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remembered my own boyhood. I must have remembered some time when I had been consumed by whatever feeling I had at the moment, anger, sadness, hope. I saw that I had wasted every day I had spent with this child.
    I took him in my arms. He was stiff, but he turned his face into my shirt in a way that told me that he accepted me, and needed me, and wanted to hide within my strength.
    My eyes were wet. I would help Carliss, I promised myself. I would make everything right for him.
    I believed it. I really thought that I would help him. And yet, after I left his room I did something I had not done before. I searched in my desk for the brass key which I had never bothered to use, and when I found it I put it on my key ring. I locked the door to my study. I did not like doing this. It meant that I was acknowledging that I did not trust Carliss. But it was true: I didn’t trust him. Some day I might. But not now.
    It also meant that I was still a gray, civilized man, and that I valued my collection more than I did Carliss’s soul. I had done a good deal of work with disturbed children. I knew children who had burned down houses, killing people in the process, released car brakes or loose roof tiles to cripple fathers, mothers, uncles, rival siblings.
    I hated myself for being so woodenly adult. I was a complete, finished product, an educated man, a man of taste, and all the savor had left my life. I needed Carliss. I could learn from him.
    But I sat at my desk like a man waiting for the phone to ring, or an alarm, drumming my fingers and trying to convince myself that I could help Carliss and at the same time continue to be the same muddle of rationality and obliviousness.
    It is not at all unusual for the children of a psychologist to be shrieking horors. It is as though a human being has only so much nurturing he can offer, and that a psychologist gives it all away at the office. I did not enjoy being a living cliché. I would change.
    But I hated myself for having failed again, for choosing the narrow, guarded route over the wider, open expanse of life. Go ahead, I told myself drily. Lock your treasures away.
    Cherry had collapsed on one of the living-room sofas. She opened one eye when I slipped into the room. “I promised Carliss that I’m going to help him,” I began.
    Cherry waved me silent like a woman so exhausted she could scarcely breathe. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
    Her medication had made her stoical and weary. I was smart enough to be thankful. Whatever bad news she was about to tell me would wait for awhile.
    I looked upward, as though I could see through the plaster into Carliss’s room. Go talk to him again, I told myself. Go to him now. But I told myself the ancient, adult lie: there will be plenty of time for that.
    Even on this severe day I did not question the way I knew life to be. There was joy, and then, on other days, anguish. I never realized that we were not the only hunters. I never understood that there were entities in the world that collect humans as we collect works of art. I did not even know enough to be baffled. I was a cheerful realist. Patience and intelligence would, I believed, persevere.
    I thought I was having, simply, a bad day. I thought this afternoon was nothing more than an unconnected string of calamities. If the day had not been so difficult I would have tried to see it as nearly comical, in an ugly way. Even as my life withered away as I sat there beside Cherry, I never guessed that something foreign was working at my life, gnawing through it to reach my heart.
    Something that wanted my life, and was about to find it.

Four
    That night I woke.
    What was it?
    A sound of some sort. A cry. I lay staring into the dark, thinking that there was something wrong and unable to determine what it was.
    There was no sound at all, now. Perhaps I had dreamed. I reviewed everything I could remember from the evening—Cherry taking another pill with a