Ricky didn’t say anything, and the history teacher continued after pausing to catch his breath.

“Is that possible, Uncle Frederick? You’re the damn expert. Can someone have their life changed that quickly?”

Again he didn’t reply, but the question echoed within him.

“… It’s awful, you know. Just awful,” Timothy Graham burst out. “You try so hard to protect your children from how sick and evil the world really is, then let your guard down for a second and blam! It hits you. Maybe this isn’t the worst case of lost innocence you’ve ever heard of Uncle Frederick, but, then, you’re not listening to your beloved little girl who never hurt a single soul in her entire life, crying her eyes out on her fourteenth birthday because someone somewhere means her harm.”

And with that, the history professor hung up the telephone.

Ricky Starks leaned back at his desk. He let a long, slow breath of air whistle between his front teeth. In a way, he was both upset and intrigued by what Rumplestiltskin had done. He sorted through it rapidly. There was nothing spontaneous about the message he’d sent to the teenage girl; it was calculated and effective. He’d obviously put in some time studying her as well. It also showed some skills that Ricky guessed he would be wise to take note of. Rumplestiltskin had managed to avoid security at a school, and had the burglar’s ability to open a lock without destroying it. He was able to leave the school equally undetected and then travel straight down the highway from Western Massachusetts to New York City to leave his second message in Ricky’s waiting room. The timing wasn’t difficult; the drive wasn’t long, perhaps four hours. But it denoted planning.

But that wasn’t what bothered Ricky. He shifted about in his seat.

His nephew’s words seemed to echo about in the office, rebounding off the walls, filling the space around him with a sort of heat: lost innocence.

Ricky thought about these words. Sometimes, in the course of a session, a patient would say something that had an electric quality, because they were moments of understanding, flashes of comprehension, insights that were bristling with progress. These were the moments any analyst searched for. Usually they were accompanied by a sense of adventure and satisfaction, because they signaled achievements along the path of treatment.

Not this time.

Ricky felt an unruly despair within him, one that walked at the side of fear.

Rumplestiltskin had attacked his great-niece at a moment of childish vulnerability. He had taken a moment that should be filed in the great vault of memories as one of joy, of awakening-her fourteenth birthday. And then he’d rendered it ugly and frightening. It was as profound a threat as Ricky could imagine, as provocative as he could envision.

Ricky lifted a hand to his forehead as if he suddenly felt feverish. He was surprised not to find sweat there. He thought to himself: We think of threats as something that compromises our safety. A man with a gun or a knife and a sexual obsession. Or a drunk driver behind the wheel of a car accelerating down the highway carelessly. Or some insidious disease, like the one that killed his wife, starting to worry away at our insides.

Ricky rose from his chair and started pacing nervously about.

We fear being killed. But what is far worse is being ruined.

He glanced over at Rumplestiltskin’s letter. Ruined. He’d used that word, right alongside destroy.

His adversary was someone who understood that often what truly threatens us and is hardest to combat is something that stems from within. The impact and pain of nightmare can be far greater than being struck by a fist. And equally, sometimes it is not so much that fist, but the emotion behind it, that creates pain. He stopped abruptly, and turned toward the small bookcase that rested against one of the sidewalls of the office. There were rows of texts arranged there-medical texts, for the most part, and professional journals. Collected in those books were literally hundreds of thousands of words that clinically and coldly dissected human emotions. In an instant, he understood that all that knowledge was likely useless to him.

What he wanted was to pluck a textbook from one of those shelves, flip to the index, find an entry under R for Rumplestiltskin, then open to a page that gave a dry and straightforward description of the man who’d written him the letter. He felt a surge of fear, knowing that there was no such entry. And he found himself turning away from the books that had to this moment defined his career, and what he remembered instead was a sequence from a novel that he had not read since his college days. Rats, Ricky thought. They put Winston Smith in a room with rats because they knew that was the only thing on this earth that truly frightened him. Not death. Not torture. Rats.

He looked around his apartment and office, a place that he thought did much to define him, where he’d been comfortable and happy for many years. He wondered, in that second, whether it was all about to change and wondered if it suddenly was about to become his own fictional Room 101. The place where they kept the worst thing in the world.

Chapter Three

It was now just midnight, and he felt stupid and utterly alone.

His office was strewn with manila folders and scraps of paper, stacks of stenographer’s notebooks, sheets of foolscap and an old-fashioned microcassette tape deck that had been out of date for a decade resting at the bottom of a small pile of minicassette tapes. Each grouping represented the meager documentation that he had accumulated on his patients over the years. There were notes about dreams, scribbled entries listing critical associations that patients made, or that occurred to him, during the course of treatment-telltale words, phrases, memories. If any sculpture was designed to express the belief that analysis was as much art as medicine, it could do no better than the disarray surrounding him. There were no orderly forms, listing height, weight, race, religion, or place of national origin. He had no cleverly alphabetized documents delineating blood pressure, temperature, pulse rate, and urine output. Nor did he even have organized and accessible charts, listing patients’ names, addresses, next of kin, and diagnosis.

Ricky Starks was not an internist or a cardiologist or a pathologist who approached each patient seeking a clearly defined answer to an ailment, and who kept copious and detailed notes on treatment and progress. His chosen specialty defied the science that preoccupied other forms of medicine. It was this quality that madesomething of a medical outsider, and why most of the men and women attracted to the profession found it.

But at this moment, Ricky stood in the center of the growing mess and felt like a man emerging from an underground shelter after a tornado has swept overhead. He thought he had ignored what chaos his life really was until something big and disruptive had torn through, unsettling all the careful balances he’d created. Trying to sort his way through decades of patients and hundreds of daily therapies was probably hopeless.

Because he already suspected that Rumplestiltskin wasn’t there.

At least, not in readily identifiable form.

Ricky was absolutely certain that if the person who’d written the letter had ever graced his couch for any measurable length of treatment he would have recognized him. Tone. Style of writing. All the obvious moods of anger, rage, and fury. These elements would have been as distinctive and unmistakable to him as a fingerprint to a detective. Telltale clues that he would have been alert to.

He knew that this supposition contained a certain amount of arrogance. And, he thought it would be a poor idea to underestimate Rumplestiltskin until he knew much more about the man. But he was certain that no patient that he’d ever had in any usual course of analysis would return, bitter and enraged, years later, so changed that they could hide their identity from him. They might return, still inwardly bearing the scars that had caused them to seek him out in the first place. They might return frustrated and acting out, because analysis is not some sort of antibiotic for the soul; it doesn’t eradicate the infections of despair that cripple some people. They might be angry, feeling that they had wasted years in talk and nothing much had changed for them. These were all possibilities, though in Ricky’s nearly three decades as an analyst, few such failures had ever happened. At least not that he knew of. But he wasn’t so conceited to believe that every treatment, no matter how long it lasted, was always completely successful. There were bound to be therapies that were less victorious than others.