In the grand scheme of matters, it didn’t.
Harriet awoke behind the wheel of a small automobile, not hers but one she remembered from somewhere, a trip to a farm, maybe. It was a singular—and singularly ugly—vehicle with strange creeping colors and dimensions that hurt the eyes to consider. The windshield was a cobweb vomit of crystal failures and the front seat was scattered with grit and concussion.
Harriet put a harried hand to her forehead and considered.
It seemed old lady Quimby had got the drop on her. Everything spun, but in a way that suggested a future in which they did not. Quimby had asked her a couple of questions, somewhere in the purple majesty of the last couple of hours, and now had dropped her here.
Here, being, it seemed, behind the wheel of a small automobile, not hers but one she remembered from earlier, from before it all started.
Maybe not all. Maybe just from when this started, here, now.
Harriet looked around her at the neon tubes of rushing cars climbing past her on the sluice of highway she seemed to be occupying. The speedometer suggested she was moving at either fifty or two hundred miles per hour, although the numbers swam and giggled when she tried to peg them down.
The faces in the other cars were monstrous and wicked, and she saw mostly their ears as they rocked back and forth, she passing them and they passing her.
What was it that brought her out of the drug-induced moment of solipsism?
A colossal bang. Some kind of huge noise, the kind you can’t hear because you are asleep, but then after, you feel the pain and the tension in your shoulders that it would have caused if you had heard it. Some sunuvabitch had run into the back of her bumper.
She stepped out of the car, other cars in other lanes passing and being passed around her, and the wind almost taking her off skittering to an autumnal eternity. The sunlight of the early morning scoured her aching scalp and put pinpricks of itch across the clammy clag of her back.
The enormous two-door, single-stroke engine behind her looked like an egg, dwarfing mountains and being dwarfed by thimbles. From the rounded door, a man began to emerge and then, not yet satisfied, just kept on emerging. He smiled an eerily scorbutic grin that split his head entirely in two, and she realized with a start that the top of his face was Barnabas’s. The rest of him seemed to be a suit, piloted by an impossibly small man who lived in the neck of the suit and piloted it inexpertly, lurchingly, toward her.
Cars screamed past, forward and backward, at numbing speeds.
The air whistled and catcalled as Harriet walked up to him and put a finger in the middle of his chest, nearly taller than the top of her head.
“That’s far enough,” Harriet said with a hiccough. “I see I’m not looking for Barnabas anymore.”
The horrible grin turned into a laugh that wrapped around her and asked her out for drinks in a vaguely demeaning way before never calling and probably having a wife anyway.
“Couldn’t tell you,” said the tiny voice from deep inside the awful, cavernous mouth. “I bought this at a pawnshop down on Fifth.”
Harriet shrugged.
“I’ve been down to Fifth,” she said. “Famously devoid of pawnshops.”
“Not where I go. Not on my side of town.”
Harriet looked deeper into the glassy eyes that looked like Barnabas’s. They twitched and blinked like fish on the bottom of a hot aluminum boat.
The giant tipped the top of its skull like a jaunty hat, and hucked Harriet and the terrible car over the side of the highway and into the sucking void below.
“John Mauser sends his regards,” it said.