Coldhouse Banshee

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 26 Aug 2002, 16:27 · from urth-v0208.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: (urth) Coldhouse Banshee
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 09:27:00 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0208-1604 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1604.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Good heavens ... Stone Ox has brought up a marvellous correspondence,=20
and then missed something that ... well, I guess it isn't obvious=20
because I never saw it before either, but somehow it jumped out of=20
his posting at me:

> Jack stays in the barn haunted by the banshee three nights. =20

...as does the coldhouse prank victim (Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights).

Okay, then: making the banshee story as abstract as possible... J=20
wants very badly a treasure in F's possession. F dislikes / looks down=20
on J / regards J as a poor recipient for the treasure, but for some=20
reason does not give an outright "No." Instead, he sets J to spend three=20
nights in a place which should kill him.

Now, one of the things the embedded stories in PEACE seem to do is to=20
provide better or happier endings to some of the situations in Weer's=20
life. So I am moved to speculate that the Coldhouse Prank was not a=20
prank at all, but a deliberat attempt to keep a "real world" (Weer's=20
reality) J from acquiring something that a "real world" F did not want
him to have but could not deny him.=20

To those for whom the book is fresher in their minds than it is in=20
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?)

--Blattid

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net