Widdershins (28 page)

Nothing changes about her. The innocent eyes don’t suddenly show red coals glowing in their depths. Her features don’t go all dark and broody. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t doubt her for a moment, though I can’t begin to explain why. Instinct, I suppose.

“If I’ve done something wrong . . .” I begin.

She gives a merry little laugh that makes me shiver.

I’ve always hated those movies where little kids are possessed by some powerful spirit that makes them do horrible things totally out of keeping with their true nature. But now, it seems, I’m stuck smack dab in the middle of one.

“Maybe everything about you is wrong,” she says. “Maybe those ferns and plants you’ve been tramping on are my feelings. Maybe I’m allergic to your pheromones. Maybe I’m offended by the way that light in you shines so bright.”

Again with the light. I’m tempted to look down at myself, but I know I won’t see this light everybody’s always saying I give off. I never do.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “Really. I had no idea I was trespassing on your private territory. I’m just lost.”

“No, you’re not. I found you, didn’t I?”

Some smart-alecky remark almost jumps out of my mouth, but I remember the bear, still hulking over my little blonde tormentor. I remember the fact that I’m in the otherworld, where nothing is necessarily the way it seems.

“Yes, you have,” I say. “And if my being here’s a problem, I’ll be happy to get out of your hair. I just need for you to point me in the right direction.”

“Don’t you want to stand up for yourself? Don’t you want to protest your innocence some more?”

I don’t know why it took me so long to twig to the red hat she’s wearing, but I suddenly realize that she must be a fairy, a Redcap. Except according to folklore, they were supposed to be these wicked little goblin men. They’re usually described as short and wizened, with long teeth, big red eyes, fingernails like an eagle’s talons, and long greasy hair. Their caps are red because they’ve been soaked in the blood of their victims.

So she doesn’t have their look. But their whole purpose in living’s to make life miserable for anyone around them and she certainly seems to have that much down pat, not to mention a really good vocabulary for a little kid.

There are milder Redcaps, almost like brownies, but they’re invariably described as little men, too. I’d never heard of a Redcap appearing as a small blonde child with a bear for a companion, only that doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure the otherworld’s full of things and beings that I’ve never heard of.

“I’m just trying to be polite,” I tell her, because one thing I do know is that fairies expect a good dose of respect.

“Hmm,” the little girl says. She cocks her head like a bird. “So what’s your name, polite girl?”

Right. Like I’m going to fall for that.

“Jilly,” I tell her, which is enough to be true and respectful, but not enough for her to work some mojo on me. “What’s yours?”

“Today it’s Emily.”

“Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Emily.”

“Are you? Are you, really? Because I just have to say the word and Grath will eat you in two bites. And maybe I will and maybe I won’t, but since you don’t know which it will be, how can you be pleased?”

“Except you told me not to be scared of him,” I say. I tell myself to be brave and face the bear. “I’m pleased to meet you, too, Grath.”

“How do you know that’s Grath?” Emily asks. “Maybe Grath’s a dragon who’s hiding just out of sight, waiting on my word to appear and wreak terrible havoc, not to mention eating you.”

“I guess I don’t,” I tell her. “I guess no matter what I say or do, you’ll find something wrong with it.”

“Ha ha.”

“No, seriously. You remind me of these friends of mine, the crow girls. They’re just as—” I’m about to say “illogical” and amend it quickly to “—quirky.”

“Well, I don’t like them.”

“I didn’t expect you would. What do you like?”

“Oh, the usual.” She counts them off on her little fingers. “To be left alone. To not have strangers tramping around my woods, pretending to be polite. Daggers made of sugar and left-handed pinwheels. Songs that only make sense when they’re sung backwards. Anything with a clock mechanism in it.”

“Well, I don’t have a dagger or a pinwheel. I don’t have that sort of song either, or anything with a clock mechanism in it. But I can leave you alone and not tramp around in your woods anymore. I just need to know which woods are yours so that I can leave them and not accidentally intrude on them again.”

“They’re all mine,” Emily informs me. “Every last stick, twig, and leaf of them.”

“Oh. I guess we have a problem then.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have a problem. Only you do. Once Grath eats you, everything will be fine again.”

I make a point of keeping my gaze on her face and not looking at the bear.

“Is there anything I can do so that Grath won’t eat me?” I ask.

“Can you stop them from coming to my bedroom late at night and hurting me?”

Oh no, I think. How can that kind of thing exist here as well? But then I realize that if human dreamers can appear in the otherworld, they’re not necessarily always going to be nice people. Pedophile freaks are going to have dreams just like everybody else.

“I know about being hurt like that,” I tell her.

“No, you don’t,” she says. “Nobody’s cut off your nose. Nobody’s made a necklace out of your fingers and toes.”

“Nobody’s done that to you, either. At least, you seem to still have your nose and all your fingers, and they’re very pretty, too, I might add.”

“I don’t want to be pretty.”

“Well, the world’s full of stuff we don’t want. We just have to make do with it as best we can.”

“They won’t let me make do. They just want me to do what they say. They just want to hurt me, and they’ll hurt me even more if I tell.”

I’ve been concentrating on her, but as she gets more agitated, the bear looming at her side growls and stands taller. I steal a glance at him and wish I hadn’t, because the shaking in my legs starts up again, worse than before.

“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.

Emily looks exactly like the painting accompanying the text of “Prince Teddy Bear.” In the story she was a precocious little girl living Cinderella-style with a stepmother and stepsister, only she didn’t have a fairy godmother, and there was no royal ball waiting for her to attend and lose a glass slipper. All she had was a toy teddy bear she’d found in the garbage, missing an eye and so old and used up that all its plush was worn off. But she loved it. She called it Prince Teddy Bear, and in the end, her love brought it to life like the Velveteen Rabbit and it rescued her from her life of drudgery and toil.

I know, I know. I never said Wentworth wasn’t above borrowing the best from other stories to use in her own. But that’s not the point. The point is, I had it worse and I didn’t have a magical teddy bear. I didn’t have anything. I was all on my own, this little kid trying to deal with crap that no one should have to, but especially not a three-year-old whose family is supposed to protect them, not abuse them.

When my brother first started coming into my room at night, I used to pretend that the things he was doing weren’t happening to me. They were happening to Mattie—the girl in the picture book.
She
was the awful little girl who made my brother do the things he did, not me.

I didn’t know about the Eadar then.

I didn’t know that I was creating one.

I never knew until right now, until I’m facing her here in the otherworld and understand what it was that I did all those years ago. How I’m responsible for the nightmare she’s been living—trapped in these memories of abuse that were my experiences, not hers.

“None of that happened to you,” I tell her. “Your name’s Mattie Finn and you were born in a story. Your bear is just a version of Prince Teddy Bear, your companion in the story. All those awful things happened to me, when
I
was a little girl. I just pretended they happened to you so that it wouldn’t hurt me so much.”

“I know all that”

“You do?”

“Why do you think I hate you? Why do you think I’m going to let Grath eat you?”

“But I didn’t
know
what I was doing.”

“So that makes it okay.”

“Of course it doesn’t. Nothing can make it okay. Just like nothing made it okay for me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “You still have to feel the pain I had to feel.”

“But I already
have.
Those things all happened to me first.”

Mattie turns to look up at the big bear by her side. When she looks back at me, she seems confused.

“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?

I can’t even start to understand how that would work—how it would even be possible.

“Mattie,” I say.

But she shakes her head before I can go on.

“I need to think about this,” she says. “About what we’re going to do to you. Maybe we can give you to him, and he’ll leave us alone.”

“No,” I say. “We need to face this together.”

But I’m too late. She and the bear are gone, and I’m alone in the woods again.