As Sally Yan talked to the man she hated most in the world, he stood in a humble pose of submission and it hurt her heart to see it.

She saw at last the man who came home each night after a day of labor which insulted his soul. He’d been a doctor in the old country, she now knew, and he was a janitor here, and a drunk. His home was the one place where he ruled and she had taken that away from him. She had welcomed in the vampires, surely she should let him…

No! It was still working at her from inside! She had wanted to welcome in the vampires, the ones who were on their way to becoming angels. But it was endlessly complicated.

“Alright,” she said with weary determination. “You’re not my father. You’re going to show me your real face now.” And now that there was real danger, she could look again.

She saw her father’s exhausted, wrinkled face ripple as if worms were pushing out. A series of images, as if the monster riffled through a deck of cards: a big howling ghost, a sad tiger, a hissing viper, each thing smaller and weaker than the last. A starving kitten, a dead rat.

She stayed vigilant. When the icy hands grabbed her from every direction, she was ready. But she knew enough not to fight: this couldn’t be a physical struggle.

Lavinia, she thought, and only then did she feel the pressure in her hand that must have been there all along. Somewhere out in the real world Lavinia was holding her hand, pressing something into it.

The pressure in her hand became her pentagram.

Silly to hold it up, the monster could feel it right there. But she did hold it up. Never mind all the mysticism that she couldn’t remember even now. It was a symbol of healing and powerful good works and it was profoundly a part of her past. Like Lavinia’s star, like Amanda’s cross, like that simple, humble white cross built into the beehive building on the island.

Wherever the things had come from (she saw them flashing harsh, jagged, broken), they had latched on to the tormented submissive mind of Rich Poore, created the terror he feared the most and broken free from their prison.

Sally, like Rich, submitted easily. But she would never again surrender to darkness. In Lavinia she had found someone worthy of her surrender.

The pentagram glowed like a sweet lamp in the back yard of a magical house where her mother’s flowers grew, or like Jesse and Walter’s yard with the stately redwood.

But Sally Yan knew what image she most wanted.

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The little girl in her was excited, eager to see, for real and for true, in real life, at last… a little fairy the size of a cat.

***

Walter knew who was coming for him as the struggle inside the glass curtain slowed into watery stillness and then Sally began to blaze with light.

When he was ten, he’d gotten fever crazy sick. The last thing he’d looked at before the fever bit was an ad in a magazine by his bed: a business executive with a distinguished face rubber stamping something. There was a sternness about that man: you wouldn’t want to sit in front of him on trial for anything.

For a day and a night a fevered Walter had struggled in red darkness with the Rubber Stamp Man, who could decide whether you got into heaven or went the other way. Little Walter (he’d never been Wally) pictured hell as “down the sewer with a bunch of runny caca” so he tried a thousand times to be clean white paper for the seal of approval but always the Rubber Stamp man turned off his green desk lamp.

At last Walter had woken up, drenched with chilly sweat and with no real resolution.

He was on his knees now, trying to be clean white paper for Sally. But there was that blot that he just couldn’t rub off and the Rubber Stamp Man was coming, relentlessly coming.

***

Amanda Malreaux’s eyes were still wide from the sweet and bitter revelation of a moment ago, a revelation which Sally had somehow witnessed and which Amanda herself could still scarcely believe. But she let go of that and tried to be present for Sally from half a world away, in spite of her confusion and shame.

When the sun had first hit her, she would have committed any sexual act imaginable with any man or woman nearby. She still could feel the raw passion and how it had consumed her!

She had been an experienced woman when she joined the Community of Saint Francis. In fact, the Community discouraged women with no sexual experience from joining and made plenty of room for people to change their minds before taking serious vows.

She had met Kendal Williams when she was an anthropology student at Bryn Mawr. A quiet, intense man, reasonably good looking (how that had once mattered!) who reminded her of her Algerian father, though not in looks of course (Kendal was white). He had visited to lecture on Women in the Paleolithic and stayed for the evening mixer. Virgin mojito in hand, she’d been pleasingly aware of his maleness as she met his eyes and displayed all her own knowledge. That night in her dorm room on the third floor of gothic Pembroke hall she elected not to touch herself while thinking about him, instead letting the warmth in her belly stay a sweet flame. (She was not a virgin but any explicit sexual touch would make her think about that dismal earlier encounter.)

She’d run into Kendal three more times that year and a goodnight embrace had turned into a passionate kiss which made her run back to her room full of sweet confusion. During the summer she made her decision, called him where he lived an hour outside New York and stated clearly that she would like to come and spend several days with him.

Those had been breathless days in a city still recovering from 9/11 and the lovemaking when they finally got to it had been wonderful, though less than the perfection she had dreamed of.

Then pregnancy, in spite of the reasonable precautions she had taken, and the agonized decision about abortion.

It all came back as she remembered who she had seen, but she had to push it down and focus only on being of service. Service.

***

Since he came back to life, Peter and Charity had not stopped making love. They didn’t stop now…