The Fackelmann scam and the wraith's return (p. 934)
He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he’s got no idea who they’re talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.
Context
The theme's biggest late-book passage: Gately's fever-dreams culminate in the graveyard, digging up a dead guy's "Continental-Emergency important" head with a very sad kid whose moving mouth makes no sound. It corroborates, from the other sleeper's side, Hal's Year-of-Glad flash of digging up his father's head with Gately (scene 003, pp. 16-17 — which stays excluded there as prolepsis; the dream side of the triangle lives here). The kid's soundless mouth is scene 001's condition met in dream; "Too Late" is the dream's verdict on the whole race for the Master. Carlisle's exegesis (recorded, not adopted): the sad kid is post-collapse Hal, the head is JOI's, and winged Joelle's question is Hamlet V.i at Yorick's grave — "a fellow of infinite jest."