Prefatory Remarks:
Many people refer to the town in
Phantasm as "Morningside," after the cemetery (
Phantasm) and the psychiatric clinic (
Phantasm II). Kate Coscarelli,
Phantasm: The Novel (Pulp XMachina, 2002), establishes that it is actually the town of China Grove (13). The China Grove fortuneteller Mike visits on Colton Road in
Phantasm is identified as Mrs. Starr (70). The particle "The" is always capitalized in "The Tall Man" throughout the novelization.
Phantasm is explicitly set in 1979,
Phantasm II "seven years" later (1986), and after the opening scene,
Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead "two years" after that (1988), followed immediately by
Phantasm: OblIVion.
Summaries:
"Hell at S-MART" (Brian Keene, pp. 1-12). Ash has been moved out of Housewares and into the Men's Department after he killed a woman attacking other S-MART shoppers. After he offends some overweight customers, his manager offers him a transfer to S-MART's five-thousandth store in the small backwoods town of Seven Valleys, Pennsylvania, as Housewares manager. Ash travels to Seven Valleys in a Greyhound bus driven by Chuck Woodruff and is the last passenger except for former cocaine-dealer T-Bone; Reggie arrives in the now-empty town at the same time in the Cuda, tracking the Tall Man and hoping to reunite with Mike. Ash, Chuck, and T-Bone arrive at the S-MART, where Chuck is killed by a sphere. Ash and T-Bone destroy two spheres, and Reggie arrives and destroys four more but misses a fifth, which Ash destroys before it can kill Reggie. Ash, Reggie, and T-Bone restock in Sporting Goods and go to the local funeral home, where they kill a large number of dwarves and encounter the Tall Man, who attempts to leave with the incapacitated Mike. T-Bone tackles the Tall Man through the dimensional gate, and Ash follows, trying to rescue T-Bone. They land on Mars, where the Tall Man tears T-Bone's head off and orders a horde of dwarves to kill Ash. Ash uses the incantation "Kandar, Vishnu, Nicktu" from "the Book of the Dead" to summon the Lord of the Deadites to immediately overwhelm the Tall Man, and Reggie pulls Ash back through the dimensional gate to Seven Valleys. Ash hurriedly tells Reggie to close the gate, but Reggie says there's no way to do so; Ash slashes through one of the posts with his chainsaw, closing the gate ("Why didn't I ever think of that," Reggie wonders). Reggie and the still-unconscious Mike leave in The Cuda, while Ash stays behind, worried that the incantation may have released something on this side of the gate. As they part, Reggie calls Ash "Housewares" and Ash, Reggie "ice cream man." Ash mutters to himself that "Something tells me it's not over yet," and the Tall Man startles him from behind, saying that no, "IT ISN'T." Ash screams.
Notes:
- The preface says that "no two film series stand taller than the PHANTASM and EVIL DEAD sagas" for "wildly imaginative horror filmmaking," and describes the story as "a crossover tale featuring the main characters from each of these series" (1).
- Ash's manager, Charlie, tells him that "Ash, I can't fire you. You've been with the company ever since high school. You were never in trouble before. I know it's been rough on you the past year. After Linda died up at that cabin, you went through a hard time. That's why I didn't reprimand you when you disappeared for those few weeks without calling in." (2) This strangely anticipates Mr. Roper's subsequent inability to fire Ash from the Mount Pleasant Value Stop because of his seniority in "El Jefe," Ash vs. Evil Dead.
- Ash is not wearing a prosthesis (2, 4). There is no mention of the Spring-Driven Iron Hand he built in Army of Darkness, another strange anticipation of Ash's "hand-crafted" Italian rosewood hand in "El Jefe."
- Reggie records in Reggie's Journal: Entry 1,096 that "From what I can tell, he's been running operations there [Seven Valleys] for about a month, which means the town should pretty much be emptied by now" (3).
- Reggie hasn't slept in anything but motel beds or had sex in five months (3).
- The Tall Man compares T-Bone favorably to himself: "YOU ENSLAVE YOUR PEOPLE WITH THE DRUG, COCAINE. I ENSLAVE PEOPLE TOO. YOU OFFER THEM AN ESCAPE FROM ONE HELL TO ANOTHER. I SEND THEM TO HELL" (10).
Checkpoints:
- After Reggie introduces himself as a former ice cream vendor, Ash briefly sings Van Halen's "Ice Cream Man" (9). Van Halen released "Ice Cream Man" in 1979.
- T-Bone has a "Tec-9 Automatic Pistol" (5). Intratec U.S.A. began selling the 9 mm Pistol TEC-9 in 1984.
- T-Bone wears a Chicago Bulls jacket (4) despite heading to Baltimore (4), where his mother lives (9). This suggests he is an admirer of the team's performance when led by Michael Jordan, winning the National Basketball Association championship in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, and 1998.
- Ash destroys a sentinel using an "assault rifle" he commandeers from the S-MART's stock (7). The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 enacted the "Assault Weapons Ban" from September 13, 1994 through September 13, 2004.
- Ash is startled to see "the Mars Pathfinder lay on its side" after passing through a dimensional gate, and his "mind twisted in upon itself, grappling with this revelation" (11). NASA launched the Mars Pathfinder in December 1996 and it landed on Mars on July 4, 1997.
"Pact with the Devil" (Mike Oliveri, 14-21): Knife-collecting antisocial high-school student Dean dislikes the town of Braidwood, site of the Braidwood Nuclear Power Plant, to which he and his mother moved from Chicago two years ago after her divorce. He notices that a number of mysterious deaths (he thinks there have been eight to ten funerals this week) seems to have coincided with the arrival of the new owner of the funeral home, whom he thinks of as the "Tall Man." Dean dreams of the Tall Man telling him to "Come to me," and he sneaks out to the funeral parlor, where he sees the Tall Man retrieve two corpses from a hearse driven by a man in a blue jumpsuit and gas mask, and he realizes that the Tall Man is "
taking old bodies as well as killing for new ones." He walks in on the Tall Man preparing a corpse in a back room of the funeral parlor, with three more stacked in the corner. He is caught by a silver sphere, which does not kill him. The Tall Man reveals he knows about Dean's violent revenge fantasies, and recruits him to bring him people because "The work is progressing, but it's slow." Dean agrees to work for him rather than be killed the sentinel, and spends a few weeks luring people to the funeral home, including two stoners, Zack Lane the quarterback, the school guidance counselor, and the school "tramp." When his mother disappears, Dean searches the funeral home and is attacked in the basement by the midget version of Zack Lane, and stumbles through the gap between two silver prongs, sees a line of marching midgets, and returns to the basement, finding more in the black canisters, including his mother. Dean returns home, consults his copy of
The Anarchist's Cookbook, and goes to confront the Tall Man. He slips a pipe bomb into the Tall Man's waistband, and blows him in half. Dean returns home and goes to the bathroom to wash his face, and then sees the Tall Man in the mirror. Dean turns to face him, and hands break through the mirror behind him, dragging him through it "and toward his new enslavement."
Notes:
Dean acts as The Tall Man's Judas goat "for the next few weeks" after his recruitment (18). By the time he goes to confront The Tall Man, he thinks that "the town was deathly quiet these days, with many people already taken by the Tall Man" (20). This is roughly consistent with Reggie's estimate that The Tall Man can empty a small town in "about a month" in Keene, "Hell at S-MART" (3).
Checkpoints:
- Dean uses a recipe from "The Anarchist's Cookbook" to create his pipe bomb (21). William Powell published The Anarchist Cookbook in January 1971.
- Dean thinks of the rural area surrounding Braidwood as "stepping onto the sets of "Deliverance" or "Dukes of Hazzard"" (14). Warner Bros. released Deliverance in July 1972, and The Dukes of Hazzard aired on CBS from January 1979 through February 1985.
- Dean is socially isolated: "With his black clothing and penchant for punk music, he had few friends." (14) Punk rock developed in the 1970s and saw revival in the mid-1980s, but without specific band names or songs, Dean's taste in clothes and music cannot be used to date him.
- Before he is recruited as a Judas goat, Dean is dismissive of the deaths of three of his fellow students, and "just wished the "trauma counselors" would leave him the hell alone" (14). One of the people he delivers to The Tall Man is the guidance counselor, whom he lured "by expressing some grief and desire for help in mourning for one of the students" (18). Endemic psychotherapy and the stereotypical empathetic counselor is a cliché of the early 1990s.
"Red Planet" (Richard Elkin, 23-34): Immediately after stepping through the dimensional fork to pursue the Tall Man, Reggie remembers taking Mike for a ride in his ice-cream truck, but sees the figure of the Tall Man carrying a gold sphere and realizes he is experiencing an illusion. He is actually in a black void beyond a dimensional fork. The Tall Man tells him he finds Reggie annoying and inconvenient, and offers to return him to his before he met the Tall Man, reunited with his friends and family and never to see the Tall Man again. Reggie refuses and demands the Mike gold sphere, but the Tall Man refuses in turn and has the sphere attack him. A dwarf slows Reggie's flight toward the dimensional fork, but the sphere strikes the dwarf and Reggie escapes. He closes the gate by putting his hands on the chrome poles, and then looks around to find himself on a recent battlefield beneath a dry, hot orange-red sky. He recognizes the armor and equipment of the dead soldiers as being from "early in the war; maybe 2010 or 2015 Earth," and is now "fifty years of age, at his best estimate," his right Achilles having healed "years ago"; he laments the destruction of the 'Cuda on I-65 outside Indianapolis, shortly before the end of the fuel supply. He strips the body armor, uniform, and ""breather" mask" (with an hour's supply of oxygen) of a dead corporal and walks toward the nearest city, the abandoned ruins of Pittsburgh. After searching all the local cemeteries, funeral homes and the City Morgue ("dead houses") for a "loading dock" (the white room with dimensional fork and stacks of black canisters containing dwarves), Reggie finds one in St. Anthony's Hospital, having previously overlooked that a hospital also has a morgue. Finding that the dimensional fork led to the Red Planet, Reggie dons his "breather" mask and drops a grenade behind himself while passing through, destroying the fork after he uses it. After searching the Red Planet surface for ten minutes, he finds a tunnel and enters a network of tunnels being dug by dwarves. After fifteen minutes, he is found by Mike as a gold sphere, who leads him to a cavernous room behind a door unlocked by the sphere's serrated blades. The room is "filled with an overwhelming array of ancient, lifeless mechanisms and machinery from a world long dead" and "two towering, antenna-like structures." The Tall Man disarms Reggie and uses Mike to engage with a control panel activating the antennae as an "oversized fork" for use by "the
others" as part of "colonization" so that "our world" can be "reborn." While the Tall Man is preoccupied, Reggie draws a .38 hidden in his boot and shoots Mike, shattering the gold sphere. The machinery (including thousands of spheres) deactivates and the room collapses into a fissure, the Tall Man falling into the depths. Reggie escapes the tunnels but his oxygen supply is depleted just before he reaches the surface, where some oxygen remains. Reggie lays down to die within sight of a street sign marked "DEATH VALLEY 2 MILES," having been aged into an old man after his last trip "many years into the future" through a dimensional fork, resting in the sands of Red Planet Earth.
Notes:
- Despite the continuous narration, there are actually three versions of Reggie in this story, as each of his trips through a dimensional fork shifts him forward and time and laterally in space.
- The Tall Man's base beneath Death Valley contains "lifeless mechanisms and machinery from a world long dead" (32). He tells Reggie "I have note spent all of this time preparing this planet for colonization only to have you ruin it now, ice cream man" and that "I do have a surprise for you, though. It is time you met the others… before you die" (33), and when Mike resists activating this machinery, he tells Mike "We are at the threshold. Our world is about to be reborn" (33). Reggie "didn't know who or what was about to emerge from this oversized fork, but he sure as hell didn't want to find out," and The Tall Man pays him no further attention, "anticipating the arrival of the "others"" (33).
Checkpoints:
- Reggie thinks "Better to burn out than fade away" and "smiled slightly at the recollection of the line from the song, but could not remember the title or the artist" (27). He is paraphrasing the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" from "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," released by Neil Young in 1979.
- After passing through the first dimensional fork, Reggie thinks he is "fifty years of age, at his best estimate" (27), but his estimate is complicated by "having traveled time through the forks so often" (27). If his estimate is right and Reggie is approximately the same age as Reggie Bannister (b. 1945), then this version of Reggie is chronologically proper to 1995.
- After passing through the first dimensional fork, Reggie reflects that "The sky was always a good gauge of the time frame he was in. From its hue, and from the looks of the armaments on the soldiers' bodies around him, he could tell it was early in the war; maybe 2010 or 2015 Earth" (26).
"The Portal" (Kristen Deem, 35-51): Dr. Jebediah Morningside conducts experiments with his "dimensional fork" at his home in Pennsylvania-Dutch country, where he lives with his widowed, congenitally blind, wheelchair-bound mother, Mrs. Morningside. He seeks the "vibration" that will allow him to create a portal to the afterlife, so that he can recover patients whom he has lost, including his father who died of heart failure and old age. His practice as physician and undertaker has been diminishing in the face of local superstitions and concern over his experiments, both among the "Englisch" and the local Amish, who treat him with arm's-length respect as a descendant of Mennonites whose grandparents had left the Amish community to better develop their medical practice. He has been rescued from one experiment by what appears to be a phantom preventing him from falling through a dangerous portal, and locals report seeing a "dark one" who appears to be Morningside's Doppelgänger (albeit strangely dressed, with turned-down collar, too-skinny cravat, and a red talisman). He treats Amish carpenter Jacob (who calls him "Herr Morninkseit" and "Herr Doktor"), and experiences a hallucination of his porcelain basin filled with "vivid yellow" fluid. His mother, a clairvoyant when dreaming, sees a young man pass between two silver poles and hears a voice say "
You go where I want you to go, boy…" and then sees a mortician at a Grecian mansion transporting a living body in a hearse carriage. Morningside is called to attend to his consumptive patient Rebecca as she lay dying, and she tells him "Dr. Morningside, he's…
you!" and that she is bidden to go "beyond the di-men-shun-al fork," then tells him that "You must join us!" After her death, he embalms her, and then arranges her funeral. During the funeral procession, he reflects that he has been hoping his experiments will attract some entity who will help him understand the physics of what he is doing, and wonders if the strangely-dressed young man who had appeared a week ago and seemed to recognize him but fled when startled by his mother had been a messenger. He sees a newly-drafted soldier whom he believes to be the same young man, and halts the funeral cortege, dismounts, and asks the young man to help him, but is rebuffed, the soldier not knowing who he is. Soon Morningside receives a telegram ordering him to the nearest Army post by the end of the week. He dreams he is in a metal carriage labeled
Cadillac and hears his own voice tell him he need never die, then he sees his mother is seated with a strangely-dressed teenage girl and hears his loved ones will remain immortal, then he sees himself transfusing his own yellow blood into a corpse in a sterile operation room and hears he will possess the gift of reanimation, then he sees himself in a glowing room before two metallic poles, and finds a red jewel, "
the key… the focusing device." He realizes that the ruby cuff links he wears can stabilize the gate and resolves to do so today. Mrs. Morningside hears movement after being alone in the house for two days, and encounters her son changed, and he chloroforms her, telling her she will be "the first." Morningside experiences terrible agony as "glowing yellow liquid" alien protoplasm is extruded from his body and then congeals into a duplicate of himself; he has become "a template" that has been "duplicated numerous times" to create "corporeal forms" for "it," and "each time a body was destroyed the creature returned to unite with its human progenitor and rip from him another incarnation." He is kept in an invisible enclosure that slows the passage of time, because the creature can only manifest as his doppelgänger while he is still alive, within a black stone chamber with a passageway revealing a red sky and a red giant. After more than a century, the creature has returned several times recently, and Morningside realizes that this means that someone "was finding ways to stop its earthly incarnations, however briefly." He resolves that somehow he will escape and close the door in the space/time continuum that he had opened. In the meantime, he will wait.
Notes:
- Morningside's practice is in Pennsylvania-Dutch country, near an Amish community. He wants to leave for "the budding Oregon territory," but stays because he feels his mother could not make the trip (38).
- Morningside was visited by "a young man" in "black garb" "a week ago" who was startled by Mrs. Morningside (44). This is Mike Pearson's visit to the past, seen in Phantasm: OblIVion.
- Morningside dreams of his mother "in a strange, candlelit room, the walls lined with religious icons," sitting with "a young teenage girl" whose "attire was… strange" (45). This is the fortuneteller, Mrs. Starr, and her granddaughter Sarah, seen in Phantasm.
- Morningside dreams of finding a small red jewel in a room with a dimensional fork, and hears a version of his own voice call it "the key… the focusing device," and he realizes that his ruby cuff links can help him stabilize the gate (45).
- Morningside reflects that "For more than a century, it had ravaged Earth" (48).
Checkpoints:
- Morningside thinks of his home as being in "this rustic 1800's [sic] town." (35)
- Morningside's practice is in Pennsylvania-Dutch country, near an Amish community. He wants to leave for "the budding Oregon territory," but stays because he feels his mother could not make the trip (38). The Oregon Country was organized as a territory in August 1846 and was admitted to the Union in February 1859.
- Morningside has been trained as an embalming surgeon, using cannula to infuse "zinc chloride and arsenic" into the arteries of the corpses he prepares, and this training makes it very likely he will be pressed into service by the Union Army (41). Thomas Holmes's method of embalming via intra-arterial injection of arsenic, mercury, and zinc salts became increasingly prominent from mid-1861 when he began using it to embalm the bodies of officers and men killed during the War of the Rebellion (1861-65).
- Morningside sees "a small band of recruits," "Young men from surrounding towns, newly drafted into the Union Army" during Rebecca's funeral (44). The Militia Act of 1862 (12 Stat. 597) authorized the president to enroll the militia to supplement volunteers during the War of the Rebellion.
"A Winged Sphere for a Mint Green Mummy" (Madison Brents, 67-74): Twenty-five days after "the aberration," the New Jebediah is unexpectedly met in Jebediah Morningside's laboratory by a Second Tall Man emerging from an abnormal dimensional fork with a peculiar frequency, who attacks him with a unique sentinel "made of glistening white bone, and two coal black leathery wings" and fangs dripping with a clear toxin. The Second Tall Man seizes the gold Sentinel from Jebediah's head and renders it leaden gray with a telekinetic attack. "The old woman" in "her wheelchair" comes to see what's happened, and the fanged sphere kills her as well. The Tall Man takes the Boy from the box where Jebediah had kept him, and takes him through "the augmented gates" to Death Valley, where Mike lay dying, and reinserts the gold sphere into his head. An indeterminate time later, the Tall Man tells him not to worry about the Ice Cream Man and instead takes him to the tomb of Moses, built by "an alien race with which I am not familiar" on the moon. The Tall Man explains that the winged sphere sought him out and told him about the tomb, where he read a wall of Egyptian hieroglyphics and changed his mind about "everything I was taught on the red skied planet." After the Tall Man explains something about "the
after world" to Mike for an hour, the winged sphere conjures a normal dimensional fork, and Reggie emerges immediately after leaving Mike in Death Valley. Mike agrees to let the winged sphere attack Reggie, who is left paralyzed and is placed on the stone embalming table in the tomb. Mike and the Tall Man leave through an alien portal in the wall, and the winged sphere follows them. Robotic scarabs emerge from a statue of Anubis and embalm him alive in "a type of mint green silken web." Years later, in "
A.D. 2059," NASA astronaut Reese Olsen tells his colleague Daniel he's found a carved doorway on the moon, and they enter it, finding the mummy in an artificial-gravity Egyptian tomb. Daniel places his hands on the two poles, triggering "two hidden stigmata drills" that impale his hands and close the door. A "solid white/black winged ball" emerges from the mummy's head, and realizes he has to use the grappling gate to "go back in time where the Tall Men are created and convince one of them to come back here and study this place." After he leaves, the robot scarabs go to work on the two astronauts. In "
AD 1978," Mike awakens in the middle of the night from a dream that "covered
years" with Jody returning and ending in a tomb on the moon, and runs from his bedroom to the church where Jody's closed-casket funeral was held. (The wrecked HemiCuda is in the driveway, he and Reggie not yet having restored it.) Reggie finds Mike in the nave, and they talk about Mike's dream. Reggie sits at the church piano and plays an "unfinished piece" he and Jody had been working on, which Mike identifies as the music he heard throughout his dream like a soundtrack. Mike adds that Reggie doesn't know how to play the piano. Lightning strikes a nearby transformer and the lights go out, and "low to the ground growls filled the air as abominable things approached them in the darkness."
Notes:
- The New Jebediah keeps Mike's gold sphere in a box at Morningside "Twenty-five days had passed since the aberration" (67). After the Second Tall Man restores Mike's sphere to his head, he recovers memories "of many days locked in a box in Jebediah Morningside's laboratory" (69).
- The Second Tall Man travels to Death Valley while Mike "was dying" (69). This must be moments after Reggie passes through the dimensional fork at the end of Phantasm: OblIVion.
- The Second Tall Man mentions Deuteronomy 34: 6, and says that the reason nobody could find Moses's tomb is that he was entombed on the moon, and that the chamber to which he brings Mike "was indeed once the tomb of Moses. And an alien race with which I am not familiar constructed this tomb. The winged sphere came from this very room," and that "That fanged sphere searched me out, and told me of this tomb. I have reconsidered everything I was taught on the red skied planet" (70).
- Reggie emerges in the tomb of Moses "having traveled to the future from the moment after the extraction of Mike's sphere" (70). Apparently this is the version of Reggie who retreated back into the gate only to be displaced by the 50-year-old future version of him arriving at Pittsburgh in Elkin, "Red Planet."
Checkpoints:
- Astronauts Reese Olsen and Daniel discover the tomb of Moses on the moon in "A.D. 2059."
- Mike awakens from his dreaming in his bedroom in "AD 1978."
Conclusions:
- At first glance, "Hell at S-MART" might seem to be set within a year of the Evil Dead-Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn-Army of Darkness sequence, since Charlie says Ash has had it rough "this past year," and he mentions Linda's death. This doesn't work, however, as Linda died in early October 1982, and Reggie is following The Tall Man and looking for Mike, which means the story cannot be any earlier than 1988. Mike Pearson would be in Morningside Psychiatric Clinic and Reggie living at home with his family in China Grove in 1982 or 1983. Therefore, Charlie's statement must be broken up: it is not that Ash has had it hard "this past year," what with Linda's recent death and all; rather, Ash has had it hard "this past year," and furthermore he must still be upset over Linda's death all those years ago. (Charlie specifically mentions Ash having been with S-MART since high school, implying he's known Ash the whole time. If so, then he remembers Ash and Linda as a couple, it would not be strange for him to mention the years-old trauma while expressing his sympathy for Ash's problems.) Ash is able to commandeer an "assault rifle" from the Seven Valleys S-MART, so the story must be set before the AWB of September 1994. Ash sees the Mars Pathfinder after passing through the dimensional gate, but Pathfinder did not leave Earth until December 1996 and arrive on Mars until July 1997, well after the AWB would have prevented S-MART from stocking an assault rifle. Given that close reading of The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness strongly suggest Ash was a mechanical engineering major at Michigan State University, it can be assumed that he had been reading up on the Pathfinder project and was surprised to see it because it had not even launched yet. He is specifically said to "grapple" with the "revelation," and is no stranger to space/time travel, so presumably he realized that he must have traveled forward in time as well as to Mars when he passed through the Seven Valleys dimensional gate. Ex-drug-dealer T-Bone wears a Chicago Bulls jacket while traveling to his mother's home in Baltimore, implying not local loyalty but rather admiration of that team's success in the early 1990s, winning National Basketball Association (NBA) championships in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, and 1998 led by 'shooting guard' Michael Jordan. I conclude that the story is set some time in the early 1990s, before September 1994.
- "Pact with the Devil" must take place after January 1979 (Dean is familiar with The Dukes of Hazzard), but could take place virtually any year after that. Dean's black clothing and punk music tastes suggest anything from the mid-1980s onward, but without knowing any specific bands or songs, nothing can be pinned down. He is currently in school, so it occurs sometime between mid-August and early June. His classmate Zack Lane's status as football team captain and quarterback is relevant, narrowing the time frame to football season, typically late August through December. My rule of thumb is that, faute de mieux, a work of fiction is more or less contemporaneous with its time of release, so I conclude that the story takes place over the course of a "few weeks" in late 1998.
- "Red Planet" begins immediately after Reggie passes through the dimensional fork in Death Valley at the end of Phantasm: OblIVion. After passing back through the fork, an alternative Reggie, about 50 years old, arrives a day's hike outside Pittsburgh in what he estimates is about 2010 or 2015, early in the war. He then passes through another dimensional fork to become an old man two miles from Death Valley, "many years" into the future, after Earth's orbit has shifted and it has become transmogrified into the Red Planet.
- "The Portal" is set in the 19th century in Pennsylvania-Dutch country, during the War of the Rebellion (1861-65). Dr. Morningside is to be enrolled for service in the Army against the slaveholders' rebellion because of his training as an embalming surgeon, indicating that his intra-arterial infusion method has become popular and that the Militia Act of 1862 has already gone into effect (July 17, 1862). I conclude that the story is set some time between July 1862 and the cascade of rebel surrenders following the traitor Lee's capitulation at Appomattox Court House (April 9, 1865).
- "A Winged Sphere for a Mint Green Mummy" is set 25 days after Phantasm: OblIVion (assuming that the extraction of the gold sphere from Mike's head is the "aberration"), in 1988, but the New Jebediah seems to have translated Mike's sphere to Dr. Morningside's laboratory in the 1860s until the Second Tall Man brings Mike's sphere back to the end of OblIVion. Reggie's mummy is discovered by astronauts in AD 2059. Mike awakens from his dream of the events to come in AD 1978.
