Saturday, October 17, 2009

Bag of Bones: Chapter 21 (pages 356-374)

This entire chapter is a "dream" sequence in which Mike and Kyra travel back in time to the 1900 county fair. I will describe this chapter as "real" because that's the way Mike describes it and at the end of the dream he has a ribbon and pine sap that he picked up from his travels back in time.
The first thing he notices as he wakes up by Dark Score lake is that there is Royce Merrill's gold tip cane laying in the bottom of the pond and by this he knows that Royce has just died. Mike keeps walking until he gets to the county fairgrounds and he hears Sara Tidwell singing and once he enters the fairgrounds everything becomes much more vivid to him and he knows that this is no dream. He walks around the grounds and sees everyone dressed in 19th century attire (including himself). He goes up to the bandstand to see Sara playing and notices that while everyone is dressed in the period, Sara is dressed in Mattie's dress. Kyra appears and she runs to him and it's clear that both of them are asleep but have somehow been transported back in time. Everyone Mike sees he can identify as an ancestor of one of the current townspeople.
Here introduces something that maybe I missed or hadn't been brought up before, that Sara is an evil spirit . Mike gets chills from her and she laughs at him. He tries to leave with Kyra but Devore (we're assuming Max Devore's grandfather although he isn't given a first name) appears with six other people, two of them who appear to Mike to be ghosts, and try to block his way. Mike notices one of the men with Devore looks a lot like him (Mike) and he thinks that this might be the person Max was referring to when he said that his grandfather was from the TR. Perhaps his grandfather was a henchman for the evil Devore. After they get closer to the group, Mike realizes that they are all walking corpses.
Mike and Kyra run away into the Haunted House that's at the fair and after walking through it, they get away from the bad guys and Kyra takes one door back to her house and Mike takes another. Mike awakens with the ribbon and pine sap from the "dream."
A big plot point from this is that the Sara Laughs or Sara Tidwell's spirit is torturing Jo's spirit in the house. At the end of the chapter Mike hears Jo's spirit screaming and Mike implores the other spirits to leave her alone.
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I suppose this will be another plot added to the book. Jo's spirit being trapped in Sara Laughs and Mike trying to free her.

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