There’s a small, dark space here. I grasp my flashlight from around my neck and shine it in. Spiders scatter in the beam of light, and dust whorls fly up around me; the hole smells like old wood and paper, and my light strobes across a shape, rectangular and dusty.

I reach in to pull it out.

It’s a book, square and worn, leather bound. On the cover someone has etched an illustration of the earth, with figures in the space surrounding it: men and women, each one with a malicious, angry face. These figures seem to be casting threads from their hands that weave around the world. In the upper right-hand corner is the moon, and a tiny figure standing on its surface with her back turned, tears flying into the air around her head.

It’s a strange and disturbing etching. And at the top, in familiar handwriting, are the words “The Witch Hunter’s Guide to the Universe.”

“My mother etched this,” I say.

Ebb nods. “She hid this here, before you were born. She wanted to keep it close without you ever seeing it. Then she”—he looks at me apologetically—“forgot.”

“Forgot?” Germ asks.

He hesitates. “Forgot everything,” he says, his eyes flashing down at mine for a moment, before flashing away. “At least everything that matters. Once they took it all away from her.”

I feel a creeping, sick feeling. Like I have known something bone-deep all my life but no one has ever named it until now: that there is something really wrong with my mom. Something beyond what a doctor could say.

“They?” I ask.

Ebb looks down at me for a long time, hesitant. “There are worse things in the world than ghosts in the basement, Rosie,” he says. “You’ll need to know about them now if you want to live.”

CHAPTER 6

In second grade, I stopped talking for a whole month. It just seemed like every day I said less and less until it was whittled down to zero. Germ said it was my quiet way of yelling for help.

At home, my mom didn’t mind or notice, and when my teachers asked her about it, she said vaguely that the doctor was helping, and when my doctor asked about it, she said the teachers were helping, but neither thing was true.

Germ minded a lot. She tried to coax me into talking by waving my favorite candy in my face but telling me I had to ask for it. I didn’t budge. So she started talking through all the silences. She talked more so I could talk less. It felt like she was carrying all the words for me that I couldn’t say.