That evening Helga fed them dinner, shared wine and memories with Lavinia and made a sweet effort to draw Sally out. Sally drank red wine, to which she was not accustomed, and toyed with the increasingly pleasing idea of sex with both Lavinia and this gorgeous older woman.

She wanted to ask about the pentagram but found herself instead asking what Lavinia and the mysterious Poky had been like. But sensitive Helga saw that Lavinia looked uncomfortable and demurred. So, Sally pulled out the pentagram and said defiantly, “What can you tell me about this?”

Helga held out a gentle hand. “May I?” Sally handed it over, acting more nonchalant than she felt.

“It’s very charming. The little men are so cute! A hippie version of the Wǔ Xíng.” She gave a creditable pronunciation of the Chinese words with the correct dip in the first word and the rising inflection on the second. That was how Sally’s mother had pronounced it and Sally found her eyes misting up.

Quickly she said, “My, um, my Dad had something like this, I found it when he died. I don’t mean the hippy-dippy carving, I mean a chart like on your office wall.” Aw, why had she said “hippy-dippy?” She liked the carvings.

Sally, determined not to be like KerriAnne, had stayed away from drugs and alcohol and had no idea how the wine was affecting her. She moved closer to Helga and put a hand on the beautiful woman’s arm. Helga took a quick breath. Sally’s face was almost against Helga’s shoulder as Helga explained the arrows and the Five Elements.

“The arrows around the outside of the star are the ‘generating’ directions and go from wood to fire to earth to metal to water and back to wood. Wood, you see, feeds a fire, fire makes ash, that’s earth, earth gives rise to metals, ya? Where else do we dig them from? Metal collects water and of course water nourishes growing wood.”

Sally’s cheek touched Helga’s shoulder. “Um, ya,” Helga continued quickly, “so then the arrows on the star itself are the ‘overcoming’ arrows, they go from wood to earth to water to fire to metal and back to wood.” Voice breathless, she traced the arrows from corner to corner and Sally’s finger traced with her. “Wood overcomes earth as it pushes up, the earth overcomes water. A dam, ya? Water puts out fire, fire melts metal and metal chops wood.”

When she reached wood again, her fingertip stroked Sally’s. Sally liked this secret space with Helga (she didn’t see the eyebrows Helga raised at Lavinia, asking permission). Helga stroked her cheekbone as warmth wriggled through Sally’s groin. She was going to do this, and until tomorrow, she would not think of the dark place they must go.

Helga turned Sally’s face up and ran a firm fingertip along the underside of her jaw. “Mmmmm,” Sally said encouragingly, arching against the golden woman, tilting up her face to be kissed if that was Helga’s desire.

But then she felt Lavinia’s firm hand on her ass and she made the classic mistake of someone having their first threesome. She ignored her long-time partner’s annoyingly familiar hand and wriggled against the glorious new lover, mewing like a kitten. Helga brought Sally’s mouth to hers.

“Mmm, you have good taste, my dear,” Helga murmured. Sally almost said thank you but Helga continued, “I like this one better, much better. She was seeking the dark, that one.” Lavinia grunted a New York grunt.

Helga was talking to Lavinia, not her! Sally darted between embarrassment, arousal at being talked about like a possession and terror of the dark place to which they must go tomorrow.

She willed herself back into passion, let her small breasts come forward. Helga stroked her neck and Sally swam on the clean smell of her, the pleasant scratch of her fingernail. Her warm tongue glided along that sensitive place while her right hand did indeed stroke Sally’s breast. Sally, gasping with the pleasure, reached up and stroked Helga’s cheek, feeling like the front of her body would melt.

But there was Lavinia’s hand again, demanding, striking just the wrong dark chord into this glorious golden symphony. Sally was barely aware of the annoyed look she gave Lavinia. But good decent Helga caught it, reluctantly calmed her breathing and spoke to Lavinia, including her. “Come, sweetie, kiss me like you did back then?”

Lavinia heaved a sigh but let herself be coaxed forward. Sally, moved by some spirit of Dionysian mischief, asked, “Was she good back then?”

She had been asking Helga, but Lavinia answered. “She was hot and she still is,” and put a firm hand on Helga’s lovely breast.

Annoyed, Sally asked mischievously, “Why did she and Poky want to go to that place? Were they looking for the Slender Man?” She winked with drunken sophistication.

Lavinia darkened with embarrassment. She had found “the Slender Man” on the internet a few weeks ago and thought it was real. They’d been doing some research on Jesse’s computer. “Hey, babe. This might be the thread we’re looking for. Tall, skinny, pale spirit, haunts the Black Forest. Sounds vampire to me.”

Sally had giggled. “Oh baby, that’s just creepypasta.”

“That’s just what?”

“Creepypasta. You know, stuff made up on the internet to creep people out? The Slender Man is an internet meme.” Lavinia had blushed then too.

But further research had revealed that while The Slender Man had been invented out of whole cloth by Eric Knudsen on an Internet forum called Something Awful, there were older legends of Die Grossman which might have been the thread they were looking for – or might have been made up too. It was hard to be sure of anything on the internet.

There was also a creepy legend of “the Erlking,” a vampire-like spirit of the Black Forest that stole away children. At least that one wasn’t just an Internet meme, Goethe had written a poem about “Der Erlkönig” a long time ago.

Helga said now, “Nah, that stretch of forest, it just … has a bad local reputation.” She shivered and Sally felt her body tighten. “If you tell me it is the source of the vampire plague then I am not surprised. This one, she looked for trouble back then.”

“She’s good in the sack,” declared Sally with a merry laugh, “but not much in the brains department.”

Lavinia crammed “Jesus fuck” and “go fuck yourself” into one muttered sentence and stomped off. And Sally came to herself with a flushed face to find Helga shepherding her to the office room without a trace of the sexual interest of a moment before.

Just before Helga left, she said, “Ah!” rummaged in a drawer and handed Sally an English pamphlet on the Wǔ Xíng. “This may tell you things you wish to know. Good night.” She hurried away.

Sally crawled miserably onto the uncomfortable massage table bed with Lavinia and put tentative arms around her. Lavinia turned over, pinned Sally’s arms to her sides and looked at her with angry eyes blazing. “This what I got to look forward to? Jealous shit and acting like a kid, can’t hold her liquor? My brain department takes up a whole floor, babe, and it’s fuckin’ bright enough to figure out it don’t like this shit.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Sally said like a little girl, tears coming easily. There it was again, that burning desire for Lavinia to spank her hard and furious. She kept talking in the little girl voice that she knew would draw just that from Lavinia. “I’m really really sorry. It was so rotten of me to say that and I’m…” but she drew the line at saying, I’m a bad girl. “I’m really sorry I said it.”

Lavinia glared another minute. Then she sat up and yanked Sally across her lap. Sally gasped with excitement at what was to come. Lavinia whacked her ass several times through her pants before ordering, “Ass naked. Now.”

And Sally, mortified at what Helga might hear or think, pushed her pants and underwear down and arched her ass up, cheeks spread open so that Lavinia’s hard hand would fall on every bit of her sensitive places. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m a bad little girl, punish me,” she gushed, reveling in the release and the renewed bond.

“Oh yeah. Oh, you bet I will,” Lavinia said, and the wicked glint was back in her voice.

A long time later a satiated Sally sat on her pert and happily burning posterior, reading the pamphlet Helga had given her while Lavinia’s arms held her tightly.