Chapter 12 Summary

Back in 1984, Weed Atman is now a Thanatoid in Northern California, neither alive nor dead, attending a party thrown by the Thanatoid community at a hotel convention center. Van Meter is playing bass guitar in a band hired for the event. He wishes he had Zoyd there to play keyboards, but Zoyd is hiding out in a nearby region called Holytail.

Holytail is an isolated marijuana growing region where Zoyd is staying with a grower. Every year the local sheriff wages a campaign to track down marijuana fields and burn them, but he has always had a hard time getting into Holytail, which is in rugged country and whose growers have an extensive warning network.

At the hotel, Weed runs into Dr. Larry Elasmo, a dentist he has vague memories of visiting back in the 60s. Dr. Elasmo was an odd kind of...