Subject: (urth) PEACE: Quantrill's gold

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 03:08:43 +0000

mantis wrote:
>Well now you're wrong: the gold historically exists and has never been
>found! (I know, you mean it was never where they were digging.)
>
>I will go further and say that even though the gold wasn't there, still the
>meeting between Kate and Quantrill really did happen: when Weer sees Kate
>and Q it is as valid as when he sees Kate and Hannah. Ghosts are valid;
>Kate has already been established as one of the more coherent ghosts of the
>novel; any ghostly memory channeled via Kate is valid.

Kate really met Quantrill? The "bearded man" in the sectioned-off text on
page 195 is presumably Quantrill. I don't know why it isn't written from the
first-person point of view, as would be expected in a diary, but that
sectioned-off text is from the diary. Lois had been reading to Den from it,
as is clear from the italicized line at the top of the next page, where Lois
says: "_So you see it has to be near the river. She mentions it several
times_." That she was reading to Weer from the diary is explicitly affirmed
when Weer confronted Gold with the blunder about Hannah having gone to
Boston (200), which piece of information was included in that sectioned-off
text on page 195.

Why Weer didn't give the excerpt exactly as written (if he didn't), I don't
know. He evidently gave his Aunt Bella's article verbatim. Perhaps he just
wrote down his memory of the mental image he created when Lois read the
passage to him. Still, Kate's meeting with Quantrill never happened outside
of that fake diary, afaik. Or have I forgotten something?

>Furthermore, this means that Lou Gold, even while "forging" the diary, was
>in some sense channeling Kate.  Seems outrageous, I know, but then the fact
>that his forged Necronomicon somehow "works" is a pointer; as well as the
>fact that, as I've written above, Ghost Kate is already established in the
>text.

Kate and Hannah I can believe; Kate and Quantrill is hard to swallow. Lou
Gold made up the whole thing about their meeting just to spice up the
forgery. As Weer told Gold "You shouldn't have included Quantrill's buried
treasure---", because that was the bridge too far, the lie that led to his
exposure as a forger, to the end of Weer's romance with Lois, to his
daughter's sexual blackmail and, eventually, to Weer's stroke when Sherry
died.

>>Why would a murderer mark the grave of his victim?
>
>While I argue against Weer murdering Lois, still, the text is clear that
>ghosts can be pinned down and this is why Weer would use the stone: not to
>mark the grave (though it would do that as well) but to pin the ghost down
>so she wouldn't come after him.  Like a stake through the heart of a
>vampire (iirc the old tradition of pinning them down rather than turning
>them to dust).

What I meant was; if Weer had murdered Lois and buried her (and intended to
get away with the crime), he wouldn't want to call attention to the fact by
marking the grave.

-Roy

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 14:53:04 +0000

>of that fake diary, afaik. Or have I forgotten something?

That is not the verbatim of the diary text.  If you prefer, it is the image
of the "story behind the veiled text" that Weer imagines as Kate reads it,
but I think it is too close in style to the intrusions of Ghost Kate
interacting with Hannah at the end of the banshee tale (where Hannah speaks
in italics) to be anything else but a ghostly "story behind the veiled
text."

The Boston detail is a difference, especially when Weer is so certain.
OTOH, when teenager Hannah Mills presumably returned with mother and sister
to the farm and discovered that bandits had been there, had locked up her
dad and the hired man and maybe done something unspeakable to beloved Kate,
well that would understandably put a dampener on the whole trip, perhaps
even to the point where the trip would not be mentioned by Hannah.

(Plus, the moonlight tryst with Kate provides another solution to
"Quantrill's buried treasure," since afaik Q did not have any known
offspring, but Kate certainly did.)

=mantis=

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From: StoneOx17 <stoneox17 at aol.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 10:36:52 +0000

Mantis writes, speculating Hannah may actually have gone to Boston:

> OTOH, when teenager Hannah Mills presumably returned with mother 
> and sister to the farm and discovered that bandits had been there, had 
> locked up her dad and the hired man and maybe done something 
> unspeakable to beloved Kate,well that would understandably put a  
> dampener on the whole trip, perhaps even to the point where the trip 
> would not be mentioned by Hannah.

But Hannah herself says (p. 10, Orb) "I never in my life been a hundred 
miles off from that little house, but it's gone now, and I never saw it go."

-- Stone Ox

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