“What ability? I just couldn’t face up to what was happening to me, so I pretended it was happening to someone else. That doesn’t exactly require any special powers.”

“Perhaps not. But then tell me this: what made it real?”

I blink in confusion. “Okay, I’m still not following you. What’s real about this place? It’s just inside my head.”

“And yet here we are. Here we physically are.”

“Someone said I’d probably created a hidden pocket world back when. You know, a few acres stashed away in the dreamlands, but parked just outside of normal access for anybody but me.”

“And how did the little girl you were manage to do that?”

“Beats me. I don’t know how I made it. I don’t know how I pulled Mattie out of the book and invested her with all my bad memories. It just happened.”

He nods. “Because of the light.”

“The what?”

“Your gift from the Grace.”

“Oh, that.”

I’ve been hearing about this for ages. From Joe. From the White Deer Woman. From pretty much anybody with an ounce of magic in their blood. I’m supposed to be filled with this magical light which doesn’t seem to do anything for me except make me an easy target to find in the otherworld.

“You’re saying the light made Mattie?” I ask. “And I guess you?”

“Not the light. You brought us to life from the book. The light was only the fuel that allowed you to do so.”

“Okay. Whatever. The light let me do it. So what’s your point?”

“You didn’t just make a nightmare for Mattie Finn. You made all of us, too.”

“ ‘Us’?”

A floppy hand rises to point at the yard in front of us. I follow the movement and stare at the crowd of beings standing out there in the grass.

They approached the house so quietly, I never heard them, which, considering the size of some of them, means they’re either really good at sneaking around, or I need to pay attention to my surroundings more.

There’s the tubby hippopotamus Hank-a-Widdle and Frocious the lion from “A Circus in a Teapot.” I look more closely and spot the Dancing Greasy Groos—a family of gangly-limbed monkeys—from the same story. There’s a pack of Rackhamish fairies—all twiggy and leafed; the Prince and Princess from “Speckled, My Egg”; Farmer Dorn, his wife Sarah, and the farmyard mutt Putsy from Tom’s story; the nine sisters from “The Cakemaker’s Magic Candlestick.” And more, so many more.