Laundry Day consumes Wellwood House in punishing heat: the girls strip beds, haul heavy wet loads between the Barn’s machines and the clotheslines, and endure mosquitoes, blackflies, grasshoppers, and fire ants. Fern overheats and has swollen, bitten feet, but still gets assigned to kitchen duty with Zinnia and Holly afterward.

While they work, Fern asks about swimming. Hagar warns them off the nearby woods, saying they have “turned sour,” with old graves and rumored drug-taking “hippies,” and adds a grotesque caution about “glass eels” that supposedly swim up pregnant women in the river. The talk shuts down any idea of an approved swim.

That night, Fern struggles to read How to Be a Groovy Witch and then can’t sleep in the stifling room. Fern wakes to find the door open and a huge black dog sitting in the hallway. Zinnia panics, but Holly, half-asleep, approaches the dog as if it’s friendly and follows when it calmly walks away.

Fearing Holly is walking into danger, Fern forces Zinnia to come along and they trail Holly down the stairs, past the faint glow of Nurse Kent’s TV, and out the front door despite Zinnia’s fear of being caught and “sent home.” They follow Holly and the dog into the backyard, where Rose emerges from the Smoke Shack, already expecting them, and claims the dog as a “spirit animal” that came to Rose first.

Holly and Rose lead the reluctant Fern and Zinnia into the woods after the dog. The trek is hard on Fern’s pregnant body, with briars, roots, and choking insects, until the trees open onto a vast, moonlit field that slopes to an enormous, silver river. In a dreamlike mood, the group reaches the muddy bank, and when Fern asks if they are going in, Rose undresses and wades into the water, inviting them to follow “on the other side.”