The man stares at me another long minute, this time in surprise. His face softens, and his anger is replaced by recognition. And then concern.

“And I’m afraid we do bring trouble,” Ebb adds nervously. “We’ve got a problem.” He gives me a sort of encouraging look. Maybe he’s not leading us to our deaths after all.

“The Memory Thief has found out about her?” Homer says heavily, as if a weight of worry has just landed on his shoulders.

Ebb nods. He recounts the events of the night quickly, looking down at his feet sheepishly. When he gets to the part about Germ charging the moths, Germ flushes bright red and starts looking down at her feet too.

Homer stands for a long time, taking it in. Then he turns to me.

“Your life has changed forever, Rosie Oaks. You’ve gotten the sight, and I’m afraid you can’t go back now to unseeing. And now you have found out that the world is both better and worse than you thought.” He looks around at the other ghosts, up at the sky, still moving with its strange cloudlike figures and pink light. “I’m sorry about it. But now we have to figure out how to keep you alive.” He mutters something under his breath at the moon. And then he sighs. “Come with me,” he says.

CHAPTER 9

We stumble our way across the cemetery. The ground is sunken over graves in places and makes a sickening squish beneath us. I trip into a headstone, which elicits a cry from one of the ghosts.

“Respect my grave!” he yells across the hollow.

“We’re sorry!” Germ mumbles, her face flushing.

The ghosts don’t part for us, even though we keep saying, “Excuse me, excuse me.”

“Forgive their manners,” Homer says nervously, scanning the woods as if expecting danger at any moment. “Most of them haven’t been noticed by a living person since they died. Just walk right through them.”

After hesitating for a moment, I step through a ghost blocking my way. Then another. Then another. Germ does the same. It gives me an icky, unsettling feeling, and Germ looks slightly nauseated.

“I know they’re a gloomy lot,” Homer says with an apologetic look. “You would be too, though, I guess, if all you wanted was to move Beyond, to the up there”—he casts his eyes to the pink hazy ring of the sky—“but you were stuck here.”

“Why can’t they just go up there?” I ask. “Just float up to the sky?”

“We can’t fly, for one thing.” Homer looks at me, his urgent expression softening into a smile. “And anyway, we are tied: earth-tied, home-tied. We have our haunts—our graves, the place where we lived, the place where we died, perhaps a place or two that has special significance to us. But trying to leave those places thins us, drains us.”