Staples was rapidly rethinking his decision to allow the book to leave his sight. He considered just leaving it in the garage to mildew away in the cold and the damp, but somehow he knew that if he ignored it, the book would find him rather than him finding the book. 

He took three cautious steps toward the book. It didn’t move. Didn’t so much as open its cover. So he took three more steps, and then another three. The book was practically within reach when suddenly...it wasn’t. He blinked, not processing the empty floor before him when he heard a distinct thump from just outside the garage. 

A thump that sounded suspiciously like a book dropping onto pavement. 

Staples looked apprehensively out of the garage door to see the book  sitting innocently in the middle of the driveway. 

“What the actual heck is going on…” 

He took a couple apprehensive strides towards the book, but he was barely within a yard of it when he heard the distinctive thump coming from the sidewalk, maybe twenty feet away. Staples paused in his driveway, the choice before him clear. Ignore the book and face...well he wasn’t sure yet, but he figured that a complete guide to summoning demons probably wouldn’t take too kindly to being ignored. Or, he could follow the book to wherever it was leading him, because he was sure now. The book was trying to take him somewhere. 

“...this is what I get for trying to summon a demon,” he muttered, shaking his head, and then he took off towards where he’d heard the book land. For the first few minutes of this odd chase, he was taken directly down sidewalks, where he could easily weave between the pedestrians, only occasionally crashing into someone, and rushing off just as quickly, calling apologies over his shoulder. 

Then the book decided to switch things up a bit, taking a sharp turn down the alleyway between two houses, choked with weeds and cluttered with tin cans and scraps of paper. Staples plunged into it after barely a moment’s hesitation, emerging only to vault over a series of bushes. 

Well, to attempt to vault over the bushes. The book was moving rather quickly by now and he didn’t want to walk around the bushes and lose it, but at the same time, he was a skinny bookworm who only emerged from his house to visit the library and collect materials for a demon summoning ritual. Staples was not an athlete, and this was proven when he came crashing down on the other side of the shrubbery from a rather ill thought through jump. 

He hauled himself up to see the book sitting just in front of someone’s wooden fence. 

Staples did not like where this was going. He rubbed his hands off on his jeans and eyed the book. He was already chasing down some cursed book and trying to summon a demon. He was not adding jumping a fence and trespassing to the list. 

Staples felt distinctly like he was having a stare off with the book, like he was daring the book to do it, to teleport into that person’s yard. The book had no facial expressions, but he felt like it was taunting him. When his couple of steps towards the book didn’t prompt it to disappear, he took a running shot at it, diving towards where it was sitting before the fence. He crashed into the now empty dirt and the bottom of the fence, his stomach plunging at the all too familiar sound of fluttering pages and a grassy thump coming distinctly from the other side of the fence. 

For the second time he hauled himself to his feet. He eyed the fence, only a few inches taller than he was. He told himself that he was not jumping a fence and that he was most certainly not trespassing onto someone’s property for the slight chance of summoning a demon. He turned back towards his house. 

---

As Staples struggled to grip the top of the fence in the moonlight, his sneaker clad feet slipping against the smooth wood, he wondered what his life had come to and where his self control had gone. 

He tumbled into a raggedy flower bed on the mysterious other side of the fence. Weeds and shrubbery scratched at his face and hands, and he was pretty sure he had at least two wood burns and three splinters from his admittedly pathetic attempt to climb over the fence. The book was sitting innocently in front of him in the weeds, seemingly no longer moving. 

“Seriously?! I follow you- you demonic textbook all the way out here, and you drop me in someone’s bleeding flower bed?” he hissed angrily towards the book. “What is this? Revenge for trying to recycle you? I mean, can you blame me? You tried to get me to buy a freaking poisonous, hallucino—” Staples abruptly trailed off as the waxing moon came out from behind a cloud and shone down on the flower bed where he was camped out. 

Just beyond the book was a scraggly plant choking the flower bed, dotted with pale violet, trumpet shaped flowers. 

“...Devil’s Trumpet,” he murmured, stunned. “The final ingredient...it’s just...growing in someone’s garden? How on earth?” Staples eyed the supposedly toxic plant, and then his bare hands, and then his sock clad feet, a plan to abduct the plant already coming to mind. 

“Well, sacrifices must be made for all things I suppose,” he said, already yanking off his sneakers. 

Approximately three minutes later, his feet were sockless and his hands were not, as he yanked the book towards him and took a fistfull of the plant by the bottom of the stem and worked on uprooting it. The moon moving out from and then behind the clouds made ripping up the plant a challenge, but after what felt like forever, it seemed like he had enough. His anxiety of being caught in this person’s garden ripping him to shreds, he whirled up and around, chucking the book and the plant haphazardly over the fence. Chancing a look back towards the still dark house, Staples sidled a few feet along the fence, then gripped the edge and hauled himself back over.

When he got home, he put the plant upstairs in his room with the other materials, then ran downstairs to write out a quick note. 

Twenty minutes later, he was departing the house with the devil’s snare for the second time, this time having stuck a note inside the person’s mailbox: 

 To whomever lives here- 

You have a highly toxic plant in your back garden. It’s the one with the lavender trumpet flowers. I would advise getting someone to remove it. 

From, 

A concerned individual

---

That weekend, Staples finally set about summoning the demon. He had stolen salt from the kitchen downstairs, and then sprinkled this in a large circle on his bedroom floor, making sure there were no gaps in it. Always take precautions when summoning a demon, the book had said. You never know if the being you summon will be a malevolent individual or not, and it always helps to be able to trap them within a salt circle, should they choose to curse you or drag you back behind the veil into the netherworld. 

It occurred to him that he was very possibly about to set fire to the whole house, so he abandoned his salt circle for the moment to open all the windows on the top floor and to haul up buckets and pots of water, should something untoward happen. He arranged these within easy reach of his position before the circle. 

He then brought up his mother’s large skillet pan. You probably weren’t supposed to be summoning a demon in a large skillet pan. You probably should be using something more dramatic, like a cauldron or a pit in the middle of the woods, but Staples had access neither to a cauldron, nor a woods, as he was probably the only sixteen year old to be grounded for skipping school to go run around in a field. 

So. A skillet pan was his only choice. 

He placed down his slip of paper with the sigil to summon the demon in the middle of the skillet, and then laid the devil’s trumpet across it like kindling, and then built up a small teepee above it out of the elder wood. 

Then he waited. He was waiting for the witching hour. This was the only place where the book hadn’t given suitable information. The witching hour, apparently, could be any time from midnight to three in the morning. He figured that 1 am seemed like a good middle ground. 

When it got close to one am, he sat up, stretched, and then double checked everything for the demon summoning. When it all appeared to be in order, he sat, eyes on the time on his phone, lighter at the ready. The moment that 12:59 blinked to 1:00, he flicked the lighter open and touched the flame to the center of the summoning sigil on his sheet of paper. For a moment, the paper seemed to burn like normal, when suddenly, the sigil began to grow white, and the flames leapt up, catching on the elder wood, climbing up the devil’s trumpet wound around them, until he had about a foot tall blaze feeding off of his miniature bonfire. The sigil was still glowing, white light pulsing up and out of the flames, a beacon into the night that stopped abruptly at his ceiling. Then the light turned red, and the flames shot upwards, burning on nothing at this point, the fire taller than Staples was. 

He took several steps backwards, the buckets of water forgotten, smoke clouding his room, the fire detectors alarmingly silent. Panic was rising in his chest as the light emanating from the cooking 

skillet kept getting brighter and brighter.  

The flames were twisting now, roiling and pulsing, expanding and contracting, growing, growing, growing. 

Staples ran back from the demonic fire, one hand on his door when he noticed the shadow within the flames. And with all the grace and casualness of someone walking through their front door, a person stepped out of the flames, which abruptly fell back behind them.