Floyd, when younger, looks for explanations of what he sees in the night in the Bible (discovering the Holy Spurt is what calls him out of his sleep) just as Pierce looks for knowledge in the pages of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle's compendium. In later years, Pierce tries to recall why he gave Floyd the diamond from his dead aunt's wedding ring, but the reason eludes him.
When Floyd was a boy in Depression-era Kentucky, and shortly after his mother died in childbirth, he was called out of his sleep to witness the town's dead walking -- a silent nocturnal procession into a cleft of Hogback Mountain. Later, working for the Good Luck mines, he has the job of picking shale ("bone") from the coal extracted from the same mountain into which he'd seen the dead recede. During his time working for the mining company, Floyd is never called out into the night; he is born again into a congregation of "forty gallon Baptists who insist of full immersion" and "takes Jesus into his heart."
Later he calls on this internalized Jesus to help him with the transformations that allow him to do battle with a local witch. Pursuing her, he is led to a procession of the early dead, those called before their time, and discovers "there were those, like himself, called out by the Holy Spurt; and there were others who were called out by the Devil's Fiddle." This "feud" goes back generations.
[This section of "Love & Sleep" essentially transcribes Carlo Ginzburg's "The Night Battles" into Appalachian Kentucky].
The witches who "suck away the world's life, draining it's goodness" are akin to "the great devil Hoover, who had brought ruin on the country, only to be turned out in disgrace himself." The despoilation of the witches also linked to the coal industry: "They only hastened the coming-on of the world's end with their money-getting . . . They had ripped-out the womb of the hills; they took away too much, took away the unripe with the ripe, leaving no mother by which more could grow; they would end by leaving the mountains barren."
Floyd sees the world dying around him but also senses, knows there is a new world waiting to be born, "he could feel it beneath his feet, see it before him as the new moon can be seen held within the old moon's arms. He had come to the end of his Bible, the last pages, and he knew."
Pierce has a dream of Purgatory ("filled with that dread, at once hopeless and apprehensive, that Pierce had known in schoolyards and Little League tryouts and day camps") as "a burnt-over hillside under a night sky, burnt blackness and shriven trees, the ash still warm under foot" -- that landscape very similar to the mining-despoiled land around the cabin at Hogback where Floyd lives with the girl Bobby.
In seeing the failure of his magic (of the Invisible College) to prevent Bobby from going to Detroit with Floyd, Pierce arrives at adult consciousness: "Pierce Moffat, who had been all one until then, came invisibly, indetectably, in two: one part of him passing into an underground river like sleep, where for years it would remain; and another part left alive aboveground, grown-up and dry-eyed, where wishes did not come true, where he did not know how plans were made, or deeds done. Not until the earth at length shifted in its course, and the dark river broke from its bed, would the lost boy come forth to stand before Pierce, and claim his place: the hidden at length patent, and the inside out."
As they mature, Pierce and his cousins come to forget the details of their interaction with Bobby and their desperate attempt to baptize her and claim her soul for Catholicism. "They forgot more than that; they forgot their allegiances too, and their college; AEgypt. They just forgot, as an emigre ruthlessly forgets the Old World from which he came, expunging it by an effort he does not even admit to, so that the New World, which after all holds all his chances for happiness, can have his whole soul."
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