Opening
Lisey crosses a threshold. Bleeding from Jim Dooley’s attack and driven by Scott’s bool hunt, she reenters Boo’ya Moon, confronts the Pool’s power, and comes back with a plan. By rescuing Amanda and setting a trap for Dooley, she turns grief into resolve and memory into weapon.
What Happens
Chapter 11: Lisey and The Pool (Shhhh—Now You Must Be Still)
After the attack by Jim Dooley, a wounded Lisey Landon reaches home and treats the deep cut on her breast with soaked tea bags, a homespun remedy Scott Landon once swears by. The pain and Vicodin open a locked door in her mind: the first time Scott takes her to Boo’ya Moon when they are staying at the Antlers in New Hampshire. She realizes Dooley won’t stop, and neither can she. The bool hunt isn’t whimsical—it’s a map through the past, a living thread of Grief, Memory, and the Past.
In the memory, twilight saturates Boo’ya Moon. Scott guides her through lupin to the Fairy Forest of “sweetheart trees,” where a bent wooden cross marks Paul Landon’s grave—dug long ago with a child’s plastic shovel, a raw emblem of Childhood Trauma and Its Lasting Impact. As laughers howl from the dark, Scott shows a broken sign pointing toward the “Pool,” a place he mines in metaphor and, Lisey now understands, in fact—a living source behind Creativity and Its Dark Source.
Scott teaches her to “picture home” to cross back. When the flashback breaks, Lisey lies in bed with the silver spade from Nashville in her hands, the truth finally clear: the pool is real; Boo’ya Moon is real; the bool hunt trains her to return alone. Night is when the worst things—Scott’s “long boy”—stalk. She closes her eyes, pictures Boo’ya Moon, breathes the perfumes, feels grass. She makes the jump.
Chapter 12: Lisey at Greenlawn (The Hollyhocks)
Twilight again. Lisey arrives carrying the silver spade and her yellow “delight” square. She straightens Paul’s tilting marker, then follows intuition into the Fairy Forest. At the Bell Tree, a tiny silver bell—once lifted by Scott from the pizza joint where she worked—glints. She leaves the spade at its base, a quiet, intentional offering.
The forest tightens; the laughers rise. A clearing opens to the pool—a vast, mirror-smooth basin cupped in rock. The sight flips her deeper into memory, to 1996, when Scott went catatonic, lost in Boo’ya Moon while his body sat in their guest room. Lisey remembers the seated ranks of shrouded figures and blank-eyed watchers on stone benches, all drawn to the water’s siren depth. The place is refuge and snare, a living embodiment of Madness, Sanity, and Family Curses.
Chapter 13: Lisey and Amanda (The Sister Thing)
In that 1996 memory, Scott sits wrapped in Good Ma’s yellow afghan, eyes fixed on the pool. Lisey feels what the water offers: visions of most-wanted lives and never-were chances. If night fully falls, she’ll lose him. She gambles, ripping off the afghan and bluffing a retreat down the perilous path. The spell fractures—Scott calls her name and follows.
By the pathhead, Scott whispers that she must be still. Something vast and piebald, Scott’s “long boy,” grazes the edges of the trail—a physical shape for the family “bad-gunky.” They try to home-in on their room, but the yellow afghan tethers them to Boo’ya Moon like an anchor. Scott tells her to drop it. Lisey lets it go. The long boy swivels toward the sound, buying the heartbeat they need. They land in their guest room as the power dies; the TV spits out Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” instead of the right program—proof Lisey’s will helps steer them home.
Chapter 14: Lisey and Scott (Babyluv)
Back in present-time Boo’ya Moon, Lisey wades into the pool. Warmth spreads; the breast wound dulls. This is the “prize” Scott promises at the end of the bool hunt. Remembering the revenant’s word—“a drink”—she takes two slow swallows. As she turns, a shrouded figure on the benches feels unmistakably like Scott, and she hears him speak her name once more before she crosses back.
She returns soaked and sandy, but steadied. Grief settles beside new clarity. She moves. She calls Professor Woodbody in Pittsburgh and arranges the bait: tell Dooley she’ll meet him in Scott’s study at 8 p.m. She records the same message on the barn answering machine. En route to Greenlawn, she chats with Deputy Alston, masking bruises and intentions with composure that reads like steel.
Chapter 15: Lisey and The Long Boy (Pafko at the Wall)
At Greenlawn, Lisey sets a return-point image—an empty beer bottle propped under her license plate beside the loon. She finds Amanda on a patio, hollowed by catatonia—mind marooned at the pool. Knowing an anchor blocks travel, Lisey uses her second sip. She kisses her sister, passing the pool’s water mouth-to-mouth.
They arrive in Amanda’s version—Southwind—where the pool is a harbor and a child-dream pirate ship, the Hollyhocks, rides at anchor. Lisey locates Amanda on the benches and coaxes her back, promising a fight that needs both of them. They picture Lisey’s car—loon, beer bottle, exact lines—and snap to the lot. Amanda wakes sharp and bristling. They peel away before staff can intervene, spin a decoy story to send Darla and Canty to Derry, and phone Dr. Alberness with a plausible mess. A quick stop at Amanda’s house yields clothes and a loaded .22. They head for Lisey’s, readying Scott’s study for Dooley at 8.
Character Development
Lisey shifts from haunted widow to strategist, stepping into the power Scott trusted her to claim. Around her, the living and the remembered recalibrate: a sister returns, a husband’s secrets clarify, a stalker sharpens into purpose.
- Lisey Landon: Embraces Boo’ya Moon on her own terms, travels at will, heals herself, rescues Amanda, and sets a calculated trap. Fear narrows into focus; action replaces reaction.
- Amanda Debusher: Snapped free from self-induced catatonia, she regains her tart wit and fierce loyalty. Southwind confirms a long-running tie to Boo’ya Moon—one Scott quietly understood—and she becomes Lisey’s indispensable partner.
- Scott Landon (in memory): The grave of Paul, the terror of the long boy, and the anchor of the yellow afghan reveal his fragility and his reliance on Lisey. The bool hunt reads as a love-forged manual for her survival.
- Jim Dooley: Mostly offstage but omnipresent. Lisey frames him as a “Deep Space Cowboy,” aligning his obsession with the older predations of Gerd Allen Cole. He is compulsion, not simple greed.
Themes & Symbols
The pool crystallizes the book’s exploration of creativity and danger. As literal locus and psychic mirror, it offers solace, inspiration, and annihilation. For Scott, it’s a waiting room of sorrow; for Amanda, a harbor of adventure; for Lisey, a medicine well she must not overuse. Because it answers desire, it snares the unwary—making it the beating heart of Creativity and Its Dark Source and a live wire through Madness, Sanity, and Family Curses.
Memory guides action. Scott’s bool hunt forces Lisey through layered recollection—Antlers, Paul’s grave, the afghan sacrifice—until past and present fuse into strategy, a pattern aligned with Grief, Memory, and the Past. The “long boy,” the laughers, and the anchoring afghan give trauma flesh and function: terror that hunts, sound that corrals, objects that bind. Love demands costly choices—the afghan dropped, the healing water shared—and those sacrifices echo the vows at the core of The Enduring Power of Love and Marriage.
Key Quotes
“Shhhh—now you must be still.”
- Scott’s whisper becomes survival doctrine. Stillness wards the long boy, but it also models how Lisey handles terror: quiet mind, precise action, controlled crossing.
“A drink.”
- The revenant’s promise names the prize—healing as simple and profound as water. Lisey turns it into agency: a sip for herself, a second for Amanda, love literally transferred.
“Long boy.”
- The childish label sticks because it fits: a seemingly endless, piebald embodiment of inherited horror. Naming it lets Lisey strategize against it and frames trauma as something seen, not just felt.
“Deep Space Cowboy.”
- Lisey’s tag for Dooley reframes him from petty extortionist to cosmic obsessive, linking him to older predators and clarifying the scope of threat she must outthink, not just outgun.
“Babyluv.”
- The chapter title doubles as a benediction from Scott’s memory—tenderness that bolsters Lisey’s resolve. Affection and ferocity coexist as she sets the trap.
Key Events
- Lisey fully recalls her first Boo’ya Moon visit: Paul’s grave, the laughers, and the broken sign to the Pool.
- She travels to Boo’ya Moon alone for the first time since Scott’s death.
- The 1996 rescue reassembles: Scott catatonic at the pool, the brush with the long boy, and the sacrifice of Good Ma’s yellow afghan to break the anchor.
- The pool’s water heals Lisey; she takes two measured swallows as her “prize.”
- Lisey uses her second sip to free Amanda, transferring it with a kiss and entering Southwind with the pirate ship Hollyhocks.
- The sisters escape Greenlawn, arm themselves with Amanda’s .22, and send their other sisters on a decoy errand to Derry.
- Lisey sets a precise trap for Dooley: an 8 p.m. rendezvous in Scott’s study, messages planted with Woodbody and on the barn machine.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters pivot the novel from elegy to confrontation. By completing Scott’s bool hunt, Lisey masters the crossings, understands the pool’s double-edged power, and accepts the costs of love—sacrifice, secrecy, and action. Rescuing Amanda gives her an ally and confirms Boo’ya Moon as communal, not private, terrain. With grief integrated and fear named, Lisey engineers the terms of the coming fight with Dooley, carrying healing water in one hand and a plan in the other.