248F: A magic mansion and a tongue thief (Solved)

This is a book I read in 2006 or 2007, there are two little boys that at some point walk through a bunch of fog and end up at some kind of magic mansion where there’s a bunch of other kids. The mansion is maintained by a number of caretakers who can give the kids whatever they want and let them do whatever they want. There is also an old woman who tells the boys she’s lived there for ages and when she was a young girl the caretakers gave her as many cats as she wanted. At one point in the story it mentions one of her cats that has a tail curved like a question mark and it some how gets boiling water splashed on it and it runs in circles then drops dead. She also tells the boys about one of the caretakers who sits on the roof of the mansion and watches all of the kids to make sure they don’t try to leave. He kills any that do. He has big bat wings, his neck is made out of the tongues of the kids he killed, and his mouth is filled with their teeth. I vaguely recall him being referred to as some kind of brother and possibly being nicknamed the tongue thief. Eventually the boys want to go home, so the women tells them how to get past the beast on the roof and how to get through the fog. The boys make it out into the real world after being at the mansion maybe a week but realize that decades have past in the real world and their families are all old. The boys go back to the mansion to try and find a way back into their own timeline. That’s all I remember. I’m sorry about how scatter brained this sounds, but I wanted to get out as many details as possible because I really want to find this book.

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