I don’t realize I’m being watched until I hear a strange dripping sound. Someone is standing behind me.

“It’s the tragic ones who linger the longest, ain’t it, little one?”

My arms swim with gooseflesh at the raspy voice. I turn to see—not the Murderer but the starfish-covered sailor standing in the hallway, dripping luminous water that doesn’t wet the floor.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to ghosts.

“Tragic?” I manage to say.

The man shrugs. “Nothing cheerful about how the boy died. There’s a reason he’s called Ebb,” the man says. “Used to be Robert when he was alive. Loves animals, that boy. Even bugs, always drawn to them.”

I wait for him to say more.

“He’s looked after you since you were a baby, as much as a ghost could, which I suppose isn’t much. Kept you company even though you couldn’t know you had company.”

I stare out at Ebb, trying to reconcile the boy he’s describing with the ghost I’ve met—angry at me one minute, melancholy the next, sometimes kind and sometimes not.

“Don’t mind his moods,” the man in the slicker says, as if he’s read my thoughts. “You’d be moody too if you were tied to earth while your parents had moved Beyond.”

I turn. I want to ask about Ebb’s parents, and what happened to them, but before I can summon the words, the man floats through the wall and is gone.

I swivel back to the window and watch Ebb move from tree to tree, whispering to tiny insect ghosts. He must sense me watching him, because he turns and looks toward the window, then lifts his hand in a half wave. I half wave back, blushing with shame for being so mean to him. And then I turn away.

I look around my room, feeling defeated. The first day is already gone, and I’m no closer to finding anything that could help me fight a witch, except for the cryptic note on the back of my birth certificate. I will go to the hospital tomorrow, I decide, though I have no idea what I’ll look for. Hopefully Germ can come with me.

I nervously fiddle with my mom’s knickknacks on my shelf—the matchbox, the shell-engraved whistle, an old wrinkled Playbill, and then my fingers move to a few of my worn, faded books: The Wind in the Willows; Aesop’s Fables; M.C. Higgins, the Great; Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; all the Harry Potter books; and on and on.