It was the absence of the letter that unnerved him. Hadn't he specifically placed it inside his well-worn copy of Moby Dick? Yes, he definitely remembered doing that just yesterday. A Sunday it was, at two thirty in the afternoon. How could it have disappeared in little less than twenty four hours?

Well, no need to get frantic, he thought, the pudgy fingers of his left hand nervously running through his thinning brown hair. Maybe I put it in another book? Yes, that must be it. He shooed Alice away with a penny-loafered foot. She mewled at him like a sickly infant and crept off towards the bedroom.

Furrowing his brow in successive wrinkles from eyebrows to the beginning of his receding hairline, he stared at the bookshelf and pursed his lips. This is just ridiculous. I know I put it in that book! Slumping down at the small reading table, he sighed.

There was a spot on the table he scratched at nervously, the varnish having worn off ages ago. He scanned the rows of books, squinting at the smaller spines. A vague anger was building behind his eyes, the frustration was becoming quite palpable. His pulse was steadily climbing, tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump. The room felt suddenly warmer.

In every way he felt that losing that letter was making him lose his mind. Already he possessed a failing grip on the thin sanity he was born with and this one little thing was stretching it all too far.

Somewhere in the house Alice was mewling to herself, licking a spot on her belly. Over the years she had seemed to regress back to her former kitten behaviors. The incessant fretting and compulsivity of her master agitated even her dim animal soul. She had become nearly as manic as he and the hairless patches of raw skin on her body revealed her stress.

He had managed to get up from the table and start pulling books off the shelves. Flipping through each, he held his breath for those few seconds it took, always ending in an exasperated exhale as he moved to the next one. Carefully he placed each empty book in its proper place and delicately he took another. Though he was desperate to find the letter he dared not harm his precious books in his haste.

Through the shelves he went, alphabetically by author, by genre, by publication date. The sound of riffled pages and the thud of a shut hardback provided a sort of manic soundtrack to the world he had created.

And so it was, at two thirty on the dot, he found the letter, tucked away carefully on page nine of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. His obsessive mind reveled in the seemingly unconnected relationship between the two books. Grinning he pulled out his newest hiding place: The Great Gatsby. Gently he placed the letter against page eleven, put the book upon the shelf and sighed in psychological ecstasy.

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