The U.S. highways on which Beau made his original journey in his Olds 88 (double infinity; double worm; double ouroboros) are now overgrown, bypassed by the Interstates: "the older roads whose numbers in their white badges had once been codes for escape or pursuit" passing the "ruined shells" of places, "amoeba shapes whose lights were out and broad windows boarded."
One continuity: Beau picks up the Evangelical radio station WIAO he'd listened to many years before in seeking the Old Holiness, the uncorrupted "more perfect gospel bearer" amid the snake-handling religions of Appalachian Kentucky.
The holy man he finds explains the true meaning of Simon Magus's heresy: that not just Jesus but every soul on Earth contains the full power of God and that every woman, not just Mary, possesses the full wisdom of God.
Preparing for Rosie Rasmussen's solstice party -- the invitations read "come as you aren't" -- at the old tourist castle, Pierce tries to craft for his costume the head of a knight's charger but it comes off as an ass's head instead.
Giordano Bruno, in the dungeons of the Venetian Inquisition, tells his fellow prisoners the story of Onorio, the Universal Ass whose earthly foolishness causes it death on earth but whose soul is a brave servant of God in heaven.
The love-sick Pierce increasingly dissociative, living in several worlds, enacting several choices at once. At the solstice party, he unawarely speaks with the ghost of Fellowes Kraft, who laments his own failure to knit past and present together.
Kraft's ghost exhorts the befuddled Pierce: "It'll have to be you that does it. Somehow, I don't know how. If you don't make a contribution, haven't I labored in vain? Not to speak of your own sufferings."
Sam, now in the hands of Powerhouse, is to be cured of her seizures by Roy Honeybeare -- first by denying her medicine and then (inevitably) by helping her remember -- that is: inducing false memories of -- sexual abuse by her father.
Beau and Spofford launch a successful plot to help Rosie steal Sam from the Powerhouse cult. Beau warns the others that, once Sam is freed, he won't himself come back: "Beau said to go on. . . . He said he'll be all right, and don't look for him. He won't be coming back."
Crowley explicates: "When the world ends, it ends differently for each person then alive to see it, each person who chances to see it among the other things to be seen and felt and understood around us all the time; and then very soon it begins again. And almost everyone persists into the new world, which is exactly like the old in almost every respect, or seems to be in the brief moment when the old world can still be remembered.
"Almost everyone. The creatures of the passage time do not persist, who only came into existence for the length of time the world wavered undecided over what shape it would take next. . . .
"When the West was endless, a sea reaching into the sunset, that was where the beasts and heroes of an old age went at last, stepping aboard a ship restless at anchor. . . . So now too."
With that, Beau Brachman heads West to gather all those who will not be a part of the new age: "It may take long, it may be years still, but Beau will gather them all up, as leaves are gathered: as leaves, or pages."
Pierce, without awareness, agrees to take up the task Boney had proposed to him of retracing Kraft's journeys in Europe.
Spofford gives him a ride to Arcady, and Pierce brings up the shepherd's crook he had seen him with in the Spring. Spofford says he never had such a crook. Sam relates to the distracted Pierce that the "ode home" she used to see in Dee's seeing stone is gone. In such small absences, the old world's end is apparent.
In Kentucky, Sister Mary Philomel hears the old box (clearly, the one assembled by Rudolf's court magicians) whirr and clank.
At Solstice, finding Pierce awake in Boney's office at Arcady, Sam says she has been awakened by the snow. She asks him to sing "Silent Night," but he cannot. Then her "favorite," "We Three Kings" -- song of the Magi, patron saints of alchemists. They sing it together.
The date is "the twenty-second of December, 1979. When Sam was Pierce's age, it would be ten years into a new century, no a new millenium, and the world would be as it was coming to be: it would not be the way it had all along been, nor yet what we then thought it would become."
"Daemonomania" ends with Giordano Bruno being led to the stake to burn and his soul's escape into the body of a holy ass. "Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed, and they laughed and fell behind, none could catch him. Some noticed the sacred Cross on his shaggy back, the Cross that all asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, Whom one of their kind once carried; but this Cross was not the same, no not the same."
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