Good heavens ... Stone Ox has brought up a marvellous correspondence, and then missed something that ... well, I guess it isn't obvious because I never saw it before either, but somehow it jumped out of his posting at me:
1 quoted line
Jack stays in the barn haunted by the banshee three nights.
...as does the coldhouse prank victim (Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights).
Okay, then: making the banshee story as abstract as possible... J
wants very badly a treasure in F's possession. F dislikes / looks down on J / regards J as a poor recipient for the treasure, but for some reason does not give an outright "No." Instead, he sets J to spend three nights in a place which should kill him.
Now, one of the things the embedded stories in PEACE seem to do is to provide better or happier endings to some of the situations in Weer's life. So I am moved to speculate that the Coldhouse Prank was not a prank at all, but a deliberat attempt to keep a "real world" (Weer's reality) J from acquiring something that a "real world" F did not want him to have but could not deny him.
To those for whom the book is fresher in their minds than it is in mine, then: Do any possible real-world F's and J's come to mind? The most obvious candidate for F would be Julius, who owns the barn / coldhouse... is this even plausible? And if so, who would be J?
(Is this another candidate for when Den "really" died?)