The Powerhouse conclave occurs at a bypass stripmall, including a dinner at a horrifying chain barbecue restaurant (the Powerhousers "their mouths open wide, baring their teeth and scrunching their eyes into a semblance of fury, lifted sandwiches as tall as they were broad and dripping with glossy gravy") and the meeting itself at a sterile motel with a phony Dickensian pub. "There is or was then a certain acrid smell to new motels, arising from the artificial woods and wools they are furnished with maybe, or the harsh cleaners used to scour away the traces of so many humans passing so constantly, or from all that and also another subtler stink of falsity and veneer."
Watching the Powerhouse evangelist Pitt Thurston "a new kind of despair entered Pierce. Long ago in Kentucky he and his cousins with a delicious sense of trespass had used to watch the preachers on TV, they had just begun use the new tool, they were clownish in every sense, they talked too loud and their haircuts were amazing, and their faith was so real and frank it was shaming. Pitt Thurston had learned not from such as they but from late-night talk-show hosts and corporate sales managers."
Pierce on Pitt Thurston: "Oh hateful man, a catalog of all that Pierce despised and feared . . . The suit of pale wintergreen, supressed at the waist, sculpted and tufted at shoulder and lapel. The horrid familiarity with the Deity, his boss man, his chum; the smug self-love, the violent energy directed against others; who could not see in him the smooth beast horned like a lamb who fronts for the Big Beast in Revelation, the top salesman, who marked the foreheads of everyone so they could buy and sell."
The "Big Beast" Honeybeare? "He was heavy, both large and fat; his pants taut around his loins, constricting the large lump of his privates."
Powerhouse a consumerist faith ("just ask"): prayer brings "health, wealth, new cars." Also promotes a belief in spiritual election, as members of Powerhouse are not responsible for any sins they commit -- Pierce recognizes the Carpocratian Heresy: "there is no sin for those who are saved" -- such sins being the work of the powerful demons who contend for their souls.
The ex-psychotherapist Mike Mucho, now an acolyte of Powerhouse, confronts Pierce on how he can explain existence without a belief in God. Pierce replies that "just because I rejected his or the Bible's explanation didn't mean I had to come up with one of my own."
Rose, also Mike Mucho's former lover, alludes to the upcoming custody battle between him and Rosie Rasmussen over their daughter Sam.
The Powerhouse cult as a new form of alchemy. Rose contemplates how "all the gifts she had been given (of the Spirit but not only those of the Spirit, other things too, amazing luck, finding yourself in the right time and the right place to get what you wanted or needed, a test grade, cash, a parking place even, a wake-up call, there wasn't anything too small that it couldn't be made to go right) that all of it was for the making of that new clarity and certainty and power"
The former feral girl Bobby -- now a physicians aide at the children's hospital where Sam is a patient -- had been drawn into Powerhouse International in the hope it could relieve her disturbing dreams of the dead -- manifestations of her nature as a witch. Powerhouse, inevitably, convinces her the dreams are the result of her having been a victim of child sexual abuse by her grandfather/stepfather and stokes her rage. Going back to Kentucky where her grandfather is dying, she begins to see the falsity of the memories implanted in her consciousness.
Pierce horrified, frantic, afraid at the love he conjured for Rose Ryder: "he had messed with magic for his own delight, to get for himself what he wanted but should not have had, and in consequence had harmed irretrievably the world, 'the world,' like a kid with a chemistry set who by chance learns to crystallize or liquify the bonds of space and time."
Beau Brachman goes to New York where he'd once lived. He is handed a flyer by a starveling boy who, when Beau looks back, has disappeared. The flyer, in tiny type, exhorts him to look for the universal goddess Sophia.
Beau recalls similar deliverances in his earlier life in New York in the 1970s: cards printed with the letters "MM" that led to an underground sex club that practiced the spirituality of "copulation without generation."
At "MM," Beau had met the literary agent Julie, who had been Pierce's lover. He goes to see her and they discuss the expected dawning of the new world, which Julie had expected to be a great rising of Atlantis. Beau suggests instead "it won't be a city from the sea, it will some small and unnoticed thing, apparently one of a million identical things but not identical, you will very likely miss it even if its in your own backyard."
Beau tells Julie that her role as a literary agent is important as "the world is made of stories" and that "at certain times" people hunger for stories "like food and shelter." Julie considers how the routine pulp fictions she agents -- the one before her begins, parodying Crowley's own production, "Something has happened in hell" -- all seem to have the mythic plot Beau suggests people are looking for.
[Per Beau's prophecy, Pierce's narrative, which Julie is agenting, may be the one among many seemingly similar things that reveals the coming of the new world].
After his return from the meeting of Powerhouse International in Conurbana, Pierce is psychologically undone. He wants to talk with Beau Brachman, but Beau is away (as we know, he is in New York). He calls the minister Rhea Rasmussen, who tries to counsel him to get over his grief at Rose growing away from him -- not realizing that Pierce's true fear is that the succubus Rose will come back to him, not give him up.
Casting her eyes over Pierce's collection of books on demonology and mysticism, Rhea wonders whether the demons are of his imagination. Explaining he is an historian not a believer, Pierce sees in Rhea's suspicious response "the Medieval answer . . . too much reading . . . too much knowledge, not enough wisdom."
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