still find our Puck again by studying the Book. It was the Book that brought us together in the first place, after all; it was the Book that led me to Puck, that led the two of us to Jack. A million folds in the Vellum, Jack had said, and in everyone of them Puck dies; but while neither of us will say it out loud, we both suffer under the hope that perhaps there's one fold where he
lives.
    “We should stick together,” I say. “We'll find a road out.”
    Jack grins.
    “You're
still
thinking too linear, Guy.”
    He slaps the roof of the car and steps back.
    “Be seeing you,” he says. “Somewhen.”
    I sit in the car for a while looking out at the falling snow caught in the headlights, the confusion of white and black like static on a TV set, the Hinter closing in around me. The red ink covers every inch of the page open in front of me, its first line written