Now that Alfreda has begun to learn the Wise Arts, she is needed at home in the village of Sun Return. The woods around the cabin are alive with playful Poltergeists. Candles light by themselves, and even the rocks dance! There is much work for a young practitioner.

But a more dangerous task calls. For a new family has moved to the frontier; a family with strange ambitions and even stranger powers. And chief among them is a dark, handsome man known in Cat Hollow as Harold Hudson...and known on the Other Side as The Keeper of Souls.