Saltpeter, charcoal, sulfur, resin, naphtha, aqua fortis, camphor.
All of that stuff was reasonably straightforward, even if you had to do some substitutions. Gasoline for naphtha (you've also found that kerosene and even motor oil work as well), and although nitric acid may or may not be what the author meant by "aqua fortis," it works. The trouble is that the book's author was very vague about the quantities needed. The first time you tried the fifth spell in the book, you deliberated used more of each than you hoped was necessary necessary, which meant you spent $150 on this one spell, with nothing left over. You could probably use less, but you're dealing with explosives, and you'd rather err on the side of caution. Because $150 will buy you a successful spell, you spend $150 each time you need to execute it.
But you don't begrudge the $150. What you do begrudge is the one really nasty ingredient: Four hundred pounds of earth taken from a graveyard.
There you have experimented, using dirt from directly atop a grave, but also dirt from a far corner. Both times it worked. Still, it's nasty business, shoveling dirt into five-pound sandbags. It takes up less room than you'd think—it all fits neatly in one corner of the bed of a pickup truck—but it's heavy, sweaty, backbreaking work.
Has to be done in the dead of night, too. Not because the book calls for it, but because you don't want anyone seeing what you're doing when you're getting it.
You also have to use human hair. Naturally, you use your own. Not much, just a little lock.
The first time you attempted this spell was also the first time you paused and thought long and hard about what you were doing and how you were going to do it. The ingredients are all explosive, and you were going to light them on fire. The sigil took care of that, though. Under its instructions, you added each ingredient, one at a time, to the bowl balanced on the sigil, and after each addition you ran a fingertip around the sigil. When you were done you had a black, foul-smelling liquid, but it didn't seem unstable. So far so good, you thought at the time.
But worse even than that, you had to pile all the stuff—including the dirt—onto the sigil. The only sigil available was the one in the book. You've tried copying out the sigils, but there's something funny about the book: Although you can copy out the sigils onto paper, the ones you copy don't work: they don't transmogrify the stuff into whatever magical form it needs to be in for the spell. (Even more frustrating, Will Prescott is the only guy who seemingly can copy the sigils and get them to work. But he is spooky in a lot of ways.) But it couldn't be helped. So you found yourself a nice deserted spot, opened the book to the spell, and dumped out all the dirt atop it, poured the other ingredients over it, and lit a match.
You light a match now and set it to the pile you've just constructed atop the book. You are enveloped by a purple bloom of light, which quickly evaporates, and when the phantom lights clear from your eyes, you watch the blue-violet flames that noiselessly lick all about the dirt. No heat comes off them, which seems almost like a miracle on top of the magic. You leave it to burn.
You check back in a few days later, and find that the fire is still burning. The pile of dirt has also begun to tighten up into a solid cylinder. The next day, when you come in, a couple of fissures have opened up in it. A single rent runs up one side, almost to the middle, and two smaller rents have opened in the sides. It is making a kind of magical mannequin, and these rents have given it two legs and two arms. Before it is done, a lump at the other end will look like an onion-shaped head.
The fire has gone out, and you relight it. The book warned you about this in its characteristically vague way. The fire will go out, and you'll have to relight it, and keep relighting it until it doesn't relight anymore, which will be the sign that it is finished. You're not sure how long, in the best of circumstances, it will take. Maybe six days, you would guess, if you babysat the thing and relit it instantly on its going out. By checking in every few days, though, you are letting it lie cold for hours on an end, and so it takes more like seven or eight.
Halfway through the time, though, you pull the book out from underneath. This does not interrupt the spell. Possibly you could have retrieved the book earlier, but you like to wait until the thing has solidified, so that you don't accidentally pull out any dirt with it.
A week after you started, the thing is done. It is grayish-white all over, and with a rag you rub a thin film of dust from it. It looks like the rough form of a statue—the trunk and limbs and head—abandoned by a sculptor before he had gotten down to the work of carving it into an actual likeness. It only weighs a few hundred pounds, but it might as well weigh a ton.
The book calls it a "pedisequos". You think of it as "a golem."
Like the creature of myth, it is a servant made of stone. Unlike the creature of myth, it is not animated. To make it live, you have to set a complete persona on it: mask and memory strip. (Use only one, and you get a thing like corpse in one case, and an unchanged statue in the other.) Onto the face of the new pedisequos you set the newly made persona of yourself.
The mask slips into it like a plate slipping into a sinkful of water. At the same instant, the golem vanishes and a naked person—you—are laying there. There's no bullshit of taking ten minutes to wake up, either. Your doppelganger opens its eyes, looks at you, and sits up. "So I guess it's a week later," it says in your voice.
This is your servant: It looks like you and will act like you. It will obey you too. That's not because it necessarily likes you. But the hair you added to it puts it under your power. (If it was someone else's hair, it would be under that person's power.) It will not only obey you, it will let you reshape its personality to an extent. Onto one of these things you once set a persona of one of your bitterest enemies, and after five minutes of careful instruction you had gotten the thing to think of you as its best friend, and itself as your bosom buddy. But otherwise the things display all the instinctive personality that comes with the persona. They will act just like the person they are imitating, easily and naturally.
Having confirmed your success, you reach forward to grip it by the forehead. Using the standard trick, you pull the persona off its face. The golem reappears in its place. But now it has assumed a sitting position.
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