"the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld"

(99.20-101.22)  The long paragraph detailing the rumors of HCE's whereabouts concludes today with as definitive of an answer as you're going to get in the Wake.  Anyone with any sense, the narrator seems to say, believes that that "there had been a real murder."  Who's to blame?  "The MacMahon chaps," the narrator says, "it was that done him in."  (McHugh notes that legend has it that the Irish MacMahon family was founded by Reginald Fitz Urse, the principal murderer of Thomas Becket, Catholic saint and subject of a fairly decent T.S. Eliot play.)  The Dubliners loaned or begged copies of "D. Blayncy's trilingual triweekly, Scatterbrains' Aftening Posht" to determine whether the news that HCE is dead by land or water is true.  The verdict, at least for now, is death by water:  "He lay under leagues of it in deep Bartholoman's Deep."  So much for HCE's big resurrection.

The following paragraph is another Babel of mixed languages (like the paragraph we had a few chapters back) that (with translation help from McHugh) basically gives a news report of HCE's demise.  The Viceroy (HCE) visited beautiful young schoolgirls, and this giant in Phoenix Park got a banging and tongue lashing from his alewoman ("Bannalanna," or HCE's wife Anna/ALP).

Following HCE's death, a new pope-like figure is elected to assume his place and lights are lit throughout the "long (O land, how long!) lifesnight" to mark the occasion.  But, the narrator cautions us, we shouldn't write off HCE as insignificant, and we shouldn't doubt "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."  (While the idea of a tesseract was foreign to a lot of Joyce's contemporaries, we now generally know this is a pretty significant thing, thanks to the Avengers movies.)

On page 101, we shift from the assembly men who began murmuring about HCE on page 97 to the dispersal women who are wondering about ALP.  We thus begin our most extended passage to date on HCE's wife, whose presence has informed the entire book (the Wake's first word, after all, references ALP's river iteration) despite her relative lack of narrative time.  The women want to hear all about her, and they begin to ask questions about her identity.  But first, there's an aside about Buckley and the Russian General.  We're going to get more on that story in a couple hundred pages, but for now we learn that everyone seems to know that it was Buckley who struck the Russian, instead of vice versa.

More on ALP, and the conclusion of this chapter, tomorrow.