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stacks of stenographer’s notebooks, sheets of foolscap and an old-fashioned microcassette tape deck that had been out of date for a decade resting at the bottom of a small pile of minicassette tapes.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