Simplicity. The simplicity alone swept him away. The very notion that the entire ordeal was no ordeal at all—not for those who read and thought and were unafraid. He looked at the list before him. On the surface it looked like a grocery list, but as you read it the oddity struck. What kind of cake could be baked from cat’s urine and the whole head of a hummingbird? The list was long and complicated, each ingredient demanding its own special care and sometimes an ingenious method of collection. It had taken well over a month to compile this list. How do you capture the stale breath of a hag threescore and ten? Where could he possibly find the ground tooth of a leviathan? But after painfully checking and rechecking with similar recipes and rites, he was sure it was okay to substitute nail clippings for the breath. And a shark’s tooth instead of a real sea monster’s. He was confident the substitutions would work, except for one: the most powerful ingredient was the body of a babe, no older than three years. He could not decide if the “babe” had to be human or whether it could be any species of infant. The worry had caused him many a sleepless night and many dark dreams of sneaking into a house after midnight and stealthily snatching an infant who would look dolefully into his eyes, innocent and quiet, sucking its thumb in sweet contentment. In the dream he would sing to the child, singing: Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, as he smothered it to its white death beneath a goose-stuffed pillow and when he raised the pillow in the dim starlight the silent child would still be staring at him, this time the eyes a little puzzled, unfocused, slobber rolling fresh from its still-smiling, slightly parted lips. He would wake from these dreams with a moan at the back of his throat, chill sweat beading his forehead, the fear of the wrath of the one true God beating in his breast, frantic to escape. But it would be madness to commit such a horrible sin to obtain his freedom. For was not this dipping, this dunking, this drowning in magic an attempt to escape from that sin he would surely commit if he remained human?