For more than a decade, he has been consumed by the search for some way - any way - to escape the eternal punishment which must necessarily await him after death. Every avenue of research has ended in failure, every magician or sorcerer turned out to be a charlatan. Jeremiah is past his prime, and his mission grows ever more urgent as the spectre of his eventual death stalks closer.
In desperation, and his knowledge that he is damned regardless, he turns to the darker arts, those which the church has explicitly forbidden. For, if they had no power to work against God, he reasons, there would be no reason that they should be prohibited. And so he has come, at last, to a resolution. On Walpurgis Night, one of the nights in the year on which the borders between the earth and the fairy realm are thinnest, he will attempt to call upon the Fair Folk to strike a bargain, and thereby gain the eternal life of their kind.
Having no records or precedent to guide him, he works from information gleaned in fragments from the old stories: a circle drawn in salt on the ground, which the fey cannot cross; meticulous instructions written around it in chalk so that even the cleverest of truth-twisters will not be able to trick him out of anything with which he does not wish to part; words of poetry compiled and composed into a chant with which he will call a faerie to his aid.
As the clock in the nearby church begins to strike midnight, he begins. The circle is drawn out and surrounded with writing, a gap left through which the faerie will be called, and his voice raises in his readied chant. As he rattles off the rehearsed rhythms, he feels a growing certainty that this time, as no other time before, he will succeed. Finishing his call as the last strokes ring out, he reaches for the salt and completes the circle, hopefully trapping the faerie inside.
"I command you, spirit," he cries, "reveal yourself!"