When I strolled back onto my downhill street I passed by the prying and suspicious eyes of my neighbors out on a walk. Could they imagine the gravity of my daybreak mission?

I parked and dragged the branch inside, closing the door behind me. As I drew the branch onto my work desk that lay in front of the arm chair in the living room, Artie caught sight of the long straight twigs and leaves that dangled from its ends. To my horror she batted at the stick I carried, scraping at the ends of the wood with her talons.

"Ack! No! Bad Artie! Bad Familiar!" I cried, picking up the little wooly beast by the armpits and gently setting her aside in the hall.

I laid the arm of elderwood down on the work table. Then I snapped up a disk of quicklite charcoal and sparked it up on the kitchen range's high burner setting. I returned and placed it inside the brass censer upon which I sprinkled some pinches of aloe wood, frankincense, and mace. The smell of the smoke which belched across the table was sweet and musky, and I doused the branch in its fumes.

First I clipped the ends of the branch past the length I didn't want. Then I took the wood working knife and began to shave off piece by piece of the bark. I stripped off the brown pock-marked bark until it was green, and then yellow, and then beige. Then I sanded it smooth.

As I performed this tedious task for many minutes unabated, Artie slunk across the shelves behind me, knocking my father's old books from the seventies about social theory and hominid evolutionary development down to the ground at her determined march.

I withdrew my sharper engraving knife and carefully drew the seal of Lord Frimost into the wand's center. The abstract sigil gave the impression of some symbols... a number 4... an R... a Y... A degrees sign... Mars..., but I knew I would probably never glean its secret meaning, save to ask its owner myself.

I again baptized the finished baton in the incense smoke. The length of it was naturally perforated in the middle, like a Dionysian thyrsus.

It was done. I held in my hand the wand of evocation, and I had constructed the first major instrument and begun the ritual sequence. It would be only a matter of time before I summoned Frimost himself and made my pact.

I wrapped the wand in a clean sheet and scooped up Artie into bed. I curled up with my delighted kitty-kat wearing a smile, content that I would soon make contact with the infernal guardians of desire themselves.