Episode Two (1/5/01)

Lily Sloan was as drunk--and as suicidal--as sheíd ever been. Lily was nearly destitute because of the long legal battle with the high school that fired her for teaching the truth about the JFK assassination, and the stress had kept her battling with the woman she loved almost as intensely. So when one Father Mario Garibaldi came into the bar she was in on New Year's Eve, told her to come to his church's basement, and step into a tub of holy water and a tub of molten silver, the sick thought crept into her head that this might be divine providence itself saying it was time to die. What could be a more fitting sign, Lily asked herself, than a priest telling you to jump into a bath of something lethal?

But that was purely internal. Externally, Lily initially dismissed Garibaldi and his apocalyptic visions of how stepping into those tubs would fulfill her role as "the chosen one" so she could help stop a vampire and werewolf invasion...?! "Liquid metal? Come on, Padre." Lily fanned a hand at Garibaldi. "How much have you been drinking?"

Garibaldi, diminutive as he was, still managed to block Lily's path heading out of the basement--much to her irritation. "Please, I'm begging you! All I ask is you simply touch the holy water and see what happens," Garibaldi said as he took Lily by the hand and led her to the first tub. Lily abruptly snatched her hand away from his, but then thought back to movies she'd seen that depicted holy water melting evil as if it were acid. Jokingly, Lily decided at that moment to see if it would burn to the touch since she had been called inherently evil by more than enough homophobes over the years.

From that point on, nothing in Lily Sloan's life made its usual sense ever again: As she dipped her right index finger into the tub of holy water, the water literally rose in the form of a small geyser to meet her fingertip. Lily recoiled and backed away from the tub. "It's not a trick," Father Garibaldi said, "it's real."

Lily timidly tried it again, and sure enough, the holy water met her touch high above its otherwise placid surface. Finally, Lily recalled the words of her grandmother, "Child, ain't nothing better than being able to look back on something you've done that you remember being scared of at first." That, plus her suicidal mindset, impelled Lily to step inside the first tub. Miraculously, the holy water showered her upside down with drops occasionally hitting the basement's ceiling. Then Garibaldi called out over the sound of the shower, "Now, take a leap of faith into the second tub!" The one, of course, filled with molten silver.

Cascaded with holy water, Lily began to think, to feel as though it were actually possible to make bodily contact with the silvery lava. Whatever forces at work that caused the water to behave this way would surely similarly protect her, she thought. Since the tubs were right next to each other, all it took was a single step to find out...

TO BE CONTINUED