Daemonomania, by John Crowley

Bantam 2000, $24.95 hb.

After building his mythology in Ægypt and Love & Sleep, Crowley now takes time to work within it in this, the third book of four. He also becomes more explicit about the structure of his universe, although it is sometimes hard to know if he is presenting the architecture of his fictional reality, or simply being "literary" in his references. The mood is dark and autumnal, with persistent themes of melancholy, possession and failure. And yet not unrelievedly so: young Sam is rescued, Pierce bitterly discovers some self-knowledge, and the new age is forming.

We discover the secret of Robbie, Pierce's imaginary son and sexual fantasy. He is Eros, a little Cupid come to prepare Pierce for Rose. We can guess that one of Pierce's forgotten wishes was to be "possessed" by Love, and so he has been, to a demonic extent. His steamy domination of Rose ("laughing aloud like devils delighting") has ended and left him wrecked. How is it that magicians always know they must avoid being caught in their own spells, yet they always are? Pierce thought he was the master, but after Rose has escaped his bondage and become bound to the Powerhouse cult, she says "That was made up. That was just a game."

Rose is still a mysterious character. She has much more inner life than in the previous books, but remains strangely dreamy, pliable, afflicted with poor memory.

Crowley draws for us a gnostic cosmology where the human soul originates in the "realms of light" far beyond this world we know, in which we have become entangled by love and sleep and forgetfulness. Here we are oppressed and kept in bondage by uncountable spirits more powerful than we who keep us from returning to our proper homes. "All the angels are fallen angels." In the end, Dee realizes that it is best to have nothing to do with them. "The gods are sustained by human tears."

Crowley sometimes implies that "possession" is a metaphor for melancholy, for purely mental troubles. But psychological states themselves seem to have, at best, merely metaphorical status. What is the difference between a "syndrome" and a "devil"? Freud was the epitome of Science a century ago, but seems much less so now, since it has been noticed that his works contain no testable hypotheses.

The Powers seem quite real in this book, and the despised Powerhouse is one of their venues. Pierce is terrified that they may have real magic, as indeed they seem to have. They send him a warning nightmare, and are able to tune in on Rose when she is pondering that possession might be more like external domination, something one could cast off and escape from. Mike Mucho phones, interrupting her. "Just thought I'd call." Then she has lost her train of thought. (She also knows when Pierce is calling her, shortly thereafter). Beau has been keeping an eye on them, and in combating them he sacrifices himself.

The emphasis by the Powerhouse (and by many real Christian sects) in casting out evil spirits and replacing them with holy spirits is here given ominous accent as another variety of demonic possession. When "all the angels are fallen angels" then holiness does not result from inviting a spirit in. Bobby commits her murder after being exorcised.

Although he sets up plot expectations for the next book, not all seem very promising. Sam as a magical child? Bruno surviving the fire somehow? He spent so much time building up expectations about the black chest, and now he seems to have decided it isn't so.

I again wonder if Crowley despairs of carrying through his project. As the ghost of Fellowes Kraft laments:

Well I've failed. I failed. Yes I think that's evident now...The conception was just too huge, the parts too many. No matter how long it was let to go on, it got no closer to being done...I so much wanted it to knit...Past and present, then and now. The story of the thing lost, and how it was found. More than anything I wanted it to resolve. And all it does is ramify...I'm so sorry. Well at a certain point invention flags, you see; you begin to repeat, helplessly. You keep coming upon the same few conceptions over and over, greeting each one with glad cries, yes! Yes! The way on! Until you realize what it is, oh here I go again, the same story again, as ever. And you feel so damned...I just hope...we won't all be in here forever, and none of us able to move up, or down.
If this reflects Crowley's attitude toward his own work, I wouldn't be surprised if he simply pulled the plug and moved on to other work. I didn't expect Dee and Bruno to die until the fourth book. I would hate to see him give up, and yet I also want the story to resolve, and amount to more than coils of self-referential literary conceit. I sense a flagging of energy, as when he feels obliged to end each section with a Meaningful Passage. In this book Crowley is at his best in little aspects: further details of Little Enosh, radio station WIAO, and the tremendous explication of astrology.

And yet. Recall the remarkable, unforeseeable, inexplicably wonderful endings of Engine Summer and Little, Big. Might he step off into an entirely new, startling direction for the resolution? That would be worth waiting for. I see one such possible breakthrough: the closed, claustrophobic gnostic universe is not the only one imaginable. Recall that in a previous book Pierce thought of God as a nine-year-old girl. Now he has had a semi-conscious dialog with her and receives the message that has been traveling toward him from infinity since the start of the story: "Wake up." But I doubt if Crowley will make a transcendental turn; it doesn't seem like him. He also comes up with such dull epigrams as "The tale has no author." (Is that the sort of thing he thanks Harold Bloom for?)

Mysteries:

One last tidbit. Pierce finally remembers the lyrics to "Bobby Shaftoe":

Bobby Shaftoe went to sea
Silver buckles on his knee
He'll come back and marry me,
Handsome Bobby Shaftoe.
But I found these in a 1921 grade school songbook:
Bobbie Shaftoe's one year old
Bobbie's eyes are bright as gold
And his nose both pink and cold
Little Bobbie Shaftoe!

On the rug he loves to doze
Then he wakes and off he goes
Stepping on his cushion toes
Pretty Bobbie Shaftoe!

Bobbie Shaftoe's black and white
When it's dark his eyes are bright
Like two lamps set in the night
Pretty Bobbie Shaftoe!

Bobbie's very fond of fun
Round and round he'll frisk and run
Now I ask you everyone
What is Bobbie Shaftoe?

Crowley must be familiar with these lyrics, given the constant dog and wolf imagery applied to Bobby in the second book.
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Notes

The page numbers refer to the first hardbound edition.
3 PROLOGUE
On the bus to Conurbana.
7-Uxor: wife, marriage, partnership, divorce
8-Mors: death
9-Pietas: religious observances, voyages
The theme will be autumn melancholy. Just after the passage time.
Did we know that Val is a barkeeper?
4 First book: Spring. Second: Summer.
5 Pierce knows that his choices make the new world. What had he done?
6 Common reality: Heraclitus' xynon?
The fable of riding the bus.
11 UXOR
The passage time as end of the world. Some pass into the new world while others still live in the old.
Omens.
12 Sam's illness cured Rosie's void.
Allan Butterman's car: Tigress.
13 Sam's second seizure on the passage night.
Is Gothic a plain style of lettering?
14 Sam's "old house", resembling the castle, an old barn, a trailer on blocks.
15 Fellowes Kraft's plans for a Shakespeare festival at the castle. Almost put on Marlowe's Faustus.
16 Sam's mother and father sat on thrones. She had a hundred tiny sisters who lived in a ball. Angels?
17 A joke: ghosts at the castle.
18 The secret geometry of the landscape; will no longer exist in the future.
19 Pierce sitting with Beau on the passage night, the autumnal equinox. Moving to the house in Littleville the next day.
20 The confusion of inside and outside, dreams and reality.
21 Rose rolled her car on the passage night.
"Real, though, usually." What?
Is Rose's hair black? I thought it was red.
22 Rose's car: little red Asp convertible. Her loaner: a Terrier or Harrier.
Her frequent gaps in memory.
23 Rose a quick drunk.
25 Pierce has told Rose about Robbie, as if he were real. And why is he still hanging around?
26 Pierce's car: a Steed.
27 Beau: "We know there is." His group?
Rose's accident a suicide attempt.
31 Pierce's ms Part I & II correspond to Crowley's first two books in this series.
He began to write when Robbie appeared. Rose may be responsible also.
Why does Rose call the bedroom "Invisible"?
32 Rosie's dream of flying.
33 Brownie: an elf-doll?
34 "You little. You big."
Kraft title: The Company.
Boney's ghost. Standing before the front door?
35 Boney's car: a Buick. Rosie's (Mike's): a Bison station wagon.
Boney left everything to "his old girlfriend, Una Knox".
36 Rose studying her Climacterics. She will be 28.
37 Mike Mucho the current inventor.
He is Rose's "former lover".
Fantasy of Peru. One more dead.
38 Pierce's idea of Climacterics as a spiral up a mountain.
Good day to get her hair cut.
Pierce's anecdote of Helvetius and the alchemist. 1666.
39 Rose "laughed at first." Did he punish her?
40 The game of Telephone, pushing anecdote towards clarity, wonder and exemplum.
Pierce's three types of readers.
41 Quoting Hegel, but proposing that Nature also changes. Many Ages, long or short, the previous one ending about the time of Helvetius. The current one ending now.
42 Pierce plans to conclude in his book that the changes are inside, a truth about human nature, not external Nature.
Patients' cars: Foxes and Jaguars.
43 Mike: a Powerhouse convert.
Ray talks about the passage time.
44 Christian power over demons. Healing by casting out demons.
47 Rosie feels that Mike has been "replaced". Did the "real" Mike get off of the bus?
49 Mike offers Pascal's wager.
Rose always asks "What'll I do?" as opposed to Pierce's "What have I done?"
She fears the loss of Being.
50 Mike extorts Rose.
51 Rosie's childhood cough.
52 Bobby Shaftoe: nurse's aide with big hair.
53 Sam suffered from Mystery Shrieking as an infant.
59 Reversing the relativity of motion
60 Rose prays and regains her lost hour.
Animating spirit, consubstantial with the soul. Telepathy
61 Pierce cheats, pretending to use magic on Rose. He's been spying.
"Laughing aloud like devils delighting."
Pierce "examines" Rose.
64 Is Pierce's "Soft Voice" related to the faith-healer's techniques?
65 What's in the bag? What does he do to her? He hears a narration of his actions.
66 Was Rose really at the porno film shoot? Has Pierce invented that and is it now real? Is this a Crowley self-reference, the changed plot element?
67 Pierce felt warned to flee.
68 He thinks his fetish is not inside himself.
69 Rose is aroused by fire and fireworks.
Sex is innocent, power is not. [But: what is it Pierce has with Rose?]
70 "They're not from here" -- the healers.
72 Rose aroused by cutting her hair.
73 Spirit manifested as speech or song, and as semen.
74 "He was now lost."
76 Mike cautions Rosie about the Halloween party: "you don't know what you'll attract."
77 Sam "being dead" in the leaves.
78 Ray: parental behavior invites the demons to possess their children. Is he accusing Mike, regarding Sam?
79 Ray cast out a demon on the passage night. "Time bifurcated" for Mike.
80 Sam will always have epilepsy.
81 Is this the "moleskin-colored" crystal? Gray-brown quartz. Her old house. What did she see in it? Her seizures started shortly after looking into it for the first time.
"Come out."
82 Dee speaks briefly to Sam through the crystal. (And he is a fiction inside the fiction). Is this the first time for her?
Dee back in England, 1592. Gray quartz stone.
83 Dee now has the sight but the angels are gone. How could Madimi be in the clear stone when that was part of a vision in the first stone?
Gold making: the king inside matter becomes his own wife and bears a son.
84 The same process throughout the ladder of creation. Prague the emblem of this action.
85 Who are Madimi's enemies?
86 Dee doesn't know if the spirits of the stone are wicked or not.
87 Kraft's ghost looking at the ms on his desk.
89 Mathesis: mathematical magic.
Dee and Bruno meeting twice is Kraft's invention. Historically, they never met.
The secret brotherhood.
90 The brotherhood becomes visible during the passage time. Some of its members are "nobodies."
The Kraft ms has contradictions between Parts Two and Three. Same for the Crowley books? And did we know the ms is divided into Parts?
Pierce has not yet seen the stone and does not seem much interested.
91 What did Kraft actually believe? Pierce? Crowley?
What is the one thing from a previous age that has not lost its potency?
Pierce feels a great spell working on him.
Kraft's dead dog relaxes as the ms is removed.
92 Al-Kindi's rays. Pre-Newtonian determinism.
93 Picatrix. Hermes and Adocentyn.
94 Bruno has learned how to compel the imaginations of other men, and perhaps of gods and daemones. He has grown, transforming his inner cosmos.
England, March, 1584. Writing Expelling the Triumphant Beast.
97 Love is magic. The passive love of the lover, the active love of the magus which binds and is not bound. The mage grows on the hunger of others.
The ministers to condemned prisoners.
98 Two prerequisites for successful magic: (1) faith, both active and passive, (2) the magician must not be caught in his own nets.
99 The ass of useful toil, bearing the Sacrament.
100 Kraft bought Picatrix in Prague. What effect does it have on Pierce and Rose?
101 Jean Bodin's book on demonomania. Obsession with spirits.
102 Bruno vs Bodin. Cosmological vs transcendental realities.
103 The willing demonic possession of the the magicians. Mike's warning.
104 The Three Kings the patrons of epilepsy.
Frank Walker Barr on the 16th century witchcraft craze.
105 Pierce believes it can never happen again.
Does he have reason to believe that Hildy has lost her faith?
Ars Auto-amatoria, or Every Man His Own Wife.
108 Pierce has told Rose he can teach her to be invisible.
Both Rosie and Spofford have had sex with Rose.
109 Pierce: are the possessed guilty or merely unfortunate?
Robert Burton and spirits in the bowels. Pierce constipated. Melancholics tend to be self-involved masturbators.
110 Grand melancholics drawn to higher things.
Epilepsy one of the forms of spiritual absence. Pierce knows sex is such also.
The categories of psychiatry suddenly vacant. Future healing.
Pierce does not recognize his own melancholy.
111 Dee's burned books are returned to him. Unchanged?
112 Gems in the Giant Mountains. Kraft had been there when young.
113 Madimi appears grown and naked. In Prague, same as near the end of Love and Sleep.
114 Gold-making requires sexual potency.
115 Did Dee never recognize Kelley's duplicity? To what extent did Kelley deceive himself?
Using the clear stone.
118 Jane Dee says the angels communicate confusedly, as in the game of Telephone.
Last record of angelic conversation: May 23, 1587.
119 "The globe was dark, gone out." Is it lit up when in use?
The child's ball. Whose footsteps?
122 Dogs, stars, stones, roses.
Spiritual creatures, names beginning with "B".
Who or what is the daughter of Fortitude?
123 Kelley possessed. Good and evil spirits the same.
124 The Faraway Lodge includes a bar and restaurant.
125 Northern woods in North Dakota?
"The wolves aren't wolves."
126 Hollow men, operated from beyond. Like the Powerhouse member.
Technical error: I don't believe M1's were used in Vietnam.
First mention of Cliff.
128 Why has Pierce specifically studied the early autumn constellations? Because of the story of Andromeda?
Sagittarius the door by which the dead leave the earth.
Barr: once the universe was made not of matter, but of time. Such a world can be replaced by another.
We come into the world through Cancer.
129 Passing down through the spheres. Explanation of astrology.
Spofford knows his soul was created recently, locally, and is still being formed.
130 The boat of the soul with Cancer painted on the sail.
131 Fear the complementary soul. Rose appears, of course. Driving the Asp. Circling like an animal.
132 Rose's big fire. Pierce seizes her in the dining room.
133 Nerve endings of the textbook homunculus.
134 Sexual absence of being. The erotic bond wastes away and must be shored up. The lover attempts to become the beloved by entering her totally.
Pierce is not capable of the normal bonds of love.
Why did his life in the city require a "barge" of a bed?
Potion of the Sphinx (the "Gypsy")
135 Electric fire = Moloch's mouth.
"How sweet I roamed from field to field" -- Blake.
The eye is the mouth of the heart, eating Recognition.
136 Is it possible Rose will forget all this?
Leaden star: Saturn?
Rose: Terrier sedan.
Exiles fleeing in the wrong direction.
137 Pierce thinks Rose has forgotten Climacterics.
No "frankness, openness" between them.
Pierce whispers stories in her ear which discover or create a new Rose.
138 Andromeda: The Marriage of Agent and Patient. The seal or emblem of bondage.
Rose wears a studded collar, new chains.
139 Who is Rose addressing: "I love you."
140 Rose driving the Terrier. Can't get a part for the Asp. Wasn't she driving it earlier?
141 Rose seems much changed, having decided to go with the healers. Mr. Winterhalter insists he has never seen her before. Is this where she "got off the bus"?
142 "Who would you be saying this begone to?" Rose points at him: "That little one."
The imagination test.
146 The maze Heimarmene ("fate").
Pierce doesn't know right from left.
151 Pierce has sat before the Andromeda emblem too long.
Masturbation by mail.
152 Old Rosicrucian ads.
153 Rosie knows sex is for making babies. Other uses require extra work.
155 Cliff seems to be a healer of some sort. An albino.
157 Rosie briefly sees Boney's ghost.
158 Pierce: all magic is bad magic. Was it so? He claims he didn't want power over Rose, but to be her at the intense moment. He worries: what if we went too far, to death? Death of the Kiss.
159 Bruno: magicians, lovers, gods are are hunters of souls, seeking the power to bind.
Robbie was Pierce's Eros. Is he gone now? The last of the Three Wishes. He thought it was an award.
The human soul is older than the gods and comes from farther away. Because we have forgotten that they have power over us.
163 MORS: Ember Days
Kelley seems to have been replaced by a bigger man. Possessed. Hectic melancholy.
165 The crystal cold, vacant, gone out.
Dee considers that the visions may have originated in Kelley.
Bumblebee-sized elemental spirits?
Dee projects his own thoughts into the crystal and speaks with Madimi for the first time.
Madimi's mother (the "daughter of Fortitude"?) called Amphitrite ("Understanding"). He mother's name is Night.
167 Madimi can give Power but not Understanding.
All the angels are fallen. By definition?
She predicts the witchcraft craze.
168 "Do not fly from the powers into the arms of other powers. The powers reside each inside all the others."
She gives Dee a wind. Kelley's gold not good.
169 Dee and Kelley both make gold, easily. "Real enough."
170 Dee practices with his wind, lets it go.
172 The witch craze.
173 The spirit walkers (werewolves?) who fight the witches.
174 Bruno on the varieties of magic.
Details of death by fire.
175 Dee: he who believes himself a werewolf has a form of melancholy.
176 Jan, the imprisoned young man from the Giant Mountains.
179 Dee's astrological treatment for melancholy.
181 The god Jupiter within the planet.
182 Jan seems to think werewolves are always men and witches always women. They fight each other for the harvest.
The Three Kings patrons of the werewolves.
185 Jan thinks he is pursuing one witch. Dee thinks the "witch" is Jan's melancholy.
The witches bring back news of the dead. Only they can do this.
186 Jan tries to excuse the witches. Their hunger cannot be satisfied.
187 Jan's spirit-journey.
188 The witch has the melancholiac's dark face.
Is Jan also the lame boy?
192 Bruno and Dee's second (fictional) meeting. Invisible shape-shifting.
194 Andromeda in alabaster. No freedom without bonds.
196 Dee tells Bruno he was warned of his coming to England by spirits. Bruno seems skeptical.
197 Dee's Monas glyph. Bruno is emphatic that the One cannot have a sign.
198 They see the sign glowing red. "The emptiness in God's heart is man."
199 Bruno and Rudolph.
202 Rudolph's magi.
204 The chest.
205 Kelley chosen to do what?
206 Passage times all alike, like Eliade's sacred time. Like Christmas in Little, Big.
208 Bobby is afraid to sleep some nights. She can't remember what happens.
209 She sees the dead man by the road. Car: Tempest, white convertible with red top. Memories of murder.
210 Bobby's "kind." Like but opposed to Floyd's. No blood of his.
211 She sees the dead. What do they want?
212 She thinks about going up the mountain to the more perfect gospel teachers, but does not.
213 She turned to the Powerhouse when her dead daughter appeared to her.
216 She knows that her kind are pursued by others. She is not certain if Rose is of her kind or not.
217 Convertible: Stingray or Vixen.
225 Pierce writing about the origin of modernity.
226 The Powers who make the new world may use old components. The reader's choice.
Pierce has committed the unknown sin against the holy ghost.
227 He is appalled that so many people believe in God and judgement.
228 Letter from Spofford. Cattle mutilations.
Telegrams have stopped working.
230 The Christian cult as wizardry.
231 Pierce considers Christianity an "isolating, antiworld story."
He is jealous that Rose is leaving his bondage and entering another.
234 Chutes and ladders: going down and coming up.
237 Pierce claims he wanted understanding instead of power, but knows that isn't true.
238 Pierce hears Rose speak in tongues. Whose language is that? She doesn't believe it happened.
242 What Rose believes to be true in the world, Pierce believes is true only in a story.
244 Pierce and failure; the frozen pipe.
248 He feels the world has grown small, with an angry Jehovah hovering just above.
249 He is disgusted by the return of bigoted religion. [But: is it different than what happened at Barnabus College when he was there?]
251 His dream of the Christian intruders. His fear of real magic. No escape.
253 He thinks of burning the Kraft ms, wondering if it is the source of his troubles.
257 Only Val or Rosie can free Boney. Why?
260 Rose plays the music heard in the past, Book 1. She thinks "Am I awake at last?"
Why a black room?
261 Pierce assaults Rose.
263 His failure in having no loving compassion. The beings of the future expect him to understand this.
265 On the bus to Conurbana.
266 He realizes how unwise his is, getting his wishes.
267 Bobby's car: Tomcat.
Floyd is still alive. In a coma at the Catholic hospital.
268 She speaks to the new spirit within her. Does she believe in it?
Ray: What I tell you three times is true.
Christianity as the displacement of evil spirits with a good one. The evil spirit sins, not the true self.
269 The Powerhouse tells Bobby her visions of the dead are actually a melancholy within her. Like Dee.
270 Does she recover memories of Floyd, or invent them?
271 Her exorcism.
Floyd saw the dead also.
272 The passage night. White Tempest convertible.
274 "What did he see?"
Chutes and ladders.
276 Bobby has seen Floyd in the land of the dead.
277 It was on the passage night, with the stolen car, that she visited him and turned him over.
279 Her problems are not sin, but nature.
She vows to bring Floyd back, or to go and stay with him.
282 Pierce at supper with a dozen flesh-eating Christians.
283 Retlaw O(tto?) Walter. Why a palindrome?
289 Pierce feels himself passing into the new world of the Powerhouse.
290 Rose on their sex life: "That was made up. That was just a game."
291 The coin pauses in the air.
292 Rose had gotten off the bus.
294 Bruno. The Little, the Big. Composing signs. Nox, mother of Aphitrite.
296 Are the couple before black Orpheus Pierce and Rose?
299 Miracles occur when the Emperor rearranges his salon.
306 Dee: The end of the world comes to every man alone.
310 Jan the ancestor of Kentucky coal miners.
311 The dark and light brotherhoods. The jealous rulers.
312 Beau in NYC. The Sophia handout.
313 What is MM? Marilyn Monroe?
314 Protest against the Powers means not reproducing.
315 Beau lived in NYC when Julie and Pierce were lovers. He met her at MM after her time with Pierce.
Julie's phone calls on the passage night.
316 What does she know about Pierce's fate? Who are "those guys"? (Beau's circle).
The story about something or someone needing saving.
319 Beau's number was not listed "of course". Why?
320 Pierce's fear and weakness made a world.
326 Who left the car part for Rose?
327 Rose and Mal Cichy.
328 Outer possession. Rose's thoughts interrupted by a call from Mike.
329 Does she sense Pierce is about to call her?
334 An angel inside the baby. Nothing inside the angel.
336 Little Enosh. Snoopie Sophie.
337 Pierce cries while reading the comics.
338 Sam won't sleep in Pierce's bedroom.
He thinks of her and Robbie and feels guilt. Who had he harmed?
340 Sam and the brown crystal.
342 John Dee's return to England. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.
His life in Manchester.
345 He realizes the danger of calling spirits. Kelley dead.
346 Kroll's threat of human sacrifice. The engine in the box.
348 The year of Macbeth.
349 Death of Dee. Rosicrucians.
350 How the monas glyph and the Invisible College came to Pierce.
351 Intimations of the machinery of fate.
354 The gods are sustained by human tears.
355 Pierce's childhood encounter with Bobby. Axel.
356 On the spiral mountain, inventing a real past.
357 He has forgotten whether he stole the diamond.
358 The long black box from Prague, kept by the Sisters.
360 Pierce's failure to save Bobby the great tragedy of his life.
A task to be completed. For whose sake?
365 Rosie's 3-way with Rose and Mike.
366 Pierce and Rosie between the sheets.
367 Spofford "eaten by wolves."
369 Beau's car: Python. Previous car: Olds 88. His network. Radio WIAO.
370 The Passion of Sophia exiled into the hollow of God's heart.
371 Beau and the more perfect gospel bearers.
372 Plato Goodenough.
373 Beau sees human bodies as machines.
374 Cosmo-Marxists. The Domination System, rising above the levels human powers to levels of other powers.
Mal Cichy's and the "MM" way is by indulgence in desire. No escape in either direction.
375 Beau's realization that his mission takes him back to the Faraways.
378 Bruno's story of the Ass. All spirits return to Amphitrite.
379 Bruno in prison.
381 Rosie didn't like Boney?
382 What does her costume mean?
383 Boney's ghost, his longing.
384 What is it that frees him? Val's laughter? Rosie in the mirror? He begins his ascent of the spheres.
385 Rose in Bobby's car: Tomcat.
387 Pierce and Kraft had read the same book, hence the familiarity of the ms.
392 The awful secret evil that pervades the world. Fleeing the Powers.
393 Pierce encounters Kraft's ghost.
394 Crowley's confession?
395 Kraft gives Pierce his mission.
What's Mal Cichy doing at the party?
396 Una Nox: "One Night", Catullus: "One endless night's sleep."
397 Return of Spofford, with wolf's tooth. (And one of his own missing).
398 "I'll never tell. It can't be told."
402 Pierce's dream of the future Rose.
404 Beau hints that Pierce was guided to the Faraways.
405 For a moment Pierce remembers being in the Army. But he wasn't.
406 The imagination game again.
408 Remaking the past: diesel fuel.
410 Remaking the past: breaking the windshield. Sojourn with the shepherds that never happened. That must have been a fantasy.
411 Pierce meets Bobby in Rose's apartment.
416 He fails again at a rescue mission, but: he has remade the past again. The Powerhouse crew have not yet left for Indiana.
418 Ray insinuates that Mike has sexually abused Sam.
421 The monument on Mt Randa honors Hurd Hope Welkin.
423 Dogs, starts, stones, roses.
The types of spirits.
424 Pierce's young Bobby "didn't happen"? Who is the nine-year old girl of his imagination? Knee socks, plaid skirt. This is how he imagined God in one of the previous books.
425 His awakening. He again realizes that Bobby = Robbie.
426 Sam's seizure.
428 Spofford: Dodge Ram.
"Ask for Bobby." How does Beau know her name?
429 Rosie had dreamed of Ray. The "succor" dream?
In what way does Beau "know" Ray? Why does he want to wait until dark? Why won't he sit in Boney's office?
430 Is Sam's exorcism the great event which must be prevented? Does Mike now believe he once hurt Sam?
431 Cliff approaches Mike. What is the question Beau (looking like Jesus) asks Ray?
433 Somehow, Beau got Sam, gave her to Cliff, who gave her to Rosie.
Beau won't be coming back. Rosie weeps.
Sam: "Beau made the lights go out."
434 Beau's role in the unwritten end of Kraft's ms. Settling the passage time, going to Adocentyn. Is the new age made from his substance?
437 Pierce/Crowley's plan for the book.
438 After returning from Florida.
439 Rose is going to Peru after all.
440 The tale has no author. But neither do we create the stories.
441 The innermost spark of knowing and the outermost knowing.
442 The three wishes. Spofford denies he ever had a crook.
445 The Powerhouse doesn't believe in sacred time.
446 Pierce: What'll I do?
447 He imagines that the chest is the surviving artifact. For a time it is, then he decides it isn't, and it ceases to be so.
He decides Bruno must be the survivor.
448 Sam to be the magical child.
The chest contains: cup, key, stone, book.
Sam's old house is gone. Does she still have the stone?
449 1979.
451 Death of Bruno. Transmigrates into an ass.
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Bill McClain (wmcclain@watershade.net)