I smile. “Literally hanging around?”
“Oh, no. I’m retired now. I was never much good as a scarecrow anyway. I like crows too much and, well, why shouldn’t they have a share of the corn? They were here first, after all.”
“Not in Ellen’s story.”
He takes a seat beside me. “Yes, well, that’s the thing with stories. They only hold a little piece of your life, and even then, it’s from somebody else’s perspective.”
“Unless you write it yourself.”
He shakes his head. “No, the perspective still wouldn’t be right. It would be an older you writing about a younger you, and memory has a knack of playing tricks on us, no matter how much we think we know better. Nobody remembers things the way they really happened, only how we think they happened.”
“Are you talking about my memories of Del?”
“No, no. It’s just . . . “ He has work gloves for hands and spreads them between us. “You’re getting the details right, but you’re missing the big picture.”
“I don’t understand.”
It’s weird following the play of emotions on his face. The features are painted on, but they’re still mobile like a real person’s.
“The little girl who didn’t know what she was doing, but still made Mattie’s life miserable . . .”
“You mean me.”
He nods. “The young you, yes. Where do you think she got the ability to do that?”
“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.
There are traditional fairy-tale characters, too. Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, the seven swan brothers and their sister. None of the villains, but otherwise it seems as though every character Wentworth ever painted is standing out there in the yard. All the companions of my childhood that I used to people the stories I made up in my head.
I’d forgotten all about them, though how I could have done that seems impossible. But seeing them now fills me with a confused delight.
It’s like finding a box of childhood toys that you haven’t looked at in thirty years. You never think of them. It’s like they never existed. But if you come upon that box and open it, the memories all flood back. Each toy you pick up, no matter how small and inconsequential, looms large once you hold it in your hand again.
Some things you can’t forget. Bad things. Awful things. Sad things. When you’ve had a childhood like mine, you just try to put it all out of your mind. But seeing this crowd of memories come to life in the yard, I realize it’s so important to remember that there were good things, too. Maybe they only lived on paper, or in my head, but they sustained me through those long, unhappy years.
“Without you,” Tom says, “we wouldn’t exist.”
I turn to look at him. “So, you’re like Eadar?”
Eadar are the inhabitants of the half world—what Joe calls the between. Beings created out of imagination, who exist only as long as someone believes in them. They’re like my friend Toby Childers, the little man who was my companion the last time I got lost in the otherworld. Some are only wisps of beings—born from a daydream and fading quickly away. But others—like the beloved characters of favourite books—can become so real that they take on a life of their own.
Tom looks puzzled until I explain it to him.
“Exactly,” he says. “We are Eadar, made real from the page by the power of your imagination.”
I look out again at the crowd . . .
“But I haven’t thought of any of you for so long,” I say. “How would you all still be here if you need belief to exist?”
“You were that powerful. You are that powerful.”
“Here,” I say.
He nods. “Yes, here.”
I’m trying to figure this out, but I must be totally dense because I really can’t see where he’s going with all of this.
“So, what are you saying?” I ask. “that you’re . . . grateful?”
“Indeed,” he says. “How could we not be? And we’ve come to you now to remind you that the child you were did good, as well.”
“For you, maybe, but that doesn’t change what happened to Mattie.”
“No, of course not. But if you’re going to write down the tale of what happened back then, you need to tell the whole of it.”
“I don’t think it’s going to make Mattie feel any better. It’s going to make her feel worse. You guys get to . . . do whatever it is you do, which I’m guessing is enjoyable because no one looks particularly ticked off. But all she got was my nightmares.”
He nods. “But if you don’t put our part of the tale in there, we might no longer have these lives of ours.”
Now I get it.
“You’re trying to get me to not make another mess of things,” I say.
He nods. “And if we’re still here, we can take care of Mattie when you’re finished setting the world a-right again.”
“You couldn’t before?”
He glances back at the house. “Not so long as the Conjurer was in power. I won’t say that we don’t want to live, as well. We do. But we are not like him. And if you don’t write us into the story, then the good you did when you were the child you were will be gone. Only the ugliness will remain.”
Now I totally understand what he meant when he first asked me, Do you really think that’s going to be enough?
“But I didn’t know I was doing it.”
“You didn’t know you were hurting Mattie, either.”
I look away from him and try to pick Mattie out in the crowd.
/> “I don’t see her,” I say.
He shakes his head. “She’s not here. She’s in the dark woods.”
He points to the left, to where the spruce and pine and cedar grow thick, climbing up into the hills.
Once upon a time, I think.
Because that’s how it is in fairy tales. You have to go through the dark woods before you can come out the other side again.
But what if you don’t ever get to come out?
I see Mattie’s face in my mind. The way she looked at me.
I look back at Tom. “I can’t just ‘once upon a time’ this better, can I?”
I don’t have to explain what I mean.
“In this place, you’re the Conjurer,” he tells me. “At least you are once more, now that you’ve defeated your brother.”
It’s funny. I never thought of it as defeating him. I just thought of it as surviving.
“You can do anything you want,” Tom adds.
When he says that, I know how I can fix things for him and the rest of the Eadar my younger self pulled out of Wentworth’s book. But that won’t work with Mattie. Just as the healers couldn’t fix my body until I dealt with the monster hidden in my head, I have to help Mattie do the same before I can work any magic for her.
Because some things—the deep, meaningful things that sit at the heart of our souls—can’t be touched by magic. They can only be touched by the hurt or the love that we offer to each other.
That’s the real measure of our worth: How we touch each other in a way that really matters.
Which, I realize, is what the Grace is all about.
I lay the book down on the step and stand up.
“I have to go to her,” I tell Tom.
“I know,” he says.
I walk down the steps and onto the grass. The Eadar open their crowded ranks to make a path for me, but they reach out and touch me as I pass by them. On my arms, on my shoulders, on my back. It’s a curiously empowering experience. I don’t have words for them, they don’t have words for me. But we communicate our joy for each other’s existence without them. That joy flows over us like a wave of light. Like the light that’s supposed to be inside me that I can never see.
I can almost see it now.
I can certainly feel it.
The sensation holds all the way across the yard and follows me through the fields to where the forest begins. But once I’m under the dark boughs of the spruce, my footsteps swallowed by the carpet of needles under my shoes, I’m on my own. I may continue to hold their good will, but the deeper I go into the woods, the less tangible it becomes.
I don’t worry about how I’m going to find Mattie, one small girl in all these acres of dark woods. We’re in a story now—Mattie and I—and the story will lead me to her.
When I find her, she’s sitting among the roots of a huge pine, holding the torn remains of her teddy bear. The pine’s roots twine around a snarl of granite pushed out of the ground by frost.
“What did you do to him?” she asks. “I can’t feel him anymore. Not really. It’s just like there’s a sliver of a memory left, but that’s all.”
“I wrote him out of the story.”
She studies me for a long moment before she asks, “Is that what you’re going to do to me?”
I shake my head.
I hadn’t even thought of that. But even if I had, it’s not something I could ever do. Mattie’s not my enemy, for all that I’m hers.
“You can’t make it better,” she says.
“Iknow.”
“Nothing can make it better.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“So, why are you here?” she asks.
That stops me. I want to see her through to the other side of these dark woods. But is that really what I’m doing here? Am I here for her need, or my own? But if I’m expecting forgiveness, shouldn’t I be willing to offer it to Del first?
Except I’m genuinely sorry for what I did to Mattie. Del doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
She holds up the teddy.
“And look at Grath. Look at what you did to him.”
I didn’t do anything. That was Lizzie. But considering how everything that’s happened here is because of me, she’s not wrong.
But this, at least, I can fix. I only have to wake up the charm. Which, I know now, is calling up the light. The hidden mystery of the Grace that put the tiniest quiver of itself in my unworthy body when I was a child. But while I know I don’t deserve it, that doesn’t mean I can’t use it.
Once upon a time . . .
And the torn teddy bear is mended like it was never hurt in the first place.
I guess I’m expecting her to at least be pleased with this. But her eyes are still cold when they lift from the mended bear to my face. She sets the teddy bear down on the grass.
“Kill her, Grath,” she says. “Kill her forever.”
And hard on the heels of those words, the teddy bear swells and grows and changes, from sweet toy to that giant grizzly I encountered when I first entered this world.
Tom Foolery said I was the Conjurer now, but it looks like I’m not alone. Mattie has enough magic in her to create a protector for herself.
What happens if I die here? What happens to Mattie and the other Eadar? Does the world end, or can it go on without me?
I think maybe it does. Go on, I mean. I’m not so egocentric as to think that it has to die with me. Maybe that can be my last conjuring, that the world goes on, no matter what happens to me.
Once upon a time . . .
The grizzly rears above, one enormous paw drawn back to strike me down.
Part of me doesn’t want to struggle. Part of me believes that I should just let the damned bear tear me apart. That I deserve whatever happens.
And maybe I do. Or, at least, maybe I deserve something. I should have to pay something for what I did to her.
But I didn’t give in to Del, and I’m not going to give in to this impulse either.
For all I know, it’s a piece of Del that’s making me think this. Maybe a small unending tremble of confusion and uncertainty is going to be his legacy to me, the bit I have to carry forever.
So I call up another piece of the story.
Once upon a time . . .
Once upon a time, there was a girl who went into a dark wood, but she wasn’t scared of what she might find in there, she wasn’t afraid of ghosts or ghouls or hungry beasts, because she was a ghost herself.
Just a Ghost Girl.
I flinch when the grizzly’s paw strikes me.
Except it doesn’t. It goes right through me instead, as though I’m made of air. As though I’m just a . . .
Ghost Girl.
The bear roars with frustration and attacks me with renewed fury. Branches and pine needles and bits of rock go flying in all directions because it can’t touch me. It can only tear apart the ground I’m standing on.
Finally it stops and looks back at its mistress.
Mattie jumps up and runs to where I’m standing. She tries to beat me with her little fists, but they’re no more effective than the grizzly’s big paws and just go through me.
Mattie lets her arms fall to her sides. Her shoulders bow with defeat. But her eyes don’t give up. They burn.
“What do you want from me?” she cries.
“Nothing,” I tell her. “I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“I know, I know, I know, I know. You’re sorry. You were just a little girl yourself, and you didn’t know better. But now you do. Now you want to make it all up to me. Now you promise everything’s going to be better.”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t know that. I’m just sorry for what I’ve done to you. If I could take it back, I would. But I can’t undo the nightmare. I can only tell you how sorry I am.”
“Sorry doesn’t do anything.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“You’re just saying it to make yourself feel better.”
/> “I can’t imagine anything making me feel better about what I did.”
She turns away from me and reaches for the grizzly. When she touches his fur, he shrinks back down into a teddy bear again. Clutching him against her chest, she looks at me again.
“So, now you’re back to pretending you’re nice,” she says.
“I don’t think what I did was particularly nice. It was horrible.”
“Oh, but you’re nice now, aren’t you? With that big light inside you, and anything you want you can just make happen, because now you’re the Conjurer and I’m still nothing.”
“If that’s true,” I tell her, “then it’s not working.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just want you to know that I’m sorry. That I’m here for no other reason than to tell you that.”
“So what? Am I supposed to forgive you?”
I shake my head. “I’m not here for that.”
“Then why are you here? And stop saying you’re sorry.”
I decide to come at it from another direction.
“What do you want, Mattie?” I ask her.
“If I could have anything?”
“If you could have anything.”
“For you to be dead,” she says.
“That’s not an option,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t die for Del, and I’m not going to die for you.”
“Then let me forget.”
I study her for a long moment.
“Are you sure of that?” I ask. “I thought that was what I wanted, but all I did was make a nightmare for you. And the memories never really go away—not forever. Not for real. They end up festering away inside you and spoiling everything.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“Pretty much. But until I got here, I didn’t know how badly.”
She doesn’t say anything, and I stop myself from talking. Instead, I change the story about the Ghost Girl and become who I was when I walked into the woods. I offer her my hand.
“What do you want now?” she asks.
“I just want to show you something.”
“Maybe I don’t want to see it.”
“That’s your choice,” I tell her. “I won’t make you do anything.”
“But you could.”