The shopping wasn't the most ridiculous part of the setup, it turned out. The pages, spliced together in the "manual" actually had drawings in them that needed to be reproduced. One on the floor, one on the wall. The floor one was a circle, "big enough to encompass a grown person laying down". Another - and this gave me the biggest pause - was a pentagram-ish shape to be drawn on the wall with the chicken blood. Asking myself once again why I was doing it, and realizing there was no good reason, at least no better one than why I worked retail, I got on with the task.

I chose my bedroom as the right setting. After moving some furniture around, I got down on the floor and tried to reproduce all the runes and squiggles as accurately as I could. It was more pains-taking than I expected it to, in between the JPEG compression artifacts and my knees killing me, but I finally did it. Making the scribbles on the wall with chicken blood turned out to be relatively easier, and while a bit lopsided, both shapes seemed to come out roughly as they were in the book. Feeling triumphant over vandalizing my own apartment, I took a few pictures with my phone and posted them to the thread, without bothering to look at the replies.

It was about 10 PM, usually the time I'd need to start preparing for sleep. I thought it would be all easy from here - some stupid incantation, ten or so minutes of awkward silence, and then my schedule would continue uninterrupted. But - as it turns out - you need to wait until 3 AM before you can commence the ritual. I muttered curses under my breath and, feeling stupid about having put all this work in and determined to do it right, decided I'd make up an excuse if I got to work late next day.

Waiting until 3 AM turned out to be more exhausting than I thought, but it gave me enough time to familiarize myself with the entire procedure. All throughout the thought that I was making a fool of myself didn't leave me. Finally, as the hour was almost about to roll over, I took a quick trip to the toilet to refresh myself. It took me a moment of staring into the mirror before I realized - I was washing my junk, preparing for sex with an entity that I didn't believe existed. Or did I? Looking back at it now, there was more than just pure scepticism in me that night, there must have been.

My recording setup was simple: I positioned my phone on a chair and propped it up against a stack of books. I made sure the circle was in frame and that all the lights were off. I figured even in such conditions it would be obvious whether I was screwing a demon or an escort. As instructed, at 3, I darkened the room completely and carefully got on the floor. I lit the candles positioned around me, then took the Bible and put it in front of me. Kneeling, I opened it on a random page, about two thirds in, and took a pot of the blood I had set aside earlier, then made a big X from corner to corner. Then, I half-shut my eyes and concentrated on what the book referred to as "lustful thoughts" while muttering incantations that sounded like total gibberish. I'm not sure what language the transliterations were from, I was just sure none of it made any sense. I knelt there, in silence, chanting over and over while thinking about naked women. Women who I had met, women who I only knew from television, women who were fictitious. I noticed that the imagery in my head seemed to get more vivid as I went on, and as I fantasized about having sex with them in what the instructions dubbed, "the most desirable way", the only significant change that I noticed was that I was getting a hard-on.

I couldn't tell how much time must have passed, but kneeling, frustrated and thinking about sex while also unable to actually do anything eventually lost its charm. I reached into the corners of my mind and thought up the most debauched, most shamefully perverted scenario I could think of inside my head, and while my dick did feel like it was about to pop, nothing supernatural, or even noticeable seemed to be happening in the room.

I gave up. I did everything the instructions said to do, and nothing materialized. I felt extremely tired, frustrated and stupid. Through my half-closed eyelids, I could witness the candleflames dancing every now and then, undoubtedly what idiots thought were spirits gathering around. I think I saw a page move, but I attributed it to my tiredness and the overall darkness in the room.

I opened my eyes and tried to fight through the pain in my knees as I started to get back up.

Then, all of a sudden, all the flames in the candles I could see tilted towards me, towards the center of the circle. The left side of the Bible, lifted very lightly up, and before I could make sense of what was happening, it slammed itself shut, and all the candles went out. I was in complete darkness. My body tried jumping up from the sheer startle, but my knees were so sore, I barely managed to stumble back up into a hunched-over position.

My heart almost leapt out of my chest. I felt I was getting dizzy as the panic set in, but told myself it was just the draft. It must have been, right?

I managed to stand up in the almost pitch-black room. As I was trying to regain my stability, I had this eerie feeling that there was something - someone - else in there with me. I turned around saw, first in the corner of my vision and then in front of me, what looked to be a female figure. I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it. I was going to rub my eyes, but then the candles lit back up. There was what seemed to be like a naked woman, almost exactly my height, standing right in front of me! My brain barely registered her voluptuous hips and sizeable breasts, and the candlelight flickering off her silky-smooth skin, when the full terror of the situation overwhelmed me. I yelped out like a schoolchild and jumped back, a pathetic limping leap of a creature without feeling in its legs, a prey to a predator right in front of it.

Whatever was in front of me giggled. It was a very specific giggle, one that unmistakably sounded youthful and full of vigor. It was both playful and yet charged with something sensuous. I watched it - her - start moving towards me.