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case of the doctor being out-psyched by his patient, but I don’t really care anymore. Any reasonable person would be a little spooked after spending day after day in the chaos and physical danger of that place…the murderers, the rapists, the dregs of the dregs. It’s impossible to lead a normal family life while working under those conditions. You saw how I was on Norleen’s birthday.”
    “I know. Not the best surroundings in which to bring up a child.”
    David nodded slowly. “When I think of how she looked when I went to check on her a little while ago, hugging one of those stuffed security blankets of hers.” He took a sip of his drink. “It was a new one, I noticed. Did you buy it when you were out shopping today?”
    Leslie gazed blankly. “The only thing I bought was that,” she said, pointing at the box on the coffee table. “What ‘new one’ do you mean?”
    “The stuffed Bambi. Maybe she had it before and I just never noticed it,” he said, partially dismissing the issue.
    “Well, if she had it before, it didn’t come from me,” Leslie said quite resolutely.
    “Nor me.”
    “I don’t remember her having it when I put her to bed,” said Leslie.
    “Well, she had it when I looked in on her after hearing…”
    David paused with a look on his face of intense thought, an indication of some frantic, rummaging search within.
    “What’s the matter, David?” Leslie asked, her voice weakening.
    “I’m not sure exactly. It’s as if I know something and don’t know it at the same time.”
    But Dr. Munck was beginning to know. With his left hand he covered the back of his neck, warming it. Was there a draft coming from somewhere, another part of the house? This was not the kind of house to be drafty, not a broken-down place where the wind gets in through ancient attic boards and warped window-frames. There actually was quite a wind blowing now; he could hear it hunting around outside and could see the restless trees through the window behind the Aphrodite sculpture. The goddess posed languidly with her flawless head leaning back, her blind eyes contemplating the ceiling and beyond. But beyond the ceiling? Beyond the hollow snoozing of the wind, cold and dead? And the draft?
    What?
    “David, do you feel a draft?” asked his wife.
    “Yes,” he replied very loudly and with unusual force.
    “Yes,” he repeated, rising out of the chair, walking across the room, his steps quickening toward the stairs, up the three segments, then running down the second-floor hallway. “Norleen, Norleen,” he chanted before reaching the half-closed door of her room. He could feel the breeze coming from there.
    He knew and did not know.
    He groped for the light switch. It was low, the height of a child. He turned on the light. The child was gone. Across the room the window was wide open, the white translucent curtains flapping upwards on the invading wind. Alone on the bed was the stuffed animal, torn, its soft entrails littering the mattress. Now stuffed inside, blooming out like a flower, was a piece of paper, and Dr. Munck could discern within its folds a fragment of the prison’s letterhead. But the note was not a typed message of official business: the handwriting varied from a neat italic script to a child’s scrawl. He desperately stared at the words for what seemed an infinite interval without comprehending their message. Then, finally, the meaning sank heavily in.
    Dr. Monk , read the note from inside the animal, We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums…my awe-struck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon. Jonathan Doe.
    “David?” he heard his wife’s voice inquire from the bottom of the stairs. “Is everything all right?”
    Then the beautiful house was no longer