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stacks of stenographer’s notebooks, sheets of foolscap and an old-fashioned microcassette tape deck that had been out of date for a decade resting at the bottom of a small pile of minicassette tapes.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.