The bed bolted to the ceiling: the guardian-ghost theory and the "mental buckling" that raised his game

pivotal · 20 Nov YDAU

• When: 20 Nov YDAU (same blizzard morning; reported by Coyle to Hal and Mario)
• What: The same night the forehead froze, Coyle woke to find Stice and his bed both gone — the bed-frame "some way got lifted up and bolted to the ceiling" overnight without Coyle waking, hanging over the room. Sworn to secrecy before the ceiling incident, Coyle now relays Stice's own explanation: that he thinks he's been "selected or chosen" to be haunted/possessed by a "beneficiary or guardian ghost" residing in ordinary objects, meaning to teach him "not to underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level." Coyle judges "Stice is mentally buckling" — staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, betting he can stand on a chair and lift it simultaneously (flexing his temples for half an hour) — and asks whether "it still count as buckling" if the buckling is what raised his game. Hal offers the darker gloss: the guardian ghost teaching Stice to raise his game "Or hurt somebody else's." The undeniable fact, all agree: "There's no denying The Dark's raised his game this fall." A note on the telling: all of this is relayed by Coyle, secondhand, from Stice's own claim; the guardian-ghost vs. mental-buckling reading is the crux, left open.