“Hello, Ricky. You are lucky to be alive.”
“Hello, Doctor Lewis,” Ricky replied. The old man was standing behind his desk, his hands flat on the surface, leaning expectantly forward. “Shall I kill you now, or perhaps in a moment or two?” Ricky asked, voice flat with the hard restraints he’d looped around his rage.
The old psychoanalyst smiled. “You would, I suspect, be justified in shooting in some courts. But there are questions you want answered, and I have waited up this long night to answer what I can. That is, after all, what we do, is it not, Ricky? Answer questions.”
“Maybe once I did,” Ricky replied. “But no longer.”
He leveled the gun at the man who’d been his mentor. The man who’d trained him. Dr. Lewis seemed a little surprised. “Did you really come all this way just to murder me?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ricky said, though this was a lie.
“Then go ahead.” The old doctor eyed him intensely.
“Rumplestiltskin,” Ricky said. “All along it was you.”
Dr. Lewis shook his head. “No, you are wrong. But I am the man who created him. At least in part.”
Ricky moved sideways, coming deeper into the office, keeping his back to the wall. The same bookcases lined the walls. The same artwork. For a second, he could almost imagine that the year between visits hadn’t actually taken place. It was a cold place, that seemed to speak of neutrality and opaque personality; nothing on the walls or the desk said anything about the man who occupied the office, which, Ricky thought darkly, probably said as much as anything. You don’t need a diploma on the wall to certify being evil. He wondered how he had missed seeing it before. He gestured with his weapon for the old man to take a seat in the swiveling leather desk chair.
Dr. Lewis slumped down, sighing.
“I am getting old, and I do not have the energy I once had,” he said flatly.
“Please keep your hands where I can see them,” Ricky said.
The old man lifted his hands up. Then he pointed at his forehead, tapping it with an index finger. “It is never what is in our hands that is truly dangerous, Ricky. You should know that. Ultimately, it is what is in our heads.”
“I might have agreed with you once, doctor, but now I have some doubts. And a clear- cut and enthusiastic reliance on this device, which, if you don’t know, is a Ruger semiautomatic pistol. It fires a high velocity, hollow point, three-hundred-and-eighty-grain cartridge. There are fifteen shots in the clip, any one of which will remove a goodly portion of your skull, perhaps even the piece you just pointed to, killing you rapidly. And you know what’s truly intriguing about this weapon, doctor?”
“What is that?”
“It is in the hands of a man who has already died once. Who no longer exists on this earth we share. Why don’t you consider the implications of that existential event for a moment or two.”
Dr. Lewis paused, eyeing the gun. After a moment, he smiled.
“Ricky, what you say is interesting. But I know you. I know the inner you. You were on my couch four times a week for nearly four years. Every fear. Every doubt. Every hope. Every dream. Every aspiration. Every anxiety. I know you as well as you know yourself, and probably much better, and I know you are not a killer despite all your posturing. You are merely a deeply troubled man who made some extremely poor choices in his life. I doubt homicide will prove to be another.”
Ricky shook his head. “The man you knew as Doctor Frederick Starks was on your couch. But he’s dead and gone and you don’t know me. Not the new me. Not in the slightest.”
Then he fired the pistol.
The single shot echoed in the small room, deafening him for a moment. The bullet tore through the air above Dr. Lewis’s head, slapping into a bookcase directly behind him. Ricky saw a thick medical tome, spine out, suddenly shred, as it absorbed the shot. It was a work on abnormal psychology, a detail that almost brought Ricky to laughter.
Dr. Lewis paled, staggered, rocked momentarily side to side, then gasped out loud.
He steadied himself carefully. “My God,” he blurted. Ricky could see something in the man’s eyes that wasn’t precisely fear, but more a sense of astonishment, as if something utterly unexpected had taken place. “I did not think-” he started.
Ricky cut him off with a small wave of the pistol. “A dog taught me how to do that.”
Dr. Lewis rotated slightly in his seat and inspected the location where the bullet had landed. He burst out a half laugh, half gasp, then shook his head. “Quite a shot, Ricky,” he said slowly. “A remarkable shot. Closer to the truth than my head. You might want to keep what I said in mind over the next few moments.”
Ricky eyed the old physician. “Stop being so obtuse,” he said briskly. “We were going to talk about answers. Remarkable how a weapon like this helps focus one on the issues at hand. Think of all those hours with all those patients, myself included, doctor. All those lies and distractions and tangents and thick systems of delusions and detours. All that painstaking time spent in sorting out truths. Who would have thought that things could be uncomplicated so quickly by a device such as this. A little bit like Alexander and the Gordian knot, don’t you think, doctor?”
Dr. Lewis seemed to have regained his composure. Rapidly his countenance changed, and he was now staring at Ricky with a narrow, angry gaze, as if he could still impose some control over the situation. Ricky ignored all the look implied, then, much as he had nearly a year earlier, he arranged an armchair in front of the old doctor.
“If not you,” Ricky asked coldly, “then who is Rumplestiltskin?”
“You know, do you not?”
“Enlighten me.”
“The eldest child of your onetime patient. The woman you failed to help.”
“That I discovered on my own. Keep going.”
Dr. Lewis shrugged. “My adopted child.”
“This I learned earlier tonight. And the two others?”
“His younger brother and sister. You know them as Merlin and Virgil. Of course they have other names.”
“Adopted, as well?”
“Yes. We took all three in. First as foster children, through the state of New York. Then I arranged for my cousins in New Jersey to front for us in an adoption. It was really pathetically simple outwitting the bureaucracy, which, I am sure you have already learned, did not really care all that much anyway what happened to the three children.”
“So, they carry your name? You discarded Tyson and gave them your own?”
“No.” The old man shook his head. “Not so fortunate, Ricky. They are not in any phone book listing under Lewis. They were reinvented completely. Different names for each. Different identities. Different designs. Different schools. Different education and different treatment. But brothers and sister at heart, where it is important. That you know.”
“Why? Why the elaborate scheme to cover up their past? Why didn’t you…”
“My wife was already ill, and we were beyond the age guidelines for the state. My cousins were convenient. And for a fee, willing to help. Help and forget.”
“Sure,” Ricky replied sarcastically. “And their little accident? A domestic dispute?”
Dr. Lewis shook his head. “A coincidence,” he said.
Ricky wasn’t sure he believed that. He couldn’t resist one small dig: “Freud said there are no accidents.”
Dr. Lewis nodded. “True. But there is a difference between wishing and acting.”
“Really? I think you’re wrong there. But never mind. Why them? Why those three children?”
The old psychoanalyst shrugged again. “Conceit. Arrogance. Egotism.”
