CHAPTER 16 
On Monday, two days till the dark moon, I skip school for the first time in my life. I convince my mom to cover for me. Turns out, it doesn’t take much.
“I’ll dial,” I say, standing by her computer as she punches data from an enormous book of numbers onto her keyboard. “And then you just read this,” I say. “Okay?”
Mom barely glances from the screen as she nods. “Okay,” she says.
I lay a sheet of paper down in front of her that explains I won’t be in today because I have a cold. And then I dial the phone. And though she sounds like a robot as she reads my script to the person who answers, she is polite and unmistakably, at least, my mother.
“Thanks,” I say as she hangs up. I give her a kiss on the cheek, and she flinches.
I curl onto the couch with The Witch Hunter’s Guide, and that is where I spend my morning, looking for anything I’ve missed.
I read “Secrets of the Earth and Moon,” which gets increasingly stranger as I read.
There is a magical thread of connection through all things Most people sense this even if they don’t say it. Water, trees, grass, animals, insects, and people are tied together by it, each with gifts to share: water quenches the thirst of the trees, the trees shelter the animals, the animals are masters of motion and flight and song, and the people build worlds beyond what animals can dream. Even the moon has gifts to share—reflecting magical light for people to dream and hope by, its gravity steadying the earth on its axis.
But the witches have begun to break this thread, their curses turning people to their darker natures, causing them to forget, to take, to grab at the world around them. They want people to forget their connection to all the other pieces of the world, and to magic itself.
If the witches succeed—and break the thread that binds us—they can send the moon and its goddess spinning off into space. Without the moon, nights will become unspeakably dark. The earth will lose the rhythm of its tides. The weather will grow wild. Witches will be undeterred by moonlight. Untold chaos will reign on earth. And people will forget, once and for all, that they are connected to anything but themselves. And we will all be lost.
I sit back, my heart sinking, feeling a deep sense of dread. I think of how much Germ worries about what she sees on the news. Are the witches and the world so inescapably tied? Is the world really in so much danger?
I flip back to the section on witches and find the Time Witch—whom Ebb spoke of with such bitterness.
Revisiting Mom’s drawing makes my skin prickle and my hair stand on end. It shows a woman with a hungry mouth and sharp teeth staring out at the reader, dark black circles around her empty blue eyes, the pupils as tiny as pinpricks. She wears an old-fashioned black lace dress and a necklace of pocket watches, but it’s her eyes that scare me most. They’re deep, limitless, empty—like the eyes of a fish. The first time I looked through these pictures, it was the Memory Thief who struck fear into my heart—but now I feel relief that it isn’t the Time Witch who wants me dead. There’s a hunger to her and a malice and a deep empty coldness that makes the Memory Thief look meek in comparison.
I read the description of her.
The Time Witch: Most powerful of the witches, besides Chaos. She is catlike, loves to play games and gamble with people.
Curse: Manipulation of time.
Skills: Compresses, stretches, grows, and shrinks time. Makes weapons out of time. Makes people age too fast or takes away their ability to grow older. Makes happy moments last less time and sad moments last more.
Familiars: Hummingbirds, distinguishable by their empty blue eyes. They steal, distort, and warp the time surrounding their victims.
Victims: A person cursed by the Time Witch might age rapidly, or age in reverse. They might lose entire years without knowing it. Ghosts, fairly or unfairly, blame the Time Witch for their own angst-filled relationship with time.
The shrill sound of the phone startles me, and chills race up my spine. I sit still, not answering, and wait for our ancient answering machine to pick up.
Germ’s voice rings out after the beep. She must have finagled access to someone’s phone at school.
“Rosie, it’s me. If you’re there, pick up?” I stay where I am, frozen. For some reason, I can’t bring myself to pick up. I suppose it’s a mixture of hurt and protectiveness. The more danger I find in the world of witches, the more I want Germ to stay away. And the more I think of Bibi, the more I want to hide from Germ.
“Why aren’t you here today? I hope you’re okay. I have stuff to tell you. I’ll call you when I get home.”
After she’s hung up, I turn back to the book, and read the last few lines of the “Secrets of the Earth and Moon” section.
If the grass and the animals and the trees have gifts, people have their own part to play too… their own gift.
Imagination is a piece of the hidden fabric that only humans can wield. Imagining is to humans like flight is to birds. It is faint and invisible and hard to see at times, this gift—just a shimmer in the human heart. And it’s the reason why witches have always hated and feared us. It is our deepest power.
The hearts of witches are fearsome, and have been unstoppable for as long as time. But do not count out the human imagination. It’s a whispering, quiet thing, easy to drown, easy to kill.
But it has a power that can destroy the most terrible darkness.
I trace the words with my finger. I don’t understand it, or what it could mean about how to fight.
But when I close the book, I’m convinced. The world needs witch hunters. It needs people like my mom—or who she used to be—who are brave enough to do what she did. I’m just not one of them.
I’m in my room at around three, staring at the walls and lost for what to do next, when I hear gravel crunching in the driveway and see Germ riding her bike up to the house. She must have raced over from her house as soon as the bus dropped her off.
I step back from the window, and listen to the sound of her feet as she clomps up the stairs and knocks. She waits, then knocks again. Upstairs my mom stirs, but she never answers the door if she can help it.
Germ walks around to the side of the house and taps on the parlor windows.
“Rosie,” she calls up to my window, but I don’t answer. “Rosie, are you here?”
I tighten my hands around the cover on my bed. I want to hurry downstairs and open the door, but I stop myself. I’m a swirl of confusing feelings—anger at her, guilt about being angry, wanting her to stay safe and away.
After a while, Germ yells again. “Okay, I’m going!” she yells. “But I left some stuff by the front door.”
I hear her feet crunching across the gravel a few moments later, and step back to the window just in time to see her pedaling down the driveway and disappearing onto the trail that runs between her house and mine through the woods.
Once she’s gone, I walk down the stairs, open the front door, and find a pile of papers held down by a rock. On top is a note in Germ’s big, messy, greedy-for-the-page writing:
Found some interesting stuff at school and printed it out. I figured sometimes the internet might know more than ghosts do. Hope this helps.
I take the pile inside and sit down on the sofa, sifting through what turns out to be mostly printed newspaper articles, all about—for some reason I can’t guess at first—a man named Hezekiah Thomas. He lived in Seaport in the 1920s and was hanged following a strange and sad saga. I become more and more riveted as I read.
The saga begins with a woman named Helen Bixby, who moved to town when Hezekiah was twenty. He fell so in love with her that he learned carpentry and built her a house with his own hands as an engagement gift. Only, Helen Bixby turned him down and married someone else—and then lived happily with her husband just down the road, Hezekiah’s only neighbors.
The tragic part comes next. One night, Helen—her husband away for work in the city—showed up at Hezekiah’s house in a blizzard. She was having a baby and it was coming very early, and she needed help getting to the hospital. Hezekiah, seeing her outside and consumed with bitterness, ignored her cries at his window, the sound of her fists pounding at his door. He watched her wander away in the snow. Helen Bixby, I read on breathlessly, never made it to the hospital; she died in the snowstorm.
And then I come to the part that really makes me pause.
The articles indicate that no one would have been any the wiser about the terrible thing Hezekiah had not done if he hadn’t—drunk on whiskey one night—confessed all of this to his brother, who turned him in. And he was hanged for his crime, though many said it wasn’t a crime at all. One of the headlines of the articles reads: WHAT MAKES A MURDERER?
My arm hairs begin to prickle at the words.
I shuffle now, fast, through the articles until I come to one with a clear photograph, one that I can make out more easily.
There is the photo of Hezekiah Thomas. His eyes are fiery and full of anger. His skinny frame is coiled as if he’d like to lunge at the photographer. He is standing beside a beautiful white house, built by his own hands. My house.
I know him, of course. His face is only too familiar to me. He lives in my basement.
He haunts the hospital because he should have brought her there that night, I think. He can’t let the past go.
I feel a small—just a tiny—prick of sadness for the Murderer. Clearly his guilt and rage have made him a monster.
The phone rings again; again it’s Germ, and I don’t answer. She calls a few more times, then gives up completely. As the afternoon fades into evening, the house is quiet again.
Watching the sun sink slowly in the sky, I feel a weight in my stomach—about the Murderer, about the witches, about my mom. All of this knowledge, and I’m no closer to really knowing anything that can help.
Is Ebb right in telling me I should go, leave, run away and never come back?
I walk to my closet and pull my orange backpack out. I start to think about what to take if I do leave—I lay aside a couple of books, some warm clothes, a bag of Twizzlers I keep in my drawer. I put it all in the backpack, just in case.
Downstairs I make dinner for my mom and me. The wind is blowing, but clouds only briefly cross the moon before they float onward. The sound of the wind whistles against the windows.
“Some say the wind is the goddess, trying to blow the world’s troubles away,” Crafty Agatha says abruptly, startling me. I hadn’t realized dusk had arrived. “Sometimes it feels like she will never stop.”
I follow her eyes to the window. I don’t see—at first—the lonely, forlorn figure floating along the edge of the cliffs, surrounded by fireflies. But then my eyes and attention focus, and I realize I’m looking at Ebb. I bite my lip for a moment, then—suddenly decisive—pull my coat on, slip my trusty flashlight around my neck, and hurry outside.
I catch up with Ebb by the cliffside. The ghost of the rabid possum is out tonight, and he nips at my heels viciously as I walk, before he finally hobbles away. The wind is wild, whipping at the bugs and the grass and the trees, but Ebb doesn’t seem to notice. Still, he’s a lonesome sight.
When I reach him, he’s talking to a grasshopper on a leaf.
“What are all these bugs doing here?” I ask flatly. I’m not the best at starting conversations. A hello would probably have been better.
He looks at me for a moment, and I worry, since I’ve been so rude to him, that he’s going to ignore me. But he finally says, “They came to get a glimpse of you. Insects spread news pretty fast.” He shrugs. “They came to see the girl they think is going to fight witches and save the world.”
I shake my head. “One witch,” I say. “And why do they care?”
Ebb takes this in, then looks down at the grasshopper again. “Animals, insects… they see the invisible world much easier than people do. Like, you know how dogs seem to be barking at nothing sometimes?” I nod. “It’s not nothing. Anyway, animals hate witch darkness as much as anyone else does.”
I watch him. “How do you talk to them?”
“It’s mostly listening, really. When you’re dead,” Ebb says, “you can’t make a sound that the living will hear. You learn to listen instead.”
Ebb pulls his ghost spider out of his pocket, and gently pets the creature on the head with his pinkie I try not to stare.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Like… what would a tree even talk about?”
Ebb shrugs. “Oh, I dunno, bird nests, the weather, wind, earthworms tickling their roots, what the soil tastes like on any given day, when their bark feels dry. Stone is the hardest to understand—very slow to say anything, pretty aloof, concerned with ancient news—volcanoes, floods long ago. Mosses are kind of interesting.” He tilts his head thoughtfully. “Constant gossip about when it’s going to rain. Nature’s always talking, if you know how to hear it.”
I think of what The Witch Hunter’s Guide says about nature and magic, how it’s all connected.
I look around, and my eyes settle on a small cedar tree at the edge of the property where the land plummets down to the sea. “And what’s that tree saying right now?” I ask him, fighting back a smile, the first I have smiled in days.
“It just keeps pointing its branches to the water. All the trees in the yard do. Like they’re trying to tell us something. But I can’t figure out what.”
Words rise into my mind. He’s out there swimming, waiting for me, I think. But I shake the thought away.
“Have you had any luck,” Ebb asks, “finding more clues?”
I tell him about the hospital, and the Murderer, and everything I’ve read in my book, and how none of it has led anywhere. The more I talk, the more my frustration and worry tumbles out.
“I still don’t even know how a witch weapon works,” I say. “I still have no idea how to find one. I’m completely defenseless, which means I’m no closer to finding out how to kill a witch.”
The wind is blowing so hard, my hair keeps flying into my mouth as I talk. Ebb looks at me shivering, then up at the sky.
“Let’s go somewhere away from the wind,” he says finally. “I want to show you something.”
Ebb leads me down the path that crisscrosses down from my high yard to the beach, winding through rocks and steep crags.
“Where are we going?” I say, looking up at the cliffs all around us, feeling nervous the farther we get from home on such a wild night. Far above, the cloud shepherds are busy herding shapes of mist. Ebb’s answer doesn’t exactly reassure me.
“Better just see it when we get there. It’ll sound too creepy otherwise.”
Still, I follow, scrabbling clumsily down the steep rocky trail as Ebb floats easily ahead of me. We emerge onto the beach, at the edge of a cave Germ and I used to explore when we were younger.
He leads me to the lip of the rocky hollow, and we hurry inside out of the wind.
“Don’t worry. High tide won’t be for a while,” he says. “If there’s one thing I know now, it’s the tides.”
I turn my flashlight on and look around. It’s a dismal place—dark and empty, musty, mildewed and forlorn. Ebb turns to me, looking almost embarrassed.
“Where are we?” I ask. But with a sick thud in my chest, my eyes light on something that gives me the answer before he can.
On the wall of the cave, just visible in the beam of my light, are words etched in stone: Here on this day May the 5th, Robert Alby and his parents were taken by the tide.
Ebb clears his throat. I realize, in a sudden flash, how a Robert might come to be known as an Ebb. How ebb is what happens when the tide goes out.
“This is where I died,” Ebb says, looking everywhere but at me.