matter. Just being a child is a frightful nervous strain on the child itself. Think back to your own childhood. When you first read the story of the Gorgons, with their snaky hair and brazen claws, how did you feel?"

Helen looked at him. "Like screaming!" she said.

"You see? A child identifies itself with its fantasy life with a terrible inward intensity. And it grows cold and distant when an adult tries to break in on that life. A child puts a part of itself into everything—its play-things, its toys; in fact, there's almost a physical transference, as though ectoplasm flowed out of the child and into its books and toys!"

"So you believe in ectoplasm now!"

"You know better than that!"

"Do I?"

"Please, dear! Let's not quarrel...."

Upstairs in his own small room Johnny picked up Fuzzy Head. Fuzzy Head was older than Johnny. Fuzzy Head was ten years young, a medium-sized walking and talking doll with a wooden trunk, metal limbs and a plaster-of-Paris face. Modern, functional dolls are fearfully and wonderfully made, but old-fashioned dolls speak the language of childhood, of dark, unexplored attics, hidden jam pots, and calico-draped dressmaking dummies as slim as mother used to be.

Some children prefer them.

Fuzzy Head was a hybrid—a Second World War priority doll, a product of scarcity and dread, made in that fluttering heartbeat of time between Oak Ridge and Bikini.

Put the bright side outward. There are still children in the world. Paint his cheeks and give him a chubby look. Make his eyes glitter like agates won by a clever little boy in a game of marbles.

Fuzzy Head wasn't beautiful, though. He was far too peculiar to seem attractive to anyone except Johnny. He had survived thumpings and poundings, the infinite unrest of the very young, the petulance and dark rancours of Johnny's early infancy.

His head was still covered with fuzzy locks. Hence his nickname, 

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