“I’m so sorry I did what I did to you,” I say. “I know that saying I didn’t know what would happen isn’t an excuse. And neither’s the fact that I was just some scared little kid. But take comfort in knowing that it can’t ever happen to you again. Those days are long past and over.”

“Maybe for you.”

Now it’s my turn to be confused.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “It all happened a long time ago. It’s been years and years since I was that stupid little kid, projecting my hurts onto you.”

She gives a sad shake of her head. “This is the otherworld, where everything’s always happening at the same time. Past, present, future. And he’s still here, in this part of the otherworld.”

I feel a shiver of dread, like I’m that little girl again, waiting for the creak of my bedroom door as it opens.

“Who’s here?” I ask.

“You know.”

“But . . .”

That’s impossible, I want to say, except I know it isn’t. In this part of the otherworld, she said. Joe’s told me about these places—the pocket worlds that make up part of the otherworld. Special places we make for ourselves that other people can’t access unless we let them in. But normally, they’re places of safety and wonder—a heart home where everything is good, insofar as you’re concerned, at least.

Trust me to create a horror show.

I don’t need to ask if this is where I am. If this is why I met a version of White Deer Woman, who told me she was born from my memories—a copy of the real one. She knew, but I don’t think Mattie does. I want to ask her, but I know it wouldn’t be right to lay that on her, as well. It would be bad enough if she was only an Eadar, still existing because of the terrible memories I invested in her when I was a child. But to tell her she might only be some figment of my imagination, made real by the power of the otherworld, existing only in this place and unable to roam anywhere else the way my friend Toby can . . . that was too unfair.

But it explained a lot. It explained how the battered toy bear from the story had become this powerful creature standing at her side. And it raised some horrible questions in my mind.

Was my brother Del really here as well, perhaps transformed into some even more monstrous version of himself, made gigantic and even more fierce, the way that Prince Teddy Bear had been changed?

And what about my body? White Deer Woman said I was here in my body. That it wasn’t still lying in a bed in that hotel in Sweetwater. Did that mean I was somehow trapped in my own mind?