There had been the candles and the geometric shape drawn on the floor, and he had begun to chant Eu-hu, Elihu, Asmodeus, deus deus stygios—nonsense syllables of course—how could they be anything else? But they had come to him and something in his monotonous soprano had shaped them—no, fleshed them. A glove looks like a hand; thrust a hand into it and it looks the same but is not, it is a far more potent thing. Words are words—nothings—but there seemed to be that in his young chanting that filled, that fleshed, each of them. And as for the words themselves, they came to him each dictated by the last, like the cadence of pacing feet: being here, there is only one place to go next; from Ahriman to Satani is somehow simply obvious, and then like hopscotch the young voice bounced on Thanatos, Thanatos, Thanatos. It was then that the bulge happened in the middle of the pentagram. The floor couldn’t have swelled like that (it showed no signs of it later) but it did all the same, and the thin pennants of many-colored smoke and the charnel smell did happen, and the crowding feeling of—of—of Something coming up, coming in. Then goggle-eyed kids deliciously ready to be terrified were terrified, ready to scream, screamed, ready to escape, fled in a galloping synergy of wild fears—all but young Smith, who stayed to watch the plumes of smoke subside, the bulge recede… for his chant had stopped, a panic-driven sneaker had cut the careful yellow frame of the pentagram, so that soon nothing was left but the echoes of that abandoned-abbatoir smell and in Smith’s heart a terrified yet fascinated dedication; he cried, he whispered: “It really worked…it really worked!”

An old-wives’ tale once had heart-attack victims munch the leaves of the foxglove and recover. Along came science and extracted digitalis. In just this way Smith learned what it really is about bat’s blood, and the special potency of the body-fat of a baby murdered at the dark of the moon, and how these and many other things may be synthesized and their potency multiplied without recourse to bats or babies, stars or stumpwater, Eucharists, eunuchs or unicorn born.