“And now I’ve told you,” Emily says.

“No, you haven’t,” I assure her. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I want to calm her down, because if she calms down, then hopefully the bear will, too. But I have a sinking, horrible feeling inside me that nothing’s okay at all. Because a memory is pushing into my consciousness from deep inside me, rising up from somewhere lost and hidden. A memory that I don’t want to recall.

No, it’s not the sorry story of my own childhood horrors. I think I’ve pretty much worked my way through them as best as I can by now. It’s the how and why behind Emily’s having had to experience the same nightmare.

“How can it be okay?” she asks. “It’s never okay and now I’ve told and there’s never going to be an okay again.”

“Emily . . .”

“Do you want them to cut off my nose?”

“No, of course not. But I don’t think it will happen. I don’t think it can happen. Not anymore.”

Because I know who she is now. I remember.

Like I’ve said, the otherworld is full of all sorts of beings. There are the spirits who make their home here and stray into our world on occasion: fairies, animal people, and all the rest of the magical and odd beings that we’ve put into our myths and fairy tales. There are humans visiting in physical form, though they’re rare; mostly we visit in our dreams. Some say this is where the ghosts of the dead come, too, but I don’t know about that.

But I do know about another sort of being that’s particular to the otherworld: the Eadar. These are beings created from our imagination: characters from books and paintings, and even daydreams, who exist only so long as there is belief in them. I think the Eadar are where the whole idea of fairies needing our belief to exist comes from.

That’s what Emily is. She’s an Eadar. Only she’s not Emily. She’s Mattie Finn from “Prince Teddy Bear,” a story in The Wandering Wood, which was this fairy tale collection illustrated by Ellen Wentworth that I read and reread as a child. I had it even before I knew how to read and got comfort just from holding it and looking at the pictures. I’m not sure where it came from—probably from some uncle or aunt before my parents alienated everyone in our family—and I didn’t realize it at the time, but half the stories in The Wandering Wood were original. Mixed up with old classics like “The Matchstick Girl” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” you’d find other stories such as “The Scarecrow That Couldn’t Sleep” and “Prince Teddy Bear” that were written by Wentworth herself.