From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: (urth) PEACE: Quantrill's gold 
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 21:08:43 -0600

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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