He shook his head. “It’s a pretty sentiment,” he said, “but one can’t do what can’t be done. That brother of hers has changed the two of them back into children and closed the road into her mind. There’s nothing we can do. Only she can stop him, but she has to believe that she can.”

“Changed them into children?” I asked. “You mean physically?”

The little man nodded. “They might be children in their minds, as well—I wasn’t there long enough to tell. I tried to tell them that he doesn’t have the magic himself—that he only has it if they believe he does—but I don’t think it took. And then I was cast out.”

“But you said you had to believe he has the power. If you didn’t, how could he cast you out?”

“I don’t believe, but she does. So long as Jilly believes, he does have the power.”

“And there’s nothing we can do?”

The little man shook his head.

“This sucks,” I said.

He gave me another of those blank looks that told me he didn’t catch the idiom, but I didn’t bother to explain it to him. My mind was too busy trying to figure out a way out of this mess. Then I had a thought.

“You know where they are, right?” I asked. “I mean, you can’t get to them, but you do know where they are?”

“Yes, much good that it does us. As I told you, I can’t get back to them.”

Maybe he couldn’t, but we weren’t completely alone in this.

“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve got a friend that might be able to take it from here.”

I was thinking of Joe. If anybody could get to Jilly, it would be him.

So I explained to the little man how I’d gotten here and who we needed to find if we were going to help Jilly and Lizzie.

“This is the man who left you here?” he asked.

“No, that was Walker, the deer man. And I don’t think he did it maliciously. He was just looking off into I don’t know where and then started talking to someone I couldn’t see. The next thing I knew, he was gone and I was stuck here.”

“I wonder what he saw,” the little man said.

He got that look in his eyes then that Joe so often had, that Walker’d had just before he vanished on me, as though he was seeing into an entirely other world—which, come to think of it, was probably exactly what they were doing.

After a long moment, the little man’s gaze cleared and he focused on me.

“This isn’t good,” he told me.

I was so not ready for more bad news.

“What is it?”

“See for yourself.”